A Soldier of the Great War (91 page)

"What things?" she asked. "What things?"

"You can have someone look into a file, to find out about a war hero."

"Yes yes. I am sure. I am of the royal house."

"Then, Lorna," Alessandro said, "make a pact with your swan."

 

A
S DINNER
was ending and the prisoners leaving their benches, the giant still sat under the kerosene lamp at the midpoint of one of the tables. Someone was singing the "
Libiamo...
" from
La Traviata,
and singing it so beautifully that the flames in the lamps seemed to dance in joy. Alessandro circled the table. Because he kept his eyes on the giants huge head, the room appeared to spin around it.

He watched the great Neapolitan face, twice the size of a normal face, and as the background in motion, bathed in golden light, blended with the aria, he thought of the difference between the music of his country and the music of the country in which he was captive. Italian music was bound at all times by the limitations of the human heart, never more exuberant or elated than a heart could be without breaking, or sadder than a heart could be without taking hope. In the music of the North, sadness prolonged joy far less, and in dejection no light appeared against the dark. The extremes were magnificent, but it had not the most human of all attributes, balance.

It appeared that even the giant Neapolitan, a violator of draft animals, was moved by the aria, so Alessandro opened the conversation on a relatively high plane.

"So beautiful, like a sunset over the roofs of Naples."

"What sunset?" the giant asked.

"The one in the west."

"Which one is that?"

"The one that takes place in the evening. In the Bay of Naples, ships flee to all parts of the Mediterranean, disappearing into the darkness, moving slowly and steadily under fading and bobbing lights."

The giant stopped eating and turned to Alessandro, looking him over very carefully. "You're not a priest," he said.

"No, I'm not."

"You don't dress like one."

"That's right."

"So what are you talking about?"

"Music."

"What music?"

"Indian music. Do you like Indian music?"

"I don't know what it is."

"It's music from India."

"India?"

"Yes, a country that has many rhinoceroses."

The giant was skeptical. "How many?"

"As many as you want."

"Who owns them?"

"The Bank of India. All citizens, however, and all visitors, are free to ride them and take care of them, feed them hay, feed them oats ... bed them down."

"Where is this country?"

"It's far, but not that far. You can get there on a ship. Wouldn't you like to listen to the music? The music comes from the places where rhinos wander in vast numbers. I can arrange for you to hear it. Shall I?"

"I don't know," the giant said. "Am I allowed to?"

"Sometimes," Alessandro said, "we do things that we're not supposed to do, don't we?"

"Yes, we do."

"Good. I'll set everything up. For one night, you'll take my job, and I'll take yours."

"A whole night? I don't want to listen to Indian music for a whole night."

"You will find much more than music where I send you," Alessandro said.

"I will?"

"Yes."

As the giant's eyes sparkled in belief and disbelief, Alessandro thought, never mind her sadness, for she must turn directly to God, who cannot but answer her.

 

L
ORNA WAS
acquainted with an official of the Ministry of War who might have been her twin. Even though they had beheld one another merely once or twice, two prisoners tortured on the same rack could not have had more mutual empathy or trust. To break the rules for the sake of someone for whom all the rules had been shattered at birth was both pleasurable revenge and the cause of great satisfaction: the pilot's dossier had been copied and compiled, sub rosa and without a trace, in a dozen different departments, and it was carefully bound between gray covers with embossed silver lettering. Alessandro guessed that a high official who requested a report would get something similar, on rag-paper pages that had been through a typewriter that could print red, green, and black.

The formation over Gruensee had been
Kampfstaffel
D3, flying Hansa-Brandenburg D3 aircraft. A neatly typed list matched the pilots with their planes, and in 5X, a number that had settled in Alessandro's memory forever, had been a Major Hans Alfred Andri, whose operational report was appended. He had thoroughly strafed and bombed an enemy mounted column and destroyed several buildings in the village of Gruensee, but had not been thorough enough to mention in his account that every building in
Gruensee had had a red cross on a white background clearly visible on the roof. Perhaps in five or ten years inquiries would arrive in the Austrian Foreign Ministry and this might be discussed.

Andri had flown sixty-three missions, and when the war ended he had returned to 87/1/4 Schellingstrasse, in Munich. Schellingstrasse was not far from the Alte Pinakothek, where Alessandro had first heard the guns.

 

W
HEN
A
LESSANDRO
was awakened at dawn, the day was charged with the energy of a lightning storm in the snow. He could hardly keep his limbs still as he followed the roiling black and gray clouds that tumbled over the city, riding on their first light after having been born on the steppes of Russia. Vast thunderheads accumulated in the east, piling up and growing high. The currents, tumblings, and precipitous falls within gave the staid black and gray masses a sense of movement. The crows that in winter fled Russia for the Austrian plains were circling on high by the thousands, black confetti against the light. Falling and rising at remarkable speed, they stiffened their wings as they sought to stay still in the powerful waves of air.

When Alessandro, and the giants two companions, reached the stables, they idled until they had idled too long, and then began to work. Everyone had a cart and a grinder, and each took a row of stalls. When they didn't see Alessandro emerge from his row with the grindings, they thought that he was working slowly. Then they saw him staggering down the aisle, a saddle and bridle in his arms.

"What are you doing?" one of them asked. In four years, he had never seen such a thing.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Alessandro answered.

They followed him into the stall of a Lippizaner and watched him saddle and bridle the horse. "You're not supposed to do that!" they said.

"I know."

"So why are you doing it?"

"Why am I in this place?" Alessandro asked them, turning briefly away from his work. "Why are you? Were you born here? The war is over."

"The sentry will shoot as you exit," one of them said, smiling almost in satisfaction. "You won't get twenty meters."

Finished with the horse, Alessandro took off his shirt, pants, and boots, until he stood before them totally naked. They thought he was crazy, until he unrolled the uniform, and then they said, "Ah!"

After dressing quickly, he faced the two open-mouthed manure grinders. "Stop looking at me as if I were Zeus," he commanded.

"You'll be shot," they cautioned.

"No. I won't be shot. I'm going to shoot them, and then I'll go home. I'll be perfectly safe. I can see the future, and the clouds are lifting."

"You can see the future? How can you see the future?"

"I know enough now about the patterns of the past to see the darkness of the future unraveling before the golden light of time. Behind the clouds is the dawn. How can I possibly know such things? The fact is, I do. So watch out."

They protested that if he escaped they would be shot, so he had to hit them on the back of their heads with a manure shovel. Because they were terrified of combat, something they had never seen, he was forced to chase them around the stall. They thought that being hit by a manure shovel would kill them, as it might have, but Alessandro managed to put them gently to sleep in the hay.

He unhitched the Lippizaner. With the reins and bridle in his left hand and the manure shovel hanging from his right, he walked to the guard booth at the ramp.

The guard came out because he was curious about what he had already perceived to have been an irregularity. "Hold the reins," Alessandro told him. He did so obediently.

"You are German, sir?" he asked as Alessandro walked behind him.

"No," Alessandro said, "Italian," and then whacked him on the head with the shovel. He took the guard's pistol and a wallet stuffed with money, then dragged him into the sentry booth and covered him with a blanket.

The horse was skittish. His limbs were twitching, his strength begging for an outlet.

 

T
HROUGH THE
open door of the freight car in which Alessandro rode toward Linz and Munich, the moon shone brightly over fields and mountains and seemed to jump from place to place as the train changed its heading. The illusion that the moon was bathed in the glow of the snow-covered ground preceded from the fact that the moon does not generate its own light, and is lit from elsewhere. The soldiers on the train were not able to see the sun, now rising in the Western Hemisphere, but they could see the brilliantly lit snow, and perhaps because their world had been turned upside down they suffered the illusion without protest.

The moon was so close and full that it resembled the Roman moon in August, stunningly light and perfectly round as it rides above the horizon like a float on the waves, bathing the palms of the Tiber, the broken monuments, and the ash-colored fields in the warm light of its youth before it silvers in the cold.

Riding with Alessandro were Germans and Austrians who had been prisoners in the east, Frenchmen trying to get to Paris, thieves, deserters, active units returning to bases and camps, farmers going back to their farms, and fathers coming home to their children. They were dressed in dozens of different uniforms, nonuniforms, military coats without insignia, civilian coats with insignia, and even in blankets stenciled with camp names and directions for putting out fires. They wore helmets with spikes, Italian or British flat
helmets, mouton caps, wool socks, and officers' hats, and they carried bundles, packs, and sacks tied with puttee straps and artillery lanyards. After years of painful shaving with hand-held blades, cold water, and no soap, they now had beards in all stages of growth, and they knew that when they returned home in tatters and blankets, with gaunt faces, and eyes that sparkled like stars, they would frighten their families, but that after they bathed and as they gradually put on weight and lost the sparkle in their eyes, their families would slowly understand what they had been through, and would embrace them.

Not everyone had families. Alessandro did not. Still, he found that he lacked certain anxieties, for unlike travelers who are expected he did not have to report home or send telegrams. He could take a side trip to Portugal or Japan and never come back, and no one would miss him. Wherever Luciana was, she could only have heard that he was dead.

As he stared at the moon floating lightly above the mountains he realized that returning homeward all throughout Europe were those who had been given up for lost, who had been mistakenly put on the lists of the fallen, who had disappeared, who had been captured, or left for dead. After all the unexpected reunions, even the families of the dead would take hope, only to be battered by the disappointment of the years that followed.

A hundred thousand miracles lay in wait, and millions of tragedies would have to be relived. Alessandro thought with not a little bitterness of the husbands who would unexpectedly return to their wives, and the fathers who would take their children by surprise as they were playing in the front yard, but when he saw the children freeze, and then run to their fathers' arms, his bitterness left him. The more he imagined the scenes of return, expected or unexpected, the more he wished the best for those who would have such luck, and the more he loved them and their children.

***

L
YING AGAINST
a mound of straw as he tried to keep the wind from under two blankets that he had bought, Alessandro held the 9mm pistol he had stolen from the sentry, in case someone in the mass of men huddled in the car should dislike Italians or covet what he had left. He tried to think of something to tell the border guards. In the chaos of defeat, the demarcations between Germany and Austria had not faded, and each jealously guarded what remained to it.

The long train had started in Russia where the railway gauges shifted, and was so full of men without papers that Alessandro hoped to be passed over. If he wrote all his answers they might think he was German. Many Germans who had served with the Austrian army had left informally when the end of the war whetted their appetites for home, but Alessandro had no wound on his throat to which he could point, no pink line or star-like scar to explain a lack of speech. Had anyone had any alcohol, he might have feigned intoxication, but he could not get drunk on potato soup. Nor could he successfully pretend feeblemindedness, for then he would be hard put to explain the pistol, the relatively large amount of cash, and the uniform of an imperial officer. The pistol itself was a problem, but were he to hide it he might never see it again, and he needed it.

It was too cold, he was too tired, and the train was now going far too fast for him to jump off. He imagined that if the habits of war persisted he might be arrested and shot as a spy, and it seemed that the war was quite alive. In the absence of one of Orfeo's official documents with a waxen seal as big as a dessert plate, how could anyone really know?

After the previous few years, a border and border guards did not seem insurmountable, and yet he could not get off the train and he was too tired to think of a way to save himself, so he stopped thinking and fell asleep.

When he awoke, the train had halted in the cold winter light that seeps across the mountains at dawn. Even though the doors
faced south temporarily and were open upon the advancing sunrise, the air that flowed in was unrelievedly frigid.