A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin Page B

if he were to eat that night, he would be too fat to lie with Patrizia.
    The dining hall in the Schlernhaus was dark. Everyone had gone upstairs except some soldiers and mountain guides who sat around a grate of glowing coals in the guides' room, talking about war. The sound of a zither came softly from the upper floors—for the princess.
    No one cheered. The guides stared at him because he walked so pompously, and the kitchen cadet who had to stay late to serve the food was anxious to go to bed, because he had to rise at four A.M.
    "Tell me about it," the attorney Giuliani asked, "what it was like. Why was the tea spilled? The note they sent back with you said that Herr Willgis ran all the way to his house. That amazes me....
    "All right," his father said, "I can understand why you might not want to talk. I'm going to bed now. If you like, we can go home tomorrow."
    Alessandro nodded.
    The cadet put a piece of Sacher torte on the table, took off his blue apron, and stumbled dizzily out the kitchen door toward the cadet barracks, saying, "Just put the dishes in the sink, so the rats don't jump on the table." Alone in the kitchen, his courage beginning to ebb, Alessandro thought to seek out Patrizia before he was too afraid to do so. He was tempted just to go to bed, but the image of the beautiful, shy, blonde girl made him rise. He trembled so much as he put the dishes in the sink that the fork clattered against the plate and the cup against the saucer like palsied old men. Then, with the weighted heartbreaking tread of someone on his way to be hanged, he walked toward the stairs. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to breathe—in her breath, and he bumped against the stairs in the dark and started to ascend to the upper floors and their dizzying, intimate warrens.
    During the day the soldiers of the
Leibregiment
stayed rigidly by the doorposts of the royal compartments, and nothing in the
world, not even a tiny July gnat, could get past them, but, inexplicably, at night they paced back and forth like bears in a shooting gallery, taking long trips down the hall at precisely timed intervals when it was easy for a small boy treading softly on alpaca socks to glide into the forbidden wing and have his choice of twenty doors in two facing rows.
    His chances of finding her before he himself was discovered were not good: he could tell nothing from the doors themselves; it was quite dark; and his time was limited because someone would undoubtedly come out into the hall.
    Choosing a middle door at random, he was about to put his hand on the latch but was deterred by a raspy voice from within. Someone was talking to himself. "...to Gisella! But Hermann will be exposed for what he is within a week. In a year's time, I'll be the favorite in court, and the monkey will jump on the nut. On the other hand, no one ever got rich by putting octopus ink in a drinking glass, and the emperor likes Von Schafthausen—mistakenly, of course...." Clearly this man was going to stay up all night, and he was not Patrizia.
    Alessandro moved to a door at the end of the hall. Slowly, quietly, he lifted the latch and looked within. There, in the flashing, cloud-scudding moonlight, lay a huge beached whale of a woman, with exceedingly spacious gaps in her teeth, enormous fleshy lips, a porcine nose, and ears shaped like powder horns. Who was she? She had been too ugly to come to dinner. Perhaps she was a maid, or an unfortunate royal relative forever hiding on the upper floors of palaces and inns.
    After shutting that door, Alessandro despaired of finding Patrizia, but after his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that neatly placed in front of each door was a pair of shoes or boots. Ordinarily, no one was permitted to wear boots in the Schlernhaus, and they were kept on racks under the stairs, but royal shoes and boots were allowed to sleep near their masters and mistresses.
    Some were huge, others womanly, and the shoes of the servants had