by Alan Furst
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.
