The Gate of the Sun

‘A little while ago …’

‘I don’t care about a little while ago. A little while ago was a long time ago. The priest was saved,’ she said. ‘Why the priest?’

‘I don’t understand.’

She told him.

‘Ana, the children.’

‘They have to know.’

Pablo stared hard at the piece of shrapnel lying in the palm of his hand.

‘Why the priest?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, pointing at the children and shaking his head.

‘I don’t expect you to. What would you know about living and dying? It’s written in blood, not ink.’

Jesús said to the children, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’

They began to gather up their possessions.

In the distance Ana could hear gunfire, the firework splutter of rifles, the chatter of machine-guns and the bark of heavy artillery.

‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I saw a peasant, a refugee, lie like Coll in front of a tank. The treads rolled over him, crushing him, but the tank blew up.’

‘You want me to get killed. Is that it?’

‘I want your children to be proud of you.’

The children remained absorbed with clearing up but Pablo’s bottom lip trembled.

Jesús stood up, knocking the bottle of ink over the scrubbed table. He fetched a newspaper and soaked it up. His fingers were stained blue. The children were silent, following him with their eyes. He walked to the door.

‘I hope the bottle of anis is full in the bar,’ Ana said.

He stood silhouetted against the fading, rain-swept afternoon light. He looked very thin – he didn’t eat as much as the children and, although he was only 32, he stooped a little, but still she let him go.

When she went to bed he had not returned.

In the morning she left the children with a neighbour and marched to the front with a platoon of women militia. They were dressed in blue, and they carried rifles on their shoulders and food for the men. They went first to University City, the model campus and suburb to the north-west of Madrid, near Tetuan, where Fascists who had crossed the Manzanares were fighting hand-to-hand with the militia and the International Brigades. They fought for faculties, libraries, laboratories, rooms. The walls of half-finished buildings swayed; the air smelled of cordite, brick-dust and distemper, and rang with foreign tongues. The Moors bayoneted the wounded; the Germans placed bombs in elevators and sent them up to explode among the Moors.

Ana shot a Moor wearing a kerchief as he raised his bayonet above a German from the Thaelmann Battalion of the 11th International Brigade who was bleeding from a chest wound. It was the first time she had killed. She took provisions to the British defending the Hall of Philosophy and Letters against the Fascists who had already taken the Institute of Hygiene and Cancer and the Santa Cristina and Clinical hospitals. Someone told her there was an English poet named Cornford among the machine-gunners. A poet!

She went about her duties coldly. She no longer thought about young men who knew nothing about each other killing each other. She thought instead about her grandmother and her father and her one-eyed brother who were dead, and she thought about the priest who was alive.

With the other women she descended the heights to a bridge across the Manzanares which the Fascists hadn’t crossed. The Moors were grouped at the other side, Foreign Legionnaires with red tassels on their grey-green gorillo caps behind them. Assault guards and militiamen held the east neck of the bridge, another inlet to the city. The guards were armed with grenades and rifles and one of them was firing a Lewis machine-gun. When Ana and her platoon arrived the dark-skinned Moors in ragged uniforms were advancing across the bridge while the militiamen fitted another magazine on to the Lewis gun. Ana knelt behind them, aimed her rifle, a Swiss antique made in 1886, and squeezed the trigger; the rifle bucked, a Moor fell but she couldn’t tell whether it was her bullet that had hit him because the other militiamen were firing, although without precision and she was dubious about the resolution of these exhausted defenders who had never wanted to be soldiers. There was no doubt about the resolution of the Moors trained by the Spaniards to fight bandits in Morocco: they ignored the bullets and stepped over the dead and wounded.

For some reason the magazine wouldn’t fit on the Lewis gun; it was probably a magazine for another gun; such things were not unknown. The assault guards and militiamen shuffled backwards. The Moors moved forward firing their rifles. A militiaman in front of Ana threw up his arms and fell backwards.

Ana shouted to the women, ‘Keep firing!’ But the militiamen were turning, running towards the women, blocking their view of the Moors. Ana stood up, aimed the ancient Swiss rifle at the militiamen and fired it above their heads. ‘Sons of whores!’ she shouted at these men who had been bakers and housepainters and garbage collectors. ‘Turn back!’

They hesitated.

‘Mierda!’ shouted Ana who never swore. ‘Have you no cojones?’

She reloaded quickly and fired between them. A Moroccan fell. And the militiamen turned away from these women who were more frightening than the Moors and the machine-gunners, fitted the magazine to the Lewis gun, and, planting it firmly on the road surface, aimed it at the Moors who were almost upon them.

Chop-chop went the gun, piling up bodies that were soon too high and disorderly for the back-up Moors to navigate. Instead they retreated. The militiamen sent them on their way with a hail of bullets. Then they looked shamefacedly at Ana.

She looked across the modest river and thought: they knocked out one of Salvador’s eyes with a club then they removed the sight of the other with a bomb dropped as casually as boys drop stones over bridges. Couldn’t they have left my father to die in his own time?

She said, ‘Fix the next magazine.’ They nodded. Then she led her women back to their barrio in Tetuan. Jesús was standing in the yard.

He had acquired a gorillo cap and a bandolier which he wore over a blue shirt she had never seen before. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle. The children, hands tight fisted, observed him wonderingly.

She smiled at him. She felt as happy to see him there as she had in the days when her whole day had been taken up with waiting to meet him.

‘What game is this?’ she asked.

He looked a little ridiculous. He hadn’t found a jaunty angle for his cap; his ears were bigger than she remembered beneath it; the ink was still blue on his fingertips.

‘The game you told me to play,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that if we were all cowards there would be no wars?’

He straightened the stoop in his back and, so thin that she wanted to stretch out a hand and feel the muscles moving over his ribs, walked past her towards the killing.

CHAPTER 3

February 1937.

Chimo, philosopher, legionnaire and murderer, said, ‘What are you thinking about, Amado?’

Adam Fleming, sheltering in a slit trench from rain and bullets, said, ‘England.’

‘More than that, Amado – you sighed.’ Chimo was an authority on untruths and half-truths because they came readily to his own lips.

‘Why do you call me Amado? My name is Adam. Why not Adamo?’

‘You are Amado. That is you. Were you perhaps thinking about a woman?’ Chimo was an authority on women, too.

‘I was thinking about my sister.’

This troubled Chimo. He massaged his jagged teeth with one finger and the red tassel on his gorillo cap trembled with his anxiety. Finally, he said, ‘But you sighed.’

‘My sister is in Madrid …’

‘She isn’t a red?’ Chimo, brushing raindrops from his abundant moustache, looked apprehensively at Adam through monkey-brown eyes.

‘No, Chimo, she is not a red.’

‘Then to be in Madrid is bad. Very bad. They are starving there. And if we cut the road to Valencia on the other side of the Jarama river then hunger will make them surrender and there will be a great killing.’

‘Were you there when we attacked Madrid?’ Adam asked. He had arrived in Spain last November but he had been too late to take part in the attack which Franco had called off on the 23rd, laying siege to the city instead.

‘I was there,’ Chimo said. ‘They fought like devils, the reds. Particularly the women. Ah, those women, fiercer than the Moors. Those Madrileños, those cats … You have to admire them. Abandoned by their Government who ran off to Valencia, fighting with 50-year-old Swiss rifles, antique weapons taken from the museums … But they were good in the streets, those cats, not like our Moors who are good in open spaces, in deserts …’

‘I heard there was a lot of killing in the city before we attacked.’

‘I heard that, too. Mola and his Fifth Column! Obvious, wasn’t it, that the reds would seek them out and kill them. I hear they took a thousand from the Model Prison and shot them a few miles from Barajas airport. Killing has become a pastime in Spain,’ Chimo said.

‘I hear that Franco could have taken Madrid if he hadn’t decided to relieve Moscardó, at Toledo. I hear,’ Adam said carefully, ‘that Franco doesn’t want to win the war too quickly. He doesn’t want to rule a people who are still full of spirit.’

‘You will hear many things,’ Chimo told him. ‘Every Spaniard is a politician.’

A shell fired from the Republican lines on the far bank of the Jarama, south of Madrid, slurred through the rain digging a crater 50 metres in front of the trench and showering their grey-green campaign tunics with mud.

‘Sons of whores,’ Chimo said. ‘Red pigs. That was the first. The second lands behind us. The third …’

‘I know about range-finding,’ Adam said. He had acquitted himself reasonably well in the cadet corps at Epsom College at everything except rolling puttees round his calves.

‘… lands here. With our name on it.’

Rain bounced on the lip of the trench and fell soggily onto the brown blankets covering their guns; Adam wondered if it would drown the lice; he doubted it – they were survivors.

Chimo said, ‘Tell me, Amado, what are you, an Englishman, doing in this trench waiting for the third shell?’

‘What are you doing, Chimo?’

‘I am a legionario.’

‘What are you fighting for, peace?’

‘Peace?’ The tassel on his cap quivered. ‘Peace is the enemy of the soldier.’

‘How old are you, Chimo?’

‘Nearly 27.’

‘A veteran!’

‘And you, inglés?’

‘Twenty-one,’ Adam said. A confession.

‘And what are you fighting for?’

‘Ideals,’ Adam said, silencing Chimo who was an authority on many things but a stranger to ideals.

Ideals, too, were self-effacing at Epsom College unless, that is, they were represented by the gods of sport, although there were outposts in that mellow-bricked academy where learning ran a close second to rugby and cricket.

Adam was sent to Epsom, close to the race-track, the home of the Derby, because his mother wished him to be a doctor and the college was renowned for its contributions to medicine.

It was at Epsom that Adam first became aware that his character was seamed with perversity. What he objected to, he subsequently decided, was the attempt to inscribe privilege on pubescent souls. To achieve this many enlightened disciplines were invoked. Games were compulsory unless a medical certificate was produced; such a document was viewed as evidence of weakness and its possessor was consigned to the company of other failures. Crimes were punished by headmaster or housemaster with a cane; misdemeanours by prefects with a slipper and they never shirked their responsibilities. Meals were passed from seniors to juniors along tables the length of the hall, any remotely digestible morsels being removed en route so that the smallest diners were given incentive to rise through the ranks to the heights where the food, although still largely indigestible, was at least warm. A chaplain boomed prayers at 8.40 every morning; modest homosexual practices were not severely discouraged because they were a natural adjunct of puberty and a necessary preparation for the rigours of heterosexual intercourse that lay ahead.

Adam invoked the wrath of both masters and boys not because he was one of the runts of the herd but because he seemed constructed to become one of its leaders. He wasn’t tall but his muscles were long and sinuously sheathed, his expression was secretive, and his hair was black and careless and widow-peaked.

So what did he do? He refused to shove in the scrum; he played tennis, a highly suspect sport; he smoked State Express 555 in a hollow on Epsom Downs while the rest of the house made panting cross-country runs around the frost-sparkling racecourse; and, unforgivably, he read. Inevitably such transgressions brought about retribution. But again he broke the character-moulding rules that decreed that you endured cane or slipper with stoicism: he howled and yelled until the punishment was curtailed; then he rose, dry-eyed, and grinned at his tormentor.

At the end of his first year he told his mother that he had no intention of becoming a doctor. And God help the ailing population of Great Britain, he added, if any of his fellow inmates ever got a scalpel in their hands. His father, home from the City that evening and smelling slightly of whisky, was summoned but, as always, he kept his distance from family crises, regarding children as a necessary by-product of marriage. His mother accused Adam of being ungrateful but soon became accustomed to the prospect of having a barrister in the family and was heard to confide at a garden party, ‘Who knows, he may become Attorney General one day.’

Towards the end of his last year, before going to Cambridge, Adam, who had no intention of becoming a lawyer, seriously endangered his reputation: he accidentally revealed that, despite his consumption of State Express, he could run and so swift was he that he was entered for the mile in the public school championships. Canings and slipperings ceased; he was extracted from the scrum and encouraged to play tennis; he was served lean meat and fresh vegetables; a maths master who reported seeing him leave the Capitol cinema in Epsom with a shopgirl was taken on one side and rebuked for voyeurism.

For Adam the mile was a triumph: he came last.

‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’ Chimo asked.

‘At Cambridge,’ Adam replied.

A rat peered over the lip of the trench. One of their own machine-guns opened up behind them. A Gatling replied; he wished the trenches were deeper but the legionnaires and Moors were used to scooping the sand of North Africa.

‘Cambridge, where is that?’

‘In England,’ Adam told him. ‘In East Anglia. It has a bridge over a river called the Cam. There are many colleges there. One of them, Trinity, was founded, refounded rather, by Henry VIII. Have you heard of him?’

‘He had many wives,’ Chimo said. ‘He must have been a stupid king.’

‘He chopped some of their heads off.’

‘Not so stupid,’ Chimo said. ‘At Cambridge they taught you to speak with a city voice.’

‘The purest in Spain. Castilian.’

‘Tell that to a Basque; tell that to a Catalan,’ said Chimo who spoke with a broad Andaluz accent.

The rain seeped through the blanket on to Adam’s rifle, a 7 mm Spanish Mauser. He turned his head and noticed minerals, quartz probably, shining wetly in the hills.

‘Catalan,’ Adam said. ‘Basque. Communist, Anarchist, Trotskyist … That’s our strength, their confusion.’

‘Did you know I can’t read or write, Amado?’

‘Does it matter? You talk enough for ten men.’

‘All Spaniards talk a lot. Ask a Spaniard a question and he delivers a speech.’

A spent bullet skittered across the mud throwing up wings of spray. Chimo said, ‘Tell me something, Amado, are you scared?’

‘I would be a fool not to be.’

‘You are a fool to be here at all: it is not your war.’

‘I sometimes wonder whose war it is.’

‘Clever words from one of your books?’ Adam had with him behind the lines Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, the French edition of Ulysses, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and an anti-war book, Cry Havoc! by a newspaper columnist, Beverly Nichols.

‘Nothing clever. But if it had been left to the Spanish it might have been over by now.’

‘Who would have won?’ Chimo asked.

‘Without German and Italian planes our side wouldn’t have been able to land troops in Spain. Without Russian “advisers”, without their tanks and planes, the Republicans would have been driven into the sea. Perhaps it is their war, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s.’

‘And Britain’s? You are here, inglés.’

‘Most of my countrymen are on the other side.’ Adam jerked his head towards the enemy lines across the small, thickly curved river. ‘With the Americans and French and Poles …’

‘And Germans and Italians. It isn’t just Spaniards who are fighting each other.’ Chimo combed his extravagant moustache with muddy fingers. ‘Why are you fighting on our side, Amado? And don’t confuse me with ideals.’

‘Because I was looking for something to believe in,’ Adam said.

A second shell exploded behind them throwing up gouts of sparkling rock.

‘The third one,’ Chimo said, ‘is ours.’

Four of them at the dinner table to celebrate the 60th birthday of William Stoppard, Professor of Economics at Oxford. Kate, his daughter, 18 and already bored; Richard Hibbert, at Trinity, Cambridge, who would have joined the International Brigade if he hadn’t been a pacifist; and Adam. Subject: non-intervention.

‘It is, of course, quite disgraceful,’ said Stoppard, his pointed pepper-and-salt beard agreeing with him.

‘Why?’ Adam asked in the pause before dessert. Two of the leaded windows in the rambling house near Lambourn were open and evening smells, chestnut and horses, reached him making him restless.

‘Why?’ The beard seemed suspended in disbelief. Kate, blonde with neat features, hair arranged in frozen waves, stared at him. She took a De Reszke from a slim gold case and lit it.

‘I hope no one minds,’ she said.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Adam said.

‘Too bad.’ She blew a jet of smoke across the table at him.

‘Perhaps,’ Stoppard said, ‘you could explain yourself, young man.’

‘I’m questioning your assumption, sir,’ said Adam who had drunk three whiskies before dinner. ‘Am I to assume that you are referring to the possibility of intervention on the side of the Republicans?’

Was there any other kind? the silence asked.

Hibbert, who was in love with Kate Stoppard, said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Fascists at Badajoz.’ He turned his heavy and wrathful face to Stoppard for approval; Stoppard’s beard nodded.

Adam poured himself wine and said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Republicans at Madrid.’

Kate squashed her half-smoked cigarette – she didn’t look as though she had enjoyed it anyway – and considered him, neat head to one side. The flames of the candles on the table wavered in a breeze summoned from the darkness outside.

Stoppard began to lecture.

‘The Fascists are the insurgents. Their ostensible object: to overthrow by force the Government of the Republic elected by popular franchise. Their ulterior motive: to re-establish the privileges they enjoyed under the monarchy – in effect the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera – which were the exploitation of the poor.’

Adam said, ‘With respect, sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ As the second silence of the evening lengthened he said to Kate, ‘That’s what Wellington said when some idiot said to him, “Mr Jones, I believe?” I’m a great admirer of Arthur Wellesley.’

Stoppard said, ‘Perhaps, Adam, you would be good enough to elaborate on that last statement and enlighten us.’

A timorous girl in a black and white uniform served dessert, lemon soufflé.

‘Certainly,’ said Adam. ‘Do you believe in God, sir?’

‘Get on with it, man,’ Hibbert said excavating fiercely with his spoon in the soufflé.

‘I ask because I cannot understand how you can support a regime that condones the destruction of churches and the murder of priests.’

‘Ah, the Irresponsibles; I thought we’d come to them,’ Stoppard remarked indulgently. He tasted his soufflé; his beard approved.

‘From February to June this year,’ Adam said, concentrating, ‘160 churches were burned. There were also 269 assassinations, 113 general strikes and 228 half-cocked ones. Spain was in a state of anarchy, so is it small wonder that generals such as Mola, Queipo de Llano and Franco and the rest decided to bring back stability?’

‘Did you do your homework on the way?’ Stoppard asked. He winked at Hibbert.

‘As a matter of fact I did. It was inevitable that you would talk about non-intervention. But there’s nothing to stop anyone intervening. Not even you, sir.’

Hibbert said irrelevantly, ‘John Cornford’s fighting with the International Brigades. And Sommerfield. And Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew.’

‘A pity they’re fighting on the wrong side.’

‘Are you a Fascist, Adam? A blackshirt?’ Hibbert asked.

‘What I am,’ Adam said, watching Kate lick lemon soufflé from her upper lip and wondering about her breasts beneath her silk dress, ‘is anti-Communist. We all know what’s happened in Russia – a worse tyranny than before. Do we want that in Spain?’

Stoppard laid down his spoon and addressed his class. What we were witnessing in Spain, he told them, was an exercise in European Fascism. Hitler wanted to assist Spain so that he could establish bases there for the next war and help himself to the country’s iron ore. Mussolini was helping because he wanted to control the Mediterranean. And both wanted to test their planes, their guns and their tanks. If they, the enemies of the future, were championing the Fascists, why should not Britain aid the Republicans?

Adam, who had learned at Cambridge never to answer a question directly, said, ‘What is so different between Fascism and Communism?’

The third silence of the evening. Kate took a cigarette from her case and tapped it on one painted fingernail.

Adam said, ‘Is Hitler a dictator?’

Of course.

‘And Stalin?’

So it appeared.

‘Are they not both anti-Semitic?’

Perhaps.

‘Enemies, imagined or otherwise, purged?’

There were similarities.

‘Both presiding over elitist societies in which the masses are subservient?’

‘That’s certainly true in Germany,’ Hibbert said.

‘And Russia. Ask any peasant.’

‘I haven’t met any recently,’ Stoppard said but no one in the class smiled.

The maid served coffee; Stoppard lit a cigar. ‘Adam,’ he said, almost fondly, ‘suggested just now that there was nothing to stop anyone intervening. On either side, you implied. Is that correct?’

‘Quite correct, sir.’

‘Then why, Adam, don’t you volunteer to fight for the Fascists?’

‘I might just do that,’ Adam said.

Chimo said, ‘Have you had many women, Amado?’

‘Not many,’ said Adam, who had made love to three girls.

‘I have had many, many girls.’

‘I’m sure they all remember you.’

‘Oh sure, they remember Chimo. And I remember one of them. You know, she gave me a present.’ He pointed to his crotch.

‘You don’t have to go with whores: you’re too much of a man.’

‘You don’t know girls. How can you fuck them with a chaperone sitting on your knee?’

‘Fuck the chaperone,’ said Adam, old soldier with three months service behind him.

Kate took Adam to her father’s cottage in the Cotswolds for a long weekend – without her father’s consent – five days after the dinner party at Lambourn.