Ellis Island & Other Stories by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780440322047
Google: iDFXAAAAYAAJ
Goodreads: 3376408
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2015-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

A Room of Frail Dancers

His brigade approached Beersheva in hundreds of trucks crowded in knots on the pale desert road, surging ahead when it put the curves and narrow bridges behind. They arrived at dawn, angry and out of temper. It had taken several weeks to hold the fall, and when they had gotten the upper hand and crossed the canal to take apart the Egyptian Army in the old fierce fashion, they had been forced to stop. Many had died. Many had fought oblivious to danger and death because they were angry and lost.

At sunrise, people came out on their balconies to see the brigade roll in. They stood silently as the thousands passed in a long column. The soldiers were sunburnt and unshaven and their eyes sparkled starlike from dark jagged faces. Some had bandages or slings, and to a man they were armed with submachine guns or automatic rifles, with so many different shining bandoliers of shells that they looked like tigers being carried down the road in drab diesel trucks. They had been riding for several days and were lean and hard from weeks of fighting. They were alive. They returned silent glances to the nightgowned women and the old men on the balconies, glances which told far more than the dead telegraphy which had flooded back over the wires.

The trucks discharged at the station, where, beyond the platform, a train was steaming and trembling in the white morning sun—wet and cool on its western side, dry and already hot on the eastern side. Then they grouped interminably in lines, to which they were fully accustomed. They surrendered weapons to sullen armorers who cursed because they knew that they would be a month at cleaning. They gave over belts and pouches, helmets, canteens, shovels, and kits, to the back of unmanned trucks into which canvas flew like locusts. At a toss, they were reduced to their black boots and khakis, papers, private weapons, and silver neck chains with the perforated dead tags—one to stay with the body, another to be nailed on the coffin. At card tables set up on the sand near the tracks they were demobilized with a thudding stamp on their blue booklets. Little was said, for they had been without sleep and were worn down.

The train filled slowly. Climbing past its shadowed underbelly, they walked through to semi-compartments with yet another view of desert light and silent sky—a shimmering lamination of beige, blue, and white. In the distance, Bedouins moved a herd of goats—a black mark crawling across faceted hills. Farther still, a frail single-engined observation plane rocked in a straight line across the clear air, heading for an airfield or perhaps away from one.

Rieser’s Christian wife had left him (his own fault) and untreatable and progressively worse seizures had driven him back after many years into an army he had once longed to escape, into a war placed as if by design to complement an indifference to death. He felt the deadening of all lively things.

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