A Soldier of the Great War (72 page)

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.

 

W
HEN THE
door opened and shut, and the legs of the rush-bottomed chair scraped against the floor, Alessandro could barely speak.

"What time does the moon rise?" he finally asked, as matter-of-factly as if he had been querying a ticket agent about the arrival of a train.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The moon."

"What about the moon?"

"What time does it rise?"

"I don't know. I don't have a watch. Sometimes I don't even know what day it is, much less when the moon rises."

"I thought you would."

"Are nurses supposed to know when the moon rises?"

"Yes. In Rome, every nurse knows when the moon rises."

"As you can undoubtedly hear," she said, "I'm a Romana, and you know that I'm a nurse. I don't know when the moon will rise, do you?"

"What do you think I am," Alessandro asked, "an
idiot-savant?
The moon is capricious to the point of insanity. It rises and sets all over the place, at different times. You never know what it's going to do. Sometimes it doesn't appear, sometimes it's disguised as a pale crescent, and sometimes it comes out full in the daylight. The sun doesn't shine at night, does it."

"Not in Europe."

"Imagine if, like the moon, the sun did as it pleased. Only an
idiot-savant,
someone intoxicated with logarithms and railroad timetables, would know when the moon rises."

"Do you know?" she asked.

"In about an hour."

"You're an
idiot-savant.
"

"I was almost an
idiot-savant,
but I didn't succeed. When I was in middle school I could memorize three hundred words of French in a minute. That's as close as I've come."

"I'm not impressed," she announced.

"Why? How many words of French can you memorize in a minute?"

"All of them."

"All of them?"

"Yes," she answered. "Every single one."

"And how is that?"

"I'm French."

"I don't believe it. You have no accent whatsoever."

"My father was Italian."

"Was?"

"He died on the Isonzo."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I," she said slowly.

"And your mother?"

"She was French. When I was a child, she died of influenza." Alessandro heard a break in her voice, even now. "I became a nurse."

"You've come here because of your father?"

"Yes. At the beginning of the war I was on the Somme. I loved my father very much. He was a Romano, who spoke like a Florentine. He was just like you."

"How do you know what I am?"

"You're an educated man who was born in Rome and will die there," she said.

"You're right. I was born in Rome, and I have been educated almost to death. What was it like on the Somme?" he asked. "No matter how many thousands die here we're always left with the impression that we are only pretending, that the real war is there."

"The real war is there," she confirmed. "When it stops there, it will stop here. If it goes on there, it will go on here. France is the heart of the war. France is always the heart of the war."

"Why?"

"Geography, illusion, or because the French see themselves as the center of the world. The country is so beautiful that when the world is finished with its work it looks to France for what it loves. With everyone's head turned so, it becomes the center. I'm able to say this not because I'm French, but because I'm Italian."

"You think in broad terms."

"At times."

"You're a nurse."

"Yes, I'm a nurse." After a moment's reflection, she challenged him. "Would you be surprised to learn that I have read a book on economics?"

"I suppose I would have to be."

"What about twenty?"

"Twenty?"

"Yes, economics—history, theory, prices, inflation, why not? It's true."

"You can't, being a woman, earn a living as an economist."

"I know."

"I am deeply impressed by a woman who, for no reason other than her own fascination, has read twenty books on economics."

"But I stopped."

"Why?"

"I wanted something more alive. The first book I read after that was a description of the South Pacific. Cerulean blue on every page."

"Let me see you."

"No."

"What if the house were hit by a shell?" he asked.

"
Pouf, au revoir,
goodbye," she said. "Do you think it will be?"

"No."

"Then do you think you should turn around?"

"No."

"Tell me why?"

"Because I'm the only soldier of the thousands you've seen, other than those who are blind, who has fallen in love with you without seeing you."

"And how could that possibly matter?"

"Because you're beautiful."

"Perhaps I am, perhaps I'm not, I really don't know. Don't turn around."

"It's difficult."

"Then perhaps what comes of it will be good."

"I don't know your name."

"I don't think I should tell you. The more time passes when you know neither my name, nor anything else about me, and have not seen me, the better you'll know me. It's your supposition, but I've come to believe it."

"Well that's good."

"But aren't you disappointed that someday you might come to know me, my name, my age, my face."

"I know your age."

"You do? How?"

"By your voice. You're twenty-three."

She was amazed. "And when is my birthday?"

Instead of thinking about it, guessing, or fearing that he might be wrong, Alessandro said, "June," and he was right again. "You were born in Rome, in June. It was when I was four years old, and loved to ride on merry-go-rounds and in pony carts. For several years, at least, we both lived in Rome, completely unaware of one another, though we may have crossed paths a dozen times. Rome was for me an entire universe. Young children see so clearly things of poignant detail, even if they soon learn to forget."

"But not you."

"I hope not."

"You know me by my voice."

"It's no talent of mine, but the lovely way you speak."

"
Le refus de la louange est un désir d'être loué deux fois,
" she said.

"I don't have to translate that," he told her. "Only in France are the wounded required to speak French, and even there the requirement is harsh, because life is difficult enough without having to pronounce it correctly. Did you smile?"

"A little smile."

"Tell me your name."

"No. I resent you. I resent that you can see me without looking at me. I resent that you may have fallen in love with me without having seen me. I resent that you lie here, wounded, and your power darts about the room."

"You won't let me see you," he answered, "but I have seen you. In our conversation you haven't been subordinate. Our powers are exactly equal."

"Yes, but you're wounded!"

"And you're tired. We're exactly equal, to the longest decimal, precisely, and it will always be so. The balance is perfect, and you know it."

"If it's true, it isn't fair," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you're going back in the line." Her gown rustled under her coat as she rose from the chair. And then she left.

Alessandro lay in bed observing the light of the moon as it bleached the window panes and washed the sky with silver. He felt his fever warm the blankets and burn his face. He waited quietly, and was prepared to wait longer.

Half an hour passed, enough time for her to have walked home and walked back. She was all grace, and he might not have heard her on the stairs, especially if each step was taken with hesitation.

Now the moon was fully visible through the open window, perfectly round and bright. Though she had not returned, he put no limit on his waiting, and refused to think of its end or of disappointment. He was prepared to listen for her until his strength failed. The moon crossed the window, and its uncompromising light left in darkness the side of the room it had first lit. The clock in the village struck the quarter hours, the halves, and the hours. The snow-covered streets, bathed in white and glistening with ice, were empty, and sentries at the edge of the village would have slept had it not been for the dazzling moonlight that brought them marvelous waking dreams.

It was not a time for coming and going, but Alessandro heard the door open. She had come back. She spoke haltingly and with great feeling.

"I went to bed, but then I rose and dressed again. I can't stay. My name is Ariane," she said. "Your name, Alessandro, is written on the chart."

 

T
HE NEXT
day, Ariane came at five-thirty in the afternoon. When Alessandro had glimpsed her standing outside the dispensary, with her left hand shielding her eyes from the sharp light of the glaciers, almost in a salute, she had been thinking that she wanted a man, even if it were someone barely acceptable. It would not be the greatest sin to take a man who was perhaps a little coarse, or not of her social station, or who would leave her later, or philander, or die before he departed the mountains. Souls were floating up at such a great rate that surely God would forgive her for holding one down and keeping him close to her in the warmth of her bed. She wanted a man who had seen the bodies lined up in rows, the tatters, the endless columns of exhausted soldiers walking bitterly from place to place, the corpses sprawled over the wire. She would not know how to talk to a man who hadn't seen these things, as she had, much less lie with him in love, and here every man knew what she knew.

One of the minor casualties of the war had been her expectation of finding someone in circumstances that were more joyful than those of the dispensaries in Gruensee—at a dinner party, a ball, a picnic, the racetrack, or on the terrace of a house at Cap d'Antibes, surrounded by geraniums and bees. She had assumed that love would come under blue skies, perhaps early in June, with a young man of good prospects and family, perhaps of wealth, perhaps as quietly handsome as he was strong. She was uninterested in towering, square-jawed men with huge domineering faces, who
were to be bred like horses with horse-like women. She wanted someone to match her in fineness of feature—a man whose virility did not crawl all over him, but who was, instead, meticulous and unassuming.

After months of sleepless nights and exhausting days in the snowbound village of wounded conscripts, she cared no longer for anyone to be sent to her, as if on a breeze, in a lovely time of year. As much as she needed love, she had to refuse it. Hardly a man came through, even those who were married, who was not as desperate for affection as was she, and, each time, the symmetry served to seal her heart. Boys who were mutilated and dying called with their eyes for her love, and that she could not love them was slowly killing her.

She had lingered in Alessandro's room at first merely because she had been cold and tired. Their eyes had yet to meet, their judgment had not been overwhelmed, and the accident that had tested their patience was as if the terrace at Cap d'Antibes had been transported to Gruensee, as if the reticent graces for which she longed had been married hypnotically with the stronger things that drove men to women and women to men, in a place like this, the first refuge from battle.

"It's Ariane," she said as she entered the room.

He had always been impressed by the self-possession of someone who could refer to himself, in this way, by his own name.

"I took over some shifts. I'll be in and out all evening."

Alessandro sat up straighter in bed. He tugged at his linen hospital gown until it was smooth. "If you do things like bring me dinner and take my temperature, the game may be over."

"It's not a game," she said, closing the door behind her. The latch clicked.

She hadn't removed her cape, and her right hand held the gold chain that crossed at the top near the throat. She walked forward to the open window, closed it abruptly, and turned on her heels.

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.