Night Soldiers

The Moorish brigades and Spanish Legionnaires of General Mola were aimed at the city in four columns. Mola had been asked, by a foreign reporter covering the Nationalist side, which column would have the glory of leading the attack against Madrid. “I have a fifth column,” Mola had boasted, “inside the city, and it is they who will lead the attack on Madrid.”

This might have been a deception, meant to sow suspicion among allies of wildly different passions: Basques and Catalans seeking their own nationhood, communists of several disciplines, anarchists, democrats, idealists, poets, mercenaries, and those moths who were forever seeking the flame of the hour in which to immolate themselves.

Or it might have been said merely to torment the inhabitants a little. Civil war is not unlike a fight between lovers: each side knows precisely how to infuriate the other. During the Nationalist siege of Gijon, the water supply of the defending Republicans gave out, and they suffered terribly from thirst. Quiepo de Llano, the Nationalist general, went on Radio Seville every night, drinking wine and smacking his lips into the microphone. After that, he boasted of the sexual prowess of his soldiers-the women of Gijon must be ready! It was a powerful station, and all across Europe people tuned in for the nightly show.

Faye and Renata walked for a time, talking in low voices, circumnavigating the rooftop. The rain had stopped, though lightning still flickered over the Guadarrama. They talked about life, laughing at times. At moments like these, Faye felt she was looking down at the entire world, that it was all laid out for her. Her urge for such flights had been dealt with rather summarily at Pembroke-those professors she’d thought to be sympathetic would listen stoically for an hour, then turn her head forcefully back to learning, study, the obligations of womanhood. Everything substantive, hard and demanding. She’d sensed a long line of romantic girls like herself, extending out the doors of the little cottages where the faculty offices were located, sent home to study, marry, pray, bathe in cold water- anything but life in its purest, most abstract twirls and adagios, which was what she loved to think about. Renata was willing to talk to her on any level she chose and Faye was more than grateful to be found worthy of such attention: she needed to be taken seriously and she knew it.

“When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,” Renata said at one point.

They turned a corner.

“I think that is what I believe,” Faye said. “I think. But perhaps not. Sometimes I feel I’m like a …” She stopped. Moved to the parapet of cracked plaster that closed in the roof. Stared out across the city. Renata caught up and stood by her side.

“Isn’t that strange,” Faye said.

“What is?”

“Perhaps it is a lover’s signal.”

“What?”

“The blue glow. Over there. Across the street, then one, two, three blocks-no, two blocks, three streets.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Here, look, squint your eyes and follow my finger.”

“God in heaven,” Renata breathed, then turned away quickly, calling “Felix” in a loud, urgent stage whisper.

He arrived at a trot, sorrowful eyes peering from beneath a wool muffler knotted around his head. Renata spoke to him in rapid French, then pointed. He said a few words back. She gave him what sounded like an order and he turned on his heel and left in a hurry. “I have sent him for the street map,” she explained.

The blue light moved suddenly, then came to rest in a new, more visible, position. It disappeared for an instant, as a shape moved past it, then glowed again.

“There’s somebody there,” Faye said.

“Yes, there is. Have you your pistol?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.” She thrust out a hand.

“We’ll go together.”

“No! The post may not be abandoned-it must be two to work the gun. Listen, please. When Felix returns, you must remain here. I will go and see about this light. Now please, the pistol.” Her eyes intense behind the gold spectacles, she wiggled her fingers impatiently.

Faye got angry. “You’re the one on guard,” she said, voice rising. She glanced at her watch, a tiny thing her grandmother had brought from Russia. “It is two-twenty,” she said triumphantly. “And I’m the one who’s going.”

“Faye, no!” Renata shouted and hurried after her.

Faye opened the door to the hatch, started to climb down. Renata held the door and watched her descend. “Amen, then,” Renata said. “Be careful.”

The door clicked shut and she was in darkness. It gave her heart a twinge. She’d expected Renata to argue further, finally to insist on going along. Holding the revolver tightly so that it wouldn’t fall through her waistband, she galloped down the marble staircase. As she reached the door, she heard Felix running down the hall, somewhere above her.

Lieutenant Drazen Kulic, Second Section, Fourth Directorate (Special Operations), NKVD, had waited three days for the thunderstorm in the Guadarrama. With the lightning as cover, he intended to make a great flash of his own. Without the storm, the great flash would bring down Nationalist units from everywhere, there would be a ratissage-literally “rat hunt,” a counterinsurgency sweep-and he had little confidence in his guerrilla band’s ability to elude it. They were not mountain people. They were railroad workers and boilermakers and machinists, UGT communists to a man and very brave, but they did not know this terrain. If they had to move too quickly through the forests there would be lost weapons, excessive noise and sprained ankles. Those who could not keep up would have to be sacrificed and, worse yet, it would have to be done by hand, since a pistol shot was unthinkable. He’d seen townspeople attempt to fight in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he was damned if he was going to add one more ghastly scene to the tragicomedy of the Spanish war.

Earlier that day, he’d sent his least valuable man down the road. Disguised as a cripple-they’d cut him a primitive crutch from a tree branch-he’d walked up to the roadblock carrying a newspaper packet of dried beans. They’d done the thing right-it was even a Nationalist newspaper, ABC, the Monarchist daily-but to no avail. The sentries at the roadblock wanted a password. They were very sorry, they knew how bad things were in the village, that his poor sister needed the habichuelas, but-no password, no going down the road. They took the beans, saying they would take them to the sister, but they hadn’t even asked her name.

The convent schoolhouse in the village was being used as a Nationalist armory, logistical support for the Falangist columns in their advance on Madrid. The radio message sent to Kulic’s group in the Guadarrama from the Soviet base in Madrid had been specific: Take the armory. Well, he couldn’t take it, with twenty machinists, but he could blow it up, and that he intended to do.

He had fourteen time pencils-virtually the same explosive device that had accidentally killed T E. Lawrence’s lover and bodyguard, Dahoud, as he tried to blow up a train. After Arbat Street, Kulic had attended a special school deep in the Urals, and he’d had to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom very thoroughly. What Lawrence did to the Turkish supply columns in World War I, he was now trying to do to Franco’s fascists. With time pencils manufactured in 1914. No matter. He would find a way once they broke into the armory. Theoretically, you could sink a battleship with a candle. Theoretically.

But first he had to get his people down a road. For that, he needed to steal the password. Thus, at 4:00 P.M., as the mountain skies darkened and the wind blew hard from the west, they’d set up their own roadblock two miles east of the Nationalist sentries. Along came two Guardia in a small truck. Kulic’s men, acting like normal sentries, had demanded the password. “Rosas blancas” came the answer. White roses, a Carlist symbol of purity.

At 10:30 P.M., with the storm very close, a light rain pattering down on the road, they marched to the roadblock, gave the password, and walked into the village. A company of Navarrese infantry was assigned to hold the area and protect the armory, but the rain had long since driven them back into the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where they were billeted. Kulic set up his machine gun facing the doors of the convent and sent a small ambush