Night Soldiers

and sneered at the militiamen. But when he fell he just looked like a bundle of rags. They brought a horse to drag the body away, one of the horses that used to do the same job for the bull on Sunday afternoons.

The sergeant of the firing squad had seen her standing there. He made a clenched fist and said, in sad and solemn tones, “No pasaran, senorita. No pasaran.” She had come to know Spain, and Spaniards, and she perfectly understood his irony. Observe this dirty work. Thus our slogans come to reality. And he was praising her, in his own special style, for not turning away from what had to be done.

Frances Bernstein would have turned away. Faye Berns did not. Frances Bernstein was the daughter of Abel Bernstein, the fierce proprietor of Bernstein’s Department Store-Established 1921. The second largest department store, after the mighty Abraham amp; Strauss, in Flatbush.

Faye Berns came to life midway between Pembroke and Paris, on the S.S. Normandie, as Frances Bernstein’s well-worn Brooklyn Public Library card stood high on the wind for a moment, then fluttered into the Atlantic to the cheers of a Danish painter named Lars. Frances Bernstein had spent twenty-three years waiting to become Faye Berns. Although near crushed to death by a parlorful of great-breasted aunts with diamond rings up to their wrists, an overstuffed apartment with a twittering canary, and a really very sweet Cornell man named Jacob, she had managed the transmigration of souls. She had escaped.

The canary was called Rabbi Cohen. That was Abel Bernstein, the anticlerical socialist, speaking. He was rich, it was true, but he sold goods of reasonable quality at a fair price to workers. That was his political destiny- the store, her family called it-and he accepted it. Picked up the checkbook, took out the fountain pen, let the National Peace Guild and the Brooklyn Committee for Social Justice know where Abel Bernstein stood. When she wrote from Paris that she was going to Spain, had already visited the Comintern offices on the Rue de Lafayette, his letter back to her was a classic. He agreed with her stand. Right was on her side. Now was the time. But please God for the sake of your mother do not go to Spain!

In the darkness of the little room under the eaves, Faye Berns became conscious of the ticking of the clock. The heartbeat rhythm of insomnia. Oh God, she thought, now I can’t sleep. She opened her eyes. The room was so dark, the air seemed to fill with dancing gray particles. The insomnia was an old enemy, vanquished by daily hard work and the exhaustion of simply surviving in a beleaguered city. But now it came back, especially on those nights when Andres took his drafting materials from the closet and went away-usually for the better part of a week.

Very well. She had dealt with executions and the Condor Legion, now she would deal with insomnia. She tried to turn on the light, but the electricity was off. Went to the sink in the corner and tried to splash water on her face, but the water was off. Peered at the clock-it was 12:05. She did not have to be up on the roof until 3:30, but Renata was up there now, so she might as well visit. A visitor, she knew-Andres sometimes brought her a cup of tea- helped the hours pass.

She laced up the boots, first pulling hard at the two pairs of cotton socks to make sure there was no crease. Checked the safety on the Llama pistol, then stuck it inside the waistband of her thick corduroy skirt. Damn Andres, she thought. What clothes she had not given away were being ruined by the gun. Why could she not have a holster like everyone else? She had stood in line for a day at the armory to get the pistol, but nowhere in the city could she find a holster for it. She asked Andres, finally. Of course he could get her a holster, it would simply mean that a soldier at the front would do without. Well, did she want it? He tormented her with privilege, as though she would, by the hand of fate, eventually turn into the cosseted little dumpling she had been born to become. Well-her fingers found ribs-she was no dumpling now. Her waistband had more than enough room for the gun. She had long chestnut hair, a nose with a bump, and a wide, generous, impertinent mouth. Her single good feature-the way she saw it-were eyes the color of pale jade that had raised more than their share of hell. Her beauty, the aunts had always insisted, was inner, and it had taken a number of years, and a number of boys, to pay the world back for that.

Over her work shirt she pulled on a heavy gray sweater that her Aunt Minna had knitted as a graduation present-she liked it because it was of sufficient length and bulk to hide the pistol-then tied the red neckerchief loosely around her throat. In a city running out of everything, it was as much of a uniform as anybody had. She closed the door behind her and climbed the iron-rung ladder to the roof.

“Todavia?” Still?

“Siempre!” Always!

Sign and countersign, called quietly across the roof, were peculiar to 9 Calle de Victoria-each building had its own passwords. The city was awash with secret signals, codes, posters, banners, pronunciamenti painted feverishly on walls-hammers and sickles with drip lines to the sidewalk. The fiery Basque orator La Pasionaria made daily speeches to the city over a network of public address systems wired together through the streets. Her words-It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees-were repeated everywhere. Constantly she reminded the women of Madrid that their traditional weapon, boiling oil hurled from a basin, was not to be put aside when the enemy arrived.

At the top of the hatchway to the roof, Faye Berns paused for a moment and looked out over the city. It was black and cold, the faint outlines of cathedral spires pointed shadows in the darkness.

“Faye?” Bundled in a large, shapeless army coat, Renata moved toward her through the gloom.

“It’s me.”

“Can it be time?”

“No. I came for company.”

Studied closely, feature by feature, Renata Braun was something of a covert beauty, subtle and finely made, though the impression left on the world at large was that of a woman whose surface was fashioned by the exigencies of a life lived in difficult times and places. She was fortyish, with salt and pepper hair hacked off short, a delicate nose that reddened in the cold, and severe, gold-rim spectacles that were continually removed so that she could rub the dent marks where they pinched. A Berliner, she carried with her the sophisticated aura of that city and was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, often to the edge of cruelty. Renata was Andres’s friend. Faye was Andres’s lover. They had, over a few months’ time, worked it out from there, becoming, finally, closer than sisters, a friendship in time of war.

Renata took her hands. “Ach, ice.”

Faye shrugged and smiled. She had given her gloves away and Renata knew it. She squeezed back for a moment, then put her hands in the deep pockets of her skirt. “How goes the night?”

Renata made an ironic little gesture with her mouth. “Very slow,” she said. “With der Sphinx at one’s side.”

Faye looked past her, saw the dark shape of Felix, the Belgian journalist who never spoke if he could help it, sitting slumped on an upturned crate beside the machine gun. The position was backed up against the wall of a shed-so that the roof overhang kept the rain off the gunners-and “protected” by a semicircle of meagerly filled sandbags. The machine gun lay back on its tripod, muzzle pointed at the sky.

“Hallooo, Felix,” she called out quietly. Needling him, knowing he thought her an atrocious American brat, knowing he agreed with those stern Spanish commanders who, echoing Winston Churchill, called the foreigners in Madrid “armed tourists.”

“The poor thing,” Renata said, shaking her head.

Faye could not see his face, but she could imagine it. A sneer compounded of disgust-specific; and ill- temper-general. Felix was obsessed with doom. He had come to Madrid as correspondent for a Christian Socialist newspaper in Antwerp, then stopped filing stories, stopped doing much of anything. He wanted to leave the city, somehow he could not, yet he seemed to loathe everything about it. Mostly the frenetic tension of the place, which drove people into hilarious, slightly crazed companionship. Live today, for tomorrow we die. You could be married at any militia office in five minutes. And divorced as quickly, though many declined to bother with official sanctions in any way at all. There was an army, a real army, with tanks and planes and artillery, a few miles to the west. When the battle came, everybody in Madrid would simply pick up a gun and walk out to meet it. Such courage made them saints, of a modern kind, and they knew it. They cared enough about something to die for it, and a sweet, delicious madness blew through the city like a wind. To be a Madrileno was a privilege, an honor. Only a few, like Felix, could find no joy in it.

Or were there, in fact, more than a few.