Night Soldiers

for all four at once, of course, but over time, in a few weeks say, they would be honorably slain in action against the enemy.”

“I’m sorry. I appreciate your thinking, but it just won’t do.”

“Who gave this order, Maltsaev?”

“I can’t tell you that and you know it.”

“Then you do it.”

“Me? I’m a political officer. I don’t shoot anybody.” He took off his straw hat and examined the inside of the crown; the leather band was sweatstained and he blew on it to dry it out.

Kulic knew he was trapped. He wanted to cut Maltsaev’s throat. But then they would all die. The Ukrainians would come and, once they arrived, all the talking was over. So it was four now, or twenty-one tomorrow.

He stood up. “Sergeant Delgado,” he called. Delgado stood up naked in the stream. He was a boilermaker by profession, a man in his forties. His arms and neck were burned by the sun, the rest of his body was white.

“Yes, comrade?” the sergeant called up the hill.

“I need a patrol of four men,” he answered in his rough Spanish. He called out their names. “To gather wood,” he added.

“We have plenty of wood,” the sergeant responded.

“Sergeant!” Kulic yelled.

Nodding to himself that officers were crazy, Delgado picked his way delicately among the rocks in the streambed and went off to gather the patrol.

Maltsaev was finished blowing on his hat. “You’ll see,” he said, “everything will work out for the best.” He put the hat back on, carefully adjusting the angle of the brim so that his eyes were shaded from the sun. They went up the mountain to gather firewood. Kulic was armed with his pistol and, slung over his shoulder, a Spanish bolt-action Mauser rifle, the basic weapon of the Spanish war. The four men were not armed, the better to carry the wood. They chattered among themselves, enjoying their holiday, drawing pleasure from the work detail. Now and then they looked over their shoulders at Kulic, but he waved them on. At last he found what he was looking for. A small glade, an utterly peaceful place where no people had been for a long time.

They began to gather wood, snapping dead limbs off fallen trees, bundling up twigs and sticks for kindling. They worked for an hour, tying the wood with hempen cords in such a way that it could be harnessed to their shoulders, leaving their hands free. It was the way he had taught them to do it. He knew, also, that once they were laden in this way, it would be nearly impossible for them to rush him successfully.

When they were ready to go, he held up a hand and unslung the rifle, holding it loosely at port arms. They stood there for what seemed like a long time, watching him, their faces slowly growing puzzled. One of them finally said, “Capitan?”-a term of honor they had granted him.

“I am sorry,” Kulic said, “but I must ask you to sit down for a moment.”

Carefully they knelt, balancing their loads, then sat, lying back against the wood bundles.

“I am told, by the Russian who came to the camp this afternoon, that you are members of the organization known as POUM, an anarchist group. Is this true?”

“Our politics are complicated,” Marquin answered, making himself spokesman for the group. “We are members of the UGT, the Communist party, but we have all attended meetings of the POUM in order to hear the thoughts of comrade Durruti, who is a greatly gifted man and a fine orator. ‘If you are victorious,’ he has said to us, ‘you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall … and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’ “

Kulic was impressed with the speech. “You can remember all that?”

“All that and more. So many of us do not read or write, you see, that memory must serve us.”

“But you are not members.”

“No, but we do not disavow them. They too are our brothers in this struggle. We attended their meetings, before we came out here to fight the fascists, gave them a gordo for the coffee, signed petitions in favor of freedom for the working classes. Can this have been wrong?”

“I am afraid so.”

Sitting next to Marquin was a fat man. How he had managed to remain so, despite forced marches and the unending physical demands of partizan life, Kulic had never been able to figure out. He had, when he spoke, the piping voice of a fat man. “Then we are to be shot,” he said.

Kulic nodded yes.

Two of the men crossed themselves. Marquin said, “We are ready to die, it is in the nature of this work we do. But to die dishonored, by the hand of our leader …” The pause became a silence as he realized that nothing he could think of would finish the thought.

“You are not dishonored, and I myself do not understand this, and I do not agree. I am, like you, a soldier, and I have been given an order, and because I am a good soldier, I will carry out that order even though I believe it is wrong. All I know is that we are involved in a great revolution. It began a long time ago, far from here, and it will go on for a long time after we are gone. The POUM is in the way, it would seem, of victory in Spain. A sacrifice will have to be made. That is everything I can say.”

One of the men struggled suddenly to get up but the wood borne by his shoulders held him back, and the fat man, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it impossible for him to move. “No, no,” the fat man said, “let it be. Our enemy is not in this place.”

Marquin spoke up, his voice absolutely calm. “I wish to be the first,” he said, “but I want to stand up.” He wrestled the load of wood from his shoulders and stood. Straightened his mono overall so it hung properly, combed his hair into place with his fingers as though his photograph were about to be taken. His eyes looked directly into Kulic’s. Kulic worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it to his shoulder, sighting on the man’s heart. He had never known the name of the man in the tavern in Zvornik-that had all happened too quickly for any but a perfectly instinctive reaction. The man had rushed at him with a piece of wood, Kulic had plunged a knife into the very center of him, he had seemed to swell up suddenly to the size of a giant, then twisted away, wrenching the knife from Kulic’s hand and falling upon it so that the steel hilt banged against the cement floor. After that there was only the sound of the last breath rushing from his lungs. Kulic tightened his finger on the trigger. The Spanish Mauser was a simple weapon, made to work for a long time, and there was nothing delicate about its mechanism. The trigger was on a hard spring and it had to be pulled with force.

Slowly, Kulic lowered the rifle. He forced the bolt back and, as the ejected cartridge spun into the air, caught it cleverly in his right hand. Then he put it in his pocket.

Slowly at first, and then more rapidly as they understood what was happening, the other three men unburdened themselves and stood up. Kulic nodded his head toward the west. “Portugal is that way, I believe.”

“But we have no guns,” one of the men said.

“You will draw less attention without them,” Kulic said.

He was not to hear Marquin speak again. The man studied him as his friends walked slowly west along the curve of the mountainside. There was no gratitude in his eyes. Perhaps a veiled smile, perhaps the faintest hint of contempt. It occurred to Kulic then that Maltsaev might have been right in ways he had not understood, but it was much too late to have thoughts like that so he turned his attention to other matters.

He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and, when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree. A 825.

At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroen, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the Neva’s stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the