by Mark Helprin
And how refreshing it was afterwards to go back and reflect once again on things and quantities, the books in his shelves, the small everyday machines, speculation, conversation, a new suit of clothes, buttered bread and tea in a café on mornings before school, the grandeur of what he studied, and the excitement of a winter night at work under his light inscribing equations in fine pen across the pages of a blank book.
But these were only the general, and Ann the specific. He had fallen in love with her in the station years before, and then again at the camp when she had spurned him, if only because she loved him too much. With Ann it was not a question of silken moments, but just Ann, not a single association, just Ann. Her singing at Kreuzlingen had so much entrapped him in a lifelong love that he remembered each day several times the way she was sitting at night by the fire, in a blue jacket, her dark auburn hair falling beyond her shoulders. Her voice was clear and especially beautiful, and she was embarrassed to sing, but she sang and her French songs rang out among the hills. For him they still sounded there, having survived all the years of ice and snow, the new roads and buildings, the children getting older and dying. Her songs were still heard.
Later in Paris he knew her at school, loving everything she did. But for several years it was just dreaming, for they hardly even spoke and their manner was such that anyone else never would have had the vaguest notion that they were aware of one another, much less passionately in love. And then one day she broke her ankle on the playing field and he carried her up the steps to his car and drove her to the hospital. He had never touched her except accidentally or to take something from her hand. When he held her, her arms around his neck, he sensed for the first time that far from hating him she loved him; that she thought of him just as he had thought of her, in enveloping dreams; that she was thrilled by his presence as much as he had always been by hers; that she wanted to kiss him; that he was loved back. Then there was a golden fall when he scouted for perfect places in the woods and took her there on weekends. Her hair, lightened in the summer, fell from her blue student’s cap. The weather was dry and cool and wavelike winds moved the trees and grass like breathing as they lay together for the first time in the diminishing October sun, its rays weakening into a cool sigh.
His aspirations were as great as his experience was little, but he could do no more than enjoy the impressions he felt so keenly. Life was a powerful confusion with rewards to those who did not control it. Those times were marked by the strangest remembrances: the heavy wooden door of her house, the black metal of his car, the letters they wrote, how Spain had passed them by and they had been hated for being so finely able to achieve what all the world’s revolutions and all the red armies, what neither fascists nor pilots nor propagandists, nor the righteous or the daring or the obsessed, could do—and that was to create a heaven on earth. They had been hated for not noticing the definitive and terrible approach of the whitest winter ever to be seen. But had they feared and been oppressed by just the pressure of its advance, then they would have had nothing at all.
In no time they had finished university and found themselves hurtling through the June fields of Normandy on a fast black train, one car of which was filled with their families and friends on the way to the wedding at Honfleurs. He was uncomfortable at the wedding itself: they thought it too beautiful and too much a part of the nineteenth century to be their own, but they wanted the old men and women—for whom the white dresses and morning suits, the flowers and childrens’ carts, the canopy, glass, and ring, were real—to be happy and to remember, as memory was all they had. But the great thing for Leon and Ann was the train ride itself, something which had not been planned as enjoyment.
They all met at the North Station early in the morning when the streets were still wet and being swept. A cool wind came into the train shed from the north, and everyone was dressed informally but Leon, who wore a three-piece black suit with two fountain pens in the vest pocket. He had just published a paper in an important journal of biochemistry and won recognition as the Majeur of his department. This was published with his picture in all the newspapers of Paris and people had been recognizing him on the street—not many people, but some. The car they had reserved was supplied in each compartment with champagne, fruit, and cheese. Leon and Ann went from one group to another, being toasted in each compartment and drinking back until they became riotously intoxicated and staggered down the corridor as the train lurched back and forth, sending them crashing into walls and doors. In one place they played cards for half an hour with an old uncle of hers, in another they received gifts—for her a black gem of some sort set in a gold foil, for him more fountain pens, the kind with an edelweiss on both ends which looks just like a Star of David. All the time unbeknownst to them they passed the rusted cannon and common graves of the Great War. The old men and not so old men looked out the windows at places they had heard of or fought in, never dreaming that they would have the opportunity to glide by so peacefully in a car laden with champagne. They thought quietly and looked at the new summer fields; some of them managed to smile.
After the wedding they stayed at Honfleurs boating and swimming. When they returned to Paris, it was the middle of summer and they settled down to work. She often wore a white silk dress and a white hat. They went to museums and walked in the parks at night—it was almost as if Paris were again the city of the century before. But winter came, and then the next summer, and the twentieth century clicked suddenly back into place like the sharp closing of a rifle bolt.
AGAIN THEY were on a train, he and Ann, with just the beginnings of real fear about what Paris would become. Early one morning his father had driven to their apartment and burst in during breakfast looking like someone they hardly knew. “You must get out of Paris now, immediately,” he screamed. His sons reaction was one almost of dumbfoundedness; he began to compose himself for analysis of the risks and probabilities, but the father took him by his dressing gown and lifted him from the chair. “Listen to me. I tell you to leave and go south. It is not at all like the last time, for Paris is going to burn, and we will burn first of all. You must leave.”
“But how can we, Papa? You are here, and Mother, and Ann’s parents and the family. The banks are closed, what nonsense, I am not even dressed,” he said somewhat sheepishly before he was slapped across the face and knocked down. He then began to understand his father’s understanding.
“All right,” he said with a red eye, “we will leave.” They dressed, he took his bank books and magazine article, and the three of them drove to the house of Ann’s father, who agreed to leave that day because he too felt it was the opportunity, and “If they don’t take Jews as I suspect they will, then we can return. We will always be able to say, if anyone should think to ask, that we are on holiday.” He thought because he was so old that he should take charge.
“Monsieur Orlovsky, take the children to the station. We will follow later today after I arrange some business. If all goes well, shall we meet in Aix at the house of Pellegrin?”
“Good idea,” said Leon’s father, a bit of the fight returning to him, “we will all go separately and meet at the Pellegrins. The children this morning, we in the afternoon as there is some business that I too must finish before leaving, and you at night.”
He took them to the station and gave them money enough for several weeks’ travel. “I want to see Mother,” said Leon, and his father replied that he would see her at Aix and shortly. And then as it became clear that the train was going to leave, the father kissed Ann as he would have kissed a little girl, and turned to his son.
“Until Aix,” he said, but just stood there with his hands at his sides. “At the house of Pellegrin.” A column of soldiers marched into the back of the station filling it with the rough cloth color of their uniforms. The father, who had seen and lost so much, embraced his son and they gripped one another as if for the last time. Leon remembered his father’s tweed jacket, and the smell of cigars even on the shoulde
r. He remembered how suddenly his father looked so old, and how the old man had grasped his hand with a pathetic strength as if to say, Although we could never communicate and cannot communicate now, I love you very much. And then he backed away and said, lifting his head a little, “Your wife.” Leon nodded, climbed on the train with Ann and turned to see his father for the last time standing in a Paris station looking hopeful and childlike, in a black and white tweed jacket which was easy to see against the soldiers’ cloaks of the darkest gray. The train pulled away, and Leon feared for him. When they had embraced he noticed how the power of his father’s grasp had so lessened with the years. And he thought of the tweed jacket pushing its way through the masses of soldiers.
This train fell southwards instead of climbing north. The fields and trees were crazily indifferent to streams of refugees along the roads. It seemed to Leon that this was yet another battle in the Great War, for much of the equipment looked the same and the feeling was that the dead had risen to take revenge upon the living, that the trenches had suddenly burst open from the pressure of all that had grown within, and that a hideous rotted whiteness was about to envelop the land.
Unlike their wedding train, this one was not rapid. It often pulled over onto sidings for several hours, sometimes for the night, and it had a curious habit of going backwards for scores of kilometers and then coming to a dead halt in the middle of countryside as quiet and lush and black with night as in a dream. Then the conductors would walk up and down with red lanterns, the current would cease, and a tiny old man’s voice weave its way through the corridors saying, “Stop for the night. Sleep outside or in. Leave at daybreak.”
The trainmen replied to all questions with upraised shoulders and eyebrows. “It is war,” they would say, “not a cafe.”
“All the trains have been requisitioned,” said Ann authoritatively, “and therefore our parents must have gone in a car. This must be. They are already in Provence.” Leon kept busy buying food, bribing conductors to return to him his seat, and looking over and over again at his article as if it might have given him answers. On one of the seats a soldier had left a pea-green great coat with many pockets. With the practice of an established refugee Leon appropriated it, and used the pockets on food-gathering expeditions. He even brought back a bottle of good perfume for Ann, who was as overjoyed as if she had been impoverished all her life. He remained clean-shaven because a barber was also fleeing Paris and had brought his artillery. When the train halted the barber cut down oak branches and heated fresh river water in a large vat he had paid a soldier to steal, and then shaved most of the men on the train in return for food or money, and sometimes for free, just because he missed his home and his shop and the streets he knew so well.
Several days passed, and although Leon and Ann had been used to leaving Paris in the morning and arriving at Aix that evening they were still somewhere in the middle of France—surrounded by cursing farmers, refugees, and confused army detachments hurrying in retreat as if to a battle already won. The life itself was not so bad, somehow there was always fresh food, the weather was good, but his impatience was tremendous regarding the house of Pellegrin, good friends in Provence sure to help. He was sure that his parents, even if they had started by train, would have then taken a car and gotten to Aix after a pleasant journey through the countryside in new summer. Undoubtedly they were in Pellegrins garden, reading and talking. “My country is being invaded, and yet she contrives to be beautiful.” It was early then for Provence, perhaps a little quiet, but a summer bursting out amid the mountains and white-faced cliffs. “I am sure they are there, and they must wonder about us. It is war after all and the sirens are real enough.”
Ann, on the other hand, did not seem to worry, but was instead very quiet and happy. This angered him but he said nothing, thinking her very selfish for her lack of concern: she behaved like a schoolgirl on an outing, a little crazy, and he thought that callous indeed, but it only made him love her more.
There was a halt again after yet a few more days, in a small town which they guessed to be in the Midi (it was difficult to tell after being shuffled around for days on nameless sidings and rusted one-track lines). The engine hissed down, the electricity ceased, and the voice of the little old man passed through the train, “Leave tomorrow morning, express South, all tracks now clear, no hotels here.” In an instant the passengers had their cooking tools and orange crates alongside the train turning the freight yard full of military trains and matériel into a temporary camp. But this was not unusual as all of France had become a camp of one sort or another.
Leon threw on the coat and checked his wallet. “I will get some food,” he said, “before it’s all gone.”
“Please, try to get some meat or fish.”
“Maybe there will be a restaurant. Then I will return with just an invitation—steak, watercress, and wine.”
“Of course. I’ll dress for the occasion in my dress. Go before it’s too late.”
He jumped from the train and ran enthusiastically over the many tracks and through the munitions until he came to the town, where restaurants were closed, except for one just for soldiers. There were some farmers with old trucks, selling vegetables and poultry. He bargained with them and afterwards stuffed a chicken, leeks, and potatoes in his big pockets. The coat was unbearably hot but the pockets served well. Again it would be chicken soup, not bad, but he wished he had some beef, especially since Ann had asked for it. Because it was hot he walked slowly back to the yards singing to himself a Jewish song he had learned in camp: “The Day Will Come.” Off to his right he heard a humming noise like swarming bees but with a sharpness which offended the ear. Over the glowing terra-cotta tiles of an old house he saw six dots coming almost directly for him from a sky of very pleasing blue. They came so fast that he hardly knew what was happening until they began in terrifying immediacy to strafe and bomb.
At first he had no idea of the target, but then his sense of general danger became a much greater fear. Obviously, they were after the train yard. He began to run, his heart giving him much energy by its beating and fear. It was only after he saw the fighters diving at the yards that he decided to throw off his heavy coat with all the food, and even then he paused for half a second to take his wallet, without which he knew he could not survive.
Bombs were exploding all over the yard, tracer bullets, barely visible in the sun, making puffs and ricochets on the earth and steel. It was the part of a bombing attack comparable to starting a cold engine. Inside, things had not begun to catch, and bombs often fell isolated and without effect. But there were six planes and it was not long until the engine began to go—secondary explosions, walls of flame, freight cars blown apart so that their sides and doors flew like chaff.
He was running as fast as he could, with the incredible grace and energy of instinct. He never in his life had run so fast, nor had he been as sure of foot or as quick to dodge as then in the freight yard.
The train on which he had spent the previous few days was pulling away. The engine had gotten up steam, a track had opened, and it was gathering speed. Ann was in the window of their compartment, throwing things out the window and herself about to jump. “Leave them,” he shouted, “stay,” even though he was far away and the train was really beginning to move. He cut over toward it with incredible speed. He could hear feet that seemed not to be his own pounding the earth and stones. All was well; he had gone between the fires and bombs and shells, and he was running magnificently. “Stay,” he screamed to Ann even as she pulled away with the train, because he knew he would make it. He tried to open one of the doors, but it was shut tight. He began to panic, for he knew there wasn’t time for her to help him and the train was passing over cross switches on which he lost a lot of speed.
But then she said, “Other side, other side,” and he felt great relief remembering that there the doors were open. He stopped for breath, nodded his head to her confidently, and pointed to the other side of the train. He
would wait, get some wind, and then when the back of the train had passed him, make a break for the open doors. She understood this and they were confident that he would succeed. He stood there while the accelerating train passed him car by car and the bombs fell all around. But not one had struck the train, and he had not been wounded at all.
When the last car passed he set out with everything he had, leaping across the rails in one jump, and running furiously to an open door which was banging to and fro. He had room and time to spare. Even though the train was already going fairly fast he could have run beside it and entered by any door, but he wanted to be safe and he began to close on the first. He knew he could do it. It had become a great adventure—what a story to tell. He was sorry about the coat and the food, but he still had his wallet. He and Ann would be safe; he smiled.
And then he heard a terrific roar. A fighter plane’s engines came so close he thought it was going to hit him. The deafening noise was followed by a string of explosions rapidly overtaking him. They were incendiary bombs, phosphorus. One exploded some meters in front of him and the world went white. He could see nothing, and he tripped and flew forward crashing onto the railbed of stones and slate. He heard whistles, bombs, and engines, and then lost consciousness thinking he was dead.
When he opened his eyes it was pitch dark except for some orange fires far away He could hardly see, but that was nothing. Ann was gone.
The old conductor had said the South of France. He raised himself and tried to sense what was around him, thinking only of how to get to the house of Pellegrin in Aix where she and his parents would be waiting.
WITH MUCH difficulty he stumbled across the rails until he heard a train passing slowly in front of him. He judged it a freight and somehow managed to catch hold of a ladder on its side and climb to a hatch through which he let himself fall without much caution. He landed on bales of some sort of cloth, perhaps felt or even velvet, and lay on them quite comfortably except for his wounds and some burns on his feet and ankles. He could see the sky through the opening, but not the stars, as he was partially blinded. The train had been a shadow, but since they had lived in the summer near the railroad he was always able to distinguish different trains even without sight of them.