by Mary Gordon
“No,” he says. “It’s not nothing. But it may not be enough.”
—
It is impossible, after this, to break through Russell’s pessimism. She knows he’s right. The possibilities of a Republican victory seem increasingly remote. Franco has cut a swath right through the middle of Spain. Sy talks about the NKVD—the Russian secret police—who he says are “crawling all over Valencia like bedbugs.” He becomes increasingly obsessed with the secret police. And Katie, prone increasingly to fits of hysterics, leaves for America. Sy asks to be sent home to America, but his requests are denied; if he leaves, he will leave as a deserter. Somehow, from a source never determined, rumors circulate about his incompetence. Nevertheless, he is forbidden to leave.
A young Spanish man arrives one day asking for Dr. Levin. Hollow eyed, disheveled, pacing up and down waiting for Sy, he is the embodiment of desperation. When Sy appears, he embraces the young man. “Coco, my old friend,” he says in Spanish. Then he begins speaking Russian. The young man gestures to Sy that they should speak outside.
Sy comes back and says they should all meet in his room later that evening. He looks wild; his hands are trembling.
Russell and Marian knock on Sy’s door. He is pacing up and down; he gestures for them to sit on the bed. “I met them in Baltimore,” Sy says, “when I was training at Johns Hopkins. This young man, the one who was just here, José Robles is his name; his father is José Robles too. The father not only translated American writers, he also provided translations of the writers of Soviet Russia. We’d sit next to each other at political meetings; we met to speak Russian. When I first arrived in Valencia, I contacted the Robleses; we had an evening out. I was worried that José Senior was speaking too freely about what he had learned in his job translating for the Russian generals.
“I never got a chance to see him again, I guess Katie took up all my time, what little time I had after the hours I worked. And now, just now, his son told me he was taken away by ‘some men,’ he doesn’t know who, they weren’t wearing uniforms. They haven’t seen him for a week; when José asked at the Soviet military headquarters, they told him his father was being ‘interrogated.’ ”
Sy frantically asks everyone he comes across in Valencia what has happened to José Robles. He is told to stop asking: that some things are not to be looked into; that Robles is probably a fascist spy.
“He’s no more a fascist spy than I am. He was much more an orthodox Marxist than I ever was,” Sy says.
One night, men, saying they are there in the name of the republic but offering no other credentials, take Sy away. No one knows where he is, and Russell becomes frantic, as Sy was frantic about Robles, and is told the same thing: Don’t question. He is a fascist spy. He will be given a fair trial.
But Russell will not stop asking. Marian is terrified at his obsessive concern, at his sensitivity to slights, his over-vigilance about what he calls “the worst elements in the party.”
“What can it mean, what can it possibly mean…that people who don’t identify themselves take people away, no one knows where. Robles hasn’t been seen again. He’s probably dead…who knows how, who knows where. And they could easily do the same with Sy.”
“Don’t say that, you don’t know that…you’re getting hysterical like Katie,” Marian says. She hears her father’s tone in her own voice: “You must never cry out.”
After a week, it is whispered: Sy has been sent home; he is a danger to everyone; he has been declared mentally unstable.
—
And then, there is the evening of the radio broadcast, which everyone gathers to listen to, as there is only one radio. They meet in the hospital lobby, though even there the reception is irregular and faint. There are desperate efforts to get the Republican radio through the fascist jamming. One boy from Brooklyn, tall with light, curly brown hair, can pick up the loyalist signal when no one else can. He fiddles with the dials, he pounds the top of the set; he moves it an inch here, an inch there. The voices come and go. But, too often, it is jammed by the Nationalist stations and then come the horrible voices. That night, the loyalist signal disappears, replaced by the voice of Queipo de Llano, the fascist general in charge of Seville. He is a drunken braggart. Impossible to believe that he is human as others are human. The sickening, mocking singsong of his voice. Taking pleasure in naming the names of his targets, describing what he will do to the families of his targets. “I will take the skin off the backs of their wives and children and turn them into purses and wallets. I will sit in a café, drinking beer, and, for every sip I take, I will raise my hand, and ten reds will be shot down like the pigs, the dogs they are, dogs and cloven-footed beasts. We are the real men, and we will show you what red-blooded men can do to those red faggots who won’t fight to the death as we will. Red red red, rojo rojo rojo. Sangre sangre sangre, blood blood blood.”
Marian knows that when there are words like this in the air, and they enter your brain, all doubts about the righteousness of the comrades are nothing. The infighting, the cover-ups, the incompetence, the inefficiency, the bloodlust that you know are part of the people who are on your side. You must not forget what side you’re on.
Then, some of the young men listening to the broadcast jump to their feet and raise their fists above their heads. “We’ll show them who the faggots are. We’ll make them kneel and suck each other’s dicks. Then we’ll cut their balls off and make them wear them as faggot necklaces.”
She sees something in Russell collapse. She sees it and hopes that no one else does. He has been warned by another doctor, a Scot, who is also homosexual—or queer, as Russell likes to say—to be discreet, that he can do as he likes but needs to be careful not to be seen. Yet Russell still seems unprepared for the comrades’ ugly words; they shock and hurt him, and he keeps saying, “What a fool I was, I believed things would be different with them, I believed them when they talked about human freedom. But they only mean freedom for people like them. They’re no different from the fascists.”
“Of course they are, Russell, you know that’s not true. Of course they are. They aren’t perfect—they’re not good to women either. They think they have a right to fondle our breasts, they pretend we’re equal, but they don’t mean it for a minute, they only let me drive an ambulance when there’s absolutely no one else, they don’t believe women can drive as well as they can although I can drive rings around them. But to say they’re no different from the fascists—for God’s sake, Russell.”
But he isn’t listening to her.
—
It is only a few days later that he tells her he has decided to leave.
“Come with me, honey, please. We can live in the Village; we can get a dog; you can go back to Vassar, you can take the train into the city on weekends, you can become whatever you like, you never have to see your family. They can’t get to you. You’re my wife.”
But she says no, as he knows she would. She wants to stay. Because in America, she is Johnny’s sister, Marian Taylor, daughter of the Taylors of Park Avenue and Newport. Marian Rabinowitz is a joke in America, a joke she will have to live a humiliating life to keep alive. No work, no plans. Here she is needed. Here she knows what she does is important. And if she dies doing important work, it’s better than living with emptiness. Why should she not put her life on the line? She has no connections. In America, the sham marriage might become a shackle. She and Russell might grow to no longer love one another. And that she could not bear.
“Sometimes,” she says, “in terrible times like this, the best you can do is the least bad thing. The thing that does some good, or at least the least harm, or at least alleviates some harm.”
“As long as you can live with the consequences of what you’ve refused to look at clearly. As long as you know that you’re responsible for whatever that brings about, that you’re responsible, too.”
“That’s the way you think, Russell. I don’t think like that. That’s not who I am.”
&
nbsp; “I wonder, I really wonder, because you know I love you more than anyone in the world, and yet I have no idea what you’ll become.”
“Become when?”
“Whenever it is that you become whatever it will be.”
•
Everyone who works with him gathers what food there is for a party that he does not want, and none of them ask why his wife is staying behind; it is a time when questions are better not asked.
He’d been worried that his request to leave would be denied, as Sy Levin’s was. But he is not stopped; he is thanked for his service.
“More and more,” Russell says, “things are done arbitrarily and no one feels a responsibility to explain what’s being done.”
When he leaves, everything changes. People don’t know what to do with her; she has always understood that she’s been given a place at the hospital because she is Russell’s wife. Some of the Spanish nurses resented her at first because she had no training, but her fluency in Spanish gave her an advantage over some of the English speakers who were better trained. They learned to accept her because she is strong and tireless, good at setting up IVs, adept at carrying stretchers, able to drive an ambulance if men are scarce. And the young Spanish girls who have no more training than she does come to her as an adviser, complain against the Spanish nurses to her, and the nurses know it. She also knows that some of the hard-liner comrades were aware of Russell’s doubts about the party; somehow, they knew he’d been involved with a young anarchist. How much, she has often wondered, were she and, particularly, Russell, under surveillance, and by whom? And so, she can’t think it is an accident that, two weeks after Russell leaves, she is asked if she’d be willing to transfer to another hospital. Malvarosa, near the shore, the hospital not for those just off the battlefield, not the place for life-or-death surgeries, but the place for the fixing of broken bones, for convalescence, for those with infectious diseases who have to be kept alive but apart from other patients.
The hospital of Malvarosa, she soon understands, is one of those slightly romantic places for the sick that seemed to spring up all over Europe before the Great War. It was built for sick children, particularly children with tuberculosis, built by the sea in the belief that putting sick children where they could breathe the sea air would help their diseases. Probably it didn’t, Marian thinks, but she hopes that being in a lovely place did something; she hopes that at least it made them happy for a small stretch of time.
She doesn’t question her new placement. She’s relieved to be away from the true believers and from the constant political theorizing, arguments that, she feels, are sapping the small reserves of energy left after the impossible demands of her work. But she has come to understand that, for some people, the arguments are a source of energy, not a diminishment of it. For her, it is just one more reminder of the endless talk at her family’s table that always made her long for nothing but silence.
—
She is driven to the new hospital in an ambulance, accompanying a patient with a broken pelvis. She helps carry the stretcher, says goodbye to the Spanish aides and to Lydia Wentworth, who has been transferred to the Teruel front. Marian helps carry the stretcher to the patient’s new bed in the new hospital and walks slowly around the place that will be her home. And she thinks: How odd that I find it beautiful. Beautiful hospital. How oddly the words fit together. The place has an almost theatrical glamour: a set for a play whose theme is the healing power of the sun and sea. Gothic arches, green-tiled roofs, ornate cornices, high rooms through which the air blows calmly, thin white curtains billowing in the sea breeze. Chandeliers with crystals like diamonds; somehow, despite the demands of the sick, young women stand on ladders, polishing the crystals of the chandeliers. The floors, the walls, even the risers between the stair steps are covered in yellow and blue tiles with a pattern of acanthus leaves. She thinks of the railroad station, how wonderful it is that humans take the trouble to ornament, to design, to use color for no reason but to bring joy.
While she waits for the head nurse to explain her duties, she examines the photographs on the portion of the walls painted ochre above the tiles. Children on the rooftop, posing self-consciously for the photographs, children unused to being photographed, looking—what? she wonders. Grateful, frightened, hopeful, ashamed? How many of them survived, how many are fighting in the war, and on which side? The hospital was called St. John of God before the election of the Republic; now it is Asilo Sanatorio Hospital Popular. She’s glad for the change; she hopes the children weren’t made to confess to sins they couldn’t have committed in order to be given the care they needed to save their lives. Or perhaps the nuns were kind. There are no pictures of the nuns who must have been the nurses here among the parentless children.
Finally, her duties are explained to her by a reluctant-looking doctor, Ramón Ortiz. Spoiled priest, she thinks, using the family term for someone who should have been the priest, had all the attributes of the ideal priest, but failed to answer the call. She sees by his hands that he can’t be old, but his hair is thinning and his spectacles add to his prematurely old, therefore clerical, look. “Stout,” she thinks, is the word for his physique: short, solid, not fat. The look in his eyes is regretful, on the edge of defeat but not succumbing. Everyone is on the edge of defeat; it is January 1938, and only a fool would believe the war is going well.
Ramón Ortiz points out the dormitory and advises her to rest until the morning. “After which, Señora Rabinowitz, there will be no rest at all. Walk by the sea while you can.”
He shakes her hand, and she notices the dry width of his palm.
—
Asilo Sanatorio Hospital Popular. There is pain here, even ruin, but not everything suggests that the most likely outcome will be death. The groans and cries of the wounded might just have a termination that is something other than the grave.
No one here spends their free time arguing about the conditions in the Soviet Union. Sleep here is possible; occasionally, the wounded walk by the shore, their heads bandaged, their tended limbs relearning their first use. Here, she is not Russell’s wife, and no one asks about a husband. She lives not as half of a privileged couple, but as a single woman among other single women. There is exhaustion, hunger, but a bit more freedom, a bit more time, and something of the atmosphere of her old school, however disguised. She makes a friend, Carmen Hernandez, and she has not made a real friend since Johnny died, since her identity had become that of Johnny’s mourner, joined to Russell by their joint vocation. Carmen is a Spanish woman, younger even than Marian—seventeen—and like her an untrained volunteer.
They are tearing up old ruined sheets to make bandages of them. One of the sheets, besides being threadbare, is seriously stained: blood, or some unacceptable effluvia…it doesn’t matter. But as they shake out the sheet, they both notice at the same time that the shape of the stain is exactly that of a cross. And they both start laughing. “Milagro,” says Carmen, “Veronica’s veil.” “No, the stigmata,” says Marian. They cross themselves; Carmen kneels before the sheet. “You see,” she says, “we have the blessing of God upon us. Take that, you piece of shit Franco. Where is your miracle sheet?” They hold out the sheet to the other women, and everyone is beside themselves with laughter. “Stop, blasphemers,” says Carmen, putting the sheet on her head so it looks like a nun’s veil. All the women put sheets on their heads, pretending to be nuns. Marian does too. And with sheets on their heads, they sing “The Internationale.”
After this, she and Carmen seek each other out. One of the convalescents has taken Carmen’s fancy, and one night Carmen asks if Marian can take her place: she has—she uses the English word—a “date,” which she pronounces day-tay. Thrilled to be part of a secret infraction of rules that probably don’t exist, Marian agrees.
The next morning, taking up the tone she would have used after a dance at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Marian asks Carmen, “How was it?”
“Disappointing,” Carm
en says. “I could hardly get him to shut up about collective farms.”
One of the patients who has family living nearby provides Carmen, in great secret, with two eggs. She takes Marian behind the hospital and shows her the eggs, as if they were stolen diamonds. “I know I should share them with everyone,” she says, “but I don’t want to. So this is my idea. Not quite in the spirit of the revolution, but I hope you’ll go along because you’re on night duty. You boil the water on the paraffin stove they use for sterilizing, boil it in this pan, and just slip the eggs in when everyone is sleeping.”
“But how will I get water without anybody noticing?” Water is scarce, and clean water is stored in large covered jugs in the center of the ward.
Carmen looks unhappy for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she says. A smile breaks over her face then: sly, larcenous. “Wine,” she says. “We’ll boil them in wine.”
Marian is frightened; if they are caught, they will be shamed publicly, called greedy, accused of threatening the war effort. But the imagination of a freshly boiled egg, which she has not had for months; the joy of a comradeship that is real, not a political fantasy; the reminder that she is still young, lively, something other than a machine in the service of the war effort—all these are irresistible.
She tells the head nurse to grab some sleep; everything is quiet, she tells her, I’ll call you if you’re needed. Gratefully, the nurse lies down in the ward’s one empty bed. Marian, looking over her shoulder like a cartoon burglar, opens the sack in which she has carried the small pot, the wineskin, the two precious eggs. She sets them on the stove. She dips the eggs into the bubbling purple, carefully, so as not to crack them. She times them: seven minutes, she thinks, seven a magic number, a number of good luck. The eggs have turned a lovely shade of mauve, almost like dyed Easter eggs. She wraps them carefully in a bandanna and puts them in the sack. She opens the window above a grassy patch and empties the pot of hot wine, then places the stained pot facedown into the sack.
