The Communist's Daughter

by Dennis Bock

  “It doesn’t look as if there’s a war on from here. From here it just looks like Spain.”

  I said, “I don’t know what Spain looks like without a war going on.”

  I turned to the chess game. The son was smiling widely, pleased that his old father was two or three moves away from losing his king. He called the waiter over, ordered another anis and lit a cigarette. He smoked Ideales, the labourer’s brand. Apparently, his elderly opponent didn’t merit another anis.

  “Where is that American captain taking you?”

  “Up into the hills.”

  “What’s happening there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The son was now standing over his father. The old man’s king was on the floor by their feet, and he sat without moving, his hands resting on his thighs. His head bobbed slightly, then was still. His son was talking to him, but he didn’t answer. Puzzled, he laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.

  I stood and stepped over, touched the old man’s hand and neck, then turned to your mother.

  “Tell him his father is dead.”

  We returned to the villa, both of us quite unsettled, and two guards led us down a series of winding streets to a small plaza on the other side of the village with a cathedral on one side and a small bar on the other. The partisan was standing there smoking a cigarette. He snorted, smiled and spat.

  “A drink before we leave,” he told us.

  We followed him into the bar, whose ceiling was something to behold. Legs of ham hung from the beams, each with a small cup piercing the bottom to catch the drippings of grease. Kajsa had been quiet for a long time.

  “The girl?” said El Viti.

  “My assistant comes with me.”

  He shrugged.

  When the barman began mopping the floor, we carried our drinks and a white plate of olives out to the sidewalk and enjoyed the last of the day’s sun on our faces. He began spitting again, slowly and delicately, turning his back to us. I mentioned that I’d been told that from the Guadarrama Mountains, over the hill from this village, you could see all the way to Old Castile. He said the view toward the north was of strategic importance, and for this reason small outposts and pillboxes had been constructed along this range and staffed by men from the villages on the south side. I gazed up at the cathedral, opposite us, crowned with empty storks’ nests.

  “Those old monuments are good for something at least.” He snorted and spat.

  “The observation posts on the mountain?” I asked.

  He speared an olive, ate it and threw his toothpick to the sidewalk. “No,” he said, “I mean this puta church and the old puta buzzards up there sh——ting on the priest’s head all through the day. Everyone s——ts on the priests these days, even the puta storks. I s——t on the milk. It is not so pleasant to be a priest now, my son,” he said, smiling.

  I suspected he was in favour of shooting every last priest in Spain. We’d all heard stories of summary executions.

  “It’s a lovely birdhouse,” I said.

  He smiled again, then said to Kajsa, “The men up there—they haven’t seen a woman in weeks. They’ll tear you to pieces with their eyes. Going up there is not something you want to do.”

  “I go with the Doctor,” she said.

  “How far are we going?” I said.

  “We shall arrive in the morning, at first light,” he said. “How are your legs?”

  “My legs are fine,” I said.

  “And the lady?”

  “The lady’s legs are fine,” she said.

  He told his barkeep friend to leave his mop and prepare food for us. We drank another vermouth while talking about the war. Kajsa was sipping a brandy.

  “What about those bunkers?” I said. “How often do those men come down here?”

  “Whenever they feel like it. Everyone here is for the Republic. On this side of the mountain there is no trouble.” A whistle sounded from inside the bar. He went inside and returned with a large rucksack.

  “Food?” I said.

  “Ours and the lunches of the others. We do not go up empty-handed.”

  We finished our drinks and I went inside to pay, but the man waved me away with his big hand. “Viva La República,” he said. I answered in kind, thanked him, and the three of us set off along cool narrow streets where old ladies stood in their doorways and rabbits and botas hung in shop windows. Beside the town post box we met up with the two guards and another man, all carrying carbines. They did not speak.

  We took the dirt road leading out to the main highway, also dirt, and walked for a quarter of an hour until we turned on a secondary road and followed it into the foothills where a yellow gate marked the trail that would lead us up to the old partisans who sat watching, day and night, for movement in the valley below. I wondered if there was a man of importance up there whose wounds needed tending, a man who couldn’t be moved. That wasn’t likely, though I no longer cared to ask. El Viti would say nothing. His English was good, but we spoke little as we walked. He cleared his throat of phlegm and set a steady pace up a dry streambed gouged deep into the rock. Large boulders that had been washed loose and fallen fir and pine trees slowed our progress considerably. Through the trees I could see horses on the side of the mountain. Branches overhead obscured the last of the day’s light, and the air was cold. The three men accompanying us did not speak.

  Occasionally we discovered small pools of water, and I asked if there were any fish.

  “Farther down,” the guide said, “below the town. If they’ve not all been blown up. You know, Doctor, that a Spaniard has no sport. He uses a stick of dynamite.”

  One of the other men said something, and he translated. “He says if we used our ordnance on the enemy and not on the trout we might kill more Fascists.”

  One of the men quietly began to sing, and a moment later the others joined him. It was a song I’d heard before, but in the dark it sounded remorseful.

  Nearing midnight we approached an observation post at the ridge overlooking the northern slope. We came from the west and stopped two hundred yards off, and one of the men disappeared into the darkness. Fifteen minutes later he returned and led us to the clearing where the sentry stood waiting, his carbine over his shoulder. Wisps of snow blew over his boots, and a bright moon lit his gaunt, grey face. An old man, he tried to smile but looked tired, as if he’d just been woken up or this war had been going on his entire life.

  “It is quiet here,” he said. “What have you brought me to eat?”

  He talked with the others while El Viti showed me the stone building the man occupied. Constructed of native stone and thus invisible as a man-made structure, it wasn’t much more than a cave with a firepit and viewing window and a log for a bench, but it was positioned so that everything below was visible for fifty miles. That sparkle of lights was Segovia, and, our guide said, you could see dust or flashing glass or metal from any convoy of more than three trucks at a distance of twenty miles.

  We left the man his food and a bottle of wine, and continuing west along the ridge we met more such men, all over sixty. Each time, one of our guards went forward to warn the sentry of our approach. The fingers of the last man were clawed with rheumatism, and the snow there covered the path. I wondered how he managed so high up. After giving him the food and wine, we walked on.

  Over his shoulder, El Viti said, “We shall eat something when we get to the top, higher up along the ridge. Señora, how are these old men, are they as bad as I said?”

  “They’re happier to see the wine than they are to see a woman,” she said. “And it’s ‘señorita.’ I belong to no one.”

  He looked at me, then at her, and smiled.

  I saw him wondering what the correction implied. I am with no one. To a mountain man like this, it meant, Even i
f I am with the doctor, he has no claim over me. We continued up the path. It was very cold now, and the footing on snow-covered rocks was treacherous. Yet the men carrying the guns moved easily, their breathing untroubled, whereas my lungs burned. Perhaps they knew these trails from boyhood. The path soon disappeared, dropping into a bend. One of the men walked ahead. Then me, then Kajsa. I followed it down a slight incline and then up and up until I could see the end of the treeline. It would be light in a few hours.

  I assumed the men somehow knew what had transpired. I felt their superior grins. An important doctor who can’t keep a rein on his woman, they would be thinking. Perhaps this is how foreigners are, with all their grand talk, nothing more than cuckolds. I loosened the straps of my rucksack and continued on, wanting to send them all to the devil.

  Then I heard your mother cry out, a short shriek that filled the night air completely. I ran back along the trail and found her buckled over on her knees and holding her stomach. She looked up and she dropped her hands to the ground.

  “I am all right,” she said. “Keep those men away.”

  “You have to rest.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just keep those men away.”

  Before long, she regained her strength and we took her back down to the last observation post. I left her there with the old man with the clawed fingers, then started off again up the mountain.

  *

  Five days later, back in Madrid, I met her at the Crystal Palace in the Retiro Park, where we’d emerged from the tunnels into daylight almost two months before.

  “I’m sorry about all that,” she said.

  Her cheeks were flushed. In fact she looked as healthy as I’d ever seen her, as though she carried a light within her, and I told her so. She turned and watched the ducks nibbling the underwater weed of the pond. The sun shone. It was late April.

  “I have something for you,” I said. The perfume was wrapped in brown paper, and the small envelope held a card on which I’d written a poem. She read it, and then I asked, “Do you have time tonight? You could wear this.”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” she said.

  On the opposite shore the towering statue of Alfonso XII, overdressed in his cautious suit of sandbags, looked south over the city.

  We walked up to the boating lake and sat at the busy outdoor café and drank coffees with anis. It was a nice break from the war, I remember thinking.

  *

  I regret the delay in getting on with this narrative, but I have come to Yang Chia Chuang to begin work on establishing a training school. I have little time for anything other than this important project. There is still much work to be done, Lord knows, but the first hurdle, and perhaps the highest, has been cleared: I have persuaded Dr. Chiang Chi-tsien, Director of Medical Services for the Eighth Route Army, and a number of his fellow colleagues, that within months such a school will begin to ease the chronic shortage of medical care at the front, and that I’m the only person available to make the school a reality. It is my hope that in the first six months we will prepare hundreds of mobile medical units. My efforts on the ground have not been enough, as I cannot win this war fracture by fracture, heart by heart. I understand, now, that my time is best spent educating a new generation of doctors and nurses.

  I have completed the medical text I began some months ago. Despite overwork and exhaustion this has been a time of great energy and optimism. I envision each regiment of the Red Army equipped with its own field unit, and with this school, and possibly others, we might achieve that goal. I might spend a day in the operating theatre and save perhaps ten lives. What a wonderful day that is. But now, with this program, I might save a thousand.

  *

  What is the qualitative difference between the deed done for its own sake and one accomplished for purely selfish reasons, though resulting in the same benefit? Is there one? Does it matter? I was unable to consider this question during those months in Madrid. But now that I am asking it of myself here in the thin air of this mountain night, I am forced to pause and look about me.

  What do these people do but give every ounce of sweat to the labours of survival and an improved lot for the future? Not a single man or woman, not even a child, Ho would assure me, places himself or herself above this cause. And can I say the same? I wonder how much of my life has become a drama in which I daily costume myself in gown and mask. How much of my life has taken its own course, in spite of me? I will give of myself to the last breath, of that I have no doubt. But has the actor been outwitted by the grand tragedy he serves?

  Shortly after the New Year, thirty qualified candidates chosen from all corners of the Border Regions arrived to Yang Chia Chuang to immerse themselves in the three-week course I had prepared. There they would learn the essentials of front-line medical care. By then I was under no illusion. I was not teaching the art of surgery, but my students were learning the basic skills so vitally required and so often lacking at aid stations throughout the territories. Graduates would return to their precincts with that vital knowledge and continue the process of education. It was a far cry from the actual surgical training truly required, but it met an urgent need.

  Within four weeks I was confident that the school was capable of operating without my stewardship. I was eager to return to the field. It was an unhappy addiction, these frequent forays, but of pre-eminent importance. Through that hard winter and into the spring my eighteen-member team sought out field hospitals, medical units and guerrilla fighters. We were strafed, bombed and sniped, pursued by the Japanese, and we very nearly froze to death almost every night before March brought its first thaw. Always we came upon wounded who were holed up, entrenched, and dying all manners of death—from trauma, sepsis, starvation, TB. Great numbers or simply one man, abandoned to his fate. We were received as angels of mercy. So far gone were the hopes of the men we encountered that any help at all, even if only to help them die faster, was welcomed. Under enemy fire we cut and stitched, stabilizing peasants and partisans and regular soldiers so they might be delivered out of harm’s way.

  For some time I had been riding a horse captured from the Japanese. One day, while returning from an inspection tour, I got to wondering what might have become of its previous owner. Lost in thought, I rode on, only slightly behind our lead guide. Perhaps I’d been partially hypnotized by the slow clomp of the beast beneath me, exhausted as I was, and by the thin air of that mountain altitude. Where was he? I wondered. Who had he been? Perhaps not so unlike me. Was he somewhere behind us, like so many of his comrades, eyeless, their dirt-filled mouths crying out mutely for a solemn return to the homeland? Yes, your horse is alive, I wanted to say, alive, if miserable in its new calling, and you are not. The beast outlives its master.

  I wondered if perhaps it would be appropriate to shoot it once I arrived at the Base Hospital, as if in respect for its fallen owner, but it had proven too useful for that. Spurring it on, I pondered if it was better to be a beast of burden or, say, a little monk nibbling away at time as a mouse does cheese? A horse has a use, at least, and a quiet dignity in its labours. A monk is utterly useless and without consequence. I forgave the animal its origins and urged it to climb higher. It was early morning. The light was faint, almost blue, the sun not fully over the ridge to the west.

  Near midday we came across a man alone and left for dead. The Japanese hadn’t done such a thorough job on him. Perhaps they’d left him like this for a reason, or else had become bored with their torture, impatient to move on to better things. I asked Mr. Tung to come forward. The other men kept away. I dismounted and with Mr. Tung walked over to the man. The landscape was barren. The wind, carrying small flakes now, prowled in upward dancing surges. Snow snaked between the rocks as if scurrying from itself.

  He was lying there, watching as we approached. He made no gesture, no movement, but his eyes were full of life and terror. His severed hands lay beside
him, gripped in comradely greeting. When I kneeled down, his gaze shifted to his hands and made a strange face. It was as if he were trying to make them respond. His legs were broken and splayed out, bent and distorted from beneath him, his knees snapped backwards. He would be dead in a matter of minutes.

  There was a wound in his chest I could fit my hand into, and his lungs were filling. There was no use for Mr. Tung since the man couldn’t talk. He tried to smile at me, it was an apologetic smile, then he looked at his hands again. They were just out of reach. He seemed more aware than I had ever been in my entire life. Of all the eternity of moments that had been lived and were yet to be lived, this one in this timeless place, and with us as bystanders, had been fully dedicated to this simple man. This was the centre-point of his life. This was the fire, the flame moving underground. It was perhaps all he would amount to. Whether the precious facts of his life were in any respect complete or significant, it didn’t matter now. This was the most important moment in his life, the exact moment of consciousness he’d wondered about while sleeping in caves and on the rocks of this mountain, freezing, sweating, eating gruel and starving, listening to his friends’ stories of home, he himself dreaming of his life and always trying to imagine what death would be like when it came. And now, as I’d seen hundreds of times before in the faces of other men, he was sitting patiently, resignedly, staring down over the retreating landscape.