Savage Coast (22 page)

“No,” they called. “Not yet.”

She turned back to Hans, waving to him to talk to the men, and hurried into the train. The suitcase was in Peter's room. It was lying where Hans had left it. She took it into their compartment, and pulled open the heavy strap. A shadow fell. Drew was in the doorway.

“Never mind,” he was out of breath. “Thanks. The professor has gauze.

“How is her knee?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “It's getting stiff.”

“Better keep it clean.”

“It's so hard to keep it clean, or anything else for that matter. Such a ghastly thing to go through, this trip! We're supposed to be in Mallorca now,” he said bitterly, “and if we ever do arrive there, I'm going to ask for three more weeks' vacation to get over this.”

“That should be easy enough,” Helen said. He looked as if sleep were the only thing he had ever wanted.

“That man at Cook's!” he said. “Thanks awfully. The knee is probably nothing at all.” He went down the corridor.

Helen sat in the corner of the compartment. The newspapers were piled on the bench across from her. Outside, the sound of the crowd around the two men was growing louder and louder. Flies accumulated in the hot train. The smell of the refuse and stale provisions
was heavy. She saw, as the nerve in her leg began to throb again, the boxed paragraph on the open page of the French paper:

On Saturday, according to all the latest reports, Barcelona was calm, and as yet not a shot had been fired.

THE NERVE PULLED
and pulled, regularly, with the accent of the sentence, with her memory of the early Pyrenees frontier when first she had seen the newspaper, of the audacity of that landscape, which never could flourish in a more temperate zone. The nerve pulled with the beat of footsteps in the corridor. She felt she should recognize them; listened, and failed. As they stopped, she looked up from her corner. Hans was in the doorway for a moment before he was on the seat beside her, kissing her question still, twisting against her as he turned on his back with his head heavy in her lap.

“The men say the General Strike is still on,” he said, answering in his monotone as if he were making love to her with words, “except for four industries: gas, water, electricity, food.”

She hoped he would not speak of it now, if he had heard that the train was to move.

He looked up at her, pressing his face against her, deep in her light wool sweater. “I do not think this train will go.” The words mumbled; she felt them as if they had been spoken in her body cavity. He threw his arm out, hanging his hand over the floor, swinging it in to her arm on his chest. She was looking out, memorizing the building opposite: the train would stay—that would make it impossible, and soon all the oddness would fall on them, their burden on the town, their equivocal tourist status, their condition as foreigners, having to act differently.

“What a life we could have together!”

She came back to his words with violent suspicion. These were the phrases that the eyes recalled, treacherous complicated fools promised their lives away and then withdrew. She knew about this.
But his eyes were single minded, his eyebrows locked against a vertical line of thought. He continued.

“First we must find our work. And that may be quite short; look how the government is winning here! If it is only a question of Spain, we may see a free republic, everything will be ahead of us.” He closed his eyes, and the line was erased. “You will not know how long it has been since I could see the future.”

Always, return. For in the hills, again, the crackle of rifle-fire.

His eyes broke light with each sound. The bullets might have ploughed through his eyes each time.

“They do not contradict us,” he said, to convince them both. “I am used to them; this time, they do not need to cancel what we have.”

Passengers began to come back from breakfast. Hans tightened on her arm, lay important and like sleep for a moment against her; and brilliantly sprang up. “Shall we look at the newspapers?” he invited politely as the German family and the two children passed the door. He picked up the sheets in the corner, assorting them, and laughed at the masthead. “Do you know where we are?” he asked. “The compartment of the French reactionaries!” He watched her. “We might walk,” he suggested.

She said no, the heat.

“Your leg! They told me you had pain.”

She said no, there was nothing wrong, a little humiliated because he was an athlete, thinking what histories she had come through from her logical past, when she would have taught her body its place, and neither over-valued nor been embarrassed at such a point. No good, this does not tally, this is better, she thought, not allowing herself to think What Next? this immediate response, this taking fear and responsibility and love in one's full grip. A defect that reminds me of a time before this is nothing, she knew, as ghostly as a habit that one falls into again after years of disuse, like her young-girl habit of wringing her hands, that would not
be recognized as hers by any of these friends, or any of the friends she had left, but only by people who had made her miserable in her early youth and whom she now despised. For Hans, I am well, and soon I will be well.

“Then we will read newspapers and be a family sitting for a moment after breakfast,” Hans was saying. “Do you prefer the first section—no, here are two papers,” he laughed. “Very nice, very bourgeois; five minutes of this will be quite enough. Who will win the Davis Cup?”

“These are old papers,” she said. “They've played it off by this time.”

“In Australia! And I am very impatient because our sports-column is out-of-date. Did you see Perry play in England?”

He turned the page. “Look!” There was a large photograph of a port flashing with boats. “A bombing! One of those yachts that sit so gracefully in the bay off St. Maxime. Shelled! Do you know the coast?”

“I don't know any of the country,”—her voice sounded remote, as voices in a fast falling elevator—“from London.”

“We must see that soon,” he said. “St. Maxime and St. Tropez and that worldly little bay, where now they are bombing yachts.”

The taboo on any talk of the future kept her quiet, she picked up the other paper and ruffled through it. A line of portraits and a page-long story stopped her. They were all portraits of one man, his success, his passionate floodlight genius, his asylum: Nijinsky. Snuffed out, the article cried, in a rant of sentiment.

Peter and Olive came in, and dropped on the bench. “If you want to go, there's a Red funeral at the end of town—mass funeral. The Swiss team's up there now. The English are collapsing,” said Peter. “Mrs. Drew's knee. And the constipation of the lady from South America, which makes her more and more hopeless. But the professor says that the mayor is confident the train will move.”

“The professor is a very polite gentleman,” said Olive. “Under the circumstances, I would tell the train just that. Everyone's at the edge already: just tired enough, just hungry enough, jumpier than the town. Nothing to
do
.”

“But in good company,” Peter bowed formally.

Hans was looking at Helen. Olive noticed: “Just imagine!” she cried, in a witty voice, “during a revolution, with a 100 percent Aryan!”

“What is that?” Hans wanted a definition.

“You.
Du bist
,” answered Olive, “
echt deutsch
.”

He was irritated, and humored her.

The heat and the flies made it noon already. “Let's play anagrams again,” said Peter.

“Fine,” said Olive. “Until I fall asleep.”

“Come on, Helen.” She saw Hans's impatience. “In German, please,” he asked, stiffly.

“Oh, God,” said Peter. “I don't know. Anagrams, word-games,
Wortspielen
—is that right?”

“Word-games!” said Hans. “You'll excuse me. I'll be back Helena.” He swung out the door.

They started to play anagrams.

The pale miraculous morning, the rows of hands lying upon the doors, the harsh bell, worldly bay, Nijinsky, anagrams.

Olive was asleep on Peter's lap. As the sharp gun sounds came down out of the hills. As the little group of young men came around the corner.

They were followed by two old men who trailed them curiously.

There was a noise in the corridor. The tall bitch stood at the door, gasping the words out. “They've just taken over the mansion on the corner—that's the Socialists,” she forced the words, “and the U.G.T. have that big place on the Calle Mayor. We saw it rammed in yesterday.”

She went down the corridor. They could hear her, stopping at
every door, repeating her breathlessness, fainter, until the group advancing down the street drowned her sound out. They were discussing loudly. One of the boys had a gun. It was obvious that they had reached an agreement. They turned to the old men for confirmation. Several very little children, the eldest about six years old, came up around them as they stood.

“There's the way to hold a meeting,” said Peter. “Look at the row of houses, all solid and decorated. Objective right before them— two minutes, they face it; three minutes, they determine on procedure; four minutes, all approved. That's a meeting for you!”

Olive sat up, slow with sleep. “What's that about meetings, forever?”

Peter put his head back against the lace, looked at his wife, chanted softly.

“I love Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky is my sweetheart.”

Olive laughed. “He always calls me names when he can't depend on the answers,” and she looked at him with her soft look of familiarity that Helen so envied.

“No, really. The sharpness of this: you can't discount the bravery, all the sacrifices, the directness of method here. Even if they lose their heads, the white-hot conviction carries them through.”

The sound was coming down the street. The little group reached the first of the houses. Its ornate door met them; it looked as if it would withstand centuries.

They reached the door and pounded on it, with their hands and with gun-butts when it scarcely shook. The leader called down the street, and two more boys with guns came running up, and the three rammed at the lock. It broke at last; they pushed the door in. Olive held up the window shade, her mouth open in anger.

“I don't like that!” There were steps in the corridor. Peapack was running down the corridor, and Coffee-and-Tea, and the bitches. They stopped at the door.

“Opening houses!” Coffee-and-Tea said. “We're all getting our
baggage ready. Pile up the suitcases, there's no way of telling where they'll stop. We've got to get into the baggage-car!” He ran past with Peapack. The bitches came into the compartment.

“What do you suppose that means?” the tall one asked.

The others were looking out the window. Two of the unarmed boys were coming out of the house, their arms piled high with sheets of papers and boards. As they spilled the sheets at the feet of the leader, it was easy to see from the train what they carried. Paintings, engravings, drawings; they held the largest framed painting up for the leader to see. It was a daub of the Last Supper. He nodded, and then one of them put his foot through the canvas, up-ended the square, and began very methodically to break the frame. Another boy came out of the house, carrying four crucifixes in his hands. He threw them on top of the pile. One of the drawings spun around as he kicked the heap together, and Helen could see that it was an Ascension.

“Religious subjects!” she exclaimed. They were all shocked; the forcing of the door destroyed something for them.

The group passed on to the next house. The door was barred with wrought iron, and would not splinter. They drew away from it, into deliberation on the street. The little children were looking at the pictures on the pile, holding up the gaudiest, showing each other the halos.

“I don't like it about the children,” said Olive. Peter turned away from the window to look at her eagerly. His face softened. “I think this will be all right,” he said to her.

A boy was being sent over the garden wall, boosted up by two others. He disappeared around the side of the house, and a moment later the fracture of glass could be heard, and the dashing of fragments. The door shook, and the boy unbolted it to let the others through. Small children crowded at the door; and, in through shadows, the somber, carved hallway could be seen by the passengers, over the heads.

The lady from South America was coming through the car, calling for the professor.

But the boy appeared at the door, carrying more paintings, crucifixes, iron candelabras, plaster statues. He threw them down on the spreading heap. A plaster saint rolled down from the top, turning eccentrically, its blue plaster robe collecting dust. It rolled away from the pile.

The leader had a long cloth case in his hand, and pushed it back, taking out the shiny, expensive-looking gun. All the others crowded about.

“They can use that,” Peter said.

The leader handed it to one of the younger men. As they stood close to him, one of the little children, a tiny dark boy, ran into the house. The boys were pointing the gun into the crowd, finger on the trigger.

“Oh, God!” Olive said, with a twinge of panic on her face, and drew her shoulders together, head down. The leader knocked a hand off the trigger, knocked the barrel up until the gun pointed at the ceiling of the hallway. The boy pulled, and the little click of the unloaded gun surprised them all.

The minute the boy had his orders, he ran down the street, carrying the gun in its case very carefully.

At that moment the little child dodged out of the doorway, and started running the other way with his baby's short run. He had something under his arm. He put his black head down, running hard, and charged directly into the skirts of a woman standing in the roadway. He was lofted a few steps back, and looked up, recognizing his mother. The woman pulled the bundle from his arm, separated the three white towels, and caught the boy's shoulder.