Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  Kulic stared down the hill at his men. A word to Maltsaev and they'd all be dead. Julio Marquin, the spiderlike little shipfitter who'd climbed the convent drainpipe, was poking at a pot of rice over a bed of coals. They cooked by day—there could be no fires at night in the Guadarrama. The fool! Why had he gone and gotten his name on the wrong list? He despaired of the Spaniards, their instinct for survival had been eaten alive by their political passions. The Spanish Legion, under Yagüe, had a regimental hymn announcing to the world that their bride was death, and the Republican side was no better. Thus they slaughtered each other. What did it matter if four of them went to heaven early? His own pride was in his way, surely. How he protected his men. Took every care to protect them, to keep them from getting hurt.

  He recalled, suddenly, that he'd killed his first man when he was fifteen, in a tavern brawl in Zvornik. Such strength and determination it had taken to do that. Where was it now?

  “Well,” Maltsaev said, “how shall it be?”

  “The best time,” he took a deep breath, “is during battle. All sorts of things happen. It could not be arranged for all four at once, of course, but over time, in a few weeks say, they would be honorably slain in action against the enemy.”

  “I'm sorry. I appreciate your thinking, but it just won't do.”

  “Who gave this order, Maltsaev?”

  “I can't tell you that and you know it.”

  “Then you do it.”

  “Me? I'm a political officer. I don't shoot anybody.” He took off his straw hat and examined the inside of the crown; the leather band was sweatstained and he blew on it to dry it out.

  Kulic knew he was trapped. He wanted to cut Maltsaev's throat. But then they would all die. The Ukrainians would come and, once they arrived, all the talking was over. So it was four now, or twenty-one tomorrow.

  He stood up. “Sergeant Delgado,” he called. Delgado stood up naked in the stream. He was a boilermaker by profession, a man in his forties. His arms and neck were burned by the sun, the rest of his body was white.

  “Yes, comrade?” the sergeant called up the hill.

  “I need a patrol of four men,” he answered in his rough Spanish. He called out their names. “To gather wood,” he added.

  “We have plenty of wood,” the sergeant responded.

  “Sergeant!” Kulic yelled.

  Nodding to himself that officers were crazy, Delgado picked his way delicately among the rocks in the streambed and went off to gather the patrol.

  Maltsaev was finished blowing on his hat. “You'll see,” he said, “everything will work out for the best.” He put the hat back on, carefully adjusting the angle of the brim so that his eyes were shaded from the sun. They went up the mountain to gather firewood. Kulic was armed with his pistol and, slung over his shoulder, a Spanish bolt-action Mauser rifle, the basic weapon of the Spanish war. The four men were not armed, the better to carry the wood. They chattered among themselves, enjoying their holiday, drawing pleasure from the work detail. Now and then they looked over their shoulders at Kulic, but he waved them on. At last he found what he was looking for. A small glade, an utterly peaceful place where no people had been for a long time.

  They began to gather wood, snapping dead limbs off fallen trees, bundling up twigs and sticks for kindling. They worked for an hour, tying the wood with hempen cords in such a way that it could be harnessed to their shoulders, leaving their hands free. It was the way he had taught them to do it. He knew, also, that once they were laden in this way, it would be nearly impossible for them to rush him successfully.

  When they were ready to go, he held up a hand and unslung the rifle, holding it loosely at port arms. They stood there for what seemed like a long time, watching him, their faces slowly growing puzzled. One of them finally said, “Capitán?”—a term of honor they had granted him.

  “I am sorry,” Kulic said, “but I must ask you to sit down for a moment.”

  Carefully they knelt, balancing their loads, then sat, lying back against the wood bundles.

  “I am told, by the Russian who came to the camp this afternoon, that you are members of the organization known as POUM, an anarchist group. Is this true?”

  “Our politics are complicated,” Marquin answered, making himself spokesman for the group. “We are members of the UGT, the Communist party, but we have all attended meetings of the POUM in order to hear the thoughts of comrade Durruti, who is a greatly gifted man and a fine orator. ‘If you are victorious,' he has said to us, ‘you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall … and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.' ”

  Kulic was impressed with the speech. “You can remember all that?”

  “All that and more. So many of us do not read or write, you see, that memory must serve us.”

  “But you are not members.”

  “No, but we do not disavow them. They too are our brothers in this struggle. We attended their meetings, before we came out here to fight the fascists, gave them a gordo for the coffee, signed petitions in favor of freedom for the working classes. Can this have been wrong?”

  “I am afraid so.”

  Sitting next to Marquin was a fat man. How he had managed to remain so, despite forced marches and the unending physical demands of partizan life, Kulic had never been able to figure out. He had, when he spoke, the piping voice of a fat man. “Then we are to be shot,” he said.

  Kulic nodded yes.

  Two of the men crossed themselves. Marquin said, “We are ready to die, it is in the nature of this work we do. But to die dishonored, by the hand of our leader …” The pause became a silence as he realized that nothing he could think of would finish the thought.

  “You are not dishonored, and I myself do not understand this, and I do not agree. I am, like you, a soldier, and I have been given an order, and because I am a good soldier, I will carry out that order even though I believe it is wrong. All I know is that we are involved in a great revolution. It began a long time ago, far from here, and it will go on for a long time after we are gone. The POUM is in the way, it would seem, of victory in Spain. A sacrifice will have to be made. That is everything I can say.”

  One of the men struggled suddenly to get up but the wood borne by his shoulders held him back, and the fat man, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it impossible for him to move. “No, no,” the fat man said, “let it be. Our enemy is not in this place.”

  Marquin spoke up, his voice absolutely calm. “I wish to be the first,” he said, “but I want to stand up.” He wrestled the load of wood from his shoulders and stood. Straightened his mono overall so it hung properly, combed his hair into place with his fingers as though his photograph were about to be taken. His eyes looked directly into Kulic's. Kulic worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it to his shoulder, sighting on the man's heart. He had never known the name of the man in the tavern in Zvornik—that had all happened too quickly for any but a perfectly instinctive reaction. The man had rushed at him with a piece of wood, Kulic had plunged a knife into the very center of him, he had seemed to swell up suddenly to the size of a giant, then twisted away, wrenching the knife from Kulic's hand and falling upon it so that the steel hilt banged against the cement floor. After that there was only the sound of the last breath rushing from his lungs. Kulic tightened his finger on the trigger. The Spanish Mauser was a simple weapon, made to work for a long time, and there was nothing delicate about its mechanism. The trigger was on a hard spring and it had to be pulled with force.

  Slowly, Kulic lowered the rifle. He forced the bolt back and, as the ejected cartridge spun into the air, caught it cleverly in his right hand. Then he put it in his pocket.

  Slowly at first, and then more rapidly as they understood what was
happening, the other three men unburdened themselves and stood up. Kulic nodded his head toward the west. “Portugal is that way, I believe.”

  “But we have no guns,” one of the men said.

  “You will draw less attention without them,” Kulic said.

  He was not to hear Marquin speak again. The man studied him as his friends walked slowly west along the curve of the mountainside. There was no gratitude in his eyes. Perhaps a veiled smile, perhaps the faintest hint of contempt. It occurred to Kulic then that Maltsaev might have been right in ways he had not understood, but it was much too late to have thoughts like that so he turned his attention to other matters.

  He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and, when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree. A 825.

  At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroën, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the Neva's stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the 6:30 departure. He had not really slept—Yaschyeritsa's face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long—and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel.

  “Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty.” It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby—a grossly overfed baby—with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama's boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa's knee and tattle at every opportunity.

  “Yes, hello,” Khristo managed. “Usually I drive,” he added.

  “Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed, by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles.”

  At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting—Khristo counted spitefully—eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid.

  “Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?” Lubin said.

  “Yes. I am Bulgarian.”

  “Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimovich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?”

  “No,” Khristo said, “I don't know it.”

  “It is not important.”

  As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Sascha had one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.

  At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away.

  “Why did you do that?” Khristo asked.

  “A rule of driving, Lieutenant,” Lubin answered proudly. “To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly.”

  Khristo put his head in his hands.

  Buenas noches, mis amigos. Buenas noches, todos los peleadores bravos que puedan oír ma voz. Y buenas noches, Madrid. Hay veinte horas, y la hora para el jazz hot. La selección primera esta noche es una canción del Norteamericano, Duke Ellington, lla-mada “In a Sentimental Mood,” con Louis Vola tocando el vio-lón, trum-trum-trum, Marcel Bianchi y Pierre Ferret en guitarras, Django Reinhardt en la guitarra sola, y, entonces, el grande Stephane Grappelli tocando el violín. Gusta bien, todo el mundo, gusta bien.

  The Emerson, in a tan wooden case with white dials and a little light that made the station band glow green, played best on a table beneath the window. Faye angled it slightly to the left, then fiddled with the tuning knob until the signal came in clear. Andres had gone out to yet another meeting, she was exhausted, and she was going to wrap herself up in a quilt, listen to the radio, and read a Djuna Barnes novel that Renata had discovered somewhere. All day at work, mailing out fund-raising letters for various defense committees, she had planned to spend the evening this way. She really liked the Ellington song, it boded well for the radio program, and for her private evening. Lately too many people, too many rumors, too much jittery bravado. The antidote: spend some time alone, doing things one liked, the more the better, and do them all at once. She would have made herself a cup of tea, but lately, inexplicably, there was no tea to be found. She would go to bed early, she didn't have to man the machine gun until 5:30 the next morning, and that was hours away.

  “In a Sentimental Mood.”

  The music that Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli made was very spare—compared to the lush crooning of the big bands it was thin and plain, hardly anything at all. The rhythm guitars and bass plunked away on the same note; a one-two, one-two beat on the chord that changed rarely, and the tempo of it was peculiar. Should you dance to it in an embrace, you'd have to move quickly, a foxtrot in a hurry. But if you danced apart, like the Charleston, it would be much too slow for the dancers to do any tricks at all.

  Soloing above the rhythm was first Reinhardt, a Gypsy guitarist with three fingers burned off in a wagon fire, then Grappelli, a classically trained musician who played nightclub violin—take away the other instruments and he sounded like a violinist at a wedding—all perfumed sentiment. Reinhardt's playing was jazzy; long, rhythmic runs, the perfect counterpoint to the too-sweet violin. The two men were, Faye thought, opposites bound together, tenderness and cold passion. She wondered if they liked each other.

  The record had been made at a bistro in Paris called Le Hot Club. Listening to the song, she could see it. Dark and smoky and close, a tiny dance floor, a thin woman in pearls with vacant eyes, barely dancing. Faye looked up from her book, head propped on elbow, and had at that moment a premonition: there would come a day when this song would bring back everything of her time in Madrid. It made her—a bizarre trick—long for a past that was still in the future. She burrowed deeper into the quilt, returned to her book.

  Sometime during the last flourishes of the violin—Grappelli playing notes that sounded like musical tears, a crazy kind of sadness that wasn't serious at all yet hurt in a special way—the door opened.

  Andres came in but she did not see him, not really, she saw the man who stood by his side. Immediately she began writing short stories about him, because his presence came to her in metaphors. Eyes like tank slits. He had blue eyes hidden away in there, and black hair and pale skin and square hands. He wore a da
rk blue shirt buttoned at the throat and a soft gray suit, and when he leaned over, formally, like a Slav, to shake her hand, she could see an automatic pistol holstered at his waist.

  Andres was so dear to her, he approached her always like a clumsy man asked to hold—but only for a moment or two while its owner was occupied—a priceless glass vase. She lived in this body every minute of every day, it was just herself. But to him she was treasure. He ran his soft hand along her body and said silk. To be glass and gold and silk was a great honor, she knew, but she also knew it took living up to.

  The curious thing about Andres was that he was two people. Quite distinctly two people. Andres at a distance was a malleable, hesitant man who moved invisibly in the crowd. But when he spoke, he changed. He was, then, the opposite of malleable and hesitant. Spending time alone with him in a room, you met the strange thing that lived inside him: a fierce and clever animal, a beast that might hunt you down if it decided you'd somehow hurt it.

  For some reason, Andres had not expected her to be there. He was unpleasantly surprised and his eyes moved around too much. For the sake of appearances he introduced the other man, but gobbled his name so that it was simply a syllable or two. The man took her hand briefly—here and gone. His face seemed closed with tension. The two of them, Andres and his friend, made together a magnetic field of such exclusionary force that she was surprised her very body did not fly right out the window.

  But they could go to hell.

  She too fought in this war and what she had learned about war was that slowly but surely it sucked your strength right down to the marrow. She held this ground. And her forces were arrayed about her. The jazz on the radio, the quilt, the book, the bed—the two men would attack at their peril.