In Sunlight and in Shadow (56 page)

Backed into a corner, Chester, whose real name was Nigel something, could only repel. “Do you realize,” he pronounced royally, “that I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said?”

“Why? Because you’re stupid?”

“Because your speech is hideous and unintelligible, not English.”

“Oh,” said Harry, having encountered this in his student days. “Not English. Not English. Let’s explore this.” He was angry, and used to fighting hard. What a dinner party it was, like eating whale hot dogs at a boxing match.

“My dialect versus yours. Were there a pure, uniform, consistent English in England, you might have a point. But there isn’t, not even in London. Not even in Oxbridge. If you can understand someone from Southwark, much less Bristol, why not from New York or St. Louis? In India they speak as if they are floating on a cloud. In the Caribbean it’s like singing. And by the way, you’d be better understood if, when you spoke, you removed the ball bearings from your cheeks.”

Harry was an airborne trooper who truly expected that he would not live long. He didn’t care about breaking up dinner parties, and all he wanted to do was to float to Claire.

“Tell me, then,” Chester asked from a rather deep crevasse, “pimp of New-World-vulgar speech, what is
salpiglossis?
”

“What?” Harry asked, laughing. “Are you out of your mind? I may have had too much to drink. I’m sure I did. But you? Am I imagining you? You can’t be real.”

“I’m testing your command of English. What is
salpiglossis?
”

Harry had two options. He could laboriously demonstrate that his ignorance of the word
salpiglossis
had no significance, or he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Though it would be nearly impossible, he prayed for a miracle, and God, apparently aware of the reading Harry had done on his cot at Camp Quorn, north of Leicester, in loneliness and cold, in the absence of women, in the scholarly devotion that for Jews is worship first class, sent him one. It came via the fire and the light, the magic of the evening, the vitality of London, the spirit of man and the beauty of woman, from the improbable, from love, from all he treasured, and from a required botany course that once had almost driven him crazy.

“
Salpiglossis,
” he said, with a long, dramatic pause, “as I recall from a difficult time, is a herbaceous, somewhat showy-flowered garden plant allied to the fucking petunia, its etymology deriving, I would guess, from the Greek
salpigx,
trumpet, and
glossa,
tongue, of course. Isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately,” Chester volunteered, “it is.” And then, “And what am I to do now?”

“Eat your whale steak,” Harry answered, “and I’ll eat mine. We speak the same language, which makes us brothers. Imagine if we spoke German. We wouldn’t know what the hell we were talking about. We’ll drive on to Berlin and sort this out later.”

Harry drained his glass and, lest he grow ill, refused wine. Embarrassed at having been the center of attention for too long, he glanced now and then at Claire, who, had there been another man closer to her age, by now would have begun to pay him attention for the purpose of influencing Harry, even were it the kind of influence that vanishes with evening and infatuation. She had turned to Chester, with whom she was engaged in conversation that on her part was for Harry’s sake, the elevation of her voice reflecting this in reaching just the right level to find him across the table.

The excitements Harry had felt when first beholding her were quickly outdone merely by listening to what she said, for the things she said and how she said them were more attractive to him than anything he might see or touch, and vastly multiplied the powerful alchemy of her appearance and voice. Getting up between courses to go to Martin at the head of the table, with his napkin in hand trailing like a scroll held by a statesman in a monumental painting, he heard Chester say, “I have a general contempt for war,” and Claire’s reply: “What a coincidence! So do I! Let’s send a telegram to Hitler and Mussolini. Maybe they do, too.”

Harry found a side chair and positioned it next to Martin so they could converse, as far as possible, in relative privacy. From the corner of his eye he could see the fire in the salon and its reflection in a set of glass doors. This was a stand-in for all of London, which he imagined as if he could see it from the air, as if he could somehow take in all at once the careful labor and extraordinary judgment of centuries; the balance, restraint, and fairness of the English; their heartbreak and trials like a knife cutting at the city as it was turned on the lathe of time. The moonlit curve of the Thames, which could not be blacked out or erased, was a guide for the bombers that then with incendiary vengeance restored to London its darkened lights. In peril, every detail could sing, and did.

“Anything you want me to tell Margaret before she learns Morse, which, if she stays up all night, she’ll know by tomorrow morning?”

Martin blinked out that he wanted lemon in his tea in the
P.M.

“Milk at other times?”

“Y.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t be unusual,” Harry said, “for me to present you with a monologue as I did in tutorial. But how will you bring me up sharp? How will you point me right and guide me along?”

“O-n y-o-u-r o-w-n.”

“There are so many things I wanted to ask you, in that you’ve done this, been through it—twice now. Complicated questions that I didn’t ask when I could have.”

“Now you guide,” he blinked. “I need to see this through.”

“I see.” It would be nearly impossible, like a son guiding his father, and not just in the ordinary things but in something far separated from Harry’s youth, strength, and the frame of mind to which he had been brought by rigorous training and war itself. In a single moment, between courses, he would have to contradict his training, resist his predilections, open all the gates he had shut to survive, and put himself into the heart of the afflicted man. With the fire and its reflection vying with Claire on the periphery, he would have to backwater all the way up the Thames to a different time and a different self. But Martin was dying, as Harry would too, so Harry, who loved him, did his best.

How he knew where to go was a mystery, but it was given to him to know. “You once told me,” he said, “that you believed the impressionists were the product of the Siege of Paris and the Commune. That the darkness and misery had bred an explosion of color, that the love of life cannot be suppressed.”

Martin blinked a simple Y. He did remember. He had originated it.

“It didn’t occur to me when you said that, but when I was in college I knew the most extraordinary person. At least, a person to whom the most extraordinary thing had happened. The tragedy of his wealthy family was that he was blind from birth or shortly thereafter: I don’t know the circumstances.

“Though he lived in the dark, the decoration of his apartment had been accomplished as if in service to a client with the keenest appreciation of color and form. The blind can appreciate form, of course, but not by sight; and color, but only by heat. He had never seen proportions all together making a whole. He had never seen a face, or a color. He didn’t know the beauty of one shade fading into another, or the attraction of changing light, like one of those precisely turned engines in Cavendish, its brass and mirrors casting rays according to the physicist’s command.

“But”—Harry leaned forward—“one morning, as he was getting out of his bath, dizzy and disoriented with heat, he fell, hit his head, and immediately”—Harry violently snapped his fingers—“he could see. Strong light shone down from a lamp above. He had never seen light. The wall upon which his towel bar was mounted—these he knew by touch—was a deep green, and the towel bar itself a highly polished brass shining in the light. As he stood looking at this, having risen as if lifted, it was so beautiful to him, he who had no conception of light, that he thought he had died, and that this—a towel bar on a bathroom wall—was heaven. He thought he was in the dwelling of God and the angels. Overwhelmed, he shook and he wept, partly from gratitude but in the main because the world, now written in full, was almost too wonderful to bear.

“There, in the light shining down from a bathroom ceiling, was the selfsame glory of the most massive suns. The man saw God in the towel bar in his bathroom. He was able to see and feel without the obstruction of training, conformity, necessity, or the ordered blindness of habit.

“I may never see you again. I may die before you. You may die before me. What can I say to a man of the widest range I’ve ever known, who is now made prisoner in his own body, except to keep in mind my once-blind friend, for neither of us has a fair or promising choice except to follow his lead and to see, I only hope, that concealed in the world we have is a world greater than we can imagine.”

It was understood without announcement that Martin could not eat with the rest of them and had been fed before. Aside from blinking, with Harry his only interpreter, he could not participate. But this was not the first social affair after his paralysis. He wanted company and conversation, and had he the energy he might have told Harry that observing in silence was in some ways better than being on tap to be witty, or even just to speak. Being present without obligation was much like watching a movie, but with a realism unparalleled by anything in a theater—in full and perfect color, 195 degrees of view in three dimensions, stereoscopic vision, true sound, and the touch of air, aromas, perfumes. . . . By command of circumstance, Martin receded, almost contentedly.

“What do you do with your days?” Claire asked Harry, not quite out of the blue.

“Our camp is north of Leicester, at Quorn House,” he said. “You may have heard of it. We have the great house but we live in rows of tents. Bouncing back and forth from one to the other makes us classless.”

“It doesn’t make you middle class?” the Texan asked.

“We don’t do averages. It’s feast or famine, like the classic problem of warming yourself by the fire. Unless you turn like a rotisserie, one side is too hot, the other too cold.”

“So you pivot?” the Texan’s wife asked.

“I spend as much time as I can in the house. Many of the boys feel uncomfortable there because they can’t get used to the elegance. They’re always aware of it, as if they were in the lobby of the Roxy, staring in wonder at the high ceiling. But it’s cold in the tents, and the smell of kerosene never leaves.”

“But what do you
do?
” Claire asked.

“You really want to know?”

“It’s why I asked.”

“We rise in the dark and spend time cleaning our quarters, bathing, dressing. Then we eat breakfast. It’s still dark when we start our run. My stick—that is, my detachment, the men with whom I will jump into France (I don’t think that’s a secret)—does twelve miles each morning.” There was a slight gasp. “Not everyone does, but we do, in boots, with weapons, ammunition, helmet, and a light pack.”

“Twelve miles?” Margaret asked.

“Every goddamned day. When we get back, we eat again. Then we go out on the field and do calisthenics and hand-to-hand fighting for an hour and a half. Every day.”

“I hope you can take a nap,” Margaret said, maternally, and, in Harry’s view, insanely.

“No nap. We go to the firing range for a few hours. After that, maintaining equipment, map study, briefing. I study French and German every day, for less than half an hour but regularly. Then a shower, dinner, an hour’s free time in which I usually read but most everyone else plays cards. It’s like a casino.”

“You don’t play cards?” the Texan asked.

“I never learned how. The only game I like is chess. And then lights out. Sometimes we have a movie, sometimes there’s no routine because we go on an exercise, or jump. Rarely do we get leave, but when we do I come to London. In camp the water’s cold, the air’s cold. After a while the cold, the mud, even jumping out of airplanes, become the default conditions of life.”

“What weapon?” the Texan asked. Though old enough so that the draft passed way over him, he was an excellent shot.

“All weapons, including German, French, Russian, and Italian.” Turning to his British hosts and Chester, he said, “We have bazookas, but sometimes the
PIAT
. The standard weapon is the M1, but I have a special situation with the M1 Carbine.” Here it was as if he were describing a villa he had just bought in the south of France, and how he would refurbish it. He knew that this was in its way pathetic, but the hand he had been dealt was now so close to his heart he was ashamed of neither his enthusiasm nor his concentration.

“The M1 is long and heavy, almost ten pounds. With the stock folded, the carbine is half the length and less than two-thirds the weight, although I have a wood stock, because it gives the carbine a better balance. It’s worth a little bit of extra weight and a fair amount of length. Because of its longer barrel and greater mass, the M1 is accurate out to a quarter of a mile. You need it for what the infantry does, so it’s standard. The carbine normally is accurate to less than two-thirds that range, but in a pinch it does better. That’s because the M1 has an eight-round clip and requires a pull of the trigger for each shot, but the carbine has a thirty-round magazine and can fire at seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute.”

“What does that do?” the Texan’s wife asked.

“It means that in two seconds you can put thirty bullets into a target, as opposed to two at most with the rifle. The thirty will spread to cover so much of the target box that you’re likely to get a hit. That’s why we have two designations, accuracy range and effective range. In practicing, you wouldn’t waste ammunition that way, but you would if circumstances demanded it. Ammunition is heavy. You can’t ever have enough of it, and you have to carry it. Just from the weight I save from carrying the carbine rather than the rifle, I can carry a hundred extra rounds. And loading the rounds into the magazine is easier than clipping them, and loading the magazine into the carbine is easier and faster than inserting the clip into the rifle. If the enemy is assaulting you and you have to reload once every thirty shots, you’re a lot better off than reloading every eight. With all the other equipment we have to carry, the carbine’s lesser weight saves us. It’s superior by far.”