Night Soldiers

He was, above all, a nice man.

Dark-skinned, with thick sensual lips and a gently curved nose, the brown eyes-soft and deep-of a favored spaniel, and a few strands of hair combed hopefully across a balding head. He wore always a hand-knit sweater beneath his camel-colored jacket-the night air was crisp-and the canvas shoes of a comfortable man. He did, it was true, speak an odd Spanish, rather formal and stiff, but that was undoubtedly due to a childhood spent in Ceuta, down in Spanish Morocco. Was there a touch of the Moor in him somewhere? This was suggested, but it did not matter. It was simply impossible not to like him, and he quickly became a pleasant fact of life in San Ximene, appearing every week for a day or two, then going back to Tarragona in his rackety Fiat Topolino.

Though humble and self-effacing, he could not have been entirely without importance, for he was occasionally sought out by two of his employees. In San Ximene, it was a curious notion that something, anything, could be so important that it would not wait a day or two, but Senor Cardona was a city gentleman, and it went without saying that city gentlemen were occupied by matters of considerable gravity.

Los Escribientes de Senor Cardona.

San Ximene rather honored their part-time resident with such a title-Senor Cardona’s clerks. It had a bit of a ring to it. Of course, the country was at war, and it seemed that nothing was the same anymore. The men who visited Senor Cardona were proof of that. Clearly, these were not the usual escribientes. One might have expected pale, doleful fellows, their spirits turned gray by years of sitting at desks and writing in ledgers. Or minor tyrants, of the fat-assed, preening variety, little lordlings who made life miserable for poor people with their nasty rules and educated meanness.

These escribientes were quite another matter. But with so many men fighting at the front, a businessman, it was supposed, had to make do, had to take what he could get. The younger one, with the pale skin, black hair and blue eyes, conducted himself with reserve and courtesy. Some of the village daughters quite liked looking at him, a feminine perception of banked fires warming their curiosity. No, it was the older one who bore thinking about, the older one who caused the local gossips to trail their nets.

The women in black who met at the well at sundown had a ringleader-Anabella was her name, she looked like the get of a mating between a monkey and a sparrow-who led the daily pecking sessions. El Malsano she called him, tapping a forefinger against her temple. The unwholesome one. “He has snakes in his brain,” she said, “and they bite him.” One of the younger women crossed herself when she said it, though that gesture was now very unwise indeed.

Others were less colorful in their descriptions but gave him something of a wide berth. What sort of escribiente walked about in a drunken stupor? His index and middle fingers were brownish yellow with nicotine stains, his lank hair hung carelessly over his forehead, and the lines in his face were too deep for his years, like a film star, perhaps, whose career one day had faltered and died.

He was a Frenchman, probably there was no more to it than that. Serreno had overheard the clerks speaking French as they hauled a bundle of blueprints from the trunk of their long-hooded black Citroen. These were not, however, the same French people so much in evidence at the Aguilar household in summers past. None of that particular grace remotely touched them.

So it went, back and forth, as it does in a small place where people have known one another all their lives, the convalescent draftsman and his two French clerks, something to talk about.

In the tide of village opinion there was one dissenter, and he made his views known only once and was silent thereafter. This was Diego, the POUM representative to the Committee for the Carlist Mules. One hot, slow afternoon in September, he watched the Citroen crawl slowly up the white street toward Senor Cardona’s cottage. When it had passed, he spat out the barn window and nodded to himself, affirming a private theory. “Russians,” he said.

His co-committeeman, the communist Ansaldo, raised his eyebrows and came to a full stop, his well-laden shovel frozen in midair. “How do you know that?” he asked.

Diego shrugged. He didn’t know how he knew, he just knew. His friend put the shovel back down, stood upright, and sought the small of his back with his free hand. “If that is so, we are very fortunate indeed.”

Diego wasn’t so sure. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps not.”

“They will help us against the Falange,” Ansaldo said. “They will bring tanks and aeroplanes.”

“If it suits them,” Diego said.

Ansaldo lowered his head a little. Diego knew what that meant. “You are a stubborn man, Diego. Russia is a mighty nation, a great people, and our only ally in this fight. If it is true they are here, you should feel joy to see them.” He was warming up his guns, Diego could tell, for a full afternoon of political cannonade.

“Yes, a mighty nation,” Diego mused aloud. He was silent awhile, his mind seeking the applicable wisdom. At last he found it. Con patienza y salivita, el elefante se coja l’armagita.

It was an old saying in Catalonia, well tested and well proven over the years. With patience and saliva, the elephant screws the ant. But he chose not to say it. Those two were Russians, he was sure of that, and if there were two, there would be more. He had heard that the Soviet Union was sending health workers to Spain. He was not sure what health workers would look like, but he was quite sure that they would not look anything like those two. He balanced all this in his mind for a moment, then decided that it was a good time not to have opinions. Maybe later. For the present, the best course was to clean the stables and shut up. On October 9, just after midnight, it began to rain in Madrid.

Then, over the Guadarrama range to the west, white flashes lit the sky. A moment later came the long, rolling reports of marching thunder. Faye Berns was jolted awake, came to her senses sitting upright in the narrow bed, her right hand reaching for Andres-who was not there-her left hand resting on a large revolver on the night table. Boots, she told herself silently. Right away. Now.

She swung her feet over the side of the bed, discovered she’d kicked the quilts onto the floor during the night, reached down and swept them aside, found her right boot. She dropped to her knees, tried to look under the bed, but it was pitch black. The stone floor was like ice-there was no heat in the building. As she reached toward the foot of the bed, she leaned on the quilts and found the other boot muffled within.

The room’s small window lit up for an instant. She counted to four-elephant before the sound of the thunder reached her. It was a storm in the mountains, nothing more. There were no sirens, no screams, no machine guns firing from the roof. She took a deep breath and let it out, felt the pounding in her heart ease off, and fell back down on the bed still holding a boot in each hand. Thunder and lightning, not the other thing. She used to love storms. At home, they meant a break in the sweltering, humid summertime, the rain washed down the Brooklyn streets and, for a while, the air actually smelled sweet, like the country.

Andres said that in war you sleep with your boots on. She said they kept her from sleeping. He said that soldiers learned to sleep no matter what. And there you had Andres. Soft as a mouse, but a fountain of righteousness-he lived and breathed it, wore it like a suit of moral armor. Oh, you couldn’t do it? That was fine, he understood. You must be doing your best, for nobody ever did less. He would just do more himself. Would do your job as well as his own. Anywhere but here, she would have thought him an insufferable prig and hated him wholeheartedly. But it wasn’t anywhere but here, and here, where everything was upside down and inside out, somebody had to be Andres, somebody had to set the example.

It took ten seconds to put on the boots, and with ten seconds to spare you could live instead of dying. According to Andres, who knew about war. But she didn’t think this particular ten seconds mattered all that much. From the top floor of 9 Calle de Victoria, formerly the maids’ attic, it took about forty seconds to run down five flights of marble stairs to a long, vaulted hallway that led to the street. There was an alcove in the wall about ten feet from the door-at one time a polished mahogany table had stood there, but it vanished into the barricades during the street fighting of July 19-and that was going to serve as Faye Berns’s bomb shelter. Some of the building’s tenants took cover in the basement, talking and drinking wine until dawn. This she would not do. Let the Condor Legion blow her to pieces-they would not bury her alive.

Besides, it was the prevailing opinion that the Germans would not attempt night bombing-they were too much in love with their fancy Messerschmitt machines to smash them up on Madrid’s surrounding hillsides. The Italian pilots, however, were another story. She’d seen one of them when his plane crash-landed in a beet field just outside the city. Some militiamen in their blue monos-mechanics’ overalls had become the uniform of the Republican brigades-had carried him back to the city hanging tied, hand and foot, to a pole, like a wild boar taken in a medieval hunt. Even so, he swaggered. He had a stiff handlebar mustache and he cursed his captors at length and with vigor. When he stood against the wall of an elementary school he refused the blindfold