by Peter Weiss
That green. That green that Lorca sang of, said Gallego, his gaze directed at the Swedish coast as it streamed past. Green wind, green branches. The ship out on the sea. Stahlmann stood beside him, leaning on the railing of the ship that they would take from Le Havre to Leningrad. That dense, succulent green we’d dreamt of in the rocky soil, in the russet dust of Andalusia, and then in the desert, in the blinding sand around Bogari. He was trying to convey to his German comrade, who during the war had led a partisan column, something of the days, the weeks, the almost five months that had elapsed since the collapse. Actually, since he was thinking of the palace of El Pardo, in which he had been barricaded with his unit until the twenty-fourth of March, he had to reach even further back, to his childhood in the village of Siles, near Jaén, where he had been born to peasants and had worked as a herder in the scraggy highlands. I first received shoes, he said, when my mother sent me into the city at sixteen years of age to learn to read and write and get a trade, after the death of my father. To begin with he couldn’t wear the shoes, as the soles of his feet were tough from traipsing around in the mountains, the arid slopes. Apart from attending school, he initially had few options other than going back to herd livestock. While he and his thirty men, members of the Party and the youth organization, were holding the Pardo, behind the windows on the first floor, bolstered with sandbags, he often thought about his origins, his trajectory up until the outbreak of the war. That they held out for three weeks was nothing extraordinary; it was the natural consequence of a path that he had been on since joining the youth association as a seventeen-year-old. Looking at the chandeliers beneath the ceiling, with its hosts of painted angels, at the gilded chairs along the walls of the hall in which he was holed up, the last few years had pieced themselves together inside of him to form an indissoluble whole. It felt as if he had come directly from his village to defend the city and the country here, at this advanced position. Broad, darker sections in the fabric covering of the walls showed where Goya’s tapestries had been. The floral patterns of the mosaics on the floor were strewn with bullet casings. Sleeping figures lay beneath brocade curtains, while the others kept watch at the loopholes. In July of thirty-six, he said, all poverty, all misery came to an end for us, we were now embarking upon the struggle for our liberation. I had grown up among children who died young, the infirm, unemployed, and beggars. Even in the city only a minimum of food could be rustled up. And yet here, without money, with no occupation, he had met young people who were preparing themselves for a revolution in the country. After evening classes and late-night study, after a few years of school and political education, he had become the youth leader of the province, and in October of thirty-four, as a participant in the general strike and insurrection, he had ended up in prison together with tens of thousands. By the beginning of the war, at twenty-one years of age, a country lad, a herder who didn’t even know how many men made up a battalion, he was named a major in the People’s Army. But everyone, he said, received unimaginable strength from the certainty that the struggle would lead to the extinction of injustice, of need. From one day to the next, their faces transformed. The harried, careworn look in their features gave way to the expression of joyful confidence. We didn’t perform miracles, he said, but rather carried out actions for which we had been preparing for a long time. The difficult times lay behind us. Reaching for our weapons triggered the onset of our relief. Which is why, right up to the very last moment, capitulation remained unthinkable. Though we knew we were cut off in the Pardo, we were still waiting, hour by hour, to be rescued. Behind the fence, just a few meters away from us, were the Falangist marksmen. Tanks had advanced. They yelled out that we should surrender, that Madrid was occupied by Casado’s troops. And yet, he said, since everything I had learned had been acquired in the battle against a superior power, in the third week of March I still believed that the struggle would continue, that victory was possible. How could we have imagined that we were alone. Such a thought would necessarily fly in the face of all our previous knowledge. We’d have been cursing ourselves if, in our palace, which had been spared the heavy artillery so that it could remain intact for el Caudillo as a residence, we had entertained the notion that all support was exhausted. Cowering at the machine gun, he had remembered how awestruck he had been by the arrival of the International Brigades. That was the first time he had seen people from another country. The foreigners wore the same uniform as he did; he stood alongside them in the same army. The sense of belonging had been intensified further by the fact that they could not speak with one another. He became acquainted with the solidarity that required no common language. And now, he said pensively, we had the fascists directly in front of us. Our rations were running out. We prepared ourselves to stay to the final cartridge. Our medic assured us he could still operate on each of us at least seven times. We wouldn’t have left the Pardo if somebody hadn’t managed to sneak through to us to deliver the order to withdraw. We still refused to believe that Madrid had fallen. Plenty of cities had fallen and the war had continued to be waged. The north was lost, but Modesto was gathering units for a counterattack. To outsiders this might have seemed absurd. For us it was the right decision. Even at the Battle of the Ebro we’d only have needed a few more hours and the enemy would have been forced to retreat. But the reinforcements never came. Why, we asked ourselves, would the reinforcements not make it to us this time. For an eternity, the enemy’s front line had been frail, demoralized. After the unspeakable efforts of the people, it was unthinkable that the reactionaries could win out. The building we were in, he said, was not just any palace, it had been one of the main seats of feudalism, a royal estate since the Middle Ages, expanded by Carlos the Third, filled by the fourth Carlos with the masterpieces of Velázquez, Murillo, Goya. You know the picture, he said to Stahlmann, in which Goya captured the royal family, fourteen figures, puffed up, witch-like, puppet-like, looking addled and adipose, in shimmering robes, pompous uniforms. We had promised ourselves that the palace would stay in our possession, that the cretins, whose power was now only recognizable in their rustling, shimmering clothing, would never again return to these chambers. But we were urged to hurry. In Madrid, having been recognized by England and France, the armies were preparing their victory parades. I was caught in the contradiction between my mission of bringing my group to safety and my desire to continue the revolutionary struggle. My indecision was resolved by my duty to save the lives of my comrades. We had to accept a partial defeat. We had to make it through in order to continue the struggle elsewhere. Everything that followed, in its seeming arbitrariness, its improvised nature, taught me one thing, that there is rarely a situation with no way out, and that failure merely meant failing to find that way out. As the green Swedish coast receded, and the waves, sliced through by the bow, rolled frothing along the side of the ship, he asked himself how their withdrawal from the Pardo, with its flash-like impressions, could be translated into words. Before daybreak they had heard a bellowing voice issuing from the entrance, the iron gates had been opened, an ambulance drove up to the main entrance. The driver of the wagon, carrying identification issued by the anarchists, who were among Casado’s guards, had convinced the soldiers out front with the volume of his voice that he had orders to remove the Republicans from the palace. Gallego could still see himself in the mirror above the open fireplace, flanked by candlestick holders, while he fixed up his filth-encrusted hair with his fingers. Then they jumped down the marble steps, in a moment the doors of the automobile were slamming shut behind them, they raced down the road, through the plains, away from the bluish, snow-topped mountains of the Guadarrama to the barracks, where the driver, yelling once more and waving his papers, demanded gas, and, because his audacity aroused the impression that he was one of them, the Falangists gave it to him as well. Thus they broke through the blockades surrounding Madrid, and they went on like that, traversing the country, until they reached Mazarrón, just outside Cartagena. Traveling across the
Baltic Sea, with everything lying behind him, he was able to depict it in this way, and yet it had not been picaresque, as it now sounded, accompanied by laughter. We were surrounded by terror, he said, by panic. Through the window of the ambulance they saw the city shot to bits, the streams of refugees, the Italian tanks, the plundering fascist troops. At one point, they drove slowly past a procession of captive Republican soldiers. In one burning village, a small child was walking round and round in a circle. Bodies hanging from the branch of a tree. A heap of people shot with harquebuses in an open field. They lay shoved together in the shuddering wagon. A stop on the side of a dirt road. The doors of the ambulance were wrenched open, they jumped out, the driver saluted, hopped into his seat, turned around, the car disappearing in a cloud of dust. He had fulfilled his mission, said Gallego, we had to go on alone. Thirty men, politically persecuted, we discussed what we should do. The entrances to the coastal cities were under surveillance. The harbors were overflowing with people looking for freight ships, fishing boats, that could take them across the sea to Africa. Off the coast the Italian fleet was waiting. I set off toward Mazarrón, he said, to rustle up a boat. The others waited behind a mound of earth next to an olive grove. Looking for a way out, but with no idea where I might find it, I ran into a pilot, in the middle of the road, who I recognized as a member of our air force. He drove us to a nearby military airport. Holding out his revolver, he explained to the soldiers, who were under Casado’s command, that he had been issued the task of escorting us out of the country. The pilots, confused by the general chaos, powered up the engines of eleven planes, those little Natachas, the light bombers, and soon enough they were ready to go. Gallego returned once more to what seemed arbitrary, coincidental. There is no such thing as a coincidence, he said, and neither is anything impossible, for they had always seemed to overcome the impossible. If I hadn’t sought out what was then unknown, he said, I wouldn’t have encountered the pilot, and if his demeanor had not been so assertive, then we wouldn’t have coaxed the crew out of their doubts. There was also no such thing as foolhardiness. Everything during the last few years had been a risk, we were well acquainted with this situation, and when something had to be altered, we knew no hesitation. Later we found out that our helper had been Carrasco, a hero of the Republic. The planes that were sent after us to shoot us down were manned by Communists who feigned a few maneuvers before turning back, since they didn’t have enough fuel for the flight to Africa. The pilots who brought us to Oran decided to stay with us. And now, immediately upon our arrival, the next phase of the civil war began: the battle without weapons, in exile. Our adversaries were now the French. We were penned up in the fortress of the harbor city. The things we had heard about the reception of Spanish refugees in France were repeated in Algeria. Colonial troops picked up the people on the ships that had managed to get through the sea blockade to Oran and stuck them in camps. We protested against the treatment that was meted out to us. We were not at war with France and so we also didn’t want to demand the fulfillment of conventions that applied to prisoners of war. But we weren’t even considered prisoners of war, much less captive officers. In the eyes of French institutions, the Republican army didn’t exist. They only entertained diplomatic relations with the army of the fascists. Incessantly, taking shifts, we demanded to be released; yelled, whistled, hammered on the bars of the cells. Gallego saw Oran in front of him, that white, glowing city. Around the citadel, the steep alleys and stairwells of the old Spanish quarter climbed up toward Djebel Murdjadjo. Below, to the west of the bay lay the main commercial harbor; opposite, behind the throngs of Arabic houses, the modern French district and its wide avenues opened out like an amphitheater. We directed all of our energy, he said, toward forcing our release. When we were picked up from the fortress to be taken to an internment camp, it seemed like a victory. Our pressuring had achieved something; we believed that from the interior of the country it would be easier to flee. The first commandment was to never accept what one was given. Initially, the transfer to the Bogari garrison, three hundred kilometers away, at the foot of the Hauts Plateaux bordering the Saharan Atlas, was evidence of the strength we still had. However it soon became evident that life in the desert was more difficult to bear than imprisonment in the fort. From the south, the Simoom whipped up dust and clouds of sand over the camp. By day, we often had temperatures of up to fifty degrees; the nights were ice cold. Yet here we were, a mere sixty to seventy kilometers from Algiers, having already escaped from Madrid; it had to be possible to also overcome the walls around these barracks. There was a French regiment stationed there and a regiment of Foreign Legionnaires. The majority of the troops were off monitoring Bedouin tribes or hunting apes in the mountains. The soldiers who stayed behind mostly sat around dozing during the day, or hung around at the nearby oasis, where there were a few date palms and they had planted some tobacco plants. Because it is the duty of every prisoner to flee, said Gallego, we constantly thought about the escape that could begin at any moment, but whose execution remained unclear. Almost three months had passed since the flight from Spain when we decided to make a run for it. In our impatience, we chose the wrong option, the option which, had we taken it, would have led to our certain death in the desert. At the same time though, we continued to pursue the other possibility, the one we had ceased to believe in, of forcing the colonial authorities to move us through our tireless expression of outrage about our unlawful imprisonment; and thus, before we were able to seize the ill-advised chance to climb over the walls from the washing station on the edge of the barracks, salvation arrived in the form of a convoy of trucks that took us through the desert to Algiers. This in turn was a result of the negotiations regarding the deportation of Spanish refugees to the Soviet Union, which had taken place in May and June in Paris. In a contingent of three hundred members of the Republican Army, we were first shipped out to Marseille. Since the cabins were overflowing with priests traveling to an ecumenical congress, we had been housed in the hold with sheep and mules. Here, in the depths, in the stench, many of us became seasick; we had heard there was supposed to be a point in the hull somewhere where the lurching was minimal. We spent the night searching for that point, which we didn’t find, and then returned to the livestock, which to me at least was familiar from my youth. We were transported through France in a livestock wagon as well, behind sealed doors; through a vent in the wall I saw the country that had so often been praised to us and had inflicted so much suffering upon us. A one-hour stop in Paris. At the thought of that, a warmth overcame him. The international solidarity that he had never ceased to believe in was confirmed in the embraces of the French metalworkers who greeted them, giving them food, wine, cigarettes. An hour on the platform of the Gare de l’Est in Paris, the city in which they were not allowed to set foot, before continuing on to Le Havre. And then, together with Stahlmann—who after traversing the Pyrenees had arrived in Paris illegally, had been taken in by comrades and hidden for months—the walk across the gangway to the Soviet ship. For Gallego and many other Spaniards traveling with him, making it to Soviet soil was the fulfillment of a long-standing dream. Now, in the breeze, in the green wind, it seemed to him as if he had to recount everything once more, as if what he had just recounted had already drawn away from him; he searched for words to conjure up the face of the anarchist in the Pardo, the face of the pilot on the country road, all the faces of the friends and helpers, and the detested faces of the enemy.