First Russian Summer

MarkHelprin

First Russian Summer a story by MarkHelprin l—IlS HAND SHAKING, FINGERS JL J SPREAD SO THAT THE OLD MAN was imploring with the very breadth of his grasp for the attendant to be silent, he made...

...Later this month Knopf will publish a collection of his stories entitled A DOVE OF THE EAST...
...Levi," his grandfather said, "this is the finest thing on earth, these trees and mountains, not because 1 own them because I don't, as my land is not visible from here, and besides, no man owns the land...
...in September, 1975...
...It impressed him deeply then with the simplest it had to offer, lessons taken early from no man but from his first views, which in all their power saw him through the shaking of history and into his age...
...said Levi, who was already convinced...
...The greatness of the world he thought is not in anything man has done but in what God has done...
...Levi learned that soft lesson and it became the steel of his life...
...When they reached a high ridge overlooking a stand of timber, fir and pine as far as the eye could see, his grandfather stopped the carriage and they both looked out on the light and dark green...
...This old man, though he lived in the Hebrew Home for the Aged, was not the kind of fellow to spend all morning putting on his pants...
...One might think young men could easily consider their fathers and grandfathers a most precious resource, aside from allowance and inheritance...
...His strong face and gleaming eyes showed that he spent many hours in the sun, if only in the garden, and that here was a man who although heavy with age was as light inside as a man could be, a man whose imagination and memories kept him in steady forward flight and beat down time as easily as white gulls rise high on currents of shimmering blue air...
...Then he gave the horse its rein and took the little boy through twenty miles of trees, a forest which would turn even a vain actress away from herself...
...The curtains ceased billowing inwards, and a reddish light from afternoon and the bricks seemed to dim...
...The difference between an old man and a boy is so great that in explaining himself, assuming that he can, an old man will want much time and silence...
...Whenever he wanted he could put himself on that road, wide-eyed in the cool air, rushing through a newborn greenness in a time when the world loved its open spaces and colors signified all there was to know...
...This is the finest thing on the earth, not any painting or books or music, but these trees...
...As a little boy he had gone for the summer to his grandfather's timber forests...
...Copyright© 1975 by Mark Helprin...
...are old tools, but when guiding young fools their experience can be invaluable...
...At eighty he found himself able to make a powerful case for that which he thought just and good, and like all good men he found himself most of the time alone in a world which insists on the worship of local gods, a world blind to the fact of its own creation, being, and turning, a world of clever bugs who have a buggish strut and who make excuses for their mortality in the minute and insignificant gas of their works...
...Those are man's games...
...He was aged it is true, and he had no one, no one, and nothing, that is true too...
...Sunlight was golden and the air at that altitude was cool and clear...
...The fresh air was good for the child as he watched the horse watching the road they traveled...
...If a man, even an average man, has learned well by observation, then he should be in great demand...
...They were alone in vastness...
...Why, Grandpa...
...And even if there were a man who couldn't see that, he could see the shape of things and how astonishing they are...
...It seemed as if the train had taken a lifetime for it had gone more than a thousand miles from Odessa...
...First Russian Summer a story by MarkHelprin l—IlS HAND SHAKING, FINGERS JL J SPREAD SO THAT THE OLD MAN was imploring with the very breadth of his grasp for the attendant to be silent, he made the room still...
...Because, Levi, God made the forest and this clear air...
...It was a simple memory, but he loved it, and in recalling it he felt the color of his life...
...Of course there Mark Helprin's stories have appeared in THE NEW YORKER and in MOMENT...
...And this made him remember a time long ago...
...He looked quite unlike the other patients in that he was tan and ruddy...
...And a small sleepy blond boy with large brown eyes and a miniature suit and suitcase had rushed into his grandfather's arms in tears, since he had never been fully convinced that the train was not an eternal matter and he himself doomed to live the rest of his life in various forms of rolling stock...
...Since it is not that way and wisdom finds no market, old men spend much time talking to white walls...
...That was in 1884, and his little boy's face and eyes were to see the whole world shudder and break and become alive again more than once...
...His grandfather met him at the station...
...The little boy was still in the man, as the man had been in the little boy that day when all time touched the depth of a young child in his grandfather's timber forests...
...FromAOOVE OF THE EAST AND OTHER STORIES by Mark Hel prin 1o be published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc...
...But his grandfather had met him in a small black carriage pulled by a spotted horse with a white mane...
...But age was something inappropriate to him, having come by accident in between observations of great magnitude...
...In order to give time and silence one must have great respect, perhaps the reason the young are taught to defer, not for the sake of deference itself, but to give them an opportunity to learn lessons of difficulty...
...But then he was just a child who had seen nothing, more than thirty years before the October Revolution, in the Russia of Czar Nicholas, when he remembered the world to be vastly green and young, with so many colors just beyond his sight, and he had for a little boy such a grown-up sense of the beauty of the world...

Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3


 
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