But it was most of all, Khristo thought as he heaved on the end of a railroad tie pressed into service as a lever, an intelligence failure. Someone, not knowing the range of the German bombers, had decreed that trains could run during daylight. And here was the result of such ignorance. As they took the wreck apart, pulling away boards, manhandling cast-iron wheel carriages and axles, they came upon the bodies. Most of them, like the American on the road, already wounded and bandaged. Now and then they found one still alive and carried him down to the road, to be taken back to Tarragona by a fleet of private cars and taxicabs called in from surrounding towns. But mostly these wounded, who had expected to live, who had had the luck to survive gunfire or artillery bursts, were dead, twisted into impossible positions by the force of the wreck.
From the survivors, who worked along with local policemen and firemen, Khristo learned they had been fighting against the Asensio column to the west of Madrid, and it had been a nightmare. They had retreated from Navalcarero, across the Guadarrama River, all the way back to Alorcon. They had been, like Republican forces throughout Spain, very brave but poorly armed. The Nationalist field guns had chewed them up from a distance, and forays against the gun emplacements brought them into enfilading machine-gun fire, which mowed them down in long lines. A company of miners from Asturias had arrived to fight by their side, but they had no guns whatsoever and fought with dynamite. When civilians took the field against organized forces, Khristo realized, they learned the simplest tactical truths at brutal cost. And they lost. Lives, armaments, strategic support, positions, and ground- everything. Like the Crusaders of old, they believed the justness of their cause would somehow protect them, and they were equally wrong.
The rescue effort was led-brilliantly, Khristo thought-by the chief of police of Ribarroja de Ebro, who had made his way to the scene in pants, boots and pajama top. He was a tall man with a pitted face, and he seemed to be everywhere at once. Directing, encouraging, ordering, in total calm and with total authority. When Sascha had tried to explain, using his garbled Spanish, that their mission precluded any possibility of helping in the effort, the man nodded in sympathy and, saying
Three boxcars of live steers had traveled with the train, en route to the markets of Tarragona, and a number of animals had been injured in the wreck. Some of them had managed to make their way into the fields, where they lowed ceaselessly with pain and terror, drawn-out pleading calls from the darkness. The policeman tried to ignore it but he could not and finally, to everyone’s silent relief, a detail of surviving wounded had been given pistols and sent off, limping and shuffling, wandering through the mist and smoke, to find the animals and put them out of their misery. Thus there were shouts and pistol reports throughout the long night.
Toward dawn, a train from the east had passed slowly on the remaining track, reinforcements headed for the Madrid front. All wore red scarves. They stuck their heads out the windows and gave clenched-fist salutes to the workers on the road, called out
At daybreak they were relieved by a company of infantry quartered nearby and the two collapsed against the side of the car, sitting in the weeds by the side of the road. Khristo stared sorrowfully at his hands, black with axle grease, soot, and dried blood, two nails split all the way to the base, a slice across the palm that had bled itself dry. It had been a long time since he’d really worked, every muscle in his back told him that. He sat quietly, in a kind of stupor, hypnotized by light as the first sun found the river. He watched the mist burning off, the pale green water moving lazily in its autumn flow. It looked so clean to him, the way it changed itself instant to instant, brushing along its banks, running to the sea. He wanted to go up next to it, put his aching hands in for as long as he could stand the cold, but he was too exhausted to move. By his side, Sascha picked with great difficulty at the sealing tape on the neck of a brandy bottle.
“Surely,” Khristo said, “there will be trouble over this.”
“Oh yes,” Sascha answered. “Our orders are clear. Do not meddle, do not become involved, NKVD business precedes all else. For me, of course, it no longer matters, so I shall take the brunt of Yaschyeritsa.”
“Sascha, please, for once be real. Truly you are leaving?”
“Recalled,” Sascha said. The word seemed to hang for a long time. ” ‘Recalled to Moscow.’ That is the phrase.”
He put the bottle down, reached over and tore up a handful of weeds. “Let me see, we have here hemlock and wild mustard, chicory, allium, and here is the legendary asphodel, a wildflower of great antiquity. I took a year of horticulture in university. With the famous Academician Boretz. See over there? Those are crown daisies, there is fennel I think, and field marigolds. Good old Boretz, never hurt a fly, couldn’t walk without bumping into the ground. But a Trotskyite, or worse. So, that was Boretz. They are going to kill me, Khristo.”
He went back to work on the bottle, at last getting it open and taking a few delicate sips, then offering it to Khristo. The brandy tasted like fire, but the bitter strength of it kicked some life back into him.
“Why do you not run away?” Khristo asked quietly.
“Yes, it occurs to one. But it would be futility itself to try. They hunt you down, my friend, they always hunt you down. And before they dispense with you, they make you sorry you ran. They brought one fellow back to Moscow and let us see him in the morgue, just his face, mind you. One would not think it physically possible to open a mouth that wide.”
Khristo watched him carefully, but his face, coated with oily dirt, was empty. “What has happened,” he said, “is that Yagoda is finished. Now it is Yezhov, the dwarf, who runs the service. Yagoda has been accused of murdering the writer Maxim Gorky by spraying poison on his walls. Also, he is accused of complicity in the affair of Kirov. Rumor has it that the scythe is out in Moscow for real-this one will make the events of ‘34 seem like the nursery. So, fine fellow, what you’ve seen of Sascha’s useless life is what there will be.”
Khristo tried to take this in. The utter lack of drama in Sascha’s demeanor somehow acted to balk understanding. “A dwarf,” Khristo said.
“Yes. The Great Leader exceeds himself in whimsy.”
“My God.”
“The curious part is that I don’t care. Oh, later on, in the Lubianka, I shall kick and scream and plead for mercy-hug their boots and all of it. It is expected of one to do that-they demand their theater. But now, right now, I feel nothing at all.”
“Sascha, this cannot be.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll await you in hell. There we will keep track of the devils-who works, who doesn’t, who makes secret plots with angels. You shall see, it won’t be as bad as you think.”
At last the old Sascha. He was relieved. “Those devils must be watched-they stab the Revolution in the back! Perhaps I should accompany you?”
Sascha smiled gently at his efforts to play along with the mood. “Application refused,” he said, “reapply in thirty days.” He thought for a moment. “Thirty days in truth, Khristo Nicolaievich. I am only the first to go-there will be others. Many others.”
“You are serious?”
“Yes. In their eyes we have been ruined, you must understand. We have seen the world, and we must not be allowed to tell others what we have seen. Or perhaps we have consorted with the enemy. Who among us has remained pure? Impossible to know, so safety lies in throwing out the whole batch and starting anew.”
Khristo felt his pulse quicken. This was not Sascha the mad poet spinning dreams. This was the Sascha who
