A Soldier of the Great War (93 page)

"There won't be another war, not in our lifetime."

"Not in yours," Alessandro said, pulling back the hammer, "Many soldiers were in the house you bombed. Some were dying already. Some thought they were out of it and would return to their families. And who took care of them?" For a moment Alessandro was unable to speak. Then he resumed, his voice quivering. "Nurses, a dozen or more." He leaned forward. "Who do you think nurses are? Young girls. After you flew away, the rubble burned so hot that I couldn't face it.

"One of them was..." Alessandro was unable to finish. He just stood there.

"Would she have wanted you to do this?" Andri asked.

Now Alessandro seemed to grow calm. After a while, he smiled, and he said, "Why don't you ask her?"

Andri nodded in resignation. "All right. I have no arguments. I thought I'd come through. I've tried to be happy these last months. I suppose it will have to do."

A door burst open on the right, startling Alessandro so much that he pivoted to bring the pistol around, holding it tensely in both hands, but standing across from him was a girl of six or seven. She wore a loden coat, her hair was braided, and she carried a schoolbag.

"You're late getting off," Andri said. "The teacher will be angry."

She remained in the doorway.

"This is Ilse Maria, my daughter. Ilse ... go."

She refused to move.

Alessandro looked at the child, and then, as he lowered the pistol, he turned to her father and said, "Now you've beaten me twice."

 

W
HEN
A
LESSANDRO
had first stood face to face with Bindo Altoviti he had been so rich in attachments as to be enchanted by the idea of solitude. His home on the Gianicolo had been a fortress against time. Never had he returned to anything but a loving family, he had taken for granted the fraternity of the university, and the world was a garden of exquisite and invulnerable women.

He went again to the room in the Alte Pinakothek. The hand of Bindo Altoviti, resting almost effeminately upon his breastbone, looked like the work not of Raphael but of an assistant. A thousand of Raphael's images raced through Alessandro's memory for comparison—balloon-like war-horses whose expressions were
true to those of animals and reflective of those of man; scenes and faces rendered deliberately in the golden light of dusk; cherubim whose expressions were those of older children, because babies would not sit still even for Raphael.

Unlike the new paintings, with their disheveled and hallucinatory colors, each and every one of Raphael's brush strokes, all of his shining planes, the rendering of the air in light—whether bright or subdued, whether of morning sky or evening star—was disciplined with an iron hand. Here were no stratagems or conceits, nothing centrifugal, nothing wild, nothing without the rich harmony that seemed to be the world itself as seen in heavenly recollection. The one weight that aligned all the elements, and reconciled every contradiction and variation, was the burden of mortality.

In tireless variety, the painter's subjects reflected what seemed to Alessandro to be their conviction that they had alighted upon the earth only momentarily after emerging from a storm of souls. The sapphire blues and windless skies were a place of shelter, a refuge from great and overwhelming battles, a placid heaven that passed too quickly for most to know and was neglected in favor of the crudely imagined paradise that had been plagiarized from its elements. The world is a quiet place, Alessandro thought, its images forever fixed. They do not vanish. They can be remembered, and they can be foreseen. Nothing and no one are lost. That was the promise and meaning of the painting, and the source of Bindo Altoviti's equanimity. Perhaps, someday, Alessandro would see things as placidly as the young Florentine, but now he would have to be forgiven his restlessness, for he was about to walk from Germany to Italy, over the mountains, in winter, and that was a task not of contemplation but of luck and drive.

 

T
HE TRAIN
to Garmisch-Partenkirchen was nearly empty, and Alessandro was alone in a second-class compartment. The door
and windows facing east were gradually turned southward, and, as the train rocked, Alessandro slept with the sun shining on his face, and his left hand hanging limply over the edge of his seat.

In the early afternoon he was awakened by the sound of the train passing slowly across a steel bridge. Far below, a river dashed over ice-sheathed boulders as big as houses, and mist filled the gorge like an aurora, rising and falling in thick arches that buckled, twisted, and sometimes collapsed. Not much faster than a man could walk, the train moved up a steep grade, over trestles and through tunnels. The air was pristine and fresh, and, despite the stench of the soft coal that fueled the engine, it smelled of evergreens and mountain laurel. Just to the south lay Austria.

Alessandro would have to weave through German, Austrian, and Italian armies, border guards, militia, police, and districts where strangers were both detested and unknown. He thought to turn himself over to the Swiss. Though he wasn't familiar with their policy on escaped post-war prisoners he guessed that they would give him something to eat, make him fill out forms, and hand him over to an Italian consul, who would kiss him on both cheeks and put him on a train to Rome. The mountains to the west, however, looked far higher than those to the south, he would have less daylight the longer he stayed on the train, and, because the area to the west was a natural road to Switzerland, it might be more closely guarded.

He opened the door, descended the steps, leaned out, and jumped into the snow. He hit the ground at a run and stayed up for a moment or two, his boots churning below him, but then he lost his balance and rolled into a drift. The train passed by, clacking steadily as it disappeared around a bend of newly cut pines that looked as thick as rabbit fur.

Alessandro brushed the snow off his clothes. Though the air was cold in the shade, in the sun the day was springlike and the snowmelt shone in blue and gold. Wet ice crusts revealed patches
of grass in which wild flowers would not have been unexpected. With four or five hours of daylight and an hour of dusk remaining, Alessandro set out at an even pace, expecting to walk and climb by moonlight.

The first section of country he crossed was the kind of steep, treed hillside that one sees from trains, and that, despite its proximity to a railway track, is wild and alluring. He had half a dozen hills like this to cross before he came to the high meadows that led to the snowfields and glaciers. In the forests the snow was neither as windblown nor as packed as in open meadows and on the mountainsides.

He moved amid the trees, listening to the wind roar in their upper branches and looking through a fragrant tangle to lakes of blue sky. As he walked upward, slowly warming and slowly gaining the balance and footing that he would need for the mountains, he heard the concussions of artillery. Though the sound was an artifact of memory, it echoed off the trees and its more powerful bursts cracked along the granite outcroppings like a snapping cable.

He was comforted by this sound. In summoning it he could remember simultaneously not only his ideals, friendships, and loves, but how they were shattered. In the sound of artillery, he heard the profession of his faith, and it gave him strength to take the hillsides with a purpose, as if, beyond the mountains, where he could not see, someone was waiting.

 

H
E CROSSED
six ridges, each higher than the one preceding it, before he came to the point where he would not see trees until he was in Italy, and when he cleared the forest he was confronted by a world of glaciated mountains. In the dusk they were a dusty-rose color and the distance to them appeared so vast that he thought it would take a month to reach them, but it was only a trick of light and shadow, and they were neither as far nor as high as they seemed to be.

Here and there in the snow-covered pastures were hay-filled cabins where he could find shelter from the wind. He sought the one farthest from any farmhouse or village and closest to the great glacier upon which he would soon be walking. Several hours after dusk he stopped at the end of the meadows, in a place where the glacier was so close that he could feel the rivers of cold air that flowed from it and carried its sounds—the muffled sound of a locked wheel skidding on a steel rail, thunder-like cracks, a barely perceptible rumble, as if from a giant piece of furniture being pulled slowly across a rough floor.

He found a hut and went inside, where he burrowed into the hay and curled up like a sleeping dog. Though he was hot from his exertions he knew that in half an hour he would be freezing. He wanted to fall deeply asleep while he was warm, so that he might glide unconsciously through the cold that would follow. The minute he was awakened he would have to set out, moonlight or not, for the only weapon he had against the cold was to move. The moments before sleep were like summer.

He awoke at midnight, shivering so violently that he found it difficult to get to his feet. He buttoned his clothes tight, bloused his pants in his socks, put on every item of wool he could find, and burst out the door, almost falling down the slope that descended to the tongue of the glacier. The moon was down, his head throbbed, and his fingers were too stiff for him to have opened his food even had he been warm enough to try to eat.

He had to use both ice axes. The crampons were not necessary, and he would never have been able to strap them on anyway. After struggling up a short fractured ice wall by pulling himself forward with his arms, he was on the glacier. It rose gradually toward a line of mountains that then shot straight into the air like the spray of a wave exploding through a sinkhole. With luck he would have a moon or a sky clear enough to let the starlight through, and with more than luck he would reach the peaks by daylight.

The sky was almost entirely clear, and he was able to see, even if not comfortably. At summer's end, rivers of melted snow had cut new crevasses into the glacier, sometimes receding just before the cut would have opened to the sky. A perfectly flat stretch of snow only a few centimeters thick might delicately span a chasm twenty storeys deep. Alessandro had never liked walking on glaciers, even in a roped party of three or four: it was too much like walking over a mine field. Now he had no rope, no companions, no light, not even a worn path to trust more than a featureless plain.

At first he went around even the smallest crevasses. Then he began to jump them, and those he was willing to jump increased in number and width until, by the time the moon rose and lit the white expanse in which he was lost, he was running to get his starts and sailing over deep crevasses that at their narrowest convergence were more than a meter in width.

He landed on cornices and projections that sometimes lasted only long enough to take his last step and would then drop away. The cool light of the moon had not prevailed against the darkness of the crevasses, which looked like rivers of black oil.

Soon his fast progress took hold of him entirely. The risk and exertion elated him. He felt ennobled and invulnerable. As graceful as a gazelle, he flew over crevasses, and, when he hit the other side, he ran because he felt too strong not to run.

Long before first light, he took a small crevasse no more than the width of a newspaper. Four or five meters beyond it was a wide canyon for which he needed momentum, so he lengthened his stride and jumped far and high, landing hard on a flat and flawless section of snow. The pieces of snow that filled the air around him as he fell were very thin: he would have gone through even had he tried to tiptoe across.

He felt neither fear nor disappointment, and time stood still. He had a sense of great and overwhelming joy. As he was falling, snow and ice crystals blew past his face, and for a long moment
he was purged entirely of regret, guilt, sorrow, expectation, and ambition.

Something wrenched him from fearless perfection and limitless joy to sorrow and determination, and he turned the long ice axe until it was perpendicular to the narrowing walls of the crevasse and both tip and head began to bounce off the ice and scrape channels into it deeper and deeper. Holding on to the shaft of the axe was like being at the end of a rope playing off a pulley and gradually slowing.

He fell slowly enough to hope that he would not be crushed on a jagged floor of ice, but when he hit he discovered that the bottom of the crevasse was soft snow. He landed on one knee, with the other leg bent and the ice axe across it. He was amazed to be entirely intact, unhurt, and happy.

Just before a January dawn at the top of Europe, kilometers from the nearest light, in a snowfield on a glacier as vast as a great city, Alessandro Giuliani knelt in the snow inside a forty-meter crevasse, in absolute and total darkness. With his blood ringing in his ears and his heart pounding, he began to laugh—because he had instantly assumed the exact pose of Sir Walter Raleigh, someone of whom he had not thought for even a tenth of a second since he was nine years old.

 

T
HE SUN
was rising in the clear, and by the time Alessandro pulled himself out it was lighting the eastern faces of the mountains with the great shadow-breaking glare that follows the weak and tentative light of dawn. By mid-morning he was off the glacier, climbing a steep couloir of ice that would take him as high as he had ever been. The sun was hot and his face was quickly burned. He had neglected to eat, but lack of sustenance seemed only to lighten him as he rose into the thinning air.

Realizing that his energy was flowing from him too fast, he tried to moderate the climb, to breathe more slowly, and to move
with less urgency, but he couldn't. He was drawn ahead by a longing he could not explain, and carried upward by great sources of strength he had not known he possessed. He had no belay, and would have fallen five hundred meters had he lost his hold.

At the top of the couloir the wind blew with such ferocity that Alessandro had to squint to see. The way down on the south side was not nearly as steep as the way up, and he would be able to walk. Moving a few steps beyond the ridge, he surveyed what lay ahead. To the left was Innsbruck, a tiny patch of white, terra cotta, and blue, in the valley that led to the Brenner Pass. Along its sides lay the great military camps that Alessandro had seen from the train years before. Were they full, their occupants now would be battle-hardened soldiers rather than fresh recruits. He descended into a populated Austrian valley that he had decided to cross in the light.