A Soldier of the Great War (73 page)

"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."

Not knowing what to say, she asked if he wanted her to bring the dinner.

"Why must we eat so early?"

"For the same reason that you eat early in the line, so people don't have to work too long in the dark."

"I'm not thinking about dinner."

"No?"

"No."

"What are you thinking about?"

"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.

 

S
EVERAL HOURS
later when Ariane crossed the green to sign the nurses' muster sheet, her face was red and her hair disheveled in a fashion that connoted neither the pressing-down of sleep nor the action of the wind, but something quite different. Her eyes were in rebellion against focus, and she felt as if she were floating through the moonlight. Her commanding officer, a Swede who was able even at fifty to wear her blond hair in a single braid and still look like a young woman, stood up abruptly next to a little table at which she had been writing in a notebook, approached Ariane, and put the heel of her hand on Ariane's forehead. When she saw that the young woman's neck, chest, and shoulders were almost pink and red, and that her hair was tangled, with a lock in front falling until it touched her right eyebrow at the top of its strikingly bold arch, she dropped her hand and stepped back.

"You must be less obvious. You must never appear in public the way you look now," she said in French.

Ariane blushed.

"It's quite apparent that either you have typhus or you have spent the last three hours making love. Ariane, even in France you would cause a stir in this condition, would you not?"

"It would depend upon the reason, Madame."

"Anyway, this is not France. Try to be more discreet. And if you're found out, come to me. I'll say you have a fever, and all will be well."

Ariane smiled in gratitude.

"Ariane."

"Yes?"

"The war has put an end to many things. One cannot expect the forms of the past to prevail, but will you marry this man?"

Ariane tightened her lips and pulled-in the lower one somewhat, as she often did when she dealt with a difficult question. "I hope, Madame, that he will not be killed."

 

I
N THE
high mountains, summer and winter are shuffled throughout the year like wild cards, and in the last days of Alessandro's recuperation summer came briefly to the Alto Adige. As the sun shone from dusk to dawn in clear motionless air, the dispassionate colors of winter were enriched, birds sang as if for their lives, and it was so warm and bright that the partially recovered soldiers took to the snowfields, where the air was hot with dazzling reflections.

One morning Alessandro went to the nurses' barracks to wake Ariane, who lay in a bed just behind the partition that divided the sleeping quarters from the dining room and the kitchen.

The other women, who were standing half dressed at ironing boards, holding kettles, or sitting on their cots lacing their boots, froze as Alessandro knelt by Ariane. As he put his left hand under her head, and his right hand on her shoulder, and lifted her gently from sleep, no one moved. They watched as if the world depended upon it, until she modestly pulled the blanket up almost to her chin. Then they resumed what they had been doing.

As Alessandro waited outside, leaning against a stucco wall that had already been warmed by the sunlight, he thought of the
women who lived with Ariane in the chalet. He longed for the gentleness in the way they lived, the peace, and the safety. Even their fingers were beautiful—their voices, the way they brushed their hair, the way they laced their boots, leaning down with tresses about to tumble forward but held in check as if by a miracle. They were beautiful even in the way they breathed. A few days before, as Ariane had taken off her dress, Alessandro had watched the rising and falling of her chest, the movement of the rib cage barely perceptible under the skin, and the changes in color that accompanied the steady sound of her breathing. Though neither he nor Ariane knew, she had begun to carry his child.

When she came out, fresh from sleep, Alessandro asked, "Do you think you can walk all the way down to the Adige?"

"I can," she answered. "I'm not sure about you."

"I don't walk on my arm. Anyway, if I have trouble, you can carry me."

 

T
HE SLOPE
from Gruensee to the Adige was white without imperfection. Alessandro and Ariane skated down and across it for an hour. Falling brought not pain but surprise, for the snow was powdery and dry, and even when they fell they stayed warm. Though the glare hurt the back of their eyes, and they were quickly sunburnt, they felt like the angels who inhabit the cool air above a flume, and who, with nothing to do but sing, give to the water its tranquil and hypnotic sound.

On the riverbank they found a bare concave rock facing south, and stayed there for as long as the sun warmed them, lost in lovemaking in which sometimes Ariane's hair hung over the edge of the rock and was lapped by the ice-cold Adige as it surged and relaxed. The river roared, and on their granite platform it was so hot and bright that they leaned down to cup the cold water in their hands and drink.

"What is the name of the painting?" Ariane asked as if she had suddenly realized that she hadn't remembered.

"It's called
La Tempesta,
and it's in Venice, in the Gallerie dell'Accademia. They say, what could it mean, a woman with a child, disrobed, and the soldier, standing apart from her, disconnected. But I know exactly what to make of it. Today I saw a lovely sight—the nurses lacing their boots, brushing their hair, fastening their earrings. If I were a painter, I would have wanted to paint it. So with Giorgione. He intended to praise elemental things, and to show a soldier on the verge of return. I'm not surprised that scholars and critics don't understand it. Giorgione lived in the time of the plague, and the scholars and critics, for the most part, have had to do without plague or war, which make the simple things one takes for granted shine like gold. What does the painting mean? It means love. It means coming home."

Alessandro had been ordered to a unit of Alpini far to the north of Gruensee. "When the war is over," he said as he held her, full of hope, "we'll marry, we'll live in Rome, and we'll have children."

She cried.

 

O
N THE
morning of Alessandro's departure, a squadron of six Austrian bi-planes on a snow-covered field near Innsbruck started their engines. The powerful winds of the high ranges, in updrafts, downdrafts, and cyclones that raced around the peaks, made flying dangerous, but these airplanes were much heavier and more powerful than most of the light craft that daredevils had flown through the mountains before the war, or even the fighter planes that were dispatched to reconnoiter and to harass the Italians in their solid trenchwork and fortifications. Most of the time, in the vastness of the mountains, airplanes were no more threatening than insects. These, however, each carried four hundred kilos of bombs. With twenty-four hundred kilos of high explosive and incendiary, a
small group of aircraft, if piloted well, could destroy a railroad train, explode an ammunition depot, cause great harm to a column on the march, or obliterate a river crossing.

Just to fly in the Alps, with no place to land, was an act of daring. Parachuting onto a glacier or the slopes of a mountain was extremely dangerous, but flying in winter winds and storms that were lifted over mountain walls like soldiers going over the top of a trench made parachuting seem safe. When the planes lined up on the field, engines bellowing and snow lifting from the ground in patches that rocketed away on the wind, the pilots cleansed themselves of inhibition, and in the unbearable sound of the motors and the ceaseless vibration they entirely forgot fear and softness.

One by one the planes lumbered forward on the clean snow still violet in the dawn, gunned their engines, and sailed down the runway. The pilots were dressed in leather and fur. They had hot-water bottles that they would jettison as soon as the heat dissipated, vacuum bottles of hot tea, and meat sandwiches. Though they were not to be aloft for long, they wanted to be warm, and the cold air made them hungry.

They left the valley floor and soon were in the mountains, an abstract of ice and rock devoid of greenery and human works. In the shadows below them, the slightly blue-gray ridges woven into desolate ice fields were the color of someone who has frozen to death. They turned west and flew briefly over Switzerland, and then started a broad left-hand bank that would bring them to the Italian lines from the rear, with the morning sun at their backs. As parts of their faces froze in the wind they threw out their used hot-water bottles and joked, with hand signs, of having bombed the glaciers. Below them, the ice was still blue.

By the time the sun, now high enough to bring yellow and gold into the world, had carpeted the snowfields with shadows, they were over Italy, patiently cutting through the air in their broad turn. They opened the tea and sandwiches. So appreciative were
they of the heat that they let the tea scald them. It strained through their tea-colored mustaches, and the vapor from the vacuum flasks was instantaneously left behind to hang quietly in frigid sun-filled air several thousand meters above a snowy plateau.

Arising that morning at three, as troops of soldiers often do, a group of Italian lancers had broken camp under dazzling starlight. It had taken them an hour to dress, wash in the thundering black Adige, and kindle the breakfast fires. The river water was so cold that it made the air seem like the morning air in Rome in late spring. Just to breathe the mist that hung above the rapids was to wake a hundred times.

The fires burned quickly and with a lot of crackling. Orange sparks ascended from wave-like sheets of flame that showed the same intense and shadowy glow as footlights. The thousand lancers had their bread and coffee by scores of these fires. They were silent and reflective almost to a man, thinking of their families in recollections brought on by the special grace of early morning. At times like these, they felt as if the war were over, they had won it, and they were about to start home.

By first light the littered camp on the riverbank had been forgotten, its bright fires turned to patches of lukewarm ash. A column of a thousand men and almost two thousand horses, wagons, and caisson-borne machine guns moved slowly northward to the Brennero, with the river always in sight. Now the black water that had slipped away so fast in the starlight was pale blue, or white where it boiled over rocks. Forced between huge boulders in the riverbed, it rose in serpentine arches with silver underbellies. The saddlery and harnesses had long before been worn to soft, dark colors, and could hardly be heard, but the click of metal bits as nervous horses worked their jaws back and forth, the snortings and whinnies, the creak of wagon wheels, the slappings of sabre cases against the horses' flanks, and the high-pitched commands shouted by the officers floated on the sound of the water, and when the column rounded a bend and was hit by a gust of cold wind, the lances and pennants made a whistling noise.

They were marching north on a snow-covered road because a general studying a map in Rome had come across the long narrow fingers of flat ground that rested on the great north-south ridges, and decided that a proper conquest required a regiment of cavalry. Not much room existed for maneuver, but a small cavalry unit, lances down, might exploit a break in the enemy lines and rush across the windblown ground to the next and distant redoubt.

The cavalrymen were not used to the mountains, and their officers were unfamiliar with the terrain. Accustomed to the thick, sweet air of sea-level farms, the horses were agitated and unnerved by the light, the thinness of the atmosphere, and the ways in which sound carried. Cliffs rearing up to dizzying heights were beyond their ken, and they grew skittish as the road began to bend into steep switchbacks.

Shortly before ten in the morning the lancers began to move onto the plateau upon which sat Gruensee. The head of the column halted at a fork in the road. The way right led down toward the valley and up again, and the way left passed through Gruensee to the high plains where the lancers were bound. They had been marching for six hours, and wanted least of all to descend only to climb again, so they went left toward the town.

 

T
HE UNIT
of Alipini to which Alessandro had been assigned was camped far to the north, under the precipitous walls of the Cima Blanca. Trying to wrest the heights of this massif from the Austrians, it had suffered heavy casualties, and needed men to work machine guns, do guard duty, haul wood, and take care of isolated outposts.

The car that had been sent for Alessandro was so large in comparison with the diminutive platform upon which sat the driver
and a tiny freight box, that Alessandro asked about it. He was told that the machine pulled field guns up mountain roads and did not need a large freight box, and that he would ride on the running-board.