by Mary Gordon
The largest room, a ward with nearly a hundred beds, iron bedsteads next to one another, as in a dormitory. But here there are no healthy sounds of schoolchildren, here there are cries of pain, groans of despair, cutting through the air in several languages to say, “I’m dying, I know that I am dying.” A room but almost not a room, in any case a room like no other room: behind the beds there are glimpses of diamond-shaped, indigo tiles; the floors are tiled, too, but the patterns are obscured by a hundred feet, by beds, by medical equipment. And always there is something that must urgently be done, so the eye cannot afford the luxury of simple looking. Only sometimes when she is on night duty and the room is silent, except for the moan of someone whose pain has outstripped sleep, does she say to herself: This is a room something like other rooms; here is the ceiling, the walls, the floor. But then a moan transforms itself into a cry and she has to get a nurse, who comes rushing.
—
The stink from gangrene is the worst. And then, the unbearable sights: guts open to the air, sores putrefying with maggots in them. Worst of all is the exhaustion, the bone-crushing exhaustion, exhaustion like a magnifying glass that enlarges and distorts, the constant ache behind the eyes, the lids demanding to be closed and the struggle against them: no, you will not close, you will not close. If she falls asleep doing something essential, the consequences will be enormous. For days she longs for sleep as someone might long for water or food or love, which she has never yet longed for, as she has never been in love, has never been seriously attracted to anyone because she has known almost no possible men. Her brothers’ friends are bullies or brutes, or the nice ones are on their way to drinking themselves to death. Johnny’s friends, whom she occasionally dreamed over, never seemed interested in her in that way, and later she would understand why. And after Johnny’s death, she believed it impossible that her heart would ever open to anyone again.
Besides the physical exhaustion, there’s the exhausting rage at the shortage of supplies, the having to make do against impossible odds: operations done when the power goes out, which it often does, by everyone making a circle with flashlights or, when the batteries run out, with candles. Rewashing bandages until they fall apart, having to ration sniffs of ether so the men have respites only from unbearable pain, and she thinks perhaps that is worse: the shock of reawakening.
And hunger, something she never imagined for herself, a hunger so fierce that food becomes not only an obsession but a terror. She dreams not of sex or of flying but of food: she dreams of the new bread their cook baked in her parents’ kitchen in Newport; she dreams she lifts the white towel from the warm loaves and strokes them, as she would the flesh of a lover or a child.
She fears most of all that she will do something unforgivable for food: suppose she fights a child for a crust of bread, suppose she steals a piece of cheese from a dying man. Oddly, oranges fall everywhere, carelessly, as if what happens to the ground they grow in is of no concern to them. You pick them up from the street; often they are bitter or half rotten, but you salvage what you can, and you are very, very grateful for the fallen fruit.
She has had very little training, a course in first aid. She trains with the young Spanish girls, girls leaving their villages for the first time. One of her skills is her fluency in Spanish; she doesn’t tell anyone it’s because her father moved the family to Argentina for two years, thinking he might invest in beef cattle, bringing back with them to America two servants: a gardener and his wife, who would be their nanny. She loves Pablo and Jacinta; she keeps her Spanish up out of love for them, choosing to study Spanish rather than French in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, so she makes friends with the Spanish-speaking girls, who are considered a bit overexcitable, a bit louche. She will never say: I learned Spanish from my servants. No one needs to know, because it is a new world, everyone is equal now, there are no servants and masters, no rich and poor. Everyone is the same; everyone is equal. The girls’ hands smell wonderfully of oranges, but they apologize for it, for coming back from picking oranges from the trees around their houses, which are still, miraculously, intact. They think it is more honorable to be learning to bind the wounds of fighting men than to be picking oranges, which anyone might do, anyone not devoted to the revolution, to saving the world.
The bombing: another new way of being alive, a new way of being alive that is impossible to make sense of, because time means nothing that is in any way familiar. Everything seems to be happening at once; events pile up on top of one another like the stones from the destroyed buildings. Always your mind is tumbling over itself; you forget what came first, whether you saw the boy with the green eyes screaming for his mother on Tuesday or Wednesday. She wants to write to her family: I have seen what liars the fascists are; they say they never bomb civilian sites, but I can tell you they do because today I saw a line of children waiting for their ration of milk and bread, laughing, pushing and punching each other like other children, and then the bomb fell on them and I saw spilled milk on the pavement, rose colored, mixed with blood, loaves of bread beside an arm, an amputated leg. And always people running, running holding their children, old people trying to run to something, from something. They lie that the city of Guernica was not bombed by them, but set on fire by anarchists, a bold-faced lie, my family; the planes are German, they are Hitler’s planes. But Marian knows what her father would say: anything is better than godless communism. Always the two words yoked together “GODLESSCOMMUNISM”: no separation possible.
She is doing many different things because she is trained for nothing. Mostly she carries stretchers. And was it a Tuesday or a Wednesday that she saw the child with its head on its dead mother’s breast, a girl child, maybe four or five, her skirt up around her head so you couldn’t see her face, but you could see the sex, so vulnerable, but lovely, a little cleft, like a clean, washed-up shell. Marian couldn’t bear that people would be looking, so the first thing she did, before she checked the pulse (though she knew the child was dead), was to pick her up gently as if she were her mother, or as if she were reassuring the mother, and then to pull the child’s skirt down so she is modest in her death, so she will not be looked at in a way that dishonors her further. But what’s the difference? She’s a dead child, a murdered child, what’s the possible meaning of honor? But she will not let the child be shamed in death.
Was it the same night, or another night, that they all went to the café, everyone who worked together? It was full of ordinary people, families with children. Do Spanish children ever sleep? she wonders. When do they sleep in peacetime? One little girl sat in her mother’s lap. In her hair, there was a blue ribbon, elaborately tied, though the child had hardly any hair at all, and the material of the mother’s dress was so thin that the word that came to Marian’s mind was “sleazy”; that is the sound for what the cloth looks like. It could just fall apart or be ripped in a second. The husband said to Marian, “What upsets my wife the most is she can’t get any thread now to mend the baby’s clothes, and the baby is active, she is tearing up all her clothes.” Old couples held hands as if to reassure each other that it’s worth surviving. Courting couples kissed with a desperation that seemed almost like anger. The waiter said to her and Russell, “Americans love ice in their drinks. I have got some ice.” And he produced two grey, corrugated ice cubes and some whiskey.
The door to the café opened, and a man walked in singing in German. He was carrying another man on his shoulders; the man had lost his legs. Everyone toasted them.
She learns that it is better if the bombing is at night because then it can seem unreal, almost theatrical, but in the day, you have to see the faces and the frantic running, from something, to something, you never know what. But to say it is better is the consequence of needing to believe that horrors are relative: that an instant death is better than a prolonged one, that a night raid is better than a daytime raid because at night you cannot see the faces. But a nurse named Jo from Montreal hates the night raids mo
re. I know, she says, that for the rest of my life I’ll hate bright white lights.
—
There are moments of what could be called normal life. Even an entertainment committee, which organizes dances in which the young Spanish girls dance with each other and the pale northerners, unabashed at not knowing the steps, hold each other, bobbing up and down like rowboats on a choppy lake. On some streets, you can see into houses whose roofs have been blown off, whose windows have been shattered. She sees a woman watering a plant; she sees a canary in a blue painted cage. A dressmaker, hungry for customers, rushes out onto the street when she sees American nurses, saying, “Angels of Spain, let me make for you something lovely,” and thrusts on them fashion magazines, a decade old.
Marian and Russell even play bridge with other couples. There are only two couples close to their age; one is an English couple, a nurse and a dentist. Marian is very fond of Lydia Wentworth; without speaking, they recognize they were both privileged girls. Knowing that she will understand, Lydia says to Marian one day, “When I think of how hungry I am all the time, how I’d eat almost anything, I remember when I was in boarding school in France and I refused to eat French cheese; I would go into the woods and vomit it up every time. I asked my mother to tell them I would only eat cheddar. They wrote back to my mother, ‘When she is with you, she is yours. When she is with us, she is ours.’ ”
This is the only time Lydia says anything specific about her past. Her husband, Len Wentworth, is the son of a miner, the first in his family not to have gone down into the pits; he is a man as silent as Marian has ever known. She works hard to resist the temptation to confide in Lydia, to tell her the truth about her marriage, but she is loyal to Russell; if he is not really her husband, he is really her closest friend.
“It’s a good thing there are only two couples allowed in a bridge game, because the Wentworths would never agree to sit at the same table with the Levins,” Russell says one night after the Levins insist they have drinks after the game.
If the Wentworths are a near caricature of British reticence, the Levins enact, daily, suspicions about Jewish volubility, Jewish volatility. Katie Levin has no trouble talking to nearly everyone about Sy’s sexual problems. She says she just asks everyone in case they have advice: Sy is a premature ejaculator. When she approaches Marian, she stops herself and says, “Of course, you were probably a virgin when you married Russell. You probably have no experience at all.” Marian would like to say, “I still have no experience. I am still a virgin.”
Katie is a singer; she has lived in Spain for more than a decade, studying flamenco music. Sy is a neurosurgeon, trained at Johns Hopkins. Katie is given to fits of weeping and then fits of gaiety, to which, despite herself, Marian feels drawn. Gaiety is hard enough to come by; whatever the source, it seems, in its rarity, a valuable commodity. Katie says that her most prized possession, which she has held on to despite everything, is three washcloths. “One for my face, one for my armpits, one for my nether parts. I insist on fastidiousness. What I mean to say is: I insist on not stinking.” And Marian worries, for the first time, baths or showers being a luxury, if, in fact, she stinks.
Marian and Russell worry about Sy’s dramatic changes of mood. He is a brilliant surgeon, but occasionally Russell covers for him, on those days when he says he is unfit to operate and would not trust himself with a scalpel. Like his wife, he is not reluctant to speak about his past, about the circumstances of his conception. His parents were Russian and in one of the endless pogroms his mother was raped by a Cossack and infected with syphilis. A rumor was circulating at the time that pregnancy could cure syphilis; dutifully, his father impregnated his mother and Sy was born. Of course, the pregnancy and the birth were no cure, and Sy grew up beside an invalid mother who died when he was ten, and a father whose depressions ended in his years in a mental hospital.
Marian finds Sy endlessly interesting. He speaks seven languages; he knows music and physics and ancient history; he gets bored with conversations that don’t veer from the political. He makes Russell laugh; one night he sings a song in a mock Yiddish accent: “Oh the cloak makers’ union is a no-good union…The right-wing cloak makers and the socialist fakers are making by the workers double crosses.” Another one, all in Yiddish, called “Shiker Is a Goy,” is about a drunken Christian who pisses in the window of a Jew’s house. Marian sees Sy’s vulnerability, as she saw Johnny’s, and she is frightened for him; she wishes that Katie were more dependable, less prone to name-dropping—her father is a theatrical agent in New York.
Marian and Russell assumed that Katie and Sy are married, but one day they ask if Marian and Russell would accompany them to the American embassy in Madrid so they can be legally married. “There’s a good chance I’ll die here, and I need her to be married so she can collect my life insurance,” Sy says.
They don’t enjoy their time in Madrid; shells fall everywhere, sirens pierce the air the whole time they are there.
But their return to Valencia worries Marian and Russell for the Levins in a new way. The most die-hard party members castigate them for insisting on a bourgeois marriage. Sy is warned that his irregularities have been observed.
“Sy is almost determined to ruin himself,” Russell says when Sy makes a remark after Marty—the French commander of the International Brigades, known to be an intimate of Stalin’s—insists that all the women wear regulation nurse’s uniforms, instead of the comfortable overalls they have adopted. “I thought this was a war, not a fashion show,” Sy says.
Russell takes his arm and says, “Let’s get out of here, pal,” and the two couples take themselves to a café, where Sy can rail in what they hope is relative safety, and Katie fixes her makeup using a small gold compact she always seems to have with her.
—
Despite the horrors, sometimes there are moments when the beauty of the world, the miracle of drawing breath, can pierce her, and some rind is pulled back, some skin exposed, vulnerable, like the skin after a burn. And she feels her eyes filling with tears simply because she is alive, with tears for the Spaniards she works with, full of ideals, giving everything, and the others from all over the world, giving up their lives for what they know to be the truth.
She and Russell go to the railroad station, which has, miraculously, not been bombed.
It presents, despite everything, the possibility of holiday pleasure: the murals made up of small mosaic tiles. Flowers, fruits, women carrying baskets on their heads. The windows are Moorish in shape; the panes are midnight blue, separated by stark white mullions. Columns support the ceiling: lime and peach with gold borders. The roof is glass—a crystal palace—and the light it lets in always seems joyous.
“You see, Russell,” she says, “this is why we’re here, because there is something good in human beings, something that wants ornament, that wants blue glass and pink and green tiles that turn into flowers, all that work, just to say life is good.”
“There was money for it then,” he says. “Maybe it should have been going into the mouths of the workers.”
It’s the only time she gets angry at him. “Why do you have to smash the hopeful things? Why do you have to spoil the moments that let us make sense of being alive?”
“It’s who I am. There are things I refuse to forget.”
She knows what he means: so often she makes herself forget what happened to her brother, and she knows that underneath the forgetting there is a remembrance that is her life.
And so she walks the streets of Valencia without Russell, because she can’t stand to hear what he says about the buildings: she loves them; she’s lost too much; their lives, their work are too difficult; she won’t allow these moments to be stolen from her. Even by the person she loves most in the world, the only living person she can say with any truth she loves at all.
It is her first time walking alone in a city. Even in New York, she always seemed to be accompanied. She didn’t love Park Avenue, with its looming luxury. (O
urs is the penthouse. We have a rooftop garden—our own park. But then, the whole avenue is really a garden, isn’t it?) Her love for downtown was a public love: faces, gaits, smells so various, demanding to be shared. And in the cities she traveled to with her parents, she was overdressed, overwatched, overlectured: everything was pointed out, nothing left to her own eye to choose. Look at this—no, not that, this. Here she can mourn and shudder at the horrors she has just come from seeing. The orange trees, the posters proclaiming the triumph of the workers; these are hers, no one need tell her how to understand them. She loves even what would seem unworthy to be loved: the whores with their overly made-up faces, offering caresses in the name of the revolution; the children, much too young for it, selling sugar water that would quench no thirst. Because she has worked here as she has worked nowhere else, she has a right, she believes, to inhabit this city as she had no right to inhabit anything that might suggest the Taylor wealth, the Taylor privilege. In this horror-stricken city, she has, for the first time, placed herself at home on earth.
She understands why Russell dislikes the modernista architecture. If what pleases you are the spare lines of the new buildings of New York, the lacy facades of Valencia would seem at best frippery, at worst trash. Perhaps none of the comrades would approve if she said she enjoyed the half-mad rococo facade of the Ceramics Museum: gods lounging in extravagant indolence, bruisers curled in on themselves like sleeping babies, draped in girlish leaves and lace. They would point to the striking beauty of the skyscraper, the rightness of Bauhaus. But why, she wants to ask them, why do you have to choose? Can’t you be thrilled by the Empire State Building and also love the Ceramics Museum? She wants to tell them that they remind her of her father and his implacable insistence on orthodoxy of taste. She wants to tell them: Don’t you see it is the cause of sorrow? Saying, If this, then not that. Why, she wants to ask, can’t you have some of both? But she knows that, when life and death are at stake, you can’t afford that kind of soft middle. Of course, she knows that the decorative richness of the ornamented buildings is based on slave labor. She supposes that knowledge should render them to her unlovable. But it does not, and there is no one with whom she can share her troubled loves.