The Communist's Daughter

by Dennis Bock

  Wars never go hungry. There were always new men coming to this one—Americans, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Italians, Canadians, Britons, Dutch, each man committed to defending the legally elected government of the Spanish Republic. The war attracted the intellectuals of the world, of all classes and professions. Foreign professors fought shoulder to shoulder with local farmers. In village squares throughout the country men gathered to collect a rifle and armband and listen to an oration by a town leader, or perhaps a radio address, and organized themselves into units, and all the while believed their numbers and weapons and brotherhood were sufficient. They were moved forward singing and hopeful to meet with their brothers, whom they would assist and from whom they would inherit the worst of the fighting, and the capital would quickly enough hear of their gallantry and from tavern to tavern up and down the land their names might spread. One evening it would slip under a creaking old door back home and alert a sister or mother or father, pride and overwhelming gratitude filling the house like the arrival of a new baby, neighbours hearing of how well the boy had done in the fighting. Such thoughts were harboured in many a chest as men sat in trenches only two hundred yards distant from those who would kill each and every one of them if they should be so lucky.

  *

  It is late. In under four hours I will be back in the operating theatre and I will now try to sleep. But let me leave you with this thought: I wonder if, in time of war, anything can be as vivid as the imagination, anything so clear and riveting as a man’s thoughts at the moment he draws his last breath. It has sharpened my own, I can say that, even through this exhaustion. I saw it over and over again in Spain—not those thoughts, no, but the men those thoughts inhabit or haunt. The imagination journeys longest when the body is tense with fear, when someone unseen lies in wait. It dreams of a moonlit dance and melancholy loves and gathers meaning and significance where before there was none. A spontaneous word, a wisp of hair—in normal life a moment gone almost before it was fully noticed. Yet only a short drive north, scattered over miles of front line and dead-dog gullies and scrub deserts of sharp mountainous terrain, the silent dreams of men took wing. It is in the silence hanging over the land that you find what is worth fighting for. Sainthoods are here for the taking.

  *

  Early July. The sound of insects fills the sky. China seemed a lovely country today, and so, too, on this night. We had a beautiful afternoon and early evening, and the darkness now chatters with an abundance of life that remains hidden until dark falls and then, all of a sudden, surprises you with its forceful insistence. I’m watching the faintest streak of orange-red sunset retreat beyond the eastern face of the Wu-t’ai Mountains. It is a spectacular drama—the light crawls back over miles of rock in the space of time it takes me to write this sentence. From here it’s half the length of my forefinger, yet it holds within its embers the light of millions of years. That will give you a sense of the size of this country and the small place we occupy in it.

  We have moved shop to General Nieh’s headquarters in Wutaishan. General Nieh is the Divisional Commander of the Communist Eighth Route Army, one of the key military forces in this war against the Japanese. Conditions are generally better here than up in Shensi, where we spent some miserable weeks this past winter. General Nieh is a fine man and spares no effort in securing what medical supplies and funding he is able to for me and my assistants. I still have great concerns regarding the lack of trained medical staff. I have been sending letters back home, hoping to raise awareness, because we need all the attention we can get. Today I finished an article for The Manchester Guardian. Ho will send it tomorrow. With its proceeds I intend to reduce for the Chinese the burden of keeping me on, though I claim no more rations than anyone else. How I would like to pay my way! Every cent counts.

  We are presently camped at the edge of a small stream whose name Mr. Tung, my translator, told me, but I’ve forgotten it. I find its splashing calming after these last few terrible days. I have dark circles under my eyes and am no more than skin and bone. I am told to rest more. Of course I should. This is because my nerves are showing. God help these people! The Chinese are too polite and obedient to say anything to me. They are a deferential race in the extreme but all so incredibly devoted to our work that it pains me when I’m short with them and bully them perhaps a little more than is necessary. Each man and woman pulls his or her own weight and then some. I should be grateful for that. Yet I push and push and push. It’s uplifting and gratifying to see how much they give, but often I am too forceful and too angry. Nerves and exhaustion and a short temper by nature, I suppose, and these late nights with you, though you’re scarcely to blame for that! Well, this trickling stream helps. Anyway, we are hunkered down here with time enough, it seems, to return to the story I want to tell you.

  Why am I writing? I’m so very busy, and I ask myself this question night after night. I ask it now. I know it is not to spout political slogans for you or to claim idealistic affiliations. None of those may make any sense to you by the time you read this. They’re just words, after all, and I’m aware that words change or lose their meaning. What do you think, for example, when I write the words “justice” and “society” and “democracy”? They are often used these days, and so they should be. But will they mean anything to you twenty or forty years on? Probably not, and maybe that’s for the better. Maybe there will no longer be any need of them. Maybe we will have accomplished what we set out to do. When my dear old mother raised me we had no such words. She said only, Do unto him, Norman, as you would have him do unto you. You see how complicated this has become?

  I remember thinking this on a particular day in Montreal. I had just returned home from a full night and day at Sacre-Coeur Hospital. Not long out of my marriage, I passed before the hallway mirror and glimpsed a tired and conflicted man. I was taken with the desire to examine my heart. Do unto him, I thought. The odd thing was that I didn’t know what it was I was in need of. I saw traces of my wife, Frances, wherever I looked. A portrait of her I had painted during our days in Detroit. A novel I had read aloud to her years before. An old Eaton’s chair, worn, comfortable and entirely out of place. I found blame and regret in each of these, but no connection to myself. Soon, too exhausted to continue, I switched on the shortwave radio hoping to catch the opera from London and thus calm myself before bed. Do unto him, I thought, as you would have him do unto you. This seemed to me a baffling riddle.

  But the signal did not come clear. I picked up the crackling transmitter, shifted it, shook it, held it upside-down. I practically stood on my head to get a proper sound out of that rickety old box. In fact I put myself into all sorts of contortions trying to coax the signal but still nothing came through, just a crackling, hissing blur. Do unto him, I thought. Finally I leaned out the window, hoping this might help, and it was then that I heard through the background noise the terrible news of war in Spain.

  *

  Tonight I am thinking about your mother and that morning she and I emerged from those tunnels. It was almost as if the war had ended for me, as if the world had changed, for the better, as well as something inside me. Soon, when I could manage, between surgeries in various neighbourhoods and trenches and running the administrative affairs at the clinic, we began sharing our nights together in hotel rooms not far from where those bombs had first driven us underground.

  We stayed at the Hotel Santander, a fourth-floor pension with a lift that sank noticeably when you stepped into it, then creaked and popped as the cables over your head dragged you up through the building’s sour old innards. The pension smelled of the woodsmoke that rose from the chimneys in the neighbourhood, of bleach, of the lentils brewing in the family kitchen down the hall where a radio played most of the day behind a beaded curtain. It smelled of hand-rolled cigarettes, of oil paints and turpentine and of coffee brought up from the bar downstairs.

  In the morning we would walk east on Huertas or on Cervantes Street to t
he Plaza Cánovas del Castillo, where we’d part with a discreet touch. Smiling, I’d walk past sandbagged fountains, uprooted cobblestones, blown-out buildings. I was a man in love. I remember your mother’s scent following me as I joined the bustle along the Paseo del Prado and then slipped into the quiet Retiro Park to walk past its shimmering, steaming ponds, among its trees and morning strollers, thinking what a gift the world was to those who chose to see, and up I walked to the Crystal Palace and Vergara Street on the other side of the park, where the clinic and its empty bottles and cold syringes awaited me.

  Early in March your mother had taken the paints and brushes and canvas from one of the studios at the Prado where the restorers had worked before the war began. That month the fighting at the western fringes of the city went on without stop, but the city itself often fell quiet and we could almost pretend the war never was. On nights such as those she sat in the chair by the window overlooking the street and allowed me to resume my work on her portrait. She said the restorers had abandoned their work after the first bomb punched a hole through the roof of the seventeenth-century Italian Room. “No one else is using them,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Happy Birthday, Norman.’”

  I dragged my thumb over the bristles and said, “Forty-eight years old.”

  They were excellent brushes. I hadn’t held a paintbrush since coming over to Europe.

  “What about this?” she said, pulling the blanket from the bed and draping it over her shoulders. It was past midnight.

  “I like it.”

  The blanket slipped to reveal a perfect white shoulder.

  “You’d rather stick to saving lives?” she said.

  “I prefer the artist’s life.”

  She waited before saying, “Wrong war, then.”

  I found a piece of charcoal in the tin of paints and used it to begin sketching. “In what war was the painting any better than this?”

  “There must have been one. The Napoleonic, maybe.”

  “Goya liked that one. Shoulder, please.”

  She adjusted the blanket.

  “This lighting’s too romantic,” I said. “Too many shadows. Turn your head a little. A little to the left.”

  “We can’t have people thinking you’re a romantic, can we?”

  “I would certainly be ruined.”

  “So would I,” she said.

  *

  The war always came back soon enough. You’d almost have forgotten it, then the sound of planes would come over the city. Usually it was difficult to tell how many. We got a better sense when the bombs started falling. You’d hear them out there, even if they were falling up in the north end near the Estrecho metro stop.

  “Three or four,” she said the first night I took her up with me.

  “More than that,” I said.

  Then she said, “I’ll bet that’s Cuatro Caminos.”

  “I’ll take you to a shelter. Then I’ll go up there.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “It’s nothing to see,” I said.

  When she insisted we left the hotel and walked to Sol and flagged down a truck carrying eight or ten boys from one of the Socialist youth groups. This is a memory that troubles me still. They circled around, waiting for a raid, then went up there with picks and shovels and buckets and dug people out of the rubble. I told them I was a doctor. They gave us a hand up. The driver took Alcalá Street to Recoletos and turned on Raimundo. It was a fifteen-minute drive. The city was dark, no lights whatsoever, and felt abandoned, dark and quiet but for the far-off pounding in a distant neighbourhood. We drove in silence. There were very few vehicles on the roads.

  Continuing up Raimundo Street we saw a glowing mist rising over a horizon of squat buildings. It became a leaping mass of flames a little way up Bravo Murillo. The planes were gone now but had set a dozen buildings afire. There was only the sound of the fires and gas explosions and the confusion of people crying and screaming. Teams were already going through the wreckage. The boys we’d ridden with started clearing rubble with their pickaxes and shovels. When they pulled away part of a wall of a music store they found a small girl pinned under a piano and bookshelf and rough wood beams. She was not conscious. A man came and claimed her as his daughter, calling her name again and again. The flames from the burning buildings glowed off the piano top like a candelabra. The man finally permitted us to move his daughter to the aid station two blocks up Bravo Murillo, where she died just before first light.

  By then the fires were under control. The rest of the wounded had been taken to hospitals around the city. I would see them later in the day as I made my rounds. I often visited ten or twelve hospitals per day. On a side street up Bravo Murillo I saw Kajsa sitting on the curb beside an old woman. I walked down and waited just out of earshot. The old woman was rolling rosary beads between her fingers. They would be worn to nothing before the end of the war. The morning light filtered through the blue smoke of the smouldering fires. The whole neighbourhood seemed shrouded in the deep blue light of an old forest.

  I waited for your mother to finish comforting the woman, then we walked back to the centre of town. Away from there, the city was back to normal. Cafés rolled open their shutters, jewellers and fruit-sellers swept their storefront sidewalks. Automobiles and military vehicles drove through the streets without urgency. The sky was clean and pure again. You wouldn’t have known there was a war on for a thousand miles in any direction.

  That is what it was like to live in a besieged city. The war flew in upon us from the front lines and from the Nationalist airfields to the south, most often at night, but also first thing, or at midday, or at the hour of the siesta or the afternoon stroll. Sometimes it was predictable. Three or four days running the same three planes came overhead, the Italian Capronis, each marked with its identification number under the left wing. They cut the sky in perfect thirds. These were men of ritual. Other times seemed to bring no pattern to the brutality. After a stretch of quiet days the bombs always fell again.

  Kajsa found more paint. No one would miss it, she said. Occasionally she went down to the Prado to pick up the new announcement posters from the printing presses in one of the basements there. She was always going, always busy. During the day she worked with the prostitutes in the same Madrid neighbourhoods that we went to at night when the planes came. I thought you might like to know that she gave of herself in this world.

  *

  One day the room smelled of figs that she’d bought on the steps of the San Miguel market from a little old man, she said, “who subsists on bread and water. He probably eats scraps gathered up from abandoned market stalls. Maybe a few of his own figs. And he’s made happy with a couple of extra centimos.”

  “Do you deny him that?” I asked. Your mother seemed troubled, and I couldn’t understand why.

  No, she did not. In fact she’d emptied her purse into his hand.

  He shook his head, she told me. “No, no. Not that much. Only three of these,” he said, picking out the coins, “only this.”

  When she insisted he grew angry. He began to shout, “I am no beggar! The pretty American believes I am a beggar!” Every beautiful foreigner in Madrid was thought to be an American.

  She told me this as I sat on the bed eating the old man’s figs. It was something that troubled your mother more than I was able to understand at the time.

  “Spanish pride,” she concluded.

  How would he have seen her, that old man, I wondered, this beautiful “American” in the midst of all that chaos? He would not have seen condescension in her, or pity. That was not possible. Your mother was a generous soul. She stopped people in the street. She asked questions. The smile she wore, and her soft brown eyes, perfect comprehension, would have revealed that this woman’s proffered gift was a simple, pure, muted gesture. I cannot imagine otherwise.

 
“I suppose you could be his daughter,” I said. “He would not take alms from his daughter. That would make him weak.”

  The figs sat in their paper cone on the night table. In the street below we could hear the neighbourhood beginning its ritual evening stroll.

  “The street’s filling up. Do you want to go down for a walk?”

  “I don’t even remember why I’m here,” she said.

  I rolled a cigarette and lit it. “I don’t believe that.” It was a cool evening. I opened the ceiling-high double windows. The crowds streamed by below. “You know more about it than I do.”