Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (66 page)

We spent most days now just watching and waiting; watching each other and waiting for the war to move. It was a festering time, drenched in doubt and suspicion. The Republic was in peril, and one took no risks with its enemies. But of the several dark little games in which Kassell involved us, few of them seemed to bear the stamp of reason, and the authority behind them, if any, was a mystery. One hoped, yet doubted, that they had a purpose, but as in most wars they were bungled and malevolent jokes.

One day Rafael and I were told to go and track down an old farmer who lived out in the wasteland towards Madrigueras. There’d been some small acts of sabotage – a couple of lorries blown up, part of a bridge destroyed – and the old man was thought responsible. He’d been seen by a neighbour packing long sticks of dynamite into a box, so we were told simply to go out and get him.

It was a cold walk through the snow, and for once Rafael had no conac. He smoked instead, using the dry edge of a newspaper wrapped round a small bundle of herbs. Rafael would smoke anything: old beech leaves, sugared-moss, corn-husks, even crushed pine bark with tar – at least that was the smell of it. For cigarette papers he preferred foreign journals –
Paris Soir
or
L’Humanite –
or the thin pages of antique prayer-books.

‘These amateur dynamiters are the worst,’ said Rafael. ‘And where did he get the stuff? Not by parachute, that’s for sure. We need it, anyway. And him.’

We came to the farm in the late afternoon. There was a thicket of thorn bushes round it, and a leashed demented dog. The brushwood roofs of the buildings were held down by heavy stones and the light on the walls was a sort of dimpled pewter. We saw no horses, mules or donkeys – we’d probably eaten the lot in Tarazona.

We dodged the dog and approached the buildings. A short thin woman came to the door and saw our guns. She smothered the fierce flash in her eyes and told us the house was ours. ‘Come in. There is only the old one,’ she said. The howling wolf-dog leapt to the full extent of his chain, clawing the air, his wet teeth shining like ice.

We went into the small bare room and found the dynamiter standing ready, black hat in hand, dressed in his best corduroy suit.

‘Mario Nunez, at your service,’ he said.

‘It’s lies,’ cried the woman, walking angrily up and down, bobbing jerkily as though riding a miniature bicycle.

The farmer stood with bowed head, resigned and waiting.

‘It’s a lie – a lie!’ the woman cried again.

Rafael shouldered his rifle and said it was time to go. The farmer raised a long brown hand and brushed the woman lightly across the forehead, and for a moment they stood motionless together in the bare luminous room, like two age-worn wooden carvings.

Outside, a car blew its horn, and we led the farmer through the door. Emile and Jean were waiting to take him to Albacete. There was much, it was thought, that the dynamiter could tell us. Meanwhile, Rafael and I had to search the place.

The woman followed us as we returned to the house.

‘What do you want, you pollutions?’ she asked.

‘Only the dynamite, grandmother,’ said Rafael.

‘You’re as likely to find the Holy Virgin as dynamite here,’ said the woman.

‘That I believe,’ said Rafael.

We searched, but found very little in the house. Only a picture of Saint Teresa and the political icon Largo Caballero on the walls and some rolled-up mats and a wooden bowl on the floor. How could this man have been a saboteur, or even dangerous at all? Yet he’d been seen packing dynamite in a box.

We went into the yard and examined the outhouse. The woman followed us like a strutting hawk. The building was of crumbling mud-brick, the thatch breaking away in the wind. Bits of harness lay around, and the remains of a cart, and some olive stones in a broken barrel. Rafael began stamping the floor and eventually he found it – a mouldering trap-door fitted with an iron ring.

‘Ojala!’ said Rafael, and lifted it open. We climbed down the ladder into the small dark cellar below, lit a match, and saw a padlocked chest. Then the old hawk struck, flew down the ladder behind us and began clawing at us with her long black nails.

While she fought, she cursed us and all our families. Then she turned and threw herself across the chest. I remember her tattered black clothes splayed from her arms and legs, reminding me of a shot crow hung up on a fence. So that’s where it was. Rafael lifted the now exhausted woman and set her down in the corner, where she remained bolt upright, weeping.

We kicked the padlock from the chest and opened the lid. In the dim light we saw the long white sticks stacked neatly together. Dozens and dozens of them. Rafael crowed. ‘Mother of God! The cunning old devil. Enough here to blow up an army.’ Breathing heavily, and with great care, he lifted a stick in his hands. It fell in two parts, each joined by a thread. The sticks of dynamite were long altar candles which the old farmer was holding in trust for the church. Together with some items of priests’ regalia hidden away at the bottom of the trunk. Pandering to the priesthood was thought by many of us at that time to be as bad as blowing up our bridges.

Quite soon, and without explanation, I was dropped from Kassell’s little outfit and switched to another company. I don’t know whether I’d passed a test or simply been discarded, but it was back to the ranks for me. No longer the feminine little house with its tiny balconies, the shadowy evenings by the wood-fire, the privileged suppers with Kassell rehearsing his macabre and amorphous exercises.

He shook my hand when I left.

‘None of us are specialists,’ he said vaguely. ‘We can’t afford specialists in this war. We must follow the struggle wherever it leads us.’

My new Company Commander was Polish-American and wore a Siberian hat. He had a beautiful absent face and a drowsy manner that quite swallowed up his authority, so that one frequently lost sight of him for hours together, only to find him perhaps marching in the rear of the ranks carrying somebody else’s kit. Comrade Caplin believed in equality to the point of personal self-effacement.

I’d been in the company for several days, packed at night in a warehouse with some hundred others, when the word came that we’d been found new billets. We paraded leaderless in the plaza, stamping our feet while the search began for Caplin. He was found in the cinema, writing poetry, and he came and led us out of the town.

He took us to a gaunt little chapel on the edge of a hill; an old, beautifully proportioned, but crumbling building which was, it seemed, to be our new headquarters. The heavy main door had been ripped from its hinges and now leaned half-burnt against the wall.

The interior of the chapel was wrecked and gutted. Nothing remained but some small empty niches and the bare, naked altar. As we stamped in from the slushy street, our clothes and ponchos soaking, each man bagged his personal patch of ground by throwing down his kit. The chapel filled rapidly, the territories staked out; but I hesitated as under a spell. The altar, beneath its tinted east window, was a stripped pedestal of stone and plaster lightly washed in flaking blue paint. Quickly I went up to it, threw down my bags, stretched myself along it, and lit a cigarette. With this gesture, this idiot impulse of brash bravado, I believe I stained the rest of my life…

Half the members of my new company were Spanish now – stocky, grinning, round-headed types from the villages north of Madrid. Although young, their faces had that wizened, russet-apple texture that came from exposure to fierce winters and roasting summers. When they saw me claim the altar for my bed, some of them looked at me with blank, frozen stares, while others flashed their teeth and chanted crude parodies of the litany.

But for most, even the most ribald, profane and godless, there seemed to be an invisible area here which it was still impossible to cross without the blessing of a priest. Even in this bare and mutilated chapel a holy charm seemed to lie on the ground surrounding the sacred stone. An unseen line ran from wall to wall and everyone appeared content to remain behind it. Except for me, the petty violator.

The chapel soon took on a humid male cosiness, while the ghostly aura of incense which had impregnated the walls was quickly obliterated by our musky presence. We plugged the doors and broken windows against the heavy cold. We built up a thick atmosphere of smoke and coffee; we talked, played cards and quarrelled. There was nothing to do. A great pause, a great silence had settled on Tarazona. In the snows of the Sierras the battle for Teruel had begun, a last desperate attempt to cut off Franco’s north-eastern salient which threatened to slice our territory in two. For the sake of pride, politics and the people’s morale, only Spanish Republican troops were being used in this attack. The International Brigade was temporarily set aside; indeed, it was hoped officially it would not be needed at all.

So at this time, when the frozen peaks were aflame and the slow bloody encirclement of Teruel city began, we just lay around in our smoky chapel, waiting as Christmas came.

We had one true veteran among us, the only one with battle experience, and he showed it with a moody lassitude and a quiet indifference to discipline. Arturo, from Bilbao, was the company machine-gunner, weedy and strangely tall for a Basque. His was the long recumbent figure I saw every morning stretched out near the altar steps. After the breakfast bucket of coffee had gone round, he would remain for hours lying spread on the floor, rigid, motionless, like a medieval stone relic, while his cadaverous face flickered with fever. Someone found a priest’s robes in the chapel cellars and these Arturo wrapped round himself. He’d then lie stiffly cocooned in scarlet and black, cursing and shivering.

Our company leader by this time had lost himself. There were no parades or drill; we ruled ourselves. Sometimes Arturo would rise up, throw off his robes, assemble his machine-gun, and blow great holes in the walls. This raised our spirits, and under Arturo’s instructions we formed teams and did it ourselves. The din in the long narrow chapel was ear-blasting, but we were pleased with our training; it was all we got.

At night especially, under the string of light-bulbs, I think there was a simplicity about us. Some new Americans and British had joined our company. Wine was brought in, and we began to use the altar as a kind of bar. We were young and, as I remember, direct and trusting, even in our fights and excesses. Among us the young Spanish peasant, American student, Welsh miner, Liverpool dock-worker had met on a common shore.

We didn’t talk about it much, during those days of waiting. I played chess with Paul, a scholarly mechanic from Ohio, whose dark trembling earnestness concealed a sharp Jewish wit. We were restless, moody, charged for action. Girls came whispering at the door and the chapel windows. Stubby little virgins, with wide liberated eyes. They stood waiting outside, in solemn groups of two. They would go with us anywhere, into farm huts and hovels. But none would cross the threshold of our sacred building.

An almost wolf-like hunger, too, was now part of our lives, sharpened by the winter cold and idleness. At last, wearying of our acorn coffee and thin donkey soup, a half a dozen of us pooled our pay – over a thousand pesetas in fresh-printed notes – and persuaded an old farmer to part with three chickens, each of which looked as hungry as we were. These bony birds we took to two widowed sisters who lived with their old father on the other side of the town. They had one of those bare stone kitchens which were still almost medieval – a paved floor, high roof, brick and tiled stove by the wall, a few chairs, a table, a twist of olive wood in the corner, and hanging from the rafters an old ham-bone and some harness.

The sisters were wispy, watchful, bright-eyed, sunken-cheeked, their bodies almost mummified in their widow-black. The father sat on a high-backed chair near the stove, his limbs as lean as a whippet’s. He slipped to his tiny feet as we came crowding in and raised a wrinkled fist.

‘Your house,’ he said. ‘Jose, at your service. And my daughters – Dona Anselm – Dona Luisa…’

The sisters bridled at this, but lost none of their watchfulness. They took the birds we had brought with us with little clucks of the tongue. ‘Come back in two hours,’ they said.

So we walked around in the snow, and when we returned Dona Anselm swept our boots with a broom. The old stove blazed with a mixture of wood and refuse, and a great iron pot stood bubbling upon it. The entire kitchen simmered and was awash with steam, a steam banked on the long-forgotten juices of real home-cooked food, swimming aromas of tomatoes, dried beans, and garlic sausage, and boiled chicken peeling on the bone. How the widows had done it seemed a miracle. We stood there in a swoon of hunger. A hunger more blest in that it was about to be appeased. The widows could have asked us another thousand pesetas.