Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  “Who is he?”

  Peter shrugged slightly, and asked the Swiss, they had dropped into whispers. Peter put his mouth near her ear.

  “Lluís Companys, President of Catalonia.”

  The committee-man nodded.

  The secretary finished the lines he was typing. His lips tightened, the deep sharp groove down his lone upper lip became lighter, and his lined forehead cleared. He reached over his desk and inked a seal. The room was quiet, now that his machine had stopped. The stamps of rubber seal on paper had a final, military note.

  The secretary stood up, and began to read in a flat voice.

  “The Workers’ Committee of Catalonia hereby thanks the passengers of the train of the Madrid-Zaragoza-Alicante line, now detained in the Moncada station, for the expression of their recognition of the position in which Catalonia and all of Spain has been placed. The committee wishes to assure the passengers that every effort will be made to continue to provide for their comfort and complete safety. Por el Comité Trabajador de Cataluña.”

  The secretary sat down and drew a telephone toward him. Peter and Helen stared, fevered with the sign. The secretary was speaking softly. Then the lines were up, the people held the communications. The brightness of the room, the heat, the promise that the telephone meant!

  The secretary turned his typed sheet over to the Swiss.

  “Say that some of us have our sympathies in theirs,” whispered Helen. “We can tell him, at least!”

  “Yes,” Peter said the Swiss. “Tell him!”

  The Swiss had a settled face, pitted and firm. It shifted, entrenching further in solidity. “No,” he answered. “We have no place in their politics.”

  “Foreign nationals.”

  It seemed impossible to continue without any indication, without making any sign or giving a partisan clue.

  The secretary folded his hands. “Is that all?”

  They stood. Everybody stood. The door opened.

  The Swiss moved forward to shake the secretary’s hand. He turned then to the committee.

  Each of them did the same. The two files met, grasped hands, and passed. They shook hands with a smiling curious intensity, trying to find language in that touch. It was, again, a humiliation to Helen not to be able to speak. But there was no constraint: they shook each others’ hands: they could count on the transmission: they were sure.

  Foreign nationals.

  “It was like that on Bastille Day,” Peter whispered. Heavily, they moved down the sharp steps.

  A man with a long gun hurried down with them, at Helen’s back. She could feel the gun pointed at her, feel a passage bored through her back, a tube leaving a cold fear through.

  They walked, a little apart, down the street. The man with the gun was running in the other direction, and then he was gone.

  Secret, furious, the night grew. The street rested, but the black air was alert, waiting for its game to start, its sun to approach, its act of will to resolve this war.

  Peter and Helen walked slowly. “The night,” she said.

  “Vivid and black.”

  “Those people are, somehow, historic facts.”

  “Realer than any, more strong than any, more the clue?”

  “No,” she said. “We romanticize.”

  A cold flaw ran over their faces. They reached the station. They said good night to Toni and the Swiss. They all were bound to each other insolubly, it was a grief to part, the good night protracted.

  Peter and Helen walked down the platform. The yellow trees swung on the low wind, yellow, perfume of lilac. The small lit blossoms were clear; perfect and blond in the night.

  “Mimosa?” she asked. They stood under the bright tree, the yellow light fell over their faces. He peered with a scientist’s squint into the tree; she turned white and quiet. Her dark hair was tinted with light.

  “I never knew,” he said. “Maybe. The words came again.”

  “They came up once today, stronger than ever before, creating what they said.”

  “General Strike?” he asked

  PEAPACK WANTED TO go to sleep. She asked Olive to come in with her and Helen. They were better off than on the wooden benches of third. The gray cushions were heavy, but upholstered. Helen’s leg jumped; sleep, she thought.

  Peter came to the door. “Good night,” he said, and kissed Olive.

  “Where will you be?” she asked.

  “The Hungarians have captured three compartments,” Peter answered triumphantly. “I’ll be in there. I’ll come by early—first thing, dear,” he said, and shut the door.

  The three women lay down.

  Helen snapped the light off. As she shut her eyes, knowing the train lay dead in a dead station, she felt a powerful muscular motion around her: the train, the secret hills, the country, the whole world of war rushing down the tracks, headfirst in conflict like a sea, unshakable, the momentum adding until the need burst through all other barriers: to reach the center, to will continuance.

  SHE DREAMED THE sea: a green streaked sea, with black tremendous currents. And headlong, plunging through the stream, a force rushing, which carried her along; until she ceded her will to it in a huge gesture. In that moment she revived, she drew will from the enormous source, and thought, even in the dream: O Parable.

  And passed, during the voyage, faces.

  Of all these, two came clear; husband and wife, the poets, their looks like light, their beautiful heads. She saw them changed, the fine familiar bones tapering down, planted tight in seabottom; and the currents swept over their faces, but could not change their steady look. She felt a hammering of love, faith in them, in the force which carried her memory upon the looks she loved so much and trusted, she called to them loudly: You are my legs; and swept by in the immense currents. In blackness.

  OFTEN, THAT NIGHT, she woke to the motionless train and the laughing cry of cocks.

  *A right-wing weekly in France.

  CHAPTER FIVE79

  ‘Where can we get a good meal?’ . . . .

  ‘I am not sure if it can be managed,

  I expect everything is shut’ . . . .

  ‘But why should everything be shut?’

  ‘The Revolution—’

  She had overlooked the Revolution again—

  an affair of foreign politics.

  —Sylvia Townsend Warner80

  It was the bomb that stopped the roosters. The soft, tremendous explosion shook the town, their cages, the train. Immediately a ghost of smoke rose from the village, a dark escape in the morning air.

  All the eastern sky was mottled brilliant.

  Helen pulled herself stiffly off the suitcase and cushions, slid the door open behind its green shade, and left the compartment. There was no water. It was not until she gave up the idea of washing and stepped down to the platform that she remembered what woke her, why she had hurried from the train.

  If they were bombing the village!

  Smoke evaded the arms of the woman who bent over the dirt. Helen watched, leaning against one of the little yellow trees. The peasant woman had set her baby down, against the next tree, away from the blowing smoke, and was feeding sticks into a small fire. The covered red pot was set on the stones piled as a fireplace.

  The green branches went slowly, and their smoke smelled like brine, vivid and stinging.

  But the baby was on the safe side; its eyes, holes burned in the expressionless face, were turned to the flame. It was colorless in the early morning; transparent, it showed the grass behind the fire.

  The woman looked up and nodded.

  “Café?” Helen asked.

  “No. Sopa.”

  Peter came up behind her. “Soup,” he said.

  They stood and watched the fire.

  “Was it a bomb?” she asked.

  “They bombed the church,” the woman said.

  They heard the soft waking noises from the cars, the beginning of fretful voices, the sighing return to consciousness of the trai
n.

  THE ENGLISH WERE coming down from the next car. Drew’s sweater was limp; and young Mrs. Drew was quite crumpled. Only the lady from South America looked polished and beautiful. The Belgian woman could be seen in the background, following them up the platform, her scarf flying behind her, all gem-clean like some fatal figure in contemporary painting.

  The lady from South America patted her silvery head. “I despise letting myself go this way,” she said to Helen, “but I couldn’t sleep at all, and there’s nothing one can do . . .” She drifted to a whisper. The mouth, still russet-colored, hardly moved.

  “Did you hear the explosion?” screamed young Mrs. Drew. “They’ve bombed the church and arrested the priest, the Spanish gentleman says. We’re not to go up to that part of town today.”

  They were walking up toward the café.

  Peapack caught up with them. “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!” The English looked at her coldly. “Was that a cannon?” She sat down next to the Belgian woman, who began to illustrate the sound of guns. The proprietor of the café was arranging the wine bottles behind the counter, listing the levels on a long sheet of paper.

  He said something to the lady from South America. Her face changed in passionate horror. Her hand lifted in a sharp, beautiful gesture, denying everything, the words he had spoken to her, the world. The proprietor came to the tables for orders.

  “What is it, what’s happened?” Helen leaned over Drew toward the lady. She turned the helmeted head.

  “He’s just told me they caught five Fascist officers this morning—early, before four o’clock—and shot them and cut their throats.”

  The proprietor, bent over Helen, added something.

  “Leche,” she answered.

  “Milk? Don’t you want coffee?” asked the lady from South America, automatically. “He says they’re on view in a cellar in the next block—we should go see them.”

  “God!” breathed Drew. “Does he say the train will move?”

  The proprietor looked at Drew as the lady translated, he grinned. “Huelga General,” he responded. He told the lady more of the story. She seemed to become more frail and fashionable as he piled on horror.

  Peter and Olive came in, pulled up a third table, and listened.

  The lady relayed: “He says the men who went out of town last night stopped the Fascists’ car in the hills. It surrendered immediately, and the captain who led the men said: ‘Do whatever you want with me. I’ve killed two or three hundred of your men, and it doesn’t matter what becomes of me.’”

  “So what did they do?” asked Peapack.

  Peter laughed her down.

  But another Englishman had crossed over to them, a shortish, pale little man, with a hanging nose and chin. He smiled pleasantly and asked in a Jewish Cockney accent: “But what did they do?”

  “Shot them,” answered Peter.

  “And slit their throats,” said Drew, drawing a line with his finger.

  “They’re in a cellar down the street,” repeated the lady from South America. She turned back to Helen. Her head moved again with the precision of that London Lady. “I don’t know whether it’s going to be worse here than in Barcelona,” she said, contemplative. “The only chance to consider is that they might have a telegraph line open in Barcelona. If I could get word through to my son and mother . . .”

  Helen asked about her flat in the city.

  “But that is nothing. My sister’s family will try to take care of it for me. They’re in the suburbs—” her face changed, “but they’re not just fighting in the square this time. If I could get word to Geneva, my son—” She broke off again, with an exquisite final note in her voice. Hopeless and beautiful, deposed.

  “Perhaps the train—” cut in Drew.

  She overlooked him. “He’s a striking boy,” she continued, looking at Helen, making her words personal and significant, as if here was a secret clue; “he’s twenty-two.” She spoke the words with a subtlety beyond anything she said, an exquisite inflection, tender and naked. “My dear,” she said directly to Helen, “I might be your mother.”

  THE WORDS CAME, shaking the blood inordinately, filled with a compassion that was unlooked-for, indeed undesirable, filled with every softness, an echo of the need of the other world which had just ended; and they were strong enough to strike through the conversation of the little Cockney, deep in Coffee-and-Tea, prices and stocks, with Peter, through the pudding solicitude of Peapack, the vanishing vitality of Olive, the handsome Drews. The softness reached her, the unhappy older woman reaching with a phrase, taking her hands, stroking her with the words, recalling all old unhappy softness. And through the windows of the café, the break came.

  Through the windows they saw cars pass, splattered U.G.T., C.N.T., carrying the men with the effort set in their faces, carrying loudly through the village heavy guns.

  They could see the boys who drove them.

  They could see the mark, the bullet hole, the streak along the hood. And the vicious machine gun.

  “U.G.T.—Unión General de Trabajadores. C.N.T.—Confederación Nacional del Trabajo,” said Peter.

  “Oh my God,” said Olive. “The guns.”

  “Les mitrailleuses!” screamed the Belgian woman. She stood up, puddling the coffee, pale with milk, before her.

  “Let’s go back,” said Drew.

  Helen picked up a newspaper as they went back to the train. “Morning routine,” she smiled at Drew. He spoke gently: “It would be nice to wash. I’ll see what I can do.”

  From high up in the hills, slapping across hill to hill, came the first wild sound.

  “Rifle fire!” exclaimed Drew.

  Helen hurried ahead to the lady from South America. She had not answered the lady’s phrase; she hoped she had shown how closely it had touched, how it had canceled the wish for softness. She spoke hurriedly and impersonally.

  “Look,” she said, “you have a family in Barcelona, and I have a letter to the head of the publicity committee of the Games. It won’t do me any good to get in a bit sooner”—she stumbled over words, the lady said nothing—“the letter doesn’t identify me except by name, it’s good with the government, they’re People’s Front games, it’ll get you past the officials. Take it, you take the letter, you should be there.”

  In that moment, before the lady said anything, Helen wondered at the step of the possible sacrifice she was making. Because of the fragmentary half-caught resemblance to a woman in London who had been kind to her? The broken half-suggestion of a banal phrase? War between worlds?

  The lady moved the beautiful russet mouth. “You are extravagantly kind,” she was saying.

  A shot came like terror out of the hills.

  “But I mean it, I mean it,” Helen pressed. “You can pass for me, it’s only my name. I want you to be there. They say a bus may come. There’s a rumor.”

  “I’ll speak to the doctor about it,” the lady was answering. “There’s a doctor on the train who got on at Gerona. I’ve been talking to him. The authorities here are quite severe, stricter than your Americans. I’ve been speaking to this little doctor”—her voice descended melodiously, became confidential—“you know, I’ve been suffering so, I haven’t been, for two days—I can’t bear going to the W.C.s here. They’re not clean. I’ll talk to the doctor again. Have you found a clean bathroom?”

  Helen said no, but about the letter—

  “You’re a dear to suggest it. If you really wish.” The lady consented, gracefully, with her neck. “But I must speak to the doctor.”

  They had reached the station platform.

  It took Helen a moment to accommodate the change. From the exquisite, caught-in-a-revolutionary bottleneck, to descend to these physical intimacies—! She saw how ridiculous she was being. It was true that the sun was high over the fetid train, that the small refuse-heaps at either end of each car were apparent now to everyone; the flies were atrocious.

  The lady’s delicate hand went out. He
r chic red bracelet flashed.

  “There he is, now—and the professor, the gentleman from Madrid!”

  THEY ALL SAT on the bench in the waning shadow of the station, laughing at the professor.

  “. . . nobody was arrogant, everybody’s trying to help,” he was saying. “I went to the restaurante, as you suggested,” he nodded to the Englishwoman whose compartment was opposite the Workers’ Café, “and engaged a waitress in conversation. We thought we could get meals wholesale for the train,” he added parenthetically, in a charming, modulated, classroom voice. “I went in and asked her for a menu, ‘Oh, we don’t have anything like that,’ she said, very much put out. ‘Well, what have you to eat?’ I asked her, and she laughed. ‘Anything you like, sir, anything at all, we have your favorite dishes,’ she said. ‘But what?’ I’m afraid I was very insistent. ‘Ask for something,’ she told me. ‘Veal?’ I said, very tentatively, you know; they should have some sort of veal. ‘No, no veal today.’ I could see she was on the verge of tears. She did want to please. ‘Well, you tell me,’ I said. ‘We have a lovely omelette,’ she suggested. I asked her how much it was. ‘It all depends—how much omelette do you want?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I told her—it was getting very complicated. ‘How hungry are you?’ she finally asked; and I told her I wasn’t at all hungry.”

  Drew howled with laughter.

  “It’s such an old joke, too,” said the professor, “if only it hadn’t happened!”

  “What are we going to do, though?” The English woman’s long face took on vertical marks of hopelessness.

  “I’d like to wash,” said the lady from South America.

  “All right,” said Drew, “that’s the easiest yet. I rigged up something for my wife this morning. Wait a second.”

  He came out of his compartment with a shallow tin basin. “Water down the street!” he shouted, diminishing toward the café.

  “The town’s given us its other pump,” the professor said. “Erratic, but water. Seriously, though,” he looked around. Peter and Olive had come up. “You’re the reliable people on this train,” he said to the group. “We’ve got to do something to keep the morale up. What with the Belgian, and the woman from Peapack, and those Hollywood people . . .”