A Soldier of the Great War (81 page)

As the grappa spilled down Rafi's chin, Alessandro shook him in anger. He was sure that he could see Rafi's chest rise and fall. He opened Rafis jacket and put his hand inside. The heart was still, the skin frozen.

Alessandro was so exhausted that, without tying himself in, he lay down on the ledge and slept. The sun was strong, and he had had to close his eyes to block out the glare. If he had rolled in his sleep, he would have flown.

 

W
HEN HE
awoke, the wind had stopped and the sun was beating down on his sunburned face. He turned to Rafi. Alessandro wanted to bring him home, and he thought he could. It was still morning, it was warm, his hands wouldn't freeze, and he had all the rope he would need.

The most difficult part of the thousand-meter
abseil was
prying Rafi's arms away from his sides so a rope could be passed around his chest. The body was stiff. Pulling at the wrists did no good: the leverage stopped at the elbows, which bent, leaving the upper arm unmoved. Alessandro had to use his ice axe to lever out the upper arms. To deal with Rafi's body as if it were a log or a board was terrifying, nauseating, and sad. In novels and in the theater, bodies were treated with delicacy: a gentle touch, a kiss, the featherweight pull of a shroud that then parachuted over the face of the deceased in a nearly imperceptible puff of air. In the ancient literature, corpses were handled more gingerly than newborns, but in one single morning Alessandro had sent one hurtling a thousand meters onto rock and ice, and was prying apart the arms of another with an ice axe. Only God, it seemed, was fit to take care of the dead, to lift them without damaging them, and handle them without disgrace. The soul, Alessandro told himself, fled long ago, and I am merely doing what I have to do.

He apologized as he passed the rope around Rafi and tied it at the back of his shoulder blades, and he apologized for what he was going to have to do. The line of bolts and ledges that they had used for their retreat was twenty meters ahead on the traverse. It was a perfect way down, with bolts set at intervals so that the end of each rappel was a ledge big enough to stand on.

Rafi's body would have to be pulled from where it was and swung like a sandbag to reach the line of descent. This would batter his corpse, and it seemed somehow to be immeasurably cruel. Alessandro put on his pack and climbed toward the line of retreat.

For the first time, the rock was not unpleasantly cold. The fissure was sheltered, and only occasionally did breezes run along its length and jump out again into the abyss. They lifted Alessandro's sweaty hair and cooled his head. He stopped twice, once to put on his hat, and once to take it off, and when he took it off he dropped it. It disappeared from sight only after it had fallen for a full minute.

When he reached the line of retreat, the sun and the angle of the rock allowed the enemy to see him moving far above them, and they wasted no time. Soon, hollow concussions echoed through the cirque, sending down torrents of loosened ice and snow. The Austrians were still using phosphorus shells that had been piled next to the guns the night before, and, when these burst, star-shaped tendrils of white smoke were lifted on the upwelling winds. The Italian side replied with a counter-barrage that failed to deter the Austrians from further shots, and made the mountains ring ever the more.

Under fire, Alessandro grew resolute, and the chest-vibrating concussions awakened him as nothing else could. The bolt at the head of the retreat line was solid. Two hundred meters below, almost out of sight, was a wide ledge. The way to
abseil
two hundred meters was to use a light cord that the Germans, and only the Germans, called a
Reepschnur.
Instead of doubling the
abseil
rope, one used this cord to pull it past the rappel ring on the bolt. The end of the rope was tied in a monkeys fist so it would not pass through the rappel ring, the cord tied around the rope between the monkeys fist and the ring. Pulling the lighter line would pull two hundred meters of the heavier rope through, if the lighter line didn't break with the weight and friction of the first unbalanced tugs. If it did, the only thing to do was to go back up, using prussik slings. Such a task on a two-hundred-meter line would take hours. Alessandro hoped that the cord would hold, but it was even lighter than he normally would have used, as it was all that had been available.

He passed the rope through a rappel ring that he set on the bolt with a runner, and when it was taut he pulled hard to bring Rafi off the ledge. Rafis traverse seemed to take all the time in the world. The body bounced against the rock face, twirled, and gathered speed. Alessandro leaned back, hanging out over space, to take the upward pull. The weight that passed underneath him, swinging to and fro, was the man Luciana had been going to marry.

The Austrians could not have known what this was, but they fired upon it, and although they didn't reach it, their shells exploded halfway up the wall as if to bar the way.

Alessandro lowered Rafi to the first ledge. He had to do it slowly, and he had to stop every few minutes lest the rappel ring heat so much from the friction that it burn through the rope.

When Rafi reached the ledge Alessandro was unable to maneuver him onto it. The body dangled half on and half off and would move from place to place as the wind pushed the rope and spun him on his delicate pivot. That meant that the rope would have to take the weight both of Rafi and Alessandro, and that it would be stiff and inflexible as it passed through the rappel gate that Alessandro had fashioned of four of his carabiners.

He attached the light cord and tossed it down. It unfurled like a stream of water that dashes off a cliff, in waves that overtook waves ahead of them and then were overtaken. After he set the rappel gate he stepped backward over the drop.

The tension that Rafi put on the rope, which was really three ropes tied together, and the weight of the rope itself, had an effect that Alessandro had not anticipated. Not only did it stiffen, but it was held against the rock, so that he was able to use his feet not just to push off, but to push back and put tension on the rappel gate. He walked slowly down the rock face, toward the shell-bursts beneath him.

When he arrived at the ledge he took Rafi in, untied him, disengaged the rappel gate from the rope, and pulled on the retrieval line. Though he had to pull at first with all his strength, and hang on the light cord, it worked.

He then had to endure two hundred meters of rope cascading down upon him and striking in rapid unavoidable blows. The sensation was like that of being beaten by a crowd of people. The second half of the rope fell beyond the ledge and down the cliff. When the end passed him, Alessandro's relief turned to panic. The
rope was heavy, it was falling fast, and he had neglected to belay himself. If it pulled too strongly it would take him with it. If he let go, he would have no rope. He wound the end around his forearm, and waited for the pull.

When it came, it jerked him from where he was sitting, with his back against the wall, into a full standing position. He almost tumbled headlong over the edge, but he pulled up and straightened himself explosively, neutralizing the downward force.

Now he set up quickly. He was moving so fast and he had so little time that he actually kicked Rafi's body over the ledge. He was sweating, the artillery concussions were vastly louder, and the shells broke a hundred meters below him on both sides of the rope. The smell of gunpowder, lignite, and phosphorus rose in moist clouds. Ten thousand bagpipes could not have done more to lift his spirits than the sounds of the instruments that sought his death. He trembled as he set the rappel gate and backed off the edge, and he trembled as he descended toward the bursting shells, but he was not trembling from fear. In firing their cannons at him the enemy had done him a great service, and he floated down between the shell-bursts like a man on fire.

The louder the concussions the greater his satisfaction and the easier it was to drop toward them. His natural instinct, it seemed, was to fight. The cannoneers stopped for a moment as they adjusted their aim, and he went as fast as he could, and as unevenly, to make their problems with elevation triply complex.

The first newly aimed shell came in on the left. When it burst, the concussion deafened him and the rush of air pushed him away from the explosion. He scraped against the cliff and twirled on the rope. As if he were in a close fight, he screamed as he twisted himself to face the wall. They had the elevation just right. All they needed was a tiny adjustment in bearing.

He loosened the rappel gate and dropped twenty meters at a time. His feet and knees pounded against the wall. As his hands
slid down the rope, the deerskin gloves were smoking. The rope burned through them and took the skin off his palms. Droplets of blood, like warm water, fell from where he had been an instant before. Shell fragments and rock rained down. To keep up the speed, he pushed out from the wall whenever he slowed, and the carabiners in the rappel gate grew so hot that they made the rope smoke as it ran through them. Despite the shells bursting above him, and the fire in his hands, he reached the second ledge, crashing down in a heap next to Rafi's body, and despite the pain and shock of the fall, the first thing he did was remove the rappel gate from the rope.

For a quarter of an hour he lay on the ledge as the Austrians threw shells against the wall above to bombard him with rock fragments and falling shrapnel. It was already past noon, and actually hot, even though the shadowed crevices all around his resting place were filled with snow and ice.

As soon as he set up his rope and tossed over the cord, they began to fire. As he was lowering Rafi he could see the flashes of the cannon at the bore. With his hands opened up, for every flash of the cannon he had stars of light from pain. When Rafi was down, Alessandro followed, falling more than rappelling. The shells tracked his descent but the gunners could not spin their wheels fast enough to catch him.

As he sailed onto the third ledge he felt as if all his organs had burst inside him and as if his ankles, legs, and arms had been broken, too. Blood issued from his mouth. But he was determined to finish. Every few seconds, he spat to clear his throat. He retrieved the rope and took its blows. Then he set up again, noticing with hardly a thought that one of the shells had blown Rafi's feet off, and that a sticky pool of blood and lymph had oozed from the legs.

"Over you go," he said as he pushed Rafi over, as if he and Rafi would later be able to discuss what had happened, and, perhaps, argue about it. Lowering him, he waited for the artillery, but the
Austrians had seen enough detail through their telescopes to hold their fire as Alessandro struggled to bring himself and his charge to the base.

His hands caused him so much pain that he could think of nothing better than to have them removed when he got down. His clothes were caked in sweat, blood, and dirt, his face blackened, and his hair matted. He moved as if in a daze, and fell through the last twenty meters of rope only semi-conscious.

He finally came to rest against Rafi, who was with him at the end, four or five meters above the river, dangling beneath an overhang. There they slowly turned, cooled by breezes that glanced off the ice-cold water below.

A hundred Austrians in coats, caps, sheepskins, and tunics stared silently at the half-dead, half-living mass dangling a short distance above them. Alessandro's head hung back limply at first, as if he, too, were dead, but then he lifted it, and looked at them. They were standing on the bank of the river, their rifles resting on the ground or slung across their backs.

Alessandro lost control of his bladder, and as he twisted on the rope blood still issued from his mouth.

"Can you bury him?" he asked, but they couldn't hear over the white water. They put their hands to their ears, and some leaned forward. "Can you bury him?" Alessandro asked again. They nodded in affirmation.

He reached into his pocket. The knife was still there. He knew the water would be freezing cold, and just before he cut the rope, he closed his eyes.

I
N THE
first week of June, 1918, Alessandro was awakened every morning at dawn by fierce and unintelligible arguments among Bulgarian soldiers unfit for anything but guarding prisoners of war. These former laborers, peasants, and bandits wore sheepskin vests, baggy pantaloons, and fezzes or gray mouton caps, all entirely inappropriate to the wild heat that blew across the Hungarian plain.

On June the second they had halted on the shore of an opalescent blue lake. The land was so flat that the opposite shore failed to show itself unless you climbed into a tree. Standing in the crux, surrounded by apple or cherry blossoms, you could see the plain beyond the water, and silent sheep-like rolls of cloud smoothly skating over oceans of still-green wheat.

The Bulgarians seemed to have rooster in the blood, and to Alessandro, who knew no Slavic languages, every strange syllable was bliss. Dangerous, promising, and horrible, the tongue of his captors was a thrill that he likened to watching a tiger devour the rope with which one is bound hand and foot. It sounded to him like this:
Blit scaratch mi shpolgah. Trastritch minoya dravitz nazhkoldy aprazhga. Zharga mazhlovny booreetz.

On arising they punched, kicked, and slapped each other. Some drew knives but, after much screaming, abandoned them in favor of the long whips they used on mules. As they dueled ceremoniously with these whips, standing beyond the range of harm, they spat, they clenched their teeth, and the veins and arteries in
their necks and faces bulged like vines on a house in the Cotswolds.

They were distraught because they, even they, who could not read newspapers and were eight hundred miles from the nearest front, knew that their cause was lost, Austria-Hungary doomed, and the world in collapse. And then, they themselves, literally, were lost. They knew they were in Hungary, but were unable to narrow their position down further. Four factions had developed among them, with each certain that their destination lay in a different direction. The more educated knew what south and east were, and asked of the illiterates who wanted to go north or west how Bulgaria could be north or west of Hungary. The north and west factions couldn't understand the concept and simply pointed to the horizon beyond which, they believed more and more each day, Bulgaria lay. Fixed by the perfect balance of four outwardly exploding desires, they remained immobile by the shore of the exquisitely beautiful lake, starving to death in gorgeous summer weather.