“It’s starting,” Weisz said.
“They won’t try to cross the river,” Sandoval said. “That comes tonight.”
From the opposite bank, a muted
“I think we should stay for a while,” McGrath said.
Weisz agreed. When McGrath told Sandoval they would stay, he pointed at a cluster of pines. “Better over there,” he said. On the count of three, they ran, and reached the trees just as a bullet snapped overhead.
The mortaring went on for ten minutes. Ferrara’s company did not fire back, their mortars were ranged in on the river, and they had to save what shells they had for the coming night. When the Nationalist fire stopped, the smoke drifted away and silence returned to the hillside.
After a time, Weisz realized he was hungry. The Republican units barely had enough food for themselves, so the two correspondents and their lieutenant had been living off stale bread and a cloth sack of lentils-known, after the Republican finance minister’s description, as “Dr. Negrin’s victory pills.” They couldn’t build a fire here, so Weisz dug around in his knapsack and produced his last tin of sardines-not opened earlier because the key needed to roll back the metal top was missing. Sandoval solved that problem, using a clasp knife to cut the top open, and the three of them speared sardines and ate them on chunks of bread, pouring a little of the oil over the top. As they ate, the sound of fighting somewhere to the north, the rattle of machine guns and rifle fire, rose to a steady beat. Weisz and McGrath decided to go have a look, then head northeast to Castelldans and file their stories.
They found Ferrara at one of the machine-gun positions, said goodby, and wished him luck. “Where will you go, when this ends?” Weisz asked him. “Perhaps we can talk again.” He wanted to write a second story about Ferrara, the story of a volunteer in exile, a postwar story.
“If I’m still in one piece, France, somewhere. But please don’t say that.”
“I won’t.”
“My family is in Italy. Maybe, in the street, or at the market, somebody says something, or makes a gesture, but mostly they are left alone. For me it’s different, they might do something, if they knew where I was.”
“They know you’re here,” Weisz said.
“Oh I believe they do know that. Across the river, they know. So all they have to do is come up here, and we’ll pass the time of day.” He lifted an eyebrow. Whatever else happened, he was good at what he did.
“Signora McGrath will send her story to Chicago.”
“Chicago, yes, I know, white socks, young bears, wonderful.”
“Goodby,” Weisz said.
They shook hands. A strong hand, Weisz thought, inside the glove.
Somebody on the other side of the river shot at the car as it rode along the ridge line, and a bullet came through the back door and out the roof. Weisz could see a ragged piece of sky through the hole. Sandoval swore and stomped on the gas pedal, the car accelerated and, as it hit the holes and ridges in the road, bounced high in the air and slammed down hard, crushing its old springs and landing steel on steel with a horrible bang. Weisz had to keep his jaw clamped shut so he wouldn’t break a tooth. Under his breath, Sandoval asked God to spare the tires, then, after a few minutes, slowed down. McGrath turned around in the passenger seat and poked a finger into the bullet hole. Calculating the distance between Weisz and the bullet’s path, she said, “Carlo? Are you okay?” The sound of the fighting ahead of them grew louder, but they never saw it. In the sky to the north, two airplanes appeared, German HE-111Heinkels, according to Sandoval. They dropped bombs on the Spanish positions above the Segre, then swooped down and machine-gunned the east side of the river.
Sandoval pulled off the road and stopped the car beneath a tree, as much cover as he could find. “They will finish us,” he said. “There’s no point to it, unless you wish to see what has happened to the men by the river.” Weisz and McGrath did not need to see this, they had seen it many times before.
So then, Castelldans.
Sandoval turned the car around, drove back to the paved road, and headed east, toward the town of Mayals. For a time, the road was deserted, as it climbed a long, upward slope through oak forest, then emerged on a high plain and met a dirt road that passed through the villages to the south and north.
Up here, the sky had closed in; gray cloud above empty scrubland and a ribbon of road that wound across it. On the road, a slow gray column that stretched to the far horizon, an army in retreat, miles of it, broken only by the occasional truck, pulled by mules, which carried the ones who could not walk. Here and there, among the plodding soldiers, were refugees, some with carts drawn by oxen, loaded down with chests and mattresses, the family dog on top, next to the old people, or women with infants.
Sandoval turned off the engine, Weisz and McGrath got out and stood by the car. In the hard wind that blew down from the mountains, there was not a sound to be heard. McGrath took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her shirttail, squinting as she watched the column. “Dear God,” she said.
“You’ve seen it before,” Weisz said.
“Yes, I’ve seen it.”
Sandoval spread a map across the hood. “If we go back a few miles,” he said, “we can go around it.”
“Where does this road go?” McGrath said.
“To Barcelona,” Sandoval said. “To the coast.”
Weisz reached for a pad and pencil.
The censor, in Castelldans, didn’t like it. He was an army major, tall and thin, with the face of an ascetic. He sat at a table in the back of what had been the post office, not far from the wireless/telegraph equipment and the clerk who operated it. “Why do you do this?” he said. His English was precise, he had once been a teacher. “Can you not say, ‘moving to reposition’?”
“An army in retreat,” Weisz said, “is what I saw.”
“It does not help us.”
“I know,” Weisz said. “But it is so.”
The major read back through the story, a few pages covered in penciled block print. “Your English is very good,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Tell me, Senor Weisz, can you not simply write about our Italian volunteers, and the colonel? The column you describe has been replaced, the line is still being held at the Segre.”
“The column is part of the story, Major. It must be reported.”
The major handed it back, and nodded toward the waiting clerk. “You may send it as it is,” he said to Weisz. “And then you may deal with your conscience in whatever way suits you.”
26 December. Weisz sat back against the faded plush seat in a first-class compartment as the train chugged slowly past the outskirts of Barcelona. They would be at the border crossing in Port Bou in a few hours, then France. Weisz had the window seat, across from him a pensive child, next to his mother and father, a fastidious little man in a dark suit, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. Next to Weisz, an older daughter, wearing a wedding ring, though no husband was to be seen, and a heavy woman with gray hair, perhaps an aunt. A silent family, pale, shaken, leaving home, likely forever.
This little man had apparently followed his principles, was either an ally of the Republican government or one of its minor officials. He had the look of a minor official. But now he had to get out while he could, the flight had begun, and what awaited him in France was, if he was unlucky, a refugee camp-barracks, barbed wire-or, if his luck held, penury. To avoid train sickness, the mother reached into a crumpled paper bag and, from time to time, dispensed a lemon drop to each member of the family; the small economies had begun.
Glancing at the compartment across the aisle, Weisz could see Boutillon, of the Communist daily
The Spanish major had been right about his English: it was good. After finishing secondary school at a private academy in Trieste, he’d gone off to the
