by John Wilson
“Have you looked inside?” I asked eventually.
“I cannot,” Laia replied. “It is locked and there is no key.”
I almost laughed out loud. “Yes, there is,” I said, pulling my keychain from my pocket. The old key looked the right shape to fit the suitcase’s locks. I reached forward and then stopped. I was excited and nervous at the same time. I doubted the suitcase contained a simple answer, so what would I find inside? More mysteries?
Laia noticed my hesitation. “Perhaps you should read this first,” she said, producing a new white envelope she had been holding by her side. “It came with the letter from the lawyer. It is addressed to you.”
I put the keys down, took the envelope and tore the flap open.
Hello again, Steve,
If you are reading this, it means you have taken me up on my challenge and are in Barcelona. I hope you have met Maria and that she has agreed to help you and has introduced you to the collection of memories in my old suitcase. That is where you should begin.
I find myself envying you and the discoveries you are about to make, but some of the things you will find out will be hard. I know they were almost impossible for me to live through. That is a life lesson I learned in Spain: the most wonderful passion can exist alongside the most brutal pain. But I must allow you to find things out in your own way.
I can visualize every scrap of paper in that suitcase, and there have been countless hours over the past decades that I have sat and imagined going through it as you are about to do. That suitcase contains a piece of my life. A piece that no one except Maria knows about and that does not even exist in my mind, now that I am gone. Yet, if, at the end of my long and eventful life, I were offered the chance to relive any three months of my life, despite the pain, it would be my time in 1938 in Spain.
I have traveled all over the world, but I never voluntarily returned to Spain. After I was shot down in the Second World War, I was smuggled through Spain on my escape, but that was all very secretive and I barely knew where I was. After the war I was not allowed back into Spain—had I gone anyway, I could have been thrown in prison or worse. Later, when it would have been safe for me to return, I didn’t because I convinced myself that there was nothing left there for me. The letter I received from Maria proved that I was horribly mistaken in that assumption, and I sometimes wonder how my life could have turned out differently. Of course, I have had the best life a man could hope for, filled with the wonderful love of my wife, my children and my grandchildren. Still, I can’t help but wonder.
I think, if I am honest with myself, it was fear that stopped me ever going back. Not physical fear, although I experienced enough of that in Spain to last a lifetime. Oddly, I think it was two opposite fears: fear that Spain would not be as I remembered it, and fear that it would be too much as I remembered it.
To you, this is probably just an old man becoming nostalgic. I hope it will mean more in time. What is important now is your present and your future, and I fervently hope that the suitcase before you will give you a tiny fragment of the wonder and passion that was mine so many years ago.
Good luck with your quest.
Give my love to Maria, and know that I love you and wish you everything you wish for yourself for a long and happy future.
Grandfather
SEVEN
I let the letter drop and stared at the battered suitcase. This was it, what Grandfather had wanted me to find. There was a tremendously important part of his life in this case, a part that no one else knew about and that I was about to discover. I felt as if he was sitting beside me, more alive than he had ever been when I knew him. But something was wrong.
I looked up at Laia. She was watching me intently. “Where’s Maria?” I asked. “Who is she?”
Laia lowered her gaze to the table and blinked rapidly. When she looked up at me, there were tears in her eyes. “Maria was my great-grandmother,” she said softly. “She died the night before this letter arrived.”
“I…I’m sorry,” I stammered. I felt helpless. More than anything, I wanted to put my arm around Laia’s shoulder and comfort her, but I’d only met her minutes ago. “You were close?”
Laia took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “Yes, we were very close. She always claimed that I was her soul mate and that watching me was like once more being young. She said looking at me was like looking in a mirror that turned back time.” Laia smiled sadly. “We both have a very stubborn streak. Even when she turned ninety years old and the stairs took her an age to climb, Maria refused to leave this place. She said that it had always been her home and that her past was here. She told me many times that without a past we are nothing more than fallen leaves that blow around the park at the whim of any breeze that comes along. Our past anchors us and makes us real. That is why you are here, no? To discover your past.”
“My grandfather’s past,” I said.
“It’s the same,” Laia said with a shrug. “The past does not begin when you are born. It is a line, a thread that winds back through your parents, grandparents and all your ancestors. You live in Canada?”
I nodded.
“Then at some time an ancestor of yours stepped onto a boat in the Old World to seek a better or a freer life in the New World. He or she is a part of you, just as the Moors who ruled this country a thousand years ago are a part of me.”
Laia sipped her coffee. “But listen to me go on. We have just met and already I am lecturing you as if we were in a class at the university. It is a failing of mine. I have no brothers or sisters and no interest in the dancing and parties that my school friends find so entertaining, so I spend my time with books. They are very good companions, but not so good at conversation.”
“It’s okay,” I said hurriedly. In truth, under normal circumstances, I would happily have sat all day listening to this girl talk endlessly about anything she wished, but my eyes drifted to the suitcase.
Laia noticed my glance. “But the past you seek is much more recent.”
I pulled the suitcase closer and reached forward with the key. Laia placed her hand on top of mine, halting the movement. “I don’t know what you will find in here. I know it is very important to you, but I also know it was very important to my greatgrandmother. One night, as a child, I came through to get a glass of milk and found Maria sitting at this table, just as we are now, staring at the suitcase. In all the years of keeping it, she never opened it, but I suspect that there is a piece of her past, and mine, in here as well.”
“Then we’ll discover it together,” I said.
Laia squeezed my hand and then released me. With the skin of my hand still tingling from her touch, I fitted the key into the lock and turned it. There was a soft click, and the silver latch sprang up. I repeated the process on the other side and, with a quick look at Laia, lifted the lid.
I don’t know what I expected to find. With all the mystery, Laia’s talk of the importance of the past, and the weird jet-lagged feeling that I was somewhere else on a different day, nothing would have surprised me. What we found ourselves staring at was a collection of yellowed newspaper cuttings, a crumpled, dirty red scarf, a brown dog-eared pamphlet entitled Spain in Arms 1937, a shapeless piece of black metal about the length of my thumb and a khaki beret with a red enamel star pinned to it.
I picked out the lump of metal and turned it over in my hand. It was heavy and obviously part of something much larger, but there was nothing written on it to say what that might have been. I looked at Laia, and she shrugged. I placed the metal to one side and reached for the beret. It was filthy and tattered and didn’t look much like something someone would come halfway around the world to find. It felt as if it would crumble to dust in my hand. “Was this my grandfather’s?”
“Maybe. It is very old, and the red star was the symbol of the Communists in the war.”
Laia reached in and pulled out the red scarf. “I think this was Maria’s.” The scarf was simply a large, square handkerchief. It wa
s frayed along the edges and one corner was torn off. Laia lifted it to her nose. She closed her eyes and spoke softly. “Maria was sixteen when the war broke out in 1936. There was much fighting in the streets of Barcelona in those first days, between the army and the people. Some fighting was nearby on the Ramblas, and Maria once showed me where the streets were barricaded. It is still possible to see chips in the old bricks where bullets struck.”
Laia lowered the scarf and stared at it. “Maria took messages between the different barricades. No one had any uniforms in those days, so she was given a red scarf to wear round her neck to show that she was one of the people and not a Fascist.”
A sudden thought struck me. I put the beret down and reached for the travel pouch that hung around my neck under my shirt. As Laia looked on with a puzzled expression, I pulled out my passport and took the old photograph from inside the back cover. “You look very like her,” I said, passing the picture over.
Laia gasped. “That’s her. I’ve only ever seen pictures of her when she was older. Everything was lost from that time.” She reached out and gently touched the surface of the photograph as if she could make contact with the smiling young woman standing in the doorway. Her finger slid over to the young man. “Is that your grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“When was the photograph taken?”
“In 1937 or ’38, I think.”
Laia nodded. “Maria would have been seventeen or eighteen. Look,” she said, pointing at the young Maria’s neck. “Do you think that could be this scarf?”
“It’s hard to tell from a black-and-white photograph, but it’s possible.”
Laia stared for a long moment at the photograph. “He looks like a nice young man, your grandfather,” she said eventually. “They look so happy.”
“They do,” I agreed. “And Maria was very beautiful.”
“But we must get on,” Laia said, handing me back the photograph.
We almost bumped heads reaching forward to retrieve the next item from the case. I pulled back, flustered. Laia laughed lightly and lifted the pamphlet out. The cover was dark orange and made of cheap creased cardboard. It showed a charcoal sketch of a determined-looking man holding a rifle and running forward. The title, Spain in Arms 1937, was at the top and the author’s name, Anna Louise Strong, at the bottom, along with the price, 25c. Laia examined it and passed it over to me.
The pamphlet was more a small book, over eighty pages long, and it smelled musty. I thumbed through it, looking at the chapter headings: Heroic Madrid, Front Trenches, The International Brigades. Someone—Grandfather?—had underlined sections in blue pen. Most had no comment, but one caught my eye. Underlined was, I would rather die stopping fascism in Spain than wait until it comes to Britain. In the margin beside it, someone had scrawled or Canada!
As I reached the back of the small book, a folded page fell out. It was so cracked along the fold and stained and worn that large pieces were unreadable, but it seemed to be a small poster advertising a meeting in Toronto in 1937. The headline was Stop the Bloody Hands of Fascism in Spain, and it had been distributed by the Communist Party of Canada.
While I was looking at the book, Laia had been gently lifting out the first few newspaper cuttings. Some were in English and some in Spanish. One was the front page of the New York Times for July 18, 1936, with the headline, Spain Checks Army Rising in Morocco.
Laia pointed to a clipping from a Spanish paper called El Diluvio. Most of the page was taken up with huge black letters that screamed NO PASARAN! “That was the slogan from the defense of Madrid in the first months of the war,” she explained. “It means They Shall Not Pass.”
Silently and carefully we lifted the last of the cuttings out. All were about Spain and all were dated 1936 through 1938. Underneath them was a colored poster, the same size as the bottom of the suitcase. It showed old-fashioned biplanes with garish red stars painted on the sides, flying in formation over a muscular arm ending in a clenched fist.
It was all very interesting, but I was disappointed. The beret and the scarf were links to the young couple in the photograph, but they couldn’t tell us a story. The book and the newspapers could tell a story, but it was one I had mostly discovered on my computer at home. How did all this help my quest? Laia reached in and lifted out the poster. She began to translate the Spanish slogan below the raised fist, but I wasn’t listening. The poster wasn’t the last thing in the suitcase.
The book at the bottom of the suitcase was thin and not much bigger than my passport. It was covered in plain brown leather, worn at the corners and heavily stained. One particularly large stain spread darkly out from one corner over almost a third of the cover. As I reached for the book, Laia looked up from the poster. “What is it?”
The leather cover was stiff with age. I opened it to the first page. The paper was very thin and, unlike the newspapers, hadn’t yellowed. The page was covered with closely spaced lines of writing that made me draw in a sharp breath. The writing was neater, but there was no mistaking my grandfather’s hand.
JUNE 15, 1938
Here I am at last, standing on the Spanish earth. My dream is coming true! All the months I have spent reading about the struggles of the Spanish people against the rich, self-interested landowners, the blood-soaked hands of the Church and Franco’s brutal war machine have led here. What better time to begin a journal?
At last I can do something. Even if my government is happy to sit complacently and watch or, even worse, help Franco, Hitler and Mussolini crush all freedom under the iron heel of Fascism, I am not. I will fight and, if necessary, die beside my comrades from Canada and all around the world, to see the Spanish people freed from tyranny and Fascism stopped in its tracks.
NO PASARAN!!!!!!
This won’t do. I have just read back what I have written. Why is it that the thoughts I truly and passionately believe in seem so stilted and preachy in black and white on the page? I want to tell everything of the adventure I am beginning, but I will do it in two ways. I shall collect newspaper cuttings and anything else that will tell the broader picture, and I shall reserve these pages for my personal story. There will be no more lecturing from me.
I doubt I shall be able to write every day. Some days will probably be too busy, and in any case, this is a small volume in which to record everything. I shall, however, jot down thoughts and significant events as they occur and as I find time.
First, where am I? I am sitting in the dust beside a rough road in the foothills of the Pyrenees, waiting for a truck to take us to Barcelona. From there we will join our units in the International Brigades for training. I shall join the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the XVth Brigade.
Dawn is brightening the clouds to the east, but the air is still chill. My comrades and I have spent the night climbing and scrambling over mountain passes from France, terrified that every dislodged rock will alert a border guard who will turn us back, or worse, open fire. But we made it.
We are eight in number, myself and another Canadian called Bob, three Americans from New York, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German escaping Hitler’s regime. We are all exhausted by the night’s journey, and all except me are trying to catch a few minutes’ sleep. I can’t; it’s all too exciting.
An old man—a peasant with ragged clothes, wooden clogs and an unbelievably weather-beaten face—has just walked past along the road. As he drew level, he turned, raised a clenched fist and greeted us with “Salud.” Only our guide, Pedro, and I were awake enough to respond.
I can hear the rumbling of our truck in the distance, and Pedro is waking my colleagues. I shall continue this when I have a chance.
EIGHT
Laia coughed softly, dragging me back to the present. “It’s Grandfather’s journal,” I said. “He began it the morning after he and some others walked over the Pyrenees. He was on his way to join the other Canadians who were fighting in the Fifteenth International Brigade.”
I let my hand slide gent
ly over the words on the page. “He wrote me and my cousins letters before he died. He wrote the way he talked, and reading them was like he was still alive. This is different. He sounds so young and enthusiastic, but old somehow too. I guess that’s how people wrote back then.”
“It is a voice from a different time,” Laia said. “He was young, just like Maria, but he must have had much enthusiasm—and courage—to bring him all the way here from Canada.” Laia shook her head in wonder. “They were the same age as us and they were in a war. Perhaps young people grew up more quickly in those days.”
“I guess they had to,” I said. “And I thought coming here on my own to look for Grandfather’s things was a big adventure.”
“Is this what he wished you to find?”
“I think so.”
“Good, but I do not think you should read the whole journal right now. I know some things that might help you understand better, and I have an idea.” Laia glanced up at a large clock across from us. “But we have been here a long time. Do you like pizza?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised by the sudden change in topic.
“Good,” Laia said. “I know a place on the Ramblas that will interest you.” She stood up. “Shall we go?”
“Sure,” I replied, standing. I looked at the clock. It was after eleven and I had eaten only the pastry since yesterday. “Pizza sounds awesome.”
Laia smiled. “On the way, I shall show you some history.”
“You speak very good English,” I said as we walked along narrow streets between ancient buildings that seemed to be reaching above us to block out the narrow strip of blue sky.
“Thank you. Maria spoke a little English—perhaps she learned from your grandfather—and she taught me when I was small. My mother insisted I take English in school. She said it was the language of the computer, the Internet, and that speaking it would open up more opportunities for me. I spent a summer in England and an English boy spent a summer with us, so I had plenty of practice. And I love languages. I speak Spanish, Catalan, English, some French, even a little bit of Latin, but I don’t get to use that much.”
