Guernica

by Dave Boling

  Neither mentioned Catalina. There was a threshold.

  They talked through the evening and most of the night, then slept in the cradle of each other’s arms beneath the quilt Mariangeles had sewn for Alaia. Neither spoke as Miguel readied to leave in the morning, both sifting through the meaning of what they’d done.

  “Miguel,” she said. “Before . . . I should tell you why—”

  “No,” he stopped her.

  “I—”

  “No.” More forcefully the second time.

  Another moment passed without words. Alaia pulled open a drawer in the small cabinet at her bedside.

  “Miguel, come here, please,” she said. “I have something to show you.”

  Alaia placed in his hands a doll made from an old worn sock. She had one more story to tell him.

  PART 6

  (1940)

  CHAPTER 24

  Eduardo Navarro possessed neither the language skills nor the heartlessness to translate the Latin message etched onto the church’s clock tower. The Polish refugee, referred to only as “Monsieur,” had pointed out the phrase to his wife, who was spoken of only as “Madame.” The man was well into his sixties and paunchy, with the bearing of a person from whom much had been taken. What remained of him was a sloping midsection and a proud insistence on protecting his wife, who also had been reduced by their trials.

  Monsieur had shed the haughty residue that sometimes lingers in wealthy men after the money and its power are exhausted. But he continued to make a show of assisting his struggling wife as he limped along himself, clutching this token of masculine dignity as if it were the final family heirloom. And when Dodo or Renée offered instructions, Monsieur repeated the signals to his wife, to signify his approval of the plan.

  The walk from Saint-Jean-de-Luz to Ciboure and then Urrugne, through a passage trellised by plane trees, was the simplest part of the journey. But the couple, already badly faded, needed a rest across from Urrugne’s ancient Church of Saint Vincent. After long drinks of water from the bota and many wheezed inhalations, Monsieur gestured toward the inscription below the clock on the tower.

  Vulnerant omnes

  Ultima necat

  It spoke an unpleasant truth bluntly expressed: Every hour wounds, the last kills. Dodo saw no need to act out the translation.

  Left to their own judgment, neither Dodo nor Renée Labourd would have found worthy risk in smuggling this Jewish couple into nominally neutral Spain, where they could be shuttled further along toward England or America.

  Since the Nazi occupation of France, the heavy patrolling of the border with Spain had all but choked off the easier routes of passage. When the smuggling of refugees was merely a matter of sneaking past the indifferent Spanish or French border guards, reasonably safe options had been plentiful. They could time their movements between shift changes at a bridge passing from Béhobie into Irun, or they could load the refugees onto a boat piloted by Dodo’s father and take the short ride from Hendaye or Saint-Jean-de-Luz into any port in Spain.

  But the Nazis viewed the evasion of subversives as a specific insult and operated random patrols at the river, installed unblinking guards at checkpoints, and planted a network of informers in each border town. Now boats at all harbors faced extensive searches, and those in open waters were stopped and inspected with greater enthusiasm.

  Captured refugees were shipped to concentration camps, often accompanied by those locals who had provided their passage and protection. If resistance was met? Well, bullets were plentiful, and sometimes paperwork was less demanding when subjects were shot in the process of “escape.”

  When word reached Renée of the Jewish couple’s impending arrival, she and Dodo were doubtful. This would be the frailest cargo they’d ever handled. But the refugees had migrated through France on a series of local trains, spending as little time as possible exposed on the platform, trying to tiptoe along the narrow path between effective stealth and conspicuous skulking. They had shown papers half a dozen times, and their altered documents passed casual inspection. They traveled as a pair with a shepherd who stayed at a safe distance, ready to step in as a concerned third party if the couple was detained.

  For Renée and Dodo, smuggling humans was much easier than smuggling other commodities. Foodstuffs, alcohol, weapons, and munitions were heavy and obvious. Humans transported themselves to some extent. But they also could talk when it was most dangerous, they could fall and break bones, and they could drown. If a pallet of rifles was dropped in the river, no life was lost. Refugees? A different matter.

  “What must they have been through already to get this far?” Renée asked Dodo.

  “Lost everything . . . they surely have lost everything, family, home . . . everything,” Dodo said as the two inflamed their strongest bond: mutual indignation.

  “I’m not sure they can make it, and where does that leave us?”

  “I’m mostly sure they cannot make it,” Dodo said, adding a playful smirk. “Let’s try.”

  When the couple struggled to descend from the train at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz/Ciboure station, Renée released a fatalistic groan in Dodo’s direction. And now, only hours into a plodding escape, the couple appeared unable to go on. After a year of living off scraps while hiding in basements and attics, and then being trundled on and off trains and through a succession of safe houses, they neared collapse.

  It was already late evening and their best chance was to get to Béhobie and the edge of the Bidassoa River in the darkest part of the night. The hope was that they could row them across in a friend’s boat during a gap between patrols. If not, they’d have to swim and/or wade into Spain, and these two were of questionable buoyancy. The trip across the slippery river rocks was tricky for Dodo and Renée; for a pair in their sixties, drained of strength, it would border on impossible.

  The couple needed a few more minutes’ rest in Urrugne, so Dodo and Renée used the time for final reminders. They had dressed Monsieur in a sheepskin coat with a beret and espadrilles. He looked authentic but ridiculous. She was in a long black skirt and wool cap. Uncomfortable and unnatural. They had already instructed the couple to never speak. Dodo and Renée would be their grandchildren taking them for a walk through the woods, a nonsensical notion at two or three A.M. But if detained, the old couple was not to speak. If questioned, they were instructed to cup an ear and say one word: “Eh?”

  As a refresher, Renée stood in front of Monsieur and officiously acted the part of a guard, holding an invisible rifle at his chest.

  “Papiers!” she said.

  “Eh?” Monsieur responded, not only bending his ear toward Renée but also squinting hard, as if the failure to see accompanied his deafness.

  Renée repeated the process with Madame, who was slow to understand and issued a resentful flurry of Polish comments. Renée pulled the trigger on her pretend rifle and, with a percussive lip movement, went “bop.”

  Madame understood this and corrected herself. “Eh?”

  “Très bien,” Renée mumbled, and turned. It was time to press on. The sun eased into the Bay of Biscay and they had another five or six miles of surreptitious walking to reach the preferred point to ford the river. It took five hours rather than the anticipated two. Several cars passed on the road below them, perhaps carrying Nazis, although the darkness made identification impossible.

  Dodo and Renée had used this route without detection a number of times before the Nazi occupation. The river was slower this close to the mouth but wider, with less chance of concealment. Across the Bidassoa were a series of safe houses where Basque connections would feed the couple before shuffling them down the line.

  They reached a patch of alder near the riverbank at almost dawn, with the option of rowing now eliminated. Nazis had begun using a small fleet of shallow-draft skiffs, and they had helped the Spanish guards install floodlights that could be directed at the most appealing spots for river crossing.

  “Pas bon,” Renée whispered. />
  Their hopes for good fortune on this mission, slim as they were initially, had further receded. The best option was to head back, bivouac in the closest safe house, and reconsider other paths. Perhaps they could try it again the next night, get a better start on it and hike further upstream.

  Renée pantomimed a retreat to the couple.

  Monsieur shook his head violently. Madame did not understand the forces at play, but her husband’s anger registered and she unleashed a series of inhaled sobs. He lifted his wife to her feet and pulled her from the brush toward the rocky shore.

  Dodo stepped in more forcefully as lights scanned the river, spreading ribbons of silver crepe across the rippled water. “You’ve got to stop,” Dodo barked with as much authority as he could without screaming above the river sounds.

  “Arrête!” Dodo yelled, assuming the Polish man would be more likely to understand French than Spanish or Basque.

  Monsieur turned and indignantly wrestled his arm from Dodo’s grasp, wading into the water with Madame in tow. Dodo came at him again, and in his haste, he tumbled on the slippery river rocks.

  “Arrête!” he yelled from his back.

  Monsieur, now knee-deep and slogging forward with his wife clutching his jacket, turned toward Dodo and cupped his hand to his ear, miming deafness. “Eh?”

  Within two more steps, the woman had wrapped both arms around her husband’s neck, causing them both to lose balance and slip into the water. The river was shallow enough that they could have easily stood, but they bobbed together on the surface, appearing almost relaxed as they floated off. Dodo raced after them along the shore. When they crossed a slice of illuminated water, he saw that they were not even trying to swim, just holding on to each other. They were found next to each other on the shore near Hon-darribia the next day. They died in Spain.

  As friends failed to return from missions and the fire from antiaircraft guns and Messerschmitts stitched vents in his Blenheim, Charley Swan no longer saw a disconnect between his flying and the results of his bombing. He understood the processes of war by the time he landed after his first mission. This was no longer about the physics of flying objects. Charley was at war, and he strongly believed in the British cause. The blitz on London had spared his family, and his wife was unscathed in the Cambridge region. But through the letters from his family and from Annie, he could feel what it must have been like to sweat out two months of consecutive nights of ruinous German bombing.

  Annie never complained in her letters. She tried to include updates on the family and highlights from her daily life.

  . . . Speaking of Blennie, you’re not going to believe it, but after more than a year of my saying “pretty bird” to him, he has started speaking.

  Does he say “pretty bird”? No, he says, “Docka, docka,” just like Edgar. Can you believe that? I won’t take him to the children’s home because I’m afraid he’ll meet the same fate Edgar did. Of course, if he escaped, Blennie might fl y away and find Edgar somewhere where they could sit around and say “docka” to each other. Silly bird.

  Silly bird, indeed, Charley thought. At times, he would carry Annie’s letters with him on missions to read again while waiting to taxi or during the quiet moments of the Channel crossing, but the Blenheim was so cramped he began giving himself the lone luxury of carrying the one “family” photo of himself and Annie, with Blennie in his cage on her lap. There was not much time to focus on anything other than business once he strapped in, anyway. He was responsible for two others on the craft, not to mention the potential devastation of a misplaced bomb load or what might happen if he was a tick slow in sensing the threat of fighters.

  The Blens already were being phased out. They were slow and cumbersome, and susceptible to enemy fighters because they had no hope of outrunning them. The yoke blocked his view of some of the instruments, and other instruments on the panel were stacked so high in front of him it was impossible to see the runway as he neared the point of touchdown. But they had good range, and that allowed Charley to fly deep into the continent.

  His crew praised him (cautiously, out of superstition) for his capacity to anticipate the attacks of German fighters. They had little hope of evading their dives, but he seemed to have a knack for dipping or banking slightly to reduce the bomber’s profile to enemy pilots. It kept them from absorbing the worst of the attack.

  No mission was without damage, and the times were few when Charley landed without a “dent or two,” as he put it, in the wing or tail or fuselage. But as other ships fell from the sky or returned in pieces, Charley Swan’s ship was always relatively easy to patch up and make ready for the next mission. His crew called it a gift. Charley didn’t call it anything.

  It was Renée’s idea that Dodo should coax his brother into the mountains. Dodo’s invitation forced Miguel to confront his need to get away from Guernica. He worried that leaving Errotabarri was abandoning Justo. Together, they were a collection of broken parts that, in most cases, was functional. Miguel had assumed that two damaged hands helped replace one lost arm in the piecemeal assemblage.

  Miguel told Justo of his intention to turn down Dodo’s invitation, as if it were a courtesy, an unspoken payment of a debt.

  “Don’t be stupid, go help your brother. I’m fine here.”

  To prove his claim, Justo dropped to his knees, leaned forward on his right hand, and did ten press-ups.

  “Come, sit on my shoulders and add more weight,” Justo demanded.

  Miguel declined. Justo was right. There were now a few sheep and a small patch of vegetables to tend; even a man with one arm had little trouble managing these chores. He was rarely there anyway.

  But what were his responsibilities to Alaia Aldecoa? What did their night together change? She could count on Zubiri to help, he presumed. Justo could look in on her, too. If Justo knew of her activities he had never commented and had shown no bad feelings toward her. She was part of the family, Justo always said.

  But if forced to assess his reasons for making the move, the distancing from Alaia would be the first. After that night, Miguel had been careful about his visits, keeping them brief and impersonal. The one evening had surprised them both and seemed somehow excusable. A second would have been more than happenstance.

  Renée made him comfortable in Saint-Jean-de-Luz from the first moment. While trying to brag about his brother’s skillful adaptation to the ways of the travailleurs de la nuit, Renée inadvertently diverted Miguel’s concentration by serving him foods with scents and flavors that caused him to focus intently on his plate. He listened, to a degree, while he inhaled a plate of red peppers stuffed with cod. He grew less attentive when the fillet of salmon with white asparagus arrived, and he almost completely tuned out when Renée presented the gâteau Basque for which her family had gained some regional renown.

  “Good,” Miguel said when he finished. The residents of Guernica were living on old sardines, chickpeas, and bread fashioned of sawdust. This was food he’d never had even in the best times. As he suctioned up the plate of piquillo peppers, Renée explained that there were hardships in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and in France, too, but those in their business developed sources to supply almost anything.

  They didn’t have to go far for anything, either, as many of their business meetings took place downstairs at the Pub du Corsaire. Once Dodo had sanctioned the bar and discovered that it was Renée’s primary haunt, he found a cheap room on the top floor of the building. His rent was offset by various procurements he arranged for the bar’s owner. Yes, after a few mishaps in the mountains, he had learned the ways of trafficking goods from Renée and her family. And then he started inventing methods of his own.

  “Dodo was made for this job,” Renée told the distracted Miguel.

  “That’s not what your father said,” Dodo objected. “He claimed I was too big and not ordinary enough.”

  The best smugglers, Santi Labourd told Dodo, were so non-descript as to be nearly invisible. They were unnotice
d background, insignificant scenery. They needed to be strong enough to carry loads and tireless enough to walk the mountains all night, but small enough to remain nimble and fit through passages in brush and boulders that might challenge a hare.

  “Maybe you weren’t the perfect physical design, but mentally? You have it; even Father says so,” Renée said with pride, placing another basket of bread on the table, as Miguel had eaten most of the first loaf and was still intent on sopping up the abundant sauces.

  “At the start, his experience and connections on the water were most important to us,” Renée continued. “For a while, we traded services and surplus goods for grain and whatever food we could collect, and then we got it to your father, who shipped it to Biscaya. We then moved on to weapons and munitions.”

  Miguel looked up from his plate at Dodo. He had no idea the patroia was so involved.

  “Discreet, eh?” Dodo said.

  “There was a small mention, but I didn’t know how far it had gone.”

  “Not so much anymore,” Renée said, putting her plate, still colored with sauces, on the floor for Déjeuner to lick clean. “He’d still be working with us if he had his way, but it has gotten too dangerous to use the boats much now. Still, when the cargo is merely information, he’s extremely valuable.”

  “Information?” Miguel asked, distracted by the sight of a dog licking up the remnants of the dinner.

  “Deployments, the movement of men, defenses, that sort of thing,” Dodo said. “Patrols can inspect boats as much as they wish, but if the important cargo is in the head of the patroia, it can’t be detected or confiscated.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then maybe he sails to Bilbao to off-load the catch . . .”

  “And?”

  Dodo knew the next link in the network would jolt Miguel. “Then the most natural thing in the world might be for the patroia to visit his new favorite priest, Father Xabier, and then it might be equally natural for the good father to hear the confession of men who are, let’s say, of British heritage, perhaps working at the consulate, who might be able to pass along portions of his divine message.”