A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin Page A

roll in the oven.
    He was happy to be alive and would not move his head until later, when a nun told him it was safe. He saw by turning his eyes the tops of pine trees and green hills in the not so far distance. He judged himself to be on a mountaintop. “Splendid,” he said. “I’m on a mountaintop.” He could hear birds and the clicking of crutches in the garden. After a few weeks he was up and about. He could see most of Rome from the garden and some of Rome came up to meet him, although that part of Rome which traveled up the hillside to him was not people but houses and streets.
    When he had been a priest in Arizona and visited parishioners in the hospital, he thought because of its bustle and crowded corridors that a hospital was a social place. He had often thought of going to a hospital on some physical excuse to cure his loneliness, but in Rome (and he assumed that hospitals were spiritually the same everywhere) he discovered himself more alone than he had ever been. The face of his nurse was constantly changing, and there were eight doctors who cared for him in varying degree, none with particular intensity. He was alone during the day, and in the night. He did not dare draw. He was afraid to look in the mirror. No one paid him any attention, because he was old.
    There was a man dying of some unknown disease, a violinist in a symphony orchestra in the north of Italy. He looked as if he were made of old loops and patches. He smelled of death. It came from inside him—from his bowels, from his throat, even from his legs and fingers. Father Trelew had smelled the same smell in Arizona when some boys cut open a deer they had shot in the mountains several days before. Every day the violinist sat in the garden and played. He was particularly fond of the Andante of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and he played it again and again. The officials allowed it because it helped those who recovered recover, those who were dying to die, and those in the middle of the road to pass the time. Father Trelew wanted to talk to the man whose music was so beautiful; he had never before heard any Prokofiev. When he went to him in the garden, he found the old man unable to speak. But the patterns of the music were so strongly ingrained, and his hands so powerful, that he played, he played, until the day of his death—not always correctly, often out of time, but always with much passion.
    Father Trelew was not afraid of dying. He was afraid of what he might be before he died. When he first realized that he was dying he stayed in his chair—an old man in a chair—and tried frantically to remember all the parts of his life. He thought that when a man dies a man reviews what he has seen. He expected memories to jolt his frame, and visions to seek him and turn him, and shower the room with light.
    But it just didn’t happen as he expected, which he might have expected but did not. He became whimsical, prided himself suddenly on his sense of humor, and found the truth in sayings. He would say, “Love makes the world go round,” and laugh. He was generally good-natured. Every four hours a nurse, never the same one, came to ask him if he had moved his bowels. He thought this was hilarious.
    â€œFather Trelew.”
    â€œYes, Sister.”
    â€œHave you moved your bowels in the last four hours?”
    â€œMoved them where?” he said, and burst out laughing.
    He was happy for no particular reason, and for that reason he adjudged himself particularly happy. One would have thought he was getting better. He said, “I want to have a good time on earth while I can,” and spent the days in the garden, in the sun, watching flowers and delighting in the smell of rich grass, which was green as if on a riverbank. At night, he looked from his window at Rome, and because he remembered his memories so well he did not think of them, or need to. One look at Rome from a moderate distance was