A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “We’ll take care of it later,” he’d said to Gonzalo when he walked into the ICU, after embracing Lola, holding her tighter than Gonzalo had ever seen him do. He didn’t want to see Javier, though; he was too shaken. Immediately he began pulling strings, running the game as only he knew how. But this would be the toughest round he’d ever played, the one that required all of his influence, forced him to make threats and beg and persuade and use up all the credit he’d accumulated over the course of forty years in the business.

  Gonzalo and his father-in-law detested each other and nothing would ever mend that rift. But right then Gonzalo was grateful to him; it was all in his hands.

  Her father’s presence and the knowledge that he was taking care of things calmed Lola to a degree, allowing her to focus on her own guilt, which slowly consumed her.

  “I didn’t even know you smoked.”

  Lola twisted her lips, folds of loose flesh forming wrinkles at the corner of her mouth. “I quit before I met you. Filthy habit, I thought I’d beaten it.”

  He was no longer surprised by anything Lola did; she had so many faces. Their lives together had been like a masquerade. At this point, she could have shown him any facet of herself and he’d have accepted it with a shrug.

  Her silence and the way she was gazing at the lipstick-stained cigarette filter—so out of character with the woman he thought he knew—were devastating.

  “How could you have kept silent about something like that all these years?” she asked him. “You should have told me you’d seen me that day. We’d either have split up or gotten over it, and we wouldn’t have wasted all these years, living without really living.”

  “What about you, Lola? How could you do it?” Maybe he was hoping to hear some kind of confession, glimpse even a smidgen of remorse, or see some impossible contradiction that he would have known how to deal with. But she fell silent and he stopped waiting for her to speak. Back then, he told himself, he’d loved her too much to concede the possibility of splitting up over pride or jealousy or cheating or loyalty. He told himself none of that mattered to him more than she herself did. The truth was, he’d taken on Agustín and he’d won, wresting away the man’s own daughter, walking into a Falangist house and flying the Gil family’s red flag, a supreme victory that he could not and would not give up. Wasn’t that the real reason he pretended not to see what he’d seen? Arrogance, more than love. And when Javier was born and Gonzalo knew deep down that the boy wasn’t his, the vague and ill-defined seeds of vengeance were planted in his heart. A desire to use silence as payback for Lola’s sin, one that his son had paid the consequences for. It was despicable, he was despicable. But there was no sense salting the wound now.

  “I suppose it would do no good to tell you that it was a mistake, that I’m sorry—you have no idea how sorry. It’s over between us, isn’t it?” Lola asked.

  “Things are usually over well before the epilogue. It was between you and me a long time ago, but we both refused to see it. Your father will be happy; this is what he’s wanted from the start.”

  “This isn’t the end of the story, Gonzalo.”

  He’d betrayed Siaka and Laura; he’d betrayed himself. He’d hit rock bottom. Perhaps Javier would recover, maybe the whole Matryoshka mess would miraculously turn out okay, there was even a chance Atxaga was out of their lives forever. But nothing could change the things that had already happened. What was broken could never be repaired—ever. A shattered vase is never whole again, even if it’s carefully glued and you can’t see the cracks.

  Gonzalo thought of Tania. Could she be his anchor? No. He knew that, even before knowing it, even while they were still in bed.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go back to being the son of Elías Gil. What else can I do?”

  Lola crushed out her cigarette, blew smoke out one side of her mouth, and swore to herself she was going to quit before getting hooked again. She looked at Gonzalo and felt an incredible surge of tenderness for him. It wasn’t love, though, not anymore.

  “You could try being yourself. That would be good.”

  Tania showed no signs of feeling trapped when Gonzalo asked how she knew Alcázar and what her mother had been talking about when she ambushed him on his way out of the bookstore.

  They’d made love on the sofa in her studio, but she could tell right away that Gonzalo wasn’t really there, despite the effort he made to prove that he was. In fact, it was precisely the effort that gave him away.

  She told him the truth. And she did so with detachment, in an attempt to keep the events, facts, and dates as far as possible from the sofa where they lay naked, to put a concrete border between now and the past. She told him about the first time she’d seen him, with his mother at the exhibit about the Argelès internment camp, when they were much younger; about the way the image of Elías Gil always loomed in her mother’s silences and how she’d become obsessed with him; about seeing the news of Laura’s death on TV and that it had been like a fuse, reigniting her interest in that one-eyed man she’d forgotten about for years. She told Gonzalo how she’d found him and begun to follow him, study him, try to understand him, wondering if he too was obsessed with the past that everyone else seemed so determined to bury. It was no coincidence that she was in the parking garage the day Atxaga attacked him, nor was it a coincidence that she’d been out on the balcony with a book of Mayakovsky poems the first time they spoke.

  “I knew your story, I knew everything about you, but I felt the need to get closer, to smell you, to hear you. At first it was like a game, a jigsaw puzzle I had to finish, like the photos I take: They have to be perfect down to the last detail before I’m satisfied. You were the focal point in the image that was starting to develop. But I got too close, I slipped into your world without asking permission…And now here you are, with me, naked, on my sofa. And we’re talking about this after making love and I know you’re thinking I’m full of it. I didn’t want this to happen, Gonzalo. But it is what it is.”

  Gonzalo was completely disconcerted. He couldn’t take in the torrent of words streaming out of Tania’s mouth, couldn’t comprehend the detailed analysis she was giving him as she sat there, cross-legged, pubic hair on display, breasts inches from his face. It was too incongruous.

  “Why didn’t you tell me from the start? You could have just asked me. You didn’t have to invent all this stuff.”

  “This is not an invention,” Tania replied, pointing to their clothes strewn across the floor. “I am not an invention. But it shouldn’t have happened. You don’t understand, but my mother is right: You and me getting involved is no good for either of us. I was trying to get closer without your noticing, without putting you in danger, but I went too far.”

  “What kind of danger?”

  Tania’s head dropped between her shoulders. The wings of her tattoo looked different in the lamplight. They fluttered. She went to find the box of clippings that her mother kept about Elías to show Gonzalo. As he was searching for his glasses, she pulled a sheet up over herself.

  “The first time my mother saw your father was in 1941, in Moscow, during the Nazi invasion. She was eleven and your father was almost thirty. Well, that wasn’t actually the first time she saw him but it was the first time she has a concrete memory of it. Your father escaped from the military castle in the south of France where he was jailed after the war. He crossed all of Europe to join a platoon of Spanish soldiers, as political commissar.”

  Gonzalo slowly turned the pages of the album in which Anna had carefully noted all the dates and places the photos were taken: Colliure, 1939 (he recalled having seen that Robert Capa photo at the exhibit near Argelès, with his mother); Warsaw, 1940; Moscow, 1941; Leningrad and Stalingrad, 1942, 1943, 1945…And then suddenly he saw one that predated all the rest. It was from a local Russian paper, some sort of political newsletter from February 1933. Gonzalo’s
basic Russian was enough for him to read the caption beneath the photo of his smiling father, fist raised, with three other young men all posing before the Kremlin with identical enthusiasm.

  The future talent of all of Europe, helping to build the Soviet dream.

  “The redhead on the right, between your father and the short bowlegged guy, is my father, Martin. He was British. I never met him. He was almost sixty when I was born. My mother got pregnant the one and only time they were together. Then he disappeared without a word. Martin and your father are the only ones who survived Nazino…well, them and my mother.”

  Tania told Gonzalo to keep going, to the end of the album.

  She pointed to a photo. “That’s my grandmother, Irina. The girl in her arms is my mother.”

  It was the same image as the miniaturized one Gonzalo had in his pocket. Finally, he could reconstruct the cut-off portion of the mysterious woman in the photo, see who the worn name engraved on the back of the locket belonged to. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt, with a proud air that seemed to come not from wealth or ancestry but from some inner quality, a natural force emanating from within. Her eyes (so like Tania’s!) and straight nose with a delicate bridge softened her beauty. Dark fleshy lips slightly parted in a tentative half smile that showed just a bit of her teeth. Firm, assured hands with long fingers and blunt nails held, between the folds of her dark skirt, a very young girl with the same defiant stance, strong and self-confident. Though it couldn’t compare, the image of that little girl—like a miniature czarina—reminded him of Patricia. An inquisitive look, an uncanny wisdom. He imagined her as a curious, prying, dogmatic child.

  “They met on the island of Nazino, in the winter of 1933. I think your father and my grandmother fell in love, but my mother isn’t sure. Terrible things happened there, Gonzalo. Things that have nothing to do with you or me.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I already told you, it’s not a good idea for us to stir all this up. It’s dangerous for both of us.”

  “A little late for that.”

  Tania took the album from him and flipped back to the pages covering the time from the war against the Nazis. At one of them, she stopped.

  “See that colonel in the NKVD uniform standing with your father? That’s Beria, he became Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the secret police. For years he was your father’s direct boss. Now look at this other man, the one behind them dressed like a 1940s American industrialist.”

  “Who is he?”

  Tania closed the album and inhaled deeply.

  “He is the reason Laura’s dead, the source of all your pain, and your family’s and mine. For years I was forced to call him ‘Grandfather.’ Isn’t that funny? I never met my real grandfather, but if things had turned out differently on Nazino, it might have been your father. But this is the man who played the role. His name is Igor Stern.”

  23

  CLOSE TO THE POLISH BORDER, 1941

  Elías turned to the first page and read: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What did that mean? At the time, nothing more than words. He closed the book and stroked the green cover: Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, stamped in gold letters on the spine. He slid the novel back onto the shelf, between The Idiot and The Mother. Maybe these books were just part of the décor, like the enormous cubist mural on one wall. If you looked at it from a distance, there appeared to be a medieval warrior on a white battle stallion—the pride of the Polish cavalry, saber drawn; but from up close all you could see were large geometric shapes and splotches of bright paint.

  In order to stop the German tanks in 1939, those valiant lancers had charged to their deaths. It must have been a horrific, spine-chilling sight to behold—thousands of steeds snorting, hooves thundering down the battlefield, the horsemen’s battle cries ringing out as they charged the thunderous machinery. It was as poignant and dramatic as it was useless. A senseless massacre, thousands of men and animals, their blood spilled, corpses littering the battlefield, and after the onslaught, the Germans had not a scratch. But that wasn’t what the painting was about.

  On a woven chair lay several official military school bulletins and an issue of Pravda. Foreign Ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov exchanged a friendly handshake, but relations between the Germans and the Soviets were no longer as friendly as they had been the previous summer. For the first time, the Soviet press was criticizing German troop mobilization—specifically on the Eastern Front, the invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece. The Treaty of Friendship still prevailed: If Stalin did it, then the Bolshevik Party did it, so it’s all right. It was certainly surreptitious. While the rest of Europe looked on in shock as France fell in just five weeks, the Soviet Union was annexing the territories in its sphere of influence as per the treaty. But when Elías crossed the Polish border, the air was one of imminent war.

  On June 22, 1940, France had signed the armistice. Elías found out about it on a freight train, hidden among piles of cardboard as he was crossing the Low Countries, which had put up no resistance to occupation by the German troops. A Dutchman had shown him a paper with the news story. The Maginot Line—France’s impressive defensive fortifications—had proved useless. The Germans simply skirted it, invading through the Ardennes and then cutting north toward the channel, where they’d forced the English and French into a humiliating retreat at Dunkirk. France was lost. Hitler, so fond of dramatic gestures, forced the French to sign the armistice in a rail carriage in Compiègne, the exact place the Germans had signed the armistice in 1918 after losing the Great War. He then ordered the carriage to be blown up.

  Occupied France comprised the north and west of the country. Esperanza was still in so-called Free France whose capital was Vichy, in the south, but this did little to calm Elías’s fears. Marshal Pétain, the new head of state, was subordinate to the occupation forces, and the French gendarmerie were collaborating openly with the Gestapo. There were rumors of deportations, executions, and mass detentions. And Elías still had no word of his wife. His orders were categorical: He was to report to Moscow without delay—alone. He’d hardly even had time to send her a message via Pierre, in defiance of the order not to disclose to anyone his escape from Colliure. He trusted that she had received it.

  Without delay was both an ill-defined and euphemistic measure of time. Although after the fall of France, they’d theoretically entered the drôle de guerre, a so-called Phony War, the truth was that troop movements and conflicts were continuous, from the Arctic to Africa, west to east: the Nazi army and air force were spreading like a stain. Elías had been forced to employ endless forms of transportation and changes in both documentation and itinerary, as well as confront unforeseen circumstances and danger in order to reach the Polish border. It had taken him six long months to get to the grandiose building housing provincial headquarters of the NKVD, the new secret police. He’d reported immediately, but was sent to the living quarters occupied by Red Army officers, where he was made to wait three more months with absolutely no explanation. Finally, on a cold January morning in 1941, a driver from the Ministry of the Interior turned up with the order to escort him to NKVD offices.

  He’d been waiting in an elegant room for an hour and a half. By the window was a large Italian ceramic vase with floral motif, a portrait of Stalin hanging above it. Why had he been summoned to a place like this? It didn’t bode well.

  Finally, the officer on duty appeared. He was a commander in the artillery, the Soviet army’s preferred wing, and he observed Elías with undisguised mistrust. After looking left and right, finally he seemed satisfied. The man was tall and skinny as an unsteady tree; his arms and fingers waving like branches hatched with tiny blue veins.

  Two minutes later a tiny man arrived, dressed in civilian clothing: an elegant, tailored Western-style dark suit. He was balding, with short curly hair only at the crown of his round head; his blue e
yes looked kindly and he gazed over the top of his round glasses. The man watched Elías for a few seconds, giving him a friendly, protective look far different from that of the artillery officer. Despite not knowing who he was, Elías had no doubt that he held significant power; it was enough to see the stiffness with which the officer saluted him before exiting the room.

  “All in order, Comrade Commissar.”

  This little man, although he resembled an innocuous midlevel manager, was Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, commissar general of State Security, better known as commander of the NKVD—the new incarnation of the OGPU. A Georgian, like his idol Stalin, they called him “the peacemaker of Tbilisi” because that was where he rose to fame, purging and murdering those elements hostile to Stalin’s ideas. Under his command were the military, state security, customs and border control, prison administration, and forced-labor camps. Additionally, in this current prewar climate, he had an army corps of ground, air, and artillery units. Not only that, but he presided over—and this was the reason Elías was there—all of the espionage and secret police agencies. With the exception of Stalin himself, he was, de facto, the most powerful man in the USSR. And none of this seemed to weigh on him or affect his calm demeanor.

  He asked Elías to sit and inquired, in faultless French, about his trip. Beria spoke perfect German as well as English, too. Unfortunately, he apologized, his Spanish left much to be desired. He asked after Elías’s wife, and knew not only her real name but everything about her, details that not even Elías himself knew. Additionally, he promised to ensure her safety and assured Elías that they would be reunited at the earliest opportunity. Elías understood that he was being lied to. It would be a long time, perhaps years, before he saw her again.