6:30 departure. He had not really slept-Yaschyeritsa’s face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long-and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel.
“Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty.” It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby-a grossly overfed baby-with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama’s boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa’s knee and tattle at every opportunity.
“Yes, hello,” Khristo managed. “Usually I drive,” he added.
“Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed, by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles.”
At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting-Khristo counted spitefully-eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid.
“Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?” Lubin said.
“Yes. I am Bulgarian.”
“Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimovich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?”
“No,” Khristo said, “I don’t know it.”
“It is not important.”
As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Sascha had one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.
At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away.
“Why did you do that?” Khristo asked.
“A rule of driving, Lieutenant,” Lubin answered proudly. “To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly.”
Khristo put his head in his hands.
The Emerson, in a tan wooden case with white dials and a little light that made the station band glow green, played best on a table beneath the window. Faye angled it slightly to the left, then fiddled with the tuning knob until the signal came in clear. Andres had gone out to yet another meeting, she was exhausted, and she was going to wrap herself up in a quilt, listen to the radio, and read a Djuna Barnes novel that Renata had discovered somewhere. All day at work, mailing out fund-raising letters for various defense committees, she had planned to spend the evening this way. She really liked the Ellington song, it boded well for the radio program, and for her private evening. Lately too many people, too many rumors, too much jittery bravado. The antidote: spend some time alone, doing things one liked, the more the better, and do them all at once. She would have made herself a cup of tea, but lately, inexplicably, there was no tea to be found. She would go to bed early, she didn’t have to man the machine gun until 5:30 the next morning, and that was hours away.
“In a Sentimental Mood.”
The music that Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli made was very spare-compared to the lush crooning of the big bands it was thin and plain, hardly anything at all. The rhythm guitars and bass plunked away on the same note; a one-two, one-two beat on the chord that changed rarely, and the tempo of it was peculiar. Should you dance to it in an embrace, you’d have to move quickly, a foxtrot in a hurry. But if you danced apart, like the Charleston, it would be much too slow for the dancers to do any tricks at all.
Soloing above the rhythm was first Reinhardt, a Gypsy guitarist with three fingers burned off in a wagon fire, then Grappelli, a classically trained musician who played nightclub violin-take away the other instruments and he sounded like a violinist at a wedding-all perfumed sentiment. Reinhardt’s playing was jazzy; long, rhythmic runs, the perfect counterpoint to the too-sweet violin. The two men were, Faye thought, opposites bound together, tenderness and cold passion. She wondered if they liked each other.
The record had been made at a bistro in Paris called Le Hot Club. Listening to the song, she could see it. Dark and smoky and close, a tiny dance floor, a thin woman in pearls with vacant eyes, barely dancing. Faye looked up from her book, head propped on elbow, and had at that moment a premonition: there would come a day when this song would bring back everything of her time in Madrid. It made her-a bizarre trick-long for a past that was still in the future. She burrowed deeper into the quilt, returned to her book.
Sometime during the last flourishes of the violin-Grappelli playing notes that sounded like musical tears, a crazy kind of sadness that wasn’t serious at all yet hurt in a special way-the door opened.
Andres came in but she did not see him, not really, she saw the man who stood by his side. Immediately she began writing short stories about him, because his presence came to her in metaphors.
Andres was so dear to her, he approached her always like a clumsy man asked to hold-but only for a moment or two while its owner was occupied-a priceless glass vase. She lived in this body every minute of every day, it was just herself. But to him she was treasure. He ran his soft hand along her body and said
The curious thing about Andres was that he was two people. Quite distinctly two people. Andres at a distance was a malleable, hesitant man who moved invisibly in the crowd. But when he spoke, he changed. He was, then, the opposite of malleable and hesitant. Spending time alone with him in a room, you met the strange thing that lived inside him: a fierce and clever animal, a beast that might hunt you down if it decided you’d somehow hurt it.
For some reason, Andres had not expected her to be there. He was unpleasantly surprised and his eyes moved around too much. For the sake of appearances he introduced the other man, but gobbled his name so that it was simply a syllable or two. The man took her hand briefly-here and gone. His face seemed closed with tension. The two of them, Andres and his friend, made together a magnetic field of such exclusionary force that she was surprised her very body did not fly right out the window.
But they could go to hell.
She too fought in this war and what she had learned about war was that slowly but surely it sucked your strength right down to the marrow. She held this ground. And her forces were arrayed about her. The jazz on the radio, the quilt, the book, the bed-the two men would attack at their peril.
So they left. Andres mumbling something or other, the Slav honoring her with a little bow. His eyes were curious, she noticed, finding everything in the room, taking a few notes, and finding her as well.
Toward the end of October the weather turned sunny and soft for one last spell before the fall rains set in and during that time the city of Madrid began to die.
The consulate people at Gaylord’s Hotel managed to find a cot for Khristo and set it up in a hallway, and there he snatched a few hours’ sleep when he could, couriers and code clerks and military attaches rushing past
