The Gate of the Sun

‘And Salvador?’

Ana straightened her back in front of the fire. ‘He’s dead.’

Antonio stared at the cigarette cupped in his hand. ‘Papa?’

‘Dead.’

‘How?’

‘Killed by one of your bombs.’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘But the priest lived.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

And then he had gone and she had imagined him flitting through the blacked-out campus, and sidling through the front lines where friend and foe called to each other, and making his way south to the Jarama valley to resume the fight against his own people.

In the Puerta del Sol she spoke to a lottery ticket vendor. The lottery headquarters had moved with the faint-hearted Government to Valencia but tickets which could make purchasers rich beyond the dreams of working men were still on sale in Madrid. But as the crone had said, ‘Who wants money?’ If the first prize had been a kilo of sausages Ana might have joined a syndicate and bought a fraction of a decimo, a tenth part of a ticket.

The vendor was young and broad-shouldered with a strong waist and muscular arms but his legs were shrivelled, tucked under him like a cushion on his wheelchair.

She asked him if he knew any food resources. She had known him for three years, this robust cripple, and they admired each other.

‘I know where there are candles.’

‘You can’t eat candles, idiot.’

‘You can barter with them, guapa.’

‘And what do I barter for the candles?’

‘That rabbit of yours. He is very lucky. I wish I was that rabbit.’

‘If I can’t get any food today I shall eat that rabbit tonight,’ Ana said.

‘I wish even more that I was that rabbit.’

She frowned but she was not displeased; she liked his glow and enjoyed his vulgarity. It was rumoured that, during the frenzied days of July, he had produced a pistol from beneath the blanket covering his thighs and shot a Fascist between the eyes.

‘How is business?’ she asked.

‘Today everyone gambles with death, not figures.’

‘You get enough to eat?’

‘People are good to me,’ he said. ‘I am, after all, at the centre of Spain.’

‘Some people say the Hill of the Angels is the centre of Spain.’

‘I hope not; the Fascists hold it.’

‘We held it for one great day,’ Ana said. ‘Enrique Lister took it in January. And took 400 prisoners. We showed them what to expect.’

‘Just the same, this plaza is the centre of Spain because it is in Republican hands. Kilometre 0.’ He pointed across the plaza, shouldered by the red and white façade of the Ministry of the Interior, with its kiosks selling merchandise that no one wanted these days – dolls and combs and fans – and the umbrella shop with sawdust on the floor. ‘Have you ever been here, guapa, on New Year’s Eve when you must swallow twelve grapes before the clock has finished striking twelve?’

‘I have been here,’ she said. ‘And I have been to the Retiro on a Sunday and seen the jugglers and the mummers and listened to the guitars and eaten water ices and taken a rowing boat on the lake.’

‘It was beautiful to be in Madrid then,’ the vendor said. ‘Here, I will give you a ticket.’ He tore a pink ticket from one of the strips hanging from his neck.

‘But you will have to pay for it.’

‘You can repay me one day when we have won this bloody war. Now perhaps you can use it to trade for a candle which you can trade for a can of beans.’

‘If not, you share the rabbit with us.’

‘Have you noticed that all the cats have disappeared?’

‘Then there will be plenty of rats to eat. Where are these candles?’

He named a street near the Plaza Mayor where, from a height, the roofs looked like a scattered pack of mouldering playing cards.

At the stall, where a man with sunken cheeks was trading candles, Ana became inspired. Glancing at the ticket she noticed that the last three figures were 736. The seventh month of the year of ’36 – the month in which the war had broken out.

‘What have you to offer?’ asked the trader, who was not doing good business because, after dark, Madrileños went to bed and watched the searchlights switching the sky and listening to the gunfire to the west of the city and had no need for illumination.

‘I want six candles, comrade,’ Ana said.

He appraised her. Ana was flattered that men still looked at her in that way; she was also aware that she carried with her a fierceness that discouraged all but the most intrepid.

‘I asked you what you had to offer.’ A cigarette in the corner of his mouth beat time with his words.

‘This.’ She held up the lottery ticket.

‘You expect six candles for that?’

But Ana knew her Madrileños: they would bet on two flies crawling up the wall.

‘This is a very special ticket,’ Ana said. ‘With this you will be able to buy a Hispano-Suiza. And an apartment on the Castellana. And a castle in the country.’

‘Let me have a look at this passport to paradise.’

She handed him the ticket. He held it up to the light like a banker looking for a forgery. Cold rain began to fall from a pewter sky.

‘What is so special about this ticket?’ the vendor asked.

‘Imbecile. Look at the last three numbers. The month of the year the war started.’

The trader hesitated. Then he said, ‘Three candles.’

‘Burro! They were looted from a church anyway.’

‘Four.’

‘No, it is I who am the imbecile. I have always wanted a castle in the campo … Give me back the ticket.’

He handed her six candles.

She took these to a bakery off the Calle del Arenal where they baked bread for the troops; twice a week Ana and ten other women from the barrio took this bread by tram to the front. Its warm smell made the saliva run painfully in her mouth but she never touched any of the loaves nestling in the tin trays on her lap.

The baker, plump with a monk’s fringe, hands gloved with flour, stood at the doorway.

‘You have made a mistake, Ana Gomez. Tomorrow is the day for the front.’

‘No mistake, comrade. How was the electricity last night?’

‘Twice the lights failed. How can a man make bread in the dark?’

‘By candle-light,’ Ana said handing him the six candles. ‘Now give me three of those loaves.’ And when he hesitated, ‘You are fat with your own bread; my children are starving.’

She placed the three loaves in the bottom of her basket and covered them with a cloth. As she walked home through the rain she thought, ‘Today is Friday and we will be able to eat – the bread and some of the vegetable pap that was supposed to be a substitute for meat. And on Monday there will be more rations. But what of Saturday and Sunday? We shall eat the rabbit,’ she decided.

As she neared Tetuan the air-raid siren wailed. No one took much notice: they had become used to Junkers and Heinkels laying their eggs on the city. The city, she thought, was a fine target for bombers, a fortress on a plateau.

She walked down a street of small shops guarded by two tanks. The crews wore black leather jackets, Russians probably. A bomb fell at the far end of the street; a thin block of offices collapsed taking its balconies with it and crushing the empty butcher’s shop below. The air smelled of explosives and distemper.

The crews disappeared into their tanks.

Ana took shelter in a doorway beside a small church. A poster had been stuck on a shop window on the opposite side of the street, beside a bank still displaying the stock market prices for last summer. It showed a negro, an Asian and a Caucasian wearing steel helmets; beneath their crusading faces ran the caption, ‘ALL THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD ARE IN THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES ALONGSIDE THE SPANISH NATION’.

The bombers flew lazily back to their bases at Avila or Guadalajara and the leather-jacketed crews emerged from their tanks and stood stretching in the powdery rain blowing down the street with the dust from the explosions.

Ana emerged from the doorway. She thought about the bread, still warm and soft in her bag, and thought how good it would taste tonight and then, anticipating tomorrow’s hunger, she thought, ‘I will kill that rabbit while the children are playing. Break its neck with a single blow with the blade of my hand. Who are you, Ana Gomez, to worry about killing a pet when you have shot Moors and Spaniards and would have shot your own kind if they had turned and run?’

She wished the rabbit wasn’t so trusting.

When she got home she noticed that the faces of the children were dirty with dried tears.

‘So, what have you done?’

Pablo, lips trembling, pointed into the yard, ‘The rabbit escaped,’ he said.

Anger leaped inside her. She went to the bedroom and shut the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed.

When she came out the children were sitting in one corner watching her warily.

‘Who let it escape?’

‘I did,’ they both said.

She nodded and said, ‘Your hunger will be your punishment.’

Then she fetched one of the loaves from her bag and cut it in three pieces. She sliced them, then smeared them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt.

They sat down and ate like a family.

The slaughter was cosmopolitan.

Chimo brought the details to Adam Fleming who was resting with other legionnaires in an olive grove at the foot of Pingarrón, the heights which the Fascists had just captured after crossing the Jarama.

Moors had slit the throats of Spaniards; Irish had fought Irish; Italians had checked the Fascists’ advance; the French fighting for the Republicans had really shown that they had cojones; Balkans, many of them Greeks, had defended ferociously; the British were still fighting suicidally to hold a hill below Pingarrón; the Americans were waiting to do battle.

‘Ah, those Yanks,’ Chimo said. ‘Soon we shall see if they shoot like Sergeant York.’

‘I’m lucky to be fighting at all,’ Adam said. ‘Lucky to be alive. Where were you when Delgado appeared at the entrance to the bunker?’

‘I was being diplomatic,’ Chimo said. He tested the cutting edge of his yellow teeth on the ball of his thumb.

‘And brave?’

‘I know nothing of bravery: I am a soldier. They are the brave ones.’ He pointed at the hills where, alongside the Popular Army, the International Brigades were fighting to stop the Fascists reaching the Madrid–Valencia road. ‘They know nothing about fighting. Have you seen the British?’

‘I don’t want to see the British,’ Adam said.

He wondered if there was anyone he knew from Cambridge fighting under Tom Wintringham, Communist military correspondent of the Daily Worker, and commanding officer of the 600-strong British Battalion engaged in its first battle.

Already the poet John Cornford was dead, wounded in the Battle for Madrid, killed in Andalucia the day after his 21st birthday. In that engagement half of the 145 members of the British Number 1 company had been killed or wounded.

‘You should see them,’ Chimo said. ‘They haven’t got a map between them …’

‘How do you know?’

‘You should see them wandering about … Their rifles haven’t been greased and they blow up in their hands. And their uniforms! Berets, peaked caps, ponchos, a steel helmet or two, breeches, baggy slacks, alpargatas …’

‘What are alpargatas?’ Adam asked without interest. His body ached with exhaustion, his mind with questions.

‘Canvas shoes with rope soles. Imagine wearing those in the mud. Our guns pick them off while they’re still stuck in it.’

Poor, sad, would-be soldiers, Adam thought. That was true courage: even Chimo understood that. But what are you dying for? Ideals? I have those too. Haven’t I? He touched his sister’s letter in the pocket of his tunic.

What he feared most was coming face to face with an Englishman. Could he kill him? And in any case should it be so different from killing a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard? Patriotism, surely, is only an accident of birth.

No, he decided, I should not be able to kill him.

An orderly served cold rice, which they ate with their hands, and cold coffee. Rain dripped from the silver-green leaves of the olive trees. The rain in Cambridge had smelled of grass; this rain smelled of cordite.

Adam leaned against the trunk of an olive tree, shielding his Mauser rifle with his blanket. He closed his eyes and dozed on his feet, limbs jerking as he ducked bayonets. Chimo’s voice reached him in snatches.

‘Not saying they aren’t good fighters, they are … but shit, how can they fight in peasants’ shoes with guns that kill them instead of us?’

Delgado said, ‘No unexploded shells here?’ There was mud on his boots and his eyes were pouched with fatigue but his grey-green legion uniform was freshly pressed and he looked as though he had just left the barbers.

Adam pushed himself away from the olive tree. ‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Good. We attack in five minutes.’

Adam looked at his wrist-watch. They had been resting for 35 minutes.

Delgado said, ‘A lot of your countrymen up there,’ pointing at the pock-marked hill. ‘You’ll have to kill some.’

‘If they don’t kill me, sir.’

‘Spaniards are fighting Spaniards … Now you’ll find out what that feels like.’

‘I know what it feels like, sir.’

‘How can you?’

‘Is it any different from killing a Pole or a Belgian or a Greek?’

‘I didn’t want foreigners in my unit,’ Delgado said. ‘I’ve been lucky: you’re the only one. This is our war.’ He bent his cane between his two hands.

‘And the Germans’ war. And Italians’. Perhaps it isn’t your war any more, sir.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, inglés, that you’re fighting on the wrong side?’

Delgado strode away, his young captain in tow.

Adam fought his fatigue. Close your eyelids for a moment and you are in the armchair of the past.

Sometimes on Epsom Downs he had played at war, storming the racecourse grandstand on one occasion while thunder flashes exploded and masters in khaki stood in the line of fire barking contradictory orders. Adam had taken the opportunity to smoke a Passing Cloud in a nest of hawthorn bushes.

A red Very light blossomed in the sky. The legionnaires moved from their oasis and advanced towards the hill which the British Battalion, intellectuals, poets, adventurers, Jews from Manchester, Leeds and London, even a few members of the IRA, was defending.

Adam, rifle bayoneting the mist gathering in the rain, advanced into battle.

Chimo said, ‘Don’t worry, Amado, there are Spaniards fighting with the brigade as well as British.’

How could you tell one from the other? Phantom figures in front of them. Shouts and curses in Spanish and English.

‘Stay close to me.’ Chimo said. ‘I will kill your Englishmen for you.’

‘And I will kill your Spaniards.’

And then the mist lifts and there is great confusion and it’s apparent that, in their job-lot uniforms, reds are shooting reds as well as Fascists. Adam sees the scene as an old, frantically-speeded movie; when the reel spends itself the killing will stop.

He aims his Mauser and fires at nothing in particular. Finds himself on the edge of the movie screen beside a half-dug trench, cartridge cases and jagged slivers of shell-casing shining in the mud.

The Englishman stands in front of him, rifle, armed with a bayonet, clenched in white-knuckled hands. He wears a woollen Balaclava and rope-soled shoes. And spectacles, rimless and spotted with rain. An Englishman all right.

The Englishman prods his bayonet forward. The blade shines wetly but there is no blood on it. He blinks rapidly behind his spectacles, the sort you can buy in Woolworths without a prescription.

Adam holds his rifle, speared with a ten-inch blade, loosely. He does not want to kill this short-sighted Englishman. Nor does he wish to be killed. As they face each other fear pours into this pause in time, twists Adam’s bowels and roughens his throat.

Before coming to Spain he has not considered death; now it is as close as life. He understands that one thrust from that wet bayonet and the half-dug trench and the shining fragments of war and Kate with her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck will be no more. What does the Englishman see through his rimless, Woolworth’s spectacles?

‘Come on, you Fascist bastard,’ the Englishman says. ‘Fight.’

But Adam can’t move. He opens his mouth but his lips and tongue are frozen as they are in a nightmare that sometimes visits him.

The Englishman’s bayonet stabs, nearer this time.

‘Ah can’t kill you just like that,’ he continues, northern vowels as flat as slate. ‘Not if you don’t move.’

‘And I can’t kill you with an accent like that.’

A lozenge of silence inside the noise of battle. Then the Englishman speaks.

‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ he says. His bayonet dips.

Unanswerable knowledge expands inside Adam. Who is the enemy?

He says, ‘What are we going to do?’

The Englishman says reproachfully: ‘You shouldn’t be on’t other side.’

‘Why not? I believe in what I’m fighting for.’

‘You can’t.’ The Englishman knows this to be true and there is nothing more to be said about it.

‘I should kill you,’ Adam says.

‘If you don’t some other bugger will.’

‘And you should try and kill me.’

‘An Englishman? Nay, lad.’

‘Why are you fighting for the reds?’

‘Because I’m Jewish.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘A lot more but you wouldn’t understand, lad.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t understand,’ Adam says as he notices the Englishman looking beyond him, as he hears the click of a rifle bolt, as he turns deflecting the barrel of Chimo’s rifle, as Chimo pulls the trigger firing a bullet into the greyness above the rain.

And now the mist embraces them again and the Englishman disappears in it, an illusionist’s apparition. Adam calls out but his voice is swallowed by the mist and there is no reply.

Chimo hits him on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘Son of the great whore!’

‘He was English.’

‘So? I am killing Spaniards.’

‘It’s your war.’

‘Then go home, cabrón.’

Adam tells him about his sister and what the Republicans did to Paco.

‘So it’s everyone’s war. So try killing the enemy: if you don’t they will surely kill you.’

And now they are trying to do just that. Emerging from the mist, surprising Adam and Chimo who thought they were behind the Englishman; but all the senses tell untruths in the gunsmoke and the noise that never ceases.

Adam fires his rifle. Once, twice. Men fall. British or Spanish? The rifle jams. He lunges with the bayonet and the blade is as red as the poppies in the field.

Chimo pulls his sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here, Amado.’

And they are running along the hillside between shallow trenches, over bodies, taking cover behind a crop of boulders.

But these boulders are no one’s exclusive property. These boulders are an objective within the objective of the hill which is an objective within the campaign. And suddenly the fighting is thick around them; so thick that Adam cannot always distinguish Fascists from reds.

He grabs a rifle from the tight grip of a dead soldier. Fires it. The calico-rip of machine-pistol. Men fall forward which means they have been shot in the back but no one can be blamed because the reel of the ancient movie is out of control.

A punch on the head, just below the ear; he can no longer hear. He makes his way carefully through the silent carnage. He is alone now in the mist walking with a drunkard’s gait.

His head is heavy on his shoulders, his body bends with its weight; he wants to lie down and sleep. He stumbles, slides into a shell-hole, stays there, feet in a puddle, back propped against torn soil. He feels the earth shift as shells fall but he hears nothing.

The convoy skirting the Battle of Jarama at 3.30 am consisted of a black Chevrolet, an ambulance and three lorries.

At the wheel of the Chevrolet sat Christopher Lance wearing his check jacket and the pink, grey and brown tie of Lancing Old Boys. With him was a small, shy woman named Margaret Hill, matron of the British-American Hospital in Madrid and Fernanda Jacobson, head of the Scottish Ambulance Unit who often wore kilt and tartan hose and was not shy at all.

With them were 72 charges, British evacuees whom the Government allowed to leave Spain and Spanish refugees from the reds whom the Government didn’t. They had gathered furtively that evening at the British Embassy at 8 pm; now they were on their way through 32 check points to Alicante to be taken by a British destroyer, HMS Esk, north through the Mediterranean and across the Gulf of Lions to Marseilles and freedom.

As the convoy turned on to the Madrid–Valencia road shells exploded behind them and to their right machine-guns and rifles barked and coughed.

Martine Ruiz listened to them as the baby moved impatiently within her. In the makeshift British-American Hospital in Madrid on the corner of Velazquez at Ayala before reporting to the embassy she had insisted that it had no intention of entering the hostile world for at least another week or so; but even as she had been smiling comfortably at the British women the pains had been coming regularly.

The ambulance leaped over a shell-hole; Martine moaned and placed her hands across her drum-tight belly. The priest comforted her.

‘It will be soon,’ an old Spanish woman beside her said. ‘There is a hospital in Alicante.’

‘It won’t be for a long time yet,’ Martine said.

‘I can tell.’

‘It’s my baby,’ Martine Ruiz said.

The convoy stopped. Martine heard voices. But she trusted this Englishman who had a pass stamped by the Ministry of Works, the War Office, the British Embassy, the syndicates and Azaña himself.

The door of the ambulance opened. A sentry looked in. He was unshaven and wore a shiny-peaked cap on his unkempt hair. He saw the hump of Martine’s stomach and smiled. He would deliver a baby with one hand and shoot a Fascist with the other, this one.

‘A boy or a girl?’ he asked.

‘A girl,’ Martine said, smiling at him.

‘A boy,’ the old woman said.

‘Twins,’ the sentry said and, still smiling, shut the doors.

The convoy moved off. The gunfire grew fainter.

The baby pushed again. Not in Alicante, Martine said to the baby. There they will find out who I am and, although they may let you live, you will not have a mother. Tranquilo, she said. Please baby, boy or girl, tranquilo.

‘It will be soon,’ the old woman said.

The priest said nothing.

Tom Canfield, crouching, made his way along the dirt path beside the Jarama. The water idled past islands of black mud on which dark weed-like watercress grew. A stork stood alone among the bodies in a field, and its arrogance and the abandoned desolation of the field made Tom decide that the battle had passed by here, that the Fascists had crossed the river so he must be in Nationalist territory. All he could do was hold out till dusk, then try and cross the river as the Fascists had done, work his way through their lines to the Republicans and hitch a lift to the air-base at Guadalajara. Which sounded easy enough, except that the countryside with its vineyards and fallow cornfields was flat, and Fascist reconnaissance planes were flying low over the river.

Dusk began to gather with its own brand of loneliness. His wounded arm belonged to someone else; his chest hurt. A squad of Polikarpovs flew through the valley, scattering and climbing as they reached the outskirts of Madrid. One lingered. Seidler looking for him. You could bet good money on it.

Tom remembered an evening like this, a little cruel with a saline breeze coming in from the Atlantic, when he and a girl had escaped from a party at his father’s mansion at Southampton and ended up of all places in the potato fields at the south fork of the island. He had taken his open Mercer with the wire wheels and white-wall tyres. She was a happy girl with golden limbs and easy ways and they had lingered in the Mercer until the spray from the ocean had cooled their ardour. When they got back to the house the party was over, his father was bust and life would never be the same again. But he would always remember the girl.