The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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lay trapped in his throat so he switched off the lights and they lay down beside each other and he stared into the caverns of the fires in search of answers and justifications.
The justification was brought to Adam on a silver salver on 6 October, two days before the Michaelmas term was due to begin. He was sitting in the garden of his parents’ house in East Grinstead reading a newspaper summary of recent developments in Spain. Summer hadn’t quite abdicated, sunlight shining through smoke lit chrysanthemums and persistent roses, and a biplane traversed the pale sky towing a banner advertising the News Chronicle.
Adam read that General Francisco Franco had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist army and Head of State and that the Republicans had created a Popular Army. The Fascists seemed to be on the rampage – in September they had captured Irún, San Sebastian and Toledo – and if he didn’t act soon it would be too late.
But was wilfulness enough? Do I want to be a soldier of fortune, champion of my own ego? He flung down the newspaper and paced the lawns. He was near the pond where frogs plopped in the summer when the maid found him and handed him the letter on the salver as though it were something to eat.
The envelope, which bore a new Edward VIII stamp, had been posted in London the previous day but the writing was his sister’s and she was in Madrid. Fear stirred and he held the envelope for a few moments without opening it.
The letter was dated 16 August, so it must have been smuggled out of Spain – via Marseille, perhaps, on one of the British warships evacuating refugees – and posted in London.
Dear Adam,
Paco is dead. He was taken from our apartment two nights ago and driven to a village called Paracuellos del Jarama where, with two dozen other suspects, he was executed. They were forced to dig a mass grave, then machine-gunned and finished off with bullets in the backs of their necks.
I say suspects. Suspected of what I have no idea. Certainly Paco had no interests in politics, just his job and his home and his children – and me. But he was a good Catholic and an architect and relatively well off, so I suppose that was sufficient reason. Or maybe a private quarrel across the drawing board was settled in the name of the Republic; many old scores are being settled that way. All I know is that I am lost. I hear the children and I hear the maid (she is more scared than any of us) and I hear the shooting and I suppose I eat and sleep. It is supposed to be dangerous to walk in the streets but so far the Irresponsibles, as they call them, have not killed a foreign woman. Not that I care, although I should because of the children.
A part of me also knows that I must not leave Spain. For Paco’s sake, for the children’s sake because they are Spanish. I am writing to you because we always shared and father never much cared for Paco, did he? Well, tell him the dago is dead. He was a good man, Adam …
The back-sloping letters lengthened, died. The letter was signed Eve. Her name was Julia but with Adam it had always been Eve.
Adam, letter in hand, heard the plop of stones thrown by her two boys into the pond; saw the ripple of the water beneath the duckweed. They had been happy that day, Adam and Eve, sharing Eve’s family, sharing a day that smelled of daffodils and hope, even sharing the hostility of their father which, now that there were children, was more a family joke than a threat.
Ah, Paco of the healthy skin and glossy hair and provident disposition who believed that Spain would be a land of opportunity as soon as the Republic had settled … poor, naïve Paco who was forced to dig his own grave out of the land in which he believed.
Adam threw a pebble into the pond and watched the green ripples until they lapped the bank, then strode rapidly away.
Five days later he was in the solemn city of Burgos in the north of Spain.
The third shell duly arrived in the slit trench. It came with the sound of a wave unfurling and, with an impact that shook the trench, buried itself in the mud and soft rock, resting lethally five yards from Adam.
‘Shit,’ said Chimo, ‘we’d better get out of here.’
‘It’s a dud,’ Adam said. It was not unknown for Spanish munition workers who didn’t want to kill other Spaniards to immobilize ammunition.
‘There are duds and duds. Maybe this has got a delayed fuse.’
‘Why would it have that?’
‘So that we all think it’s a nice shiny shell. We even go up and pat it. Then, whoosh, it blows us over the countryside. That’s the reds for you, those sons of whores …’
The legionnaire next to Chimo said, ‘Those bastards … We came here to fight, not wait until we’re blown into little pieces by one sleeping shell.’
He climbed out of the trench and made a crouching run for the concrete bunker at the base of the flat-topped hills. The others followed. Adam, taking a last look at the shell half-buried in the mud, went last. It was his misfortune that he was a good runner.
Keeping low, he passed empty trenches, a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest on the roof, a shrike perched on a telegraph wire, shell-holes, sage and brush and leafless fig trees … To his left he saw the curves of the river and the rulered line of Jarama canal.
Bullets fired from across the river sang past him. But what he feared was heavy artillery or a strafing run by one of the German fighters now occupying luminous pools in the clouds.
He reached the bunker first. And found that the colonel in charge of the bandera, the battalion, was waiting for him. His name was Delgado, a native of Seville, and, modelling himself on General Queipo de Llano, who broadcast bloodthirsty threats to the Republicans on the radio, bore himself with exaggerated stiffness and wore his small moustache as though it were a medal; he disliked all foreigners, whether they were fighting for the Republicans or the Fascists.
He said to Adam, ‘I must be losing my hearing – I didn’t hear any order to retreat.’
Adam drew himself to attention. ‘We’re not retreating …’
‘We?’
Adam looked behind him, spotted the last of the legionnaires who had followed him disappearing into a trench.
‘I am not retreating. I’ve come to report an unexploded shell.’
‘It’s my experience that unexploded shells report themselves.’
‘In our trench. If it had gone off it would have killed the lot of us.’
‘Who gave the orders to abandon the trench?’
‘No one, sir.’
‘But you got out first?’ Delgado slapped his cane against a polished boot. He looked as though he had just shaved and showered.
‘I run faster,’ Adam said.
‘Are you implying that the rest of the men ran away too?’
‘I did not run away.’
‘You could hardly say you were attacking. What if other members of the company had followed your example?’
Adam didn’t reply: they hadn’t.
‘Name?’
‘Fleming, sir.’
‘Ah, Fleming,’ tapping his boot with his cane. ‘Why do you want to fight for us, Fleming? Most of your countrymen are fighting for the reds.’
‘Because I’m anti-Communist.’
‘Not pro-Nationalist?’
‘If I am one then surely I am the other.’
‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’
‘I can fire a rifle.’
‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’