Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  Peter grinned. “Deck games, or lectures,” he proposed. “You lecture, sir, on Spanish history. It would do us all a lot of good.”

  “I doubt if it would quiet anybody,” the professor answered. “What I was thinking of,” he twinkled over his tall, placid face, “was the chorus. What about a rehearsal?”

  “God, that would be wonderful,” said Peter. “Except they have the town already. I don’t suppose this place has ever seen anything so blonde.”

  “They’re to open at the Tivoli,” the professor continued. “That is, they should have opened last night. They must be all right.”

  “Or the teams could play exhibition soccer,” Mrs. Drew added. “Everybody ought to do something.” The talk about the chorus was getting her visibly nervous. She looked over her shoulder for Drew; he was coming down the platform with a pan of water. The lady from South America wrung off her bracelet and ring, and accepted the towel and the tiny lump of English soap. The professor watched her as she began to wash at the next bench.

  “Yes,” he said ruminatively, “that’s right, we all should. We ought to talk a bit about pooling our money, too. The bit of Spanish money most people changed at the border isn’t going to hold out forever.”

  “What do you mean, forever?” The voice came from behind them, and they all turned. It was American, and sandy. It was the Hollywood executive. “Who said anything about staying in this dump?”

  “We only thought we should make the best—”

  “Yah, thinking!” the man exploded. “That’s not going to make this trolley move. What we need is a little action, instead of taking what they hand us, and by God I’m going to see that’s what we get! I want to get out of here as quick as wheels can go, and I’d a damn sight rather be at the frontier than go to Barcelona.”

  The lady from South America scrubbed her face dry, and looked up at Hollywood. “What do you propose to do about it?” she inquired. All the contempt of the truly cosmopolitan was in her voice, and her oblique look; hatred of cowardice, of coarseness, and swagger; and besides she had just washed.

  He faced her directly. “I’ll do what I can,” he answered, with stubbornness. “I’ve got money to get out. I’ll hire a car. No,” he said, “I’ll commandeer a car, if that’s going to be the style. I’m going to the mayor now. Give me ten minutes, time enough to find out the mayor’s price, and I’ll have that car.”

  He strode off down the street; they watched him go. Drew started down after him with the empty pan, to get water for Helen. The professor said, sadly and wearily, “Shall we place bets on Hollywood?”

  THE LITTLE SHOP was crowded with townspeople, lined close, three-deep at the meat counter, keeping the butcher chopping lengths of sausage, steadily, as roll after roll of meat gave out, snatched from the meathooks, lifted hungrily from the wooden slab of the cutting-block.

  What was left of the vegetables was going very fast; cheese after cheese was handed out; and a tall stack of cans was vanishing away, its top sinking lower by the second.

  Hardly a word of conversation was heard, but the shop was full of noise: the prices of food, the rattle of heavy paper as the meat was wrapped carelessly by the butcher, the arbitrary clockwork of the chopper, descending like a judge’s gavel, significant, irregular.

  The foreigners stood at the fringe, almost against the far wall, next to the two sacks of almonds and dried fruits. They looked at each other in confusion: the need for rapid action, coming on them suddenly, made it impossible for them to speak. They saw the piles of food disappearing, as by some slapstick trick of a camera; and, casting about for help, they realized that the lady from South America was the only one who spoke Spanish.

  She stood a little apart from the group, watching the butcher, paralyzed by attraction; she was counting the blows of the meat-chopper, her lips moved visibly. Drew took her by the arm.

  “We’ll get the other things,” he said. “We can just hold them out and say cuanto vale; you go and get the meat, won’t you?” He stretched out his long fingers, pushing her gently, enough to start her one step toward the butcher. It was the same gesture the Catalan father had used on his fragile son, sending him affectionally into the third-class aisle after the basket of bread.

  The lady said nothing, but her eyebrows drew together; she was still concentrating on the chopper. She moved a few steps up, but a woman shoved her back as she ran before her to the other counter.

  Helen turned away.

  They must hurry.

  The cheese was gone already. There was hardly any meat left.

  She walked over to the low shelves beside the grocery counter, and picked up a large bottle of mineral water in each hand. A stream of people crowded her away from the counter, trying to pay for their food, trying to order from the inaccessible shelves. It is at moments when action is called for that we fail, she thought; get deeper in this, no trembling here! She stood there still, the long silvery bottles hanging like clubs, her money in her pocket, as the women crowded up to their marketing.

  Mrs. Drew came up to her. “The lady is ill, I think,” she said, in a low voice. “But she’ll be all right the minute she pulls herself together. Can’t you pay for these?” she asked, taking one of the bottles from Helen. “Get three,” she said, “three between us, and I’ll take the lady next door to get some fruit.”

  Drew came up behind her. “There!” he took out his handkerchief and rubbed it between his hands, “she’s paying for the meat now. I just steered her through all the people, and she asked for sausage as though she were sleepwalking. Makes you feel funny, though, even buying food—there doesn’t seem to be terribly much in the stores.”

  “I wish you’d pay for water,” said Helen, “and get some bread. I can’t get through, either.” She smiled at him weakly, handing him her purse. He opened it, and whistled at the note.

  “Going to be hard to change this!” he said, “I haven’t seen any paper money yet.”

  “I changed all I had at the border,” Helen said.

  Mrs. Drew and the lady were leaving the store. It was filling all the time; nobody seemed to be leaving. As Drew gave the note to the grocer, the family with two little boys in playsuits came in. They were speaking German, counting over their money; they said hello to the train-people. “Hard to get anything, isn’t it?” the tall German said sociably to Helen. “The fruit store has a few rotten bananas left, and they’re going like gold. The sausage seems to be all that’s left.” He looked around the shop. “Nuts, too dry; dried fruit, thirsty stuff; hate to eat from cans.” He marched over to the meat-counter.

  “Have to wait for change a minute,” called Drew, deep in the crowd, waving a loaf to get Helen’s attention.

  She stood back against the shelves, holding the three bottles.

  The sound of the shop was rising; since they had come in, it had lifted from the chattering monotone of a great many women buying food, going chromatically up to screaming sharpness that was broken only by the gavel, the chopper fallen on bone, as if order were being constantly and futilely demanded.

  One of the men said something about civil war. Helen looked at him without understanding, hearing only the military words. He began to repeat, but nothing could be heard. The orders, the crowd shifting in haste, payment, hunger, were too loud. And now another sound became evident: the shop divided.

  HELEN STOOD UP, disengaging her foot. “I want to go down the train a way,” she mumbled. Peapack was winking as she tried to think of the Spanish for “Excuse me,” and came stumbling out through a vapor of cucumber-cream, over the knees of Catalan boys. Helen went blind with fury; all she wanted was to lie down, on grass, and look at the Lawrence book, and let the last day arrange itself somehow in her brain.

  The three Frenchman stood aside in the corridor, holding the Saturday Gringoire flat against their chests, in clown’s positions, reading an old paper about another world. She went down the platform. The Belgian woman put her head out. “I think the sound of a can
non is coming closer,” she said mechanically, like a signature.

  Peter was talking to the engineer. He walked toward the schoolhouse with her. “He’s keeping up fuel,” Peter remarked.

  “Does he recommend anything?” asked Helen, more quietly.

  “He suggested a look at the five Fascists. I thanked him . . . Oh, God!” he said. Peapack was in obvious retreat down the platform, the Catalan boys bewildered but following.

  “She winks when she can’t pronounce her verbs. It throws them off the track,” said Helen, with a tired amused smile.

  “Are you going to the schoolhouse?” Peapack shrieked. “I do want to see the school. Tell me,” she said, intensely, to Peter, speaking as she would to a ticket agent, “is it safe to leave any valises in the train and sleep in the schoolhouse, or should I stay in the compartment?”

  “Oh,” he said, not answering, “you could have them taken to the schoolhouse, and sleep there, among them, on them, under them . . .”

  “Oh, would you?” she sang out, “that would be lovely! Is this it?”

  They had cut across the tracks to a clay lot with grass growth knotted flat in the middle, patches of weed, and an incline of gravel sloping toward the school. The square, two-story building was the newest in Moncada. It stood at one corner of the town, and the asphalt road ended before it. Its cream walls were cut by immense rectangles of glass, its halls smelled of plaster, the front steps could not be schoolhouse steps, foursquare as they were, with not a sign of erosion in the center.

  Peapack ran in, squealing, and Peter started to follow. He looked back at Helen, standing dark and quiet in the glare. “Go on,” she said, “I’m going to find a tree.”

  “Wait a moment,” he said, “wait for me.”

  It was the first minute she had been alone. No, she remembered, the compartment was empty when the train stopped for the first time and the women got out; but that had been before. Everything that had ever happened had happened since then, in blistering sun, like this sun on the gravel bank. She looked at the triangle of streets whose peak she faced. There was no shade on all those hot squares of houses; up the bare cliff behind her marched the power-lines, and before her the soft hill, half-grown in olive-trees, receded in a scum of sun-haze. She walked over the grass embankment at the tracks. The long sharp leaves were coated with dust, and hot to touch. She was standing there when Peter came out, hurrying.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s find a tree—Peapack’s inspecting the shower.”

  They walked to the entrance of one street. The road went as far as the telegraph office, and turned to baked dirt.

  “The Hollywood people were all for breaking the door down this morning,” Peter jerked his head at the barred, padlocked office, “they want to send an SOS themselves, or buy the telegraph company, or something.”

  “Did they see the doctor start off to Barcelona?”

  “No,” said Peter glumly.

  A rout of chickens were scratching among the wheel-ruts. At one of the doorways, a thin tall woman was emptying a pan of water, and the chute flashed and fell, staining the rich brown. Peter asked her where there were trees. She was sure there were none in Moncada. Up in the hills, plenty. But in this town, no.

  “Ask her about the canal!” prompted Helen.

  Canal—there was none, really; there was a little stream that the boys went swimming in—her boy could show them, it was up the road a little way, if—

  Peter said it would be all right, they could find it.

  —if he were here; but he had gone off to Barcelona, to the battle. Yes, said the woman, he was a good boy, it would be as it came. Had they seen the five Fascists? Well, they ought to; and they would find the stream, up a little farther.

  “I suppose we’ll be talking about this for the rest of our lives,”81 Peter said, on the road. “I keep thinking: we mustn’t dramatize it.” But as he spoke, the village rose up about him, the chalk-bright houses, the black sashes of the men, the guns, the challenge of trucks pounding the blank road. He looked at the girls, and laughed.

  Answering his mood, Helen said, “But they dramatize it, don’t they? It dramatizes itself. They know, sooner than we, that it is the historic moment.”

  “When I can think about it, at times like this,” he said, pulling at the long grass of the lane, “I resent the train. It’s such a damned device.”

  “I hate, too, the way we classify everyone by country. Even the tags everyone’s acquired, all place-tags: the lady from South America, the lost Frenchman, Peapack, the Swiss—it’s very insidious.”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “The line hasn’t fallen that way. When there’s any barrier, it’s come between the ones who are for the town and the ones who feel this is spoiling their trip.”

  “Don’t you feel at home?” she asked.

  “That’s not witty,” he scolded. “And I don’t. I don’t ever. What are we here? Wasted—”

  His hand pushed air.82

  CHAPTER SIX

  Look on the world, my comrades! It’s aflame! fire-tongues in the sky, new sword-blades at its core, cutting the dry dead harvest that it bore a generation gone, in all the lands of earth.

  —Edwin Rolfe83

  There must be a way to reach action.

  Helen turned back to the Lawrence book.84 Perhaps, after trying for it so hard, she could find what she was looking for here. This might carry her deeper in. Lawrence could do that, striking for the heart, penetrating, on a dark journey.

  The flies came in as she read, settling on everything, cucumber cream, remnants of food, the gray cushions.

  The book, to produce an equation,

  To bring an answer.

  “But won’t they act?” cried Josephine.

  “Act?” said Aaron. “How, act?”

  “Why, defy the government, and take things in their own hands,” said Josephine.

  “They might, some time,” said Aaron, rather indifferent.

  “I wish they would!” cried Josephine. “My, wouldn’t I love it if they’d make a bloody revolution.”

  They were all looking now at her. Her black brows were twitching, in her black and silver dress she looked like a symbol of young disaster.”*

  But on the window little yellow trees

  and the hand claps of rifle bullets and

  behind the book scenes her head produced

  scenes of faces ranged to mock at all of

  this and the mouths that mocked were those

  that cried most loudly War: streets of

  stone, streets of stone, dark rooms, no

  rest, no sleep, mockery

  She looked farther down the page.

  “But, Josephine,” said Robert, “don’t you think we’ve had enough of that sort of thing in the war? Don’t you think it all works out rather stupid and unsatisfying?”

  “Ah, but a civil war would be different. I’ve no interest in fighting Germans. But a civil war would be different.”

  “That’s a fact, it would,” said Jim.

  “Only rather worse,” said Robert.

  “No, I don’t agree,” cried Josephine. “You’d feel you were doing something, in a civil war.”

  “Pulling the house down,” said Lilly.

  “Yes,” she cried. “Don’t you hate it, the house we live in—London—England—America! Don’t you hate them?”

  “I don’t like them. But I can’t get much fire in my hatred. They pall on me rather,” said Lilly.

  “Ay!” said Aaron, suddenly stirring in his chair.

  Lilly and he glanced at one another with a look of recognition.

  “Still,” said Tanny, “There’s got to be a clearance some day or other.”*

  A wagon marked LLET going down a

  small pale street followed by a

  machine gun mounted in a produce truck,

  a shot spat against a stucco wall,

  a handful of almonds whose shells

  are rubbed off between
the fingers

  five slit throats and a red-bound wound

  a red-bound book on a stopped train

  with the track All Clear Ahead

  She clapped the book shut.

  The Hungarian printer appeared at the door.

  “Olimpiada credentials?”

  Helen nodded.

  “Get ready. The truck is coming for us. How many pieces have you?”

  “One,” said Helen.

  “Good,” answered the Hungarian. “Then you’re ready now.”

  He looked around the compartment. “I’ll be back for you in five minutes, when the team is together.”

  Helen took down her hat and coat.

  A few compartments down, she could hear the chorus. “O lord here’s the gramophone under the bags.” Laughter came through.

  Peapack was standing on the threshold.

  “What’s up?” she was asking. “What’s all the excitement?”

  “The truck is coming for the Olympiad people,” Helen said.

  “And you—you’re getting out of here!” Peapack cried. “Oh, Helen, get me out—you’ve got to get me out!” She was weeping. Her face was swollen dark.

  She hauled down the first of the rawhide bags. There was nothing to do.

  Helen raised all the questions: the lack of credentials, the necessity of sticking to a story—of saying they were traveling together— the movie camera, the fourteen hats. Peapack wept.

  At the height of the confusion, when the compartment was fully littered with hats and the five valises, Toni appeared, smiling beautifully.

  TONI LABORED BESIDE her with the suitcase. As they passed the last first-class car, the lady from South America descended, and walked along with Helen. Toni pushed ahead, bent over the thick black bag.

  It was impossible that the lady’s helmet of gray-black hair should lie so smoothly.

  “That was a curious thing you did this morning,” she said, with the peculiar provocative motion of her lips.

  Helen was puzzled.

  “About the letter, I mean,” the lady continued.