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‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’
‘I can fire a rifle.’
‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’
Adam told him that in the cadet corps he had been a crack shot; no mention of the puttees.
‘Did they teach you to run away in this cadet corps of yours?’
‘I learned how to run at college.’
‘In the wrong direction?’
A young captain loomed behind Delgado. Adam shrugged.
Delgado said, ‘I believe this to be a Spaniard’s war. I don’t believe foreigners should interfere.’
Adam thought: ‘What about the Moors?’ but he said nothing.
‘Odd that you should have chosen this time to retreat. We were going to attack in one hour from now. I should have you shot.’
‘I came to warn you about the shell.’
‘I don’t believe in that shell. How old are you, Fleming?’
Adam told him he was 21.
‘I had a son of 20. He’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said.
‘He was shot in the lungs and in the stomach. He died in great pain.’
Adam remained silent.
‘Do you know who shot him?’
‘The reds … Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists …’
‘He was shot at Badajoz by the Legion. He was fighting for the reds.’
The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky and despite the sporadic gunfire, a bird was singing on the telegraph wire. Inside the bunker a radio crackled.
Delgado turned to the captain. ‘Escort this man to his trench,’ he said. ‘I want to hear more about this non-exploding shell.’
The captain put on his cap and drew his pistol.
‘That’s not necessary,’ Adam said but the captain who was young and glossy, like Paco had been, prodded the barrel of the pistol, a Luger, in the direction of the trench.
‘How old are you sir?’ Adam asked the captain.
‘May God be with you if there isn’t any shell,’ the captain said.
A sparrow-hawk hovered above them.
They were ten yards from the trench when the shell blew.
The attack was delayed until dawn the following day. Then, supported by a barrage from their batteries of 155 mm artillery and a baptismal blast from the Condor Legion’s 88 mm guns, they moved, legionnaires and Moors, across the wet, blasted earth where, in the summer, corn had rippled, towards the river separating them from the enemy.
Some time during the fighting, when the barrel of his rifle was hot and there was blood on the bayonet and his ears ached with gunfire and his skull was full of battle, he vaguely noticed a plane drop from the sky, gently like a broken bird; he thought it levelled out but he couldn’t be sure because by then he was busy killing again.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_794dda16-6919-58a5-b195-96749eb0136b)
The smell was pungent, sickly and familiar. Tom Canfield’s nostrils twitched; he opened his eyes. After a few moments he had it: locust beans. One of the maid’s sons had brought some to the house on Long Island one day and they had chewed them together. His eyes focused on a dark corner of wherever he was and saw a mound of them, pods sweetly putrefying.
In front of the beans lay the broken propeller of an aeroplane. He tried to touch it but his arm was cold and heavy. He flexed his fingers; they moved well enough but there was blood between them. He lay still concentrating, then blinked slowly and deliberately. Part of the fuselage was above him, radial engine bared. So he had been flung out of the cockpit. He tested his other arm. It moved freely. So did his legs, but his chest hurt and the pain was worse when he breathed deeply.
He sat up. Easy. Except that his right arm didn’t belong to him. He could pick it up with his left hand as though it were a piece of baggage. Blood dripped from his fingers. He looked for the wound and found it near the elbow. His thumb felt bone.
He stood up and, supporting himself against the walls, made an inspection of the farmhouse. It was a poor place with thin dividing walls painted with blue wash. Sagging beds were covered with straw palliasses, a jug of sour-smelling wine stood on a cane table.
The strength left his legs and he sat on a crippled chair. Where was he? Behind Fascist lines, behind the Republicans, in no-man’s-land? He heard gunfire and the venomous explosions of fragmentation hand-grenades; but he couldn’t tell how far away they were.
What he needed was a drink and a bandage to stop the blood seeping from the hole in his arm. He went to the kitchen and opened a cupboard painted with crusted varnish and found a half-full bottle of Magno brandy. He poured some down his throat. It burned like acid but the power returned to his legs. He ripped down a chequered curtain and tore off a strip; he eased his wounded arm from his flying jacket and bound the wound, knotting the cloth with his teeth and the fingers of his good hand.
He looked out of the window. The ground mist had returned, so it was late afternoon. Gunfire flashed in the mist.
Despite his wound he was hungry. He returned to the store-room and chewed a couple of locust pods; they made him feel sick.
He patted the fuselage of the Polikarpov. It was still warm.
He sat down and tried to visualize the battlefield as he had seen it from the air. The hills that glittered in the sun to the west, empty cornfields, vineyards, then the canal and the river and the Pindoque bridge which carried trains loaded with sugar from La Poupa factory to the railway to Andalucia. On the opposite side of the river the heights of Pingarrón where the Republicans were entrenched. But he still could not envisage where he was.
When evening had pinned the first star in the sky he opened the door and made his way towards the voice of the river.
The rabbit, one ear folded, stared at them from its hutch in the yard. It was a big problem, this rabbit. It was a pet and it was dinner. No, more – dinner, lunch and soup for supper the next day.
The rabbit, grey and soft, twitched its whiskers at Ana and the children.
‘I think he’s hungry,’ said Pablo, thereby encapsulating the rabbit’s two main faults – it was masculine and it was always hungry. What was the point in keeping a buck rabbit which could not give birth to other rabbits? What was the point of wasting food on an animal which was itself sustenance? Was there really any sense, Ana asked herself, in wasting cabbage stalks and potato peelings on a rabbit when her children were threatened by scabies and rickets?
But despite its appetite, despite its masculinity, this rabbit possessed two trump cards: it was part of the family, thumping its hind legs when the air-raid siren wailed and flattening its ears when bombs exploded, and it was available for stud to the owners of doe rabbits who would exchange a sliver of soap or a cupful of split peas for his services.
Ana regarded the rabbit with exasperation. Jesús would have known what to do.
But Jesús was at Jarama fighting the Fascists. Fighting and writing poetry – two of his front-line poems had been published in Mundo Obrero and one of them, a soldier’s thoughts about his family, hung framed on the wall among the formidable ancestors.
What would Jesús have done about the rabbit? Killed it? Ana doubted that: he would have departed, and returned, a curved smile of triumph on his face, with provisions mysteriously acquired. Like a magician, he never disclosed the secrets of his bartering but Ana suspected that he exchanged poems for provender – there were still wells of compassion beneath the brutalized streets of Madrid.
He had returned once, at Three Kings, with a doll for Rosana that he had carved with his pocket-knife in the trenches, and shining cartridge cases and studded fragments of a Mills bomb for Pablo’s war museum. But he had changed since Ana had sent him to war: he was still good with the children but with her, although gentle, he was wary and when they lay together in their sighing bed he seemed to be searching for the girl he had met and not the woman she now was. They hadn’t made love until they were married and they didn’t make love now; instead she held him until he slept and stroked his forehead when he whimpered in dreams of battle.
He was in the Popular Army, formed to bring order to the militias and Irresponsibles, but as he walked away from the chabola, stooping under the weight of the carnage he had witnessed, he didn’t look the least bit like a soldier. I am the warrior, Ana thought, regarding the rabbit speculatively, and he should be the provider.
Food! She turned away from the rabbit, allowing it one more reprieve, and went into the bedroom to fetch her shawl and her shabby coat and her shoes laced with string darkened with blacking. She hated the hunger that was always with her, because it was a weakness that distracted her from the Cause.
She left Pablo fashioning a whistle out of a cartridge case and Rosana painting a water colour of a harlequin in black, red and yellow, arm raised in a clench-fist salute.
As she crossed the yard the rabbit thumped its legs.
She went first to an old woman who lived on her own in a hovel that stood alone, like an ancient’s tooth, in a street of rubble. Here she made wreaths with paper flowers tied with black and red ribbon; the flowers were always red and she was always busy. Sometimes she possessed extra food with which the bereaved had paid for their wreaths, but there was none on view today.
‘Just a little bread,’ Ana pleaded, hating herself. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s stale; I can toast it.’ At least they had fires in the chabola, kindled with slats from the ceilings of collapsed houses and fuelled with furniture – a walnut writing-desk had burned for two days.
‘What have you got to offer?’ the crone asked. In her youth she had married a member of the CNT; when he had died she had become the mistress of a doyen of the UGT; now she believed that age was an amnesty for the past. Her face was blotched and hooked; in her youth it must have been sharp enough to cut down trees, Ana thought.
‘A poem?’
‘Ah, a poem. What a beautiful thought, Ana Gomez.’ Beneath her arthritic fingers scarlet crêpe blossomed. ‘Except that I cannot read.’
‘If I read it you will remember it.’
‘I would prefer jewellery,’ the crone said.
‘I have no jewellery, only my wedding ring.’
‘I have a little bread,’ the crone said. ‘A little rice. Admittedly with weevils but beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Ana Gomez?’
Ana twisted the gold band on her finger; she remembered Jesus placing it there.
‘I have money,’ she said.
‘Who wants money? There is nothing to buy with it.’
‘I will come back,’ Ana said. With a gun! ‘Tell me, do you make wreaths for Fascists?’
The crone gazed at her suspiciously. ‘I make wreaths for the dead,’ she said.
Perhaps one day she will make a wreath for Antonio, Ana thought as she stepped over a fallen acacia on a street scattered with broken glass. He had returned to the capital once, as furtive as a pervert, wearing a beret and filthy corduroy trousers and a pistol in his belt. He had crossed the front line, relatively quiet on the western limits of the city since the fury of November, leaving his blue Falange shirt behind him.
He had come to the chabola after dark while she was boiling water on the walnut desk blazing in the hearth. He brought with him cigarettes – the new currency of Republican Spain. He gave her six packs, then, sitting in Jesús’s rocking chair, said, ‘I went to the house; the neighbours told me that Martine and my daughter left several weeks ago …’ Even now he smelled faintly of Cologne.
‘She’s with the British,’ Ana said. ‘Waiting to be evacuated.’ She told him about Christopher Lance and his ambulance service to British warships waiting on the Mediterranean coast. ‘She’s well,’ Ana said. ‘The baby’s due at the beginning of March.’
Antonio lit a cigarette, an Imperial. His curls were tight with dirt and the skin across his cheekbones was taut; he was growing old with the war.
‘When will she go?’
‘Soon. There were many waiting before her.’
‘Is it still dangerous in Madrid for anyone who made the mistake of being successful?’
‘For the Fascists who exploited the workers? Not as bad as it was; the real pigs are all dead. As for the rest …’ Ana tested the water with her wrist as she had done when the children were babies. ‘They can’t even buy your perfume any more. Isn’t that sad?’
‘What happened to the perfume?’
‘The Irresponsibles drank it.’
She lifted the pan of water from the fire and took it to the bathroom and told the children to wash themselves, Rosana first, then Pablo.
‘I hope it poisoned them,’ Antonio said. ‘And how have you been keeping, elder sister?’
‘Surviving,’ Ana said.
‘Jesús?’
‘Fighting.’
‘Mother of God! He’ll shoot his own foot.’ Antonio inhaled deeply and blew smoke towards the fire and watched it wander into the chimney.
‘And Salvador?’
Ana straightened her back in front of the fire. ‘He’s dead.’
Antonio stared at the cigarette cupped in his hand. ‘Papa?’
‘Dead.’
‘How?’
‘Killed by one of your bombs.’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘But the priest lived.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
And then he had gone and she had imagined him flitting through the blacked-out campus, and sidling through the front lines where friend and foe called to each other, and making his way south to the Jarama valley to resume the fight against his own people.
In the Puerta del Sol she spoke to a lottery ticket vendor. The lottery headquarters had moved with the faint-hearted Government to Valencia but tickets which could make purchasers rich beyond the dreams of working men were still on sale in Madrid. But as the crone had said, ‘Who wants money?’ If the first prize had been a kilo of sausages Ana might have joined a syndicate and bought a fraction of a decimo, a tenth part of a ticket.
The vendor was young and broad-shouldered with a strong waist and muscular arms but his legs were shrivelled, tucked under him like a cushion on his wheelchair.
She asked him if he knew any food resources. She had known him for three years, this robust cripple, and they admired each other.
‘I know where there are candles.’
‘You can’t eat candles, idiot.’
‘You can barter with them, guapa.’
