The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘I suppose so . . .’ Julio felt a lump rise in his throat, a great hole open in the pit of his stomach, but then his comrade burst into laughter and clapped him on the back.

  ‘Don’t worry, comrade. Of course I know . . . I know the whole story.’ Julio simply smiled, his heart still in his mouth. ‘Did you think I was going to trust my idiot brother? It’s all right, everything’s fine . . . I’m not like Eugenio, I’m no saint. I asked around, and I found out that your mother was a communist, but the comrades in Torrelodones told me that your father was one of us and that you stayed with him instead of leaving with her. So you see, I know the whole story. Don’t think I’m shocked. We have a commie in the family too, my brother Manolo - didn’t Eugenio tell you?’

  ‘No,’ Julio smiled again, calmer now, ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Well, we have, Manolo is an unrepentant Red . . . As a kid, he was always good at drawing, and he wanted to be a painter. He studied at the art school, and became friends with every queer in Madrid, then he found himself a girlfriend and cleared off to Peguerinos at the first opportunity. He’s in Mexico now, and from what I’ve heard, he’s fighting over there . . .’ Romualdo laughed again, as if the whole thing were funny. ‘Fuck it! That’s life. I don’t know why, but it happens even in the best of families. So, if you want to call Saint Petersburg Leningrad, go ahead. I know I can trust you, and I’m not about to tell anyone your secret. Now, come on, get out the deck of cards and let’s see if I can work out how you do that trick with the seven of clubs . . .’

  As he began to shuffle the cards, Julio Carrión González felt a wave of relief so profound that he believed he had not had such a sense of peace since he was eleven years old. But this feeling of well-being that filtered through his body like a drug, like a warm intoxicating drink, did not prevent him from learning a number of things that would prove useful for the rest of his life.

  The first thing he learned was that he was lucky, that capricious Lady Luck was on his side, as biased in his favour as a mother. It was something he had sensed on many other occasions, but now he was certain. The rest, he could guess: Romualdo Sánchez Delgado had suspected him, had found out from his brother that Julio was from Torrelodones, and there in his village, which had held out to the last, when Falangists had spent three years hiding out in wardrobes, Don Pedro, the priest, had told him the story of Teresa González, adulteress and communist, who had run away with the teacher from Las Rozas while her eldest son, out of loyalty to his father, had stayed behind. And Romualdo had been satisfied with the story. This was the second thing that Julio Carrión learned: even the most intelligent people were fools, or could be fools when confronted with someone more intelligent than they were. He was intelligent, and because of this, he did not relax but simply added to his understanding of the world the fact that nothing comes for free, and that for every Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, there was an older brother like Romualdo. Neither luck nor intelligence would be useful to him if he simply trusted to them, because the only truly intelligent decision was to trust no one, not even oneself.

  From that moment on, Julio Carrión González allowed himself to think about his future, to plan out the life he hoped for, one worthy of a conquering hero with nothing to hide. Every month, his father received his son’s twin salaries - one Spanish, one German - a standard practice the divisions could not avoid. Benigno had promised to save the money for him and Julio was sure that his father would keep his promise since he had more than enough to live on. So, on the few good days of that short, traitorous autumn, Julio could picture himself walking down the Gran Vía with an imposing woman whose clattering heels threatened to crack the pavement.

  The daydream fell to pieces quite suddenly, tumbled like a house of cards. By mid-October, the mercury in the thermometers never rose above zero, their winter provisions were insufficient, the Germans had ceased to advance, the Russians did not give another inch of ground, and any attempt to cross the Voljov was a return journey.

  On one of the many offensives that began only moments before the order came to retreat, El Casi was killed. It was not yet November. That day, faced with his first corpse, Julio realised what war really meant as Eugenio wept silently and Romualdo howled obscenities. ‘Those fucking bastards! It’s as if they knew we were coming, like they were waiting for us!’ Every night was colder, every day they were more depressed, and every morning more and more of them woke up from their dreams of glory realising that they were lost and far from home. Surely the Germans realised just how cold it would be here in December? What about Napoleon? Surely even an idiot knew about Napoleon’s Russian campaign? Every night was colder, every day they were more depressed, and less cautious about what they said. Most of them tried hard not to die, not to get wounded, not to fall asleep - that was enough for them, that was what war had become.

  ‘Promise me one thing, Julio.’ Eugenio’s voice cracked and his eyes welled with tears. ‘If I get frostbite, don’t let them cut off my legs, please, swear you won’t let them. Even if I get gangrene, even if the Germans promise to give me those metal things to help me walk, don’t let them persuade you. My mother couldn’t cope with having another son with no legs. Romualdo and I have talked about it, and we’d both rather die than that . . .’

  ‘I’ll promise you something, Eugenio,’ it had been a long time since Julio Carrión González had cried and yet his eyes welled with tears, ‘I won’t let you get frostbite. Neither of us is going to get frostbite, I swear.’

  It was coming up to Christmas and cold was gnawing at the thermometers. At fifty degrees below zero, the last defenders of the village of Possad, the farthest position Julio had reached on the other side of the Voljov, retraced their steps to the western bank of the river. This failure wounded them more than any other, because they had managed to go farther, to hold out longer, they had endured the cold and the despair, and all for nothing.

  There, in the hell that was the eastern shore, December had begun to pick off its victims. These strangers, these men from a distant land of grapevines and almonds, of olives and oranges, were dying of exhaustion. They were fighting two enemies: one brutal but visible, the second more cunning, more cruel. To sleep was to die, a traitorous death, silent and gentle like the enfolding arms of a beautiful woman. As the snow fell, its immaculate whiteness permeating the maddening silence of Russian winter, the strangers marched on, advancing through the frozen wasteland. It would be so easy now to surrender, to stop, to give in; to yield for a brief moment to sleep, to remember the crisp sheets of a warm bed from childhood, to close your eyes so as not to look upon this monstrous, deadly beauty. And in that moment came death. The lucky ones whose friends noticed they were missing and woke them in time paid for that moment of sleep in their feet and their legs or with a sudden blindness that made them scream, though they knew they would not be blind for ever.

  It was their morbid fear of freezing to death on the coldest days of that terrible winter which brought Julio and Eugenio back together. For January, which they spent languishing in trenches on the western banks of the Voljov, was colder than December, and the frostbite and gangrene it exacted frightened them more than the enemy bullets that whistled over their heads. People said it was the worst winter for a century, but that was no consolation. They were comforted only by their trust in each other, their pact to watch over each other, a pact which Pancho quickly joined, making it easier for someone to check regularly that whoever was on guard had not fallen asleep. The cold abated in February and the number of those who froze to death grew as the more careless of them thought that, with the temperature now only minus twenty, they had nothing more to fear. Julio, Eugenio and Pancho remained vigilant until finally the thaw came. It was then that the lice once more became their principal preoccupation.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Eugenio complained. ‘It’s cold enough for us to freeze to death but it doesn’t kill these little bastards.’

  Pancho, who was very good with his hands, made a
pair of tweezers from two thin metal shafts and a spring, which they used to pick lice from the seams of their clothes once they had deloused themselves, but the battle was as hopeless as their attempts to cross the Voljov.

  ‘It’s like we came to wage war on lice rather than Stalin . . .’

  When the first signs of spring appeared, Julio Carrión González was no longer sure that he had chosen the winning side. The winter had been disastrous for the Germans, but the Russians had lost their allies.

  He repeated what he had heard and fed on the fervour with which his comrades greeted his words. At any other point in his life, Julio Carrión would have laughed at the wilful credulity that spawned this epidemic of euphoria, but war had stripped him of his cynicism. It pained him to remember his own gullibility, how he had greedily swallowed the idea of a blitzkrieg hook, line and sinker, his faith that the Germans would do all the work and that he would march into Russia on clouds of glory. He still remembered the words of Eugenio’s mother: ‘You’re not going to war, boys, you’re heading for victory’, and his father’s troubled expression as he had repeated this word for word. Now, with Madrid, Mari Carmen and his job as a mechanic so far away, and death so close at hand, he could not understand how he could have so misjudged the extent of the danger that lay in wait for him.

  In the spring of 1942, Julio Carrión still believed that his side would win, but he was not thinking about victory, he was thinking about his own survival. He hated the war, hated the soldier’s life, but when he was given orders he obeyed, never truly slacking but never too eager, realising that insubordination might be as costly to him as heroism. When they advanced, he was never in the front line, but he never straggled behind, when they retreated he was never the first nor the last to take to his heels, and when ‘Stalin’s Organs’, those artillery trucks carrying rocket launchers, simultaneously boomed out their war music, he hit the ground a few seconds before the order was given, but only a few. He pretended to blend into the mediocrity of the troop, just another soldier with no distinguishing marks, and yet at Possad he fought like a wild animal, like the hero he had never claimed to be. He was fighting for himself, for his life, because every minute he survived he was one minute closer to emerging alive, because they were few, because there was no one at hand in whom he could entrust his survival. Afterwards, he was decorated for bravery, but as he stood feigning the pride and excitement he could see in Eugenio’s eyes, all he was thinking was that for two, perhaps three, months, he would not be expected to volunteer for a mission.

  Nor did he, but the thaw proved as difficult for him as it was for the others and he missed the snow when he stumbled into another patch of swamp where his legs felt like lead. Even the briefest of sorties was torture, since every time they pushed the wheels of the trucks, they jerked forward only to sink back into the mud again. Now that they had no time to pour scorn on their allies, since the German High Command had turned them into lumberjacks, carpenters, labourers lashing tree trunks together to make the marshy roads passable, even Eugenio Sánchez Delgado began to lose faith.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he would say, ‘why won’t they help us? The people living in the log cabins over there, or even people from the village . . . I mean, surely they approve of what we’re doing? They’re going to use the roads too.’

  ‘They’re doing it to piss us off, Eugenio.’

  ‘To piss us off?’ He looked at Julio with utter astonishment. ‘Why would they piss us off? We’ve come to liberate them, we’re freeing them from a tyrant, dragging them out of the Middle Ages . . .’

  ‘Come on, don’t be so fucking stupid !’ The strain of everything had eroded Julio Carrión’s patience. ‘Think about it, we’re a foreign army and we’re invading their country. Because that’s what we’re doing, conquering them, requisitioning their livestock, eating their food, destroying their harvests . . . and you think they should be out here helping us?’

  ‘That’s why we can’t cross the river.’

  Pancho, who had listened to the daily variations on the subject, unexpectedly interrupted one afternoon.

  ‘What?’ Julio and Eugenio asked simultaneously.

  ‘That’s why we can’t cross the river,’ Pancho said again, his voice calm and clear. ‘Because everyone on the other side is Russian, and occupying a country and defending it are two different things. It’s much easier to fight alongside your family than it is to be thousands of miles from home. It doesn’t matter whether we’re better or braver or have better weapons, they have something we’ll never have.’

  ‘Righteous anger,’ said Julio, thinking of Madrid. ‘Because we’re turning them out of their own homes.’

  Pancho did not waste his breath agreeing, he simply nodded as Eugenio hurled himself against the truck they had been pushing with such fury that he managed to shift it by himself. Julio went to help him, but said nothing more because he realised that for all his zeal, his unshakeable principles, it had just occurred to Eugenio that the Russians might win this war.

  Pancho had put his finger on something Julio had unconsciously intuited the first time Eugenio complained that the Russians refused to help them; he had often railed against his friend’s foolishness, but until Pancho’s comment, it had never occurred to him to connect the enemy’s strength with the reluctance of the Russians to help. From that moment, he no longer felt so compassionate towards the local populace, whose apparent laziness bolstered the morale of their countrymen on the far side of the river.

  And yet Pancho, whose real name was Luis Serrano Romero, did cross the Voljov. He did so at sunset one summer evening when the river was at low ebb, and he did so alone, though his friends recognised the furtive figure slinking toward the narrow, stony bend where the water was shallow. Later, they realised that he had counted on them seeing him because that night, sentry duty fell to Eugenio Sánchez Delgado.

  ‘Over there . . . doesn’t that look like Pancho?’ Recognising the figure on the riverbank, Eugenio turned to Julio with his usual expression of disbelief. ‘Where the hell is he going? Has he gone mad?’

  Pancho was moving quickly, soundlessly, not looking back, and they did not dare call out his name because he was their friend, and although they did not know where he was going, they knew he had no business being there, he should have been in the trench, sleeping in his dugout. To call out would have been tantamount to turning him in, and yet they couldn’t simply stand there with their arms folded while Pancho waged war on his own.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Eugenio voiced his worst fears. ‘You think he’s deserting?’

  ‘No,’ Julio suddenly understood what was happening, ‘he’s going over.’

  ‘What?’ Eugenio stared at him, wide eyed, his lower lip quivering.

  ‘He’s going over to the Russian side. Come on!’

  Julio started to run and Eugenio followed, trusting to a plan that did not exist, for there was only one thought in Julio Carrión González’s mind, something that Romualdo had said which came back to him now, that even the cleverest people could be fools. He was the biggest fool in the division, because he should have known, should have guessed, should have been able to read the signs - signs he knew only too well: Pancho’s silence, his stoicism, his willingness to eat only half his food and give the rest to the Polish women at Grafenwöhr, his comment about the people in his village not being accustomed to eating much, and his eloquent explanation of the Russian resistance. He should have realised why Pancho knew by heart the number of soldiers in every regiment, the number of officers and their ranks, but he had been a fool, he, Julio Carrión González, who had thought himself the cleverest of them all. It was impossible to know how many traitors figured among the number of deserters the High Command reluctantly admitted to. Among those who had been court-martialled and sentenced to death were many who had been captured while trying to defect to the enemy, he knew that, but Pancho had been more intelligent than all of them. This was what Julio Carrión González was thinking as
they reached the riverbank and found themselves looking down the barrel of Pancho’s sub-machine gun.

  ‘Not another step,’ he said, his voice as composed as always, ‘not another step or I’ll shoot you.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Pancho.’ Eugenio raised his rifle, his hands shaking as Julio held up the lantern to illuminate the scene. ‘Come back with us and we’ll say no more about it.’

  ‘No.’ Hearing him speak, Julio realised that he would rather die than come back. ‘First of all, my name isn’t even Pancho. Pancho is my little brother. I used his name when I enlisted, because they would never have taken me under my own name. My name is Luis Serrano Romero, private first-class, Seventh Brigade, the Zapadores Battalion. And I’m not twenty, I’m twenty-four.’ Then, still holding his gun in his right hand, he slipped his left into his pocket and took out a small red cardboard folder that Julio immediately recognised. ‘See this? It’s right here in black and white: Luis Serrano Romero, membership number ninety-three, Socialist Youth Movement, 16 September 1936, Villanueva de la Serena, Badajoz.’

  He put the card back into his pocket, and Julio realised that he had never heard the man string so many words together.

  ‘I set out from Villanueva de la Serena with this card tucked in my boot, survived the freezing cold and the thaw, the dust and mud and sand . . . And here I am - here we are, both of us.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘No, Eugenio, I’m completely sane. So sane I gave the Nazi salute every day, sang your fucking anthem, knelt during your masses, swore your fucking oaths, and I cursed every one of you every day, just so I could get here, and do what I’m going to do.’

  ‘You’re crazy . . .’ Eugenio repeated dully, his eyes wide.

  ‘No. I’m not.’ Pancho almost smiled. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t get it. Well, right now I’m going to join my comrades. Dead or alive. But if you try to kill me, I’ll shoot one of you first. Maybe both. I’m a better shot than either of you, I’ve been to war before, you know.’