The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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got it. Where did you learn to fight like that?’ His accent was Brooklyn, as refreshing as water from a sponge.
‘Columbia,’ Tom said, sitting at the table. ‘Where did you learn to talk like that?’
‘A rhetorical question?’
‘Rhetorical, Jesus!’
‘I come from Brooklyn and I mustn’t use long words?’ He beckoned a waiter. ‘Beer?’
‘Fine,’ Tom said, examining a bruised knuckle.
‘You a flier?’
‘Am I that obvious?’
‘I can see it in your eyes. Searching the skies. My name’s Seidler,’ stretching a hand across the table. His grip was unnecessarily strong; when people gripped his hand firmly and looked him straight in the eye Tom Canfield looked for reasons – he had become wise in the coal fields and the orchards.
The waiter placed two beers on the table.
‘Are you going to Spain?’ Tom asked doubtfully because with his spectacles and the roll of flesh under his chin Seidler did not have the bearing of a crusader.
‘To Albacete. Wherever the hell that is.’
‘Why?’ Tom asked.
‘Because Spain seems like a good place to fly.’
‘You’re a pilot? Wearing spectacles?’
‘For reading only.’
‘So why are you wearing them now?’
‘And for drinking beer,’ Seidler said.
‘Okay, stop putting me on. Why are you going to Spain?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Me, a German Jew, Hitler and Mussolini, Fascists in Spain … Or am I addressing a punch-drunk college dropout?’
‘I used to collect duck shit,’ Tom said.
‘Guano,’ Seidler said. ‘Best goddamn fertilizer in the world.’ He took a deep draught from his glass. ‘So your old man went bust?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Instinct,’ Seidler said tapping the side of his nose. ‘Who interviewed you? A Polak with pointed ears?’
‘He told you?’
‘Said you were a flier, too.’
‘A very stupid flier,’ Tom said. ‘Eyes searching the skies … Didn’t you have your eyes tested before you started flying?’
‘I’m short-sighted which means I can see long distances.’
‘So?’
‘I keep crashing,’ Seidler said.
After that Tom Canfield enjoyed Paris.
On 28 November Seidler and Canfield departed from the Gare d’Austerlitz on train number 77 on the first stage of their journey to the Spanish city of Albacete which lies on the edge of the plain, half-way between Madrid and the Mediterranean coast.
There were many volunteers on the train, French, British, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Russian advisers. Tom felt ill at ease with the leather-jacketed Russians: he had journeyed to Europe to fight injustice, not espouse Marx or Lenin or, God forbid, Stalin. But, as the train paused at small stations he was comforted by the crowds on the platforms waving banners, offering wine and, with clenched fists raised, chanting, ‘No pasarán!’ – they shall not pass. He was also cheered by the knowledge that he and Seidler were fliers, not foot soldiers; there is, as he was discovering, a pecking order in all things.
‘Tell me how you became a flier,’ he said to Seidler as the train nosed slowly past ploughed, wintry fields. Wine had spilled on his scuffed flying jacket, much shabbier than Seidler’s, and he felt a little drunk – happy to be here in Spain.
‘I wanted to join the Air Force,’ Seidler said, chewing grapes that a well-wisher had handed him and spitting the pips on the floor. ‘Actually volunteered, would you believe? I mean, do I look like Air Force material?’
‘It’s the spectacles,’ Tom said, but it was more.
‘They were polite. “Not quite what we’re looking for, Mr Seidler, but thank you for offering your services.” So I went back to selling books in a discount store on 42nd Street and learned to fly in New Jersey and waited for a war some place.’
Tom pointed at a miniature haystack on a church. ‘What the hell’s that?’
‘A stork’s nest,’ Seidler said. ‘Did you leave a girl behind?’
‘Nothing serious,’ Tom said.
‘Parents?’
‘My father had a stroke after he was cleared out. They live in a small hotel in upstate New York. They didn’t want me to come out here’ – the understatement of the year.
‘And you’re obviously an only child.’
Obviously? He remembered the house on Long Island and he remembered avenues of molten light on the water with yachts making their way down it, and men dressed in shorts and matelot jerseys drinking with his father, fierce moustache trimmed for his 60th birthday, and his mother dutifully reading to him in bed. She had been beautiful then, an older Katherine Hepburn, with chestnut hair piled high. He had never told them that he hated boats and, when he was lying on his back on the deck of the yacht, he was imagining himself at the controls of a yellow biplane exploring the castles of cloud on the horizon.
‘But you’re not,’ he said to Seidler.
‘Two brothers, one sister, all gainfully employed in the Garment Centre.’
The train which they had joined at Valencia stopped at a station, little more than a platform, and a dozen militiamen climbed on board. They wore blue overalls and boots, or rope-soled shoes, and berets or caps – one wore a French-style steel helmet, and two of them sported blood-stained bandages. Although the war had been in progress for only four months they conducted themselves like veterans and one carried a long-barrelled pistol which he laid carefully on his knees, as though it were made of glass. They were all young but they were no longer youthful.
Seidler spoke to them in Spanish. They were, he told Tom, returning to Madrid which had miraculously held out against the Fascist onslaught.
As Seidler talked and handed out Lucky Strikes, which were taken shyly and examined like foreign coins, Tom spread a map on his knees and tried to understand the war.
He knew that the Fascists, or Nationalists, were drawn from the army, the Falange and the Church, the landowners and the industrialists; that the Republicans were Socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals and the working class.
He knew that, to protect their privileges, the Fascists had risen in July 1936 to overthrow the lawful government of the Republic, established in 1931, which was being far too indulgent towards the poor. He had read somewhere that before the advent of the Republic a peasant had earned two or three pesetas a day.
He knew that the Fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, had, with the help of German transport planes, invaded Spain from North Africa and that in the north, led by General Emilio Mola, they had swept all before them. But great swathes of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were still in the hands of the Republicans. No pasarán!
He knew that the Moors fighting for Franco took no prisoners and cut off their victims’ genitals; he knew that the heroine of the Republicans was a woman known as La Pasionaria.
He knew that on the sides of this carriage where, on the wooden seats, peasants sat with their live chickens and baskets of locust beans were scrawled the letters UGT and CNT and FAI, but he had no idea what they meant and was ashamed of his ignorance.
The plain rolled past; water and