Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (47 page)

December 1937: Barcelona

Neither Barea nor Ilsa had any papers entitling them to be in Barcelona at all; but for Kulcsar this was not a problem. He settled them among the tarts and war profiteers at the Ritz, on the Gran Via, in a room with a balcony overlooking the garden—
where I can find you
, he explained—and took them to lunch.

The story he had told Ilsa was that he’d heard she was living with a dangerous and dissolute man and had got herself into trouble with the authorities, and he’d planned to take her out of Spain—forcibly, if necessary—and get rid of Barea. He had ways of making people disappear for good. But now he’d seen, and she had told him, how happy she was; and he would try to help them. He said. Barea was still suspicious.

Over lunch he learned more, and not all of it made him feel better. He could see that Kulcsar really did seem to love Ilsa, and want to protect her even if he could no longer possess her; and he began to wonder if Kulcsar’s imperious brusqueness didn’t compensate for a sort of vulnerability. He didn’t, for example, know how to ask their waiter nicely to go and find them some hard-to-come-by cigarettes: instead he was rude and peremptory, and the waiter just shrugged at him. But when Barea interceded, and made soothing small talk with the waiter, who then conjured up not only cigarettes but also a really first-class lunch and a bottle of wine, Kulcsar was chagrined:
I wish I knew how to do that
. He looked almost like a shamefaced small boy. It would have been touching, if he hadn’t seemed to offset the vulnerability with ruthlessness.

Kulcsar was also insistent, now that he could see Ilsa would never leave Barea, that the two of them had to get out of Spain.
Why?
thought Barea. It was his home, it was where his family was, it was where the war was being fought—leaving all this was crazy and wrong. And as an adult male of fighting age he couldn’t leave without an exit permit. Kulcsar, however, seemed to think they were both in danger here, whereas if they left they might be able to work against fascism in the bigger war that was almost certainly coming. He told them he would try to get them safe-conducts from the SIM that would allow them to stay in Barcelona unmolested until Barea could arrange for an exit permit. As for a divorce, he was willing to give Ilsa one; but since they were both fugitives from Austria, where the marriage was registered, it might be difficult.

For the next ten days Kulcsar hustled Barea and Ilsa in and out of government offices all over Barcelona, trying to pull the right strings to free them from their entanglement with the SIM. He seemed almost obsessed with this mission; and at last he appeared to have accomplished it. They just needed to come to the SIM headquarters in Paseo San Juan and submit to a few questions from the chief officer, a youngish man with a humorless smile named Ordoñez. Under his watchful guidance they went over old ground—who they had worked for in Madrid, what they had done, how long they had done it—expecting at any moment for some trap to be sprung at them; but in the end Ordoñez scribbled his signature on their documents, and they should have been free to go. Except that Kulcsar wanted them to see something first.

They had barely seated themselves in his office when a deep, rumbling vibration shook the building—bombs were falling on Barcelona. The lights flickered and went out, and Barea felt a cold wave of nausea, an echo of the terror that had gripped him in Madrid. Someone lit candles, throwing the room into deep chiaroscuro; and guards brought in a tiny, dark-haired woman whose wide black eyes darted back and forth like those of a cornered animal before taking in Kulcsar’s two visitors.

“You’re Ilse,” she said, in recognition. “Don’t you remember me? Twelve years ago in Vienna?” Tentatively, Ilsa rose to shake her hand. The woman’s name was Katia Landau, and a dozen years earlier she and her husband, Kurt, had been members of Ilsa and Leopold Kulcsar’s underground Social Democratic group, the Spark. What was going on here? Was Kulcsar trying to use Ilsa as a tool to frighten information out of the Landau woman, or was it something else?

Kulcsar was speaking in his prosecutor’s voice—cold, hard, insistent. The NKVD had sent him to Spain on a special, historic mission, he began: to prove that out of twenty Trotskyists in Spain, eighteen were fascists, agents of Hitler and Franco. “Perhaps subjectively you are a good revolutionary, but you are convinced that the victory of Franco would be more favorable to the realization of your Trotskyist ideas than the victory of Stalinism.” He had proof of her activities, he said, waving pieces of paper at her that he said contained “plans” that she had drawn and was planning to send to the French. She’d been spying for the Austrian fascists, also, he continued. And he knew that she and her husband, Kurt, who had been arrested in Barcelona on September 23 and had subsequently disappeared, had been in contact with the British intelligence service. Kurt should be careful, wherever he was, warned Kulcsar: “If he falls into my hands one day, I will make him pay dearly for it.”

Ilsa was sitting rigid in her chair, as if she could not bear to listen; whatever game Kulcsar was up to, Barea didn’t want any part of it. He managed to make their apologies and get them both out of the room as fast as he could. He thought Ilsa must be as horrified as he was by the pleasure Kulcsar was taking in his show of power—and certainly this demonstration of his instinct for domination, which had destroyed her marriage, was distasteful to her. But was that all? Or was she wondering why Kulcsar, or his superiors at the NKVD, were so interested in the former members of the Spark? And why Kulcsar should have wanted to make that interest, and its consequences, so clear to her? Was there something about their old group, or the people who had belonged to it, or Ilsa’s knowledge of them, that was mortally dangerous to her? Barea had no idea that the GRU’s renegade former
rezident
, Walter Krivitsky, was—or was about to be—telling all his secrets to the Sûreté, MI5, and the FBI. And he probably had never heard Ilsa mention the name of her and Katia Landau’s former colleague from Vienna, the undercover Soviet agent Kim Philby, whose history with the Spark, if revealed, would have threatened his cover as a pro-fascist journalist covering Generalísimo Francisco Franco. If Barea had known either of these things he would have been a great deal more anxious than he already was, for such knowledge was dangerous, possibly even fatal.

A few days after the scene in the SIM headquarters, Kulcsar came to bid Barea and Ilsa goodbye: his work in Barcelona was done, at least for the time being, he told them, and he was summoned back to Prague. Not a moment too soon—he hadn’t been feeling at all well and the hours he’d been keeping didn’t help—but he found himself short of cash and wondered if they could lend him some. He’d leave the repayment in an account in Ilsa’s name in Perpignan; when they left Spain, as he urged them to, it would be waiting for them. He hoped they would all meet again. Despite his and Ilsa’s philosophical differences—her belief in the individual, and his in ideology, meant they were “spiritually divorced”—he would always love her, and, he said, “if it weren’t for Ilsa, blast her, you and I would have been friends.” Barea was dubious about that; but for Ilsa’s sake he was happy to pretend.

December 1937: Moscow

On December 25, Georges Luciani, a French journalist who had been covering Moscow for both the sobersided
Le Temps
and the slightly racier
Le Petit Parisien
for the last six years, made his way across a wintry Dzerzhinsky Square. Passing the red stone walls of the Lubyanka Prison, the NKVD’s headquarters, he entered a ramshackle building next door, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, where he had been summoned to an interview with the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov.

For some time, Litvinov, a portly former arms smuggler with a staunch belief in the power of collective security—the theory that the security of one state is the concern of all—had been troubled by the spineless response of France and Britain to Germany’s increasingly bellicose behavior. He’d watched in dismay as Hitler marched into the Rhineland, and engineered a Nazi putsch in Austria, without raising so much as an eyebrow in Paris or London. He’d listened in disgust to French and British hand-wringing about nonintervention in Spain while Germany and Italy shipped arms and men to the insurgents. Now Nazi provocateurs were starting riots in Czechoslovakia, in the Sudetenland, close to Germany’s border, and Hitler was wondering aloud if he would have to intervene to “protect” the German minority there. And Litvinov (and, it might be inferred, Stalin) had had enough. He wanted to make a few things clear to Luciani—not the kind of things that could be said, formally, by the people’s commissar for foreign affairs to the French ambassador; that might create difficulties. But if M. Luciani wished to share them with the French ambassador, Robert Coulondre, no objection would be raised. M. Luciani could even take notes, if he wished.

He did.

Litvinov was brusque, even testy, about the extent to which he felt his concerns had been ignored by Russia’s supposed allies in Paris. They had allowed the balance of power in Central Europe to be unsettled, and Russia could not countenance that, he said.

Where was this conversation going?
Luciani tried conciliation: surely something could be done to remedy the situation, he murmured. After all, their countries’ long shared history …

Litvinov interrupted him. “Other arrangements are possible,” he said, elliptically. Luciani thought for a moment.

“With
Germany
?” he asked.

“Why not?” Litvinov responded. Hitler, he reminded Luciani, had renewed the old 1926 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact in 1931; by its terms, Hitler and Stalin were each bound to come to the other’s aid in the event of attack by a third party. And of course, since Russia hadn’t signed the Versailles Treaty ending the Great War in 1919, Stalin wasn’t obligated to maintain
French
security. Recently the Kremlin had “established contacts” to initiate a German-Russian
rapprochement.
M. Luciani surely understood what this meant.

Luciani understood it all too clearly, and communicated as much to his ambassador. Two days later Ambassador Coulondre sent the journalist’s notes to the French foreign minister, Yvon Delbos, along with a dispatch: “It is improbable,” he wrote, “that M. Litvinov would have dared upon such a point without having been authorized from on high, and his declaration appears to me as a sort of warning that the Soviet government wished to give in a roundabout way … If the Western powers should permit the strangulation of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet government would then break with [them] and turn to Germany, giving it a free hand in Europe.”

What Coulondre didn’t spell out for Delbos was that in that case—having used the war to keep Germany, Italy, and everyone else occupied, and having secured the contents of the Spanish treasury in his own vaults—Stalin would cut the Spanish Republic loose and leave it for Franco to finish off. But Coulondre’s warning went unheeded, maybe even ignored, by Delbos and his premier, Édouard Daladier: the ambassador’s letter, and Luciani’s notes, were buried in the Foreign Ministry archives for decades. And Spain, as Arturo Barea had foreseen, had given gold, and would now pay in blood.

PART III

“LA DESPEDIDA”

January 1938: Teruel

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the city of Teruel—as the Republican Interior Minister, Júlian Zugazagoitia, would say later—“belonged to nobody.” A Nationalist counterattack over the past few days had retaken the fortified crest of La Muela, across the Turia south of the city, and Teruel’s new Loyalist commandant had panicked and ordered his troops to abandon their positions. By the next day the Republican army’s chief of staff, General Vicente Rojo, had countermanded the order and summoned reinforcements; but not before newspapers around the world were proclaiming Teruel recaptured by the Nationalists. And then a blizzard enveloped the mountains of southern Aragon, sending flakes slantwise across the whitened fields, crippling communications and making movement almost impossible.

On January 2, Robert Capa and Herbert Matthews—dismayed by the news about Teruel and desperate to find out what was
really
happening there—were sitting in Matthews’s ancient Ford, forty-five miles north of Sagunto and 4,000 feet above sea level. In front of them snaked a ten-mile-long column of trucks, tanks, and cars, all carrying men and matériel bound for Teruel, that had been stuck in the snowbound pass for two days. Workmen were trying to break through two feet of ice pack on the road with pickaxes, and a tractor had been brought in to haul vehicles up the steepest stretch at the top of the pass; in the meantime, Capa and Matthews tried alternately driving and pushing their fishtailing car uphill, cursing as they slipped and fell on the slick surface. After eight hours of this punishment, bruised and freezing, they reached the top and let the car roll downhill toward Barracas, where they bunked for the night with a group of officers, sharing their meal of salt cod, bread, wine, and coffee in a peasant’s hut, and sleeping in bedrolls by the fire.

Although the approach to Teruel was littered with burnt-out vehicles and dead mules, they found the city itself still nominally in Loyalist hands. But the Palace of the Civil Governor remained full of rebel soldiers and their hostages, and in an effort to clear them out the government sappers had mined the outside wall facing the Turia, planning to blast their way in. Capa and Matthews arrived there just as the wall collapsed into a heap of charred timbers and crumbled stone and cement, and when soldiers started swarming up the heap of wreckage to enter the palace, Capa unthinkingly scrambled up after them. He seemed, probably was, heedless of his own safety.
Now Gerda is dead it is finished for me
. Matthews followed him.

The noise inside was deafening and chaotic: shouts and explosions, pistol shots and rifle fire, all coming from every direction. Keeping his camera going constantly, Capa made his way through a warren of bombed-out rooms, with no idea whether the footsteps he was straining to hear belonged to a friend or an enemy—or whether, around the next corner, he would find armed men or the hostages that had been imprisoned in the dungeons of the building. “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” he would say later, “and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the last minute.” Capa wasn’t the back-in-the-pocket type, certainly not now. So he followed a group of government soldiers down a bombed staircase, where he and Matthews found the shell of a room in which a rifleman was aiming his weapon through a hole in the floor. “Here’s one for you and one for Franco!” the rifleman cried, and fired. The journalists could hear moans and the sound of weeping; looking through the hole, they saw a Nationalist on the floor below with a grenade in his hand—but before he could throw it the Loyalist fired four more bullets into him and finished him off. “Rather terrible, isn’t it?” murmured Matthews to the captain standing beside them. The officer shot him a look: “But he was right!” he replied.