A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

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.

At each stop the driver looked up into his mirror to scan both the interior of the car and the street, to see if anyone would insult and delay him by wanting to get on or off.

Just tell me the story. I can see you ordering coffee and bread. You walk up to the guy and you say, 'Forgive me. I'm not a baker, and I've never been to Brazil. What's more, I don't work in a restaurant, but, though I didn't bring my microscope, please, can you give me a cappuccino and a roll?'"

As they walked, the priest, an old man from a country town, asked Alessandro if he were a believer. "Yes," Alessandro told him, "but I don't need your job of words to propel me directly into God's hands. If God will have me, it will have to be without an introduction."

"What has that to do with me? It's just as I've said. I could be any woman." "Yes. And I, in the trench, shivering, wounded, could be any man. To be reduced so, to what is elemental, is not a dishonor. Never will anyone know you better than he who has known you when everything you have has been stripped away. Never will anyone know you better than when you are as you are now, sitting in a chair, with your coat on, in this cold dark room, hungry and exhausted."

It was because the world had a life of it own. Leave winter alone or watch it to death, it would still gradually turn to summer. Miracles and paradoxes could be explained by the marvelously independent courses of their elements, and perhaps real beauty could be partially understood in that it was not just a combination, but a dissolution; that after the threads were woven and tangled they then untangled and continued on their separate ways; that the trains that pulled into the station in a riveting spectacle as clouds of steam condensed in the midnight air, then left for different destinations and disappeared; that the drama of a striking clock was impossible without the silence that was both its preface and epilogue. Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.

In these metaphysics, and in these metaphysics alone, it hardly mattered if she came or not. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what she had looked like in the light that had reflected from the glaciers. Though he had seen her from a distance and only for an instant, he remembered the way her dress cascaded from her shoulders, the red-and-white enameled clasp that had shone out as if in a painting, and the neckline that it had held together, in proportions that were almost perfect. He saw again the light in her face as she stared into the breeze that carried cool air up from the ice fields. When the truck had rounded the corner and she had become suddenly backlit, her hair glowed and her hands were clasped behind her as she rocked on her feet. He had her forever. And she need not have come. But she did.

She neither moved nor spoke, and she was the color of a rose. Backlit once again by the darkening evening sky just as she had been at the dispensary, she rocked to and fro almost imperceptibly, not because she was cold, but because the blood was pounding through her so forcefully that it actually caused her to sway. As Alessandro sat in the bed, and she stood still, he fell so deeply in love with her, so hard, and so fast, that he was able to follow her even in her reticence. After she unclasped the gold chain and put her cape on the sill, she stood before him in the flowing and pleated nurse's gown. "My father used to say," she said, "that I should look for someone who would be able to sail a boat in heavy seas, who would be a master of his profession, who would love children. And he used to say that I should seek the kind of man who could take me into the private rooms of an expensive jeweler and show me diamonds and emeralds. What he meant by that was not that this person would be rich—I think his image was of an employee—but that he would have to be patient, trustworthy, considerate, and refined." "I have a temper," Alessandro said. "Not with me," she answered. "Never with me." He dipped his head and briefly closed his eyes, as if to signify a vow. "Never."

"I'm thinking about you," he said. "I've forgotten what it's like to touch a woman, I've forgotten how to do it, but I want more than anything to kiss you, to hold you. Would you forgive me if, at first, I were awkward?" "Yes." "Would you forgive me if at first I seemed cold?" "Yes." "And for having, at the moment, only one good arm?" "Oh yes." Ariane walked forward until she stood by the bed. Her eyes swept down toward her feet, and as she kicked off her shoes, her mouth tightened. Then she straightened her head, and her eyes and Alessandro's met.

Though he knew it was not true, he felt that in Rome someone would be waiting for him. Perhaps it was because the magic of cities is that they provide the illusion of love and family even for those with neither. Lights, the business of the streets, the very buildings close together, the interminable variety and depth, serve to draw lonely people in, and no matter what they know, they still feel in their heart of hearts that someone is waiting to embrace them in perfect love and trust.