by Alan Furst
When the drinking slowed, the eating began. Ukrainian pork soup full of chopped red cabbage and garlic, cold peas with vinegar and salt, chicken stewed in cream. These he tasted, then filled up on hunks of black bread with sweet butter, first inhaling deeply of the bread—a time-honored curative for vodka drinking. The smells of the food made him enormously hungry, but the vodka mustn't, he knew, be tampered with. Let it sit down there and fume, don't make it angry by sending down a lot of chicken stewed in cream—it might not like that. The men in the room with him—there must have been forty—ate prodigiously. Physically, they were all sorts, though Sascha stood out among them in form and finery. There were dark-skinned Georgians with mustaches and oiled curly hair who, like Stalin, spoke a barbaric, halting Russian, a language they'd had to learn in school. Some were pale and beefy, like Mitya, though some grew paler, and some redder, as the evening wore on. It was this group who stood to accept the honor of the toast to Kiev, this group who smacked their lips the loudest over the Ukrainian soup. Sascha, it turned out from the toasts, was from Leningrad—St. Petersburg. The intellectual city, compared to political Moscow. Kirov had been from Leningrad. During the dinner, people wandered about talking to each other, and Khristo recalled odd fragments of conversation. There was an almond-eyed man with a shaven head and olive skin who did something with sugar beets in Kazakhstan. But most were chekists, intelligence officers, and when they talked to each other they spoke in private code—nicknames, obliquities. They laughed and whacked each other on the shoulders. And, finally, there was Yagoda himself.
He took Khristo by the elbow as they went into the sauna after dinner, accompanied by Sascha, Mitya, and several others. They were all roaring drunk by this time. They undressed in the yellow cedar antechamber, a large room decorated with Russian Orthodox icons, old wooden ones from country churches. There was Saint Prokopius with his handful of burning coals. The Virgin of Vladimir. The Anastasis—Christ harrowing hell. Saint Simeon on his pillar. Saint Lawrence racked with fire. Saint Basil. Saint Theodorus. Saint Menas, and the Patriarch Photius. They had the narrow faces and sorrowful eyes of Byzantine saints and bore the marks of time: wood rubbed smooth by handling, brass-colored halos worn down to the grain. More recent suffering—chips and pockmarks—was also evident.
Khristo hung his clothing on a peg. When all were undressed, Yagoda proposed a blasphemous toast. Raised his glass and called the saints faggots and whores, proposed a list of sexual indecencies and drank to each. Then, inspired, he ran to the wall where his clothing hung and returned with a pair of revolvers. The group shouted and clapped, howled with laughter and urged him on. Yagoda the Chemist, his glasses fogged, thick gray hair curling along the tops of his shoulders, began firing into the icons. The shots were painfully loud in the small room and it was all Khristo could do to keep his hands from covering his ears. Other revolvers were produced. Khristo was offered one and blew a hole in a triptych of the martyrdom of Saint Ephraem. His marksmanship produced a roar of approval.
In the sauna, they sat on cedar benches and Mitya poured a pail of water on the coals, filling the tiny room with white steam. Yagoda peered at Khristo on the bench opposite him.
“This one belongs to you, Sascha, am I right?”
A voice from the steam: “My very own.”
“And will he do the work?”
“Yes. Quietly too. The mice will never know he's around until it's too late.”
“You think he's a mouser?”
“A good one, if he works at it.”
“Yes, I agree with you. He has the look. Does he have the heart for it, though? That's what I worry about with a good mouser.”
From the steam, a different voice: “He's the one that blew up Petenko, at Belov.”
“Oh? This is him? The Bulgarian?”
“The very one, Stoianev.”
“Stoianev. Well, I like Bulgaria. A refreshing place, I think, where, it is said, the women do it while hanging from trees. Tell me, Stoianev, is it so?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “and while they do it, they bay at the moon.”
This produced a gale of laughter and wolf howls.
Yagoda nodded with satisfaction. “Sascha is a nimble lad,” he said. “He always finds the clever ones.” He leaned a little closer. He had the elongated face and small mustache of the intellectual, gray, speculative eyes and delicate features. “Not too clever, of course. That makes people edgy. Now tell me this, and we'll see how clever you really are. Who is it that has eyes like binoculars, ears like telephones, fingers like glue, and a mouth that whispers?”
Khristo shook his head. “I don't know.”
Yagoda threw his slim hands into the air and his eyes sparkled with mischief. “I don't know either,” he cried. “Let's dig him up and find out!”
That he remembered perfectly.
Otherwise, but for two moments that would live with him for a long time, it was all darkness. Drunken shouts, breaking glass, spilled food, rain blowing against the windows.
In the first moment, there was a thickset man in the uniform of a general, who sat against a wall with his legs stretched out before him. He held his right hand tightly over his right eye while blood welled from beneath and trickled down his cheek. All the while he was singing, in a false baritone, an old Russian love song.
In the second moment, the car pulled up in Arbat Street and Mitya let Khristo out. It was a cold, drizzling dawn. Sascha had passed out in the back seat, Khristo looked back at him through the fogged window. In sleep, he had the face of an old youth, fine features blurred, morning beard a blue shadow. Khristo stood unsteadily on the sidewalk. He had been drunk, then sober, then drunk again, and now his head had a spike through the temples.
“You can get in all right?” Mitya asked from the driver's seat.
He nodded that he could. The car pulled slowly away from the curb.
There was a woman, probably going to work, coming toward him down the street. At first he thought she was an old woman because she was stooped and walked with difficulty, but when he peered through the darkness he could see that she was not old at all, perhaps in her thirties, and rather pretty in a fragile sort of way. Perhaps, he thought, she worked at Food Store 6, which was just around the corner. Perhaps she was a clerk, coming on duty at dawn to check the produce in as it came off the wagons and trucks from the countryside. She had seen the black Pobieda, Mitya at the wheel, Sascha in his leather coat sprawled in the back seat, and Khristo, swaying for a moment on the sidewalk. She stopped, then moved around him in a wide circle, walking close to the wall of the building. She kept her eyes on the pavement in front of her, but then, just for a bare instant, she glanced at him, then looked down again, and he realized that she knew who they were. She knew what they were, what he was, and she was afraid of him.
From the New York Sun, August 23, 1936:
MOSCOW, August 20—President V. M. Molotov has announced that the Soviet Union is sending three hundred volunteers to assist Loyalist forces in the continuing conflict in Spain. “At issue,” Molotov stated in a speech to the Praesidium, “is the democratically elected workers and people's government in Madrid. The USSR must take every measure to ensure that oppositionist military units do not overthrow the popularly supported regime of President Manuel Azaña.” The unit of volunteers, who have chosen to call themselves the Brotherhood Front for the Protection of Spanish Democracy, is made up of civil engineers and public health workers and will provide technical assistance to the Azaña government. A Soviet spokesman informed The Sun that many of the volunteers are of various Eastern European nationalities.
IN CATALONIA, SOME WAY INLAND FROM THE ANCIENT SPICE city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Río Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. It was any and all of the villages of Spain, a series of white cubes stacked against the side of a brown hill, outlined sharply by a hot blue sky. To the eye of the traveler, it stood high above the road, somehow remote, and very silent and still. Go on to the next village,
it seemed to say, to Calaguer or Santoval, you will like it better there.
San Ximene, and all the countryside thereabout—the olive and lemon groves, the vineyards, the fields where sheep grazed on stubble after the cutting of the wheat—these belonged to Don Teodosio, of the noble family Aguilar.
It had always been so. Like the blistering sun that dried the soil to dust and the cold wind that blew it away, it was a law of nature, a commonplace of existence. A local maxim had it that on the third day of creation, when God divided the waters and revealed the land, the first Aguilar was discovered there, dripping, awaiting his maker with a basket of figs.
Whatever else might be said of Don Teodosio, or Doña Flora, they were, like their distant ancestor, provident with the Aguilar figs. In rush baskets woven by the maids and seamstresses of the household, the figs arrived punctually every Christmas and Easter. If you were a peasant of the San Ximene region, sometime before the coming of the great holidays you would behold the cream-colored De Bouton automobile, its body fashioned of tulipwood, rolling to a ceremonious stop in front of your mud-brick house. Miguelito, the chauffeur, would tap twice on the horn—a sound as pure as a heavenly trumpet—and you, your good wife, your shy children, and your esteemed parents would gather, bareheaded, before the whitewashed doorway to receive the gift. Doña Flora—Don Teodosio was too much occupied with grave affairs to have time for such business—would descend from the elegant car, wearing a dove-colored woolen suit with a foxtail stole, and approach the family, seconded by the chauffeur carrying the basket. She would greet you by name, inquire after the health of all, remark briefly on the piety of the season, and offer blessings all round. Miguelito would hand the basket to Doña Flora, she would in turn hand it on to the head of the household, who would thank her for the gift. Good wife, shy daughters, and esteemed mother would curtsy.
It was deemed, in general, a wise disposition of the Aguilar figs. If, somehow, you had miraculously contrived to dine as richly and voluminously as they did at the great house, the figs would have been just the thing to assure felicity of digestion, for they were infamously purgative. Perhaps they believed up there that all the world fed liberally on salted ham and pink frosted cakes and thereby suffered the attendant constipation—a distemper, like gout and melancholia, reserved exclusively for the rich. No matter the motive for their distribution, the Aguilar figs grew, had grown there for a thousand years, and something had to be done with them. Nobody, certainly, would ever buy them. Thus they came—thick-skinned and pungent, like all the gifts of Spain—to you. It was always nice to have the rush basket—something or other could be done with it. This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.
Not that they would cease to grow—the gnarled and twisted ficus carica had no choice in the matter. The harsh copper sun flamed in the heavens for months, as it always had, the ancient roots sought out what moisture remained in the stony soil of the river valley and, even in civil war, photosynthesis would not be denied. Not, that is, until the shellfire came and blew everything to hell. But, in October of 1936, the shellfire was still a comfortable distance away—more than two hundred miles away, where the Moorish armies of General Mola had besieged Madrid. And—no pasarán, they shall not pass—they would steal not one more inch of Republican earth.
So there would be figs. There would be lemons as well. Hard, green things certain to produce a gargoyle's scowl on the face of anyone foolish enough to taste them. For the true limón— a beautiful, fat, sunny fruit near sweet to the palate, you had to go to Valencia or Tarragona. In San Ximene, alas, they were not so blessed, the fertility of their little valley being most charitably described as unkind. The vino tinto, red wine, produced in the Aguilar vineyards was reputed to be curative, though exactly what it cured no one could say, lest it be life itself.
There would be figs, come harvest time, but they would no longer be nestled in rush baskets. They would not be bestowed by Doña Flora in her foxtail stole. The glossy De Bouton would never again sound its velvet trumpet at the whitewashed doorways of the San Ximene peasants. Those days were gone forever. The Aguilar figs were embarked on a new destiny.
Thirty-two percent of the total harvest would be retained by the workers and peasants of the San Ximene commune. Twenty-one percent would be donated to the food stores of the Asturian miners' brigades, fighting to the north. Twenty-four percent would be dispatched to relieve the hungers of Madrid, as the fascist noose was tightened around the city's throat, threatening to still its passionate song of freedom. Twenty-two percent of the harvest would travel east—eleven percent for hospitals on the coast, another eleven percent to feed the International Brigades, now flowing into the country from the breadth of Europe. An additional twenty percent would be required, it was felt, for trade with other villages, so that tools and seed, medicine and ammunition, could be obtained. Let the world take note and raise its fist: the San Ximene figs were going to war!
But it would not be easy. There had been defeatist grumbling to the effect that San Ximene had pledged to distribute one hundred and nineteen percent of its fig harvest. How was that to be done?
Work harder! Thus spoke the fiery idealists of the village. An old man, however, his hands frozen to knotted claws by a lifetime of torturing food from the wretched soil, rumbled with laughter at such a suggestion. “Work yourselves to death, if you like,” he said, “but you'll not get a fig tree to grow more fruit.” A young peasant disagreed. Was it not the case that some of the fruit spurs were pruned from the trees every spring? Everyone had to admit it was the usual practice to do so. Well then, let them be. At this, the old man stopped laughing. “If you do not cut some of the spurs, the branches will break in the autumn. You'll have your nineteen percent, it's true, but next year you'll have nothing.” The young peasant nodded, sadly, his agreement. He had to point out, however, that if Franco and his fascists gobbled up their beloved Spain in 1936, who was foolish or greedy enough to worry himself over the fig harvest of 1937? Heads swiveled back and forth between them as they argued. Who was right? What was right?
One timid soul—formerly a laundress in the Aguilar household—wondered aloud if, just perhaps, it might not be the safest course to lower the production goals. But at this everyone was aghast, so she fluttered her hands and quickly backed down, her career in political debate over before it began and a good thing too. For the percentages were as rocks or mountains—immutable.
These numbers were, after all, the precious fruits of weeks spent in fervent disputation—intense, talmudic sessions held in the back room of Serreño's Bar that had seen the best minds of San Ximene fully engaged in struggle—and one didn't simply cast such treasure over the nearest fence. The percentages were symbols—a de facto treaty between countervailing forces. And, truly, that they were able to agree on anything at all was simply astonishing.
Consider the opening positions: the PSUC, Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña, in which socialists and communists had agreed to agree, wanted to parcel out the harvest down to the very last fig. The technical approach, in which numbers danced formally with contributions to the cause. What value a soldier? Less than a hospital nurse? More than a railroad worker? How many figs to each? It could, if one applied oneself to the dialectic with good will, be determined. It had to be determined—the war went on, and the trees would leave dormancy in a few months. So it would be determined. They would sit there and determine it. Serreño, make coffee!
On the other hand, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM, had very different thoughts on the matter. These were the anarchists. To them, freedom was all and to hell with your pussyfooting numbers. Do nothing! That was their war cry. Action achieved by inaction. Simply leave the groves open and whoever needed figs could come and take them. Was this great battle in which they were engaged not, when all was said and done, over freedom itself? Could the past—the tyranny of priests, the despotic Aguilars, the brutal Guardia—be forgotten so quickly? Open the groves, open
the town, open the world, come to that, and let each individual attain the full flowering of conscience. The ruling of the self by the self, that was government!
Clearly, at the beginning, the contending forces had some way to go.
And if, in getting to their common solution, they agreed to distribute many more figs than could safely grow on the fig trees, well, that was considered a very small price to pay.
Soon enough, there were committees for everything. Not that you could have found a soul under heaven—not a sane one, anyhow—who thought that Spaniards and committees were anything but mutually exclusive propositions, but something had to be done. Just be thankful, they told each other, that the committees were composed of PSUC and POUM and that, San Ximene being innocent of factories and workshops, the CNT—Anarcho-Syndicalist trade unionists—didn't have to be included. They would have hacked down the fig trees, sawn the damn things into boards, and built themselves a Hall of Workers.
There were committees for the distribution of food, for health and sanitation, for education, for grievances, for justice, for the moral improvement of youth. There was a committee assigned to the supervision of Don Teodosio and Doña Flora—held under virtual house arrest since the Nationalist rising in July. This committee immediately gave birth to a subcommittee—known as the Committee for the Carlist Mules—made up of a communist peasant and an anarchist peasant who, responsible for the twenty-six gray beasts belonging to the Aguilar estates, argued politics by the hour while shoveling manure out the barn windows. It was a small irony to call them Carlist mules since they, unlike their former owners, hardly cared whether or not the Bourbon monarchy was restored to the Spanish throne, but small ironies were permitted the men who had to wield water buckets and dung shovels on behalf of the greater good for they surely got little else for their labor.
There was even a committee—an ad hoc unit comprising both mayors, Avena from the PSUC and Quinto of the POUM—that saw to the needs of the convalescent draftsman. He needed very little, it turned out: the rental of a small cottage at the edge of town, an old woman to clean once a week, some beans and vegetables from the market which he cooked for himself.