“I don’t think we need to mention this to your father.”
Javier glanced down at the crisp notes before tucking them into his wallet.
“Are you referring to the money, this conversation, or what happened at the agency?”
Lola bore the weight of her son’s caustic expression. Gonzalo might not be his real father, but Javier had sure inherited his character.
From the top of the road you could see, in the distance, an enormous crater being excavated by diggers. Close to the dam, trucks moved back and forth along the edge of the lake, enveloped in a thick cloud of dirt and lime dust. Gonzalo got out of his car and made his way down the stony slope, the blueprint his father-in-law had given him in hand. He’d been surprised at his mother’s sudden change of heart. When he went to see her, to lay out Agustín’s proposal, Gonzalo had been prepared for a long and fruitless argument, but astonishingly she’d hardly put up a fight and actually seemed eager to close the deal quickly. He got the impression she was expecting what he was going to say and had already made her decision.
The wooden bridge over the creek was still there. He wondered if its old planks would still take his weight but decided not to test it. It would have pained him to see how much heavier adults are than children, for reasons that had nothing to do with their girth. Perhaps his and Laura’s names were still carved in the wooden handrail; it would be good, he thought, to see that some things don’t change despite neglect. The house looked trapped between the rugged mountain and a ravine, a couple of steep paths being the only way down. Gonzalo hesitated, as though trying to convince himself not to stop and simply to return to his car, but at the last minute he took the key from his pocket and unlocked the gate.
There was hardly a trace of the old stone road leading to the main entrance, and the flowerbeds his mother once doted on were out of control, nothing manicured about them. The climbing rosebushes were like escapees that had made a break for it, no stakes to hold them back and hopelessly covered in aphids. The roses themselves looked drawn and haggard, giving the place the joyless air of an abandoned cemetery. The façade of the house itself showed perilous cracks, though it still emanated a sort of dignity alien to the atmosphere of abandonment surrounding it. This house had always been destined to be a monument to oblivion.
The inside was demolished. There was broken furniture throughout the living room; someone had kicked down the doors and splinters still clung to the hinges. In one corner stood a chest of drawers, miraculously intact, enshrouded in thick spiderwebs. A field mouse darted in and out among fossilized flowers, gnawing on a stalk. Its glassy little eyes observed Gonzalo, seeming to ask what he was doing there. On a cement shelf sat an old radio, its innards smashed. He pushed a button that made a click, which rang out in the silence like echoes of the old songs he and his mother sometimes sang while gazing out the window, when she was doing well. “And I searched your faded letters, for an I-love-you, my sweet…” Songs from other times. He opened a drawer and a lizard scurried to the back. Among the disintegrating rags that had once been table linens, he found an old green school notebook, multiplication tables printed on the back. Gonzalo wiped the dust and shook it out. Five times one is five, five times two is ten, five times three is fifteen…He smiled, recalling the students’ singsong voices as they chanted in unison, their teacher directing them, ruler in hand like a conductor. Two-seater desks with an inkwell in the middle, maps of all the rivers in Spain, the alphabet—written in gothic letters—hanging on the wall. Days and years of tedium, watching the rain through a window as priests spoke of Saint Paul, the Scholastics, and the theories of Copernicus, and Gonzalo dreamed of going home for the summer and spending time at the lake, swimming with Laura in its murky waters. And each June, when he returned with his old bedroll, came the realization that they’d grown a little more distant. He still blushed, recalling his shock at discovering that his sister had grown breasts. Firm white breasts with pink nipples. And her look of shame at feeling herself observed. After that she no longer swam naked with him. That’s what becoming an adult meant: hiding from others.
He walked outside and circled the house. Rotting leaves had piled up along the edges of the path. Out back, part of the old shed was still standing. Peeking through its barnlike door, which no longer closed properly, he felt his father’s presence carried in on the wind and envisioned him working on the old Renault, leaning over the open hood with his sleeves rolled up, checking spark plugs or pistons or whatever it was he checked with a rag and metal rod, Gonzalo behind him, pint-sized and eagerly awaiting instructions, excited to hand him a monkey wrench or a hammer he could barely even hold.
He pushed the door and it gave way with no resistance, as though it had been awaiting his return. The roof was full of holes and the air inside had a stale, closed-in smell. Gonzalo was confronted by disarray impossible to put right. He slid a hand along the walls as though trying to conjure faded memories by touch: hours spent chatting quietly with his father so as not to awaken his mother during siesta time, the smell of the cheap cigars he smoked, afternoons when his father sat in a chair typing feverishly on the old Densmore. Memory is a strange thing: You forget crucial incidents and remember insignificant details. He recalled the old typewriter perfectly, the same one as in his dream: it was an 1896 model but still worked perfectly, black and gold with round ivory keys whose letters had faded. The carriage return still worked, and when you got to the end of a line it would ding like a bicycle bell. The rods that stamped the letters fanned out in a semicircle, and there was no way to change case or font. You needed strong fingers to press hard enough to move them. Slowly, one after the other, the letters formed words, and the words, sentences. Gonzalo wondered where all of those words had gone, what their fate had been. What stories they told.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gonzalo?” his father once asked.
“I don’t want to grow up. I want to be your son forever,” he’d replied, as though it were a matter of remaining five for the rest of his life.
He walked out of the shed and circled around the back. An old plot now covered in dense brush overlooked the valley. From among the weeds emerged a crooked grave—no cross, no marker—identifiable only by the raised mound of compact earth with poppies growing out of it and hornets buzzing all around. Gonzalo had agreed to dig it because his mother had asked him to, agreed also to bury a gray suit in place of the body that never surfaced. It was the suit his father had worn the day his parents were married. For a long time, his mother had thought he’d return, that one day he would again put on the suit she’d so carefully saved all those years, that everything would be the same as before. She dreamed of a before belonging solely to the two of them—not to the world, or to their children, or to legend. Their private world. And yet now she was willing to surrender that hope to the teeth of an excavator. Why?
Near the grave stood a fig tree. He’d once hung an old tire on a rope from one of the branches. Gonzalo remembered swinging on it, gazing out at the valley while on vacation from school, shortly before being expelled at age sixteen. The priest who taught religion had been telling them about Judas Iscariot and his tragic end. Gonzalo paid almost no attention to the traitor’s tale, he was interested only in finding out if Judas was hanged from an olive tree or a fig, cared only about discovering what type of tree had borne the weight of his cowardice. Suicide was for cowards, he thought, that summer long ago. Now he wasn’t so sure. Love proves how futile our preconceptions are.
The sky was clear, but dotted with clouds at the horizon, as it always had been. Gonzalo sat with his back against the tree trunk and contemplated a landscape that had once belonged to both him and his sister. It felt strange to be sitting there, as he often had, after so long. Even in those days he was the quiet one and Laura talked nonstop, about anything and everything. His sister actually wondered at one point if he might be a bit slow, and although it didn’t make her love him a
ny less, she did worry about his silences, about the way he was always so lost in his own world. When he was back from boarding school, she would watch him as though fearing that if he kept holding everything in, he might explode.
When they were kids, it often snowed in wintertime. Laura would jump out of their bedroom window and dive headfirst into mounds of fluffy snow, while he chose to pack it tight, making animals and other things. From early in the morning he’d pack the snow that had fallen in the night, sculpting amazing ephemeral shapes. By that time, they were already very different, and their love for each other was no longer enough to conceal their differences. Gonzalo was the patient one, the keen one; Laura would destroy his snow shapes just to watch him turn red in fury. Thinking back to those cruel games made him smile. Laura could never sit still and thought he was too serious, too concerned about the lives of others and not concerned enough about his own. She was right: Gonzalo was always too prudent for his age, a withdrawn boy with big protruding ears who scolded his sister for going out with the older boys in town.
He missed her. Not the woman she later became but his big sister, the one who held his hand and took him on outings to the lake when he was five years old and scared as a sparrow. Their distance had eventually destroyed them, and often when he visited his mother at the nursing home, he would sit with her and ask why she was so bitter, why she never made her peace. But his mother only stared at him, and in her look he saw no remorse, no guilt. Only profound hatred. And now it was too late. There was no point settling a score with someone who was no longer alive to keep tally, but Esperanza was still vehement in her hatred for Laura. All because of the damned article his sister had written about their father.
He wished Laura had never written it. Words are nothing but rough sketches that never truly convey reality, but his sister couldn’t see that. She accumulated them, jotted them down, looked them up, and memorized their meanings; she was moved by the power of expressions but didn’t realize that, often, they die of insignificance. Her words were too lofty, she expected too much of them, was blinded by their sound yet didn’t hear the booming silence they left in their wake. Things that truly matter don’t need to be spoken to be true, and sometimes silence is the only truth possible. He and his mother could have forgotten the words she wrote, overlooked the way she slandered Elías; they could have erased her words from memory or burned them. But how to quench the fire seething inside? What to do with the ashes if, despite all attempts to scatter them, the wind kept bringing them back and piling them up at the door?
“I shouldn’t have come back,” he murmured. Perhaps his father-in-law was right and it was best to let the bulldozers raze the place. Memories are always flawed when held up to the cold light of reality. It made no sense to insist on returning to places from the past, even when they were still standing. It was always disappointing. What’s gone can never return. He’d like to believe that opening the doors and plugging the leaks would be all it took for everything to return to the way it was: remodel the house, move back as he’d dreamed of doing years ago, before he surrendered to the life that Lola and her father demanded. But how to rebuild the memories of people—his father, his mother, his sister, even himself? How did that all fit in? Still, Gonzalo was chained to this place forever, like the house dog in the fable he’d been forced to memorize as a boy. Aesop was right: It doesn’t matter how long the chain is, there comes a time when you feel its restraint.
He closed his eyes, as he had when Laura made him play hide-and-seek and then hid close enough to be easily found, because being alone scared him. Where am I? Far away, Laura, he thought, you’re so far away. Nothing is wholly true, nothing is wholly false. Beneath the surface lies the evidence, and beneath one piece of evidence lies another. Gonzalo wondered what role his sister played in reality, what part he himself did, what part the house and the past. Together they formed a whole; split into disparate particles they were nothing but broken dreams.
He made his way slowly up to the road. Before climbing back into the car, he took one last look at the grounds surrounding his old home. From where Gonzalo stood he could not see the grave behind the shed, or what its ruins contained. A cloud of construction dust at the lake rose up from the valley like an erupting volcano.
6
MOSCOW, EARLY FEBRUARY 1933
The noise of the propeller engine was deafening. Half a dozen men on either side of the plane’s wings pushed while the pilot executed a 180-degree turn on the frozen runway. Snow whirled all around. It must be a 1918 French SPAD XIII, Elías deduced. He would have recognized it just by the sound of the turbine. An old model, not very efficient compared to English Sopwith Camels or German Fokkers, but a beautiful machine nonetheless. One day he’d seen a biplane like that flying low over the gray skies of Mieres. The mining company’s postal service had bought a few of them after the Great War, and once a month a plane came into view amid the mine shaft towers, bringing packages and large sacks, landing at the small airfield behind the mining complex.
His father and the others would stop what they were doing for a few minutes and wave their caps in the air, cheering the low-flying pilot, who dipped his wings in response. Little kids began running after the plane the moment it touched down, as if it was a magical dragon that had landed on the soot-blackened roofs of their shacks. Everyone admired the pilot Elías never got to meet, not because he brought their wages but because what a miner admires most is someone who spends his time so far above ground. Elías, too, had dreamed of being one of those men exploring the clouds, had dreamed of seeing the world from up high, soaring through columns of smoke and hearing the buzz of the blast holes being drilled in the mountain as nothing but a sound in the distance. That was why he’d decided to study engineering. Not to build bridges—which is what he ended up doing—but to be suspended in the air.
“Move!”
A rifle butt to the kidneys made him stumble against the truck’s running board. Elías climbed into the back—no canvas over the top—and sat down in an empty spot. He turned his head to look at the airfield. The SPAD took off hesitantly, like a bird forced from the nest for the first time, and then evened out and gained elevation, disappearing above the airfield’s powerful reflective lights. Elías’s dreams and his childhood seemed as far off as this plane disappearing into the Moscow night.
“Where are they taking us?” he said nervously to the woman who’d been made to sit next to him. Elías looked sideways at her, making room on the bench even though the truck bed was already packed and guards continued to force on more and more men, women, and even a few children. The woman was clenching her hands so tightly her knuckles were white. She had a schoolteacher air about her, and he imagined her being strict with the unruly children, sweet to the more diligent ones. Here, however, her composure had vanished.
It was pointless to wonder what he was doing there, what any of them was doing there. Most of those in the military truck wore the same uncertain expression: a mix of fear and incredulity. No one said a word. After Elías had signed his declaration, he’d been told they were sending him straight to the border, for “counterrevolutionary and anti-Bolshevik activities.”
He wondered what had happened to Michael and his sidekick Martin. And Claude. As strange as it might seem, he bore them no ill will. He was simply overcome by profound sadness. After all, Elías had signed his name to a string of lies in exchange for a glass of water, but he didn’t have to bear the guilt of having betrayed or slandered anyone but himself. They, on the other hand, had been beaten perhaps for days, had been forced to denounce him, and would have to bear the weight of that for the rest of their lives. How could they ever believe in a cause again? He’d have liked to see them one last time, to look them in the eye, say goodbye with a hug—perhaps not a warm or healing embrace, but enough to let them live their lives out in peace.
The idea of being deported almost cheered him. And yet Elías realized that so
mething didn’t add up, as he observed the stricken faces of the despairing folks all around him and saw the way mothers embraced their children to protect them from the lacerating cold that whipped through the open truck bed. The vehicle started off with a jerk that sent its occupants flying and headed full speed down a road parallel to the Moskva River and into the darkness.
“They’re taking us for a nice moonlight ride,” an old man with a sarcastic tone announced. “Courtesy of the OGPU.”
Igor Stern had no fear. He’d become immune to it at the age of nine, when a unit of Cossacks flayed his father alive, in Sebastopol. For hours he listened to his father’s cries as skin was detached from muscle and left hanging in tatters around his legs like an old shirt. One of the Cossacks had poured gasoline over him and then forced Igor to set fire to his own father. He did it unflinchingly and for several minutes stared in fascination as the human torch his father became writhed in the snow, lighting up the night.
After that, everything in life had become much simpler.
The fact that they were going to execute him was nothing out of the ordinary. Stalin himself had quoted Alexander Nevsky as saying, “Whoever comes to us with the sword, will die by the sword. On that Russia stands.” Igor had lived his twenty years like a wolf: free and wild, taking by force what fate had denied him. Murder, death, revelry, suffering, love, and hate were all you could hope for. He was no coward, wasn’t about to beg for his life the way he’d seen those before him in the firing line do. Some had shat in their pants, their feces leaving a trail in the trampled snow. Had his hands not been tied, Igor himself would have stabbed them with a bayonet. He detested the weak. Sentenced to death—wasn’t this simply the human condition?
While awaiting his turn (they shot prisoners in pairs), Igor hummed a song made popular by the great Lyubov Orlova, muse of film and dance. If there was one thing he lamented, it was not having been able to enjoy more of these refined sorts of pleasures. Although, like Lenin, he openly declared that he understood nothing about art, Igor got a special feeling when watching a play or listening to an orchestra. Like a wild animal, he sensed a kind of power that could never be tamed by the expressions of the human soul. Sometimes he mocked his fate, wondering whether he too could have been a leader like Stalin, had he fallen into the hands of the right people rather than a band of mercenaries. What would have happened if he’d had a chance to train the beautiful voice people swore he had? Could he have sung in the Grand Opera of Moscow? Could he perhaps have become Orlova’s lover? He could have. But it was easier to think that his singing sounded better in the dead of night, alone like a wolf howling at the beautiful moon whose light now fell on a wall spattered with brains. When it was his turn, he stepped forward. He didn’t need to be coaxed with a bayonet, as his companion—a damned Georgian crybaby—had been. Had the scumbag sobbed while raping and killing little girls and women? Igor bet that he had not. He bet he’d acted fierce as a rabid dog then.
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