Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (65 page)

I think we were astonished that this little man, exhausted from travelling and set down in this strange winter dawn, should pack such fire and fanaticism in him. He was my first experience of a professional working-class leader, who used words like street-calls and bugles. Wilting though we were, he had us convinced that not only would we smash Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, but go on to capture the whole world for the workers. We were all heroes, and he was our leader, and we cheered him as he stood there, larger than life, shining noble and shaking with emotion.

Then it was all over. The spell and magic quite broken. He jumped down from the platform to mix with the men and was immediately surrounded by a jostling crowd. But not to slap him on the back or carry him in triumph through the town. No, they were plucking at his sleeves and pouring out their grievances, asking to be sent back home. ‘It ain’t good enough, you know. I bin out ‘ere over nine months. Applied for leave and didn’t get no answer. When they goin’ to do something, eh, comrade?… eh?…’ The last I saw of our morning Lucifer, he was backing towards the door, muted, expostulating, eyes groping for escape: ‘Sorry, lads – sorry… nowt to do with me… sorry, I can’t do owt about that…’

That night a young female voice spoke my name in the dark. I was walking near the church, and I’d thought there were no girls left in Tarazona. But the voice that called me had a familiar, hallucinatory echo. Doug was right; it was the ‘wee lassie’ from Figueras.

‘Lorenzo – little Frenchman.’

‘Eulalia!’ I said.

She came and leaned against me, threaded her small hand in mine and asked me to take her back to her lodging. She was working for the Socorro Rojo, she said… among other things. She knew I was here; a friend had told her. Had I killed any Fascists yet? Ay! what a miracle it was to see me again – ‘Lorenzo! – my little French brother…’ ‘English,’ I said stolidly. She nibbled at my sleeve. She seemed to bind herself to me like a slim leather thong.

Her ‘lodging’ was a tiny, windowless room at the top of an old house, empty save for a bed and some posters. And a bottle of wine with two glasses standing near the head of the bed, and a man’s great-coat hanging on the back of the door.

Eulalia turned and smiled at me brilliantly, showing her tongue,her face cracking open like a brown snake’s egg hatching. Seen again in the pale light-bulb, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was, small and perilous, my murderous little dancer. She was dressed in tight uniform that bit into her tiny waist. She’d cut her hair short. She looked like a ten-year-old boy.

She sat me down on the bed and poured me some wine.

‘Socorro Rojo,’ she said. ‘I heard they tried to shoot you.’

‘A mistake.’

‘All the time they make mistakes!’ She lifted my hand with the glass towards my mouth. ‘My poor little brother. They don’t shoot you now.’

‘Later.’

‘Perhaps later. Not now.’

In the pale cold light she quickly unzipped her uniform, peeling off the crumpled green to reveal the strange pulsing fruit within. As soon as I was ready, she ran to fetch the man’s great-coat from the door, helped me on with it, then wriggled inside. Burning cold she was, close as a second skin, her mouth running across my chest. In spite of the cold, I smelt her unforgettable smell, something I’d never known in anyone else – a mixture of fresh mushrooms and trampled thyme, woodsmoke and burning orange.

It didn’t occur to me to wonder how such things could happen so easily, or to question the long and mysterious coincidence. At my age one was not surprised. Girls seen fleetingly, but memorably, from a train passing through Reading the wrong way, suddenly appeared at one’s table in a London cafe. Or one whose face stopped one’s heart as she got off a crowded bus in the City turned up days later sitting beside one in the cinema. Rare and magnetic driving patterns of youth, cutting across the humdrum chaos of multitudes.

So I found myself once more with the lyric-shaped girl, who had first held me without question in that far Figueras cellar, who had cried out her fears and hatreds in the ears of a stranger, and then disappeared in a flurry of kisses. Now, four hundred miles from there, she had casually reappeared in the night, in this beleaguered and sterile village, and here again she lay close against me, and I felt the anguished hunting of her hands, and heard again her familiar but incomprehensible whispers. All I understood her to say, in the last desperate throes of our night, was that she had found her father and brother, Lorenzo, little Frenchman, and would never lose sight of us ever again.

I got back to the barracks before anyone was awake, crawling through a hole in the wall beyond sight of the sentry. As I stretched out beside Doug he roused himself for a moment and said someone had been looking for me. He didn’t know who it was, he said. Some boss from Albacete. Then he grunted and went to sleep again.

The next day, after a fumbling morning with the Maxim gun, I was called from my company and moved to ‘special duties’. I don’t know whether Sam, my old interrogator, had arranged it, or who, or why, but it became a secret and complicated little life. I was based, with a few others, in a small private house near the plaza. Few of our numbers were of the same nationality. Our leader, Kassell, was from Marseilles.

The house had pretty azulejo tiles on the floors and walls, tiny cold rooms, and Romano-Moorish pillars. It had probably belonged recently to a lawyer or doctor, to the son of a local land-owner, even a priest. It was stripped bare now, except for its elegant proportions. We cooked for ourselves on brushfires, and slept on the floor.

There was a fragmented madness about our group, but it seemed to be necessary. Three of us spoke English, another three Spanish; but the lingua franca indeed was French. I won’t attempt to detail the extent of our antics; they entailed meetings, reports, the issuing and signing for revolvers, notebooks, walking and stalking in twos. They also included covering-up, overlapping, watching, listening, and long hours wondering just what we were doing. Sometimes there were jovial evenings, fires burning, cofiac and music, when we almost began to know each other. There were other times when we might doubt the purpose of our actions, and certainly when the means and the ends seemed squalid.

I can’t, at this length of time, recall all the characters in the group; many are shapes in a shadow play only. I remember Kassell, the boss, thin as a peeled birch tree, with a starved face and feverish eyes. We had Emile, a Dutch professor, hunched and bearded; peachy-cheeked Rafael, a horse-breaker from Jaen; two tiny Belgians – Jean and Pip – agile and feminine as lemurs; and a dark, silent Catalan we nicknamed Compadre, who may once have been a monk.

I had arrived late in Tarazona, and found it in turmoil, no longer simply a base for the International Brigades. Politically and physically its battalions were dispersing or dead, and a deliberate new nationalism was taking over. Those ragged ranks, once packed with the innocents and scatterings of Britain and Europe, were now being officially stiffened by troops from the Republican Army – Basques, Catalans, Gallegos, Castillanas, Valencianas, even Mallorquins. In such a pivotless melee our group found its natural home, and could operate without guide or comment.

I recall one little job, just before Christmas, but still can’t swear to its reality or purpose. Kassell called us together in one of the inner rooms of the house and passed round a photograph telling us to memorize it carefully. It was of a slight, round-shouldered youth, with dark fruity lips and the wide dream-wet eyes of a student priest or poet. His brow was smooth and babyish, his long chin delicately pointed.

Kassell told us his story – improbable for such a face. A rich Mallorquin, it seemed, son of a Count, he was also a hero of the Barcelona risings. A gunman, dynamiter, he’d executed three leading Trotskyists, been kidnapped, tortured and sentenced to death. He’d escaped and come south, had been seen in Albacete, and it was believed he was on his way here.

‘Why here?’ asked Emile.

‘He knows he’ll be safe with us,’ said Kassell.

The two little Belgians looked at each other.

‘What’s his name?’ asked the Dutchman.

‘Who knows?’ said Kassell. ‘Could be anything.’ He turned over the photograph. ‘But it says “Forteza” here.’

So Forteza we called him, and we went out to start our search – first to watch the morning camiones coming in. I paired up with Rafael, and together we scrutinized each newly arrived face while pretending to be listing numbers and counting heads. The trucks lurched to a halt in the square, their bonnets steaming, the men dropping off them like clods of mud. A mix of spiritless faces passed before us in the bleared light: white, hungry, blank – Anglo-Saxon, Slav, Latin-French, Iberian. But no sign or shade of Forteza.

For two days we met all the camiones, checked the church and barracks and outlying billets. Then the second night Kassell called us together. ‘He’s here,’ he said, his face soft with concern, ‘but not wishing to show himself Our job was still to find him, quickly before someone else did, and so give him our protection. Forteza was young, valuable, dangerous and hunted – but he’d also lost his nerve. If he falls into the wrong hands, Kassell was saying…

I remember staring bemused at the pretty tiles on the walls, half-drowsing in the warmth of the wood-fire. Kassell’s voice went smoothly on; Rafael sat on the floor, sorting and soaking beans; Emile, hunched and cross-legged, scribbled in the margin of a book; Jean and Pip played at pocket chess. All of us seemed to be waiting for something, but at the same time were relaxed and cosy.

Suddenly there was a muffled knock at the door, and Kassell went to answer it. When he returned his face had a curious tight radiance about it. He took Rafael aside, and they looked at me, then Rafael beckoned, and threw me a heavy coat. Before we left, he led me through the kitchen where we drank a couple of glasses of conac each.

It was after midnight when we set out together in a fine and freezing darkness. Rafael began muttering obscenities that seemed more pointed and personal than the usual flow of Spanish rhetorical oaths. Tarazona was without lights, but the stars were big and fierce. This wasn’t a patrol; Rafael knew exactly where he was going; and so, with a chill certainty, did I.

We came quite soon to an alleyway which even in the starlight I recognized by the peculiar winding of its walls. I knew the darkened house we entered, and the flapping wood on the stairs. I knew the sagging door on which we knocked.

Eulalia was not surprised to see us. She had obviously been waiting some while. She held a candle to our faces and turned and nodded towards the bed. She was in her tight, trim overalls, and wore a scarf round her head. ‘Venga, Rubio,’ she said to me.

On her rumpled bed, shaking with fear or fever, was the youth we instantly recognized from the photograph, except that the once smooth face of the priestlike dreamer was now savagely and bitterly scarred. When he saw Rafael and me, he shrank back on the bed, doubled up, and drew his knees to his chin. He broke into a paroxysm of coughing, while Eulalia soothed him, and wrapped a ragged blanket round him.

We sat down on the bed and waited for him to stop coughing. He coughed like a little dog. Eulalia stood by the door, her long eyes shining with candle-light, but they were no longer the whispering eyes I knew.

‘Frenchman,’ she said, and jerked her head sharply. Rafael cursed and laid his hand on my knee. ‘We could carry him,’ he said. ‘He’s only a baby. Anyway, he’s got to come.’

Forteza grew quiet, then pulled himself into a sitting position. He asked if we had any conac. Rafael was carrying a flask, and gave him some, which he drank in little birdlike sips. Then he smiled and let us draw him to his feet. Rafael grew hearty and wrapped his arm round Forteza’s shoulders. ‘We were worried about you, man,’ he said, guiding him towards the door. ‘For God, why d’you take such risks?’

I saw the panic slowly fade from Forteza’s eyes as he struggled to find his balance. Eulalia lightly touched the back of his neck, then put her cold hand to my cheek. ‘He could be you, little brother,’ she said. We helped the lad down the stairs and supported him through the streets. Forteza’s skeletal frame between us was as light as a bundle of sticks.

When we got him back to the house, Kassell was drinking coffee by the fire. Jean and Pip left their chess game, the Dutchman stopped writing, and all joined Rafael and me by the door. Then Kassell got up and strode forward, crinkling in his black leather mackintosh, threw his arms round Forteza and kissed him.

Forteza stood quiet, neither shivering nor coughing now. ‘Welcome, comrade,’ said Kassell, with his watery smile. ‘We thought something bad had happened to you.’ He ran his hands quickly over the boy’s thin body and led him into the inner room. Jean and Pip returned to their chess game, and the Dutchman to his writing. A little later we heard the sound of a shot.