A Soldier of the Great War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I. ROME, AUGUST

  II. RACE TO THE SEA

  III. HIS PORTRAIT WHEN HE WAS YOUNG

  IV. THE 19TH RIVER GUARD

  V. THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES

  VI. STELLA MARIS

  VII. A SOLDIER OF THE LINE

  VIII. THE WINTER PALACE

  IX. LA TEMPESTA

  X. LA RONDINE

  Copyright © 1991 by Mark Helprin

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Helprin, Mark.

  A soldier of the great war/Mark Helprin.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E4775S65 1990 90-45987

  813'.54—dc20

  ISBN 0-15-183600-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0156-03113-4 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603113-2 (pbk.)

  First Harvest edition 2005

  FOR ALEXANDRA AND OLIVIA

  I. ROME, AUGUST

  ON THE ninth of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes. The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few slightly swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed through the Villa Borghese, alone. Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.

  Alessandro Giuliani was tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair fell and floated about his head like the white water in the curl of a wave. Perhaps because he had been without his family, solitary for so long, the deer in deer preserves and even in the wild sometimes allowed him to stroke their cloud-spotted flanks and touch their faces. And on the hot terra cotta floors of roof gardens and in other, less likely places, though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands. Most of the time they held in place and stared at him with their round gray eyes until they sailed away with a feminine flutter of wings that he found beautiful not only for its delicacy and grace, but because the sound echoed through what then became an exquisite silence.

  As he hurried along the Villa Borghese he felt his blood rushing and his eyes sharpening with sweat. In advance of his approach through long tunnels of dark greenery the birds caught fire in song but were perfectly quiet as he passed directly underneath, so that he propelled and drew their hypnotic chatter before and after him like an ocean wave pushing through an estuary. With his white hair and thick white mustache, Alessandro Giuliani might have seemed English were it not for his cream-colored suit of distinctly Roman cut and a thin bamboo cane entirely inappropriate for an Englishman. Still trotting, breathless, and tapping, he emerged from the Villa Borghese onto a long wide road that went up a hill and was flanked on either side by a row of tranquil buildings with tile roofs from which the light reflected as if it were a waterfall cascading onto broken rock.

  Had he looked up he might have seen angels of light dancing above the throbbing bright squares—in whirlwinds, will-o'-the-wisps, and golden eddies—but he didn't look up, for he was intent on getting to the end of the long road, to a place where he had to catch a streetcar that, by evening, would take him far into the countryside. He would have said, anyway, that it was better to get to the end of the road than to see angels, for he had seen angels many times before. Their faces shone from paintings; their voices rode the long and lovely notes of arias; they descended to capture the bodies and souls of young children; they sang and perched in the trees; they were in the surf and the streams; they inspired dancing; and they were the right and holy combination of words in poetry. As he climbed the hill he thought not of angels and their conveyances, but of a motorized trolley. It was the last to leave Rome on Sunday, and he did not want to miss it.

  THE ROAD traveled relatively straight to the top of the hill, but descended the opposite side in switchbacks that, unlike their mountain counterparts, cupped fountains in the turns. Stairs cut through its shuttling, and Alessandro Giuliani took them fast and painfully. He tapped his cane at each step, partly in commemoration, partly in retaliation, and partly to make it a metronome, for he had discovered long before that to defeat pain he had to separate it from time, its most useful ally. As he went down, the walking became easier, and a short distance from the crossroads where he would board the streetcar he found himself on ten flights of gradual stairs and landings in a thick green defile. Through a confessional grille of tangled trees in a long dark gallery penetrated at intervals by the blinding sun, he saw the pale circle of light that marked his destination.

  Drawing closer, he knew from the open blue awning that—unlike everything else in Rome that day—the cafe that seemed to exist solely for people who awaited the rarest streetcar in Italy had not shut its doors. He had neglected to buy presents for his granddaughter and her family, and now he knew that he would be able to take something to them. Though his great-granddaughter would not be pleased by gifts of food, she would be asleep when he arrived, and in the morning he would walk with her to the village to get a toy. Meanwhile, he would buy some prosciutto, chocolate, and dried fruit, hoping that these would be appreciated as much as his more elaborate presents. Once, he brought an expensive English shotgun to his granddaughters husband, and at other times he arrived with the kinds of things that were to be expected from a man who had many years previously outrun any possible use for his money.

  The tables and chairs on the terrace of the cafe were crowded with people and bundles. The overhead wires neither vibrated nor sizzled, which meant that Alessandro Giuliani could walk slowly, buy provisions, and have something to drink. On this line the cables always began to sing ten minutes before the tram arrived, because of the way it gripped them as it rounded the hill.

  Walking through the thicket of chairs, he glanced at people who would ride with him on the way to Monte Prato, though most would leave the streetcar in advance of the last stop, and some even before it lowered its whip-like antennae, switched to diesel, and ran far beyond the grid of electrical wires from which it took its sustenance on the streets of the city. It had rubber tires and a pantograph, and, because it was a cross between a trolley and a bus, the drivers called it a mule.

  A construction worker who had made for himself a hat of folded newspaper thrust his right hand into a bucket to encourage a listless squid that Alessandro knew would have to die within the hour from lack of oxygen. The headline running along the rim of the hat said, inexplicably, "Greeks Make Bridges of Gold for the Rest of 1964." Perhaps it was related to the Cyprus Crisis, but, then again, Alessandro thought, it might have had something to do with sports, a subject of which he was entirely ignorant. Two Danes, a boy and a girl in blue-and-white student hats, were at one corner of the terrace, seated next to German army rucksacks almost as big as they were. Their shorts were as tight as surgeons' gloves, and they were so severely and brazenly entangled in one another that it was impossible to tell his smooth and hairless limbs from hers.

  Several poor women of Rome, perhaps sweepers or cafeteria workers, sat together over glasses of iced tea and were overcome now and then with the hysterical giggling born of fatigue and hard work. Sometimes they were free for a few days to go back into the country, where they had once been sylph-like little girls completely different from the obedient cardigan-cov
ered barrels they had become. As Alessandro went past they lowered their voices, for although he was courtly and deferential, his age, bearing, and unusual self-possession awakened their memories of another time. They looked down at their hands, remembering the discipline not of the factory, but of childhood.

  At another table were five strong men in the prime of life. They were truck drivers, and they wore sun glasses, striped shirts, and faded army clothing. Their arms and wrists were as thick as armor; they had huge families; they worked impossibly hard; and they thought they were worldly because they had driven over the high Alpine passes and spent time with blonde women in German bordellos. Without thinking, Alessandro formed them into a squad of soldiers in a war that had long been over and would soon be forgotten, but then, catching himself, he disbanded them.

  "It hasn't arrived yet, has it?" he asked the proprietor of the cafe.

  "No, not yet," the proprietor answered, leaning over the copper bar to glance at the wires, for he could read their vibrations as if they were a schedule. "It's nowhere near; it won't come for at least ten minutes.

  "You're late, you know," he continued. "When I didn't see you coming, I thought you had finally given in and bought a car."

  "I hate cars," Alessandro said, without the slightest energy. "Would never buy one. They're ugly and they're small. I'd rather ride in something airy and open, or walk, because to be in a car gives me a headache. Their motion frequently makes me want to vomit, although I don't. And they're so cheaply made I don't even like to look at them." He made a gesture in imitation of spitting. He was too refined to have done this in normal circumstances, but here he was speaking the language of the man behind the counter, who, like Alessandro, was a veteran of the Alpine War.

  "These automobiles," Alessandro said, as if he were conceding the existence of a new word, "are everywhere, like pigeon shit. I haven't seen a naked piazza in ten years. They put them all over the place, so that you can't even move. Someday I'll come home and find automobiles in my kitchen, in all the closets, and in the bathtub.

  "Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now it's like Milan. Now the slimmest swiftest cats are killed because they aren't agile enough to cross streets where once—and I remember it—a cow could nap all afternoon. It wasn't like this, so frantic and tense, everybody walking, talking, eating, and fucking all the time. Nobody sits still anymore, except me."

  He looked up at a row of medals displayed in a glass case above a battalion of liquor bottles. Alessandro had medals, too. He kept them in a brown Morocco-leather folder in the credenza in his study. He hadn't opened the folder in many years. He knew exactly what they looked like, for what they had been awarded, and the order in which he had earned them, but he did not wish to see them. Each one, tarnished or bright, would push him back to a time that he found both too painful and too beautiful to remember, and he had never wanted to be one of the many old men who, like absinthe drinkers, are lost in dreams. Had he owned a cafe he probably would have put his medals in a case above the bar, because it would have been good for business, but for as long as he could, until the last, he would keep certain memories locked away.

  "Let me offer you something," said the proprietor, "compliments of the house."

  "Thank you," Alessandro answered. "I'll take a glass of red wine." He had always associated the expression compliments of the house,' with some giant establishment twenty or fifty times the size of the one he was in—perhaps an enormous casino, or a resort on an island bulging with Germans in tiny bathing suits.

  As the proprietor's hand grasped the bottle, he asked, "Anything to eat? Bread? Cheese?"

  "Yes, but I'll pay for them," Alessandro told him.

  This was answered by a quick gesture that said, remarkably, 'I offered, at least, but I'm glad you want to pay, because although things are not impossible, lately they've been kind of slow.' Then, as his customer was eating, the proprietor edged closer and spoke in a camouflaged voice.

  "Do you see those two?" he asked in reference to the lascivious Danes. "Look at them. All they can do is eat and fuck."

  "I wish I could."

  The proprietor looked puzzled. He saw that Alessandro was taking alternating and vigorous bites of bread and cheese. "What are you doing now?"

  Alessandro swallowed, and looked the proprietor in the eye. "I can tell you what I'm not doing," he said.

  "Yes, but that's all they can do."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because if I carried on the way they do, I wouldn't be able to do anything else, would I?"

  "If you carried on the way they do, I wouldn't be able to do anything else, would I?"

  "If you carried on the way they do," Alessandro said, with complete assurance, "you'd be dead. You know what they do? I'll tell you what they do. They eat dinner and then they go back to their hotel, and for twelve hours they strain like gymnasts to pressure-weld themselves together, to fill every socket. By day, they sleep on buses and beaches. At night they're Paolo and Francesca."

  "It's disgusting."

  "No it isn't. You're jealous of their bliss because in our day such things were hardly possible."

  "Yes, but at their age I drove mules, real mules!"

  Alessandro awaited the connection.

  "I pushed mule trains over the passes in the middle of winter. The animals were so heavily laden and the ice so hard and smooth that we would lose them. They would vanish from us and fall great distances, always silently, but we went on. The snow was blinding and the ice-clad walls of rock towered over us, streaming mist for a thousand meters."

  "What has that to do with them?" Alessandro asked, glancing at the Danes.

  "They don't know such things, and I resent it. I envy them, yes, but I'm proud."

  "If you were one of the mule drivers," Alessandro said, "I may have seen you. I may have spoken to you, half a century ago."

  They let the subject drop, but certainly they had been in the same places: the front line in the north had stretched for only several hundred kilometers. Doubtless they would have been able to reconstruct in conversation a little of what it had been like, but they knew that to do so in a few idle words while waiting for a trolley would not be right.

  "Someday we'll talk," the proprietor said, "but..." He hesitated. "I don't know. These things are like the things of the Church."

  "I understand. I never speak of them either. I want to buy some food before the trolley comes. Can you get it for me?"

  The proprietor shuffled back and forth between the cases and counters, and as the wires began to sing and the people outside touched their luggage to make sure that it hadn't walked away on its own or been taken by short or invisible thieves, Alessandro Giuliani was presented with half a dozen neat packages, which he slipped into his small leather briefcase.

  The wires were singing like afternoon locusts. Every now and then one of them would be drawn down so tightly that it would begin to shriek like the worst soprano in the hottest town in Italy.

  "How much?" Alessandro asked. He was anxious because he knew he would have difficulty mounting the high step of the streetcar, and would have to fumble for money while supporting himself with his cane and balancing the briefcase and wallet as the car lurched from side to side.

  The proprietor didn't answer. The streetcar was grinding around the bend. It sounded like a traveling machine shop. "How much?" Alessandro asked once again. The people outside had arisen and were waiting by the side of the tracks.

  The proprietor held up his right hand as if to stop traffic.

  "What? Again?" Alessandro asked.

  The proprietor shook his head back and forth.

  "We're no longer soldiers," Alessandro said quietly. "That was a lifetime ago. Everything has changed."

  "Yes," said the proprietor, "but once, a lifetime ago, we were, and sometimes it all comes back, and moves my heart."

 
; THE FARE to Monte Prato had risen from 1900 lire to 2200, which meant that Alessandro could hot merely give over two 1,000-lire notes, pocket the change, and walk away in balance, as he had planned. Instead, he found himself holding on to many things at once while the airy streetcar swayed violently and the sun flashed through the trees. Trying to withdraw a 500-lire note from his wallet was difficult, but it would have been worse had not the young Dane separated himself for a moment from his sunburnt and beautiful lover to hold Alessandro's briefcase and take his arm as a son might have done for a father.

  Alessandro thanked the boy, pleased that lack of decorum did not necessarily imply lack of courtesy.

  The best seat was next to the man with the newspaper hat and the squid. "Good day," Alessandro said, addressing both man and squid. Sensing mischief, the construction worker looked away sullenly.

  A few minutes later he peered into the bucket and poked the squid with his finger. Then he lifted his eyes and stared at Alessandro as if Alessandro were to blame. "Dead," he said, accusingly.

  Alessandro shrugged his shoulders. "Not enough oxygen in the water."

  "How do you mean?"

  "He needed oxygenated water to breathe."

  "That's crazy. Fish don't breathe. They live under water."

  "But they do, they do. There's oxygen in the water, and they extract it with their gills."

  "So why didn't this one?"

  "He did, until there was no more left, and then he passed away."

  The construction worker preferred to believe otherwise. "The bastards at Civitavecchia sold me a bad squid."

  "As you wish."

  The construction worker thought for a moment. "Would he have lived if I had blown into the water with a straw?"

  "Probably not, since you would have been blowing in more carbon dioxide than oxygen. How far are you going?"

  "Monte Prato."

  "Impossible," Alessandro said, briefly shutting his eyes for emphasis. "It's far too warm. The bucket should have been half full of ice."