Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (71 page)

Away to the left of the city we saw lights moving about and heard clear but distant shouts. ‘They’re coming back,’ said Guido, touching his lower lip with his finger in an effort to still his stutter. And sure enough, in the morning, they came.

A long burst of shellfire straddled over us just before daylight, followed by the rattling metal of tanks and their sharp coughing guns, and the swooping buzz of Italian aircraft above. The main attack of the armour was up ahead of us, even so we were briefly overrun; our machine-gun blew up, and we pulled back down the gully, scrambling and falling over the ice. First, I remember a running close-up of the enemy – small, panting little men, red-faced boys, frantically spitting Moors. There was the sudden bungled confrontation, the breathless hand-to-hand, the awkward pushing, jabbing, grunting, swearing, death a moment’s weakness or slip of the foot away. Then we broke and raced off, each man going alone, each the gasping centre of his own survival.

I headed for the old barn where I’d spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place. Some of our men found me, I don’t know who they were, and they drove me back speechless to Tarazona.

Was this then what I’d come for, and all my journey had meant – to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?

The white daylight was like pain; I could see it and feel it – a plastic stretch of silence pulled over the face. I sat on the chapel steps; half-blind, half-drugged, while melting ice trickled over my feet. The sound of war, several days old and imprinted in the back of my head, seemed ready to return at the touch of a button. The man sitting beside me wore a crumpled white coat. He looked like a doctor or butcher.

‘Comrade, we’re sending you back to London,’ he said.

A tubby young man, with a French moustache: the Political Commissar of Tarazona.

I said I didn’t want to go.

‘You’d be more use to us there. After all, you’re not much use to us here. You could write about us, make speeches, paint posters – or something…’ He gave me his soft butcher’s smile, patted me on the arm, stood up and left, taking his white coat with him.

There was no one to say goodbye to in Tarazona; they were all of them gone, dead, deserted, or swept away in the snows. I collected my blanket, and canvas bag, and took a truck down to Albacete. The soldiers there, mostly Spanish now, flapped about in their mud-edged ponchos. There was a moist scummy air of impending spring, but a spring without warmth or profit.

I dropped my bags at the barracks and went round to the tavern where previously we’d sucked sugar and drunk crushed acorns. There were no acorns now, and the victory posters were peeling from the walls like skin. War-cries and slogans, reversed, in-growing, perversely coiled on themselves.

The young Spanish soldiers, squatting around, were not as conventionally foul-mouthed as usual; instead their speech now was almost clerical and precise, using abstract and ritual phrases.

‘We were outnumbered. We were betrayed. We were punished. God froze us.’

‘God what?’

‘He froze us with his mighty breath.’

The talk was still of Teruel; the unforgivable, unimaginable, the snatching away of the cup; the sudden tilt from light into darkness.

I left the tavern and found two men under a bridge, one bandaging the other’s knee. The first was about my age, his chin a tar-brush of beard; the other was younger, and beardless.

‘My brother,’ nodded the youth, gently twisting the bandage.

‘He followed me… I couldn’t get rid of him,’ said the younger boy.

‘I didn’t. I went with the major.’

‘How did you find me then?’

‘I smelt you out like a rat.’

‘Rather some fat-breasted nun had found me!’

His muddy trousers had been split up the seam and a wound ran from knee to groin. His brother had lightly bandaged half of it, and now cleaned the knee with water from a can. The edge of the broken flesh was green and the man was sweating gently.

‘No decent nurse would come near you, porco,’ said the youth, propping him into a sitting position. ‘I got you here, and I’ll get you home. So try not to be a burden.’

He rolled him slowly, carefully, on to a little hand-cart standing by, and pushed him off through the melting snow.

It was not going to be easy getting me back to England. I’d entered illegally and must return the same way. But the general opinion was: go I must. I reported to Captain Sam, the intelligence officer, in his little office off the main street. But something had happened to him since last we met; he seemed drowsier, plumper, more evasive. He sat in his German flying-jacket, not quite looking at me, picking at a saucer of olives. I wondered what the winter had done to change that spry little killer into this heavy somnambulist lump.

‘All you got to do,’ he said, ‘is get to Barcelona, then over the border – then it’s up to you.’

He seemed amused by this, and opened a drawer.

‘They told me to give you this.’

He handed me an envelope which contained my passport and five swoony Chanel-scented pound notes. Still in their envelope inscribed Socorro Rojo in the girl’s galloping cumulus handwriting. I could have wished the pound notes less pungent and the girl’s letter unresurrected, but I stuffed the lot in my shirt.

‘You know, Lorenzo,’ said Sam, looking out of the window, ‘I’ve often wondered about you. Just what your game is. What you’ve been doing here. They say you don’t know which side to get on a bus.’

He tore a form from a book, and stamped and signed it. Then he handed it to me gravely.

‘Your Safe Conduct,’ he said. ‘It won’t be much use to you, though. As you’re not officially here.’

The railway to Barcelona had just been bombed again, so I joined a convoy of trucks. We did the trip in one night, staying close together and keeping an eye on one another’s rear-lamps. It was a long cold night, sitting on sacks of sodden straw and sliding about at each curve in the road. The passengers were mostly army (or ex-army, as I was). There was also a middle-aged politico clutching a crocodile brief-case who huddled in a corner and kept up a whispered commentary of bitter reproaches addressed to Largo Caballero. As for me, all I wished was an end to this somehow; a quick sharp bomb, or a lucky escape across Europe, and to get back to her bed and rest.

We drove fast and bumpily through the night, tailboards and mudguards clattering, racing for the most part without lights over the stony plateau, the frightened politico whispering and whining, the driver shouting, the reek of burnt petrol rising from the floor. Stopping under a blue shaded light of a sleeping village, or to the muffled torches of sentries, or for freezing wine in a bar. Then the pleas of women and girls wanting to be taken :o the city, the good-natured obscenities of the driver, families sitting round wood-fires under the broken arches of stables, running over to beg for lifts to other villages; sounds of doom, liysteria, shrieks of laughter, cries – everybody wishing to be somewhere else.

We drove for about twelve hours that night, refuelling at roadblocks, and reached the outskirts of Barcelona in a late grey dawn. After the medieval towns and villages of central Spain, Barcelona revealed an alien industrial Europe, long squat suburbs and shabby concrete factories – a language far more cynical, knowing and enervating than the primitive naiveties of Castile.

The small greedy streets crossed each other like lines in a ledger, leading finally to the grand ruled boulevards. Compared with dandy, spendthrift Madrid, Barcelona had been the clever, rich uncle, aloof, scarcely Spanish at all. All its fine calculations, now, seemed blurred, blotted and cancelled. Across banks and offices sagged the war’s first banner of defiance and challenge, muted and fading as the grey figures in the streets.

Jaime, the man I had been told to seek out, lived at the top of an old Victorian-style house down a narrow side-street at the harbour end of Las Ramblas. The house bulged with men and meaty women and thumped with squeals and laughter. Girls’ faces like pom-poms peeped from half-open doorways. There were such aromas of oils and powders and warm flesh on the stairs that winter and war seemed wiped away.

Jaime, a tough young Catalan with a Prussian moustache, welcomed me into his tiny attic. Packed on shelves round the walls he had books and records and pretty Tanagra figures. There was a wind-up gramophone with a horn in a corner on which he was playing a Beethoven sonata. He turned it off as I entered, and the happy din from downstairs surged up through gaps in the stairs.

I’d met Jaime in Tarazona. Besides Catalan, he spoke Spanish, Basque, French, German, and English with a Dublin accent. He was a Professor of Theology from the University of Seville, and was also a wounded veteran from the Aragon front.

He showed me his new wooden leg, beautifully turned and finished, and knocked up by a local guitar-maker.

‘Rosewood, cedar and ebony,’ he said, and stamped on the floor. ‘When they play music, he dances.’

He gave me some brandy, and told me what I had to do. It was like taking part in some surrealist chess, where pawns became Kings and Queens without warning, and the value of the pieces changed in mid-play. The Police, the Army, the City Militia, the Syndicates, all had power, but its order, they said, altered daily.

‘Anyway, it will be no trouble, I promise you. Present yourself to the Secretariat. They’ll give you an exit visa. Say nothing – it will be all right.’

He must have seen the look of doubt on my face.

‘It happens all the time. Don’t worry. They know what we’re up to. But if you fall among fools – destroy your papers.’

Jaime, grinning thinly, was giving the impression of the big spider with his fingers on all the webs, controlling the city’s sprawling underbrush and all its secret comings and goings.

Well, I believed him, and strolled up Las Ramblas and presented myself straight away at Police Headquarters, where, in some grand inner office, they examined my passport and Chanel-scented pound notes, and promptly arrested me as deserter and spy.

I asked at least could I have my scented money back, but the notes were shovelled into a drawer. The Chief gave me a straight, hard look. ‘That goes towards the “Effort”,’ he said. ‘After all, you didn’t do much for it, did you?’

So once more I was being marched along the streets between two steel-helmeted soldiers armed with fixed bayonets. To the afternoon crowd I was a figure of just casual interest, children and girls gave me only the briefest of glances. A young man under guard, especially a blond young foreigner, was clearly no longer a remarkable spectacle in the city. Though one whiskered old man hobbled out of a doorway, crossed the road, and pinched my thighs.

‘Don’t shoot him,’ he said. ‘Just give him to me. I’ll take him home to the wife.’

The guards marched me on into a large black building near the docks and pushed me through a side-door, saying, ‘We’ve brought you another one.’ My reception was disinterested, no names in a book, no questions; I was merely told to wait. The vast anteroom was like a Dickensian debtors’ prison; a dark, shadowy space only dimly lit, and crowded with men, women and children sitting around on the floor. Some cooked, or played games, or slept or fumbled. There was a high chattering and glitter of teeth. I saw men in old tattered uniforms, with bandaged legs, surrounded by what seemed to be mothers, wives and cousins. They stroked the men’s feet and fed them soup. The place was a chamber of limbo.

After an hour or so, I was taken to an iron grille which spanned the far end of the room. Behind were the cells of the prison proper, and there they installed me without word or ceremony. Each cell had a couple of bunks and a cracked hole in the floor, down which a trickle of water flowed. In my cell I washed away every piece of paper that could identify me – notes, army cards, pencilled instructions, the Salvo Conductos, even the girl’s wanton and bubbling letters. Then anonymous, unknown and I hoped forgotten, I settled in my cell with a companion who never spoke.I hoped it would stay like that. I wanted no sudden keys in the lock, or my name called in the night. I hoped that by now I’d just be a blank in the system.