Refiner's Fire

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.

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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

I
T 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 machine 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.”

 

T
HEY 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.