The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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a patio scattered with olive stones. There was some bread on a scrubbed table and a leather wineskin. The bread was stale but not too hard; he ate it and drank sweet dark wine from the wineskin. The wine intoxicated him immediately.
He heard a dog barking. He opened a studded door with a rusty key in the lock. The dog was half pointer, half hunter, with a whiplash tail, brown and white fur, a brown nose and yellowish eyes. It was young, starving and excited; as Tom stroked its lean ribs it pissed with excitement. Tom gave it the last of the bread.
A heavy machine-gun opened up; bullets thudded into the walls of the patio. The lingering Polikarpov returned, firing a burst in the direction of the machine-gun. Seidler without a doubt. The machine-gun stopped firing but Tom decided to leave the farmhouse which was a natural target. He let himself out of the patio. The dog followed.
The river led him through the rain into mist. He came to a broken bridge that had been blown up, coming to rest where it had originally been built. He ran across it, the dog at his heels.
The gunfire was louder now. No chance yet of getting through the Fascist lines. He noticed a shell-hole partly covered by a length of shattered fencing. He slithered down the side, coming to rest opposite a young, dark-haired soldier dazed with battle.
Sometimes a meeting between two people is a conceiving. A dual life is propagated and it possesses a special lustre even when its partners are divided by time or location. These partners, although they may fight, are blessed because together they may glimpse a vindication of life. All of this passes unnoticed at the time; all, that is, except an easiness between them.
Tom Canfield became aware of this easiness when, coming face to face with Adam Fleming in a shell-hole in the middle of Spain, he said, ‘Hi, soldier,’ and Adam replied incredulously, ‘I can hear you.’
And because a sense of absurdity is companion of these relationships, Tom laughed idiotically and said, ‘You can what?’
‘Hear you. I was deaf until you dropped in.’ And then he, too, began to laugh.
Tom watched him until the laughter was stilled. He had an argumentative face and, despite the laughter, his eyes were wide with shock. Tom was glad he was a flier: these young men from the debating forums of Europe hadn’t been prepared for the brutality of a battlefield.
‘Where did you learn to shoot?’ he asked pointing at the Russian rifle in the young man’s hands.
‘At college.’
‘In England? I thought you only learned cricket.’
‘And tennis. I played a lot of tennis.’
‘Because you were supposed to play cricket?’
‘You’re very perceptive. My name’s Adam Fleming.’ He saluted across the muddy water at the bottom of the crater.
‘Tom Canfield. How’s it going up there?’ he asked, nodding his head at the lowering sky.
Adam shrugged.
‘Fifty-fifty. I got disorientated,’ he said as though an explanation was necessary. ‘I didn’t know who I was fighting. Maybe someone fired a rifle too close to my ear. I felt as though I had been punched.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Tom said.
‘You’re a boxer?’
‘A mauler.’ Tom hesitated. ‘What made you come out here?’ He cradled his wounded arm inside his flying jacket; the dog settled itself at his feet and closed its eyes.
‘The same as you probably. It’s difficult to put in words.’
‘I would have guessed you were pretty neat with words.’
‘I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. I knew words weren’t enough; they never are. And you have to make your stand while you’re young … I’m not very good with words tonight,’ he said.
‘I guess you’ve been fighting too long,’ Tom said.
A shell burst overhead. Hot metal hissed in the water.
Adam said, ‘My father had a cartoon in his study. It was by an artist from the Great War called Bruce Bairnsfather. It showed two old soldiers sitting in a shell-hole just like this and one soldier is saying to the other, “If you knows of a better ’ole go to it.”’
‘This is the best hole I know of,’ Tom said.
‘You’re lucky, being a flier.’
‘A privileged background,’ Tom said. ‘My old man owned a Cessna.’
Fleming, he decided, came from London; a left-wing intellectual rather than an enlightened slogger like himself.
Adam said, ‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’
‘It’s a weird thing to say but there was no other choice.’
‘I understand that. Did you ever doubt?’
‘My motives? Sure I did. I figure there’s a bit of the adventurer or the martyr in any foreigner fighting here.’
‘But our motives, surely, are stronger than self glory or self pity?’ His voice sounded anxious.
‘Oh sure. In my case anyway. I can’t speak for everyone. There are a few phonies here, you know.’
‘You think I’m one?’
‘I think you go looking for arguments.’
‘I can’t stand dogma. But you’re right, I’m too argumentative. It had me worried for a while. I wondered whether I was championing a cause out of perversity.’
‘Not you,’ Tom said. He had known this man for a long time – the frown as he interrogated himself, the dawning smile as he called his own bluff.
‘Then I had a letter from my sister.’
Tom waited; there is a time for waiting and when you knew someone as well as he knew Adam Fleming you knew that this was just such a time.
‘They killed her husband.’
‘Bastards.’
‘Then I knew I had to come here. I wish I’d come before I needed proof.’
‘You would have come anyway,’ Tom said.
‘But you didn’t need a push.’
‘Try living in a company shack in a coal town,’ Tom said. ‘Try busting your ass in the dust bowl of Oklahoma.’
He sensed that what he had said was grotesquely wrong but he couldn’t fathom why. Surely it was feasible to compare injustices in the United States with those of Spain. I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. Those were Adam Fleming’s very words.
But such is the spontaneity of relationships such as this that anticipation is everything. No need to tell a joke: just point the way. No need to say goodbye: there is farewell in your greeting.
And now Tom Canfield knew.
He said, ‘Your sister, where was her husband killed?’
‘In Madrid,’ said Adam who, of course, knew by now.
‘But you’re holding a Russian rifle.’
‘And you’re wearing a German flying jacket.’
‘I took my rifle from the body of a dead Republican.’
‘I bought my flying jacket in a discount store in New York.’
Delgado said from the lip of the shell-hole, ‘I am delighted to see, Fleming, that you have taken a prisoner.’
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