That he remembered perfectly.
Otherwise, but for two moments that would live with him for a long time, it was all darkness. Drunken shouts, breaking glass, spilled food, rain blowing against the windows.
In the first moment, there was a thickset man in the uniform of a general, who sat against a wall with his legs stretched out before him. He held his right hand tightly over his right eye while blood welled from beneath and trickled down his cheek. All the while he was singing, in a false baritone, an old Russian love song.
In the second moment, the car pulled up in Arbat Street and Mitya let Khristo out. It was a cold, drizzling dawn. Sascha had passed out in the back seat, Khristo looked back at him through the fogged window. In sleep, he had the face of an old youth, fine features blurred, morning beard a blue shadow. Khristo stood unsteadily on the sidewalk. He had been drunk, then sober, then drunk again, and now his head had a spike through the temples.
“You can get in all right?” Mitya asked from the driver's seat.
He nodded that he could. The car pulled slowly away from the curb.
There was a woman, probably going to work, coming toward him down the street. At first he thought she was an old woman because she was stooped and walked with difficulty, but when he peered through the darkness he could see that she was not old at all, perhaps in her thirties, and rather pretty in a fragile sort of way. Perhaps, he thought, she worked at Food Store 6, which was just around the corner. Perhaps she was a clerk, coming on duty at dawn to check the produce in as it came off the wagons and trucks from the countryside. She had seen the black Pobieda, Mitya at the wheel, Sascha in his leather coat sprawled in the back seat, and Khristo, swaying for a moment on the sidewalk. She stopped, then moved around him in a wide circle, walking close to the wall of the building. She kept her eyes on the pavement in front of her, but then, just for a bare instant, she glanced at him, then looked down again, and he realized that she knew who they were. She knew what they were, what he was, and she was afraid of him.
From the New York Sun, August 23, 1936:
MOSCOW, August 20—President V. M. Molotov has announced that the Soviet Union is sending three hundred volunteers to assist Loyalist forces in the continuing conflict in Spain. “At issue,” Molotov stated in a speech to the Praesidium, “is the democratically elected workers and people's government in Madrid. The USSR must take every measure to ensure that oppositionist military units do not overthrow the popularly supported regime of President Manuel Azaña.” The unit of volunteers, who have chosen to call themselves the Brotherhood Front for the Protection of Spanish Democracy, is made up of civil engineers and public health workers and will provide technical assistance to the Azaña government. A Soviet spokesman informed The Sun that many of the volunteers are of various Eastern European nationalities.
IN CATALONIA, SOME WAY INLAND FROM THE ANCIENT SPICE city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Río Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. It was any and all of the villages of Spain, a series of white cubes stacked against the side of a brown hill, outlined sharply by a hot blue sky. To the eye of the traveler, it stood high above the road, somehow remote, and very silent and still. Go on to the next village, it seemed to say, to Calaguer or Santoval, you will like it better there.
San Ximene, and all the countryside thereabout—the olive and lemon groves, the vineyards, the fields where sheep grazed on stubble after the cutting of the wheat—these belonged to Don Teodosio, of the noble family Aguilar.
It had always been so. Like the blistering sun that dried the soil to dust and the cold wind that blew it away, it was a law of nature, a commonplace of existence. A local maxim had it that on the third day of creation, when God divided the waters and revealed the land, the first Aguilar was discovered there, dripping, awaiting his maker with a basket of figs.
Whatever else might be said of Don Teodosio, or Doña Flora, they were, like their distant ancestor, provident with the Aguilar figs. In rush baskets woven by the maids and seamstresses of the household, the figs arrived punctually every Christmas and Easter. If you were a peasant of the San Ximene region, sometime before the coming of the great holidays you would behold the cream-colored De Bouton automobile, its body fashioned of tulipwood, rolling to a ceremonious stop in front of your mud-brick house. Miguelito, the chauffeur, would tap twice on the horn—a sound as pure as a heavenly trumpet—and you, your good wife, your shy children, and your esteemed parents would gather, bareheaded, before the whitewashed doorway to receive the gift. Doña Flora—Don Teodosio was too much occupied with grave affairs to have time for such business—would descend from the elegant car, wearing a dove-colored woolen suit with a foxtail stole, and approach the family, seconded by the chauffeur carrying the basket. She would greet you by name, inquire after the health of all, remark briefly on the piety of the season, and offer blessings all round. Miguelito would hand the basket to Doña Flora, she would in turn hand it on to the head of the household, who would thank her for the gift. Good wife, shy daughters, and esteemed mother would curtsy.
It was deemed, in general, a wise disposition of the Aguilar figs. If, somehow, you had miraculously contrived to dine as richly and voluminously as they did at the great house, the figs would have been just the thing to assure felicity of digestion, for they were infamously purgative. Perhaps they believed up there that all the world fed liberally on salted ham and pink frosted cakes and thereby suffered the attendant constipation—a distemper, like gout and melancholia, reserved exclusively for the rich. No matter the motive for their distribution, the Aguilar figs grew, had grown there for a thousand years, and something had to be done with them. Nobody, certainly, would ever buy them. Thus they came—thick-skinned and pungent, like all the gifts of Spain—to you. It was always nice to have the rush basket—something or other could be done with it. This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.
Not that they would cease to grow—the gnarled and twisted ficus carica had no choice in the matter. The harsh copper sun flamed in the heavens for months, as it always had, the ancient roots sought out what moisture remained in the stony soil of the river valley and, even in civil war, photosynthesis would not be denied. Not, that is, until the shellfire came and blew everything to hell. But, in October of 1936, the shellfire was still a comfortable distance away—more than two hundred miles away, where the Moorish armies of General Mola had besieged Madrid. And—no pasarán, they shall not pass—they would steal not one more inch of Republican earth.
So there would be figs. There would be lemons as well. Hard, green things certain to produce a gargoyle's scowl on the face of anyone foolish enough to taste them. For the true limón— a beautiful, fat, sunny fruit near sweet to the palate, you had to go to Valencia or Tarragona. In San Ximene, alas, they were not so blessed, the fertility of their little valley being most charitably described as unkind. The vino tinto, red wine, produced in the Aguilar vineyards was reputed to be curative, though exactly what it cured no one could say, lest it be life itself.
There would be figs, come harvest time, but they would no longer be nestled in rush baskets. They would not be bestowed by Doña Flora in her foxtail stole. The glossy De Bouton would never again sound its velvet trumpet at the whitewashed doorways of the San Ximene peasants. Those days were gone forever. The Aguilar figs were embarked on a new destiny.
Thirty-two percent of the total harvest would be retained by the workers and peasants of the San Ximene commune. Twenty-one percent would be donated to the food stores of the Asturian miners' brigades, fighting to the north. Twenty-four percent would be dispatched to relieve the hungers of Madrid, as the fascist noose was tightened around the city's throat, threatening to still its passionate song of freedom. Twenty-two percent of the harvest would travel east—eleven percent for hospitals on the coast, another eleven percent to feed the International Brigades, now flowing into the country from the breadth of Europe. An additional twenty percent would be required, it was felt, for trade with other villages, so that tools and seed, medicine and ammunition, could be obtained. Let the world take note and raise its fist: the San Ximene figs were going to war!
But it would not be easy. There had been defeatist grumbling to the effect that San Ximene had pledged to distribute one hundred and nineteen percent of its fig harvest. How was that to be done?
Work harder! Thus spoke the fiery idealists of the village. An old man, however, his hands frozen to knotted claws by a lifetime of torturing food from the wretched soil, rumbled with laughter at such a suggestion. “Work yourselves to death, if you like,” he said, “but you'll not get a fig tree to grow more fruit.” A young peasant disagreed. Was it not the case that some of the fruit spurs were pruned from the trees every spring? Everyone had to admit it was the usual practice to do so. Well then, let them be. At this, the old man stopped laughing. “If you do not cut some of the spurs, the branches will break in the autumn. You'll have your nineteen percent, it's true, but next year you'll have nothing.” The young peasant nodded, sadly, his agreement. He had to point out, however, that if Franco and his fascists gobbled up their beloved Spain in 1936, who was foolish or greedy enough to worry himself over the fig harvest of 1937? Heads swiveled back and forth between them as they argued. Who was right? What was right?
One timid soul—formerly a laundress in the Aguilar household—wondered aloud if, just perhaps, it might not be the safest course to lower the production goals. But at this everyone was aghast, so she fluttered her hands and quickly backed down, her career in political debate over before it began and a good thing too. For the percentages were as rocks or mountains—immutable.
These numbers were, after all, the precious fruits of weeks spent in fervent disputation—intense, talmudic sessions held in the back room of Serreño's Bar that had seen the best minds of San Ximene fully engaged in struggle—and one didn't simply cast such treasure over the nearest fence. The percentages were symbols—a de facto treaty between countervailing forces. And, truly, that they were able to agree on anything at all was simply astonishing.
Consider the opening positions: the PSUC, Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña, in which socialists and communists had agreed to agree, wanted to parcel out the harvest down to the very last fig. The technical approach, in which numbers danced formally with contributions to the cause. What value a soldier? Less than a hospital nurse? More than a railroad worker? How many figs to each? It could, if one applied oneself to the dialectic with good will, be determined. It had to be determined—the war went on, and the trees would leave dormancy in a few months. So it would be determined. They would sit there and determine it. Serreño, make coffee!
On the other hand, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM, had very different thoughts on the matter. These were the anarchists. To them, freedom was all and to hell with your pussyfooting numbers. Do nothing! That was their war cry. Action achieved by inaction. Simply leave the groves open and whoever needed figs could come and take them. Was this great battle in which they were engaged not, when all was said and done, over freedom itself? Could the past—the tyranny of priests, the despotic Aguilars, the brutal Guardia—be forgotten so quickly? Open the groves, open the town, open the world, come to that, and let each individual attain the full flowering of conscience. The ruling of the self by the self, that was government!
Clearly, at the beginning, the contending forces had some way to go.
And if, in getting to their common solution, they agreed to distribute many more figs than could safely grow on the fig trees, well, that was considered a very small price to pay.
Soon enough, there were committees for everything. Not that you could have found a soul under heaven—not a sane one, anyhow—who thought that Spaniards and committees were anything but mutually exclusive propositions, but something had to be done. Just be thankful, they told each other, that the committees were composed of PSUC and POUM and that, San Ximene being innocent of factories and workshops, the CNT—Anarcho-Syndicalist trade unionists—didn't have to be included. They would have hacked down the fig trees, sawn the damn things into boards, and built themselves a Hall of Workers.
There were committees for the distribution of food, for health and sanitation, for education, for grievances, for justice, for the moral improvement of youth. There was a committee assigned to the supervision of Don Teodosio and Doña Flora—held under virtual house arrest since the Nationalist rising in July. This committee immediately gave birth to a subcommittee—known as the Committee for the Carlist Mules—made up of a communist peasant and an anarchist peasant who, responsible for the twenty-six gray beasts belonging to the Aguilar estates, argued politics by the hour while shoveling manure out the barn windows. It was a small irony to call them Carlist mules since they, unlike their former owners, hardly cared whether or not the Bourbon monarchy was restored to the Spanish throne, but small ironies were permitted the men who had to wield water buckets and dung shovels on behalf of the greater good for they surely got little else for their labor.
There was even a committee—an ad hoc unit comprising both mayors, Avena from the PSUC and Quinto of the POUM—that saw to the needs of the convalescent draftsman. He needed very little, it turned out: the rental of a small cottage at the edge of town, an old woman to clean once a week, some beans and vegetables from the market which he cooked for himself.
He was a small, shabby man, Señor Cardona, self-effacing and painfully polite. In his forties, he suffered from a weakness of the lungs, and came to San Ximene now and again throughout the summer and fall to escape the smoke and dust of Tarragona, where he had a small business that produced engineering designs and specifications. He could often be seen through his window, bent over a table, making long, perfect lines on graph paper with infinite care. “You must call me comrade,” he would admonish them with a shy smile, but nobody ever did. The ancient instincts of San Ximene recognized true gentility when they encountered it, and señor he remained. There were some—there always are—who would have had him turn his hand to minor labors for the cause, but their niggling was as chaff in the wind against his self-appointed protectorate, the older women of the village. Thus the mayors, Avena and Quinto, merely shrugged when somebody complained. If the harsh, dry air of San Ximene aided the recovery of Señor Cardona, he would have all he could breathe. Besides, he paid for everything—the pesetas were not unwelcome—and paid, in fact insisted on paying, just a little more than the going rate.
He was, above all, a nice man.
Dark-skinned, with thick sensual lips and a gently curved nose, the brown eyes—soft and deep—of a favored spaniel, and a few strands of hair combed hopefully across a balding head. He wore always a hand-knit sweater beneath his camel-colored jacket—the night air was crisp—and the canvas shoes of a comfortable man. He did, it was true, speak an odd Spanish, rather formal and stiff, but that was undoubtedly due to a childhood spent in Ceuta, down in Spanish Morocco. Was there a touch of the Moor in him somewhere? This was suggested, but it did not matter. It was simply impossible not to like him, and he quickly became a pleasant fact of life in San Ximene, appearing every week for a day or two, then going back to Tarragona in his rackety Fiat Topolino.
Though humble and self-effacing, he could not have been entirely without importance, for he was occasionally sought out by two of his employees. In San Ximene, it was a curious notion that something, anything, could be so important that it would not wait a day or two, but Señor Cardona was a city gentleman, and it went without saying that city gentlemen were occupied by matters of considerable gravity.
Los Escribientes de Señor Cardona.
San Ximene rather honored their part-time resident with such a title—Señor Cardona's clerks. It had a bit of a ring to it. Of course, the country was at war, and it seemed that nothing was the same anymore. The men who visited Señor Cardona were proof of that. Clearly, these were not the usual escribientes. One might have expected pale, doleful fellows, their spirits turned gray by years of sitting at desks and writing in ledgers. Or minor tyrants, of the fat-assed, preening variety, little lordlings who made life miserable for poor people with their nasty rules and educated meanness.
These escribientes were quite another matter. But with so many men fighting at the front, a businessman, it was supposed, had to make do, had to take what he could get. The younger one, with the pale skin, black hair and blue eyes, conducted himself with reserve and courtesy. Some of the village daughters quite liked looking at him, a feminine perception of banked fires warming their curiosity. No, it was the older one who bore thinking about, the older one who caused the local gossips to trail their nets.
The women in black who met at the well at sundown had a ringleader—Anabella was her name, she looked like the get of a mating between a monkey and a sparrow—who led the daily pecking sessions. El Malsano she called him, tapping a forefinger against her temple. The unwholesome one. “He has snakes in his brain,” she said, “and they bite him.” One of the younger women crossed herself when she said it, though that gesture was now very unwise indeed.
Others were less colorful in their descriptions but gave him something of a wide berth. What sort of escribiente walked about in a drunken stupor? His index and middle fingers were brownish yellow with nicotine stains, his lank hair hung carelessly over his forehead, and the lines in his face were too deep for his years, like a film star, perhaps, whose career one day had faltered and died.
He was a Frenchman, probably there was no more to it than that. Serreño had overheard the clerks speaking French as they hauled a bundle of blueprints from the trunk of their long-hooded black Citroën. These were not, however, the same French people so much in evidence at the Aguilar household in summers past. None of that particular grace remotely touched them.
So it went, back and forth, as it does in a small place where people have known one another all their lives, the convalescent draftsman and his two French clerks, something to talk about.
In the tide of village opinion there was one dissenter, and he made his views known only once and was silent thereafter. This was Diego, the POUM representative to the Committee for the Carlist Mules. One hot, slow afternoon in September, he watched the Citroën crawl slowly up the white street toward Señor Cardona's cottage. When it had passed, he spat out the barn window and nodded to himself, affirming a private theory. “Russians,” he said.
His co-committeeman, the communist Ansaldo, raised his eyebrows and came to a full stop, his well-laden shovel frozen in midair. “How do you know that?” he asked.
Diego shrugged. He didn't know how he knew, he just knew. His friend put the shovel back down, stood upright, and sought the small of his back with his free hand. “If that is so, we are very fortunate indeed.”
Diego wasn't so sure. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps not.”
“They will help us against the Falange,” Ansaldo said. “They will bring tanks and aeroplanes.”
“If it suits them,” Diego said.
Ansaldo lowered his head a little. Diego knew what that meant. “You are a stubborn man, Diego. Russia is a mighty nation, a great people, and our only ally in this fight. If it is true they are here, you should feel joy to see them.” He was warming up his guns, Diego could tell, for a full afternoon of political cannonade.
“Yes, a mighty nation,” Diego mused aloud. He was silent awhile, his mind seeking the applicable wisdom. At last he found it. Con patienza y salivita, el elefante se coja l'armagita.
It was an old saying in Catalonia, well tested and well proven over the years. With patience and saliva, the elephant screws the ant. But he chose not to say it. Those two were Russians, he was sure of that, and if there were two, there would be more. He had heard that the Soviet Union was sending health workers to Spain. He was not sure what health workers would look like, but he was quite sure that they would not look anything like those two. He balanced all this in his mind for a moment, then decided that it was a good time not to have opinions. Maybe later. For the present, the best course was to clean the stables and shut up. On October 9, just after midnight, it began to rain in Madrid.
Then, over the Guadarrama range to the west, white flashes lit the sky. A moment later came the long, rolling reports of marching thunder. Faye Berns was jolted awake, came to her senses sitting upright in the narrow bed, her right hand reaching for Andres—who was not there—her left hand resting on a large revolver on the night table. Boots, she told herself silently. Right away. Now.
She swung her feet over the side of the bed, discovered she'd kicked the quilts onto the floor during the night, reached down and swept them aside, found her right boot. She dropped to her knees, tried to look under the bed, but it was pitch black. The stone floor was like ice—there was no heat in the building. As she reached toward the foot of the bed, she leaned on the quilts and found the other boot muffled within.
The room's small window lit up for an instant. She counted to four-elephant before the sound of the thunder reached her. It was a storm in the mountains, nothing more. There were no sirens, no screams, no machine guns firing from the roof. She took a deep breath and let it out, felt the pounding in her heart ease off, and fell back down on the bed still holding a boot in each hand. Thunder and lightning, not the other thing. She used to love storms. At home, they meant a break in the sweltering, humid summertime, the rain washed down the Brooklyn streets and, for a while, the air actually smelled sweet, like the country.
Andres said that in war you sleep with your boots on. She said they kept her from sleeping. He said that soldiers learned to sleep no matter what. And there you had Andres. Soft as a mouse, but a fountain of righteousness—he lived and breathed it, wore it like a suit of moral armor. Oh, you couldn't do it? That was fine, he understood. You must be doing your best, for nobody ever did less. He would just do more himself. Would do your job as well as his own. Anywhere but here, she would have thought him an insufferable prig and hated him wholeheartedly. But it wasn't anywhere but here, and here, where everything was upside down and inside out, somebody had to be Andres, somebody had to set the example.
It took ten seconds to put on the boots, and with ten seconds to spare you could live instead of dying. According to Andres, who knew about war. But she didn't think this particular ten seconds mattered all that much. From the top floor of 9 Calle de Victoria, formerly the maids' attic, it took about forty seconds to run down five flights of marble stairs to a long, vaulted hallway that led to the street. There was an alcove in the wall about ten feet from the door—at one time a polished mahogany table had stood there, but it vanished into the barricades during the street fighting of July 19—and that was going to serve as Faye Berns's bomb shelter. Some of the building's tenants took cover in the basement, talking and drinking wine until dawn. This she would not do. Let the Condor Legion blow her to pieces—they would not bury her alive.
Besides, it was the prevailing opinion that the Germans would not attempt night bombing—they were too much in love with their fancy Messerschmitt machines to smash them up on Madrid's surrounding hillsides. The Italian pilots, however, were another story. She'd seen one of them when his plane crash-landed in a beet field just outside the city. Some militiamen in their blue monos—mechanics' overalls had become the uniform of the Republican brigades—had carried him back to the city hanging tied, hand and foot, to a pole, like a wild boar taken in a medieval hunt. Even so, he swaggered. He had a stiff handlebar mustache and he cursed his captors at length and with vigor. When he stood against the wall of an elementary school he refused the blindfold and sneered at the militiamen. But when he fell he just looked like a bundle of rags. They brought a horse to drag the body away, one of the horses that used to do the same job for the bull on Sunday afternoons.
The sergeant of the firing squad had seen her standing there. He made a clenched fist and said, in sad and solemn tones, “No pasarán, señorita. No pasarán.” She had come to know Spain, and Spaniards, and she perfectly understood his irony. Observe this dirty work. Thus our slogans come to reality. And he was praising her, in his own special style, for not turning away from what had to be done.
Frances Bernstein would have turned away. Faye Berns did not. Frances Bernstein was the daughter of Abel Bernstein, the fierce proprietor of Bernstein's Department Store—Established 1921. The second largest department store, after the mighty Abraham & Strauss, in Flatbush.
Faye Berns came to life midway between Pembroke and Paris, on the S.S. Normandie, as Frances Bernstein's well-worn Brooklyn Public Library card stood high on the wind for a moment, then fluttered into the Atlantic to the cheers of a Danish painter named Lars. Frances Bernstein had spent twenty-three years waiting to become Faye Berns. Although near crushed to death by a parlorful of great-breasted aunts with diamond rings up to their wrists, an overstuffed apartment with a twittering canary, and a really very sweet Cornell man named Jacob, she had managed the transmigration of souls. She had escaped.
The canary was called Rabbi Cohen. That was Abel Bernstein, the anticlerical socialist, speaking. He was rich, it was true, but he sold goods of reasonable quality at a fair price to workers. That was his political destiny—the store, her family called it—and he accepted it. Picked up the checkbook, took out the fountain pen, let the National Peace Guild and the Brooklyn Committee for Social Justice know where Abel Bernstein stood. When she wrote from Paris that she was going to Spain, had already visited the Comintern offices on the Rue de Lafayette, his letter back to her was a classic. He agreed with her stand. Right was on her side. Now was the time. But please God for the sake of your mother do not go to Spain!
In the darkness of the little room under the eaves, Faye Berns became conscious of the ticking of the clock. The heartbeat rhythm of insomnia. Oh God, she thought, now I can't sleep. She opened her eyes. The room was so dark, the air seemed to fill with dancing gray particles. The insomnia was an old enemy, vanquished by daily hard work and the exhaustion of simply surviving in a beleaguered city. But now it came back, especially on those nights when Andres took his drafting materials from the closet and went away—usually for the better part of a week.
Very well. She had dealt with executions and the Condor Legion, now she would deal with insomnia. She tried to turn on the light, but the electricity was off. Went to the sink in the corner and tried to splash water on her face, but the water was off. Peered at the clock—it was 12:05. She did not have to be up on the roof until 3:30, but Renata was up there now, so she might as well visit. A visitor, she knew—Andres sometimes brought her a cup of tea—helped the hours pass.
She laced up the boots, first pulling hard at the two pairs of cotton socks to make sure there was no crease. Checked the safety on the Llama pistol, then stuck it inside the waistband of her thick corduroy skirt. Damn Andres, she thought. What clothes she had not given away were being ruined by the gun. Why could she not have a holster like everyone else? She had stood in line for a day at the armory to get the pistol, but nowhere in the city could she find a holster for it. She asked Andres, finally. Of course he could get her a holster, it would simply mean that a soldier at the front would do without. Well, did she want it? He tormented her with privilege, as though she would, by the hand of fate, eventually turn into the cosseted little dumpling she had been born to become. Well—her fingers found ribs—she was no dumpling now. Her waistband had more than enough room for the gun. She had long chestnut hair, a nose with a bump, and a wide, generous, impertinent mouth. Her single good feature—the way she saw it—were eyes the color of pale jade that had raised more than their share of hell. Her beauty, the aunts had always insisted, was inner, and it had taken a number of years, and a number of boys, to pay the world back for that.
Over her work shirt she pulled on a heavy gray sweater that her Aunt Minna had knitted as a graduation present—she liked it because it was of sufficient length and bulk to hide the pistol—then tied the red neckerchief loosely around her throat. In a city running out of everything, it was as much of a uniform as anybody had. She closed the door behind her and climbed the iron-rung ladder to the roof.
“Todavía?” Still?
“Siempre!” Always!
Sign and countersign, called quietly across the roof, were peculiar to 9 Calle de Victoria—each building had its own passwords. The city was awash with secret signals, codes, posters, banners, pronunciamenti painted feverishly on walls—hammers and sickles with drip lines to the sidewalk. The fiery Basque orator La Pasion-aria made daily speeches to the city over a network of public address systems wired together through the streets. Her words—It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees—were repeated everywhere. Constantly she reminded the women of Madrid that their traditional weapon, boiling oil hurled from a basin, was not to be put aside when the enemy arrived.
At the top of the hatchway to the roof, Faye Berns paused for a moment and looked out over the city. It was black and cold, the faint outlines of cathedral spires pointed shadows in the darkness.
“Faye?” Bundled in a large, shapeless army coat, Renata moved toward her through the gloom.
“It's me.”
“Can it be time?”
“No. I came for company.”
Studied closely, feature by feature, Renata Braun was something of a covert beauty, subtle and finely made, though the impression left on the world at large was that of a woman whose surface was fashioned by the exigencies of a life lived in difficult times and places. She was fortyish, with salt and pepper hair hacked off short, a delicate nose that reddened in the cold, and severe, gold-rim spectacles that were continually removed so that she could rub the dent marks where they pinched. A Berliner, she carried with her the sophisticated aura of that city and was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, often to the edge of cruelty. Renata was Andres's friend. Faye was Andres's lover. They had, over a few months' time, worked it out from there, becoming, finally, closer than sisters, a friendship in time of war.
Renata took her hands. “Ach, ice.”
Faye shrugged and smiled. She had given her gloves away and Renata knew it. She squeezed back for a moment, then put her hands in the deep pockets of her skirt. “How goes the night?”
Renata made an ironic little gesture with her mouth. “Very slow,” she said. “With der Sphinx at one's side.”
Faye looked past her, saw the dark shape of Félix, the Belgian journalist who never spoke if he could help it, sitting slumped on an upturned crate beside the machine gun. The position was backed up against the wall of a shed—so that the roof overhang kept the rain off the gunners—and “protected” by a semicircle of meagerly filled sandbags. The machine gun lay back on its tripod, muzzle pointed at the sky.
“Hallooo, Félix,” she called out quietly. Needling him, knowing he thought her an atrocious American brat, knowing he agreed with those stern Spanish commanders who, echoing Winston Churchill, called the foreigners in Madrid “armed tourists.”
“The poor thing,” Renata said, shaking her head.
Faye could not see his face, but she could imagine it. A sneer compounded of disgust—specific; and ill-temper—general. Félix was obsessed with doom. He had come to Madrid as correspondent for a Christian Socialist newspaper in Antwerp, then stopped filing stories, stopped doing much of anything. He wanted to leave the city, somehow he could not, yet he seemed to loathe everything about it. Mostly the frenetic tension of the place, which drove people into hilarious, slightly crazed companionship. Live today, for tomorrow we die. You could be married at any militia office in five minutes. And divorced as quickly, though many declined to bother with official sanctions in any way at all. There was an army, a real army, with tanks and planes and artillery, a few miles to the west. When the battle came, everybody in Madrid would simply pick up a gun and walk out to meet it. Such courage made them saints, of a modern kind, and they knew it. They cared enough about something to die for it, and a sweet, delicious madness blew through the city like a wind. To be a Madrileño was a privilege, an honor. Only a few, like Félix, could find no joy in it.
Or were there, in fact, more than a few.
The Moorish brigades and Spanish Legionnaires of General Mola were aimed at the city in four columns. Mola had been asked, by a foreign reporter covering the Nationalist side, which column would have the glory of leading the attack against Madrid. “I have a fifth column,” Mola had boasted, “inside the city, and it is they who will lead the attack on Madrid.”
This might have been a deception, meant to sow suspicion among allies of wildly different passions: Basques and Catalans seeking their own nationhood, communists of several disciplines, anarchists, democrats, idealists, poets, mercenaries, and those moths who were forever seeking the flame of the hour in which to immolate themselves.
Or it might have been said merely to torment the inhabitants a little. Civil war is not unlike a fight between lovers: each side knows precisely how to infuriate the other. During the Nationalist siege of Gijón, the water supply of the defending Republicans gave out, and they suffered terribly from thirst. Quiepo de Llano, the Nationalist general, went on Radio Seville every night, drinking wine and smacking his lips into the microphone. After that, he boasted of the sexual prowess of his soldiers—the women of Gijón must be ready! It was a powerful station, and all across Europe people tuned in for the nightly show.