A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online Page A

walked through the park, happy like an idiot. The fields right here in the Bronx were so golden, so bright, as if in a foreign place, that I was sure God would not forsake her. If I saw such beauty, how could He not do so? Neither of my parents had died. I had not yet seen a true winter.
    â€œBy Christmas Katrina was as white as the snow in the park and she spent most of the day with her eyes closed. She was wasting away and the doctors at Montefiore could do nothing but offer pompous opinions which were all wrong. Her father knew immediately. His wife was turned into potash for some green German field. How could they have fooled him? We sat in silence, Rosen and I, in a delicatessen below the elevated near Montefiore, wondering about the flower, Katrina, who was within the whiteness and sterility of that great smoking red-brick place of death and healing. And then she became red with a fever that never left her. They moved her at last to home. Rosen bought a cot and I lived there. We cared for her almost with a vengeance, day and night. For Rosen it was a vengeance. He was fighting God, a ridiculous little old man, fighting the murderous God of Israel. He had great energy, that old man; he could have made an empire. We all could have made an empire, couldn’t we have, but we were always too busy fighting and loving God, the bastard, God, how I love him, and how I hate.
    â€œI lived there, and while Rosen was at the store I cared for Katrina. I kissed her when she was sick, furiously. I know I shouldn’t have, but I often approached the bed and kissed her, kissed her hot face and held her to me until she sighed and slept. She was weak but she gripped me with all the strength she had, all the strength of a delicate young girl of eighteen who was dying. When I kissed her I was saying to God, ‘God don’t you see how strong she was and how beautiful? Don’t take her. Don’t take her.’
    â€œOn the twelfth of January, Rosen was at the store and I was making tea for Katrina. At that time the doctor came four times a day. She was burning. I was making tea for Katrina and the gas stove was buckling and burning. She called me, in almost a whisper, and she said, ‘Aryeh, Aryeh, do you know the lights that Christians have on their Christmas trees, the lights with a column of bubbling water? When you turn them on they bubble after a little while. Please get me some. I think if I see them I’ll get better. I feel better, and I want to look at some light.’
    â€œI became terribly excited. At last she is better, I thought. When I get the lights she will be better. I had faith in omens and I was sure that Katrina would not die, that the lights would be the things which would make her better and restore to her a natural color. It was the first time in months she had said she felt better. The lights I was sure could make her able to walk with me in the park, and catalogue her books at the store, and make love, and run about and laugh as she was so fond of doing. She was wild, Katrin’, just wild the way she would jump around and scream and grab onto me and kiss me as if her life depended on it.
    â€œI went all around Kingsbridge, looking for that type of Christmas light. I couldn’t find it. The merchants said that all Christmas lights had been returned to the factory. ‘There’s no need for them,’ one said. ‘Of course there is,’ I said. ‘No there isn’t. Nobody needs them. It’s January twelfth and nobody needs Christmas lights.’
    â€œSo I went to the phone book and called Christmas Tree Light Companies. There are dozens in New York. Only one had a supply. They sent me to their warehouse, on Sedgwick Street in Brooklyn. Do you know where Sedgwick Street is? It’s near the docks, in a tough neighborhood. I was not afraid to go there. I stood in front in the subway and urged it on like a jockey on a horse and I paid no attention to the cold