by Alan Furst
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. Serreno had overheard the clerks speaking French as they hauled a bundle of blueprints from the trunk of their long-hooded black Citroen. 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 Citroen crawl slowly up the white street toward Senor 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 pasaran, senorita. No pasaran.” 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 amp; 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 pa
inter 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.
“Todavia?” Still?
“Siempre!” Always!
Sign and countersign, called quietly across the roof, were peculiar to 9 Calle de Victoria-each building had its own passwords. The city was awash with secret signals, codes, posters, banners, pronunciamenti painted feverishly on walls-hammers and sickles with drip lines to the sidewalk. The fiery Basque orator La Pasionaria made daily speeches to the city over a network of public address systems wired together through the streets. Her words-It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees-were repeated everywhere. Constantly she reminded the women of Madrid that their traditional weapon, boiling oil hurled from a basin, was not to be put aside when the enemy arrived.
At the top of the hatchway to the roof, Faye Berns paused for a moment and looked out over the city. It was black and cold, the faint outlines of cathedral spires pointed shadows in the darkness.
“Faye?” Bundled in a large, shapeless army coat, Renata moved toward her through the gloom.
“It’s me.”
“Can it be time?”
“No. I came for company.”
Studied closely, feature by feature, Renata Braun was something of a covert beauty, subtle and finely made, though the impression left on the world at large was that of a woman whose surface was fashioned by the exigencies of a life lived in difficult times and places. She was fortyish, with salt and pepper hair hacked off short, a delicate nose that reddened in the cold, and severe, gold-rim spectacles that were continually removed so that she could rub the dent marks where they pinched. A Berliner, she carried with her the sophisticated aura of that city and was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, often to the edge of cruelty. Renata was Andres’s friend. Faye was Andres’s lover. They had, over a few months’ time, worked it out from there, becoming, finally, closer than sisters, a friendship in time of war.
Renata took her hands. “Ach, ice.”
Faye shrugged and smiled. She had given her gloves away and Renata knew it. She squeezed back for a moment, then put her hands in the deep pockets of her skirt. “How goes the night?”
Renata made an ironic little gesture with her mouth. “Very slow,” she said. “With der Sphinx at one’s side.”
Faye looked past her, saw the dark shape of Felix, the Belgian journalist who never spoke if he could help it, sitting slumped on an upturned crate beside the machine gun. The position was backed up against the wall of a shed-so that the roof overhang kept the rain off the gunners-and “protected” by a semicircle of meagerly filled sandbags. The machine gun lay back on its tripod, muzzle pointed at the sky.
“Hallooo, Felix,” she called out quietly. Needling him, knowing he thought her an atrocious American brat, knowing he agreed with those stern Spanish commanders who, echoing Winston Churchill, called the foreigners in Madrid “armed tourists.”
“The poor thing,” Renata said, shaking her head.
Faye could not see his face, but she could imagine it. A sneer compounded of disgust-specific; and ill-temper-general. Felix was obsessed with doom. He had come to Madrid as correspondent for a Christian Socialist newspaper in Antwerp, then stopped filing stories, stopped doing much of anything. He wanted to leave the city, somehow he could not, yet he seemed to loathe everything about it. Mostly the frenetic tension of the place, which drove people into hilarious, slightly crazed companionship. Live today, for tomorrow we die. You could be married at any militia office in five minutes. And divorced as quickly, though many declined to bother with official sanctions in any way at all. There was an army, a real army, with tanks and planes and artillery, a few miles to the west. When the battle came, everybody in Madrid would simply pick up a gun and walk out to meet it. Such courage made them saints, of a modern kind, and they knew it. They cared enough about something to die for it, and a sweet, delicious madness blew through the city like a wind. To be a Madrileno was a privilege, an honor. Only a few, like Felix, could find no joy in it.
Or were there, in fact, more than a few.
The Moorish brigades and Spanish Legionnaires of General Mola were aimed at the city in four columns. Mola had been asked, by a foreign reporter covering the Nationalist side, which column would have the glory of leading the attack against Madrid. “I have a fifth column,” Mola had boasted, “inside the city, and it is they who will lead the attack on Madrid.”
This might have been a deception, meant to sow suspicion among allies of wildly different passions: Basques and Catalans seeking their own nationhood, communists of several disciplines, anarchists, democrats, idea
lists, poets, mercenaries, and those moths who were forever seeking the flame of the hour in which to immolate themselves.
Or it might have been said merely to torment the inhabitants a little. Civil war is not unlike a fight between lovers: each side knows precisely how to infuriate the other. During the Nationalist siege of Gijon, the water supply of the defending Republicans gave out, and they suffered terribly from thirst. Quiepo de Llano, the Nationalist general, went on Radio Seville every night, drinking wine and smacking his lips into the microphone. After that, he boasted of the sexual prowess of his soldiers-the women of Gijon must be ready! It was a powerful station, and all across Europe people tuned in for the nightly show.
Faye and Renata walked for a time, talking in low voices, circumnavigating the rooftop. The rain had stopped, though lightning still flickered over the Guadarrama. They talked about life, laughing at times. At moments like these, Faye felt she was looking down at the entire world, that it was all laid out for her. Her urge for such flights had been dealt with rather summarily at Pembroke-those professors she’d thought to be sympathetic would listen stoically for an hour, then turn her head forcefully back to learning, study, the obligations of womanhood. Everything substantive, hard and demanding. She’d sensed a long line of romantic girls like herself, extending out the doors of the little cottages where the faculty offices were located, sent home to study, marry, pray, bathe in cold water-anything but life in its purest, most abstract twirls and adagios, which was what she loved to think about. Renata was willing to talk to her on any level she chose and Faye was more than grateful to be found worthy of such attention: she needed to be taken seriously and she knew it.
