“What did you tell him?” Gonzalo asked once they were out on the street.
“Something my mother often says, an old Russian proverb: Yearning for the past is like chasing the wind.”
Gonzalo slipped his hands into his pants pockets and turned to her, though she couldn’t see his somber expression.
“Is that really what you think? That yearning for the past is like chasing the wind?
“Yes.”
“I hardly even remember my own father. I know he used to take me to the lake to go fishing when the weather was nice, but only because my mother has told me about it so many times, in great detail, and I tell myself that I remember him staring into the bottom of the lake, telling me stories, teaching me to hold a fishing pole and cast a line. I talk about it like it was true, but it’s just a borrowed memory.” The image of Javier, when Gonzalo asked if he’d taken the gun, clouded his face. “I wonder if that’s the way all children remember their parents, if Javier will simply think of me as something invented.”
Tania gazed fondly at him. “The way children see their parents is never fair, Gonzalo. Until they become parents themselves.”
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Javier had said, but it was so obvious that he was lying.
“What about the way parents see their kids?”
Tania took his arm and pressed against him. “That, I couldn’t tell you; I don’t have kids. But I bet that no matter what it is that’s troubling you, you’ll find the answer. Sometimes all you have to do is tackle things head-on.”
That was so easy to say, Gonzalo thought. And cliché. And yet often so true.
Somehow, unknowingly, they’d crossed an invisible border and found themselves in new territory. Realizing this, they were slowly finding their footing. Gonzalo didn’t want to think about anything; he wanted only to experience these new feelings, to let them consume him before he had to come back down to reality. Just for a few minutes.
They reached Karamazov Bookstore. Tania dug out her keys and jiggled them in her hand. She was trying to act lighthearted, but it came off as unconvincing. Gonzalo both feared and prayed she would ask him to come up, but Tania slid the key into the lock and pushed the door open, switched on the hall light, and turned as though to say goodbye. He was gripped by the sense that the present was the only thing that mattered, that the past and the future—anything outside of that precise instant—didn’t exist at all. His pulse was racing.
Tania smiled, as though reading him like a book. “Do you want to come up?”
Gonzalo couldn’t control his pounding heart. Boom, boom, boom. One foot wanted to walk in, the other to make a run for it.
“It’s probably not the right time,” he said in a last-ditch attempt to avoid crossing that threshold, which was beckoning to him like an open mouth. When is the right time, Gonzalo? If you wait for it, it might never arrive.
It really didn’t matter who kissed whom. What mattered was that they both wanted to.
Barcelona was dim and hazy in the predawn light. He could have been anywhere, and he didn’t care. Geography was only a state of mind. Gonzalo walked down streets that belonged entirely to him at that hour. He lit a cigarette and rested his elbows on the handrail of a bridge crossing over a deserted avenue. The traffic lights flashed, changing color like a silly children’s game. A cat crossed the street like a lone frontiersman, a blissful couple walked arm in arm, exhausted, no doubt making promises that they truly believed they’d be able to keep. Tania’s skin was still on him, he could feel her on his fingertips, under his nails. The remnants of her perfume were trapped in his shirt; if he inhaled deeply enough he could smell her. Would he see her again? Absolutely. Whenever she wanted.
No matter what the old woman said.
He’d bumped into her on his way down the stairs, trying to be quiet. She was sitting in an armchair facing the counter, and her silhouette, in the dark, had startled him. At first Gonzalo had thought she was asleep, reading glasses and an open book in her lap.
He passed by on tiptoe, but when he reached the door, her sharp voice hit him like a hammer. “Are you like your father, Gonzalo?”
He turned and saw that her eyes were empty, like those of a statue. The look she was giving him was stark, inescapable.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
The old woman calmly closed her book and folded her glasses before getting up. The weak dawn light outside reflected her profile in the glass.
“Are you like Elías? The kind of man who takes control of people, robs them of everything, and then abandons them to their fate? Is that what you’re going to do to my daughter?”
Tania grew up knowing nothing of Elías’s existence. And then one day, when she was ten or twelve years old, she found a bunch of newspaper clippings her mother kept hidden in the back of a dresser drawer. A strapping man in an NKVD uniform whose Cyclops eye looked all-seeing. Right away, she was both enthralled by and afraid of that eye. When she asked her mother who he was, Anna became furious, snatching the papers out of Tania’s hands and slapping her across the face (the one and only time she’d ever laid a hand on her). For a long time, her mother refused to say a word about him, wouldn’t tell her who he was or why he was so important. But clearly he was. Spying on her mother, she would see her go into her bedroom, gather up those clippings, and stare at them for ages, lost in thought, a distant look in her eyes, as though she’d gone to another time and place that Tania knew nothing about.
And as is always the case with forbidden places, Tania spent her teenage years lurking around their edges, inventing what she didn’t know. Anna had photos of both of her parents on her nightstand. But Tania imagined that her mother’s father—a teacher executed in the thirties for being a Trotskyist—was not her real father, that this one-eyed giant had been Irina’s lover and the two of them had had an endless tormented, secret, passionate affair. Sometimes, if she voiced one of her crazy theories, Anna would look at her and shake her head in resignation.
“Did we come to Spain so you could find him?” she’d ask.
“We came to Spain to build a future, not to live in the past.”
Vasili Velichko—Uncle Vasili as Tania had always called him, though he wasn’t actually family—was no help. He denied knowing anything about Elías Gil, and when she interrogated him about the past he’d cling to the same story she had already heard: In 1934, Tania’s grandfather and grandmother Irina were killed by the OGPU, leaving Anna alone in the world at the age of three, a ward of the state. Velichko met her when she was six, at an orphanage near Kursk that he’d gone to inspect in his role as commissar. He’d felt sorry for her, and for as long as he could he made sure to send money so that Anna would have everything she needed. Then came the war and his long imprisonment in Siberia, and for the entire twelve years he was there, Anna was the only person he corresponded with. She sent him clothes and food when she could. And when Velichko got out of the gulag, Anna took him in. There followed many hard years—very hard years—but in 1965 came an opportunity to start over, in Spain. Uncle Vasili had come alone first, to get set up, and years later was able to send for Tania and her mother. Those broad brushstrokes were all the detail her uncle and mother ever gave to account for twenty long years of their lives.
Though she never forgot about the mysterious one-eyed man, over the years Tania buried her thoughts of him in the shallow grave of things her mother was trying to forget. She grew up, and Uncle Velichko and Anna grew old, without any of them realizing it. When democracy returned to Spain in the mid-seventies, Vasili opened his bar, and Tania—then sixteen years old—joined the youth brigades of the PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party. She’d bring her friends to the bar, trying to impress them with the Stalin-era photos on the walls and the stories told by an actual people’s commissar, and when she really wanted to astound them, she’d speak to him in Russian and get mad when h
e insisted on answering in Spanish in front of her comrades. Her mother opened Karamazov Bookstore in the late seventies, and it soon became a hub for Russian literature aficionados. But she never let Tania use the space for her meetings. Anna had no interest in politics and had become fearful, warning her daughter to be cautious. After the attempted coup in 1981, she got even worse and actually wanted to close the bookstore, but fortunately, Velichko talked her out of it.
The eighties were a difficult time for Tania and her mother. They argued a lot, unable to see that they were in fact as identical as two drops of water: same temper, same pride, same hardheadedness. Tania traveled around Spain and then went to France in late 1989. It was there, close to Le Boulou, that she happened upon an exhibit on the Republican internment camps set up for Spanish Civil War refugees in Argelès and Saint-Cyprien between 1939 and 1942. The exhibit marked the fiftieth anniversary of their opening, and associations to honor the memory of the dead had organized a reception for survivors, many of whom came with their children or grandchildren. It was held in a municipal sports arena, and Tania remembered the long aisles of objects on display: wooden suitcases, personal belongings, mementos, a few pieces of crudely built furniture, replicas of the shacks prisoners had been housed in, and more than a hundred black-and-white photos, many on loan from the Robert Capa Foundation.
There was a speaker, an expressive old man in a black International Brigades beret who recounted the tragedy that had brought more than four hundred thousand to French shores, a tragedy Tania knew nothing about. Many of those in attendance, especially the older people, wept openly and nodded as they listened, while their children—most of whom were French—consoled them. Tania, who by that time had already decided she wanted to be a professional photographer, began snapping away, capturing everything she could.
And that was when she saw a slight-looking woman and young man point to a large-format photo taken by the great Robert Capa himself. The woman’s gray hair was up in a bun, with several strands falling loose, and she looked physically shattered. The young man wrapped his arms around her and lovingly kissed the top of her head. Tania thought this would make a beautiful photo and approached surreptitiously to try for a better angle. And that was when she saw the image that had moved them: a shirtless man, working outside the walls of the castle at Colliure as a gendarme looked on. His emaciated torso, with tattered trousers held up only by a cord tied around his waist and his rope-soled sandals, was the portrait of dignified misery. Sensing the photographer’s presence, the man had stopped chipping at a huge rock and struck an arrogant pose, resting a hand on top of the sledgehammer, his right foot on the boulder as though it were a prized animal he’d just shot. He wasn’t smiling, but his face, toasted by the sun, had an almost jovial look, as though proclaiming: Look at me; I am not defeated.
What made the biggest impact, however, was no doubt the man’s one eye. His right eye was covered by a filthy patch, while the left one stared straight out from beneath a bushy brow.
Tania recognized him instantly. It was the man in her mother’s clippings who was dressed in a Soviet uniform and wearing the same expression on the Leningrad Front.
The old woman and young man had by this time joined other visitors and were talking excitedly. Tania waited for the right moment to approach, though she had no idea what she could possibly say. Hi, my mother has been collecting everything she can about this man for years. Finally, she saw an opportunity when the young man—Gonzalo, she now knew—went outside for a smoke.
“Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing how moved you were by that photo.”
The woman stared at Tania for some time, looking disconcerted.
“It’s my husband. Lieutenant Elías Gil. We were here together in 1939.”
“Did he die?”
The woman focused, as though absorbing all the light around her in order to brighten her own darkness, and then faltered. For a second, Tania caught a glimpse of the secret torment that lay beneath her ordinary appearance.
Just at that moment, the young man came back inside. Her son, Tania thought. They looked alike and had the same expression. The woman quickly said goodbye and went to meet him. Tania saw them speak quietly, and for a moment Gonzalo looked searchingly at her. She smiled and walked away.
That very night, sitting at an outdoor café in Perpignan, she wrote to her mother, telling her what had happened. Anna never replied, and when Tania returned to Barcelona months later, her mother refused to shed any light on the situation. That was when solving the mystery became an obsession for Tania.
She began spending time at Flight, trying to wheedle information out of Velichko without asking anything directly, until one day an opportunity presented itself. Her uncle had hung a Robert Capa photo bearing the slogan ¡No pasarán!—They shall not pass!—behind the bar. It was the perfect excuse to bring up the exhibit at Colliure and the photo of that one-eyed militiaman. Vasili saw it coming and, although he was tempted, tried once more to avoid the topic. But Tania wouldn’t give up. And finally, after all those years, old Velichko pulled up a chair and told her.
This was the first time Tania had ever heard of Nazino, and she was horrified. Vasili showed her the original report he had personally compiled and managed to have delivered to Stalin by way of Lenin’s wife and José Diaz. It was like something out of a novel, something dreamed up by a writer’s sick mind, and yet there were names, dates, statements, and documents proving that all of it was true. Tania’s mother and grandmother had lived through that nightmare. And so had Elías Gil. Vasili showed her his testimony, and Tania read it very slowly, taking deep breaths because with each new sentence she felt like she was going to suffocate. She had to stop, take a break, go have a cigarette, and come back. The report was stark and laid everything bare, no beating around the bush.
“So that man killed my grandmother and abandoned my mother in order to survive?”
Velichko didn’t correct her but also made her see that, in a way, he had been the one who kept them alive on Nazino. And for years Elías had made sure Anna had everything she needed, searching all over the USSR to find her.
“He was the only reason we got out of the Soviet Union.”
Tania insisted she wanted to meet the man, but her uncle set her straight. “He’s dead. He died in the summer of 1967.”
So Vasili told her, then, about what had happened at the lake on the night of San Juan. He explained why her mother was a friend of Alcázar, the police officer, and why from that day on the three of them swore they would never again speak of Elías Gil. Her uncle had broken his promise now, he said, only because he owed it to Elías, and because as the oldest of the three he’d be dead soon (although ten years later, he was still running Bar Flight as best he could). Still, he made Tania swear that until the day he died, she would breathe not a word of it. After he was gone, she could do as she liked.
Tania promised, and although she kept her word, she never abandoned her investigation, never stopped trying to find out what she could about that man and his story.
The realities of her everyday existence—constant travel, photo exhibits, and her complicated love life—kept her from getting too close to the past Anna wanted to keep hidden. And Tania didn’t tell her mother that in 1994 she traveled to the miserable island of Nazino, where all that survived as a reminder of what had occurred there was a simple rusted metal cross bearing an enigmatic inscription: AS PROOF OF THE HORROR, FOR THOSE WHO DISBELIEVE.
The town of Nazino was on the opposite shore, and Tania got someone to take her over on a small boat. The beach was swampy, inhabited only by black clouds of insects. There was almost no vegetation. When she asked the ferryman about what had happened there, he simply shrugged. “Things from the past.”
Tania shot two rolls of film on that trip and kept them under lock and key. Though it was hard to keep her promise, she couldn’t betray Uncle Velichko. Until he died
, she would show the photos to no one.
But in October 2001, everything changed. More than ten years had passed since Velichko’s confession. Tania was sitting watching TV when the news came on. They were talking about the murder of a suspected Russian mafia boss. The theory was that it had been payback, carried out by a female deputy inspector whose son had been killed by the crime boss. A gruesome story, too complicated for its thirty-second slot, and Tania would have paid no more attention had it not been for the fact that the next thing to fill her screen was Alcázar, her mother’s friend, the one who had been put in charge of the investigation. This caught her attention and she turned up the volume to hear him explain. The deputy inspector’s name was Laura Gil, daughter of a well-known Communist who became famous in the fifties among those exiled in France and then disappeared under strange circumstances in 1967.
Tania raced downstairs as fast as she could and found her mother behind the counter, watching the same channel on a small TV. Visibly distressed, she lifted her chin and looked up at her daughter.
“I suppose it’s time for us to talk,” she whispered.
Why hadn’t she listened to her mother? Why had she risked approaching Gonzalo, spying on him, following him and finding out everything she could about the man? What was she hoping to accomplish? What was she thinking? Maybe at first she’d simply been trying to come to grips with the demons her mother had been fighting since childhood. That man, Elías, was responsible for Anna having fallen into the hands of Igor Stern. In the end, Anna had told her that Velichko’s story was true, but incomplete. He’d left out the hell that her mother had lived through after Elías exchanged her life for his own. Tania was furious, recalling the sad yet heroic portrait of him she’d formed that day in Colliure, before she knew that the old woman and her son were worshipping a monster. But as the months passed, something changed, not just for Gonzalo but also for her. There was something she was attracted to that had nothing to do with memory or grievances or the past.
A Million Drops Page 37