The Girl from Krakow (7 page)

“Yes, the midwife and the head nurse told me that you supervised the delivery efficiently. Go on.”

“When you said you needed medical staff, I thought there might be something for me here. I came to Barcelona with orders to join the medical units of the International Brigades. But I am much more well suited to a women’s lying-in hospital.”
Much less suited to a frontline dressing station
, Tadeusz thought to himself.

“So it seems. I have had reports from the ward nurses about your intelligent interventions all day.” Marti pressed the tips of a thumb and forefinger to his forehead and drew a deep breath, then released it in a despairing sigh. “What am I to do?” He was looking at Tadeusz, but appeared to be addressing himself or the air. “They’ve taken away all our experienced men. The only way we were going to keep a doctor was by getting one they couldn’t use, a gynecologist who doesn’t speak Catalan or Spanish. And now we have been denied even that.” Another deep breath, another sigh. Only then did he focus on the man before him. He glared at Tadeusz. “What is your previous experience?”

Here an outright lie was called for, and Tadeusz had no difficulty providing it. “Six months in Sisteron, Haute Provence.” He did not offer the name of any hospital, and to his relief none was requested.

“Do you have your medical certificates?” Marti was still glaring. “Bring them to the office immediately.” Before Tadeusz could answer, Marti had turned his back and was descending the stairs. Five minutes later, Tadeusz was sitting in the hospital director’s office, his medical lecture attendance book and a copy of the
Journal Officiel
of the previous April spread out on the desk between him and Marti. It was the best he could come up with. It did not seem advisable to present his Spanish military medical service orders. After what seemed an eternity of study, the director leaned back in his chair.

“I need OB-GYN staff. You can stay on as long as the International Brigades can spare you. One hundred pesetas a week, meals in the canteen, but I can’t give you a place to stay in the hospital. Too dangerous for us.”

“I accept.” Tadeusz gulped.

A week later Tadeusz was called from the wards to Marti’s office.

“You’re doing a good job, Sommermann. I want to keep you. But you have to get rid of that name. The authorities have sent warnings around about international recruits for the brigades arriving and disappearing into thin air.”

Tadeusz said nothing.

“Here’s a death certificate I pulled out of our files.” He passed it across the desk. “Memorize the details, go to the registry at the
Ajuntament,
and get a new
carte d’identit
é
.
” He looked down at the form. “Starting today you are Guillermo Romero.”

“But the nurses all know me as Sommermann.”

“Just tell them. They’ll follow orders if you would try giving any, instead of always asking for their advice.” The irritation in Marti’s voice was tinged with humor. “Besides, the nursing staff turnover is so high that in three months, there will be hardly anyone left who knows you by any other name besides Romero.”

CHAPTER FOUR

O
ne night in April 1938, nine months after Tadeusz’s last visit to his parents in Karpatyn, Doctor Gil Romero was standing at the counter of a small workers’ café in the Barceloneta. It was around the corner from his rooms, on the Carrer Balboa, and close to his favorite restaurant—a workers’ seafood grill on Carrer Baluard. The café was not large, the doors were wide open, and he could feel the gentle breeze off the
playa.
Small lamps on the walls and the bar fought vainly against the warm velvet darkness flooding through the open double doorways from the street.
Occasionally the aroma of
pulpo
—octopus—being grilled for a
tapas
would overpower the sea smell and tempt him into ordering up a
ración
. Gil had hoped to see an acquaintance or two. But no one had turned up, and after a beer he was ready to leave.

By now he had no trouble thinking of himself as Doctor Gil Romero, a specialist, a
ginecòleg
in the Catalan language, which increasingly expressed his thoughts. He loved working with women and on the medical problems of women. At first he had to listen carefully simply to understand the Catalan. Thus, almost by accident, he acquired a habit of listening. This won the nurses’ confidence. He had found a calling, something he was good at, cared about. There was even some money to be made from wealthy women, often officers’ wives, who came to him to deal with indiscretions committed while husbands were at the front.

Gil knew that things could not continue this well much longer. The Republic was not going to win. People already knew it, on both sides of the Civil War. In Barcelona the atmosphere was fevered by the knowledge. Military police were combing the bars and bordellos, sending men south toward the Ebro. More and more of those who could get out—the wealthy, freemasons, loyal naval and air force officers—were leaving for France.

Gil picked a newspaper off the bar. The Nationalists—Franco’s troops, including Italians and Germans—had finally cut off Cataluña from Madrid. Meanwhile, on Moscow’s orders, the Catalan government was rounding up anyone who didn’t accept the discipline of the Spanish Communist Party. The last remnant of the POUM leadership—the left opposition—were all put up against a wall and liquidated. It was the sort of reaction to disaster Gil had come to expect. Lose another battle; blame it on the motley conspiracy of Trotskyites, anarchists, utopian socialists, and others who could never take Comintern orders—Stalin’s orders. Matters were dealt with by the Spanish Communist Party’s version of the Soviet secret police. In fact, they had help from the real one—the NKVD, more efficient in dealing with enemies on the left.

As he was about to leave, Dr. Marti passed along the open front of the café, smiled at him, stopped, and came into the glow of the bar. “May I join you?”

It was a rare occasion. Gil smiled. “What can I buy you?”

“You can get me anything but a sangria.” He was using the familiar
tu,
and Gil noticed immediately. It was the first time in a year Marti had been friendly. He decided to take advantage of the moment.

“Dr. Marti—”

“Call me Marti. That’s what friends do, Romero.” He smiled as he made his point.

“
Molt be
.” He hoped the Catalan carried the same meaning as the Spanish
muy bien
. “I was about to ask if you were a party member. I assume so, since you are director of a city hospital.”

“I am indeed. Fully paid up.”

“But if you’ll excuse me, it’s obvious you’re not loyal to the party. You hired me instead of sending me to the barracks or even having me arrested. You’ve helped me cover my tracks.”

“You’re a good doctor. And I am a poor Stalinist. In fact, I am no communist at all. But I would have lost my post if I hadn’t joined. And you?” Marti’s frankness was more than disarming. It was dangerous. An admission like that could cost him his position, or much worse.

Gil wondered,
Is he trying to smoke me out? Surely not. He already knows enough to sell me to the NKVD or their Spanish acolytes.
He decided to be cautious.

“I am some kind of Marxist, or at least a dialectical materialist, and that’s enough. I won’t take sides in parochial disputes on the left.”

Marti looked at him. “Dialectical materialism? You are a doctor, a scientist. You can’t accept that mumbo jumbo.” He drank off half his beer, looked at Gil, and continued. “The only part of dialectical materialism that’s right is the materialism part.” The thought had a faint echo in Gil’s memories of Paris. Gil said nothing. He wasn’t going to tip his hand, take sides, give hostages to fortune. The silence hung between them.

“Well, if you are not going to be straight with me,
joven
, I’m off.” Marti raised the glass of beer and then finished it off. “Good night.” Marti’s smile was genuine and left Gil even more perplexed.

By September things were falling apart for the Republic. First there was the pointless offensive on the River Ebro by a Republican army that fought well only when defending. Gil recalled its victory in the battle of Madrid. The Fascist general, Mola, besieging the city, claimed to have four columns outside and a fifth column within. But the Republican army had succeeded in resisting encirclement for three years. It was fighting on the offense that seemed to be beyond them. Now, losing on the Ebro front, the Republican government
premier
, Negrin, unilaterally withdrew his best soldiers, the International Brigades, from the war altogether. And he invited the fascists to send their “volunteers” away. Why? Gil could only laugh out loud. Did Negrin think for a minute Franco would send his German and Italian troops, their tanks, bombers, and transport planes home too? That was the moment Stalin picked to order the Spanish party to complete its liquidation of their allies on the left.

Meanwhile, for most of September, the rest of Europe was preparing for certain war over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Even in the Spanish papers, British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s flights, first to Bad Godesberg, then to Munich, had pushed news of the Ebro front from the headlines.

On September 30, the day after Chamberlain had brought peace with honor, peace in our time, back to London from Germany, Gil was called down from the obstetrical ward. Marti got up as he entered.

“Shut the door, sit,
joven
.”

Gil complied wordlessly.

“It’s time for you to leave, my friend. The NKVD has been to see me twice looking for someone named Sommermann who had friends in the Trotskyite ICL in Paris. They said he was supposed to be with the brigades, but they completely lost track of him, till information came in from Paris. Now he’s
needed
by his unit. That’s what they said anyway. The brigades have to evacuate in good order, no stragglers. That includes the medical services.”

“I see.”

“You must get a Spanish passport. You won’t get out with a Polish one.”

It was still hot enough to perspire a few evenings later as Gil carried a single suitcase and a briefcase to the Barceloneta metro stop. The valise packed gynecological instruments among pieces of clothing so they would not rattle. The briefcase held medical certificates for one Guillermo Romero. Sitting in the steaming carriage, sweat pouring down his face, Gil waited out the stops on the metro line to Barcelona
Santas
, the main railroad station. He’d never get out the way he came in to Barcelona the first time, through the identity checks at Cerbere, on the direct line to France. He might look Catalan now, but he wouldn’t sound it to the border police checking for deserters or to the French customs agents who sent back visa-less refugees with a vengeance. His route back to France had to be indirect.

An hour later, no longer sweating, Gil sat on a wooden bench in a third-class compartment, alone but for an elderly lady. She sat beneath a poster from which shone the face of
La Pasionaria
, Dolores Ib
á
rruri, and the hammer and sickle of the Spanish Communist Party. But the woman was no republican stalwart—that was certain. All in black, under a lace mantilla, her eyes moved back and forth across the pages of a missal. Evidently she had nothing to fear from Generalissimo Franco.

With only three cars, the train slowly made its way upland, stopping at a half dozen villages around Montserrat before turning north to the Spanish Pyrenees. The railway line ended at Berga, well south of the French border. There would be no identity checks on this train.

As darkness fell, Gil began to see less of the landscape and more of his face reflected back in the dusty window glass. He liked what he saw: the slightly more defined features that long days had chiseled into his face, the jaded look of world-weary—or was it worldly wise?—sophistication in his eyes, the fashionable mustache, the off-white suit of a man who knew his way round the Ramblas. It only needed a cigarette and some smoke to complete the picture. He lit one.

Gil reflected with a certain amount of satisfaction on how foresighted he had been, making the right choice at each fork in the road. Things had worked out for him. Or at least they would work out if he could escape the net being closed by the military and political police of the Catalan rump state, now almost entirely under Soviet control.

In the dim aura of its single streetlamp clamped to the side of a building facing the station—really no more than a platform with shed—Berga was a one-lane town of drab two-story stucco houses and shuttered windows. Coming down from the platform into the dimly lit square, Gil searched for a taxi. There were none—only a grizzled man wearing overalls and cloth cap, leaning back on the fender of a dusty farm truck. He was smoking a
Celtas
cigarette—a brand too strong for Gil to inhale. He looked at Gil, who looked back, and nodded.

“How much to take me to La Seu d’Urgell?” It was a small town one hundred kilometers to the east. More important, it was as close to Andorra as one could get.
I’m not a smuggler, and I’m not on the run
, thought Gil.
Better haggle.