Kanata (39 page)

“Why are you dressed as a fascist?” the man said, as if he was a famous detective. “Why do you favour a moustache?”

“Why are you an idiot?” Bethune answered, his response thankfully untranslated. So he sat, looking less like a fascist than a Hollywood actor, trying to convince his accuser that he was on his side. But the bureaucrat was filled with the hot stupid blood of war, his childish self-importance suddenly dangerous. God save us from these fools.

He could feel Spain fading already. He had lost Canada, he thought. A man without a country and without love. How do you lose a country? The same way you lose a woman: inattention, misunderstanding, the passion becoming complacency. Maybe Russia would be his next love. Russia, that great imperfect woman giving birth to an ideology. She
sat splayed, one leg wet from the Barents Sea, the other tickling Germany, and out of Moscow in a rush of pain and blood came the Communists. Birth is always a beautiful and ugly sight to behold, filled with agony. Grotesque, absurd, magnificent, sublime. The attendants in Russia had been so busy keeping the baby alive they hadn't cleaned up the mess and this mess offended those timid souls who failed to see beyond the violence of birth. Creation is not and never has been a genteel gesture. It is rude and by its nature revolutionary, but this emergent spirit is the most heroic to appear since the Reformation. To deny it is to deny our faith in man.
Though how much faith do I have?
Bethune wondered.
Less now than when I visited Russia two years ago.

His attachment to Canada had been made more tenuous by the election of Mackenzie King, an ass, a squat receptacle of indecision and political expediency. The whole country was hovering over an idea but wasn't ready to land, and the complacency irked Bethune. The world was being redefined; fascism was on the rise, capitalism was dying. It was time to act.

A
t 6
P.M
. the Junkers bombed the city. There was no defence; the 250-kilo loads sank through the roofs of houses and apartment buildings and exploded in basements, bringing the structures down. It was a lottery, one place as good as another. At midnight, Bethune left for the hospital accompanied by an armed guard. It was dark and he heard gunshots, though it was difficult to tell how far away they were. They drove with the lights off through devastated streets. Franco said he wouldn't leave a stone standing, though they hadn't bombed the area where Bethune was
staying (the Westmount of Madrid, as he wrote Marian). They would want that for themselves.

The Palace Hotel had been turned into a hospital and the operating theatre was the cavernous dining room with its high ceiling, gold-framed mirrors, and huge crystal chandeliers. All that glass would be a problem in the event of a bomb, Bethune thought. To keep the interior dark, small spotlights illuminated operations. The small points of light reminded him of campfires in the woods around Gravenhurst where he'd grown up, cooking fish over the fire.

Bethune strode in, the Spanish assistants trailing with the equipment. There was a man lying on a stretcher and a doctor gestured to start with him. Bethune pricked the man's finger and applied one drop each of Serum II and Serum III to see how his red blood cells agglutinated. The man was French, in shock, and anemic. Bethune injected novocaine over the vein in the bend of his elbow, then cut and inserted a small glass cannula to run the blood in. He gave him 500 cc's of preserved blood that had been warmed in a bedpan of hot water and a saline solution of five percent glucose. Some colour returned to the man's face, and Bethune moved on to the next patient.

He did six more transfusions and at four o'clock got back into his car, sprawling exhausted in the back seat. Madrid is the centre of the world, he thought. What happens here will determine the future for the next century. It was the centre of the world in part because they had no news from outside. What was Marian doing at this moment? The car charged through the dark empty streets at alarming speed. He wondered if Marian was in bed with someone. With her husband, Frank? Or someone else? What would be worse?

I
n February, Bethune left Barcelona in the large Renault truck he had bought in Paris. Hazen Sise was driving. An architect from Montreal, he had worked with Le Corbusier in France and gotten caught up in the cause. The wind was up, driving wisps of dust along the road. Bethune saw the first of them west of Almería, a few hundred people walking wearily. German and Italian tanks and troops had taken Málaga, and its 150,000 residents were trying to make Almería. It would be a five-day walk for the healthy, but there was no food and they were being bombed by Junkers. The few hundred grew into thousands, the strongest at the front of the line, the weakest at the back. Many of the children were barefoot; some wore only a shirt. Men carried children on their backs. They dragged pots and pans in canvas sacks.

At first Bethune insisted that they push slowly through the refugees to deliver the blood to the front lines, but it soon became clear that both Málaga and probably Motril had fallen and no one was sure where the front was anymore. Bethune told Sise to turn the truck around. Immediately, mothers pushed children upon them, pressing sick, parched faces to the windows, their bodies wrapped in bloodstained rags. A woman of sixty had monstrously distorted legs, her varicose veins bleeding openly. These people had walked for two nights, hiding during the day from the bombers. Where did you hide 150,000 people on a plain? They were exhausted, old men lying by the side of the road, embracing death.

Bethune concentrated on families. Who to take? The child dying of dysentery, the ones without shoes, their feet swollen to twice their normal size? A hundred miles of misery. The largest exodus of modern times: families, goats, mules,
people wailing for lost relatives. Bethune used his natural authority to advantage, assessing need, taking the children from the mothers and lifting them into the truck. He let Sise drive almost forty children and a few mothers back to Almería while he stayed on the road, walking with the people, doing whatever he could.

Medicine is the study of death, Bethune thought, though it disguises itself as a force for life. It is rooted in decay: gangrene's advance, a wasting cancer, the slow choking of tuberculosis. As a child, Bethune had killed a bird. What boy hadn't, especially where he lived, in a small town, close to nature? He watched it decompose, his first medical experiment. Every day brought subtle change. It shrank. One day he arrived to a mound of maggots. Then only feathers, and finally bone. In the spring, there was nothing. Claimed by the earth. Burial was superfluous. We are all claimed, we all come to dust.

In the 1920s Bethune lived in Detroit, working as a doctor, married to Frances. They had a bright, airy apartment, ate well, entertained as a doctor should. The city was wealthy and bustling with immigrants who had come to work in the car industry. When they got married, Bethune told Frances, “I can make your life a misery, but I'll never bore you—it's a promise.” She wasn't bored, and her life was indeed a misery; they argued about money and sex, spending too much of one and not having enough of the other. She left him and filed for divorce. When he received the telegram he wrote back, congratulating her and proposing marriage. Had he stayed in Detroit, had Frances stayed with him, perhaps he'd be living in a mansion among the automobile executives, attending the symphony, eating roast beef. Instead he was in Spain, tending to the world's misery. The
Depression had ground people down, morally, spiritually, and war was its natural end. Spain knew this, and Canada would, in time.

The narrow coastal road was cut into the cliffs and these were vulnerable not just from the planes but from boats that lobbed shells along the route. When Sise came back with the empty truck, Bethune chose the largest families and packed them together, unwilling to separate them. For three days and nights Sise made trips to Almería, dropping refugees at the hospital of the Socorro Rojo Internacional. A scene of unbearable suffering and tension.

When he finally got to Almería, Bethune spent ten hours doing blood transfusions and triage, and when he went outside in the night for a break he heard the familiar whine. There were thousands sleeping in the street, huddled in packs, queuing for the milk and bread given out by the Provincial Committee for the Evacuation of Refugees. The bomb hit and a wall fell onto the street. Another hit a block away and Bethune saw the carpet of bodies heave. He ran toward them, the half-second of shocked silence now filled with shrieks and moaning. He picked up a dead child. She had no mark on her, as limp as a doll. His head was filled with hatred, the rest of him deadened by fatigue. He laid the girl down and attended to a man missing an arm.

I
n March, past Alcalá de Henares, the road was clogged with mule trains, donkey carts, bread wagons, lines of soldiers, and tanks. A cold wind came down from the snowy Guadarrama range. They were carrying the refrigerator and ten pint bottles of preserved blood in a wire basket.

Approaching the hospital, Bethune saw stretchers streaked with blood propped against the wall and a man cleaning them with a wet broom. Inside, Bethune saw Jolly, the inappropriately named New Zealand doctor.

“I've got a man here, can't make out his nationality,” Jolly said. “He's not responding to any language. Hit by a bomb. One hand is gone, have to amputate the other. Blind as well. Can you give him a transfusion?”

Bethune hovered over the patient, a large man whose head was swaddled in bloody bandages. He heated the blood to body temperature and looked at the label—“blood number 695, Donor number 1106, Group IV, collected Madrid 6th March”—part of his elaborate collection scheme. “It's okay,” Bethune said. “No hemolysis.” In five minutes they moved to the next patient.

They spent the next eighteen hours on their feet, working with the wounded. That first man stayed in his head, a Swede it turned out. To be blind and handless. What could be worse?

I
am a Modern who can see a man's soul through his open wound,
Bethune thought. He was sitting in the semidarkness of his Madrid apartment drinking a very fine brandy. Writing propaganda wasn't a noble job but it needed to be done to raise money, and Bethune sat at the Biedermeier desk and wrote about the heroism of the wounded, about valiant Spaniards, brave Swedes and Frenchmen, nurses who never slept and whose touch could repair a man's spirit.

He had never been at peace with Frances, he thought. Two divorces would attest to that. They argued in bed and
were silent at breakfast. But he had loved her once (or maybe twice). He had loved the idea of her, at least.

He thought he'd found comfort with the woman from Alabama. She was married, but agreed to divorce her husband. Even when seeking comfort, he found turmoil. He must crave it. His own father certainly had. A small-town evangelist, unstable, violent, filled with conviction and wrong-headedness. There is something fatal and doomed and predestined in myself, Bethune thought. Marian might have been the only woman with whom he could live physically and spiritually in happiness. Perhaps he had chosen her because she was unavailable. Her impossibility made her perfect.
I am a solitary
, he thought,
I don't need a woman. Or a man. I am alone in the world. How perfect for a humanitarian!
Marian preyed on him, though. What do you do with your old loves?

Did they love? They weren't lovers. Her marriage was intact; this was Bethune's gift to her. But she may not have wanted that (the way his ex-ex-wife, Frances, didn't), that her love wasn't the consuming sickness that Bethune's was. Maybe she admired him as a man, as a doctor, and that was all, and she went along with the comforting fiction of their love. He was, certainly, the principal author of this narrative. If this love was inauthentic, then what? Bethune examined his opulent flat. A glorious exile. He poured himself another exquisite brandy.

He had been drinking more, and writing poetry, a bad combination, unless you were a poet. He was clashing with the Spanish doctors and authorities and even with his own colleagues. He had written few letters and so had received few. Why the impulse for solitude? Especially here, in this struggle, where everyone was his comrade, or at least had
been. Now everyone was his enemy, it seemed—such was the nature of revolution. He was an internationalist: happier with nations than people.

Bethune's colleagues had written a letter asking for his recall from Spain. He was arrogant and irrational, they said. Perhaps he had been arrogant, but it was arrogance in the service of an ideal. It was the ideal itself that was breaking down, though at moments Bethune felt close to a breakdown himself: a race then.

The Republican government was an uneasy coalition of leftists and centrists, a smattering of anarchists, right-wing socialists, some secret misguided Trotskyites, and certainly more than a few Franco sympathizers. They suspected Bethune's secretary of being a spy. Kajsa! They suspected everyone. It was a poisonous atmosphere and the democratic ideal was unravelling into a handful of striving sects.
I am my own schism
, Bethune thought. Kajsa was asleep. Kajsa von Rothman, a good name for a spy. She was taller than Bethune, wore pants, rode a motorcycle, and had gold-red hair that suited the sun. She attracted more publicity than Bethune (and without the effort he put into it).

In Madrid he had both supply and demand for blood. The civilians rushed to donate, a symbolic blow against Franco. How these communists loved to mingle their blood, the brotherhood of
sangre
. There was already a transfusion man here, Dr. Frederic Duran-Jordá, though he hadn't worked on the front lines. That was Bethune's innovation—take the blood to where it was needed most. And organize the donors. But he had alienated his Spanish colleagues. They resented the press he received and disliked the movie
Heart of Spain
; or perhaps they only disliked the fact that he'd had a hand in making it. The
bureaucrats were still bureaucrats; no amount of idealism would change them. They suspected him of spying because he had military maps. How did they suppose he would find his way around? He had photographed bridges and roads to facilitate their movements and now these photographs were being held as evidence of treason. Goodness is thwarted by idiocy as often as evil. The Socorro Rojo Internacional had welcomed him at first, but they were no longer his ally. Now the whole country was suspicion and treachery.