Sunrise with Sea Monster (8 page)

He walks round the oak table and stretches down a hand. I take it.

You must excuse me also, he says. It is after all the least that is expected of me.

He pulls me upwards. He smiles, pats my cheek, then turns me towards the door.

Let's talk again tomorrow, he says.

There is a cry I recognise as they walk me back down the peeling corridor. I hold my sleeve to my lips to stem whatever blood
is coming from them. They turn the key in the barred door then and push me back inside the room. Every figure there is hunched
by the windows, dark against the streaming light. I hear the cry again like the strangled gull my father had inadvertently
imitated when he ran from the fishing lines. I walk across the straw-covered floor and peer above their shoulders. I see Antonio
standing by the wall, head tilted backwards at a strange angle, staring at the sky. Three Moroccans raise their rifles nonchalantly
and fire at random while his figure jerks, an odd dance to the rhythm of their bullets. He spins several times, face to the
wall, then face to us and falls.

There's silence in the room. The Welshman coughs then, a spasm, born out of years on some coalface. The boy from Turin mutters
a prayer. The Germans withdraw from the window and sit back in the straw, drawing their long knees towards their chins. I
take the scrap of paper he gave me from my pocket. I am several seconds and maybe an eternity too late since his blood has
spread a pool as large again around his body, but I read it anyway.
Because I could not stop for death
—
He
kindly stopped for me.

They rough you up, Pat?

The Welshman talks between wheezes. I remember my split lip and for a moment am glad of it.

A little, I say.

And what did they want?

Wanted to know what brought me here, I tell him.

You find out anything?

Like what?

What's going to happen to us.

I shake my head to intimate infinite possibilities, then turn back to the window.

When did they come for him? I ask.

Just before you came in.

He coughs again, then stares at me.

You know something, don't you, Pat.

What could I know? I ask him.

You tell me.

In the night his shadow edges over to my bed, invisible hands are laid upon my shoulder and his voice whispers, you cannot
sleep,
Irlandes,
like me, neither. His ghostly syntax is as misplaced as ever. I turn, about to brush him off but see nothing there. Soft moonlight
coming through each window and the figures huddled in the straw around the walls. It comes to me suddenly, with an odd, perfect
clarity, that all of us could die here. Our release would be too troublesome, and once released we would have tales to tell.
The Welshman snoring, his broken nose pointing towards the ceiling, the two Germans, their hair indistinguishable from the
straw, the Jewish boy from Turin, all beyond the help of ordinary discourse. I think of us joining that realm below the waves
and fall asleep dreaming of the Abwehr officer plucking us from a row of hooks from which we swing, gently, in the morning
light.

And I am called to him next morning. The same two guards, through the triangle of the early morning light, walking me with
the same brutal insouciance through the vaulted tomb. The German sits and smokes, questions as before. Nothing will do for
him but some answers, so I reply, inventing a past that might satisfy him. Yesterday's outburst was just that, an outburst,
I tell him. But what you want is the truth. The word seems to satisfy him and he nods. How does the son of an Irish reactionary
find himself in Republican Spain?

My father's world, I tell him, was an unfinished one. I joined the Republican movement to bring it to some conclusion. His
revolt had been stillborn, dissipating its energies in the nonsense of a Civil War. The State resulting from it was one of
paralysis, echoed in himself. I became his nemesis, his alter ego, took up the gun he'd dropped and made it my own. The divisions
in Europe echoed ours, or was it the other way round, I forget now, but it seemed important at the time to make them my own.
So here I am.

And what now? he asks.

What about now? I reply.

Where do your sympathies lie?

Where they always did, I say. With the Republic.

Irish or Spanish?

Both, I say.

But the one you said is stillborn and the other you know is finished.

I am Irish, I say. I live in realms of pure possibility.

Representations have been made, he says, and I can only act on them under certain conditions.

Who made these representations? I ask.

To repeat myself, that is irrelevant. I can only act on them under certain conditions.

What conditions are they? I ask.

We have contacts with some members of your movement. We need to expand them.

You want me to collaborate?

Phrase it as you want. To quote your movement, England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.

And what precisely is England's difficulty?

That remains to be seen.

My father, I tell him, would be most unhappy with this turn of events.

Why?

Look at it through his eyes, I say. He arranges for diplomatic pressure to be exerted to free his wayward son. His son will
only be freed on conditions that make him more wayward.

Everything has to be paid for.

Perhaps, I tell him, but my answer will always be no.

Why? he asks.

Because, I think, he gave me life once and I won't accept the same gift twice.

Because, I tell him, what you propose is unthinkable.

For myself I don't give a damn, he says and the slang comes out oddly from his lips. My job is to file a report. But you are
being more stupid than even I could have thought possible.

Why? I ask him.

Your time here has run out. They will erase this place together with all memory of it. You'll be shot.

That will have the virtue, I tell him, of keeping things simple.

You like simplicity? he asks.

Yes, I tell him. I feel my hands sweating, underneath my bluster. And it would be simpler not to change my mind.

I stand. I expect a knuckleful in the mouth again, and am almost disappointed when it doesn't come. He stands too and bends
his head, a quick, odd little bow.

Thank you, he says. You have made my job easier. My report shall be brief. And simple.

He smiles as if waiting for me to change my mind. And I would, if I could feel something, some premonition of the world having
changed, but there is nothing there, merely the sweat running down my fingers and down my forehead now. And I wonder is this
fear that has not yet reached me. He snaps his fingers and the guards come to the door. They walk me back the same corridor
and I hear cries once more. I am pushed inside to see the Welshman being dragged, barrel-chested and screaming from a mound
of flailing straw. Three guards around him, and seven more pressing the others to the wall.

I'm an Englishman, he screams, in his thick Welsh vowels. Write that down, you bastards. I move towards him and feel a rifle-butt
against my split lip and hit the straw beneath me. The three get him through the door and the others then follow with a careless
swagger.

The German boys stand by the wall and a dark stain spreads down the trousers of one of them. The Turin boy moans from his
hide of straw. No one can bring themselves to move to the window. We hear the outer door clang and his screaming stops. We
can hear the mutter of obscenities through his clenched teeth and then the sound of dragging pebbles as they move him to the
wall and after a moment's silence, the dull thud of shots. As staccato as before, but more of them.

When we can engender the will to get to the window, it is over. He is being dragged by both feet to a waiting truck, his barrel
chest still streaming, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The truck shudders as its engine ticks over, waiting for the lines
of Spaniards being led to the spot on the wall he has vacated.

There is a certain dignity, the German with the dry trousers says, in being shot on one's own.

That night, there were no dreams. I counted fish on an imaginary line to will myself to sleep and when it eventually came,
it was blank, like God's silence. I awoke with the first light and the knowledge that when they came for me it would not be
to ask questions. The mound of hay on which the German youths slept now stank of disengaged bowels. But they were silent as
oxen in their stalls, as if the world had ended. I lay there watching the light turn the straw to gold and when it was all
ablaze I heard the feet.

They came with intent, nailed boots striking off the flagstones outside. The door opened and the room was full of them, three
to keep the others in place and three to drag me. The first three were redundant since rigor mortis had already touched those
in the straw and they stayed, apparently sleeping. The others pulled me in one movement and dragged me, my feet scraping off
the floor. I tried to help them and walk but all life had gone from my muscles and any moisture in my mouth had retreated
to the pit of my stomach.
Because I
could not stop for death,
I thought, but could not remember what followed. They pulled me through to the arches and behind me I heard the door clanging
shut. I closed my eyes: I didn't want to face the blinding sunlight, the square, the reddened wall. I had told myself that
when it came I would be calm, retain whatever dignity was left to me. And now that it had come I had no alternative but calm,
that awful silence I had always suspected lay behind it all, for my lips moved and no sound came out. I would have screamed
had it been possible but nothing could move, shift or whisper in this pit my body had become. I was inert and howling inside
it but outside all else was dumb. Then I realised we had not turned. What should have been the crunch of pebbles beneath their
feet was still their boots on the flagstones; what should have been the sun bleaching the red behind my closed eyelids was
still dark. I let my eyelids open slowly, saw the curved, vaulted ceiling coming to me and away. Then another door. They have
taken a different route, I thought, to another end of the square; and two of them opened the door and I saw open countryside
outside. The German standing there, bleached by the light, pale leather gloves on his hands, an open-topped car behind him.
Come with me, Irish, he said, whether you like it or not.

The hands let go. I swayed on my numb feet.
He kindly
stopped for me,
I remembered the verse.

We drive through the outskirts, factories reduced to rubble, bomb craters filled with water, lines of people walking in both
directions as if the destination doesn't matter. His white scarf blows in the wind and the kid gloves play nonchalantly at
the wheel, one hand continuously on the horn. He talks of how they'll make the world a rubbish-tip, cut through cities like
a cleansing wind, how he would care if his uniform allowed him. He was a physicist, he tells me, worked in Leipzig with Heisenberg
on the uncertainty principle. He relates to me the bones of quantum physics, says how Einstein claimed God does not play dice
with the universe then tells me how he discovered God does nothing else. His father was Prussian, an officer, rooted in the
civilised brutalities of the Wehrmacht. Perturbed by the more pervasive brutalities of the Reich, he was foolish enough to
express his feelings and now worked as a sub-postmaster in Silesia. Both of his brothers joined the Waffen SS, and he had
chosen to hide himself in the bureau cratic niceties of the Abwehr. I ask him the connection between that and the uncertainty
principle and he tells me to look around me.

Lorries full of returning loyalists are passing us from the north and the legs of a child jut out behind a mound of rubble.

I was an indifferent mathematician, he tells me, more interested in metaphors than equations. And quantum theory was as apt
a metaphor as any for what I saw around me. I have no taste for brutalities but a certain aptitude for interrogation. I listen,
I ask the pertinent question after the teeth have been extracted by others, I find civility works wonders. My brief, if you
must know, was to question those members of your brigade whose sympathies may be uncertain. You fell into that category by
reason of your movement's approaches to the Reich. You knew about this?

I shake my head.

You have some argument with Britain?

I shake my head again.

Then certain of your compatriots do. Whether you do or don't, frankly, I couldn't give a damn. That's how you say it?

As good a way as any, I tell him.

You will be contacted in Dublin by persons possibly unknown to you. Whether or not you act upon these contacts is no concern
of mine.

He drives in silence for a while.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

He smiles. It's from a film they made while you were inside. Clark Gable, walking down the staircase. Vivien Leigh, walking
up.
Gone With the Wind.
See it, when you get the chance.