The Gate of the Sun

They walked through countryside where stems of smoke rose steadily from hollows in the hills and horse chestnuts lay shiny in their split, hedgehog shells and boys with concertina socks kicked flocks of fallen leaves; they drank beer that tasted of nuts in small pubs; they danced to Lew Stone records; they made love on a bed that smelled of lavender.

But throughout the interlude Adam was aware of disquiet. It visited him as he watched the sun rise mistily through the branches of a moulting apple tree, or while he felt pastoral loneliness settle in the evenings; it materialized in the wasting happiness after they had made love.

At first he blamed it on the challenge he had accepted at Lambourn: it wasn’t every young man who was going to fight for the Fascists. That, surely, was enough to disturb the most swashbuckling of crusaders.

But it wasn’t until the afternoon of the Sunday, when she lay in bed with her back curved into his chest and his hands were cupped round her small breasts and he was examining the freckles on her back just below the nape of her neck, where her short, golden hair was still damp from exertion, that he realized the other cause for his disquiet.

‘Don’t think,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘that you have to go and fight because of me.’ Well, he didn’t; but suddenly he understood that she was only there beside him because he was prepared to risk death – a refreshing change from conventional young men with normal life expectations.

And, as he considered this premise, it came to him that maybe his motives were suspect. Did he really believe in the Fascist cause or was it wilfulness asserting itself? Surely ideals were the essence of purity. How was it, then, that both he and the other Englishmen fighting on opposite sides could both possess them? Can I be wrong? he asked himself.

She said, ‘What are you thinking about, Adam?’ and he said, ‘This and that.’

‘You were in another place.’ She reached for his hand and placed it on the soft hair between her thighs, and he forgot his disquiet.

Later, walking through silent woods, she held his hand. How long would the war last? she asked him. Not long, he told her: Franco was at the gates of Madrid.

‘Months?’

‘Weeks.’

‘Everything has been so quick,’ she said. ‘We only met a few days ago …’

‘What would your father say if he knew what we’d done in his cottage?’

‘Cut us off without a penny,’ Kate said promptly.

Us?

They sat on a log and she took a cigarette from her case, lit it and blew puffs of smoke through narrowed lips as though she found them distasteful. Ruffled pigeons settled above them.

‘I’ll always remember how you stood up for yourself at dinner that evening,’ she said.

‘They were debating in formulas. Mathematics aren’t always right.’

‘I hope you don’t think that just because …’

‘You’re cheap?’

‘Do they all say that?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Adam said.

‘How many?’

‘None of your bloody business,’ Adam said.

‘You don’t think I’m trying to trap you?’

‘By having a baby?’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘Did you bring me to the cottage because I’m going to war?’

‘Because you’re coming back from it.’

He put his arm round her waist under her coat. He could feel the fragile sharpness of her bones, the flatness of her stomach. He felt that he was expected to utter words of deep moment but they were elusive.

He stood up. She tossed aside her cigarette and he stamped on it, pulverizing it with the heel of his shoe. He turned her and pointed her towards the cottage. When they got back he lit a fire with pine cones and they watched the sparks chase each other up the chimney. He knew that she was waiting for the words that lay trapped in his throat so he switched off the lights and they lay down beside each other and he stared into the caverns of the fires in search of answers and justifications.

The justification was brought to Adam on a silver salver on 6 October, two days before the Michaelmas term was due to begin. He was sitting in the garden of his parents’ house in East Grinstead reading a newspaper summary of recent developments in Spain. Summer hadn’t quite abdicated, sunlight shining through smoke lit chrysanthemums and persistent roses, and a biplane traversed the pale sky towing a banner advertising the News Chronicle.

Adam read that General Francisco Franco had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist army and Head of State and that the Republicans had created a Popular Army. The Fascists seemed to be on the rampage – in September they had captured Irún, San Sebastian and Toledo – and if he didn’t act soon it would be too late.

But was wilfulness enough? Do I want to be a soldier of fortune, champion of my own ego? He flung down the newspaper and paced the lawns. He was near the pond where frogs plopped in the summer when the maid found him and handed him the letter on the salver as though it were something to eat.

The envelope, which bore a new Edward VIII stamp, had been posted in London the previous day but the writing was his sister’s and she was in Madrid. Fear stirred and he held the envelope for a few moments without opening it.

The letter was dated 16 August, so it must have been smuggled out of Spain – via Marseille, perhaps, on one of the British warships evacuating refugees – and posted in London.

Dear Adam,

Paco is dead. He was taken from our apartment two nights ago and driven to a village called Paracuellos del Jarama where, with two dozen other suspects, he was executed. They were forced to dig a mass grave, then machine-gunned and finished off with bullets in the backs of their necks.

I say suspects. Suspected of what I have no idea. Certainly Paco had no interests in politics, just his job and his home and his children – and me. But he was a good Catholic and an architect and relatively well off, so I suppose that was sufficient reason. Or maybe a private quarrel across the drawing board was settled in the name of the Republic; many old scores are being settled that way. All I know is that I am lost. I hear the children and I hear the maid (she is more scared than any of us) and I hear the shooting and I suppose I eat and sleep. It is supposed to be dangerous to walk in the streets but so far the Irresponsibles, as they call them, have not killed a foreign woman. Not that I care, although I should because of the children.

A part of me also knows that I must not leave Spain. For Paco’s sake, for the children’s sake because they are Spanish. I am writing to you because we always shared and father never much cared for Paco, did he? Well, tell him the dago is dead. He was a good man, Adam …

The back-sloping letters lengthened, died. The letter was signed Eve. Her name was Julia but with Adam it had always been Eve.

Adam, letter in hand, heard the plop of stones thrown by her two boys into the pond; saw the ripple of the water beneath the duckweed. They had been happy that day, Adam and Eve, sharing Eve’s family, sharing a day that smelled of daffodils and hope, even sharing the hostility of their father which, now that there were children, was more a family joke than a threat.

Ah, Paco of the healthy skin and glossy hair and provident disposition who believed that Spain would be a land of opportunity as soon as the Republic had settled … poor, naïve Paco who was forced to dig his own grave out of the land in which he believed.

Adam threw a pebble into the pond and watched the green ripples until they lapped the bank, then strode rapidly away.

Five days later he was in the solemn city of Burgos in the north of Spain.

The third shell duly arrived in the slit trench. It came with the sound of a wave unfurling and, with an impact that shook the trench, buried itself in the mud and soft rock, resting lethally five yards from Adam.

‘Shit,’ said Chimo, ‘we’d better get out of here.’

‘It’s a dud,’ Adam said. It was not unknown for Spanish munition workers who didn’t want to kill other Spaniards to immobilize ammunition.

‘There are duds and duds. Maybe this has got a delayed fuse.’

‘Why would it have that?’

‘So that we all think it’s a nice shiny shell. We even go up and pat it. Then, whoosh, it blows us over the countryside. That’s the reds for you, those sons of whores …’

The legionnaire next to Chimo said, ‘Those bastards … We came here to fight, not wait until we’re blown into little pieces by one sleeping shell.’

He climbed out of the trench and made a crouching run for the concrete bunker at the base of the flat-topped hills. The others followed. Adam, taking a last look at the shell half-buried in the mud, went last. It was his misfortune that he was a good runner.

Keeping low, he passed empty trenches, a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest on the roof, a shrike perched on a telegraph wire, shell-holes, sage and brush and leafless fig trees … To his left he saw the curves of the river and the rulered line of Jarama canal.

Bullets fired from across the river sang past him. But what he feared was heavy artillery or a strafing run by one of the German fighters now occupying luminous pools in the clouds.

He reached the bunker first. And found that the colonel in charge of the bandera, the battalion, was waiting for him. His name was Delgado, a native of Seville, and, modelling himself on General Queipo de Llano, who broadcast bloodthirsty threats to the Republicans on the radio, bore himself with exaggerated stiffness and wore his small moustache as though it were a medal; he disliked all foreigners, whether they were fighting for the Republicans or the Fascists.

He said to Adam, ‘I must be losing my hearing – I didn’t hear any order to retreat.’

Adam drew himself to attention. ‘We’re not retreating …’

‘We?’

Adam looked behind him, spotted the last of the legionnaires who had followed him disappearing into a trench.

‘I am not retreating. I’ve come to report an unexploded shell.’

‘It’s my experience that unexploded shells report themselves.’

‘In our trench. If it had gone off it would have killed the lot of us.’

‘Who gave the orders to abandon the trench?’

‘No one, sir.’

‘But you got out first?’ Delgado slapped his cane against a polished boot. He looked as though he had just shaved and showered.

‘I run faster,’ Adam said.

‘Are you implying that the rest of the men ran away too?’

‘I did not run away.’

‘You could hardly say you were attacking. What if other members of the company had followed your example?’

Adam didn’t reply: they hadn’t.

‘Name?’

‘Fleming, sir.’

‘Ah, Fleming,’ tapping his boot with his cane. ‘Why do you want to fight for us, Fleming? Most of your countrymen are fighting for the reds.’

‘Because I’m anti-Communist.’

‘Not pro-Nationalist?’

‘If I am one then surely I am the other.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’

‘I can fire a rifle.’

‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’

Adam told him that in the cadet corps he had been a crack shot; no mention of the puttees.

‘Did they teach you to run away in this cadet corps of yours?’

‘I learned how to run at college.’

‘In the wrong direction?’

A young captain loomed behind Delgado. Adam shrugged.

Delgado said, ‘I believe this to be a Spaniard’s war. I don’t believe foreigners should interfere.’

Adam thought: ‘What about the Moors?’ but he said nothing.

‘Odd that you should have chosen this time to retreat. We were going to attack in one hour from now. I should have you shot.’

‘I came to warn you about the shell.’

‘I don’t believe in that shell. How old are you, Fleming?’

Adam told him he was 21.

‘I had a son of 20. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said.

‘He was shot in the lungs and in the stomach. He died in great pain.’

Adam remained silent.

‘Do you know who shot him?’

‘The reds … Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists …’

‘He was shot at Badajoz by the Legion. He was fighting for the reds.’

The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky and despite the sporadic gunfire, a bird was singing on the telegraph wire. Inside the bunker a radio crackled.

Delgado turned to the captain. ‘Escort this man to his trench,’ he said. ‘I want to hear more about this non-exploding shell.’

The captain put on his cap and drew his pistol.

‘That’s not necessary,’ Adam said but the captain who was young and glossy, like Paco had been, prodded the barrel of the pistol, a Luger, in the direction of the trench.

‘How old are you sir?’ Adam asked the captain.

‘May God be with you if there isn’t any shell,’ the captain said.

A sparrow-hawk hovered above them.

They were ten yards from the trench when the shell blew.

The attack was delayed until dawn the following day. Then, supported by a barrage from their batteries of 155 mm artillery and a baptismal blast from the Condor Legion’s 88 mm guns, they moved, legionnaires and Moors, across the wet, blasted earth where, in the summer, corn had rippled, towards the river separating them from the enemy.

Some time during the fighting, when the barrel of his rifle was hot and there was blood on the bayonet and his ears ached with gunfire and his skull was full of battle, he vaguely noticed a plane drop from the sky, gently like a broken bird; he thought it levelled out but he couldn’t be sure because by then he was busy killing again.

CHAPTER 4

The smell was pungent, sickly and familiar. Tom Canfield’s nostrils twitched; he opened his eyes. After a few moments he had it: locust beans. One of the maid’s sons had brought some to the house on Long Island one day and they had chewed them together. His eyes focused on a dark corner of wherever he was and saw a mound of them, pods sweetly putrefying.

In front of the beans lay the broken propeller of an aeroplane. He tried to touch it but his arm was cold and heavy. He flexed his fingers; they moved well enough but there was blood between them. He lay still concentrating, then blinked slowly and deliberately. Part of the fuselage was above him, radial engine bared. So he had been flung out of the cockpit. He tested his other arm. It moved freely. So did his legs, but his chest hurt and the pain was worse when he breathed deeply.

He sat up. Easy. Except that his right arm didn’t belong to him. He could pick it up with his left hand as though it were a piece of baggage. Blood dripped from his fingers. He looked for the wound and found it near the elbow. His thumb felt bone.

He stood up and, supporting himself against the walls, made an inspection of the farmhouse. It was a poor place with thin dividing walls painted with blue wash. Sagging beds were covered with straw palliasses, a jug of sour-smelling wine stood on a cane table.

The strength left his legs and he sat on a crippled chair. Where was he? Behind Fascist lines, behind the Republicans, in no-man’s-land? He heard gunfire and the venomous explosions of fragmentation hand-grenades; but he couldn’t tell how far away they were.

What he needed was a drink and a bandage to stop the blood seeping from the hole in his arm. He went to the kitchen and opened a cupboard painted with crusted varnish and found a half-full bottle of Magno brandy. He poured some down his throat. It burned like acid but the power returned to his legs. He ripped down a chequered curtain and tore off a strip; he eased his wounded arm from his flying jacket and bound the wound, knotting the cloth with his teeth and the fingers of his good hand.

He looked out of the window. The ground mist had returned, so it was late afternoon. Gunfire flashed in the mist.

Despite his wound he was hungry. He returned to the store-room and chewed a couple of locust pods; they made him feel sick.

He patted the fuselage of the Polikarpov. It was still warm.

He sat down and tried to visualize the battlefield as he had seen it from the air. The hills that glittered in the sun to the west, empty cornfields, vineyards, then the canal and the river and the Pindoque bridge which carried trains loaded with sugar from La Poupa factory to the railway to Andalucia. On the opposite side of the river the heights of Pingarrón where the Republicans were entrenched. But he still could not envisage where he was.

When evening had pinned the first star in the sky he opened the door and made his way towards the voice of the river.

The rabbit, one ear folded, stared at them from its hutch in the yard. It was a big problem, this rabbit. It was a pet and it was dinner. No, more – dinner, lunch and soup for supper the next day.

The rabbit, grey and soft, twitched its whiskers at Ana and the children.

‘I think he’s hungry,’ said Pablo, thereby encapsulating the rabbit’s two main faults – it was masculine and it was always hungry. What was the point in keeping a buck rabbit which could not give birth to other rabbits? What was the point of wasting food on an animal which was itself sustenance? Was there really any sense, Ana asked herself, in wasting cabbage stalks and potato peelings on a rabbit when her children were threatened by scabies and rickets?

But despite its appetite, despite its masculinity, this rabbit possessed two trump cards: it was part of the family, thumping its hind legs when the air-raid siren wailed and flattening its ears when bombs exploded, and it was available for stud to the owners of doe rabbits who would exchange a sliver of soap or a cupful of split peas for his services.

Ana regarded the rabbit with exasperation. Jesús would have known what to do.

But Jesús was at Jarama fighting the Fascists. Fighting and writing poetry – two of his front-line poems had been published in Mundo Obrero and one of them, a soldier’s thoughts about his family, hung framed on the wall among the formidable ancestors.

What would Jesús have done about the rabbit? Killed it? Ana doubted that: he would have departed, and returned, a curved smile of triumph on his face, with provisions mysteriously acquired. Like a magician, he never disclosed the secrets of his bartering but Ana suspected that he exchanged poems for provender – there were still wells of compassion beneath the brutalized streets of Madrid.

He had returned once, at Three Kings, with a doll for Rosana that he had carved with his pocket-knife in the trenches, and shining cartridge cases and studded fragments of a Mills bomb for Pablo’s war museum. But he had changed since Ana had sent him to war: he was still good with the children but with her, although gentle, he was wary and when they lay together in their sighing bed he seemed to be searching for the girl he had met and not the woman she now was. They hadn’t made love until they were married and they didn’t make love now; instead she held him until he slept and stroked his forehead when he whimpered in dreams of battle.

He was in the Popular Army, formed to bring order to the militias and Irresponsibles, but as he walked away from the chabola, stooping under the weight of the carnage he had witnessed, he didn’t look the least bit like a soldier. I am the warrior, Ana thought, regarding the rabbit speculatively, and he should be the provider.

Food! She turned away from the rabbit, allowing it one more reprieve, and went into the bedroom to fetch her shawl and her shabby coat and her shoes laced with string darkened with blacking. She hated the hunger that was always with her, because it was a weakness that distracted her from the Cause.

She left Pablo fashioning a whistle out of a cartridge case and Rosana painting a water colour of a harlequin in black, red and yellow, arm raised in a clench-fist salute.

As she crossed the yard the rabbit thumped its legs.

She went first to an old woman who lived on her own in a hovel that stood alone, like an ancient’s tooth, in a street of rubble. Here she made wreaths with paper flowers tied with black and red ribbon; the flowers were always red and she was always busy. Sometimes she possessed extra food with which the bereaved had paid for their wreaths, but there was none on view today.

‘Just a little bread,’ Ana pleaded, hating herself. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s stale; I can toast it.’ At least they had fires in the chabola, kindled with slats from the ceilings of collapsed houses and fuelled with furniture – a walnut writing-desk had burned for two days.

‘What have you got to offer?’ the crone asked. In her youth she had married a member of the CNT; when he had died she had become the mistress of a doyen of the UGT; now she believed that age was an amnesty for the past. Her face was blotched and hooked; in her youth it must have been sharp enough to cut down trees, Ana thought.

‘A poem?’

‘Ah, a poem. What a beautiful thought, Ana Gomez.’ Beneath her arthritic fingers scarlet crêpe blossomed. ‘Except that I cannot read.’

‘If I read it you will remember it.’

‘I would prefer jewellery,’ the crone said.

‘I have no jewellery, only my wedding ring.’

‘I have a little bread,’ the crone said. ‘A little rice. Admittedly with weevils but beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Ana Gomez?’

Ana twisted the gold band on her finger; she remembered Jesus placing it there.

‘I have money,’ she said.

‘Who wants money? There is nothing to buy with it.’

‘I will come back,’ Ana said. With a gun! ‘Tell me, do you make wreaths for Fascists?’

The crone gazed at her suspiciously. ‘I make wreaths for the dead,’ she said.

Perhaps one day she will make a wreath for Antonio, Ana thought as she stepped over a fallen acacia on a street scattered with broken glass. He had returned to the capital once, as furtive as a pervert, wearing a beret and filthy corduroy trousers and a pistol in his belt. He had crossed the front line, relatively quiet on the western limits of the city since the fury of November, leaving his blue Falange shirt behind him.

He had come to the chabola after dark while she was boiling water on the walnut desk blazing in the hearth. He brought with him cigarettes – the new currency of Republican Spain. He gave her six packs, then, sitting in Jesús’s rocking chair, said, ‘I went to the house; the neighbours told me that Martine and my daughter left several weeks ago …’ Even now he smelled faintly of Cologne.

‘She’s with the British,’ Ana said. ‘Waiting to be evacuated.’ She told him about Christopher Lance and his ambulance service to British warships waiting on the Mediterranean coast. ‘She’s well,’ Ana said. ‘The baby’s due at the beginning of March.’

Antonio lit a cigarette, an Imperial. His curls were tight with dirt and the skin across his cheekbones was taut; he was growing old with the war.

‘When will she go?’

‘Soon. There were many waiting before her.’

‘Is it still dangerous in Madrid for anyone who made the mistake of being successful?’

‘For the Fascists who exploited the workers? Not as bad as it was; the real pigs are all dead. As for the rest …’ Ana tested the water with her wrist as she had done when the children were babies. ‘They can’t even buy your perfume any more. Isn’t that sad?’

‘What happened to the perfume?’

‘The Irresponsibles drank it.’

She lifted the pan of water from the fire and took it to the bathroom and told the children to wash themselves, Rosana first, then Pablo.

‘I hope it poisoned them,’ Antonio said. ‘And how have you been keeping, elder sister?’

‘Surviving,’ Ana said.

‘Jesús?’

‘Fighting.’

‘Mother of God! He’ll shoot his own foot.’ Antonio inhaled deeply and blew smoke towards the fire and watched it wander into the chimney.