The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Café,’ Brendan told the waiter. ‘Con coñac. Dos.’

  ‘Fair play to you.’ Hennessy leaned closer, conspiratorially. ‘Tell me this and tell me no more, as one Irish buck who may meet his death to another – are the brothels here as good as they say?’

  Brendan laughed. It was a sound he had grown unfamiliar with. He glanced around the wide boulevard and wondered where was the minder who had tracked him since he left the radio centre. Laughter was viewed with suspicion by the NKVD unless in response to the political jokes they liked to tell the Russians in their charge who laughed with careful enthusiasm until they gauged it safe to stop.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ he admitted, ‘I’ve never had to pay for it in my life.’

  Hennessy laughed also. ‘That’s because you’re a jammy good-looking Horse Protestant bastard. Ordinarily my select repertoire of chat-up lines sees me over the winning post with the mots too, but it’s not my bodily needs I’m thinking of. We’ve a Mayo lad with us called Bourke, a bit shy with the señoritas. We’re being sent to Andujar tomorrow as part of the Marseillaise Battalion. It would be a tragedy if the first time he got laid it was in his grave. Could you point us in the right direction at least?’

  Brendan downed the coffee and cognac brought by the waiter. He was taking a risk by not returning to the radio centre, but was sick of being corralled like a man in permanent quarantine. ‘I’ll do better than that,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘A man after my own heart.’ Hennessy downed his drink and insisted on paying. He rose and strode past a group of German POUM volunteers ponderously bellowing out a revolutionary song, and stopped at a table where four men sat drinking. Despite the berets Brendan knew that they were Irish and felt an inexplicable pang of homesickness. It was not merely to do with being in Spain and the two months before that being trained as a wireless operator in Moscow. But it suddenly felt as if a decade ago he had turned his back on part of his own identity, not realising what he had cut himself off from. At sixteen he had ceased to see himself as Irish, presuming that he could not belong there. Art and the others in his family had been emotionally wrapped up in Ireland’s independence struggle, being old enough to understand what was occurring. He only began to understand life after that messy conflict ended and always viewed it as a revolution foiled by the bourgeois cancer of nationalism. But perhaps he’d only ever seen Ireland through Art’s hurt, because these four drinkers did not look like superstitious peasants. They argued freely, not caring who overheard. It was dangerous for him to sit with them because one Irishman kept calling to the German POUM volunteers whom he could not risk being seen to associate with. But they gave him a sense that there might after all be a small band of Irish people – apart from his family – to whom he could belong. Then he listened more closely and knew that he was wrong, because these volunteers had not yet lost their political innocence.

  ‘Lads, I bring you Brendan, a fellow Irish comrade.’ Hennessy pointed around the table as men rose to shake Brendan’s hand. ‘This is Charlie Donnelly from Tyrone who will blind you with poetry if given a chance. Bob Hilliard, a good Protestant like yourself, unless I mistake the foot you dig with. Beside him Kit Conway and, last but by no means least, Mr Peadar Bourke from Westport, Co. Mayo. Brendan here is with the Russian volunteers.’

  ‘I’m a radio technician,’ Brendan explained.

  ‘He’s also a man with contacts,’ Hennessy said. ‘The only thing closed in Barcelona is the churches and Peadar can’t go home and tell the mother he didn’t light a candle for her in the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, seeing as her knees are worn out praying for his soul up on Croagh Patrick. Luckily Brendan has a key, so we have a personal tour lined up for you, Peadar.’

  Brendan enjoyed Hennessy’s soft Irish bullshit and the veiled sexual ribbing the men gave Bourke. Charlie Donnelly insisted on Brendan staying for a drink, while Bob Hilliard waved the Germans over to join their table.

  It was three in the afternoon, two hours since Brendan left his post. All week the main transmitter had been faulty but Brendan was convinced that he had fixed the problem last night. He had slept in the radio centre to ensure that the equipment didn’t malfunction, then told the Ukrainian in charge that he was slipping out for lunch with Yuri who had come in to try and scavenge spare parts. Yuri was the one Soviet comrade whom Brendan still trusted. The sailor from Archangel was fearless of authority. He was among the original Bolsheviks who repulsed Mr Fforde’s imperialist navy in 1919 when they tried to shore up the White Russian forces who murdered Yuri’s wife and children. Brendan suspected that Yuri had never recovered from this loss, as if willing a bullet to claim him in every battle since then. Yuri laughed at the young robots who learnt their communism in the Lenin School instead of on the streets and, while wary of directly confronting the NKVD, openly criticised their paranoia about foreigners when he was alone with Brendan.

  Today Brendan hadn’t needed Yuri’s whisper to know that they were being followed from the radio centre. For the past fortnight his movements had been watched, ever since he realised that he had not been brought to Spain for his radio skills but so that he could be used to spy upon new arrivals to the International Brigade. While the Soviet-born volunteers were sequestered away, Brendan had been encouraged to stand most days among the cheering crowds as trains festooned with red flags arrived from Figueras with new recruits who had crossed the French frontier. He was even given money to drink with them, to discover their motives for enlisting and poison their minds against the Spanish government who were refusing to fully accept the wisdom of Soviet advice. Initially Brendan had befriended these new arrivals without grasping the implication of his actions. He had not understood that he was being debriefed in late-night drinking sessions with Georgi until he saw the NKVD officer take notes and realised that he had inadvertently set up a Welsh miner with Trotskyite tendencies to be shot. Since then he rarely approached foreign volunteers and tried to focus purely on his job as a radio operator, refusing to be drawn into Georgi’s world, to his protector’s increasing infuriation.

  But still the nightly drinking sessions had continued, with Georgi obsessively demanding information about every casual remark made by visitors to the radio centre. It was one thing to smuggle British Foreign Office documents from London to Russia. The risks were high and during the past four years Brendan had varied his routes and sometimes his identity. But at least he had felt that his work as a courier was useful to the revolution. Spying on fellow technicians was not in his character. Brendan had come to hate drinking with Georgi, especially when André Marty – the Chief Political Commissar of the international Brigade – visited Barcelona. With froth on his moustache, Marty would harangue Georgi if the NKVD had not unearthed another anarcho-syndicalist spy to be executed during his stay. If allowed to choose between killing half of Franco’s forces or being able to assassinate the POUM leadership which controlled Barcelona, Brendan knew that Georgi Polevoy and André Marty would far sooner wipe out those independent Spanish Marxists who refused to take orders from Moscow.

  He noticed now the suspicious way the German POUM volunteers at the table were starting to regard him and knew that some Irish lad had mentioned where he was stationed. Bourke and Hennessy were asking him what action he had seen in Spain, mistaking his reticence as evidence of having witnessed battles that remained too raw to be described. In truth Brendan had not been allowed to leave Barcelona, though from radio messages he knew about the Seville fascists launching their offensive against the anarchist militias trying to hold Cordoba. But the only blood he had seen was when Yuri and he wandered by mistake into a cellar adjoining the Russian quarters and found congealed pools on the floor beside a wall pockmarked with bullet holes.

  ‘Loan us a pillow case, Donnelly.’ Hennessy reached for a cigarette paper and helped himself to some unrolled tobacco. ‘It’s fine for you lazy bastards, but we have a sacred duty to perform. That right, Brendan?’

  Brendan nodde
d and the three young men rose amid much slagging aimed at Bourke. Hennessy shook the Germans’ hands but Brendan did not attempt this dangerous charade, knowing that every detail would be reported to the NKVD. Georgi would be amused at him visiting a brothel, having failed to persuade the young Irishman to accompany him on his regular visits. Judging by the crowds at the whorehouse half the volunteers in Barcelona were due for the front. The older prostitutes were almost suffocatingly motherly to the younger clients waiting in the over-furnished parlour, making a special fuss about boys who confessed to having had to slip away to war without telling anyone.

  Brendan’s family had not known he was going to Spain. After the fascists launched their coup he had intended enlisting at the British Communist Party office located between two fruit wholesalers near Covent Garden. Then he would have had time to write letters. But Georgi always cautioned against contact with any communists – including Art – that might attract Scotland Yard’s attention. So Brendan had travelled instead to Moscow to courier dispatches from his handler. While there he had discovered how Georgi was being made Political Commissar to a company of Soviet specialists sent by Stalin in response to a plea from the Popular Front government in Spain. Initially Georgi wasn’t keen on Brendan joining the expedition, fearing the loss of a good courier on the London route. But perhaps Georgi sensed that these trips to Moscow were not the same for Brendan since the cloud of Art’s unexplained deportation and the displacement of his wife and child. Perhaps Brendan had become over-used as a courier and Georgi was afraid of his cover being blown, because finally he agreed to let Brendan travel with them to Spain, joking that they could check out the beauty of Spanish women together. In Barcelona, Brendan had sent a card to his parents and another to Eva, though he knew that Georgi disapproved of such communication. But he continued to follow instructions about having absolutely no contact with his disgraced brother. Brendan had never managed to get Georgi to tell him exactly what Art’s crimes were that required his expulsion from Moscow, but Georgi sometimes intimated that only Brendan’s importance had saved Art from being shot or sent to a re-education camp.

  Bourke was quiet, seated between Hennessy and Brendan on the sofa in the brothel, still unable to decide which of the passing girls should take his virginity.

  ‘Come on,’ Hennessy urged, ‘that tall one is a beauty. If you don’t pick one soon they’ll be shagged out. You don’t want her falling asleep just before you work up to your big moment.’

  ‘I don’t want to be here at all,’ the Mayo lad confessed. ‘It’s not natural.’

  ‘Jaysus, are you a Jesuit or what?’ Hennessy raised his eyes. ‘What’s more natural than wanting a girl? The priests got their claws deep into you.’

  ‘I can’t help being who I am.’ Bourke turned to Brendan. ‘My brother is also over here.’

  ‘With the International Brigade?’

  ‘No. With General O’Duffy’s Irish fascist column. My father had us both tramping around Mayo in Blueshirt uniforms when I was too young to know better. On my twenty-first birthday I refused to attend any more rallies. He kicked me out. The last time I was back in Mayo was to heckle Paddy Belton at a National Corporate Party meeting in Castlebar where my father and brother were hanging onto his words like he was the Saviour himself. O’Duffy was on his last legs when this war broke out but they’ve a new platform now with the bishops cheering them on, claiming that nuns are being raped in Spain. O’Duffy is after dragging six hundred Irish lads over here, with women saying novenas like they were going to the crusades. My kid brother was never outside Mayo in his life. I had to come too, even though I’m on the other side. I still feel responsible for him. He’s in Spain now, but God knows where.’

  ‘Probably in a brothel,’ Hennessy suggested helpfully.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ Bourke said.

  ‘I know O’Duffy. Your brother was never safer. Didn’t his whole crew flog their uniforms for drink after arriving. Franco has them holed up in Caceres where they can harm nobody but themselves. At the first shot O’Duffy will run home like a headless chicken. Worry about yourself because we won’t have that option.’

  ‘It’s hard when brothers fall out,’ Brendan said.

  Bourke glanced at him. ‘Is your brother a fascist?’

  ‘I’ve a brother I looked up to, the strongest swimmer I ever knew. I thought he was the strongest everything.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I’ve not seen him in two years. One reason for coming here was that I was convinced he’d enlist too. I’d see him stepping off a train in Barcelona and we’d be equals on neutral ground.’

  ‘My brother joined the British army,’ Hennessy said. ‘It means he can never come home.’ He nudged Bourke. ‘That girl on the stairs with the long hair, looking straight at us. Go on, lie back and think of Ireland.’

  Bourke rose as the girl beckoned. ‘I don’t know what going into battle is like but it can’t be more nerve-wracking than this.’

  Hennessy patted his rump. ‘If you’re not down in two days we’ll rescue you.’

  They waited for Bourke to return, with Brendan ordering more black unsweetened coffee. Surveying the crowded parlour, Brendan wondered which man present was spying for Georgi. After ten minutes Bourke came down the stairs and his companions ordered brandy and let him sit in silence. Brendan wondered would Bourke feel as changed by his first encounter with death? Eventually the Mayo man managed a half-hearted joke and they walked back out to the street, past anarchist flags draped from the brothel windows. Every moment absent from the radio centre increased Brendan’s risk of being charged with insubordination. He longed to never return to that claustrophobic atmosphere of fear, which always drained any sense of being part of the collective spirit on the street. But he knew he had no option but to go there. Georgi would never let him join the Irish column and, even if he could, he already knew too much concerning this war. Making an excuse, Brendan left Hennessy and Bourke at a small café near the harbour.

  The radio station was operating smoothly when he entered. There were some messages to deal with, but none were urgent. Still he knew that he had been missed. If any other NKVD officer commanded the station he would be arrested, but his relationship with Georgi went beyond politics. At times the Georgian felt like another annoying older brother. Being cooped up in Barcelona suited neither of them. Of late they constantly argued but honest arguments between men instead of the ideological shadow-boxing that passed for debate between the others. Brendan saw Georgi’s ruthless side when he screamed at the young Russians who were terrified of him. But Georgi revealed a different side when drinking with old Bolsheviks like Yuri who refused to be intimidated by someone they regarded as a Georgian upstart. Georgi would let his mask slip in their company as he bemoaned his fate as a man constantly ensnared by young women.

  Brendan seemed to have been adopted like a lucky mascot by these older men for their occasional marathon drinking sessions. But on most nights, with demands for updates from Moscow, and André Marty baying from Albacete for death warrants, Georgi would drink in his office with Brendan forced to keep him company alone.

  Only four staff remained in the radio station now. Brendan liked when it was this quiet with the operators reminding him of one of his earliest memories – his siblings on a van listening in to a travelling showman’s radio headphones. Brendan had been too young to understand their silent awe, but never forgot it. In some ways it was the first step on his journey here.

  Yuri was back in the office and Brendan watched the old sailor curse silently as he examined a dismantled transmitter in the corner. Whoever did the inventory of spare radio parts for this expedition was the only true saboteur Brendan had come across. Yet he was probably a party stalwart whose unthinking loyalty mattered more than his incompetence. Most of the parts sent were incompatible with the transmitters and only by guile and improvisation could the technicians keep the station working. Brendan took pity on the old sailor trying to
scavenge yet another part for the ship’s radio that he had obviously still not managed to get working. If the sailor had been properly trained then the valve he stole this morning should have worked. Pilfering was illegal, but with no young zealots around Brendan tried to help Yuri locate a new part. After a few moments Yuri nudged Brendan, warning him that Georgi had entered the office.

  ‘That bastard’s in a shit mood,’ the sailor whispered. ‘Maybe his whore gave him the pox or he couldn’t get it up for her. Watch yourself and remember these Georgians are never as drunk as they seem.’

  Brendan stood up and walked quickly towards Georgi so that the NKVD officer did not spot Yuri kneeling behind the bench. Georgi indicated with a shrug for Brendan to follow him into his office. He kicked the door shut after they entered and took out vodka and two glasses. ‘Your afternoon’s whoring must have been thirsty work, comrade. Still, another drink won’t kill you.’

  ‘Why insist on having me followed?’

  ‘You deserted your post. Marty could have you shot for less.’

  ‘I was here all night and only left when I knew the equipment was working. I had no further duties.’

  ‘I’ve asked you to keep an eye on people here.’

  Brendan downed the vodka. Spanish wine and brandy had their place, but Georgi always retreated to the safety of Russian vodka at night.