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Refiner's Fire

Mark Helprin




  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  TRANSPORTATION OF THE WOUNDED

  1. A COAST OF PALMS

  II. THE HUDSON

  III. COLUMBINE

  IV. HIGH VIEW

  V. YORKVILLE

  VI. A LAKE IN AUGUST

  VII. A MEMORY OF THE PLAINS

  VIII. THE SEA AND THE ALPS

  IX. SETTLEMENT OF THE DOVE

  X. REFINER’S FIRE

  MORNING AT HOSPITAL 10

  Copyright © 1977 by Mark Helprin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  The description of the SS action in the Ukraine is drawn largely from, and includes some exact lines of, the “Affidavit” of Hermann Graebe, Nuremburg Tribunal, PS 2992.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous paperback edition as follows:

  Helprin, Mark.

  Refiners Fire: the life and adventures of Marshall Pearl, a foundling/

  by Mark Helprin.

  p. cm.

  813'.54—dc20 89-26885

  I. Title.

  [PS3558.E4775R4 1990]

  ISBN 0-15-676240-4 (pb)

  ISBN-13: 978-0156-03107-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603107-8 (pbk.)

  Text set in Adobe Garamond

  Designed by Liz Demeter

  Printed in the United States of America

  C E G I K J H F D

  Damn your eyes, you ignorant beebuckle. This is no play upon the stage, a circlet, a doublet to unfold. And I have not written it. It is a Romance—written by the ravishing pace of five thousand years.

  —Translated quite freely from The Bee and the Thimble, by Lapin of Rotterdam

  TRANSPORTATION OF THE WOUNDED

  IT WAS one of those perfectly blue, wild days in Haifa when winds from Central Asia and the eastern deserts come roaring into the city like a flight of old propeller planes. Blue-green pines in the Bahai Sanctuary bent in the tense air, and tourists trooped like pilgrims to the top of Carmel for views both miraculous and mild in a full flood of gentle northern light. Moved by an astonishing high view, the tourists forgot themselves and all the many things which had troubled them. North along the coast, a delicate string of breakers rolled slowly to shore, leaving wind lines on the sea. Far to the north were mountains of white ice, silent and heart-filling. And there was perfect quiet, until suddenly and explosively within the hotel grounds by the promenade, black musicians from America struck up their New Orleans band.

  From Mt. Carmel one can see for a hundred miles. Out to sea were ships coming to port and departing, each with prosperous cargo, each like a piece on the board of a naval game. Their progress fit the slurred elisions of the brass, drums, and woodwinds from the gardens, and their wakes seemed to freeze on the surface. The black musicians thought about the view, and the city, and the young country knee-deep in war and grinding along like an awkward but marvelous engine of the past century. It reminded the older ones of New Orleans and Chicago; of the muddy brown barges and steamships up from Mexico; of Lake Michigan’s blue, seen from a high building. It reminded them of the trolleys (although in Haifa there are no trolleys), and the old-fashioned graces they had known before America had put on its skin. Because of these affinities they liked the new country—and its people liked them.

  A country in war is a country alive. It hurts all the time and is full of sorrow, but is as alive as the blaze of a fire, as energetic and restless as an animal in its pen—full of sex and desires of the heart. The undercurrents are so strong that even the tourists take refuge in a larger view. To the east was a valley of industrial plants and enameled green fields leading to Jordan: feed factories, concrete mills where the stones of the mountains were crushed and beaten, refineries, fields of wheat, long sinuous roads, power cables vibrating like violin strings, and the well-ordered camps of an invincible army.

  In the north they saw mountains, the savage peaks of Hermon, and a sky so blue that it seemed to burn their eyes. To the west was the sea, and in between were well-tended fields, wildflowers, and heather-covered dunes. On the promenade an American Jew whose life had been a series of killing confinements said to his wife, “You see, if you come to this country you must understand that here it is the nineteenth century. These people, our people, have been left there by a combination of events. They still have the strength for fighting and building. They have a passion to clarify and to create. They are willing to sacrifice. Here, we are in our fathers’ time.”

  Everyone knew that there was fighting on the Syrian border. The war was several days old and Haifa was still but for an armored column miles long winding silently like a collection of toys far below on the Jaffa Road. The tourists expected that the Army would win immediately and without trouble; but there was something unnerving about the quiet in the north. They were fighting there, carrying guns which hung heavily from their shoulders. It was unexplained, uncontrolled, and a world apart. Those men who fought at the foot of icy mountains and in windy forests would have given their right arms for a chance to feast in the gardens of the hotel. And, abandoned to their own devices in war and sleeplessness, they thought incessantly about women. In such circumstances, one receives a sudden burst of heartfelt feeling. One longs for a home with a woman who will shelter and perceive. One longs for children, and is intent upon them and haunted by them, candles burning up.

  As the musicians continued, playing as endurance summons—a thousand years in the railroads—they heard the helicopters coming in from the battle. At least a dozen flew gracefully in formation at several levels, an angel fleet from the mountains, flying a straight and urgent course. They appeared first as specks and then glinting and yawing, hovering in the air, bringing in the wounded, the completely destroyed, those who had died while airborne.

  An apprentice butcher could have done better when drunk. They were slit open and burned. Their limbs were torn, disjointed, covered in brilliant red. The rotor blades’ concussive bursts drowned their screaming. Some died in the air, others hoped not to die. They had come from armor-littered plains and disassembled fortifications which had not lasted; they were the victims of ill-laid plans and the pride of those who conceive.

  The helicopters were thick-bodied and heavy, of the most advanced kind, with stretchers inside on which lay soldiers soundly intoxicated by the ragged choppings of the motors. In one of them was Marshall Pearl, an American, who in the mountains had become the result of an artillery shell which had hit right and blown him apart, leaving him in remnants in a helicopter, trying to grasp some chance magic to make things whole again. He was only half alive, and he was pitifully open to the air, as if for sounding, when he rode to the trim Haifa hospital called Rambam. He shuddered at the others’ screaming, and envied them for their painful superficial wounds. It was terrible and frightening. And yet, contrary to sense, like lightning-kindled forests which burn in heavy rain, he thought it was, in its way, sort of funny. He saw it as if from outside, and, surrounded by his own quiet, he smiled.

  People in all quarters of the city stared at the approaching aircraft—a military color outside; and inside, a confusion of tape, blood, darkness, and exhausted doctors dashing about in small spaces. From within, Marshall Pearl imagined that he was strapped to the feet of the m
achine as he had seen in his childhood, in pictures of the Korean War. He could hardly breathe because they had tied him up so tight, to prevent him from spilling out. He didn’t like that. It was contrary to the strange sense of humor he had about being where he was, and it seemed to constrict his efforts not to die. Even as he fell off into comfortable blackness and found himself in a deluge of memories and passions, he tried to get a hold so that he could begin to fight back somehow and in some way. They dared not give him too much morphine, though they gave him plenty, and the pain knocked him out again and again. But he awoke again and again, amused and fighting—for, being an American of the fields and mountains, of the ardent unlimitedness, he fought in times when he could not even imagine strength.

  Departing from the locust fleet, his helicopter veered in its turn and sidled down to a concrete platform between the hospital and the sea. They took him off the rack and carried him out into the air. He could hear the sea breaking against the rocks; he could smell it and sense the moisture, and his eye caught some particles of white which had been thrown upward and which hung motionless for a moment, as he imagined a bullet would do if fired straight up.

  He was pleased by the proximity of the sea because he hadn’t seen it during many weeks in the thin air of mountains. He remembered how on leave he had gone to a deserted beach and propelled himself through the clear green water and top foam with tireless speed, slapping the waves and then off again in a bound as if he were a porpoise. He reached with his left hand to feel the muscles of his right arm but he could feel nothing. Just before landing they had given him a very strong shot. His arm was there but his hand had no feeling, and so in the brisk winds by the sea and in the sun, laid flat on the concrete with a dozen others suffering the same apparel of gauze and four-cornered bandages, he realized that he had been reduced to a thought. His body was no longer to concern him, although it was frightening to imagine the pain of which he had begun to receive powerful intimations.

  The grave rush of a dozen doctors and nurses, apelike orderlies, and helicopter crewmen coalesced, and in one movement he and the others were carried in absurd procession off the pad while the helicopter lifted just as it had lightly touched down. As he was wheeled through endless deep corridors he was glad to see men and women in trim uniforms—the nurses plump and sad in their nurses’ hats and thick shoes, working hard and fast.

  Being then so truly passive, he nearly enjoyed it. Wrapped in white sheets like an albino cigar lying on the stretcher, he was hustled into aircraftlike turns and banks around corners, being finally maneuvered with famed precision right to his proper berth. Despite interweaving pain and numbness he delighted in the order, in the physical actions of people and machines, in the long looks of loving eyes judging and fleeting, in the ecstatic tiredness and burning of work. He had always been susceptible to the play of light and motion. He loved, for example, to watch trucks driving on the road; the wheels turned, the engine was hot, and there was movement through the air. He felt that even the light and motion of a truck blasting down the sea road were at every moment linked to an artful and all-powerful God.

  He was in an operating room. A nurse touched him on the head and said something he didn’t understand. They prepared, ripping and tearing his uniform, cutting the bandages, assembling instruments and sutures, shifting trays, checking dials—with the pleasing strength and rhythmic speed which had made the country and all the civilized and mechanical things he had seen in his life. They moved up the tanks and placed a mask over his face. “I may not wake up,” he said in English, and a doctor answered in English, saying, “Don’t worry. We are fighters too.”

  THEY TOOK him by the sea road down the coast to Hospital 10. This was a small military clinic on the edge of the Mediterranean, used before the war for the rest and recovery of soldiers wounded in border actions, or for those who had developed serious diseases or had undergone complete emotional disintegration. When Marshall was wheeled in past strings of Japanese lanterns and rows of cheap aluminum furniture, he was unconscious. He had fallen into a post-operative coma, and in the pronouncements of several physicians he had been declared lost. His metal tags had been separated from him and no one knew who he was. They calculated that he would need a few weeks to die, in which time his family might be found.

  Though old-fashioned, and dirtier than Rambam, Hospital 10 was a finer place. Built by the British generations before, it had that characteristic solidity, coolness, and shade marked by leafy patterns of louvers and jalousies. It was in a style once designated “one world tropical,” but as a concession to the Mediterranean, the eastern great bay of which it overlooked, red tiles covered the roof, so that a visitor might have imagined that it was a British building with an Italian hat.

  Palm trees and thorns surrounded it, and a thin strip of beach separated it from a lovely green sea. No one was swimming. The previous occupants of the place (and seemingly of another era) had been thrown out and sent to their homes or their units a week before—all except an Orthodox aircraft mechanic whose legs had been broken by a snapping cable. For days he sat on the porch and prayed as he watched the dozens brought in and the dozens taken out. Few recovered. Hospital 10 had become a death house, a terminal for the hopeless cases of Northern Command. Scores of men died there after their operations, for they had been pulled apart more than anyone could put together. The mechanic worked at prayer and the doctors smashed their fists against walls and tables. All the hard cases had emasculated their skill.

  Marshall was placed in the southeastern corner of a high-ceilinged room on the first floor, one of twelve silent men lying still in two frightful rows. Had he been able to see, he would have seen through French doors sidelong to the sea. Had he been able to see, he would have seen cream-white walls, wood louvers, slowly rotating fans, a great double door leading to the hall, a shining black floor, and in the middle of the room a small table with a green glass library lamp which glowed even in daylight. Under the lamp were paperwork and medical supplies, a telephone, a buzzer, and magazines. A nurse sat on a chair next to the table. Every few minutes she checked each patient, and when she was not going from bed to bed she sat on the white wooden chair turning her head like a clockwork beacon to watch her charges. She worked too hard and was too busy to open her magazines. She wore one sweater over another, a green army kind and her own black cardigan. She was alert, exhausted, and frightened. These men were dying, twelve at a time, and she was a pretty nurse, very young, and had never seen anything like it.

  Two orderlies brought Marshall to his bed. As they were leaving, one stepped to a window and looked out at several other orderlies resting and talking in the garden below. He flung open the shutter, stepped to the windowsill, and jumped out, hurtling through the palms to the ground. Rolling and skidding, he landed badly but then righted himself. He picked up two stones and challenged another orderly who was almost his exact counterpart and who, to complete the symmetry, took two white rocks and held them menacingly in his fists. They circled like fighting cocks and then rushed together, beating with the stones. The nurse called a military policeman, who was an exact third except for his more colorful uniform, his gun, and his club. He tried to reason with them but they were so busy smashing one another with the stones that they didn’t even know he was there. He swung his club and knocked one of them out. The other didn’t stop, so the policeman swatted him too and both lay insensible and bloody, four white stones near their faces, their faces almost touching. Other orderlies, drawn from hiding places ingenious and obscure, carried them to an ambulance. An officer appeared and was briefed, in the way officers are always briefed, as if by men who are pulling their own teeth.

  “Take the one who jumped out the window to Prison 4, and the other to Hospital 9.”

  The orderlies looked at the two but could see no difference between them. “We can’t,” they said. “We don’t know which is which.”

  The officer noted that indeed they were congruent, and he said, “It do
esn’t matter. Just take one to prison and the other to the hospital. Since they’re both the same, they won’t complain.”

  The military policeman jumped in the ambulance, a bunch of forms in his hand. The officer said, “If one wakes up, put him to sleep again or it could be dangerous.”

  “What if the innocent one wakes up?” asked the policeman.

  “As far as the law is concerned,” replied the officer, “one is guilty and they’re both the same. Therefore, both are guilty. It is like the tale of the cat and the dog. But never mind; hit him on the head.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the policeman, and the ambulance tore away, its back doors swinging wildly. At her chair, the nurse wept softly because the war seemed to be everywhere, and all the wonderful things she had known were gone.

  But Marshall was dreaming. In the quiet room with a distant rumbling of tanks and trucks on the sea highway and the insistent sound of waves, she could not have guessed that in the bed nearest the window an unconscious soldier had the world opening to him anew.

  BRIGHT SUN shimmered on the sides of the helicopter. Two nurses stood near him, leaning against the stretcher as the machine swayed. Compared to the intense light outside it was cool and dark inside the cabin. One of the nurses had an expression of terror; her eyes were wide but she worked nevertheless. The other was determined—incipient tears above a hardened beautiful face. Clenching her teeth, she changed Marshalls bandages. She was dark, with shining eyes. Marshall saw her in a diamond crown of sparkling sun. The engines roared. A soldier in the back screamed. As if in chain reaction two others moaned, and Marshall smiled like a dying young animal, numb and bewildered at the frozen light and color in the cabin enclosed within a great vibration. The colors pleased him so much, as they always had, and when the beautiful nurse crossed a floor littered with helmets and bloody bandages she fought to stay upright while the helicopter tipped. She grasped a handle above her, tightening her muscles to stay balanced. From the darkness in which men and women struggled he saw through the door down to the sea, which glowed in rippling light. Waves of deep blue light came in the cabin and filled his eyes.