A Soldier of the Great War (22 page)

Three men raced onto the platform in the back of the caboose.
One was carrying a bottle of wine, and another a sandwich. When they saw two boys with crazed expressions and bloody clothes they began to shout and gesticulate, and the one with the bottle of wine waved it around in the wind as if it were a pistol.

"Is this the train to Rome?" Alessandro screamed through cupped hands. "Where's the dining salon? May I bring my poodle aboard if I put a cork in his ass?"

As Alessandro and Rafi laughed, the trainman with the wine bottle threw it, but it missed and smashed against an abutment. Another one tossed a sandwich at him as hard as he could, but it burst apart in the wind, and the ham wrinkled itself up at Rafi's feet. As Rafi tried to explain to the stunned railwaymen, in pantomime, that he was Jewish and didn't eat ham (the first part of the pantomime was to convey that he was circumcised) Alessandro grabbed him by the shoulder. "The bridge!" he shouted.

The bridge was as far above the water as twice the height of the train itself, and the river was running full and deep. The trainmen's jaws dropped when first Alessandro and then Rafi leapt off the roof, sailed through the air for a miraculously long time, and smashed into the water like stones.

The shock of the cold water was electric. It stanched their wounds and washed them clean of blood, sweat, and filth. When they surfaced, their throats were full of choking ice water and it was difficult to see, but the current carried them swiftly to a bend in the river and they swam to a sandy beach, where they climbed out.

As they trotted through the fields to keep from freezing to death, they felt that they could do anything. Alessandro said, "Most people don't do this, but it's what saves you. It tests you in the right way."

"Only for war," Rafi added.

"We'll almost certainly never have to go to war. It's unlikely that a war will break out in Europe, and even if it did it's less likely
that Italy would be included, but I want to be prepared. And this is not just for war, you see, it's for everything."

 

O
NE EVENING
when Alessandro returned to his rooms he found a letter. It was written on the finest paper, in an authoritative and elegant hand. After removing his wet jacket, he lit the lamps and the fire. This was the kind of letter, he thought, that brings a new turn in life. As the room started to warm, he opened the envelope.

"Most Excellent Sir:" the letter began. "My life as a man upon the tiger world is rapidly drawing to a close. In seventy years of pain, I have been pushed about by one thing or another in the struggle to earn my livelihood, support my family, and continue the course upon which I have been thrown.

"As a young man I believed that with patience I would eventually become something like a king. I was convinced that I would sleep in a bedchamber five storeys high and fifty meters wide, that I would lead armies, that fate would elevate me to those high places from which life appears to be fast and beautiful.

"But my luck has been poor. The highest position I have attained has been that of chief of the old order scribes in your father's law office. The other old order scribes render me their obeisance, but this is far from what I expected, especially since they never obey me.

"This week I suffered the ultimate indignity. On Tuesday, your father brought into the office a machine that I believe is referred to as a 'typewriter.' Within a day, Antonio, a young man with a spastic and inelegant hand, had betrayed his profession and was pecking at this monstrosity, like a cross-eyed chicken, making contracts of prime importance. He can do two pages an hour! This miraculous speed has rendered me impotent.

"Not only are first-quality documents to be written on this and perhaps another machine, but the devil who brought them into the
office arrived on Thursday with a ream of filthy black paper that, when inserted in alternating layers between pieces of bond, renders up to
five copies
of an original document.

"Though the results are hideous, everything goes much faster now, and we have work for only three scribes and three machines. Your father plans to retain one old order scribe such as myself to record minutes, take letters, and accompany him to court. My hand is no longer fast enough for that kind of work. As you know, it is not easy.

"I will have to retire, but I cannot afford to retire. I have spent all my money on the sap.

"As you have expressed the same view that I hold of these writing machines, I now beg your assistance. Help me to make my one last leap.

"I must become a professor of theology and astronomy at the university you now attend. I have been studying and formulating for many years ideas and theories that will make clear the mysteries of this painful life. I do not ask for much money, but only an amount equivalent to the annualization of what I have spent upon the sap.

"You must arrange this position for me. If it is already filled I will assist the present honorable occupant in his duties, if required, for nothing, as I will shortly begin to receive a small pension. In fact, if necessary, I will contribute to the maintenance and upkeep of the professorship whatever sum is necessary to sustain my participation.

"I arrive in the middle of next week to make my last leap. With regards, and etc., Orfeo Quatta."

The next day, Orfeo was waiting in the doorway when Alessandro returned from his last lecture.

"What is that?" Alessandro asked, pointing at a huge, round, plug-like, hide case bound with straps.

"That's my suitcase," Orfeo replied, as if Alessandro were very stupid.

"Yes, but it has hair on it. I've never seen a suitcase with hair › on it.

"Untanned hides are the strongest," Orfeo replied. "These are the kind of suitcases Americans carry, but Americans leave the heads and tails on."

"What animal was it?"

"A cow."

Alessandro invited Orfeo to stay with him, so that he might dissuade him from leaping and send him back to Rome with a letter that Alessandro would write to his father, explaining the humanitarian necessity of rehiring the scribe on his own terms.

But Orfeo was not easy to dissuade.

"Orfeo," Alessandro found himself saying as they sat in front of a comfortable fire, "there isn't any way in the world that they would make you a professor or even let you assist. Not for a day, not for a minute, not for a second. If you return to Rome with the letter I'll write, all will revert to its original state."

"Adam and Eve."

"Whatever."

"The water gardens of Babylonia."

"I don't know, whatever you wish, Orfeo."

"No," Orfeo said with a confident smile. "If they hear of the blessed sap that I have discovered in all fonts, they surely will invite me to be on their faculty."

"I don't think so."

"Oh, but they will. I know they will. I have all the theories here," he said, putting his finger to his temple, "gravity, time, purpose, free will, you name it. The pain of the world is worked out."

"All right, then. I'll take you to the appropriate official, and you can tell him yourself."

"Not quite!" Orfeo declared. "That would never work."

Alessandro drew a blank.

"I have no degrees. They don't know me. It takes years to become a professor."

"That's exactly what I've been saying."

"And these men may not know of the dog-like, howling pain of the universe, or the gracious sap."

"I assure you that even if they do they won't admit it."

"We have to outsmart them. Open my case."

Alessandro gingerly unstrapped the hairy barrel that he had carried up the stairs and pulled out the most extraordinary academic robes and hat that he had ever seen. They were trimmed with purple bands and fur. A red-fox rosette was stuck on the breast, and a vermeil chain looped about the shoulder. The hat looked like a fourteenth-century warship that had been reincarnated as a purple pillow.

"What is it?" Alessandro asked.

"The robe of the president of the University of Trondheim: that is, Trondheim, Norway. No one has ever heard of him, and, besides, he's dead."

"Did you rob his grave?"

"Everyone knows that my brother-in-law is a tailor in Hamburg. Years ago, when the president of the University of Trondheim was in that city, he gave the robe to my brother-in-law to let out. He had to deliver a speech, and had put on weight—probably from eating too many of the Norwegian pancakes called
jopkeys.
But he died, and his wife told my brother-in-law to keep the robe. My brother-in-law, who has long known of my ambition to leap, sent it to me."

"How do you plan to use it?"

"Isn't that obvious? I, the president of the University of Trondheim, am passing through Bologna, where I will give an important lecture."

"But you don't speak Norwegian."

"No one speaks Norwegian. And I speak such perfect Italian that even if someone did, why would he bother?"

"What about another Norwegian?"

"I tell him that I'm a Hungarian on my way to Trondheim to take up the post, and that if he wants to speak to me it should be in either Hungarian, Latin, or Italian. Which one do you think he'll choose? Ha!"

"I hope you have in mind a name that can be taken as both Norwegian and Hungarian, if there is such a thing."

"Orflas Torvos," Orfeo said without missing a beat.

Alessandro's eyes bounced back and forth, seeking escape.

"All you have to do," Orfeo said, "is find out when the most important lecture place is empty, and help me put up the posters."

"What posters?"

Orfeo reached into the hairy barrel. "These." He had dozens of beautifully printed posters announcing his lecture on "Astronomy, Theology, and the Blessed Sap That Binds the Universe." Blank spaces for the place, date, and time awaited his superb penmanship. He was determined to leap.

Early in the evening of one of the last days in January, as sparkling gas-fired chandeliers blazed in the cavernous Teatro Barbarossa, and an express train of cold air had descended from Switzerland to freeze Italians in their beds, Orfeo made his leap. As often happens in moments of destiny, the man who takes his chances—in this case, Orflas Torvos—was perfectly calm and collected.

 

A
LONE ON
the high stage, he trod back and forth in his magnificent robes and purple hat, an astounding counterfeit. He wanted to affect the bored, irritated, arrogant expression common to academic lecturers who are pompous and cruel enough to try to humiliate several hundred people at once.

For a few seconds, Orfeo communed with his pocket watch. Then he closed it, and waited. As the very last of the thousand or so who had come to hear him took their seats in the back of the
ancient gas-lit lecture hall, he cleared his throat and stepped to the podium.

He looked into the vast interior of the Teatro Barbarossa and nearly reeled from fright and sadness. The fright arose from the sight of a thousand people looking up at him like babies who want to be lifted into the air, and the sadness from remembering that his mother and father had spent their lives in front of audiences, lit by undulating footlights and spiraling torches. They had died almost three-quarters of a century before, and had been left somewhere on the road, in simple graves. The last their four-year-old son had seen of the wood markers had been from the top of one of the circus wagons as it pulled toward the next show.

Before Orfeo was ten years of age the president of the circus called him over by an apple tree and said, "Orfeo, you must leave us. You aren't sufficiently deformed, and you've grown far too tall."

"Where are my parents buried?" he had asked.

"I don't recall. I think it was somewhere in Rumania."

"Where?"

"By the side of the road."

"I know, but where?"

The president of the circus shook his head. "It wasn't anywhere near the Black Sea, or I would have remembered."

"Thank you."

The next ten years had been spent with a group of Gypsies, livestock traders, who employed him as their scribe. When he reached marriageable age, because he was not one of them, they had left him in Trieste. From there he had made his way to Rome, where for half a century he had been a legal scribe, as the first office to which he had come near the railway station had been that of an attorney.

Now it was he who was illuminated by footlights and spiraling torches, and it seemed just, that the world made such circles, for a circle was the only means he had to get back to the lost place where his heart had been broken. He had always believed that he earned
a credit for every letter well formed, for every page without a blot. The whole world was a task of waiting that one had to fulfill.

"I miss my home in Trondheim," he said in an astoundingly authoritative, quasi-governmental, contra-basso. "I miss the way the arctic winds push the icicles from the eaves, and how they shatter as they fall, like a bomb exploding in a city of glass."

The audience came to attention in its seats. What it didn't know was that as Orfeo spoke in his deep contra-basso his soul was swaying to the music of the circus.

"You don't know anything about the sap," he said. "You haven't the vaguest idea of the blessed sap, the most gracious sap that fills the bone-white valley of the moon."

His listeners pulled themselves up ramrod straight, their brows knit, trying to accommodate his pronouncements.

"You little snot-noses, baboons. You look like the monkeys on the Rock of Gibraltar."

Their hearts thudded, they could feel the blood massing in their aortas, and they were as tense as crickets. He went on, growing more and more relaxed, his ease the inverse function of their tightening stomachs.

"All my life I've suffered this deformity while you sat in your parents' well appointed kitchens stuffing zabaglione into your gorgeous bodies—the girls, sunburnt and green-eyed, with thick tresses of blond hair braided in lascivious basket weave that fell across their strong backs....

"The boys, stupid granite-jawed idiots twice my height, intoxicated with their handsomeness, simply arrived in the afternoon, played tennis, ate, and coasted into delicious nudity with those beautiful, perfectly formed women.