The Second Son: A Novel

by Jonathan Rabb

Mila and the soldier looked over while a second barrage erupted. Hoffner made his way to them, his stride unsteady, with the booze in his stomach and a scorching sun to contend with.

  He drew up and thought to say something, but his mouth was too dry. He spat, and the man offered him his canteen. Hoffner drank.

  “The prison in Coria,” the man said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Hoffner nodded and finished the canteen.

  “You don’t want to go south,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to explain it to the señora.”

  “The doctor,” Hoffner corrected, and spat again. “The señora is a doctor.”

  “Yes. The doctor. Yagüe has half of Africa marching up from Seville. They’re already pressing in from Mérida. It’s not going to be good in Badajoz. It won’t be good here in a day or so, but we’re not going to think about that.”

  If Hoffner had any inkling who Yagüe was or where Mérida might be, he might have known enough to show some concern. Instead, he told himself not to vomit in front of the soldiers.

  Another explosion rattled behind them, and Hoffner nodded his thanks.

  “We’ll take our chances.”

  He took Mila by the arm and walked with her back to the car.

  FATHER AND SON

  An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.

  Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yagüe was well beyond Mérida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.

  “I have to get through.”

  Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.

  “If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”

  They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.

  The thick beard shouted over. “Julio. Your mother needs to make a bed for these two tonight. The woman is a doctor.”

  The boy pushed himself up and nodded, and Hoffner followed Mila across the mud.

  Inside, the house was old stone, the ceilings too low for a tall man to stand upright. Pots and pans hung from hooks and shelves, and a drinking trough of wood stretched along the back wall. Two young girls sat at a round table, with a few photographs in frames hanging behind them. One showed a man with a mule and a rifle.

  The man was seated across the room on a low stool. He was rubbing a cloth along the rifle’s barrel. He looked up when the son called for his mother.

  There was silence, and then the sound of an aeroplane from somewhere above. The man set his rifle against the wall and crossed to the doorway. He stepped outside, stared up for several seconds, and then looked out across the fields to the men in their caps and their uniforms—each of them staring up—before he returned. He took the rifle, sat on the stool, and began to rub it again with the cloth.

  The mother appeared from the back room in an apron skirt and green blouse of coarse cotton. She was slender, and her hair fell from its ties in thin wisps of brown and gray. In any other place, she and Mila might have been sisters.

  She spoke to the boy in a kind of Spanish Portuguese, only a few words making themselves known to Hoffner. The voice was deep and quiet, and she turned to Mila and continued to speak. Hoffner heard the word “frango” several times and thought she might be referring to the general, until Mila said, “She wants to know if we’ll eat chicken. I told her yes.”

  Hoffner nodded, and the woman motioned to the two girls. They followed her out into the courtyard, and the boy sat where they had been. He found a cloth and began to rub his rifle in the way his father rubbed.

  Hoffner said to Mila, “Tell him the boy is too young to have a gun.”

  She knew why he said it; and she knew there was no point in repeating it.

  The father, still focused on his rifle, said, “Will they make such distinctions in who they kill?”

  Hoffner watched as the man continued to clean. “No,” said Hoffner. “They won’t.”

  “It was a German plane,” the father said, “or Italian. Hard to tell in the dark. He was lost. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll drop his bombs here. For now he saves them for the city.”

  “Then you should send your family east.”

  “You have a car. You’re more than welcome to take them east if you like.”

  “And you’d let me?”

  “No.” The father looked over. “If you want to make it to Badajoz, you need to go tonight.”

  Hoffner was struck by the sudden candor. “The captain outside thinks otherwise.”

  “The captain wants to herd us into trucks and send us back to where you came from, or into Portugal. He’ll take my wife and daughters tomorrow. He’ll get them somewhere safe.”

  “But not the boy.”

  “If Badajoz falls, a boy with a rifle sitting here won’t make any difference. Neither will his father. So we go to Badajoz with you.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the captain about getting me my car.”

  “Your car is already halfway to the city,” the man said. “It’s loaded with rifles and ammunition and food. The captain probably drives it himself. He’s very brave. He’ll make three trips tonight, and he’ll hope the fascists choose to sleep before they make their full assault. At dawn he’ll tell you your car was needed, and that you can’t go south, impossible now with Yagüe only twenty kilometers from the city. He might ask the doctor if she can stomach the war, but you—he’ll tell an old man not to think beyond himself. Do you want to get to Badajoz?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a boy too young for a rifle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we eat and sleep, and I come for you later.”

  * * *

  At just after 1 a.m. the man shook Hoffner awake. They had laid a straw mattress by the trough, and the smell of garlic and chicken fat was still thick in the air. A dog or goat lay sleeping under the table, and Hoffner looked up to see the man and his son already with their rifles slung across their backs. The man waited until Hoffner was sitting. He then held out a small pistol to him.

  “I have my own,” Hoffner said. His hand was throbbing.

  “I’ll take it,” said Mila. She was standing somewhere behind the man.

  Hoffner looked over. He hadn’t heard her get up. They had slept. There had been no questions last night. She had given him that.

  She was in trousers and had borrowed a shoulder wrap from the mother.

  The man led them to the back room. His wife was sitting on the bed with the two girls, each in a long nightshirt. The mother’s hair was down across her chest, and she looked much younger. She held out her arms and the father nodded the boy to her, but the boy shook his head. The father reached over, took the boy by the shirt, and pushed him to his mother. There were no tears as she held him, and the boy finally wrapped his arms around her. He then kissed his sisters and stepped back. H
offner looked away as the boy ran his sleeve across his eyes. The father leaned in and kissed his daughters and his wife. The wife said something too low to be heard, and the father kissed her again and then stepped over to the window. He peered out and climbed through.

  He led them across a field and into a gathering of trees. Hoffner smelled the horses before he saw them, two deep brown colts tied to a tree and gnawing at the grass. Each had a blanket where a saddle should have been, but at least they had bits and reins. Mila ran her hand along the nose of the first and then quickly pulled herself up. Hoffner found a stump and brought himself up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed himself into the shallow of her back as she took the horse deeper into the trees. The moon followed them through the branches, and Hoffner let himself find sleep.

  * * *

  They were on an incline of high grass and boulders when first light came. The horses had proved more than worthy, a steady canter for much of the night. No one had said a word. Now it was little more than a walk, the horses’ nostrils heavy with breath and their hides moist and glistening.

  The trees had thinned just beyond Villar del Rey, leaving an open sky and white moon to light the fields and scrubland along the way. Hoffner had lost feeling in his right foot an hour ago, but it was better than the shooting pain that now circled his thighs and backside. Either would have been enough to keep his mind distracted, and for that he was grateful.

  Badajoz appeared across a valley as they crested the hill. Red tile roofs climbed haphazardly from the banks of a river and settled at the top of a hill, where a wide wood stretched up, then down another slope. Two stone towers, the color of wet sand, edged themselves beyond the tree line, no match for cannons or grenades. An ancient gate—Roman or Moorish, it was impossible to say which—stood along the bank and waited imperiously at the end of a solitary bridge.

  The aeroplanes had already done their damage. Sections of the outer wall lay in rubble, with hastily positioned sandbags and trucks at the breaches. Roofs throughout had been torn away, while streams of smoke spooled up into the air. The father pointed to a larger cloud rising from a distant hill. It was from the east.

  “Lobón or Guadajira,” he said. Hoffner imagined these were towns on the other side of the river. “They’re leaving nothing behind.” The man looked down into the valley. “It’s quiet. No aeroplanes. It means they’ll be here this morning. From the south. We need to cross.”

  He led them down the path and spurred the horses to give what little they had left. The grass gave way to low shrubs, and the horses snorted as the ground grew more uneven. The smell of burned wood and gunpowder filled the air. At the bridge, not a single soldier was standing guard.

  “There’s no reason,” the father said, as if reading Hoffner’s thoughts. “Yagüe and his Africans will be coming from the other side. If they take the city, we’ll need to defend this.”

  They were on the bridge when the sound of a solitary motor stopped them. Instantly, the father brought them back down and pressed them close to the first of the stone stanchions.

  They all peered up, waiting to see the aeroplanes. Instead, the echo grew louder off the water, and they turned to see the little Ford from Toledo driving through the gate. The car bounced its way across the bridge, until the thick-bearded captain at the wheel saw them and pulled to a stop. The father led the horses back onto the bridge, and the captain cut the engine.

  “Salud,” the captain said.

  “Salud.”

  “I was wondering where those horses had gotten to.” It was the same easy voice from last night.

  “My friend here was wondering the same about his car.”

  It was a good answer. The captain nodded. “Two thousand from Madrid have come down to defend the city. Militia and Guardia. They’re setting up barricades.”

  “It’s quiet.”

  “The last of the aeroplanes came an hour ago.” The captain opened the door and stepped out. He turned toward the city and waved his hands above his head. A mirror glinted from somewhere on the wall, and the captain brought his hands down. “They’ll let you in the gate.”

  “They would have let us in anyway.”

  “Yes,” said the captain, getting back in the car, “but now you won’t waste so much time shouting up from the bridge.” He closed the door. “You choose to go in, it’s no coming out until it’s done. You know that.”

  “So there’s a chance we’ll be coming out?”

  The captain waited and then looked at the boy. “Your rifle is clean?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good.”

  The father said, “And they’ve brought guns from Madrid?”

  “They have the high ground. It should be enough.” The captain looked at Hoffner. “You know how this might go, friend, and still you feel the need to get through.”

  Hoffner said nothing.

  “I’ve heard the stories of Coria,” the captain said. “The prison fortress. Terrible things.”

  “Yes,” said Hoffner.

  “Badajoz isn’t a place to find revenge for what they did.”

  “I’m not looking for it.”

  “Maybe revenge isn’t such a bad thing to be looking for.” The captain turned to Mila. He seemed to want to say something. Instead, he started the engine. “I’ll see you inside the walls.” He put the car in gear and headed off.

  * * *

  There was no escaping the silence. The streets stood empty, save for the occasional grind of a truck or a voice rising from somewhere behind the stones and brick. The horses moved slowly. Twice Hoffner saw young children—tears running down their cheeks—pulled along by mothers, whisked through doorways, and locked safely away. This was how war finally came, he thought, not in the open back of a truck with songs and rifles raised or on a road where men could trade stories and cigarettes. Even the crack of a sniper’s rifle signaled nothing. It came in the silence and the waiting, and the grim certainty that, one day, the dying here would all but be forgotten.

  Hoffner heard muffled laughter and peered down an alleyway. Two men, old and unshaven, sat on stools in the shadows, a wooden crate between them. They were drunk. Their heads rested back against the stone of the building. One was humming something low. The other looked over. For some reason he nodded. The man coughed and laughed again. Hoffner nodded back.

  “This isn’t their fight,” said the father. “They’ve had theirs. At least they know it.”

  The father led them through the streets and into a wide plaza at the foot of the southern gate. There was a strange symmetry to it all, trucks and cars lining the wall, with blue-shirted men and women and uniformed soldiers nestled above in whatever cracks and openings they had found for cover. The two largest trucks stood in front of the gate, while a group of soldiers directed boxes of ammunition to different points along the line. It was already hot, and the dust and grit beneath their feet swirled in tiny clouds of gray smoke.

  The father took the horses close enough to hear voices—orders shouted, the relay of information from men with field glasses standing at the topmost reaches of the wall. This was where they would make their stand.

  The father and the boy dismounted, and the father handed Mila the reins.

  “You take them where you’re going. No reason to have them here.” He nodded to one of the streets off the plaza. “You take that one around, six or seven streets. It’s to the left. You can follow the numbers.”

  Hoffner had shown the father the address for the last of the names on Captain Doval’s list—the Hisma liaison in Badajoz, the man hoarding those too-thick crates. There had been no reason to tell the father why.

  “Thank you.”

  The father nodded and looked at Mila. “You’ll be needed here. A doctor.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  Hoffner waited for her to say more. Instead, he watched as she dismounted and held the reins up to him. He stared at her, disbelieving, and saw the same eyes fro
m the hospital, the same eyes from Durruti’s camp. She was needed here.

  She squinted through the sun as she continued to look at him. “You find what you need and come back.”

  Hoffner barely moved.

  “Take them,” she said, and she placed the reins in his hand. “I’m needed here.”

  “I thought you’d be with me.”

  “Not for this.”

  “I thought you’d be with me,” he repeated.

  “I am. But I’m needed here.”

  Hoffner hesitated. “And if you’re not here?”

  She stared up at him. “Then you’ll find me.”

  She drew closer. She waited for him to lean down and brought her hand to the back of his neck. She kissed him, and he felt her fingers press deep into his skin. She released him and whispered, “You’ll come and find me.” And she pulled away.

  Hoffner watched as she walked off. He thought to turn and go but called out, “Mila.” She continued to walk. Again he called.

  She stopped. The father and the boy moved on, and Hoffner dismounted and brought the horses behind him.

  She looked almost pained as he drew up. “You need to go,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  He watched her face grow darker, and he pulled her in. His arm drew tight around her as he felt her cheek press deep into his neck.

  “There is no going anymore.”

  Her hands clasped at his back. Her lips pressed gently into his neck and she pulled back and he kissed her. She then turned away, and this time he let her go.

  THE GERMAN

  The house was like the rest, three crumbling floors of iron and stone, the wood at the bottom of the door split in wide gaps. Hoffner tied the horses to a post and knocked with the side of his fist. He listened. He knocked again, then spoke the name, loudly enough to be heard in the next house. There was movement, and the door slowly pulled open.

  A man, small with gray hair, stood in a shirt, trousers, and suspenders. His left arm and hand were shriveled by disease. The fingers reached only to his waist, and the rest hung limp at his side. He leaned his head out the doorway and peered down the street, as if he was expecting to see others. He stepped back and looked up at Hoffner. He spoke with caution. “The fighting has started?”