by Dennis Bock
Was I staring up at that documentary and thinking of your dear mother when they pulled you from her womb?
*
This is how I see it. The murderers released her after that first detention, allowing her back out into the world to lead her tormentors into a buzzing hive of plotters.
The Alemana tavern was busy by nine o’clock. The pale-yellow plaster walls were trimmed with dark oak and hung with cinema and bullfight posters. The zinc bar ran perpendicular to the street, with white dishes of cheese, sardines and olives, baskets of bread covered by a damp cloth.
By now the news of Bethune’s ouster is old news. Pitcairn knows of the embarrassment. And he knows well enough, too, that his association with the woman sitting before him might facilitate his own speedy repatriation. Perhaps he’ll go to New York, where his press credentials won’t be revoked for talking with a Swedish national of dubious allegiances. I imagine his kind mouth twisting as he listens.
“I’m tired,” she says, “I’m always tired now.”
This perhaps is when she first mentions the tenacious pregnancy, the one believed at first to have been terminated as a consequence of a vigorous pace up a steep mountain trail.
His eyes narrow, the first question marked by the entrance of another trio of drinkers. “Does he know?”
“No. And he won’t. He thinks the child—”
“I’m leaving for England next week. If I could get word to him—”
“He knows as much as he needs to know. If anything happens to me—”
“Nothing will happen. Go to France. Leave tonight.”
“If anything happens—”
“Nothing will happen if you leave.”
“If it does, take the baby. They won’t hurt the baby.”
She pushes her chair back. Its wooden paws drag loudly over the stone and sawdust floor. Heads turn. Beside them sits a young couple, infinitely less complicated, innocent as birds, really, silenced by this start. She rises and walks across the room. She might just be showing now, but hiding it cleverly under a loose sweater. Her friend, the newly appointed guardian, wonders if it could possibly come to that, a woman as formidable as this embarrassed by an unwelcome pregnancy.
Then, two months later, another round-up. Did she lead them to anyone? Those men, the same bunch who’d picked me up, by now would have grown bored. Were they surprised to see the growth in her belly? The little spy Bethune had left behind. The Communist’s son or daughter. What negotiations would have ensued? We will spare your child, just tell us some names. Your child shall be looked after. Only some names for the sake of the child, no? We will wait for the child to come. Your child buys you three, maybe four weeks of life. The child of a miracle-worker, a good Communist. But you, we’re not so sure of. Only a few names and perhaps it will see its father one day. Together they will remember you. Your legacy in exchange for a few names.
*
I knew nothing of this. I thought you’d died in the hills above Segovia. I knew only my anger. I’d been pushed out of Spain. I made do with what remained.
With that propaganda under my arm, I toured North America like some tweed-suited evangelist, eloquent, righteous, unforgiving—the very picture of my father. It was my rage that carried me. I didn’t know what was happening back there. I had no contact with anyone. I had no idea where your mother had gone. The letters I wrote her in care of the Santander disappeared, swallowed by the war.
I presented that film in auditoriums, union halls, arenas, churches and theatres across Canada and America, and then, exhausted by my own righteousness, slipped back to brood quietly in the dark and watch how those scenes, so familiar, so devastating, played before the eyes of enraged Montreal, shocked Toronto, indignant New York, sympathetic Chicago. I was a huckster of ideals, nothing more, a travelling one-man circus, an itinerant used-car salesman. This was how I attempted to ease the anguish after my humiliating defeat. By working. By fighting harder.
Every night for four months I stared up at images of the opportunity that had been denied me, the place where I could do the most good, the war that so quickly became the symbol of my infamy, considering this black-and-white testimony the lasting document of my shame. And after the lights came up I would again rise to address the audience in the practised preacher’s tones that could barely contain the anger mistaken every night for my seething hatred of Fascism and a passion for democracy.
Every day I arrived in or departed from a new town. Every presentation was as draining as if it were my last, me gasping as if I breathed with only one lung. I was a husk. I wrote nothing but pained letters to your mother. Painted nothing. I stayed half drunk. Thought of nothing but the treachery that had befallen me, of the Brutuses who’d slain me with their lies and conspiracies. I brooded, how I brooded. But was the focus of the hatred that had united Sise and Sorensen in cowardice to denounce me to the Party simply that they didn’t like my methods? Imagine being surrounded by fallen neighbourhoods and screaming, dying children while your peers, these petty bureaucrats, are satisfied with nothing more than a gentle demeanour, a soft touch, the obsequiousness of an apprentice waiter. You will not find that here, I guarantee it, not in China!
There were occasions, I believed, when the audience sensed this moral panic, when, judging from the empty shine of the collection plates, I felt they’d seized upon my collapse—after the last drop of blood had been drained from my body, my lungs crushed with the effort and passion of my speech—by making donations that were nothing less than an insult to every man, woman and child in Spain and, above all, to me. And so here it was in Sudbury, northern Ontario, so close to the fields of my youth, that I was roundly snubbed, ignored and belittled by a crowd of seven hundred whose generosity totalled $22.40. $22.40! Did they know the true nature of my raging? Had the rumours already begun? I paced nervously backstage as these blackguards mingled, surely sniggering at my public shame.
What does a man do in this circumstance? Or when he’s trapped in the mud with a wounded comrade? He fights back. He lifts the man upon his shoulder and returns him to safety. He does not accept his fate. He argues for it. He fights. He walks stiffly back to the podium and berates the hundreds who remain for their petty selfishness, their adipose greed, their Fascist sympathies. Yes, this is what I did—that man I barely recognize now, whose breathless audacity shocks me still. He retakes centre stage and announces to the departing crowd’s embarrassment that Spain is nothing if not the staging ground for the gathering war in Europe that shall consume the lives of our sons and daughters. The insult of $22.40 shall forever be connected to this miserable village! Spain is not simply a war of principle to suit your caprices, and it shall not be denigrated with the small change of a panhandler. This war is being waged deeply within each of us, and for each of us the enemy—in case you weren’t listening the first time—is our darker nature, our selfishness, our comfortable denials. This is a struggle to restore man to his noble self! And on I went before that fearful, shocked crowd, ranting feverishly, and perhaps half drunk, I don’t recall. But up the ante I did.
Ship. Plane. Automobile. Each journey was the same, yet each destination offered the slightest glimmer of hope. Would it be in Quebec, or the Maritimes, in Chicago, or in the towns and cities of California, on the Prairies, or in British Columbia that the film would speak in a new voice and transform itself into a kind of love story—to set the record straight and right the wrong? I waited and each time listened to the opening, always crushingly the same and, as I was myself, unable to be transformed into something more.
Your mother appears once in the documentary, a beautiful face caught for a moment, laughing in joyous union with the fighting men and women of Castile. Is it a party? A victory celebration? Was your mother giddy with love?
And then the painting, like a man on a stretcher, being evacuated from the Prado.
The delusional rage lef
t me, for a time, in Toronto. Here I was the returning hero, a god fallen from the clouds but still god-like as he walks through the crowds and is lifted upon strong backs in triumphal celebration. How lovely it was, and how schizophrenic. Upon my arrival at Toronto’s Union Station I was greeted by a sea of five thousand working men and women who waved me on as our car motored up Yonge Street to Queen’s Park, where I mounted a makeshift stage and delivered my pronouncements from Europe. But a week later it was back to the same pleading anger, the same thinly disguised passions, the same pathetic wanderings.
And then, in January, I sat down in a hotel bar in New York with Pitcairn.
He told me of you and how I’d find you.
*
The evening casts magic over my village, this fairy-tale idyll of Asia—a spell of coppery light. The stream in the valley below rushes blindly on, its slashing music slipping up to the ears of the child soldiers who sit perched on the moist rock, its current cleansing the blood from these mountains.
Will the passage of time likewise wash the thought of you from my memories? Will the advancing months reduce these passions to shadows?
A surgeon in a theatre of war, I am accustomed to failure and the numbing effects of relentless slaughter. This cannot be overstated. Once upon a time, I walked through the night reciting favourite poems, in hopes of unburdening myself of a drudgery I could barely survive but which only hinted at the terror to come. Now I sit here content, polishing these fragments of memory in an attempt to make something of a life pitted by failure, abandonment and war. This is the one perfection remaining for me after a lifetime of compromise and fallen ideals. No, these musings shall not diminish that which is lost. You cannot fail in memory as you can, so horribly, in the operating theatre.
*
One hundred and four degrees at 6:45 a.m. I am with the Tenth Regiment. I don’t know the name of this village but do not think it matters. The bustle of men is all around. Their calls to attention have awakened me, the cocking of rifles, the march of purposeful boots. We have been travelling for some time now, two or three days, I think, from village to village, with me largely unconscious, I am told, like a warm corpse upon its restless catafalque. Even when conscious I have been too ill to admire this vast kingdom. Perhaps I should let China take care of me for a change. A charming thought, being pampered. This is a situation I should learn from. It might help me become a better doctor. At least I can derive something from these wasted days. Illness is not anything I have ever been resigned to. Its pathetic, wheezing ways suit some, but not me.
How poorly I take instruction. I already knew that. It is not so comfortable here as it was at the Trudeau Sanatorium so many years ago, drinking and smoking and riding boats on the lake. Sickness as holiday—how good that seems now in the light of memory. We sat out on the porch gazing at the dark pines every night, remembering our freedom and health, if we weren’t leaning against the bar at Brook’s Tavern. I was tended to by admiring nurses. In my frailty, as the TB spiders nested in my lung, I organized lectures and prepared to take on the world. To think of that now. How sweet that sickness, how luxurious.
*
I am told five days have passed now since our return from that farmhouse-aid station. How I miss my typewriter. The ribbon’s completely dry. Ho is unable to work his magic out here. We will have to wait for that. I miss the green letters and the scent of your mother’s perfume. In the meantime, I hope you can make out this chicken-scratch. Ho has found me this stub of pencil and a small stack of writing paper, stolen from some functionary’s desk, I suppose. Always scrounging, if not one thing then another. Now he stands at the entrance of the tent.
*
I have instructed the supervising medical officer to inform me if any abdominal or skull cases arrive. Even in this state, weakened but alert, I am the only one qualified. Perhaps I will drip this fever onto the hearts of my wounded comrades. The poetry is dire, I know, but there is something to it, you see, this suffering shared by comrades-at-arms. Blood and sweat. We shall rise again. This is not the first finger I have cut open during a surgery. I have sliced the heart out of the truth.
I am off soon to America with this badge of courage, and with my signed confession for you. If a lack of courage forces me to send this package in care of Frank Pitcairn, you will at least have it, long after I’ve retreated again from your life. I will defend myself no longer. The story speaks for itself. I already abandoned you once. And the first time is always the most difficult.
The absurd intrudes upon the absurd. Yes, acts of bravery there are. Every day for close to two years I have closed the eyes of men who performed such acts, perhaps despite themselves, and paid with their lives. I only wish my hands had been clean enough to leave unmarked the last touch of dignity on their faces, not smearing them with blood or worse. But no man is brave, not really. No sane or wise man. He is only running.
I did not tell you. When we returned from our latest tour I found the door to my house standing ajar. Sitting at my desk was the famous photographer Mr. Friedmann—Mr. Capa, otherwise known as the Shark. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “You’re not that difficult to track down in this oversized country. How was it out there? It looks like you took a thrashing. The Japs get hold of you or something?”
“You’ve come to bring the dead back to life, have you?”
He said, “You look bloody awful. You’d better sit.” He got up, but I didn’t move. He shrugged, as if to put me at ease, and motioned to the half-finished portrait on my desk. “You’re a bit of an artist, I see,” he said. “Will wonders never cease?”
“What do you want?”
“We’re not so different, really,” he said.
“I’m not so sure that’s true.”
“You don’t feel like a vulture sometimes?”
I said, “The death of high standards. You started with a good dose of it yourself. But neither of us is here for the reason you might expect. You can’t really fight a war for the right reason. There never is a right reason. There’s always something else—a lover, a death, revenge. Look at Ansell’s man, the Nazi who saved five thousand Chinese. Life for life. A noble man, you’d think, right?”
I sat down on the floor.
“I’ll come back. You look bloody awful, old man. But I’ll bet you saved a dozen lives today.” He helped me up and put me in my bed. “I inquired in Hankou,” he said. “They say you’re leaving.”
“Soon.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll be better tomorrow,” I said.
“Afterwards you won’t need your boy, right?”
“He stays. When I go, he stays.”
“I told you about my idea, didn’t I?”
I said, “Ho Tzu-hsin is not a child soldier. He is a valet. A servant boy. He cooks and cleans.”
“You know he’ll become a soldier when you leave. I will follow him. My idea is complete in this way. An entire journey is a beautiful idea.”
“I am not his father,” I said. “He does as he likes.”
“And that’s why you can leave. He could live at least a while longer. Likely he’d already be dead if it weren’t for you. You gave him a year, a year and a half. That’s more than most of them get up here.”
I said, “You will put your camera on him and wait for him to die.”
“I’m filming this war. If that is the case, then I will film it.”
“You’re interested in watching a boy die. The instant of death, and then you go.”
“He may survive. We can’t be so certain.”
“Go back to Spain, Capa.”
He said, “That war is dead for me. Sooner or later all good causes die.”
“At least we have that in common.”
“Stay here, Bethune,” he said, “for as long as you can. As long as something is left here for you.”
“There is nothing.”
“Isn’t the boy something?”
“Take him,” I said. “Make your film.”
He walked to the door. “Maybe you should get some rest, old man.”
*
Travelling these last days with the Third Regiment Sanitary Service on stretcher and mule-back, I’m bounced over this rocky Chinese landscape like a bucket of snails.
This morning I again saw him, the boy studying one of my drawings. I was shivering in my cot, soaked by my feverish chills, and he, standing in the grey light, shining like some lucent dream-creature.
