A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  The whole explosion of rage and resentments had inevitably faded and, for the past several years, Gonzalo was able to experience the distance between himself and his sister without hatred, feeling only scorn and a sense of abandonment that had grown so large it was unsalvageable.

  “None of that matters much anymore, does it?”

  Gonzalo took off his heavy glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, where the cushions on his frames had left little indents. Without his glasses, everything became blurry, like a painting splashed with turpentine. A world of shadows that ironically, he thought, was perhaps truer than the one he saw clearly when he put them back on again.

  “But if you were happy, if you had the solid bond everyone aspires to, why get divorced?”

  Luis jutted his neck out and flexed his shoulders. It was clear that his body was tense beneath his jacket. He didn’t like talking about this. Little by little his stiffness seemed to give way to a sort of languor, as though physically submitting to the evidence, and he almost seemed to pour himself onto the table.

  “I never forgave her for our son’s death,” he said flatly. But he no longer felt the rage of before. It had dissipated, having been chewed up and spat out every day for the eight months that had passed since Laura told him, crazed, that someone had taken their son from the school gate, in broad daylight, with all the teachers and parents standing there in shock and fear. “One day, soon after Laura and I met, I found her sitting in the dark in the bathroom. She was crying and trembling like a leaf. I’d never seen her like that, and I was scared. She was sobbing, her words tumbling out, tears and snot running down her face. She told me that it was impossible to love someone you didn’t really know, that true love can develop only as the result of truth, and that silence is simply a deception. I couldn’t get her to tell me what was going on, aside from those few incoherent sentences. The next day I saw her again—we weren’t yet living together—and she gave me a big kiss and made me promise not to ask about it. I respected her wishes. I should have realized that her desperate outpouring was a sign, that there was something lurking beneath her apparent happiness, something that had been hurting her, damaging her irreparably for God knows how long.

  “Children living in poverty or being abused were her obsession. Every time there was a news item about it her ears pricked up, but she’d never talk about it. For me, having been brought up in a warm, loving home, the scenes of abuse described were inconceivable. They made me unbelievably sad, but at the same time, I felt like it was so far from our reality. Laura, on the other hand, took it personally. I watched her fall apart, as though she herself were experiencing it all. She started to write about it, conduct research, join different associations. We even took in foster children on several occasions, kids who didn’t know how to play, kids who when you gave them a bath you saw they had damaged bodies, cigarette burns on their skin, little girls who told stories about sick fathers. Laura despised the parents who had done those things with such intensity, said they’d ‘stolen childhood’ from these kids. And she spent day after day trying to fight them, taking on so much that she wore herself out. I soon realized it was eating her up. I told her that she couldn’t fight all the evil in the world by herself, that her efforts were a drop in the ocean. And you know what she said to me? ‘What is the ocean, if not a million drops?’

  “She felt the need to get truly involved rather than stand on the sidelines or even write about what was going on. I couldn’t understand it: We had money, we had standing, we could do whatever we wanted. So I was stunned the day she told me she was giving it all up to join the police. We argued bitterly, for months, but there was no changing her mind. Laura had made her decision and that was all that mattered.

  “I watched her slowly turn into a woman who no longer believed that life was a miracle, and it was as if once she’d seen that for a lie, it became unbearable. I tried to convince her to quit her job, because I saw that it was destroying her. But she swore she was fine, said she felt useful, that she could keep working. This lasted three or four years. Maybe in the end she realized that birds can’t fly forever, that they have to stop and rest, and that they need a place to return to. When our son was born, I thought it would all change, that she’d focus on me, on our child, our lives. But I was wrong. Her job started to affect us, we argued all the time. Laura began drinking, and her character changed for the worse. I don’t know exactly what she was investigating. She never wanted to talk about her work. All I know is that it was dangerous, and that it was consuming her completely. Sometimes she’d be gone for weeks and call only for five minutes, at night, to hear Roberto’s voice. I imagined her staying at roadside motels, dingy places she had no business being. I spoke to her angrily, told her she was being selfish, that she was letting her son be raised in his grandparents’ arms, that instead of saving all the children in the world she should worry a little more about that fact that her own son cried when she picked him up, because he no longer recognized her.”

  Luis stopped. He was having trouble speaking, swallowed hard, realized his coffee had gone cold and ordered another. Gonzalo told the waiter he didn’t want anything and simply stared at Luis—so together on the outside, so broken on the inside. He suggested they forget about the coffee and go for a walk. Luis agreed: Some polluted city air would do them both good. He said he missed the Barcelona sun, the sea, and color of the Mediterranean. But really, Gonzalo realized, what he missed was Laura.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  Gonzalo said no and forced himself to turn down a cigarette. He’d promised, sworn up and down to Lola that he hadn’t smoked in five months. The truth was he’d broken that promise, but suddenly he felt an intense need to keep his word. Not one more, he told himself. Luis exhaled a long puff of smoke, not picking up on—or else not caring about—the admiring look a beautiful young woman shot him. She reminded Gonzalo of the woman on the balcony, the one with butterfly wings tattooed on her neck. The reader of Mayakovsky.

  Calmer now, Luis returned to his tale of those final months.

  “One morning, last September, someone rang the doorbell and Roberto went to open the door—I used to joke that he had a calling to be a bellhop, because every time the doorbell or phone rang, he’d run to open it or pick it up. When I went to see who it was, I found my son standing there, staring, eyes wide open, not saying a word. A dead cat lay on the landing with its throat slit and a picture of Roberto tacked to its chest. The picture had been taken in the park, with a telephoto lens. I asked Laura to stop her investigation, whatever it was. And she promised to request a transfer, said she would ask to be put on desk duty, but she lied. I found out a few days later, when a guy with a Russian accent called my office and told me they were going to kill Roberto. They knew what school he went to, knew our daily timetable, everything. I was so scared I hired private security, and also got Roberto out of Barcelona, took him to the farm my family has by a village in Empordà. I gave Laura an ultimatum: Either she quit, or I’d leave her and take Roberto with me. Two weeks later, everything went back to normal. Or at least that’s what I believed. Roberto went back to school, Laura kept her word—or so I thought—and was working regular office hours, spending more time with Roberto…We even planned a vacation to Orlando over Christmas. We loved the idea of Roberto getting to see Mickey Mouse.”

  Here Luis paused. Perhaps he was hoping that Gonzalo would say something to encourage him, or maybe to stop him. But Gonzalo lacked the courage to bear the burden for Luis’s desperate need.

  “One afternoon, Laura called me at work, completely beside herself. Someone had taken our son from the school gate. Two days later he turned up on the bottom of that lake not far from where you grew up. The police knew he was there because there’d been an anonymous tip. I lost my mind; Laura did, too. But whereas I sank into a bottomless pit of grief and sadness, not understanding how this could have happened, she threw all of her rage into f
inding whoever had done it. She didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, almost stopped coming home, and when she did was often drunk or high and smelled of other men. Honestly, by then it didn’t matter, I really didn’t care anymore; I couldn’t save myself from my wreck much less pull her from hers. I realized I was starting to hate her, and one night I said terrible things. I told her that it was her fault that Roberto had been killed. She scratched my face, we fought, and…I punched her—as hard as I could, ended up busting her lip. I was horrified at the blood in bed, and yet I had no desire to calm her, in fact I wanted to keep hitting her, to let out everything I’d been holding in. It was all I could do not to, and that’s when I realized it was over. I packed my things the next day while she was out, and I left. A week later I had a law firm send her divorce papers, and she sent them back, signed. And that was it. I moved to London, met someone else, let that someone love me, and pretended I was coping. I’m still pretending, and maybe one day it will really be true.”

  For a few seconds Gonzalo thought about all the people trying to apply the same axiom: Accept defeat, because no matter how hard you try, things don’t always turn out how you’d dreamed, and all you can do is hope and dream and pretend something else will work out.

  He realized Luis was staring at him.

  “That Russian with the tattoos, Zinoviev—he’s the one who killed my son, isn’t he?”

  “According to Alcázar, the inspector in charge of the case, there’s no proof of that.”

  “But Laura thought so, I’m sure. Do you think she did it? Do you think she killed him?”

  “The proof is pretty overwhelming. Alcázar is convinced it was her.”

  Luis shook his head slowly, finishing his cigarette. He’d put on his sunglasses, and the dark lenses made it impossible to read his expression.

  “I’m not asking for proof, or what that inspector thinks. She was your sister, my wife. Do you really think Laura could do something like that?”

  Gonzalo thought back to their aerial dogfights, the two of them, arms extended, chasing one another, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, imitating the sound of gunfire. There was the day Laura finally agreed to go into a tailspin, windmilling her arms and eventually collapsing in the barn. Why did you let me win? Gonzalo asked. Because today you fought so well you deserved it, she said, hair covered in hay, snuggling him in her arms. Gonzalo had turned and seen his mother through the barn window, smiling. She’d heard, too. But maybe she didn’t remember.

  “No, I don’t,” he said with absolute conviction. He didn’t know where it had come from, but it was genuine.

  “I don’t, either,” Luis replied, flicking his cigarette butt into the man-made lake.

  3

  MOSCOW, JANUARY 1933

  The railway police officer, his expression impenetrable, cast his glance back and forth between Elías and his passport. The glee reigning in the train compartment five minutes earlier had vanished. When the four students heard the call for “Documents!” they fell silent, obeying like automatons. After five long minutes, the officer handed Elías back his passport without altering his severe expression, and then repeated the operation with the other three. Finally, when all was in order and the officer left, they exhaled in relief, and Martin—the red-haired Englishman who had boarded when the train reached Warsaw—allowed himself to make a few jokes that the others acknowledged with halfhearted laughter. Suddenly, the young scholarship recipients got the sense that Moscow wasn’t going to be all fun and games. Bolsheviks took the proletariat revolution very seriously, and this officer’s icy stare had been a warning. The train slowed noticeably a couple of miles before arriving at Moscow’s impressive station. Elías hunkered down in his coat and peered out the window, not caring how bitterly cold the wind, or how ugly his first glimpse of the paradise his father had spoken of so often. Despite its three million inhabitants and being renamed capital in 1918, Moscow resembled an immense village full of narrow roads, chaos spreading outward like a stain at an alarming pace. Legions of workers labored day and night, building the Metro. Everywhere, old buildings were being torn down and grand palaces from the time of the czars were literally being moved, stone by stone, so as not to impede the design of enormous new avenues. Classic and modern were being juxtaposed, and soon it would be a beautiful city. But for now it was a mess: construction, demolition, scaffolding, and traffic. Still, not even the enormous columns of blue-black smoke rising beyond Stalin’s iron-and-steel metropolis put a damper on the excitement of the engineer from Asturias, Spain.

  “Being a non-Soviet Communist is seen as suspicious, even in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” said Claude sarcastically. He was a young Marseilles architect and had won a Lenin scholarship to continue his studies at the Moscow Institute of Architecture. Claude motioned to the others to take note of the group waiting for them on the platform, clustered at the bottom of an enormous mural of Stalin in military cap, beneath what seemed a slogan of the Five-Year Plan: In ten years we will make up the hundred we lag behind industrialized nations. Despite their smiling faces and civilian attire, it was obvious that they were police.

  “They’re not going to take their eyes off us, even though we’re the ones who came to help.”

  “We didn’t just come to build bridges and canals. We came to learn, to be apostles and preach throughout the West what’s happening here. As Stalin says, you can’t create something new without profound knowledge of the old. And this is a nation full of knowledge,” declared Michael, the short bowlegged Scotsman who hadn’t left Martin’s side. He knew what he was talking about. This was his second trip to Moscow. He’d been sent by the Party cell in Edinburgh, and his father had worked as a fur trader in Siberia. Michael was here to work on the huge Dnieper Hydroelectric Station and put his book knowledge of generating cheap energy into practice. Of the four, he spoke Russian the best and knew the most about the USSR’s technical and industrial progress.

  Elías smiled, thinking of his father at their shack in Mieres a week ago, giving him an effusive bear hug and saying goodbye. His heart filled with tenderness when he recalled his father’s hands, the hands of a miner, holding a copy of Chekhov’s The Seagull, one of his favorite books. Elías was aware of the fact that he’d received a rare privilege, being able to finish his engineering degree in the land of Gorky and Dostoyevsky. He was hoping to stay long enough to learn the language of these gods his father worshipped, so that he could recite Pushkin like a real Soviet upon his return to Spain. He knew nothing would make his father happier.

  “Do you think, as part of our welcome, Stalin might receive us in audience at the Kremlin? I’ve heard his library is amazing.”

  His three friends gave him a perplexed look and then burst out laughing. And in their laughter, especially Claude’s, Elías detected an almost sinister sense of humor.

  “Careful what you wish for, amigo; you might get it.”

  The guide they’d been assigned introduced himself as Nikolai Ozhegov and shook their hands enthusiastically before insisting on taking their cases. He spoke perfect English, and his Spanish, when he addressed Elías, was more than acceptable. Elías felt an immediate fondness for the ungainly, talkative sandy-haired man, though he also understood the significance of his presence: As Claude had intimated moments earlier, Nikolai was a rabkor—in theory a “people’s correspondent,” in reality a police informant. They were everywhere, in factories, schools. Nikolai would be their shadow, give regular reports on their behavior, their activities, even their ideas. But this didn’t concern Elías—he had nothing to hide, he was a Communist through and through, there to learn as much as possible before returning home.

  The four friends were picked up by a black Ministry of the Interior car (later, Elías learned that Muscovites referred to these police vehicles ominously as “crows”) and driven the length of Frunze Avenue and along Tverskaya Street, now renamed Gorky Avenue at its widest point. Their gui
de proudly pointed out the eye hospital—housed in an eighteenth-century building—the Museum of History and Iversky Gate, which led to Red Square and the Kremlin. Awestruck, Elías watched the construction being undertaken on the great Lenin Library, a splendid neoclassical building destined to house forty million books and documents and located between the Kremlin and the Manège, the czars’ imperial riding academy and stables. Heading north on Leningradsky Avenue, they continued their tour, passing the telegraph office and central bank. Elías took it all in, eyes wide open, and got the strange feeling that everything he saw possessed a sort of tragic grandeur. He had to force himself to blink when, off in the distance, he caught sight of the eighth wonder of the world—Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

  “What do you think?” Nikolai asked in passable Spanish.

  Elías nodded, amazed. He’d heard so many charges against Stalin—that he was the destroyer of a thousand churches, an uncultured Georgian, a savage peasant—that the sight of the church left him gape mouthed.

  Nikolai smiled derisively. “When you go home, you’ll be able to tell people that we barbarians are becoming civilized.”

  The car pulled up before the gates of the Government Building, also known as the House on the Embankment. It was an immense complex occupying seven acres and quite imposing—sinister-looking, even—in style, on the banks of Moskva River. Construction had begun five years earlier and still wasn’t finished, but its five hundred apartments housed a good part of the regime’s intelligentsia: artists of all sorts, top government officials, and technicians. The well-appointed modern facilities, central heating, and furnishings were the envy of all Moscow. This was to be the young students’ lodging.