Winter in Madrid (46 page)

One or two of the men nodded but others looked weary. Miguel, an old tramworker from Valencia, spoke up.

‘It’s too cold to sit around talking in the dark.’

‘And what if the guards find out?’ Pablo said. ‘Or someone tells?’

‘Who’s going to lead these classes?’ Bernie asked. ‘You?’ He could sense the meeting was going against Establo; he should have made this suggestion before the cold nights sent the men shrinking back into themselves.

The scaly head turned in Bernie’s direction, eyes bright with anger. ‘Yes. I am the cell leader.’

‘Comrade Establo is right,’ said Pepino, a hollow-faced young farmworker. ‘We need to remember what we are.’

‘Well, I for one haven’t the energy to listen to Comrade Establo lecturing us on historical materialism.’

‘I have decided, comrade,’ Establo said menacingly. ‘I’ve been elected, I make the decisions. That’s democratic centralism.’

‘No, it isn’t, I’ll take your orders against the feeling of this group when a properly constituted Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party tells me to. Not before.’

‘There is no Central Committee any more,’ Pepino said sadly. ‘Not in Spain.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You should watch your mouth,
inglés
,’ Establo said softly. ‘I know your history. A worker’s son who went to an aristocrat’s school, an
arriviste
.’

‘And you’re a petit bourgeois drunk on power,’ Bernie told him. ‘You think you’re still a factory foreman. I’m loyal to the party but you’re not the party.’

‘I can expel you from this cell.’

Bernie laughed softly. ‘Some cell.’ He knew at once it was the wrong thing to say, it would put them against him, but his head was spinning with exhaustion and anger. He got up and walked back to his bed. He lay down, listening to the mutterings from the other end of the room. Someone shouted to them to be quiet, people wanted to sleep. Shortly afterwards he heard the pallet creak as Establo lay down opposite him. He heard him scratch, felt his eyes on him.

‘We are going to consider your case,
compadre
,’ Establo said softly. Bernie didn’t reply. He listened to Vicente’s rasping gurgling breath and wanted to howl with sorrow and rage. He remembered Agustín’s words that he had puzzled over. Better times. No, he thought. Whatever you meant there, you were wrong.

H
E COULDN
’
T SLEEP
that night. He lay on his bunk in the cold, not tossing and turning but looking into the darkness. He remembered how, in London, the Communist Party’s theories of the laws of class struggle had seemed to him like a revelation, the world explained at last. When he left Cambridge he had helped out in his parents’ shop at first, but his father’s depression and his mother’s complaining disappointment that he had thrown Cambridge away stifled him and he left and took rooms nearby.

The contrast between the wealth of Cambridge and the bleak shabby poverty of the East End, where unemployed men lounged on street corners and there were stirrings of a home-grown fascism, angered him more than ever. Millions were unemployed and the Labour Party did nothing. He kept in touch with the Meras; the Republic was a disappointment, the government refusing to raise taxes to finance reforms for fear of angering the middle classes. A friend took him to a Communist meeting and at once he felt, this is the truth, this is exposing how it all really works.

He studied Marx and Lenin; their harsh prose was a struggle at first, different from anything he had read before, but when he understood their analyses he saw that here was the uncompromising reality of the class struggle: iron hard, as his party tutor said. Only Communists had the ruthlessness to destroy fascism, capitalism’s last attempt to stave off its own destruction. Bernie slogged for the party, selling the
Daily Worker
outside factory gates in the rain, stewarding meetings in half-empty halls. Many of the local party members were middle-class, bohemian intellectuals and artists. He knew that for many of them communism was a fad, an act of rebellion, at the same time as he realized he felt more at home with them than the workers. With his public-school accent they took him for one of their own; it was one of them, a sculptor, who got Bernie his job as a model. Yet there was still a part of him that felt rootless, lonely, neither proletarian nor bourgeois, a disconnected hybrid.

I
N
J
ULY
1936 the Spanish army rose against the Popular Front government and the Civil War began. In the autumn the Communists started appealing for volunteers and he went to King Street and signed up.

He had to wait. The formation of the International Brigades, the routes and meeting points, was taking time. He became impatient. Then, after another fruitless visit to party headquarters, he disobeyed the party for the first and only time. He packed his bags and without a word to anybody he went to Victoria and caught the boat-train.

He arrived in Madrid in November; Franco had reached the Casa de Campo but so far he was being held, the citizenry of Madrid keeping back the Spanish army. The weather was cold and raw but the citizens, who five years before had appeared gloomy and listless, seemed to have sprung to life; there was revolutionary fervour and fierce enthusiasm everywhere. Trams and lorries full of workers in blue boiler suits and red kerchiefs passed by on the way to the front,
¡Abajo fascismo!
chalked on the sides.

He should have reported to party HQ but it was late in the day when his train arrived and he headed straight for Carabanchel. A group of women and children were building a barricade at one corner
of the Meras’ square, tearing up the cobbles. Seeing a foreigner, they lifted their hands in the clenched-fist salute.
‘¡Salud, compadre!’

‘¡Salud! ¡Uníos hermanos proletarios!’
One day, Bernie thought, this will happen in England.

He had written to Pedro and they knew he was coming, though not when. Inés opened the door of the flat; she looked tired and weary, greying hair straggling round her face. Her face lit up when she saw him. ‘Pedro! Antonio!’ she called. ‘He’s here!’

There was a rifle in pieces on the
salón
table, an ancient-looking thing with an enormous muzzle. Pedro and Antonio stood turning parts over in their hands. They were dusty and unshaven, their boiler suits streaked with earth. Francisco, the consumptive son, sat watching in a chair, looking barely older after five years, thin and pale as ever. Little Carmela, eight now, sat on his knee.

Pedro wiped his hands on a piece of newspaper and rushed to embrace him. ‘Bernardo! My God, what a day to arrive.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Antonio is going to the front tomorrow.’

‘I’m trying to clean this old rifle they gave me,’ Antonio said proudly.

Inés frowned. ‘He doesn’t know how to put it back together!’

‘Maybe I can help.’ Bernie had been in the OTC at Rookwood. He remembered annoying the other pupils by saying military knowledge might be useful when the revolution came. He helped them put the rifle together. Then they cleared the table and Inés brought a
cocido
.

‘Have you come to help kill the Fascists?’ Carmela asked. She was wide-eyed with excitement and curiosity.

‘Yes,’ Bernie said, putting a hand on her head. He turned to Pedro. ‘I should report to Party HQ tomorrow.’

‘The Communists?’ Pedro shook his head. ‘We are beholden to them now. If only the British and French had agreed to sell us arms.’

‘Stalin knows how to fight a revolutionary war.’

‘Father and I have been digging trenches all afternoon,’ Antonio said seriously. ‘Then they gave me this rifle and told me to get a night’s sleep and report for action tomorrow.’

Bernie looked at Antonio’s thin boyish face. He took a deep breath.

‘Do you think there might be a rifle for me?’

Antonio looked at him seriously. ‘Yes. They want as many fit men as can hold one.’

‘When do you have to report?’

‘At dawn.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Bernie experienced a strange leaping sensation, excitement and fear together. He gripped Antonio’s hand, found himself laughing; they were both laughing hysterically.

B
UT HE WAS
frightened when he rose with Pedro and Antonio at dawn. When they went outside Bernie could hear shell-fire in the distance. He shivered in the cold grey morning. Antonio had given him a red scarf; he wore the jacket and slacks he had arrived in with the scarf round his neck.

In the Puerta del Sol officers in khaki called the men into lines, leading them into the trams that were lined up one behind the other. As they rattled out of the centre the men were tense, gripping their rifles between their knees. At first it was like a normal journey, but as they travelled east there were fewer people, more militiamen and army lorries. When the tram jangled to a halt at the gates of the Casa de Campo, Bernie could hear ragged gunfire. His heart was thumping wildly as the sergeant shouted to them to disembark.

Then Bernie saw the bodies, half a dozen dead men laid in a row on the pavement, still wearing their red kerchiefs. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a body – his grandmother had been laid out in the room behind the shop before her funeral – but these men, whose faces were as still and grey as hers had been, were young. One boy had a round black hole in the middle of his forehead with a tiny drop of blood underneath, like a teardrop. His heart banged like a hammer and he felt a cold sweat on his brow as he followed Pedro and Antonio into a disorganized crowd of militiamen.

Pedro was led off to a digging detail and Bernie and Antonio and twenty others, some with rifles and others without, were ordered to follow a sergeant into a half-dug trench, men with spades pausing
to let them by. Sandbags had been piled high on the side facing the Casa de Campo, from where sporadic gunfire was audible. Things were chaotic: men running to and fro, lorries sliding and slithering in the mud. The men leaned back uncertainly against the sandbags.

‘Jesus,’ Bernie said to Antonio. ‘This isn’t an army.’

‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Antonio said. ‘Here, hold this, I’m going to take a look.’ There was a ladder next to Antonio and before Bernie could stop him he had started climbing up it.

‘Stop it, you crazy bastard, you’ll get hit.’ Bernie remembered Pa saying that was how thousands of new recruits had died on the Western Front: taking a look over the top.

Antonio rested his arms on top of the sandbags. ‘It’s all right, they can’t see me. Christ, they’ve got field-guns and everything out there. Nothing’s moving—’

Bernie swore, put down the rifle and climbed up the ladder, grabbing at Antonio’s waist. ‘Get down!’

‘It’s all right.’

Bernie took another step up and grabbed Antonio’s shoulder, and that was when the sniper fired. The bullet missed Antonio’s head but hit Bernie’s arm. He gave a cry and the two of them tumbled together down the ladder into the trench. Bernie saw the blood welling up through his jacket and passed out.

A S
PANISH
commissar came to visit him in the field hospital.

‘You’re a fool,’ he told him. ‘You should have reported to Party HQ first; you’d have had some training.’

‘My friends said they needed every man in the Casa de Campo. I’m sorry.’

The commissar grunted. ‘You’ll be out of it for weeks now. And we will have to billet you somewhere when you get out of here.’

‘My friends in Carabanchel will look after me.’

The man looked at him askance. ‘Are they party?’

‘Socialists.’

The man grunted.

‘How’s the fighting?’ asked Bernie.

‘We’re holding them. We’re forming a Communist brigade, bringing in some discipline.’

B
ERNIE SHIFTED
in his bunk, trying to warm his legs. In the next bed Vicente was making a horrible gurgling sound in his sleep. He remembered his weeks of convalescence in Carabanchel. His attempts to convert the Meras to communism were unsuccessful. They said the Russians were destroying the Republic, talking of cooperation with the progressive bourgeoisie while bringing in their secret police and spies. Bernie said the tales of Russian brutality were exaggerated, and you had to be hard in war. But it wasn’t easy to argue with a veteran of thirty years of class struggle like Pedro. Sometimes he began to doubt whether what they said about the Russians could all be lies, but he put those thoughts from his mind; they were a distraction and in the midst of this struggle he must stay focused.

The doubts returned, though, in the cold night. They had needed hard men then but what if they had won, would people like Establo be in charge now? The priest Eduardo had said Marxism was a false faith. He had never understood dialectical materialism properly and he knew many Communists didn’t, it was hard to understand. But communism wasn’t a faith, it wasn’t like Catholicism – it was rooted in an understanding of reality, of the material world.

He tossed and turned. He tried not to think of Barbara, it hurt too much, but her face still came back to him. Memories of her always brought guilt. He had abandoned her. He thought of her back in England, or perhaps in Switzerland, surrounded now by Fascist states. He used to say she didn’t understand things; tonight he was starting to wonder how much he had understood himself. He made himself think of an old comforting image he sometimes brought to mind when he couldn’t sleep, a scene from an old party newsreel he had seen in London. Tractors rolling through the endless Russian wheat-fields, followed by singing workers as they gathered in the plentiful grain.

S
ANDY MET
H
ARRY
outside his flat early in the morning. It was a clear cold day, the sun low in a bright blue sky. Sandy stepped from his Packard and shook Harry’s hand. He wore a heavy camelhair coat and a silk scarf; the sunlight glinted on his oiled hair. He looked happy, exhilarated to be out so early.

‘What a fantastic morning!’ he said, looking at the sky. ‘We don’t get many mornings like this in winter.’

They drove north-west out of Madrid, climbing into the Guadarrama mountains. ‘Fancy coming round to dinner again soon?’ Sandy asked. ‘Just us and Barbara. She’s still a bit out of sorts. I thought it might cheer her up.’