“I just love to hear you talk,” she said.
But there were also Julian days, not so many at first and not quite vivid enough, when they did come, to merit comment; yet still they occurred, and Florry would seem not to exist to her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes and she’d hang on Julian. He could see her seem to bend toward him, as if to absorb him. They had their little secrets, Sylvia and Julian, their little jokes, and on these days he could see a light in her eyes he never saw when she was talking to him. She seemed to be achieving a total oneness with Julian, as if, somehow, she were sinking into him.
He began to think how perfect the world would be if Julian were not around. If only by some stroke Julian could be removed, and not exist at all.
Yet the next day, she was his again and he felt the pleasure and the triumph of her attentions.
One afternoon, he felt unusually strong and asked if anybody cared to come with him on a walk. Julian said no, he’d prefer to try to drink the world dry of bubbly, but Sylvia rose with a smile for him. It was a Florry day.
They walked down the beach. They reached the base of the cliff in a matter of minutes and walked along it. The sand under their feet was white and dry and fine. The cliff towered above them, chalky and wrinkled, its crown bridged in greenery a hundred feet up. Florry felt prickly and unsure of himself.
“How’s the neck?”
“Oh, it seems all right. It’s stiff, but if I understand the doctor correctly it will
“You’ve got some nice color now. You seemed so pale in the hospital. You looked so awful there. With those other wounded boys about.”
“I hated the hospital. I’ve already put it out of my mind. I keep thinking about the battle.”
“Julian says you were very brave.”
“Julian cares about that. About being brave. Do you know, I really don’t. It has no interest for me.”
“Julian says the war is going badly.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Julian says that unless the POUM cracks the siege of Huesca, then the Soviet Union will take over the revolution. God, it’s so confusing. Julian says that?”
“Do you know, Sylvia, I don’t really care what Julian says.”
“Why, Robert, what a terrible thing to say. He admires you so. He’s your closest friend.”
“Ummmm,” was all Florry could think to say.
They walked on in silence.
“What is bothering you, Robert?”
“I’m just tired, I suppose.”
“Well, you shouldn’t say unkind things about Julian.”
“Which of us, may I ask, do you prefer?”
“Why, I love you both, Robert.”
“Do you go to him at night?”
“Robert. What a rude question.”
“Rude or not, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“But then you’re not coming to my room, either.”
“You feel terrible. You’ve told me yourself. You’re too weak. You’ve had a hellish experience.”
“I’m getting stronger.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, then I shall come tonight.”
After dinner, Florry read on his balcony until dark. He was in an odd mood, and thought he might write. He had not thought of writing in some time, when once it had been all he lived for. In his kit, he found paper and pen. He filled the pen and faced the blank paper.
“I came to Spain,” he began, “in the beginning of January 1937 because I wished at last to take a stand against Fascism and Spain seemed to be the only place avail?”
Rot, he thought.
I came to Spain, he thought, because a bloody British major said he’d throw my precious hide into Scrubs if I didn’t. When I got here, much to my ignorant surprise, there was a war on and I’m right in the middle.
He wrote on the page, slowly, and with much deliberation, “I hate Holly-Browning, I hate Holly- Browning.”
Then he crossed it out and wrote the truth.
“I hate Julian Raines.”
He looked at his watch. There was a knock on the door. Florry quickly tore up the piece of paper, and felt embarrassed and silly.
He wondered why Sylvia was so early.
“Stinky, get you out here, for God’s sake,” came Julian’s cry through the door. “You’ll never guess who’s here! You’ve bloody
“God, Julian?”
“This
Florry threw open the door and discovered himself face to face with a man of aching familiarity. There, chunky and self-effacing, stood a young man in the uniform of a Republican captain. Then Florry placed the face and the body and made the discovery that it was the officer Comrade Steinbach had executed on the flatbed truck at La Granja.
“Salud, comrade,” said the captain, kissing him.
21
THE HOSPITAL
Even in Tarragona, it had changed, Levitsky picked it up immediately; a change, somehow, in the air. Certain fashions had altered: the mono, for example, was no longer the garment of the day. Fashionable people dressed for dinner. Motorcars had been freed from their garages: everybody who was anybody had a shiny black auto. The revolutionary slogans had somewhat faded. A different feeling gripped the city.
The POUM and the radical Anarcho-Syndicalists no longer articulated the spirit of the times; they seemed, somehow, on the run themselves. Instead, the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, which six months earlier had some five hundred members, was the new gang at the top, swollen with membership and influence and ties to the government. The new slogan seemed to sum it all up: “First the war, then the revolution.”
Koba knew: he didn’t want radical regimes spouting off like absurd tea kettles. The truth is, Koba isn’t revolutionary at all, that’s all illusion. He’s a realist, a cynic. Koba wants there to be only one revolution, in Russia, his own.
Levitsky sat in a seedy, dark seaside bar just off the Ramblas and could see a group of bitter young POUMistas in their suddenly outre monos sitting in the gloom, trying to figure out over
It was beginning. Koba’s emissaries had prepared well. Whatever Glasanov’s failures in apprehending Levitsky ? that sure death sentence if it leaked out ? the man was a professional when it came to organizing terror.
His drink arrived. The schnapps was minty, sweet, almost smoky. If I ever truly become an old man, I’ll do nothing except fuss over chess problems and drink peppermint schnapps. I will drink a lot of peppermint schnapps.
He looked at his watch. It was close to one. All right, old man, time to move.
