“They sang an American song,” Christophe told them cheerfully. “‘Red River Valley.’ All the time, they sang it.”
Christophe had the starry-eyed look of an idealist, Danforth thought. There was a boundless naivete in the way he went on to praise his fellow brigadiers, a blindness to human nature he suspected most idealists shared since, in order to believe such ideals, they first had to believe that all men were as innocent as they.
“As you know, our hope is to use the great number of Spanish in France now,” Christophe said at the conclusion of his brief paean to his own lost cause. “These are republican soldiers who escaped over the Pyrenees before Spain fell to Franco. The French have put them in what they call transit camps. Le Vernet d’Ariege, Saint- Cyprien, Barcares, Argeles, Gurs.” He looked suddenly toward Anna. “These men are seasoned fighters. And they know that if the Germans overrun France, they will all be killed or sent back to Spain.” His eyes did not leave Anna’s. “Escape is not difficult. At Gurs, for example, the barbed wire is only two feet high, and there are no guardhouses.”
None of this was news to Danforth, as he’d spent the last of his time in New York being filled in on the Project by Clayton and Bannion. Even so, he listened intently as Christophe talked about how many displaced Spaniards were currently in France, almost a quarter million. They had proven their courage, and their hatred of the Germans was intense. They were Spaniards, he said, and therefore they were brave. Surely arrangements could be made to arm and supply them if war broke out between Germany and France.
Danforth would long recall the fervent nature of Christophe’s argument, his deep love for his Spanish comrades. But it was the suffering at the Spanish internment camps Christophe most powerfully described: the poor food and shelter, the anguish of their defeat and subsequent dispossession. It was a vision that Danforth found quite moving, though he saw almost no response to it in Anna’s eyes. Rather, she peppered Christophe with questions that were almost entirely logistical, as if her intent were not simply to make contact and later train and supply this ghostly army, but to lead it.
“So,” Christophe said when Anna had asked the last of her questions, “the next step is that you go to Gurs, mademoiselle.”
The arrangements were made the next day, and three days after that, Danforth and Anna set off from Paris on a southwestern journey through the heart of France that he found utterly exhilarating and that filled him with an inexpressible joy. He recognized that this happiness was fanciful and romantic, but he could not — even later, after all was known — strip this journey of its tingling pleasure or of the sense that he would never live higher or more passionately than he lived at that moment.
At Urdos station, the mountain passes of the Atlantic Pyrenees loomed ahead, but Danforth found nothing ominous in their high, jagged walls. Oloron-Sainte-Marie lay before them, and a short time later they stood before the old doors of Sainte-Marie. It had been a smooth journey thus far, but also a long one, though Danforth didn’t feel in the least depleted by it. He was on the road again, like the boy of old, only this time destined to pursue a higher goal than the purchase of Etruscan pottery or an Afghan rug.
“The Romans tramped through these ravines,” he told Anna. “These were the gates of Western Europe.”
But on the road that day, there was only a group of pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela. They were a ragged assemblage, French peasants who seemed unchanged from the Middle Ages save for their clothes. The trudging of this ancient route was no doubt a powerful act of faith, and Danforth noticed a curious sympathy for them in Anna’s eyes; perhaps this ritualized Christian journey reminded her of the Hasidim of Delancey Street, the way they also went on foot to their sacred houses.
Once the little group of pilgrims had passed, she turned idly toward the church doors, and Danforth saw that she was peering at the base of one of the church’s supporting columns: two medieval peasants, standing back to back, the great weight of the column on their small shoulders.
“Peasants doing their duty,” Danforth said lightly. “Despite the burden, I mean.” He looked at them more closely. “Contented with their place in the chain of being.”
Anna’s gaze remained on the two bent figures, their faces not at all strained as the vast weight pressed down upon them.
“Oppression often looks like harmony,” she said.
It was a remark that seemed to come from the darkest of her experiences, her expression as solemn as her voice, so entirely genuine that Danforth would for many years refuse to consider that it might have been a mask.
“Monsieur?”
Danforth turned to see a small, stooped figure standing just beyond the church door, his scruffy brown hat clutched in both hands, meekly, like a servant.
“I Diego,” he said in deeply accented English.
He was dressed raggedly, and Danforth, with his keen eye for such things, noticed every dangling thread and nodding button.
“I show you camp,” Diego said.
Danforth stepped forward and offered his hand, which Diego took in the shy, uncertain way of men abruptly dispossessed.
“I’m Tom,” Danforth told him in Spanish. “And this is Anna.”
“A pleasure,” Diego replied in his native tongue, with a quick bow toward Anna. “I have a car,” he said in Spanish, and he never again reverted to English. He motioned toward the small street that led away from the church. “Please come.”
They followed Diego to a mud-splattered Renault that Danforth thought at least fifteen years old. The black exterior paint had long ago lost its gloss, and the running boards were caked with past generations of gray Pyrenean dust. It wheezed pitiably as the engine turned, and the chaise shook and rattled before it finally jerked forward, heaved backward, then bolted forward again in the comic way of silent movies. Danforth could almost imagine a bespectacled Harold Lloyd fearfully clutching its worn black steering wheel.
“We should not go too close to the camp,” Diego said, “but you will see it very well.”
The drive from Oloron-Sainte-Marie was brief, but on the way, Danforth noticed a few straggling French soldiers, their rifles held in the loose, jaunty way of stage actors as they marched raggedly southward. They had the
