Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  Peter stiffened his neck. The tunnel shut them all in together. “Extranjeros,” he described. They nodded abruptly, and started off.

  “Let’s be getting back to the train,” said Peter. There was only one way to go. Up the little street to the Calle Mayor, and around the station. The church was cleaned out now, everything was cleanly destroyed, the streets looked neater, the meat-shop was already open and preparing for the day.

  “At six o’clock!” Helen exclaimed.

  “Sure; the same thing, everywhere. Haven’t you ever seen the east side butchers opening at five in the morning?”

  The man was hanging sausages and waved at them.

  “Does it mean the strike is over?”

  “Maybe, although food wouldn’t prove that. Look, I’ll go and wake Olive.” They could see the English, trooping up to the café for breakfast. “She may take a bit of waking, if yesterday’s a sign. We’ll meet you at breakfast.”

  “I’ll find Hans,” Helen said. She went past Peter’s compartment, looking for the one they had found. The view from the corridor window was the landmark. She swung back the door. It had been the compartment next to Peter and Olive; her hat and coat were on the rack, flies were circulating at the mouths of someone’s beer bottles, old newspapers were crushed in a corner of the gray bench. Hans was not there. It was the first time Helen saw the room plainly.

  Young Mrs. Drew walked along the platform, looking up at the windows. “Hello there!” she called. “Come on to breakfast. The rest of the car is just waking.”

  THEY SAT DOWN in their usual places at the café, and as the late passengers came in, they took their seats confidently, like guests under a formal régime. All the women were lined on one side of the chain of tables. More subdued than before, they drank their coffee without speaking. Hans sat at the far end of the men’s side; as Helen came in with Mrs. Drew, he swung his shoulders toward her seat. She was beside the lady from South America again, who for the first time was looking tired and afraid. She did not think that the train would leave.

  “They say that the train may start this morning, or that a lorry will surely come by noon,” she was telling the table.

  “But the Hungarians have gone already,” said Hans.

  “Gone!” cried the lady, and the Belgian woman echoed her.

  “What’s that?” the man in Coffee-and-Tea asked, coming in. One of the young ladies was with him. “What’s that?” he repeated officiously. He was looking very well set up, and stared at the platinum hair continually with a patronizing look of ownership.

  “Something will follow it,” said Hans, repeating the news for his benefit.

  “That’s what we heard during the night,” said the lady.

  “Were you well off in the school?” Helen asked.

  “On the benches, with those gunnysacks?” the lady laughed. “The bench tied itself into wooden knots under me all night—it’s a wonder I missed the lorry, I can’t say I slept though!”

  Peapack came in with the professor, and the rest of the chorus. They had left out any attempt at makeup, and looked oddly fresh and English. The morning around them still kept its clear, water-quiet quality, although bright light penetrated every crack, and the heat was rising.

  The manager was putting the pale coffee and glasses of milk on the table. Coffee-and-Tea was asking for rolls.

  “Do you notice,” he said to the rest of the table, “that they’re not bleeding us? I should’ve thought there’d be a rise in food prices immediately. After all, we’re foreigners.”

  “And they’re afraid of a shortage,” said Helen. She thought of the goats and rabbits she had seen. “Even though it’s not immediate.”

  Coffee-and-Tea went on. The young lady admired. “I mean, there’s no profiteering,” he explained. “The prices are just where they always were. And they could have asked any price from us. In our predicament! Why, do you know, we’re better off here—why, we’re living here for nothing and in a hotel, I wager they’d—”

  Hans cut in. “It’s a criminal offense,” he said, in German. “I was speaking to the mayor. No prices are allowed to move a centime during the state of war.”

  “What’s that?” the lady translated.

  Peapack looked up from her roll. “But nobody would know what they did, way out here in the country,” she mumbled, and went back to her food.

  “That’s what I mean,” said the Belgian woman in a cracked voice. “Anything can happen to us here, and nobody would know!”

  The table was silent.

  Peter and Olive came in, found places at the far end, ordered, and were already eating before there was anything else said. Then, all together, Hans was explaining to the Belgian woman how wrong she was, Helen and Olive speculated about the truck, the professor was outlining a plan for pooling all the money on the train that evening. The chorus had no cash left, and everyone was begging to borrow from the few who had changed their money at the border.

  “Of course, let’s pool!” said Peter. “On the same principle that the young ladies should stage a rehearsal, if only on that!”

  “Definitely,” said the man with the tall wife. “Although we’ll surely move by tonight. There’s a story I heard that the General Strike is over, and the Giral is now president of the Cortes.”

  “How does it touch the fighting?” Peter asked.

  “Oh well, if that’s how things stand, I’ve got to learn Spanish,” Coffee-and-Tea said abruptly, pulling out a little handbook. He opened it, breaking its binding. “Here!” he said to the lady. “You’ll help me, won’t you? Handy little glossary. Here—you be a shoe-store, and I’ll ask you in Spanish for three pairs of shoes: one brown, one black, and one patent-leather—”

  Terrible clamor broke into the transaction; harsh, foreign, and beautiful, a bell rang, the telephone bell behind the counter, the first bell they had heard in all that time. It struck down their conversation, turned them all toward it, coffee-glasses lifted, roll halfway to the mouth. Telephone! Then the lines, the communications—?

  Helen’s look flickered, startled, across to Hans’s look.

  Peter leaned back in his wire chair. He prepared his remark. “If that’s for me, I’m not in,” he cracked, and waited for laughter.

  There was none. The man with the tall wife forced an unlucky, stiff expression into his eyes. His glare blazed then explosively over Peter’s face. “So the lines are up!” he shouted.

  “Certainly,” said Peter to the air. “The secretary telephoned to his committee when we took the train letter to him.”

  “Even if they are,” commented the lady from South America, in a ravaged voice, “there will be nothing for us. Nobody will help us.”

  Drew burst in. He was at the door, sweater out, hair uncombed.

  “Oh, come down to the station!” he said. “A couple of men are in from Barcelona, and they’re letting the stationmaster out.”

  All their chairs went back. Mrs. Drew ran over to her husband, and started down the street ahead of them all.

  “What stationmaster?” asked Helen, in confusion. She was watching the Drews. In this moment of sight, she saw the ridge that Mrs. Drew’s heel was going to catch, and in a slowmotion catastrophe, saw her go down. The morning was changing: the hysteria here was evident. Hans was firm; the walk with Peter, even, was away from this. But here everything shook and fell in fear and increasing conflict.

  Mrs. Drew was helped to her feet. The square bruise on her knee was out and ugly, beginning to bleed. Drew stared in fear at her, and then, in a moment, was charming again, bandaging it with a handkerchief.

  Hans was next to Helen. “They’re losing their heads,” he said.

  “I’ll be in the compartment,” Helen said rapidly to him. She went on to the Drews. “Better wash it,” she said.

  “Yes,” answered Mrs. Drew. “With what?”

  “I don’t trust the water in the schoolhouse.”

  “I know,” said Drew. “We’ll use the Vich
y. It won’t sting as much as iodine.”

  “I’ve got some extra handkerchiefs,” Helen offered, and remembered the girl who had searched the train.

  “Fine! I’ll be down for them in a moment.”

  Helen hurried ahead.

  The two men from Barcelona were sitting in the center of a little knot on the platform, talking to a train official. The stationmaster! Helen called over, “Is the General Strike over?”

  “No,” they called. “Not yet.”

  She turned back to Hans, waving to him to talk to the men, and hurried into the train. The suitcase was in Peter’s room. It was lying where Hans had left it. She took it into their compartment, and pulled open the heavy strap. A shadow fell. Drew was in the doorway.

  “Never mind,” he was out of breath. “Thanks. The professor has gauze.

  “How is her knee?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s getting stiff.”

  “Better keep it clean.”

  “It’s so hard to keep it clean, or anything else for that matter. Such a ghastly thing to go through, this trip! We’re supposed to be in Mallorca now,” he said bitterly, “and if we ever do arrive there, I’m going to ask for three more weeks’ vacation to get over this.”

  “That should be easy enough,” Helen said. He looked as if sleep were the only thing he had ever wanted.

  “That man at Cook’s!” he said. “Thanks awfully. The knee is probably nothing at all.” He went down the corridor.

  Helen sat in the corner of the compartment. The newspapers were piled on the bench across from her. Outside, the sound of the crowd around the two men was growing louder and louder. Flies accumulated in the hot train. The smell of the refuse and stale provisions was heavy. She saw, as the nerve in her leg began to throb again, the boxed paragraph on the open page of the French paper:

  On Saturday, according to all the latest reports, Barcelona was calm, and as yet not a shot had been fired.

  THE NERVE PULLED and pulled, regularly, with the accent of the sentence, with her memory of the early Pyrenees frontier when first she had seen the newspaper, of the audacity of that landscape, which never could flourish in a more temperate zone. The nerve pulled with the beat of footsteps in the corridor. She felt she should recognize them; listened, and failed. As they stopped, she looked up from her corner. Hans was in the doorway for a moment before he was on the seat beside her, kissing her question still, twisting against her as he turned on his back with his head heavy in her lap.

  “The men say the General Strike is still on,” he said, answering in his monotone as if he were making love to her with words, “except for four industries: gas, water, electricity, food.”

  She hoped he would not speak of it now, if he had heard that the train was to move.

  He looked up at her, pressing his face against her, deep in her light wool sweater. “I do not think this train will go.” The words mumbled; she felt them as if they had been spoken in her body cavity. He threw his arm out, hanging his hand over the floor, swinging it in to her arm on his chest. She was looking out, memorizing the building opposite: the train would stay—that would make it impossible, and soon all the oddness would fall on them, their burden on the town, their equivocal tourist status, their condition as foreigners, having to act differently.

  “What a life we could have together!”

  She came back to his words with violent suspicion. These were the phrases that the eyes recalled, treacherous complicated fools promised their lives away and then withdrew. She knew about this. But his eyes were single minded, his eyebrows locked against a vertical line of thought. He continued.

  “First we must find our work. And that may be quite short; look how the government is winning here! If it is only a question of Spain, we may see a free republic, everything will be ahead of us.” He closed his eyes, and the line was erased. “You will not know how long it has been since I could see the future.”

  Always, return. For in the hills, again, the crackle of rifle-fire.

  His eyes broke light with each sound. The bullets might have ploughed through his eyes each time.

  “They do not contradict us,” he said, to convince them both. “I am used to them; this time, they do not need to cancel what we have.”

  Passengers began to come back from breakfast. Hans tightened on her arm, lay important and like sleep for a moment against her; and brilliantly sprang up. “Shall we look at the newspapers?” he invited politely as the German family and the two children passed the door. He picked up the sheets in the corner, assorting them, and laughed at the masthead. “Do you know where we are?” he asked. “The compartment of the French reactionaries!” He watched her. “We might walk,” he suggested.

  She said no, the heat.

  “Your leg! They told me you had pain.”

  She said no, there was nothing wrong, a little humiliated because he was an athlete, thinking what histories she had come through from her logical past, when she would have taught her body its place, and neither over-valued nor been embarrassed at such a point. No good, this does not tally, this is better, she thought, not allowing herself to think What Next? this immediate response, this taking fear and responsibility and love in one’s full grip. A defect that reminds me of a time before this is nothing, she knew, as ghostly as a habit that one falls into again after years of disuse, like her young-girl habit of wringing her hands, that would not be recognized as hers by any of these friends, or any of the friends she had left, but only by people who had made her miserable in her early youth and whom she now despised. For Hans, I am well, and soon I will be well.

  “Then we will read newspapers and be a family sitting for a moment after breakfast,” Hans was saying. “Do you prefer the first section—no, here are two papers,” he laughed. “Very nice, very bourgeois; five minutes of this will be quite enough. Who will win the Davis Cup?”

  “These are old papers,” she said. “They’ve played it off by this time.”

  “In Australia! And I am very impatient because our sports-column is out-of-date. Did you see Perry play in England?”

  He turned the page. “Look!” There was a large photograph of a port flashing with boats. “A bombing! One of those yachts that sit so gracefully in the bay off St. Maxime. Shelled! Do you know the coast?”

  “I don’t know any of the country,”—her voice sounded remote, as voices in a fast falling elevator—“from London.”

  “We must see that soon,” he said. “St. Maxime and St. Tropez and that worldly little bay, where now they are bombing yachts.”

  The taboo on any talk of the future kept her quiet, she picked up the other paper and ruffled through it. A line of portraits and a page-long story stopped her. They were all portraits of one man, his success, his passionate floodlight genius, his asylum: Nijinsky. Snuffed out, the article cried, in a rant of sentiment.

  Peter and Olive came in, and dropped on the bench. “If you want to go, there’s a Red funeral at the end of town—mass funeral. The Swiss team’s up there now. The English are collapsing,” said Peter. “Mrs. Drew’s knee. And the constipation of the lady from South America, which makes her more and more hopeless. But the professor says that the mayor is confident the train will move.”

  “The professor is a very polite gentleman,” said Olive. “Under the circumstances, I would tell the train just that. Everyone’s at the edge already: just tired enough, just hungry enough, jumpier than the town. Nothing to do.”

  “But in good company,” Peter bowed formally.

  Hans was looking at Helen. Olive noticed: “Just imagine!” she cried, in a witty voice, “during a revolution, with a 100 percent Aryan!”

  “What is that?” Hans wanted a definition.

  “You. Du bist,” answered Olive, “echt deutsch.”

  He was irritated, and humored her.

  The heat and the flies made it noon already. “Let’s play anagrams again,” said Peter.

  “Fine,” said Olive. “
Until I fall asleep.”

  “Come on, Helen.” She saw Hans’s impatience. “In German, please,” he asked, stiffly.

  “Oh, God,” said Peter. “I don’t know. Anagrams, word-games, Wortspielen—is that right?”

  “Word-games!” said Hans. “You’ll excuse me. I’ll be back Helena.” He swung out the door.

  They started to play anagrams.

  The pale miraculous morning, the rows of hands lying upon the doors, the harsh bell, worldly bay, Nijinsky, anagrams.

  Olive was asleep on Peter’s lap. As the sharp gun sounds came down out of the hills. As the little group of young men came around the corner.

  They were followed by two old men who trailed them curiously.

  There was a noise in the corridor. The tall bitch stood at the door, gasping the words out. “They’ve just taken over the mansion on the corner—that’s the Socialists,” she forced the words, “and the U.G.T. have that big place on the Calle Mayor. We saw it rammed in yesterday.”

  She went down the corridor. They could hear her, stopping at every door, repeating her breathlessness, fainter, until the group advancing down the street drowned her sound out. They were discussing loudly. One of the boys had a gun. It was obvious that they had reached an agreement. They turned to the old men for confirmation. Several very little children, the eldest about six years old, came up around them as they stood.

  “There’s the way to hold a meeting,” said Peter. “Look at the row of houses, all solid and decorated. Objective right before them— two minutes, they face it; three minutes, they determine on procedure; four minutes, all approved. That’s a meeting for you!”

  Olive sat up, slow with sleep. “What’s that about meetings, forever?”

  Peter put his head back against the lace, looked at his wife, chanted softly.

  “I love Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky is my sweetheart.”

  Olive laughed. “He always calls me names when he can’t depend on the answers,” and she looked at him with her soft look of familiarity that Helen so envied.

  “No, really. The sharpness of this: you can’t discount the bravery, all the sacrifices, the directness of method here. Even if they lose their heads, the white-hot conviction carries them through.”