Ellis Island & Other Stories (14 page)

Rieser’s Christian wife had left him (his own fault) and untreatable and progressively worse seizures had driven him back after many years into an army he had once longed to escape, into a war placed as if by design to complement an indifference to death. He felt the deadening of all lively things. Better, he thought, to perish in any kind of affirmation or action, than just to expire. So, he had been content in battle. A casual run across the field of an aerial attack had gotten him between hammered lines of strafing to an anti-aircraft machine gun, but the plane passed over the horizon. As if he had been walking during a break in maneuvers, he had not even bent his shoulders—and all the time, thunder above and orange fire from screaming tailpipes. In an attack against two panicked straggling tanks, he stayed in the open between them as they turned in the sand, throwing up dust like twirling gray skirts. As if demonstrating—though even in demonstrations, they were afraid—he threw grenades at the tanks, crippling one by breaking up the tread. He waited for a line of machine gun fire to cut him in two. The cautious, who were forever hugging a ridge of earth, were blown to pieces. He was not touched.

Alive in the desert he remembered high lakes and pines, and delicate singing in an airy church, by which he was moved to trembling but which he could not accept. His wife was a beautiful woman with a face like the purest face of a Renaissance painting. The frailty and mortality of her features linked her to a high and dominant tradition. In this little country, they did not know the vast plain upon which the world was built.

“Chiaro… chiaro… chiaro,”
he had once heard with her in Milan, thinking that in the net of the singing and in the lilting doubling Italian there was civility and clarity. He recognized that much would have to be taken in, cities and words and endless shapes, words like
“soldi,” “chiaro,
”
“incesso,”
and the understanding behind them. If he could last until he was old, then perhaps one sweet line of the music would be totally understood, and the delicate web untangled.

The women’s high voices had left him silent and full of love in a hall swamped with blackness except for a golden quarter of stage. His wife was beside him. He had wanted to tell her that he did not know how to love her, that there were walls she could not see, that he was struggling.

The train began to move through the morning, headed as far north as Nahariya, city of the river. Most would get off at Tel Aviv and along the coast. From Haifa, a white ship would carry him to the winter cities of Europe, to Paris—snow, muffled traffic, getting out of a taxi at Villa Mozart and running through the cold to a firelit room full of good friends, or had they moved?

As they crossed the yellow desert a cold light flooded his section. Rieser was one of six soldiers. The light was fine, silver, and clear. Their black eyes sparkled half in shade; their beards were rough and a few days old; they were hard and hollow. One took out a radio and switched it on, skipping to the American station from which came a song: “I’m going uptown to Harlem… if the taxi won’t take me, I’ll catch a train, I’ll go underground, I’ll get there just the same… 125th Street, here I come, get ready for me, ‘cause I’m gonna have some fun.”

“What does it mean?” asked one of the soldiers.

Rieser offered a translation into Hebrew.

“Under the ground?”

He explained the subway but was interrupted as the soldier held up an orange: “What do you call this?”

“Orange.”

The soldier peeled it. It was like watching a primitive man, for he was a young boy and the war had passed by him as if it were a party. “What do you call
this?”

“Peel,” he said, expecting the soldier’s reaction, which was to explode into laughter—teeth bared, the pits in his mouth flying to the floor as he choked. The other soldiers, too, laughed, and so did he, since
peel
in Hebrew is the word for elephant.

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true,” he said, holding up a piece of peel,
“peel.”
Again there was laughter, so much that others were attracted from beyond the partitions. Some laughed so hard that they fell to the floor and had tears in their eyes. The train shook, and as it picked up speed they became charged and excited.

Tel Aviv appeared, spread out flat, white, and green. The people thought that times were tough, but what a luxury, Tel Aviv, a city of sex and palm-lined streets. They thought times were bad because prices in the supermarket had doubled. And what if they had tripled, quadrupled? If a watch cost 400 pounds, or 800, or 1,000, what difference did it make? This is why the soldiers laughed so hard. Their friends had had their heads severed from their bodies. The blood looked as if it were three inches thick on the ground in pools that quickly hardened. Many were incinerated in tanks, and the smell of seared flesh sometimes spread for miles. And yet, they had come through, on their train from the south.

They felt invulnerable, and saw themselves walking amid the dead as if in a dream. One pass of a screaming jet with its guns pounding like jackhammers had lightened them forever. Nothing was to be feared. The planes and artillery were so much louder than the fastest express, that the noise in the desert had made the dry passes and undulating rills sound like the inside of a great factory.

At about noon they approached Tel Aviv, running fast and easy through young orange groves. Plenty of blue air came in the open window as a thick forest of shiny green went by, winding, receding, charging full up at them until some soldiers leaned out and returned with fists full of broken leaves which filled the car with their fragrance. Occasionally, a helicopter or a fighter would make a line across their path. They hardly noticed. A few more hours until Haifa, a few days going from office to office for clearance, and then he would board a ship for Marseilles. As they left the orange groves, he thought that at least he would live well and for a long time, because he had no desire whatsoever to do either.

Despite his health, there was a flaw. He was often seized and thrown down in dangerous convulsions. These seizures seemed like the country itself, out of control, a shadow play moving according to remote unchallengeable will. The great battles and a lifetime of preparation for them were like the interior of an oratorio. To a man, they felt utterly directed, seized, feebly twitching on a complex stage divided by days of sun and nights under the moon. Fighting in the desert, Rieser had felt entirely beholden. Fighting in the desert, he had finally understood the sad attenuated glances in Renaissance paintings, a meekness and resignation oppressed by full and radiant glory. Once, far away, he had seen an endless column of tanks moving in rays of sun, and their dust cloud had risen like the voices of a choir.

Tel Aviv, the central terminus. Passengers must traverse the length of the city to change trains from South to North Station. It was pleasant to walk the quiet streets, abandoned at noon except for returning soldiers, and he swung toward the sea on Allenby Road, for lunch. The whores were out early to catch soldiers, but the soldiers were not biting. He passed a row of elevated bosoms, stretched satin, and glances like whiskey tossed on hot coals, and went into an eating place where a sizzling rack of lamb turned above a white fire.

He didn’t say what he wanted, but, instead, asked the proprietor where he had been in the war.

“In Sinai. Chinese Farm.”

“Bad, huh.”

“Not so bad, but terrible,” the man answered, slicing off a piece of roast meat and offering it to his patron. “On me. You want soda?”

He remembered that he had not eaten since there had been an endlessly high black sky wounded by the scattered broken points of stars. The lamb was good, with a salad, a slice of lemon, and a cold soda. When he left the restaurant, he passed the whores again, dark of skin and painted in sharp angles with the deep colors of the Middle East, colors which lasted through the heat of day, as if fished from cool earthen urns. The line of one girl’s eyebrows traveled so far down her cheeks that she looked like a Kabuki actor.

Past villas and industry, ranks of palm and eucalyptus, stagnant canals, whirling hot seascapes, a wildfire sun, and short breathless fields compressed between railroad and sea, he traveled throughout the afternoon to Haifa, the castled port city which ascends a steep mountainside to a crest of dark blue pine.

At one time he and his wife had been thoroughly excited by form, whether of dancers, a painting, the sweep of a sentence, or the slope of a roof. The transportation of clouds across stars, flying over lake country, lace, brought from them an upwelling and sympathy so that they felt like eagles in a chase, skidding from one image to another across patterns and tatters—if not in satisfaction, then in astonishment. Gunning up the rails to Haifa with light reflecting murderously off the sea and the world washed out and white, he absorbed intricacies of form without interest. Wheels on the rails sounded so much like machine guns that he could smell gunpowder. He could make of the ruined villages, the beaches, and the heather-covered hills a construction both wondrous and cold. The spangling sun could not have been more detached. Calm and quiet, he decided that his love had somehow turned to hate, that his openness had been abused by his own corruption, that the cities were merely complex and no longer magical. The trick of form was in the cold eye after all—how hard he had once fought against that pronouncement, and with what love.

He loved Haifa, into which he rode as evening was about to descend. When he left the train, he had an alert, excited demeanor, a heightened aura which often presaged a bad fall. It was the beginning of November, autumn, a beautiful season filled with passion. Like Mexico in the fall, or any hot dusty place where heat dominates and suddenly the weather becomes mild and clear, Haifa in November was reasoned and bright. He went to a hotel and got a room. The window of the shower looked out on a harbor of lighted ships. When he was clean and had shaved, he put on his pistol (for fear of leaving it in the room) and, still a soldier until the next day when he would turn in his blue book, he went out to walk in the evening. Haifa was very calm, as if it were in the hills of Switzerland or war had never been invented. It was lucid, as if there had been peace for hundreds of years and the populace had only to busy itself with love affairs and the arts.

The war brought out the best, in certain acts of courage and recognition: and the worst, in cowardice and brutality. It did to soldiers far more than kill and maim them: it opened them to a terrible truth against which they had no power. By and large they would rebound, but some had to be left behind. He walked up the side of Mt. Carmel and wound in and among the streets of the Baha’i Gardens, where he looked down to see his ship standing in the harbor. Its tiered superstructure was lit for port. It glowed in darkness like an ice sculpture and soon would take him to a range of entrancing cities. But Haifa, a city of ease and high beauty, was right there. If he could not make his mark from the hills of Haifa and rest content in its gardens of blue-green pine, all the mild art of Europe would hold him no more.

Thinking of how far he had come and how much he had lasted, he felt a surge of courage and determination. The higher he climbed on the eucalyptus-covered hill, the more his past informed his resolution. Climbing upward, he saw a navy yard in snow that fell in chains—a soft hiss at black water, a soundless landing on the whitened ground. He saw himself as an adolescent—crippled with passion, confused, and confident. Those winters of ivory made him smile.

Near the top of the mountain Rieser came upon a hall of dancers, a night class of ballet in a stone building with a red tiled roof. French doors were thrown open to the harbor and back on the hill, from which he could see straight through the hall down to the lights of the ships. The balconies were entangled with flowers. Even in moonlight, he saw that the flowers were red. Inside, a floor of yellowed wood trembled as the dancers leapt and bent to signals of the music. They were all girls just too young to be in the army, and their mistress was herself no more than forty. She carried a baton, which she would sometimes rap sharply on the floor, causing her charges to realign and correct faulty maneuvers. The explosive rap of her baton set them up again and again in rows of violet and blue—the colors of their tights. They stretched tensely, moving about the floor in the grace of dancing, figures of imperfection in constant striving. They crossed in rows and returned with arms high. The watery harbor glinted below them and through the tangle of their limbs. In the transoms, stars shone. The mistress was enraged and encouraging, the girls afraid with expectant eyes, and they sometimes smiled in response to her approval. They danced well and seemed tireless, springing back, losing themselves between the freedom of the music and the discipline of their craft until they seemed almost to cry out in their motion. And their faces had a quickness which struck him. Likened to sound, it seemed as if they had the purity of a horn. And yet he felt that it was purposeless.

He moved to a grove of pine through which a night wind passed. He knew this group of trees, for in the daytime once he had gone there to sleep. When he had opened his eyes, he had breathed in the thin air and a resinous billow was all about him—blue sky like a soft hand at his head.

The ballet class rested. A girl in mauve-colored tights, with a shock of golden hair tied back by a dark velvet ribbon, went to the window to look inward at the hill. Most of the girls stared out at the harbor. Some continued their arches and sweeps in front of mirrors or at the center of the floor. The girl who looked inward was only seventeen. She glanced at the dark wall of pines, and saw a strange sight. A soldier walked slowly into the black, a pistol in his hand. He then disappeared as if into clouds of darkness. She looked up at real moonlit clouds passing over the mountain, and then quickly turned, as if to attention, at the persuasive rap of her mistress’s baton. But in the room of frail dancers, the mistress was nowhere to be seen.