Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (62 page)

Our group leader came striding along the platform leading a squealing Pau Guasch by the ear. He wanted to go home, he cried; he’d got arthritis and the gripe. The group leader kicked him back into line. We formed up in threes and, led by the coughing and consumptive band, marched with sad ceremony through the streets of the town. We saw dark walls, a few posters, wet flags, sodden snow. Sleet blew from a heavy sky. I had known Spain in the bright, healing light of the sun, when even its poverty seemed coloured with pride. Albacete, this morning, was like a whipped northern slum. The women, as we passed, covered their faces with shawls.

Albacete was all wind and knives, surrounded by the white pine-scarred immensities of La Mancha. As we marched to the barracks, other military figures on the pavements, of all shapes and adornment, greeted us with only a few hoots of derision.

At the barrack gates, our little brass band deserted us, and went trundling off down the street shaking out their crumpled instruments. Our brief moment of honour and welcome it seemed was ended; another trainload of scruffs had been duly delivered. We were formed up on the parade-ground, our soaking bags on our backs, snowflakes settling upon our beards. Two officers walked out and looked us over; a clerk with a clipboard stood by taking notes. Nothing was said to us; we were viewed as remote curiosities, while the mounting snow swirled and cut around us. Anonymous, unacknowledged, we stood shuffling and muttering; after all we had not yet been fed. But still they held us there in a kind of suspended detachment while the clerk counted and recounted our numbers.

There was tension, and suddenly I felt specially separate from the others. Even before it happened, I knew it would happen. A soldier hurried from the main building and handed a note to one of the officers, who read it and called out my name. I raised my hand, my companions were dismissed, and I was once more taken away under guard.

Had I been marked down from the very beginning, I wondered? If so, why had I got this far? I was led away to a small room deep in one of the basements which was a jumble of filing cabinets, maps and papers. A young fair-haired officer sat at a littered desk, and he rose to his feet when I entered. He was smartly dressed, deferential, American and charming. He introduced himself as Sam.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and gave me a chair. ‘I guess you’ve been through all this before – but something fresh has turned up…’

He produced my passport, which had been taken from me at Figueras, and slowly riffled through the pages. Two of them had been marked with paperclips, and he spread the book open and showed it to me. On his face was an expression of amused resignation – an unspoken ‘how could you have been such a fool?’

In the spring of 1936 I’d spent a few days in Spanish Morocco, which General Franco was using as the base for his rebellion at that time, and from where, in July, he started the Civil War. But of course I didn’t know this till he started flying his Moors across the Straits from there. I’d been in the very nest of intrigue, but knew nothing about it.

Sam fingered the pages of my passport with almost strained disbelief, then held it up to my eyes: Ceuta, Tetuan, Entrada, Salida – he pointed out the fatal names and dates.

‘Just what were you doing there at that time – for Gawd’s sake?’ he asked. ‘That’s all we’re wanting to know.’

Sam had now been joined by two short, square little Russians, both slightly bald and wearing civilian suits. Plumping themselves down, one on each side of the American, they waited in silence for me to speak.

I could now see the trouble I was in – first suspected as a spy, and now as a Fascist agent. No doubt about it either, Sam had the proof in his hand. I felt that sudden thump in the heart which I remember as a child when I’d been accused of some major though innocent blunder.

Yes, I said, in early 1936 I’d been working in a hotel near Malaga, and I’d made a quick trip to Morocco with a French student from Aries. Yes, it had been spring, but we hadn’t seen much of the country, we’d spent most of our time in the rooms of small hotels, behind shutters, smoking hash. Sam sighed and passed his hand over his brow. He told me to empty my pockets.

Everything I had was laid out on the desk and the two square little men went to work. Cigarettes stripped, paper held to the light, fountain-pen unscrewed, then probed and smashed. Matches shaken out on to a blotter, then each one split down the middle. The matchbox itself also cut into sections and each piece pressed against a special lamp, as were the odd papers and my notebook and pocketbook, including a few pesetas and family photographs.

While the two squat civilians were at their meticulous inspections, searching for who knows what? – secret messages, war maps, codes, plans – Sam was reading through the papers they had discarded, and keeping up a quiet, continuous stream of questions. What was the name of the student? And where was he now? What hotels had we stayed in? And how much was I paid, and who paid me, huh? Well, it was only a short trip, I said, and the boy paid for most of it. He was the son of a rich businessman from Marseilles. Sam knew I was lying, but he didn’t know why I was lying. My journey to Morocco had been solitary, innocent, but damning.

I was told to undress to my pants, and my clothes were searched carefully, including the linings and soles of my boots. Then something desperately unwished-for happened, but now too late to avoid; Sam found a packet of letters in my trouser hip-pocket. They were letters from the English girl who had followed me to the edge of France and tried to dissuade me from crossing the frontier – letters recalling the wildly passionate celebration of our last week together, a rapturous, explicit and tormenting farewell. I knew every word by heart, which were not for any other eyes. But now this neat young Bostonian, who might not have read such letters before, was scanning them earnestly line by line. He read them quite slowly, and looked up once or twice, as I stared blindly at the opposite wall. Sitting on the chair before him, I felt in every way naked, and no man before him had entered my private world. When he’d finished reading, he passed the letters back to me in silence. His face, though flushed, was as blank as mine.

Sam never referred to the letters again, but he was clearly an intense young professional, with a job to do; yet as he began to question me further – about dates, movements, intentions, motives – I was also aware of a look of dazed perplexity in his eyes, as that of a doctor who, while inquiring into one major disease, had unexpectedly stumbled on to another one altogether.

Sam’s two gnome-like assistants, having taken their turn with my clothes and boots, now came and sat down, one on each side of me. They picked things up off the desk, and put them down, shook my violin and twanged the strings, and held a little photograph of my mother up to a mirror. They muttered together, asked each other questions, nodded, then just stared at me balefully. I had a feeling they wanted to take me out and hang me up by the heels, that the use of a thumbscrew might not altogether have wasted their day. Sam, on the other hand – warm-voiced, apologetic – addressed me with concerned goodnature.

‘Well, I shall have to make a report,’ he said. ‘And it’s not going to be easy. How did you manage to get into such a mess, anyway? You may seem harmless enough, but we can’t take chances. You know that, for God’s sake, don’t you?’

‘What’s that mean, anyway?’

‘I don’t have to tell you, do I? I can’t help it – none of us can. I’m sorry, but just look at yourself

So once again I was taken away under guard and put in a small underground room and left to my own confusions. But Sam didn’t neglect me; he made sure I was warm, and brought me blankets, brandy and coffee. He sent an old woman to tidy the place and sweep and delouse it. He even sent in a girl – short and dumpy, with a tousled new look of political liberation, but she huffed and puffed and giggled so much I couldn’t see across the cell for vapour.

The old woman, however, was comfort and entertainment. Dona Tomasina, from Cuenca, was a widow of fifty, whose husband, a leper, had been crushed by a rockfall in the cave where they lived. At the start of the Civil War she was starving and walked to Albacete, where she now scrubbed the barracks for two meals a day.

Tomasina was sad about me and kept pulling my shoulders back with her thumbs and doing her best to keep my spirits up. But it wasn’t that easy. I’d been in this kind of trouble before and felt I’d been lucky to get out of the last lot. This time the situation was simpler, starker; my interrogators better trained, more implacable.

‘But they just young men, like yourself,’ said Tomasina. ‘They know you don’t do bad things. They play a little game with you. You laugh. That’s all.’

Not they, I thought. Especially Sam’s two Russians with their blue bullet-like faces. And with them around, Sam wouldn’t dare.

I wondered how many times Tomasina had gone through all this – teasing and mothering other frightened young lads as they waited their blind and blundering dispatch. Her vivid dark eyes were like split sea-urchins, their jellied pupils necked with red.

‘Your papers upside down. They sort them out tomorrow. Then you walk out and back to your friends.’

But tomorrow came Sam, his cropped head shining and clean, but with a look of embarrassed exasperation on his face.

He held up my old sweat-soaked passport and stabbed his finger at the pages. ‘It’s these damned Moroccan stamps,’ he growled. ‘Spring ‘36. Melilla. Ceuta. Tetuan. That’s where it was all cooked up, wasn’t it? And what were you doing there at that time? That’s what we want to know. Getting special training or something?’ He slapped the passport again. ‘It’s all down here, you know. We can’t get round it. Anywhere else, I might have got you clear.’

He’d brought me some writing paper, a pen and a folding table.

‘If you want to write some letters, I’ll see they get ‘em,’ he said.

He looked at me helplessly. ‘Er… if there’s anything else you need?’

‘Tomasina’s getting me a new shirt.’

‘New shirt? That’s fine.’ He was standing awkwardly by the door. ‘Well… er… I guess you don’t want me to explain any more?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, if we don’t hear from Madrid, that’s it, then,’ he said.

He hung on for a moment, then raised his doubled fist. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he growled, and left.

I wrote a few letters that day, but they were brief. I couldn’t say I was about to be shot as a spy, a saboteur, a Fascist infiltrator, a capitalist lackey – all of which had been mentioned among my accusers’ more polite suggestions. I didn’t have to explain the nature of my going at all. Sam and his colleagues, it seemed, had certainly gathered enough evidence against me; but as some small doubts still persisted, Sam promised that there would be no official record of my death.

So my letters were brief. Not even to my Mother did I wish to say farewell. Still less to the girl for whom my heart hungered. To either would have been to admit a clumsy folly, muddled, without point or glory. I had come to support a cause, to give my life to it, I supposed; but not to be rubbed out in a back-yard for having carried a violin over a mountain or for going to Morocco at the wrong time of the year. I sat in my tiny cell, wearing Tomasina’s bright new shirt, staring at the table, the walls, and wondering how this could have happened, alternately convinced that I could take anything that came, only to be visited by recurrent moments of piercing terror.

The guards let in Tomasina at midnight, with more brandy and a couple of candles. She was in bustling, chirrupy, rather overheated spirits. ‘You’ll not stay here long,’ she said brightly, skipping round me to straighten my shoulders. Anxiety, and pity, infected her smile as she lit a new candle from the stub of the old one. ‘You’ve got to keep warm,’ she said, dumping the brandy on the table. A bottle of the best, not corriente from a barrel. But it was not only brandy she’d brought me. Standing in the shadows behind her was a boy, about thirteen years old, with the dark curls and eyes of a Moor.

‘Warm him,’ said Tomasina, pushing the boy towards me, and as she left she touched my hand lightly. ‘Lorenzo, may you go with God.’

The boy led me to the bunk and lay down shivering beside me. He seemed to be far colder than I was – or perhaps the reason was something else. ‘Hurt me if you want to,’ he said, and waited, his hands fluttering about my knees. Was this Sam’s or Tomasina’s idea? I wondered. Surely, they’d done enough? First the huffing and puffing liberated girl; then this thin little shuddering boy. Well, I could neither accept nor reject him now; God knows I was glad of any comfort that night.