The War That Came Early: West and East (39 page)

Aberdeen seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a gray granite city, as if the bones of the countryside were carved into churches and shops and houses and blocks of flats. The North Sea lay beyond. Walsh hadn’t seen it before. It looked colder and generally grimmer than the Channel. Who would have imagined anything could?

More khaki lorries waited at the station as the soldiers got off their trains. Some of the drivers smoked. One or two nipped from flasks unlikely to hold water. A raw wind blew down out of the north. Summer? Gray Aberdeen scoffed at summer. What would Norway be like? Walsh half wished he hadn’t thought to wonder.

He clumped up the gangplank onto a freighter that had seen better days but didn’t reek of livestock, Pussy still in her hatbox. As soon as he found his assigned place, he let her scurry around for a while. The cat had been very good about staying cooped up—she’d slept most of the way north. But she needed to get out while she could.

She rewarded him by dropping a dead mouse on his bunk.
Aren’t you proud of me?
the green eyes asked.
Isn’t it a lovely present? Will you eat it right now or save it for later?
Walsh took it by the tail and tossed it in a dustbin. He made much of Pussy afterwards and chucked her under the chin, but he could tell she was disappointed.

A small convoy pulled out of the harbor: troopships escorted by a destroyer and a pair of smaller warships. Frigates? Corvettes? Walsh was no sailor; he didn’t know their right names. He did know he was glad to have them along.

A name began to drift through the freighter. Trondheim. It was somewhere up the Norwegian coast. Just where, Walsh couldn’t have said. How far away from the place were the Germans? Somebody in the convoy probably knew. Walsh hoped so. Nobody admitted anything about it
where he could hear, though. He did notice that abandon-ship drills came more often and were more thorough than any he’d seen before. He didn’t take that for a good sign.

Daylight lingered long, and got longer as the ships zigzagged northeast. Walsh didn’t take that for a good sign, either. U-boats and enemy airplanes had most of the clock’s face in which to prowl. A sailor told him the last run in to Trondheim was planned for the brief hours of darkness. He hoped that would be long enough to shield them from prying eyes. Past hoping, he couldn’t do anything about it but worry.

As twilight neared, an angular biplane with floats under the wings buzzed toward the convoy from the east. The warships opened up on it right away. It flew past them and dropped a small bomb that just missed one of the lumbering freighters. Then it sprayed that troopship with machine-gun bullets and went back the way it had come.

Two more German biplanes attacked the convoy an hour later. Gathering darkness or dumb luck kept them from doing much harm. All the ships made it to Trondheim. As he had before, Walsh filed off the freighter. Pussy meowed inside her makeshift carrier. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. That answered one thing. The Germans weren’t very far away after all.

EVERYONE ON HIS SIDE
had told Joaquin Delgadillo he would march into Madrid in triumph. Well, here he was, but not the way he’d had in mind. He’d heard the Republicans shot prisoners. That didn’t seem to be true: he was still breathing. Maybe they thought he was too insignificant to be worth a bullet. If they did, he didn’t want to change their minds for them.

He wasn’t even in a proper jail. They housed him and their other prisoners in a barbed-wire enclosure in a park. They gave the captives tents of such surpassing rattiness that he would have thought it a deliberate insult had he not known they used equally ratty ones themselves (so did his side).

They fed him beans and cabbage and occasional chopped-up potatoes. It wasn’t very good, and he always craved more than he got. But he
wouldn’t starve on these rations—not soon, anyhow. He’d been hungry often enough—too often—in the field to get excited about this.

Most of the Republican guards were men recovering from wounds. They couldn’t move fast. But they carried submachine guns. If anyone tried to escape, they could send a hell of a lot of bullets after him.

Joaquin wasn’t going anywhere, not right away. He was just glad to say alive after the disastrous raid on the Internationals. He was even more relieved to find himself untortured after being taken prisoner. Little by little, he started to realize not everything his superiors had told him about the Republicans was the gospel truth.

He didn’t do anything about the realization, not yet. For one thing, it was still a newly sprouted seed pushing up through dead leaves and chunks of bark toward the light. For another, he was in no position to do anything about anything. He ate. He slept. He mooched around the camp, taking care not to get too close to the wire. Coming too close—or anything else out of the ordinary—would have made the guards open up on him without warning.

When flights of bombers droned over his foxhole to drop their deadly cargo on Madrid, he’d cheered. How not? Those bombs were falling on the enemy’s heads. Well, so they were. One thing that hadn’t occurred to him before he got captured was that those bombs were also liable to come down on the heads of prisoners of war.

The only spades the Republicans allowed inside the wire perimeter were the ones the captives used to lengthen their latrine trenches and shovel lime into them to fight the stink. The guards counted the spades before they doled them out, and made sure they got them all back every time. Joaquin had no trouble seeing why: they didn’t want the prisoners tunneling under the barbed wire. But it meant the captured Nationalists had nothing but a few mugs and tin mess kits to dig scrapes in which to shelter when the bombers came by.

Joaquin had borne up when Republican planes bombed his positions. He’d always consoled himself by thinking his side had more planes with which to punish the godless foe. And he’d been right. The Nationalists did have more bombers … and they concentrated them against Madrid.

He’d always thought of bombing as a pinpoint business. That wasn’t
how Marshal Sanjurjo’s flyers went about it. Madrid belonged to the Republicans. As far as the Nationalists were concerned, they could put their bombs anywhere and still hurt their opponents.

They could—and they did. Maybe they didn’t aim as well as Joaquin thought they could. Or maybe they just didn’t care. With antiaircraft guns shooting at them from the ground, with Republican fighters sometimes tearing into them, the pilots and bombardiers wanted nothing more than to get back to their airstrips in one piece.

Either they didn’t know the camp for their comrades lay right in the middle of the city they were flattening or they didn’t care. Joaquin would have bet on the latter.

You could watch the bombs fall from the planes’ bellies. You could watch them swell as they grew nearer. You could listen to the rising whistle as they clove the air on their way down. You could watch fire and smoke and dust leap up and out as they burst.

You could, yes—if you were stupid enough. You could get smashed or chopped by flying fragments and rubble, too. Artillery fire and those earlier bombings from the Republicans had rammed one lesson into Joaquin: when things started blowing up, you got as low and as flat as you could. Even that might not be enough, but it gave you your best chance.

Most of the prisoners knew as much. They lay down in whatever tiny dips in the ground they could find. Those who had anything to dig with scraped at the hard, dry dirt as fiercely as they could. Some of those who didn’t broke fingernails and tore fingertips in the animal urge to burrow.

Joaquin screamed when bombs went off nearby. That was as much instinct as the prisoners’ frantic scrabbling at the dirt. Odds were the thunderous explosions kept other men from hearing his cries. And odds were his weren’t the only shrieks rising up to the uncaring sky.

Were the guards on the other side of the wire screaming, too? Of course they were. Terror conquered Nationalists and Republicans with equal ease. And if some of the Republicans weren’t calling out to their mothers or to God, Joaquin would have been amazed. You could tear the cassock off a priest or torch a church, but tearing the beliefs you grew up with out of your heart wasn’t so easy.

Then two bombs smashed down inside the perimeter, and Joaquin
stopped caring about anything but staying alive longer than the next few seconds. He got picked up and slammed down, as if by a wrestler the size of a building. Blood dribbled from his nose; iron and salt filled his mouth. He spat, praying the blast hadn’t shredded his lungs. Were his ears also bleeding? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

More bombs burst—mercifully, farther away. As if from a long way off, he heard screams full of anguish, not fear. He knew the difference; he’d heard both kinds too often. Whoever was making noises like that wouldn’t keep making them very long—not if God showed even a little kindness, he wouldn’t.

If the bombs had blown a hole in the barbed wire, the camp might empty like a cracked basin. Then again, it might not. The thought flickered through Joaquin and then blew out. He was too stunned to do anything but lie there with his sleeve pressed to his face to try to stanch the flood from his nose. How many others in here would be in much better shape?

The guards wouldn’t, either.… That thought also flickered and blew out. To try to escape, Joaquin would have needed more resolution than he owned right this minute. He imagined running this way and that, trying to find a gap in the perimeter. Imagining was easy. Doing wouldn’t be. Even telling his rosary beads took as much as he had in him.

Guards came into the prisoners’ enclosure to take away men who’d been killed or wounded. They didn’t seem to treat the injured Nationalists any worse than stretcher-bearers and medics who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo would have. Seeing that, Joaquin decided the Republicans weren’t just fattening him for the slaughter, so to speak.

He got another surprise a few days later: the International who’d captured him came to see how he was doing. He wouldn’t have known the man by sight, not when the ill-fated raid came off in the middle of the night. But the fellow’s slow, bad Spanish and the timbre of his voice were familiar. “Here I am!” Joaquin called from his side of the wire.

“Bueno.”
The International—the American, the Jew, he’d said he was—nodded back. “They treat you all right?”

Joaquin considered. “Not too bad. Could be worse.” Lord knew that was true. They might have decided to see how many small chunks they
could tear off him before he died. He’d feared they would do exactly that. And they still might, if he annoyed them enough.

“Here. Catch.” The International tossed an almost-full pack of Gitanes over the barbed wire. Joaquin grabbed it eagerly. He could smoke some of the harsh cigarettes and trade the rest for … well, for anything you could get here. On this side of the wire, cigarettes were as good as pesetas, maybe better.

“Muchas gracias,”
he said. “You didn’t have to do this. You must be a gentleman.”

To his amazement, he saw he’d flustered the fellow from the other side. The Jew was ordinary, or a little homelier than that: short, kind of pudgy, with a big nose and not a whole lot of chin. “I don’t want to be a gentleman,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to be a gentleman. Everybody ought to be equal,
sí
?”

“Then how does anyone decide what needs doing?” Joaquin asked. “Once he does decide, how does he get them to go along?”

“Ah!” The International leaned forward till he almost pricked that formidable nose on the barbed wire’s fangs. “Here’s how …” Like an airplane climbing from a runway, the talk took off from there.

MIKE CARROLL EYED CHAIM WEINBERG
in mingled amusement and scorn. “You came here to fight the fucking Fascists, man. You didn’t come here to convert ’em.”

“Bite me,” Chaim answered. “The more of those guys we win over, the better.”

“You know what Mencken said about that kind of shit,” Mike persisted. He quoted with relish: “‘I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.’”

Chaim didn’t want to listen, especially since Mike hardly ever read anything that didn’t follow the Party line. Why now? “Who cares what a reactionary says?”

“He may be a reactionary, but he’s a damn fine writer.” The other American sounded a little defensive, or more than a little.

“For an enemy of the people.” Chaim trotted out the heavy artillery.

Mike breathed heavily through his nose. “Okay. Fine. Have it your way. But if you’re back at that camp blabbing about dialectical materialism when you’re supposed to be up here fighting, Brigadier Kossuth’ll skin you alive. He’ll call it desertion, not conversion.”

He was right, which didn’t make Chaim any happier with him. If anything, Chaim only got angrier. “Hey, you know better than that. When did I ever miss action?”

“That time just after you got here, over near the Ebro.”

“Oh, give me a break! I was down with dysentery, for cryin’ out loud. You never got a case of the galloping shits?”

“Not to where I couldn’t grab my rifle.”

“Terrific,” Chaim said. “Grab it and shove it up your ass—bayonet first.” He was ready for a brawl. Mike was bigger than he was, and looked to have more muscles, but all that mattered only so much. Land a guy one in the pit of the stomach or in the nuts and all the muscles in the world wouldn’t do him a goddamn bit of good.

But instead of pissing off the other American, Chaim made him laugh. “All right, already,” Carroll said, as if he were a
Landsman
himself. “But watch yourself, okay? You really are making like this one Nationalist is more important than the rest of the struggle.”

“Nah,” Chaim said, even if Mike was right, or nearly right, again. He’d come to see the effort to reeducate Joaquin as a representation of the larger fight against Fascism. He realized that, just because he saw it that way, other people wouldn’t necessarily do the same thing. Some of those other people were officers who could tell him what to do and land him in hot water if he didn’t do it or if he wasn’t around to do it.