A Soldier of the Great War (90 page)

Thirty copper cauldrons as big as carriages stood over salamandrine flares of flaming methane that swayed slowly back and forth like bouquets of windblown cotton candy. In boiling seas trapped under copper domes were the dresses, shirts, uniforms, underwear, coats, towels, bed linen, napkins, tablecloths, and tapestries of empire. The laundry advertised that it washed in three shifts and never shut down. A line of footmen and chambermaids, some with baskets and others with small carts, faced a long counter behind which half a dozen laundry clerks received or returned the many different items that passed through the kettles. The clerks disappeared into a dark forest of iron racks, and emerged with arms full of clothing or linen. Alessandro stepped into line and observed the procedure.

Beyond the twenty footmen and maids ahead of him in line were the clerks. Speaking too softly to hear, the maids spoke in laundry code, and shortly thereafter their arms ballooned around sumptuous silk and velvet dresses. The line moved fast, and Alessandro didn't know what to do, until a frail footman put down a colorful uniform spattered with medals and announced that he was leaving it on behalf of Leutnant Fresser. A little old man carried the uniform into the depth and darkness of the racks.

Several minutes later Alessandro confronted a stout woman with strong hands and spectacles. The old man had dipped back into the sea of garments and was nowhere to be seen, so Alessandro said, as casually as he could, "Leutnant Fresser must have his uniform now."

"Is it due this morning?" the woman asked, as if to lay down the law.

"No, it was recently brought in."

"It takes five days to take it apart, clean it, and sew it back together," the woman said, happy to educate a slave in the ways of upper class laundering.

"Leutnant Fresser has been called to the field."

"Just as long as he doesn't blame us for not having finished it," the woman said. She wouldn't move until Alessandro agreed, and he deliberately took his time.

Then she disappeared, and returned with the uniform held like a newborn on display. "Is this it?"

"Yes. There's his medal from the battle of Sborniki Setaslava."

Alessandro hurried away in obsequious steps. Noting that the uniform appeared to be his size, he rolled it up, put it under his arm, returned to the empty barracks, and laid it out under his mattress, where it was safer than the crown jewels of Austria, for who in the world would ever look under the mattress of an Italian prisoner of war?

Alessandro took a drink of water, brushed his teeth, and threw
himself down on the bed. Were he to wait a month or two, or perhaps until spring, he would be released. He wanted, however, to exit the Winter Palace not in a gray line of prisoners, but on a white horse. He wanted to ride across the Austrian countryside and over the mountains not in a third-class carriage, but ahead of the remnants of the pursuing Austrian army.

He knew that this was because the war was still in him, and that it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in. Even when they finally settle down, the settling is tenuous, for when they close their eyes they see their comrades who have fallen. That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change, because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.

 

O
N ONE
of the upper floors was a long corridor with the typical stove at each end. Because it was reached by spiral stairs and led only to a cul de sac in which were three suites, it was seldom used. The guests who were shunted to these rooms were of relatively low station, knew that they were obliged to stay out of the way, and, being from far provinces, went to bed early. On several occasions Alessandro had had the vast hall to himself from dusk to dawn.

He had brazenly slept upon the carpet and stoked the stoves until they whitened like blast furnaces. The hall was flecked with shadow bursts, and tiny explosions of light went aglimmering from the frosted glass to the angels painted on the panels high above. They winked, their wings fluttered like the wings of hummingbirds, and the sinuous patterns that emerged from the thousands of abrupt beats were like the magical reversals of a rapidly spinning wheel. And the snow, driving at the windows and then disappearing, seemed to have been created for a prisoner hallucinating with melancholy and fatigue.

Alessandro passed the hours drawn to Rome and the south, his neck stiff with the chore of supporting his head, held unnaturally so that his eyes might capture the unseen light of memory. Electricity coursed through him to the extent that, had he been made of metal, he might have given off sparks. In unguarded conversation the sentries on the Isonzo had alluded to such things, to ghosts and visions that came to them just before dawn, the heart beating on the edge, eyes held open as if with an invisible hook.

At about three in the morning, as snowflakes churned outside the windows like an artist's exaggeration of a storm at sea, Alessandro heard a faint sound coming from one of the suites. It grew louder, as if whoever was causing it had lost his initial fear of discovery and was consumed by the music of his own making.

And what music. Alessandro had never heard such sounds. He recognized neither the instruments nor the irresistible scales that seemed to have come from the vast and languid plains of a different world. He thought he was dreaming.

As he approached the sound, he was so tired that he struggled to remember his own name, and could not, as if he had only half awakened from a winter nap. Forbidden to look at his superiors, much less walk into a room unannounced, he turned the latch and stepped in quietly, protected only by recourse to questions and statements such as, "You sent for me to collect the dishes?" or "The chef recommends the salmon pâté."

As soon as he was in the reception room he smelled a peculiar kind of smoke that started all his senses fighting against it for control. He won this fight as he proceeded to the main salon, whence came the music, now loud, all-encompassing, and unbearably hypnotic.

Underneath a cloud of blue haze that remained even though the windows had been thrown open to the extent that wind and snow periodically invaded the room, three musicians sat cross-legged on a Persian rug. They might have been Indians, Turks, or Gypsies, and their instruments had the strange proportions and
bulbous shapes that Western instruments had lost long before. The fret board on the stringed apparatus was as tall as the man who was playing it, and its base looked like a gourd. It was a gourd. The drums were clipped and curt. They were like neither thunder nor gunfire, but the quick hoofbeats of goats. Alessandro wondered for whom the musicians were playing. For themselves? For a notable? For a satyr who busied himself behind a screen with a box of Egyptian sexual utensils? As Alessandro cast his eyes around the room, he saw nothing but a huge platform covered by what looked like one of the piles of clothes that had been stripped from the dead after a big battle. He wondered what this would be doing in a suite of guest rooms in the Hofburg, in the custody of Indian musicians who played under a cloud of opium smoke. Perhaps, he thought, it was a religious object, a shrine, such as the
Ka'aba
in Mecca. Or perhaps it was a tent in which a dissolute Austrian noble lay puffing a hookah or molesting a cousin.

Then it moved, shifting from left to right and back again, rising in the center before it settled. Alessandro realized that the point to which it came was the back of someone's head. Thinking that a man or a woman was sitting in a chair within a tent of some sort, he walked around to face the occupant.
As
he did, a column of bluish white smoke rose from the nostrils.

When he came face to face with the person who had exhaled the smoke, his mouth dropped open. It was a being—the whole thing—seated on a chair that it completely subsumed. The mounds of cloth were merely a few capes that had been thrown over a woman who held the end of a water-pipe in her right hand. Her left hand twitched slightly as it hung in the air, cantilevered by foothills of rolled fat.

In one of his essays on painting, Alessandro had expressed the opinion that a face cannot adequately be described in words, or even in sculpture, that it was a province exclusively of the painters, that the recognition of a face was wholly dependent upon the ineffably expressed variations of light and color for which language had
few words and sculpture no shapes. Of the infinite variety of angles and intersections that make a smile, language has no inkling: not only no words, but not even numbers. Alessandro had speculated for ten printed pages on the helplessness of photographs and many paintings, the terrible inadequacy of statuary and death masks, even the inadequacy, in death, of a face itself. Only the great visual artists could describe a face, he had said, and poets would be wise not to try.

In an instant, however, standing before this sirenian creature, he knew that he hadn't gotten it quite right. He now realized, almost in shock, that a face may be described in words, or photographs, or a death mask, with perfect adequacy—if only it is sufficiently hideous. The chin was nonexistent. Her jaw, however, was enormous. The lower part looked like a balcony at the opera and was covered with loose mottled skin and moles from which emerged tufts of coarse black hair. Her whitened gums bled, for her teeth were at war with themselves, lying like crossed swords or splayed bodies, leaning either out of her mouth or in, and trying to bridge by horizontal leaps the enormous gaps between them. They were not admirable even individually, like piano keys or mah-jong blocks, but black or brown and shaped like stumps that had been blown apart by dynamite.

And of her ugliness this was only the beginning. Her lips were so big and fleshy that they looked like the spongy bumpers on harbor tugs, and their slick intestinal pink was relieved only by bleeding cracks and aging scabs. The sides of her porcine nose oscillated with her labored breathing, and her eyes bulged so that Alessandro, horrified, was ready to catch them were they to pop out at him like champagne corks.

And then he shuddered in awe. "I know you," he said, thinking that perhaps he was dreaming.

She replied in a froggy voice from deep in a trance of opium or hashish. "I hide, but many people know me."

"
Ich träumte, ich tanzte mit einem Schwan,
" Alessandro said. "I
dreamed I was dancing with a swan.
Er hatte der wunderbarsten flauschigen Polster an den Füssen.
He had the most wonderful fluffy pillows on his feet.
Und er war auf einem Mondstrahl in mein Zimmer gekommen.
And he came into my room on a moonbeam."

She stirred. She seemed to be struggling with her memories, but perhaps because of the drugs or because she was too moved by the recollection of days when she had been—relatively at least—a sylph, she made no response.

Not knowing what to say, Alessandro tried to make conversation, but he was so stunned that he could only manage, "So, how much do you weigh now?"

A dark cloud passed over her. "Five hundred and sixty kilos."

"But, the spiral stairs..."

"Outside the window," she said, "are a beam, a hook, and a pulley," and then she bent her head, although it was not able to bend very far, in shame. "That was you?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I remember," she told him. "And now you're a prisoner, even though the war is over?"

"I think so, yes."

"Not many prisoners end up in the Hofburg."

"Strassnitzky brought me. He had no need for me in the Belvedere."

"Blasius Strassnitzky?"

"Yes."

"Poor Blasius. He would have had no need for you in any case."

"Why?"

"He was killed."

Alessandro briefly closed his eyes. "You must be mistaken."

"No," Lorna said. "The Italians had too many prisoners. The emperor needed more to trade, and to hold the throne he had to show that even though he had delivered the empire into the hands of the enemy he had made a final gesture, done a deed of valor. His
final gesture was Strassnitzky. He and nearly all his men were killed in a cavalry charge against a fortified line and machine guns. They took no prisoners, they only sacrificed themselves.

"Blasius was always very funny," she continued. "We played together as children. He seemed so alive, so full of stories and tricks and funny ways to say things. I'm sorry for him, I'm sorry that he perished.

"For him it must have been hard to die. In that respect, we, who began life together, will have ended very differently. For me the world is hardly a pleasure. I smoke opium and hashish so that I may spend my life in dreams—it will be easy to die."

"Of what do you dream?" Alessandro asked, having opened his eyes.

Her face grew almost sunny.

"I dream of when I was a baby. My father and my mother loved me. They carried me in their arms, and they kissed me. They could hardly stop kissing me. Even when I was three and four, they embraced me all the time. If I could have a child, I would love her beyond anything that anyone would be capable of imagining. I would live for her. I have so much love in me, so much. It goes nowhere but to dreams."

"Why haven't you had a child?" Alessandro asked.

"The child would be too ugly," she answered, "and would suffer as I have. Besides, no man has ever held me, much less made love to me. In my dreams, I dream of that, too."

"Would he have to be tender?" Alessandro asked.

"No."

"Would he have to know, as you know, what it is to love and be loved?"

"No," she said. "I could pretend."

Not quite able to believe what he was doing, Alessandro spoke in a voice that startled her. "I know a man who lusts for you."

She wept.

"But
I
have needs," he shouted. "
I
have needs!"

"What needs?" she asked from amidst her tears.

"You are of the royal house. You can get things done."