Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online Page A

come, as once I took them as they came.
    One copy of the manuscript exists, and one copy alone, because at the reproduction store in Niterói the self-service machine is next to a coffee urn. I begged them, almost on my knees, with a clothespin on my nose, but they would not move it. Therefore, to protect this story from that which would destroy it, I have taken great pains to secure a totally antproof case, to which, I trust, you will return these pages one by one as you finish reading them.

Miss Mayevska
(If you have not done so already,

please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
    Â 
    H OW CAN YOU know history? You can only imagine it. Anchored though you may be in fact and document, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must subject the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but God to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A "definitive" history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past but in casting it according to his own lights, in
defining
it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstitution. Short of that, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled.
    The dominant images of the year 1919 are those of a world awakening from the nightmare of war—troops returning, families reunited or shattered by grief, the armistice, the peace. For Americans, it was a time of recrossing the Atlantic, east to west, of the return to a world as quiet and full of hope as Childe Hassam portrayed in paintings that even now have not lost the least part of their lustre. For me, however, little was tranquil as I followed the crooked and contradictory threads that illumine not only the times themselves, like bones that glow within the gelatinous plate of an X ray, but which point to where the times are headed.
    In the spring the Atlantic was crowded with busy steamships terribly overloaded on the western passage and nearly empty upon return. I was one of the American boys on the sea, but I was not returning to the New World, a hero.
Au contraire.
I was a passenger on the east-bound
Jeanne d'Arc,
I was fourteen years old, I was fair-haired, smooth-cheeked, as lean as a ballet dancer, and I was in a strait jacket.
    I had no need whatsoever to have been so constrained. At that age, especially, I was as tender and innocent as a milk-fed veal. But you know very well what happens to innocent and tender milk-fed veals, and where they end up. The judge whose bitter imagination had contrived my sentence actually had brought a cup of cheap nauseating coffee into the courtroom where I was being tried. What justice could exist when mine own judge was himself one of the many fiends I was compelled to eradicate?
    With no coffee nearby, I was very gentle. I was easily moved, always in love, and most willing to sacrifice. I worked hard, and because I lived more or less alone and had no entertainment, and was totally serious, totally nervous, I was far and away the most accomplished student in my school, though my record was mixed. This was only because I was never able to force myself to engage those subjects that did not excite, confound, or invigorate my imagination, and also because I was always immediately willing to defy authority.
    Even as a schoolboy I made mortal enemies among adults—my Latin teacher, for example, a cruel, balding young man of twenty-seven with a canine tooth that hung out over his lower lip even when his mouth was tightly closed. The first day in class, we took a look at him and we knew that God had put us on earth to carry forth the victories of the angels, which were achieved not only on the pale blue terraces of heaven but in the most unlikely corners of hell. Though I received consistent zeros in Latin, by