By now Alicia had sat down next to Cámara, crossing her legs under her on the sofa. Hilario averted his eyes from them, staring at the wall as he remembered.
‘They made mistakes, though, the CNT. When the war began they opened the prisons in many places. All crimes, went the theory, were caused by the greater crime of class struggle and repression. Now that revolution was breaking out in the face of Franco’s military uprising, that cause had been removed. So all prisoners should be freed. Besides, the very concept of a prison is anathema to the anarchist ideal.
‘But the result was that murderers and thieves were suddenly let loose. And many of them joined the CNT – perhaps out of gratitude to their liberators, or just opportunism. I don’t know.
‘Those first few months were a bloody time. People were settling old scores, killings became commonplace. Someone would get hauled up, accused of some crime or other, and then get taken out and shot by the side of the road and left there. Priests, businessmen, known right-wingers.
‘It was a bloodbath. The same was happening on the other side, worse, even – Franco’s men slaughtering left-wingers wherever they were in control. But it was no excuse.
‘Maximiliano was disgusted. He did what he could to stop it, but no one listens when they’ve got a gun in their hand and you don’t. I think he feared for his own life at times.’
Hilario closed his eyes for a moment, his chest heaving as though he were catching his breath, before opening them again to continue.
‘Then new battles started breaking out – not just the ones against the fascists, but between the different groups fighting for the Republic. The communists started becoming more important – they had money and support from Stalin. They wanted to take over, and lots of people liked them because they seemed more organised than the rabble that had been in charge at the beginning. No more militias, they said. We need a proper army, like Franco’s, if we’re going to win this.
‘But what was the point of fighting fascism if you were letting a new form of it come in through the back door? Stalin was just as bad – worse, even – than Franco. In the end being set free is the most frightening thing you can do to a person. They almost always bring back whatever it was they’ve been freed from. Under a different name, of course.
‘And what could Maximiliano do? So-called anarchists had let him down by shedding innocent blood, and now a new form of tyranny was being set in place. But he felt the need to serve the Republic, the people around him. The communists were rooting out many anarchists and Trotskyists, and anyone else they didn’t like. But they let Maximiliano stay. His reputation as an organiser saved him, I think. Not a quality you tend to associate with anarchists, but there you have it. They tried to get him to join the Communist Party, but he refused. Said he could have gone far. But they didn’t understand him, they never could.
‘And so he stayed, keeping himself out of the fights between the different factions, wondering if he’d betrayed his ideals, but concentrating on helping the refugees flooding into the city as more and more of the country was taken over. Basques, Asturians, Catalans – they all needed somewhere to sleep, something to eat. Our flat became a kind of holding centre – dozens of people passing through, perhaps staying just one night, lying on a spare patch of floor along with the others, before they could be sorted with somewhere to go. My mother gave them what she could to eat, but food was scarce, and getting more so. She suffered a lot in those times, but she believed in Maximiliano and what he was doing. The refugees needed her.
‘I remember once watching her stewing bones she’d got from God knows where. The remains of some old horse, perhaps. A little girl from Oviedo was sitting on the floor near her feet. She’d been evacuated before the city had fallen, shipped off to Cartagena, and then brought here. No one knew where her parents were, or if they’d survived. There was just a tag around her neck, with her name and address, and a pathetic appeal scribbled by someone on the back to please look after her. She must have been five years old or so. I was thirteen. All the toys in the house had gone – we’d given them all away. But from somewhere my mother managed to produce a tiny wooden spinning top. I don’t know if it had been lost in the pocket of her apron. And she leaned down and handed it to the little girl, who took it without a word and then began to play with it on the floor, spinning it with one hand and then another, watching as it wobbled and tumbled, but always catching it before it came to a halt.
‘“Don’t stop,” she said to it angrily. “Don’t stop!” As though giving it an order. And she’d start spinning it again, but again it would run out of momentum, and she’d have to catch it once more in her hands before it stopped altogether.
‘“Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”
‘She slept in my bed that night – I found a spot on the floor next to the others. The following morning my father took her with him and we never saw her again. And neither my mother nor I asked what had become of her. We couldn’t. You couldn’t. There were so many of them, so much to think about. We lived in a kind of saturation.
‘The end came quite quickly. It was the spring of 1939. What remained of the Republic collapsed – there were barely any guns left even to shoot with. Our soldiers fled the front lines, and the fascists walked in. Albacete was one of the last places they reached.
‘Maximiliano was in danger. But there was really only one choice. Surrendering would mean a swift execution – there was nowhere to run to, stuck here in the centre of the country. So he went into hiding, became a topo’ – a mole – ‘hiding in his own home, out of sight, as though he’d vanished. People were doing it all over the city, all over the country. Some of them lived like that for years, decades even. Maximiliano was forced to spend his days in a cupboard that had been used for keeping spare bed linen, hunched up, in the dark, not making a sound. Even a cough could give him away.
‘We had to be so careful. People were keen to get in with the new authorities, to get contacts, or favours from the fascists. And one of the best ways was to feed them “Reds” who had escaped. They wanted to cleanse the country, they said, to eliminate the “anti-Spain”. That meant anyone who didn’t think like them. Sometimes at night we heard the shooting of the execution squads. They’d won the war, but the killing had to continue.’
Max listened, motionless with concentration on Hilario’s story. Beside him, Alicia reached over and held his hand.
‘We managed it, though. Maximiliano was very disciplined, sleeping through much of the day in his cell, then coming out at night, late, when we felt it was safe. Then he had to wash and shave and eat in total silence. Conversations were held in a whisper, or even on pieces of paper. If any neighbour had heard anything suspicious, we knew they’d come for him straight away. Searches of people’s houses were common. And the cupboard kept him out of sight, but it would take only a minute or two to find him if someone tried.
‘We managed it for three years. A new European war had started, Hitler had taken over France. Maximiliano didn’t break, although perhaps he should have done. My mother kept him alive – I saw them sobbing silently in the dark together a few times. Even his frustration had to be wordless and mute.
‘Three years. And then they came one morning, walked straight to the cupboard and fished him out, like an errant schoolboy.
‘No one had heard him – we’d been strict about that.
‘Someone had told them. Someone who knew.’
SEVENTEEN
HILARIO BARELY MOVED as he spoke, his body still, apart from a slight heaving in his chest when he breathed. Cámara was aware of a change in him, however: something was different; he was seeing a side of his grandfather he’d never known. Something in his eyes: there was the same liveliness about them, but the spark appeared to be tempered, or alloyed.
He wondered about asking him to stop. Remembering past pain might not be the best thing for an elderly man recovering from a stroke. But Hilario wasn’t a man easily dissuaded from anything. And besides, the
story wasn’t finished; Cámara wanted to know what had happened. Alicia had handed him back the photo of his great-grandfather, and it rested between his fingers. The irony that Hilario, who always shunned any brooding on the past, insisting always on the need to move forwards, should keep this with him at all times wasn’t lost on him.
Alicia sat forwards with her elbows on her knees, her attention focused entirely on Hilario and his story. The Luger now rested on the low table next to the sofa.
‘Maximiliano was interrogated, and beaten,’ Hilario went on. ‘Immediately after the war many who’d been captured by Franco were simply shot, or done away with in whatever fashion. By this time, however, 1942, there was some semblance of order to the killings, or at least they waited a while before executing them.
‘I didn’t see him, but my mother went every morning to the prison where they held him, taking whatever she could – food, clothes – to help alleviate his captivity. I don’t think any of it reached him, and she probably knew that as well, but it helped – helped her to think she was doing something, and perhaps helped by making the guards who were stealing it all be less violent towards my father.
‘But I know – she told me later – that they’d treated him roughly. A beating only – he was saved from the more vicious tortures that had been devised.
‘Before they even came for him I had decided what I would do if he were found and arrested. Although communists were seen as the main enemy, they were all – anarchists, Republicans, socialists – lumped together as “Reds”. Maximiliano had never fought, there was no “blood crime” on him – that was the kind of language they used. But an organiser, an administrator, educated, a leading member of the CNT, an anarchist – it all added up against him.
‘Perhaps if he’d told them things – given them names of others who’d worked with him, told them of their hiding places, just something, things could have gone better for him. But he would never do that. We knew – my mother and I. Back then, in the forties, people who were found, or arrested, weren’t often seen again. At best they might get life, and their family not even informed until months later.
‘So I knew what I had to do, but, well, I waited a couple of days, and then went ahead.
‘It was straightforward – there was a recruiting centre in the city. I was still very young, but I went along, said I wanted to join, and that was it. I think they knew why I was there. There were a few others as well, hoping to help some imprisoned relative by joining up. There was something religious about it – a cleansing of your sins, or the sins of someone you loved. Make this sacrifice and maybe, just maybe, something can be done. Like buying indulgences from a priest for a family member suffering in Purgatory.
‘So I became a private in the Blue Division. They put me in the Valencia Regiment, gave me a couple of weeks’ training, and then I was sent off to the Eastern Front. Stalingrad was just beginning around that time, but we were all in the north. I arrived in Novgorod just in time for the transfer to Leningrad and the siege.
‘The division was Franco’s gift to Hitler, a thank-you present for everything Hitler had done for him in the Civil War, sending the Condor Legion, and weapons and planes. Spain couldn’t become a full ally in the Second World War, like Italy. There was barely enough to eat back then. The country couldn’t have gone straight into another conflict. At least that’s what people said. I think it was Franco hedging his bets. So the Blue Division was a compromise – the country remained officially neutral but they let Spanish men who wanted to, fight on Hitler’s side – a special infantry force as part of the German army. Only on the Eastern Front, though – at Franco’s insistence. But they were surprised how many joined up when they announced it was being set up. It had been going for almost a year by the time I went – part of the reinforcements for the new battles ahead. It wasn’t going so well for them by then. Novgorod had been fairly easy. Leningrad was something else. But at least we were up there, not south on the Volga, Stalingrad. It could have been much, much worse.
‘It got cold that winter. The Germans thought we wouldn’t cope, because we were Spanish, from the south. They didn’t know how tough the winters are here. We had cold-weather supplies sent in, but even that wasn’t enough when it was minus thirty sometimes. You had to watch for frostbite. It’s what took up most of your time, inspecting your toes, your fingers. Thrusting your hands down into your groin for warmth. The officers forbade it at first, but then ended up doing it themselves. Some of the men built mesa camillas’ – round tables – ‘with a brazier underneath. The problem was finding fuel for the fires, though. It’s not easy making wood burn when it’s frozen solid.
‘They taught me how to dig trenches, how to dig field latrines. But again, not always easy when the ground is hard as rock with the cold. Your body does strange things at those temperatures, though. You might not shit for days – every turd is lost heat that you have to recuperate. Then going out for a piss was an experience when it hit the ground solid, freezing as it left your body. Just taking your dick out to do it was frightening enough – no one wanted frostbite there.’
He raised his eyebrows. Alicia forced a quick, humourless smile.
‘We heard stories, about how bad it could get, that the temperatures could go even lower. Men being eaten alive by wolves because they were too cold and frozen to frighten them away as the animals started sinking their teeth into their feet and legs. I never saw it myself, but I believed it. Still do. You see enough that fantastical things become possible, then real and finally everyday. And you learn not to be shocked by anything.
‘And, yes, they taught me to shoot, to use grenades, and to bayonet someone to death. We were infantrymen. Frontline, the brave idiots who got it first – unless they gave it to the other side. That’s the thing about being at the front – you’re not trying to kill, you’re trying to stay alive. And you do that by killing. But that’s not your goal, that’s not what you’re thinking about. At least I wasn’t. But then I wasn’t good infantry material, as my commanding officer never tired of telling me. I was given a Mauser rifle and told to get on with it, more or less. I was the son of a Red, like a handful of the others. There seeking redemption, and as such they weren’t going to waste too much time on me. The best I could do was either kill a large number of Russians, save some of my comrades in an act of heroism, or get killed – preferably having killed as many of the enemy as possible first. There was no point getting ripped apart by a mortar shell if you hadn’t killed at least three or four Russians already. It took a lot of Russian blood, I soon learned, to clean the stain on my family.
‘So I got good at surviving – and shooting. Small things save you in conditions like that, not heroism, or bravery, or good organisation or all the things you might expect. A sudden itch in your leg makes you bend down just as a bullet passes through the space where your head had been. A slip, a fall, a pause for a smoke – or not smoking at the right time. Our lives became a litany of tiny life-saving or live-taking details. A man could leave his position on some errand and find it shelled and everyone killed on his return. Or else never return, while his comrades remained unscathed for another few hours, or days.
‘This Luger, you see. We weren’t issued with these. Only the officers. But I found it during a firefight. The hand to which it had once belonged was still clinging to it, but the body it was attached to had scattered and joined the rest of them. A shell burst. I stopped to pick it up. I thought – I don’t know – that I’d hand it in to my lieutenant, or perhaps keep it. But in the moment I paused to bend down two of my companions fell, shot by machine-gun fire. I stayed down, pushing myself as hard as I could into the frozen ground till nightfall, dizzy with the cold, willing the blood to flow to my feet and fingers. And the Luger buried in my tunic. Then, when it was totally dark I moved to head back to our positions. And the Luger stayed with me. I felt it had brought me luck.
‘I don’t know what it was that saved me – intuition? Fate? Perhaps it was
just accident, not design. But no – I don’t believe that, not entirely. If there is a design then it is so far beyond our understanding that it appears to be accident, randomness. But just because we can’t understand it doesn’t mean it can’t exist. It simply demonstrates the limits of our understanding. But you can, nonetheless, sense something – something moving it all. And you learn very quickly to accept that at any moment you may cease to exist, in an instant. All the while struggling with every breath, every movement, every thought, to stay alive.’
Alicia lit a cigarette, sharing it with Cámara beside her. Hilario told them about a big battle that had begun shortly after, as the Russians tried to break the siege. The Germans were amazed that they had the strength after hearing stories of cannibalism inside the city. It was a difficult period and Hilario’s unit lost a lot of men.
‘I thought a wound of some sort might help,’ he continued. ‘But it was looked down on – they could tell if it had been deliberate. Besides, I was in a minority – most of the men were there because they wanted to be, to kill as many Russians as possible. All that fascist fervour. Reds, communists, Russians – they didn’t make much distinction. It was a continuation of the Civil War for many of them. Veterans from the Battle of Teruel used to joke that the Aragon winter of 1938 had been colder than Leningrad. So cowardice, absenteeism, self-inflicted wounds or wounds deliberately got from the enemy were virtually unheard of. Later, when reinforcements started including conscripts rather than just volunteers, you heard of a few cases. But Hitler was very happy with us – said we were one of the best divisions in the Wehrmacht – or at least that’s what they told us. There was even a Blue Division medal struck, at Hitler’s insistence.
‘But things were coming to an end by then. Stalingrad was a big blow. The body language of some of the German officers changed. They weren’t used to it – big defeats like that. Our lot weren’t so bothered – there had been plenty of reverses during the Civil War, they said. You kept going. Victory was certain. We were fighting the forces of evil. How could it not be?
The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) Page 12
