beards and handlebar mustaches of the typical
“The guards get drunk,” Diego said scornfully as the old Renault jostled past a knot of laughing soldiers. “But we Spanish, we have nowhere to go, so we stay behind the wire.”
“But you escaped,” Anna said.
“Yes, I escaped,” Diego said wearily. “For two months I ate grass and snow. Then an old woman took me in. She lives high in the mountains.” He laughed. “A crazy old thing. Very nice, but crazy. She said to me ... in French, she said,
Diego was a careful driver, but the Renault was anything but compliant, and with the slip and slide of the muddy road, it occasionally veered violently to the left or right, making Danforth and Anna collide in its cramped back seat, each time with a little laugh, and, for Danforth, a small electric thrill at her touch.
Later it would seem to Danforth the height of solipsism that he had felt no dread as he approached the transit camp at Gurs. In fact, he had felt only the continuing elation of their recent journey; he was still adrift in its intrigue but more keenly aware of the physical nearness of Anna and of the increasingly intense nature of the experience they were to share.
Afloat in that phantasm, he scarcely felt the old Renault grind to a halt and barely heard Diego’s whispered “Through the trees.”
Diego went to the trees and motioned them forward and down, so they were in a low crouch by the time they reached him. Anna got out first, but Danforth had joined her by the time she got to the trees. “Six thousand now,” Diego said, “but every day it gets bigger.” He pointed. “There.”
Years later, in the midst of his own dark search, Danforth would see a grainy black-and-white photo of the camp taken from the water tower by a camera aimed straight into the bowels of the site. It would appear quite expansive in the photograph, with column after column of wooden barracks that reached as far as the eye could see. In that picture, Gurs had seemed as large as Auschwitz when he’d later walked those bleak grounds, still searching for a clue as to how it had all happened, and where he had gone wrong.
But on the day he first set eyes on Gurs, Danforth could make out little beyond a scattering of ramshackle barracks hammered together from what appeared to be thin plywood sheets covered with tar paper, a muddy little shantytown that reminded him of the Hoovervilles back home. Captured like a school of fish within its barbed-wire net, the defeated Spaniards seemed defeated indeed, not an army at all, despite what Christophe had said, but a weak rabble, the lost brigade of an equally lost cause.
“No running water,” Diego said. He shook his head. “Others are worse. Saint-Cyprien. Ninety thousand there. Right on the Mediterranean. They have nothing.” He shrugged.
They didn’t linger for very long after that, Diego clearly jumpy and eager to leave. He was, after all, a fugitive, and if captured he would be returned to Gurs or, worse, sent back to Spain, where he would no doubt be either executed or imprisoned.
Back in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, he quickly bid them adieu, and a few minutes later Danforth and Anna went to have dinner at a small restaurant, after which they boarded the night train back to Paris.
“What do you think of the Spanish?” Danforth asked.
“I think that if war comes, they will fight,” Anna answered.
In this, as Danforth would later learn, she had been right. When war did come, the Spanish blew up bridges and sabotaged factories and even managed to kill General von Schaumburg, the German commandant of the region around Paris.
But at the time, Danforth did not know any of this, and the logistics of helping to provision an army of displaced Spaniards seemed daunting, to say the least.
Even so, he said, “We have lots of plans to make.”
“Yes, we do,” Anna said.
And so it had seemed to Danforth that together they would take the next step in the Project, as planned: establish a network within the camps, find secret storage facilities, arrange for the clandestine provision of this most ill-equipped of armies — details that made clear the importance of their many languages.
All of this, Danforth fully expected them to do.
But they never did.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Never did?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth said.
“Why?” I asked.
My question appeared to strike him like an infinitely thin blade; rather than answer it, he said, “Tell me, Paul, have you ever heard of Chekhov’s hammer?”
“No,” I answered.
“Chekhov said that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.”
He saw that I didn’t get his point.
“On the train back to Paris, I was happy,” Danforth said. “I felt that Anna and I were now true comrades in arms. We had just completed a little investigatory mission and were about to begin the further implementation of the Project. I envisioned this as a long process, with many dramatic turns. Anna would teach me the skills she’d
