Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  “Oh, you should have said yes,” Helen answered. “You might, still, you know.” They both looked at Toni, halfway to the schoolhouse with the bag.

  “It’s very curious,” said the lady, in her accented, violin way. “Things you never dream people will do . . . If only there were a bathroom in town . . .”

  “The school’s not as bad as the station,” said Helen. “—And I don’t believe there’s going to be a lorry for the team,” said the lady. “But if there is, and you reach Barcelona, will you take a message?”

  Helen produced a postcard. The lady from South America scribed across it—“This is brought by a companion in misery who has proved very kind. Try to get word through to Geneva that everything is all right. Will be in Barcelona as soon as possible.” She addressed it to herself. “You’ll find the place,” she said. “It’s in the residential section—anyone can tell you. There—that’s my name: Mme. de Trébilhan—Mrs. Trevelyan, I suppose, in English,” she added, smiling. The black eyes dilated, the rims were very dark.

  Helen made her way through the crowd in front of the schoolhouse door. The whole train was standing there, looking at the two teams who were ready to go. Slicked down as shiny as possible, the athletes were revived and optimistic. The others were getting tired, breaking a bit. Some looked in envy at the naive Hungarians, who were repeating their detailed instructions. Toni stood over her suitcase, with Peter. She went over to thank him.

  “Hello!” said Peter. “Going out?”

  She was embarrassed. “They said to come,” she explained, diffidently. “It’s the letter I have to Tudor, the Olympiad man.”

  “Stop confessing,” said Peter. “Is Peapack going?”

  “She says she’s coming. And the five valises.”

  “To Barcelona! But how? Did she dump herself on you?”

  “She’s to be traveling with me, she says.”

  There was Peapack and the Catalan, heavy-laden. The rawhide had an expensive look.

  “If you said something friendly but critical—” Helen suggested to Peter.

  He grinned, and crossed the lot to Peapack.

  Toni turned around. His lips were almost purple. “Dirty-face!” he said, mockingly.

  “Where?” she asked, humbled, like a child, but gratified to be commanded to do anything simple, like washing.

  He showed her the smudged place, and she started upstairs. My pleasures! she thought. There was running water.

  Reaching the door as she came down, she heard one of the sickly bitches explaining to the Englishman with the tall wife: “—But only four million are organized in America, out of twenty-four million workingmen eligible for such organization, and, no matter how conservative English trade unions are, they’ve covered more ground than . . .”

  Peter and Peapack were standing together. She was being convinced. Helen jerked her head back at the school teacher, “Those are the figures I should know.”

  “Trade union figures?” asked Peter.

  Peapack put up her muddled face. It shifted, like stirred pudding. “I’ve been thinking,” she announced. “It’s an awful responsibility, and the roads are probably not as safe, even, as the train. And, then, I’d have to lie.”

  “Whatever you say,” retorted Helen, and walked away. She was sick of the whole thing. The hills were losing light gradually, standing out in detail as the sun left them. The jagged hill at the back showed ruddy. The roads were empty, shaved clean against the woods.

  “Am I a little cleaner now?” Helen asked Toni. Her cheeks were shining from the cold water.

  “Oh, you’re insulted,” he said, miserable. “You’re insulted!”

  She laughed. It had been lovely to be ordered to wash. The water had been very clean and cold, almost as cold as the well-water. Toni saw that she wasn’t insulted. And smiled.

  The lady from South America watched the starved dog cross the lot. “Any news of the lorry?” She made it a statement; it was evident that she was convinced there never would be news. “Oh,” she said quickly, bitterly, “nobody knows who holds the roads, or if they’re torn up, or if the army’s on them. How can anyone promise a lorry?”

  IN THE MIDDLE of the lot, Olive was calling Helen. She went over slowly, swinging the large hat. “Anyone who can wear sneakers and a big black hat—” Olive smiled fancifully.

  “I like the hat. I like the shoes. It’s very simple,” Helen laughed. “Any simple pleasures we find, just now—” she broke off.

  “I know one,” said Olive. “Come and see the church. The Hungarians say there’s a rope which makes a ghetto of the Fascist section, and they’re fed by the town across the rope.”

  “Just a second.” Three young boys were standing at the edge of the lot, their heavy guns in their hands. They were comparing bullets. Their sleeves hung in rags, one had a rag about his head. When the two women came close, they looked up, grinned.

  “Big,” said one of them, holding out a bullet. Helen put out her hand, involuntarily. “Por favor,” she said.

  He placed the silverly end of the bullet on her palm. It rolled over into the deepest place and lay heavy. She looked down at it as if it had a word written on it. “That’s the business end,” said Olive.

  The boys caught the remark, and nudged the spokesman. He held out the shell. “There!” he said. The shorter boy raised his finger, “one moment,” and shook something into his hand. It was a little mound of iron-black, square bits, like children’s mosaic, or beauty patches.

  “That’s gunpowder!” exclaimed Olive. “Powder,” she repeated to the boys.

  “Sí, pow-der,” they answered, delighted. The short one went through the motions—he poured the powder into an imaginary gun, took aim, clicked his tongue. “Pam-pam!” he said.

  “Yes,” said Helen.

  A quick double shot came down from the wooded hill nearest the school, like a pain in the head. The boys gripped their guns and set off, running up the dirt road. Two men caught up with them from their doorways, the guns jolting with their arms. The five hurried to the foot, stopped to talk a moment, and then spread in a fan up the hill, disappearing into the grove one by one.

  Olive and Helen recrossed the lot. The hand with the bullet tightened, setting to the weight and the consciousness. Another shot flew from the wood. They hurried. Peter came to meet them. “There’s a story that officers are in the wood,” he said, a little breathless.

  The whole train was standing in front of the schoolhouse, looking up the hill, perfectly quiet. One of the Rodman Truesdale Young Ladies pulled the professor’s elbow. “Perhaps we ought to go into the school,” she said in a flat little voice. He did not answer. Nobody said anything. Nobody went inside. There was no choice but to stand there. To look at the hill. The rounded, small trees went up it in rows to a line near the top, where they ended abruptly, and the soft hill rose from there. There was nothing to be seen. A few women came to their doors, drying their hands, staring up the hill. Slowly the sunset began to wash color above it, a russet finish, like sunset-glaze on a wide river, leaking over the sky.

  Peapack stumbled noisily down the stairs, babbling. She was very nervous. She giggled. “There’s a Rodman Truesdale upstairs, sitting on her suitcase in the backroom,” she shook with little screams of laughter. “And you know what she said to me?” Peapack continued, failing, stumbling, the words falling over each other, trying an Oxford drawl, “in her English accent, she says, moaning, ‘I’m only eighteen’—she was almost crying,” and Peapack shrieked, ‘I’m only eighteen, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever live to see my nineteenth birthday.’” Peapack saw that everyone was watching the hill, and grew quiet, suppressing little gusty shrieks of laughter.

  The Englishman with the tall wife came over to Helen.

  “If you get in,” he asked, smiling with his eyes in his blocked-out, austere face, “will you send a cable for me? To my wife’s mother,” he said. He put his hand in his pocket for a pencil, took the postcard she offered and wro
te a few words on it. His pencil moved slowly over the card, and jumped once at the end, as if his hand had been struck. A loud shot banged down, echoing, slapping among the hills. The Englishman turned with the rest. His forehead wrinkled as he stared against the bright sky.

  Near the top of the hill, at the line of demarcation where the trees ended, a little man was running, lightly, with little darting motions, shuttling behind the last row of trees. He was short and dark, and wore a wide black sash around his waist. A shadow, shadow of cloud, moved over the hill, covered him for a minute, and then he was visible again, running, scampering between two lanes of trees. The hill stood clear, in maplike clarity, very impersonal. Everything was quiet still. There was no way of telling who the man was.

  A hundred people stood watching.

  Then slowly, he could be seen moving out, holding his gun ready, looking down the slope, looking around with a reconnoitering look. He glanced once at the summit, and suddenly turned and hurried over the open shoulder of the hill. It was not until he was well over that the firing started again.

  Nobody had spoken.

  One of the Swiss cleared his throat. “They’re hunting down Fascists,” he said hoarsely.

  The Englishman, still holding the postcard, turned to Helen. His face had changed, his eyes were full of excitement. His controlled, assertive face flickered with the excitement. “I think he was a Fascist,” he said, with joy. “I think he was—and I hope to God he got away. I hope he’s legging it over those hills for all he’s worth this minute.” He was speaking rapidly, in a transport. He stopped for breath, and noticed her face. “Oh, no need to look like that,” affecting lightness, “I’m on the right side, I know the working class is on its way into its own. But the bravery, the sheer bravery of these men—cornered, broken up, fighting it out in these hills. And do you know they cut them down without a trial—they give common criminals a trial, but these fellows, they stop them in the roads and shoot them down without a word. That brave man, this morning, without a chance—that captain, do you know what he said? He said ‘You can do what you like with me,’ and they shot him down and slit his throat and exposed him to the village with his four men, I saw them in the cellar. He may have been a vicious fool, that captain”—Helen saw Peter turn as the Englishman’s voice rose— “but he was brave. And I hope they run like hell.”

  “The Fascist captain? The son of a bitch,” said Peter, bitting the words.

  The Englishman sneered through his nostrils. He was carried away. His face flickered. He stared at Peter.

  “You’d get a trial if you committed a crime!”

  From behind the hill where the man had disappeared, a sound spread, filling the sky, drowning out the quarrel for a moment. The crowd had already broken up, but people straggling across the lot stopped and looked back. For a moment they thought it was a new, protracted bombardment, the sound streaked along like a line of sonorous bombs. It was not until the plane appeared over the ridge that the fear changed and took shape. The high sweet sound of the engine ran through them. They might have been ready to be executed, strapped in the chair, the current might be shooting through them, the constraint of terror stabbed them so. Helen looked curiously up at the plane’s clean progress over the even sky. Her mind seized on it like an abstract idea, in its successful motion. It approached; it was almost directly over them. And she thought, how calm I am, she could feel the trickle at the corner of her mouth. She licked her lips to cover the fear. When she moved her tongue, the fear did go; and it seemed to have left all of them in that instant. They all went on talking, the Englishman and Peter caught up in their quarrel, the teams discussing possibilities of a truck. They hardly looked up as the anonymous plane passed harmless overhead, marking the ground swiftly with its shadow, and turned away down the sky.

  HELEN SWUNG AROUND. Olive was sitting on the low stone wall, looking at her and at Peter quarreling. She was saying, “Come now, and look at the church.” Helen moved over to where she was.

  “I can’t stand just waiting here.” She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth. “What’s Peter fighting about?” she asked.

  “The Englishman’s sporting instinct,” answered Helen. She grinned. “He thinks the captain should have had trial by jury.”

  “These English and their ‘being sporting,’” said Olive, with her hand flung out. “At home they’re being sporting to Hitler, in the Mediterranean with Mussolini, and here they want to play games with the generals. Look at them run and line up with the Fascists. That’s what I’m afraid of.” They walked on a bit. As they came to the railroad tracks, they saw that the train had been moved up the track about a hundred feet. The mayor must have let the town move it. There would be a better smell that night.

  “It’s a fine town,” said Helen.

  Olive did not answer. She was watching four people, loaded with bags, who were coming down the street to the tracks. They were the professor, Peapack, and the Drews. They hallooed. “Gunnysacks!” called Drew across the street. “Very cheap! Admirably clean! Almost soft!” He took a breath. “So cheap! Six pesetas! And if a peseta equals sixpence—” he ran out of breath again. “To sleep on!” he yelled, as they crossed the tracks.

  “Drew is lovely,” said Helen. “So cheap, so clean—he’s almost sold me one.” She laughed.

  “I suppose that really was a government plane,” said Olive softly. There was somebody calling them from behind. Olive turned. “Oh, God,” she said, “one of the bitches!”

  “Wait for me,” called the one in the red blouse, running prominently up the street, her breasts shaking. “Are you going to see the church?—I’ve been wanting to see the church all day.”

  “I didn’t like to go alone,” she gasped, as she drew up to them.

  They turned into the main street, where shadows were beginning to fill the doorways. The loud radio could be heard, turned on full blast in the café. A car, loaded with guns, initialed C.N.T., F.A.I., came down the street, its horn shouting, three times, pause, three times. The air was darkening.

  The shell of the church stood, new yellow-brick walls darkened by smoke. A wooden beam, fallen just inside the portal, was not yet completely burned. A strand of smoke turned in the air, rising, issuing up, pointing at the inscription, cut in stone, “The house of God is the gate of heaven.” Rags of red and gold cloth littered the steps. Within the arch of the portal was the arch of the stained-glass window over the shattered altar. The glass had been blown out by the explosion, and the blue sky was, through it, grotesque and untouched.

  “I don’t suppose there are many whole churches in Spain tonight,” said the bitch fatuously.

  “See the rope!” Olive’s hand was tight. Helen turned. There it lay, broken across the street, looking more like a guard against a fire area than like a boundary. Did they feed Fascists across a taut rope?

  The sullen air touched them. The dusk became feverish and volcanic. A few houses down, some boys with guns were hammering against a door.

  “Let’s get going,” proposed the bitch.

  They started down the main street. As they passed the door hurriedly, they could see the scars of the gun-butts that were ramming against it. It was a heavy brown door, carved. The building might be a parochial school, or the storehouse of an absentee landlord.

  The bitch was looking the boys up and down. “They stare at you in such a funny way,” she observed, lasciviously.

  Olive lost her temper, made a sound of dismissal, and walked faster. “Well,” said the bitch, “maybe you haven’t found it to be true; but—”

  Two boys stood over a large doll. One of them looked at it angrily. The street was quiet except for the hammering of the gun-butts on the door. The boy took the doll by the legs and threw it savagely on the sidewalk. Its head cracked open with a loud report. One of the legs tore loose. The other boy picked it up, laughed, and raised it over his head, whirling it. Behind them, the hammering was faster, and a sound of splintering.

  Th
ey broke into a half-run, and stopped at the turning. Helen felt foolish. “Don’t . . . let’s,” she said, “if we go fast, that’s enough.” They hurried down to the tracks. Two soldiers were at the crossing. The uniforms were back, the attractive olive strapped with yellow. But the army! The soldier smiled as they approached. “Guardia Civil,” one called in reassurance. He was fair, and his teeth were lightning-white against his skin.

  “Handsome,” muttered the bitch.

  A shot was fired.

  A young girl, walking along the ties, crossed herself.

  Evening was closing down perilously fast, now.

  It was only the second night. As if she had watched the passage of seasons, with the deepening, Helen thought, I know what is going to come now. I know a little of what is going to come.

  The color deepened, melodiously, melodiously.

  . . . SHALL BE THE HUMAN RACE.*

  A thin tan dog ran across the tracks.

  There, the wagon marked LLET was pouring, while women stood with pails.

  Helen began then to be very thirsty. “I want some of that milk,” she said.

  “You have nothing to put it in,” said the bitch.

  Do I need something? thought Helen.

  “It’s not pasteurized,” Olive observed.

  “Wait, we’ll have dinner.”

  “Here comes Peter.”

  Peter walked over, through the dim light, bringing the other bitch with him. It was growing dark.

  “One minute,” said Olive, “I’ve asked the German to come along with us.” She stood and waved, isolated.

  How thirsty I am! thought Helen.

  He was walking across the lot, his brown head carried a little forward, his hips perfectly timed, perfectly at ease in a controlled walk. It was almost night.

  “Who is he?” asked the bitch.

  “He’s a German,” said Olive. “I like him. Isn’t he nice, Helen?”

  “He walks well,” answered Helen. It was quite dark. They all started up the street again, walking three by three, the German going ahead with the two bitches.