Refiner's Fire (2 page)

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 doesn'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.

 

B
RIGHT 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.

R
IDING IN
a new 1938 Ford through the March countryside of North Carolina, Paul Levy was astonished by the tranquillity and depth of the blue above. Every tree and field was sheathed in gentle, clear, warm light. Smoke from clearing fires rose straight and slow, and the speed and air were perfect as the car wound through the back roads, sounding like a perpetual chain of little firecrackers. He was sixteen, the son of a Norfolk ship provisioner, and in love with the Navy and its ships. His father saw them as delivery points for canned tomatoes and brass polish, but his father's son was struck as if by lightning at the sight of one steaming up the roads, bent forward, pressing on—a squinting bridge, high black masts and angled guns, smoke, wake, urgency, and water pulsing off the bows. And when they turned, with claxons and bells, and the stern seeming to sweep like a skater over mottled ice, he saw in them the history for which his tranquil boyhood had been created. And in the North Carolina countryside, joyriding in his father's car solo for the first time, he could not help glancing through the windows at the sky and thinking of the sea.

By darkness when he returned to Norfolk he had decided to join the Navy, which, after a year or so of arguments and heated wanderings in and out of the dance places at Virginia Beach, he did. At first he went to sea as almost a child, and the little experience he had he used badly, awkwardly, making more mistakes than he could count. But at nineteen he was an ensign in the Battle of fire the Atlantic. He used to come home every few months or weeks, and each time he was more solid, stronger, wiser. Being on the sea was miserable, especially in winter, and it wore him down. But it developed into his calling and during the war he had been off Africa, Normandy, and Japan. Because he learned fast and loved the sea he became a lieutenant-commander by the end of 1946, taking a year's leave of absence to rest and prepare: he intended upon a career in the Navy, but did not want to be entirely brought up in it. He thought that a year of peace—maybe some farming, a trip across the country to San Francisco, a month at home—would do it. His father had become prosperous, especially since the fleet had not been decimated and would not be dismantled as had been the custom after other wars. They lived in a big house and it was planned that the younger sister and brother would go to college.

Paul, though, was lost to the Navy; he was an officer with Southern ways and a fighting man's demeanor. They were proud of him, but having left early and against their wishes, he was not very much like them. He had forgotten his Jewishness, almost lost it in the rush and conviviality of war. No one knew he was a Jew if they didn't know his name. Even when he said his name, everyone did not immediately know his origins, since he pronounced Levy like the tax, or the embankment which holds back a river. He was by appearance and dialect a Virginia or North Carolina farmer—and this delighted him. He was free as his father had never been to blend into the country and be whatever he wished, except for his name and except for his regret, as he saw his father growing older, that he as first son would do little in continuing what began to appear to him in the quiet spring days of his extended leave, riding again in the Carolinas, as a very important line of passage, a crucial tradition.

It took him a day to go from the balm of the internal Carolina lakes and bays to Washington Square. New York seemed to him like rows of gray teeth and he could not understand how people chose to live inside files of concrete boxes in a city which was really not a city but a machine. To him it seemed about the same as building a great engine, a thousand times greater than the Corliss Engine, and then living inside. London too had gray teeth, but in circles and en-flowered by trees and promenades. This city on the Hudson was like a sharks jaw—monotonous serrations thick and hard.

He had intended to seek out Jews, for the ones in Norfolk were in his eyes predictable and Virginianized. But to his great surprise, the Jews in New York would have nothing whatsoever to do with him. First, his approach was confused. He walked into restaurants and ordered familiar dishes. In this way he ate much and discovered that one does not retrieve receding history through gastronomy. He sat next to an old man and looked into his face, about to ask a momentous Jewish question, when the man said, “Go avay, cowboy.” He explained that his name was Paul Levy, but when the old man heard the way he spoke, he fled. Paul kept on trying.

He chose a synagogue and went to pray, but when he entered they looked at him as if he were a raccoon or a possum who had wandered in from the Louisiana Bayou. He went to see a rabbi, whose advice consisted of coldly instructing him to purify his pots and pans by boiling water in them and dropping in a hot brick. “A hot brick?” asked Paul in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You want me to boil water in my nonexistent pots and pans, and then drop in a hot brick? A hot brick! Rabbi, one of us is nuts, and its not me.”

After a week or more of seeking out Jews in New York he found himself at the house of a Roman Catholic law professor, lying on the floor of the library, which looked out on a cold Washington Square where snow was falling for the last time that spring, and next to the sooty buildings it telescoped itself into a salt-and-pepper image like the tweeds in the livingroom downstairs at the party. But the snow was twisting in cold whirlwinds like the warm viscous air above the fire. He was roundly, rotatingly drunk, davening in his drunkenness before the fire, and next to him was a Palestinian Jewess whom he had beguiled upstairs to kiss; but she wasn't drunk at all. She liked him though and had never heard a Jew who talked as he did. When he told her he was a Navy captain (he blushed at the lie) she leaned over on the Persian rug and kissed him on his mouth in such a wet sexual way and with such great affection that he said, “Would you believe that I'm really an admiral?”

“No, I don't believe you,” she answered. “But I want you to tell me about that you are a captain.”

And he did, starting with his revelation in Carolina about the Navy and the sea, his love for the sea, how in the war he had fought and endured, how his father had not known him but had seen instead a tough stranger who did pushups and could fight, and how for him being a Jew was impossible since he could not get either in or out and seemed to be hanging in between worlds which would not have him.

They stayed together for two weeks until she took him in a turtle-backed taxi to Idlewild and saw him off on his way to becoming a captain, as he had said he was. He felt that he did not know his own mind. He was apprehensive about not returning in time to resume his commission, apprehensive about leaving the silent city which he had come to like and respect, apprehensive about rising above shafts of sunlight and clouds on a straining airplane past the rows of gray buildings in new prosperity—a good quiet place for infants after the war—apprehensive of rising into an empyrean of blue, apprehensive of heading east, apprehensive of challenging the British cordon with an old coastal freighter, and apprehensive of the dreamlike frame of mind into which he had fallen. He hardly knew what had happened, but he felt as if he were certainly rising upward.

H
E WAS
lanky and well over six feet tall, with short blond hair and the remnants of a suntan he had picked up on the Albemarle. He was dressed in khaki pants, a white shirt, and a brown aviator jacket which he slung over his shoulder. Though only twenty-six, he had spent all his adult life in war. Darkness, danger, and combat did not bother him. It was a hot day in Brindisi. Children with nearly shaved heads and black shorts settled on the sea walls like rows of vultures. Heat was rising from the beige-colored stones, and prostitutes strolling under the palms were eyed by midget Italian sailors of the Adriatic Squadron. In the harbor, garbage scows and miscellaneous unkempt craft scuttled back and forth between ships, halting now and then to nestle against a cruiser or a minesweeper, not quite in the manner of a calf leaning on its mother but rather like the flies which settled on carcasses in the horse butcheries. Motors hummed and a brass band from one of the ships was practicing far in the distance, modulated by the waves of heat.

Levy had arrived at a pier in the old port, and there he stood staring at the Motor Vessel
Lindos Transit,
an appalling piece of junk by any standard, more like a bombed-out house than a ship. But if it could float and go, it would do. Air upwelling about him, he was immobilized in wonder, and a group of people on the main deck returned his gaze. There was a woman who looked Bulgarian, perhaps a washerwoman, in a print dress. Above her head and a little to the right was a dark man in a felt hat, a Polish or Czech army officer. Next to him was another thick-armed giant of a woman, with gray streaks in her hair, a face of granite, and a little child near her. The child had a tiny Japanese-like face with eyes as round and small as ladybugs. In her hair was a bright white ribbon which shone against the darkness and was in the shape of a perching bird. Next to her was another stout woman, with a worried expression—and the face of an Italian condottiere in a High Renaissance painting. Above her, leaning forward to look at the American, was a thin and handsome man whose arms were very strong. Levy could see this because the man had grasped one of the many ill-placed rails and pipes which ran overhead, and was suspended like an acrobat. There was a girl of about twenty-five, a pretty girl with black curls which were blowing in the hot breeze. Above her, more like a monkey than an acrobat, was a boy in an almost Alpine jacket and a flat cap. He was scared and bewildered, as if he had just come from a pre-war French childrens book. He was, of course, an orphan.