скачать книгу бесплатно
Sometimes on Epsom Downs he had played at war, storming the racecourse grandstand on one occasion while thunder flashes exploded and masters in khaki stood in the line of fire barking contradictory orders. Adam had taken the opportunity to smoke a Passing Cloud in a nest of hawthorn bushes.
A red Very light blossomed in the sky. The legionnaires moved from their oasis and advanced towards the hill which the British Battalion, intellectuals, poets, adventurers, Jews from Manchester, Leeds and London, even a few members of the IRA, was defending.
Adam, rifle bayoneting the mist gathering in the rain, advanced into battle.
Chimo said, ‘Don’t worry, Amado, there are Spaniards fighting with the brigade as well as British.’
How could you tell one from the other? Phantom figures in front of them. Shouts and curses in Spanish and English.
‘Stay close to me.’ Chimo said. ‘I will kill your Englishmen for you.’
‘And I will kill your Spaniards.’
And then the mist lifts and there is great confusion and it’s apparent that, in their job-lot uniforms, reds are shooting reds as well as Fascists. Adam sees the scene as an old, frantically-speeded movie; when the reel spends itself the killing will stop.
He aims his Mauser and fires at nothing in particular. Finds himself on the edge of the movie screen beside a half-dug trench, cartridge cases and jagged slivers of shell-casing shining in the mud.
The Englishman stands in front of him, rifle, armed with a bayonet, clenched in white-knuckled hands. He wears a woollen Balaclava and rope-soled shoes. And spectacles, rimless and spotted with rain. An Englishman all right.
The Englishman prods his bayonet forward. The blade shines wetly but there is no blood on it. He blinks rapidly behind his spectacles, the sort you can buy in Woolworths without a prescription.
Adam holds his rifle, speared with a ten-inch blade, loosely. He does not want to kill this short-sighted Englishman. Nor does he wish to be killed. As they face each other fear pours into this pause in time, twists Adam’s bowels and roughens his throat.
Before coming to Spain he has not considered death; now it is as close as life. He understands that one thrust from that wet bayonet and the half-dug trench and the shining fragments of war and Kate with her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck will be no more. What does the Englishman see through his rimless, Woolworth’s spectacles?
‘Come on, you Fascist bastard,’ the Englishman says. ‘Fight.’
But Adam can’t move. He opens his mouth but his lips and tongue are frozen as they are in a nightmare that sometimes visits him.
The Englishman’s bayonet stabs, nearer this time.
‘Ah can’t kill you just like that,’ he continues, northern vowels as flat as slate. ‘Not if you don’t move.’
‘And I can’t kill you with an accent like that.’
A lozenge of silence inside the noise of battle. Then the Englishman speaks.
‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ he says. His bayonet dips.
Unanswerable knowledge expands inside Adam. Who is the enemy?
He says, ‘What are we going to do?’
The Englishman says reproachfully: ‘You shouldn’t be on’t other side.’
‘Why not? I believe in what I’m fighting for.’
‘You can’t.’ The Englishman knows this to be true and there is nothing more to be said about it.
‘I should kill you,’ Adam says.
‘If you don’t some other bugger will.’
‘And you should try and kill me.’
‘An Englishman? Nay, lad.’
‘Why are you fighting for the reds?’
‘Because I’m Jewish.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘A lot more but you wouldn’t understand, lad.’
‘There’s a lot I don’t understand,’ Adam says as he notices the Englishman looking beyond him, as he hears the click of a rifle bolt, as he turns deflecting the barrel of Chimo’s rifle, as Chimo pulls the trigger firing a bullet into the greyness above the rain.
And now the mist embraces them again and the Englishman disappears in it, an illusionist’s apparition. Adam calls out but his voice is swallowed by the mist and there is no reply.
Chimo hits him on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘Son of the great whore!’
‘He was English.’
‘So? I am killing Spaniards.’
‘It’s your war.’
‘Then go home, cabrón.’
Adam tells him about his sister and what the Republicans did to Paco.
‘So it’s everyone’s war. So try killing the enemy: if you don’t they will surely kill you.’
And now they are trying to do just that. Emerging from the mist, surprising Adam and Chimo who thought they were behind the Englishman; but all the senses tell untruths in the gunsmoke and the noise that never ceases.
Adam fires his rifle. Once, twice. Men fall. British or Spanish? The rifle jams. He lunges with the bayonet and the blade is as red as the poppies in the field.
Chimo pulls his sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here, Amado.’
And they are running along the hillside between shallow trenches, over bodies, taking cover behind a crop of boulders.
But these boulders are no one’s exclusive property. These boulders are an objective within the objective of the hill which is an objective within the campaign. And suddenly the fighting is thick around them; so thick that Adam cannot always distinguish Fascists from reds.
He grabs a rifle from the tight grip of a dead soldier. Fires it. The calico-rip of machine-pistol. Men fall forward which means they have been shot in the back but no one can be blamed because the reel of the ancient movie is out of control.
A punch on the head, just below the ear; he can no longer hear. He makes his way carefully through the silent carnage. He is alone now in the mist walking with a drunkard’s gait.
His head is heavy on his shoulders, his body bends with its weight; he wants to lie down and sleep. He stumbles, slides into a shell-hole, stays there, feet in a puddle, back propped against torn soil. He feels the earth shift as shells fall but he hears nothing.
The convoy skirting the Battle of Jarama at 3.30 am consisted of a black Chevrolet, an ambulance and three lorries.
At the wheel of the Chevrolet sat Christopher Lance wearing his check jacket and the pink, grey and brown tie of Lancing Old Boys. With him was a small, shy woman named Margaret Hill, matron of the British-American Hospital in Madrid and Fernanda Jacobson, head of the Scottish Ambulance Unit who often wore kilt and tartan hose and was not shy at all.
With them were 72 charges, British evacuees whom the Government allowed to leave Spain and Spanish refugees from the reds whom the Government didn’t. They had gathered furtively that evening at the British Embassy at 8 pm; now they were on their way through 32 check points to Alicante to be taken by a British destroyer, HMS Esk, north through the Mediterranean and across the Gulf of Lions to Marseilles and freedom.
As the convoy turned on to the Madrid–Valencia road shells exploded behind them and to their right machine-guns and rifles barked and coughed.
Martine Ruiz listened to them as the baby moved impatiently within her. In the makeshift British-American Hospital in Madrid on the corner of Velazquez at Ayala before reporting to the embassy she had insisted that it had no intention of entering the hostile world for at least another week or so; but even as she had been smiling comfortably at the British women the pains had been coming regularly.
The ambulance leaped over a shell-hole; Martine moaned and placed her hands across her drum-tight belly. The priest comforted her.
‘It will be soon,’ an old Spanish woman beside her said. ‘There is a hospital in Alicante.’
‘It won’t be for a long time yet,’ Martine said.
‘I can tell.’
‘It’s my baby,’ Martine Ruiz said.
The convoy stopped. Martine heard voices. But she trusted this Englishman who had a pass stamped by the Ministry of Works, the War Office, the British Embassy, the syndicates and Azaña himself.
The door of the ambulance opened. A sentry looked in. He was unshaven and wore a shiny-peaked cap on his unkempt hair. He saw the hump of Martine’s stomach and smiled. He would deliver a baby with one hand and shoot a Fascist with the other, this one.
‘A boy or a girl?’ he asked.
‘A girl,’ Martine said, smiling at him.
‘A boy,’ the old woman said.
‘Twins,’ the sentry said and, still smiling, shut the doors.
The convoy moved off. The gunfire grew fainter.
The baby pushed again. Not in Alicante, Martine said to the baby. There they will find out who I am and, although they may let you live, you will not have a mother. Tranquilo, she said. Please baby, boy or girl, tranquilo.
‘It will be soon,’ the old woman said.
The priest said nothing.
Tom Canfield, crouching, made his way along the dirt path beside the Jarama. The water idled past islands of black mud on which dark weed-like watercress grew. A stork stood alone among the bodies in a field, and its arrogance and the abandoned desolation of the field made Tom decide that the battle had passed by here, that the Fascists had crossed the river so he must be in Nationalist territory. All he could do was hold out till dusk, then try and cross the river as the Fascists had done, work his way through their lines to the Republicans and hitch a lift to the air-base at Guadalajara. Which sounded easy enough, except that the countryside with its vineyards and fallow cornfields was flat, and Fascist reconnaissance planes were flying low over the river.
Dusk began to gather with its own brand of loneliness. His wounded arm belonged to someone else; his chest hurt. A squad of Polikarpovs flew through the valley, scattering and climbing as they reached the outskirts of Madrid. One lingered. Seidler looking for him. You could bet good money on it.
Tom remembered an evening like this, a little cruel with a saline breeze coming in from the Atlantic, when he and a girl had escaped from a party at his father’s mansion at Southampton and ended up of all places in the potato fields at the south fork of the island. He had taken his open Mercer with the wire wheels and white-wall tyres. She was a happy girl with golden limbs and easy ways and they had lingered in the Mercer until the spray from the ocean had cooled their ardour. When they got back to the house the party was over, his father was bust and life would never be the same again. But he would always remember the girl.
Tom smiled. A bullet hit a tree hanging over the river gouging a finger of sappy wood from it. He dropped to the ground, took cover behind another farmhouse with a patio scattered with olive stones. There was some bread on a scrubbed table and a leather wineskin. The bread was stale but not too hard; he ate it and drank sweet dark wine from the wineskin. The wine intoxicated him immediately.
He heard a dog barking. He opened a studded door with a rusty key in the lock. The dog was half pointer, half hunter, with a whiplash tail, brown and white fur, a brown nose and yellowish eyes. It was young, starving and excited; as Tom stroked its lean ribs it pissed with excitement. Tom gave it the last of the bread.
A heavy machine-gun opened up; bullets thudded into the walls of the patio. The lingering Polikarpov returned, firing a burst in the direction of the machine-gun. Seidler without a doubt. The machine-gun stopped firing but Tom decided to leave the farmhouse which was a natural target. He let himself out of the patio. The dog followed.
The river led him through the rain into mist. He came to a broken bridge that had been blown up, coming to rest where it had originally been built. He ran across it, the dog at his heels.
The gunfire was louder now. No chance yet of getting through the Fascist lines. He noticed a shell-hole partly covered by a length of shattered fencing. He slithered down the side, coming to rest opposite a young, dark-haired soldier dazed with battle.
Sometimes a meeting between two people is a conceiving. A dual life is propagated and it possesses a special lustre even when its partners are divided by time or location. These partners, although they may fight, are blessed because together they may glimpse a vindication of life. All of this passes unnoticed at the time; all, that is, except an easiness between them.
Tom Canfield became aware of this easiness when, coming face to face with Adam Fleming in a shell-hole in the middle of Spain, he said, ‘Hi, soldier,’ and Adam replied incredulously, ‘I can hear you.’
And because a sense of absurdity is companion of these relationships, Tom laughed idiotically and said, ‘You can what?’
‘Hear you. I was deaf until you dropped in.’ And then he, too, began to laugh.
Tom watched him until the laughter was stilled. He had an argumentative face and, despite the laughter, his eyes were wide with shock. Tom was glad he was a flier: these young men from the debating forums of Europe hadn’t been prepared for the brutality of a battlefield.
‘Where did you learn to shoot?’ he asked pointing at the Russian rifle in the young man’s hands.
‘At college.’
‘In England? I thought you only learned cricket.’
‘And tennis. I played a lot of tennis.’
‘Because you were supposed to play cricket?’
‘You’re very perceptive. My name’s Adam Fleming.’ He saluted across the muddy water at the bottom of the crater.
‘Tom Canfield. How’s it going up there?’ he asked, nodding his head at the lowering sky.
Adam shrugged.
‘Fifty-fifty. I got disorientated,’ he said as though an explanation was necessary. ‘I didn’t know who I was fighting. Maybe someone fired a rifle too close to my ear. I felt as though I had been punched.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Tom said.
‘You’re a boxer?’
‘A mauler.’ Tom hesitated. ‘What made you come out here?’ He cradled his wounded arm inside his flying jacket; the dog settled itself at his feet and closed its eyes.
‘The same as you probably. It’s difficult to put in words.’
‘I would have guessed you were pretty neat with words.’
‘I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. I knew words weren’t enough; they never are. And you have to make your stand while you’re young … I’m not very good with words tonight,’ he said.
‘I guess you’ve been fighting too long,’ Tom said.
A shell burst overhead. Hot metal hissed in the water.
