Joshua Then and Now (31 page)

The next evening he was holding forth at Don Pedro’s again, thrusting the lie dice at Joshua. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

It was Juanito who enabled Joshua to piece together the rough outlines of Ibiza’s Civil War history.

The island fell to the nationalists in 1936, following a successful uprising by the Guardia Civil. But in August 1937 a Valencian expeditionary force, led by air force captain Alberto Bayo, arrived at Ibiza in four transport ships, as well as two destroyers, a submarine, and six airplanes. The Communist poet Rafael Alberti was released from prison. The fishermen rose against the fifty men in the garrison and the island was under republican control once more – but not for long. Bayo, continuing to Majorca with twenty-five hundred men, ran into resistance from the Italian Black Shirts and, in September, a nationalist counteroffensive, supported by Italian aircraft, succeeded in routing Bayo’s expeditionary force. Ibiza and Formentera were both abandoned. The nationalists killed 55 Ibizencos in an air raid. In reprisal, the anarchists shot 239 prisoners before retreating to the peninsula. And so, when the rebels finally returned, they shot another 400 Ibizencos in reprisal for the reprisal, among them Juanito’s uncle.

There was more bloodshed in 1938.

One evening in May, as the German battleship
Deutschland
lay at anchor off Ibiza, two republican aircraft flew out of the sun and
dropped two bombs on the ship. One hit the side of the deck, the damage it caused negligible. But the other penetrated the seamen’s mess, killing 23 and wounding 75. Germany was, of course, “neutral” at the time; the
Deutschland
was on a non-intervention patrol. The republican ministry of defense hastily claimed that the battleship had fired first at the airplanes, but it was a lie. To further exacerbate matters, the republican planes were flown by Russians. Hitler, according to reports, was so outraged that it took Foreign Minister Von Neurath all of six hours to calm him down. Within a week, the Reich took its revenge. Five ships, among them the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
, fired two hundred shots into Almeria at dawn, destroying thirty-five buildings and killing nineteen people.

Before the year was out, a group of Spanish priests in exile in Liège composed a prayer to the Virgin of the Pillar:

Strolling on the waterfront, Juanito pointed out pockmarks in the buildings made, he said, on the evening the
Deutschland
was bombed. From the heights of the old town, looking out to sea, he indicated where, during World War II, tankers flying the Spanish flag had refueled German U-boats.

One day Joshua took a knife with him and buried it close to the rock overlooking Mueller’s villa. Then, alarmed at his own behavior, hardly daring to wonder at its implications, he resolved to quit Ibiza.
Taking his breakfast on the terrace of the Casa del Sol one morning, he decided to leave on the
Jaime
II, bound for Valencia the next Wednesday.

The new hotel, helped by Mueller’s patronage, had caught on quickly, displacing the Café Formentor as a rendezvous. Among the first guests who came to stay at the Casa del Sol there was a charabanc full of Americans. Joshua watched as they began to drift onto the terrace for breakfast. Dr. Dr. Mueller, taking his seat, waved. Joshua didn’t acknowledge his greeting, which made Frau Weiss smile.

Looking out into the bay, Joshua could see three destroyers, obdurate in the morning mist, rising and falling grayly at anchor. The American Sixth Fleet. Toward Formentera, an aircraft carrier, also at anchor, rocked half-concealed in the mist. An American tourist came out, sat down at a vacant table between Joshua, Mueller, and Frau Weiss, and asked the waitress, in English, for two fried eggs, toast, marmalade, and coffee. “And just this once,” he said, “forget the olive oil, will you, honey?” Then he settled back easily in his chair. An owner. Indicating the ships at sea, he winked at Mueller. “Ours,” he said.

Freiberg’s brother-in-law Max, a smuggler and money-changer of sorts who had arrived only a day earlier, emerged through the beaded door from the hotel and waddled over to the tourist’s table, cameras and binoculars slung over his shoulder. “Good morning,” he said.

“I’m not buying anything.”

“On these cameras,” Max said, warming to his pitch, “you do not pay tax. Like in America.”

Both men were wearing beach shorts and sandals. The tourist was tall and tanned, brawny, broken-faced, his smile engaging. Max was small, pasty, and potbellied.

“Hey you,” the tourist said. “Take a good look at me. Do I look like I pay tax?”

“Certainly, no.”

“Then why don’t you do me a big favor and fuck off?”

Max turned to Dr. Dr. Mueller, taking him for another member of the tourist party. “Would you like to look at a camera, Joe? They are German.”

“If they are German,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, grinning at Joshua as he simulated an American accent, “they must be the best. How much?”

“One hundred and fifty bucks.”

Dr. Dr. Mueller laughed and passed his big brown hand among the cameras and binoculars slung from Max’s shoulder, much as if he were insinuating it inside a woman’s blouse, and then he shook them about roughly. “Where did you steal them from?” he asked Max.

“Yeah,” the tourist said, grinning, as he wiped egg yolk from his mouth with the back of his hand.

Max laughed, he slapped his thigh, his stomach shook: then, abruptly, he was solemn again. He whacked his mutilated hand against the table, like a butcher flinging a fish on the counter. He propped his left leg on a chair and ran his bad hand along a scar there. “Gestapo,” he said.

Frau Weiss whistled, feigning astonishment.

“I’ll give you fifty dollars cash,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said playfully. “Real American dollars.”

Max clacked his tongue reproachfully. He wiped the lenses of a camera and set it down tenderly on Dr. Dr. Mueller’s table. Stepping back, he admired it from different angles. “You must pay two hundred dollars in New York. Don’t forget taxes.”

“Hey,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, smiling, “you’re a very smart fellow. You’re not Spanish.”

Boiling with rage, Joshua watched Frau Weiss reach over and nudge Dr. Dr. Mueller.

“I’ll let you have it for one hundred dollars without the case, O.K.?”

“How much for the binoculars?”

Swiftly Max polished a pair of binoculars. “They are German,” he said. “The best.”

Frau Weiss covered her mouth with her hand. She tittered.

“Seventy dollars,” Max said.

Dr. Dr. Mueller picked up the binoculars and studied the destroyers in the bay, frowning.

“For you,” Max said, “only sixty dollars.”

“You are not Spanish,” Mueller said.

“I am Spanish.”

“You are a Jew,” Mueller said, “is that not so?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Joshua howled, fishing into his pocket, “I’ll take the fucking binoculars. Give them to me. Come on.”

Max, Frau Weiss, the tourist, Dr. Dr. Mueller, all turned to look, startled, as Joshua hastily signed a traveler’s check for fifty dollars, added some pesetas, and thrust the money at Max.

“The camera as well?” Max asked, beaming.

Frau Weiss clapped her hands together and laughed. The sun caught a gold filling.

“The hell.” Joshua seized Max by the arm and pulled him over to Frau Weiss. He pointed at the scar on Max’s leg. “Now laugh at this, you German cunt. Co ahead.”

Dr. Dr. Mueller rose languidly and stepped between Joshua and Frau Weiss. “You,” he said to Max.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell this rude boy when you left Germany. The truth now.”

Max shrugged.

“Speak up!”

“Nineteen thirty-three.”

“Gestapo. You see how they lie, Shapiro. How they exaggerate. It’s all propaganda.”

“Unlike Dresden,” Frau Weiss said. “Everybody should be made to see Dresden.”

Joshua grabbed the binoculars and flung them from the terrace. They did not, as he had intended, shatter against the rocks, but landed short, falling softly into the sand. He seized Max by his
narrow shoulders, shaking him fiercely. “You don’t have to be afraid of him any more. He’s shit.
How did you get the scar?”

“Let me go, you’re crazy.”

Joshua pushed Max from him. He stumbled backwards against Mueller’s table. Dr. Dr. Mueller, shaking his head, helped him into a chair, and then grinning at Joshua, he called, “Waitress, the baby’s having a tantrum. Bring me his bottle quickly.”

Joshua quit the terrace, pursued by Dr. Dr. Mueller’s laughter, but he did not leave Ibiza as planned, sailing on
the Jaime II
the following Wednesday. Because on Monday, Monique and her mother arrived.

F
OR MANY MEMBERS OF JOSHUA’S GENERATION, SPAIN
was above all a territory of the heart. A country of the imagination. Too young to have fought there, but necessarily convinced that they would have gone, proving to themselves and the essential Mr. Hemingway that they did not lack for
cojones
, it was the first political kiss. Not so much a received political idea as a moral inheritance.

When John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, in
Look Back in Anger
, mourned that there were no more good, clean causes left, Joshua glowed in his Royal Court seat, nodding yes, yes, but once there was Spain. The Ebro. Guadalajara. The men of the International Brigades defending Madrid with no better map than a plan of the town torn from a Baedeker. André Malraux’s flying squadron. Dr. Norman Bethune’s blood plasma group. Arthur Koestler awaiting execution by a firing squad. Christopher Caudwell presenting his life. George Orwell, in the trenches, refusing to fire on a Fascist because he was squatting with his trousers rolled to his ankles, preparing to defecate, and it seemed wrong to kill another man in that posture.

Sometimes life improves on art. Or, looked at another way, when Joshua last caught sight of Osborne, somebody he had once taken for a spokesman, he was reposing in a photograph for the benefit of the women’s page of the London
Sunday Times
, acting out exactly the sort of item that Jimmy Porter used to read aloud, outraged, to his wife at the ironingboard.

The playwright, spade-bearded, reclined languorously on a chic, ultramodern chair. Radiating content.

In the text, running underneath, John and Jill chat.

Ah, but once there was Spain. Once, writers had been committed to revolutionary change, not their own absurdity. Instead of
Catch-22
, there was
La Condition Humaine;
rather than Portnoy, Robert Jordan.

In London, in 1953, shortly after Joshua had been obliged to flee from Ibiza, the notion of attempting a book on the men who had
fought in the International Brigades grew into an obsession. He began to sift Charing Cross Road bookshelves for anything about the Civil War. Memoirs, old Gollancz Left Book Club editions, pamphlets. He started a file on the names of volunteers as they appeared in the books he devoured or in old copies of the
New Statesman
and the
Daily Worker
. He had no literary connections, he was working in a vacuum, squeezing out a living of sorts by filling in three nights a week on the Canadian Press desk and doing the occasional broadcast for the
CBC
. Then, slowly, things began to fall into place. A piece he had written about traveling through Spain, visiting the old battle sites, was accepted by
Encounter
. He earned a stint doing a novel-review column for the
Spectator
.

In those days you were expected to churn out copy on a batch of four books, but, in recognition of the pittance paid, you were allowed to actually carry off twelve, each one worth half the retail price at a bookshop on Fleet Street. One day Joshua entered the literary editor’s poky little Gower Street office to discover a wiry figure already plundering the novel shelves, obviously a veteran man-of-letters, for he was hastily snatching up books not on the basis of such trifles as the author’s name or the publisher’s imprint, but on the only important consideration: the retail price. “Ah,” he’d say, appropriating a 21-shilling novel. “Lovely.” Next he seized another fat one, a 25-shilling beauty. “This looks fascinating.”

“Murdoch, you bastard. Leave something for me.”

Together they hopped a bus to Fleet Street, flogging those books they had no intention of reading, let alone reviewing, and then they made off for the nearest pub. “The art books, my dear,” Murdoch said, quoting an earlier reviewer, Evelyn Waugh. “That’s the stuff we want to get our grubby hands on. Some of them fetch as much as three guineas each.”

Then Murdoch asked him about Ibiza. Hesitantly, his bruises still raw, Joshua told him something about his adventures with Juanito. But he did not mention Monique. He was still too ashamed. And
then, floating on too many large gins, he found himself saying how he had outwitted and finally humiliated Dr. Dr. Mueller. Murdoch begged for more and more details. Improvising, Joshua obliged him with lies even larger.