Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (58 page)

As they raised Dino towards the opening he lifted his arms, and I saw his face in a brief glimmer of moonlight. It was thin and hollow, his eyes huge and glowing, his long pointed countenance like an El Greco saint ascending. Finally two dark shapes pulled him through the narrow entrance, and the manhole was lowered again. I heard the clink of glasses, some moments of casual chatter, Dino’s short laugh, then a pistol shot…

I’d been standing propped against the wall and listening, and now that it was over I slumped back on the straw. My hand touched the deserter’s forage-cap, which he’d left behind. It was damp with sweat and still warm from his head.

A few days later, in the red light of dawn, the grille was dragged open and a voice called, ‘Hey, Rubio!…’ Arms reached down to help me, hands caught my wrists, and I was lifted bodily out of the sepulchre.

My legs were shaking, but I put this down to two weeks without exercise; and the dawn light stung my eyes. Was it my turn now? The courtyard glittered with snow; and the hurried preparations which I’d expected – the chair, the hand-cart, the plain wooden box, the sleepy officer with the bottle of cofiac, the ragged soldiers lined up and looking at their feet – all were present. But not for me. Another young man sat bound to the chair, smoking furiously and chattering like a parrot.

But I was guided quickly across the yard and out into the lane, where two armed guards stood waiting beside a black battered car. They pushed me into the back seat and sat one on each side of me. A broad man in a hat sat up in front by the driver.

We drove fast and silently through the hunched unhappy town and out into the empty country. We climbed a poor bumpy road on to a desolate plateau across which the wind swept pink ruffles of snow. A plateau of scattered rock and thorn, and a few bent bushes, and the wide winter sky closing in.

It became hot and airless in the car, and the guards, in their heavy brown overcoats, began to steam like sweating horses. Their nostrils steamed too, and their noses shone, and dripped on the bayonets held between their knees.

They were an odd-looking couple, the guards – one small and clownlike, with bright blue chin, the other pink and chubby, a mother’s boy. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t answer; though one whistled knowingly between his teeth. We drove fast, swaying together on the curves, along a road that was both empty and drear.

Where were we going, and what was in store for me? In spite of the guards’ silence, I felt I knew this already. Something irrevocable had taken charge which could neither be reversed nor halted, some mad scrambling of language and understanding which had already misjudged my naive reasons for being here. I didn’t realize then how normal it was for anyone, if put through the right preliminaries, to be swamped by guilt.

Since my sudden arrest and imprisonment, which at first I’d been ready to accept as some light charade touched with military confusion, I felt myself sinking, more and more, into the hands of some obscure accusation against which I ceased to look for an answer.

As the sun rose higher and whitened the rocks, the landscape turned blank, as though over-exposed. And with the whistling guards on each side of me, and the bully-shouldered officer up front, I was sure I was on the road to my doom. As my eyes grew used to the light – after all, I’d been two weeks in darkness – I saw the landscape shudder into shape, grow even more desolate and brutal. Yet never more precious as it floated past me, the worn-out skin of this irreplaceable world, marked here and there by the scribbled signs of man, a broken thatched cabin, or a terraced slope. Every breath I took now seemed rich and stolen, in spite of the oil-fumed heat in the car. Even the two armed guards, grotesque and scruffy as they were, began to take on the power and beauty of fates, protectors or destroyers, who held one’s thread of life in their hands.

We’d been driving, I guessed, for about an hour, when the officer suddenly straightened up and snapped his fingers, and we pulled off the road and stopped. The dead icy tableland crept with yellow mist, and seemed quite empty save for a clump of trees in the distance. I was ordered out of the car, one of the guards stuck a gun in my back, pointed to the trees and said, ‘March!’

Why had they brought me all this way, I wondered. They could have done the job more snugly back in the jail. Yet the place seemed apt and fitting enough; no doubt they’d used it before. The officer was out of the car now, coughing and spitting, and he came and gave my shoulder a light little shove. ‘Come on, Rubio,’ he said, ‘Come on, march – let’s go.’ So I put up my head and marched…

I saw the vast cold sky and the stony plain and I began to walk towards the distant trees. I heard the soldiers behind me slip the bolts on their rifles. This then, of course, could be the chosen place – the plateau ringed by rock, the late dawn on our breath, the empty silence around us, the little wood ahead, all set for quiet execution or murder. I felt the sharp edges of the stones under my thin-soled shoes. The guards behind me shuttled the bolts of their guns.

If my moment was coming – and I now felt certain it was – I told myself not to look back. My intentions were simple. If they gave me enough time, and I was able to reach the little wood ahead of them, that would be my last chance – and I’d make a break for it. The nearest wind-bent tree looked a thousand years old, its roots pouring over the rocks like wax. The guards were snuffling behind me. Would I reach it before they fired? Would I hear the blast before the thumping bullets hit me? Would I hear anything before the dark? I walked slowly, almost mincingly, trying not to appear to hurry. I reached the trees and prepared to run…

One of the guards came up behind me and took my arm. ‘OK, Rubio,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ His comrade was already squatting under a tree and opening a tin of sardines with his bayonet. The officer and driver joined us, yawning and scratching, and we sat down in a circle together. They gave me sardines and some bread, and passed round a bottle of conac, and as I looked at the food in my hand, and at the raw, safe landscape around me, I was seized by a brief spasm of uncontrollable happiness.

The soldiers stretched out their legs and began talking about football. The officer brushed down his clothes and rolled me a cigarette. He waved his hand at the scenery, the old trees and the rocks, and said it was his favourite spot for a picnic. They came here, he said, about twice a week. I asked him where we were going now.

‘To Figueras, of course,’ he said. They were going to drop me off at the barracks. ‘We thought you’d rather ride than walk.’

But he was still responsible for me, he said, if I liked to think of it that way. But only till they’d delivered me to Brigade Headquarters, then he’d be clear of me. He looked at me oddly with his hazed, blue eyes, slightly mad, amused yet cold.

Why hadn’t he explained all this before? The car, the armed guards, the remote stop in the hills. Had this been another test, or some daft Spanish trick? Was he really as harmless as he appeared to be? Would he have been equally amused if I’d made that dash through the trees? There’s no doubt what would have happened if I had.

On a bleak naked hill above the town, Figueras Castle stood like a white acropolis – a picturesque assemblage of towers and turrets, walled in by great slabs of stone. The approach road was suitably stark and forbidding, but once I’d passed inside the huge nail-studded doors, I got an impression of almost monastic calm. Indeed the Castle, clamped down on these rocks many centuries ago as a show of force commanding Spain’s northern frontiers, appeared now as something a touch over-theatrical, and rather lacking any original ferocity.

But this was the ‘barracks’, the place to which I had been delivered, the collecting point for volunteers entering Spain from the north. My escort, warmer and more cheerful now after several more stops on the road for anis and conac, seemed in a natural hurry to get rid of me, and pushed me into a glass-fronted box-office just inside the gate.

‘We brought you another one!’ he shouted to anyone who might be listening. ‘He’s English, I think – or Dutch.’ With that, he threw my bags across the floor, slapped me on the back, gave me a heavy-lidded wink and left.

An official, bowed at his tiny desk, looked at me with a kind of puff-eyed indifference. Then he sniffed, asked me my name and my next of kin, and wrote down my answers in a child’s exercise book. As he wrote he followed the motions of the pen with his tongue, breathing hard and sniffing rhythmically as he did so. Finally, he asked for my passport and threw it into a drawer, in which I saw a number of others of different colours.

‘We’ll take care of that for you,’ he said. ‘Would you like some prophylactics?’

Not knowing what these were, I nevertheless said yes, and he handed me a bagful which I stowed away in my pocket. Next he gave me a new hundred peseta note, a forage-cap with a tassel, and said, ‘You are now in the Republican Army.’ He considered me dimly for a moment, then suddenly shot to his feet, raised his fist and saluted.

‘Welcome, comrade!’ he cried. ‘You won’t be here long. As soon as we collect a convoy together we pass you away. In the meantime you have training, political education, fraternal discussion, much to do. Study victory. See a doctor. Dismiss!’

He spoke with a curious accent. It could have been Catalan or French. He kicked my bags back towards me and turned away. I picked them up and went out into the courtyard.

It was now about noon, with the sun at its low winter strength, and across the northern horizon the mountains caught it like broken glass, each peak flashing with blue and white light. Away to the south the land sank in frozen waves, while to the east lay the violet sea. After my two weeks underground the light burned my eyes, and it took some while to get used to the view, focus on its range and open distances, which were immense and exhilarating. The Castle and its courtyard seemed lifted in pure blue air and pressed close to a cold clear sky. I ceased to wonder how I had got here at last. It was simply a moment of magical arrival.

The Castle courtyard was bounded by a bare white-washed wall along the top of which stood pots of crumpled geraniums. Some thirty or forty men lounged round the base of the wall, talking and smoking or eating lumps of bread. A ragged lot, dressed in an odd medley of clothes – some in civvies (as I was), others in long capes like Berbers, or in flashy jackets like white African hunters, while some had their heads thrust through jagged holes cut from the middle of military blankets.

I sat down on the edge of a little group, and was addressed in English by a chap who called himself Danny. Danny was a bone-thin Londoner, all nose and chin, with a small bent body and red wrinkled hands. He was twenty-two, an unemployed docker from Bermondsey, undernourished and frail; when he moved, his limbs seemed to flap and flutter like wallpaper on an abandoned house.

“Ere we are then, eh?’ he kept saying with a kind of sneezing giggle. Over and over again. Peering at me, then at the great mountain landscape, and clasping his bony knees with his hands. ‘Said I’d never make it – the lads. The old woman too. What they call this then? I got ‘ere, didn’t I?’

He’d clench up his tiny hands and look round him with a trembling squint. A shaking hiss came out of his thin sad mouth. ‘We’re ‘ere then, ain’t we?… Eh, Doug? Eh?’ He turned to a man squatting beside him. ‘An’ ‘ere’s another one, eh?’ he said, pointing a finger at me. ‘They’re coming over in bleedin’ droves.’

The Scot looked at me bleakly, as though he doubted I’d be much of a reinforcement. They’d been at the barracks a week, they said, and both showed a mixture of bravado and bewilderment, though the Scot also seemed to have a profane contempt for most of the others around him.

‘Look at this bugga’,’ he said, jerking a finger at Danny. “E dunno a gun fra’ a stick a’ rock. If we canna’ do better’n tha’, Guid ‘elp us.’

Danny stiffened and gave him a shrivelled look.

‘But we’re ’ere then, ennit?’ he said.

It was true – and we were. Danny pointed out the others gathered in the courtyard, sitting and standing in their little groups, some playing cards, or just whistling, or staring into the distance, some fast asleep with the daylight exhaustion of waiting. Everybody was here, said Danny: Dutch, Germans and Poles. Exiles from Paris, a sprinkling of thugs on the run from Marseilles, a few Welshmen from the valleys, some Durham miners, Catalans, Canadians, Americans, Czechs, and half a dozen pale and speechless Russians.