Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel

by Victor del Arbol

  “You want answers to questions that will lead you to places you can’t even imagine. I knew Pedro Recasens, it’s true. He came to see me three months ago. He told me about his declaration against my father … forty years later! I spent my entire life thinking that my father was a fraud, a murderer of women. I became a cop just to be the opposite of what he was … And suddenly this ghost from the past turns up and tells me that it was all a farce devised by Publio to cover up a crime by one of his men. Doesn’t it seem strange to you? This CESID agent shows up to tell me that, if I want, I can avenge my father’s death forty years later … And then you show up, with your guilt, your remorse, your promises … You say that Recasens insists that you and I are linked through Isabel Mola … Maybe we are, or maybe it’s nothing more than bullshit, another farce … Now, what’s truth and what’s a lie, María? Who should I trust? You? In that old man who’s already dead? No. The only thing I can trust is my own silence. You say you want to help me. If that’s true, if you really want to help me, get me out of here and give me a gun. I’ll take care of Publio. And I can assure you that this time I’ll find out where my daughter is. Will you do it?”

  María had been curling up over herself, unable to bear that cold, almost freezing, torrent of words, devoid of hatred but also of pity.

  “Will you do it? Will you help me escape from here?” insisted César, getting very close to María’s face, almost touching her.

  “I can’t do that,” stammered María, swallowing hard. “It’s against the law … I’m sure we can find a legal way … a pardon … something…”

  César Alcalá held up his hand to ask that she not continue along that path. Too many lawyers had promised him similar things, and he no longer had patience to keep listening to the same old song.

  “Then, if you aren’t going to help me, don’t come back here to assuage your conscience. You won’t find any more understanding from me, or answers to your questions. I’m not a saint.” Alcalá stood up and extended his hands toward the door where the guard waited, asking wordlessly for him to put his handcuffs back on. But first he turned to look at the lawyer. “Before we part, let me tell you something: You are trusting Lorenzo to keep you safe from Ramoneda, right? You are making a mistake. For weeks I’ve been giving reports on our conversations to the congressman’s man who comes to see me periodically. I tell him what you and I talked about, and he hands me a note written by my daughter. It’s my proof that she’s still alive. That man, whom I’ve never told you about, is Lorenzo, your ex-husband. The same one who got you into this, the one who promised to save you from Ramoneda and then used you as bait to get that maniac out of his lair. The same one who will leave you to your fate as soon as Publio decides to eliminate you, like he did with Recasens. He sold him out, or let them kill him, which is the same thing. You wanted answers; there, you have one. You see how bitter the truth can be, a little slice of truth, María. And how wrong your choices are.”

  * * *

  That afternoon María Bengoechea called Greta. She needed to talk to someone she knew, cling to something lovable, hear a friendly voice. But the only thing she heard was the ringing on the other side of a line that nobody picked up. She left the phone on the bed and went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

  She felt bewildered. Just a few short weeks earlier she was a completely different person, with pretty clear horizons. She had her problems, like everybody; her level of dissatisfaction at work was more or less acceptable, and she had those little daydreams that allowed to her to keep on living without taking up too much of her energy. But suddenly, there she was, leaning on the railing of her balcony with views of the sea, fighting with the wind to light a cigarette, the sky covered by coal-colored clouds, feeling that things were sifting through her fingers, that her life as she knew it was about to collapse. Crying without knowing whether it was in rage, self-pity, or despair. She was alone in that maelstrom of betrayal and lies.

  And being alone terrified her. She sucked down the cigarette and left the balcony in search of the phone, unable to dare believe the malicious idea that little by little was growing inside her head.

  19

  Near Leningrad, December 1943

  The military photographer grouped the peasant family in front of the cabin door. They obeyed his orders without argument, quietly, used to being moved from one side to the other by the vicissitudes of that changing front, the Germans on one side, the Soviets on the other. When the photographer set up his wooden tripod with the camera, he turned toward the officer who was waiting along with his companions in the armor-plated tank parked beside the frozen ditch.

  “Now, Lieutenant, stand next to the girl.” The German army photographer spoke Spanish with an accent that the lieutenant found amusing. His Spanish was nasal, almost incomprehensible. “Can you please smile? And if she doesn’t mind, have the girl take your arm.”

  The lieutenant clenched his jaw. Smile? That bureaucratic nuisance whom they’d been dragging along since the outskirts of Leningrad was asking him and his crew to smile. The thermometer marked forty below zero, it had never been so cold on this side of the lake, the fuel froze in the gas tank, the turret was stiff, like his extremities, but they had to smile just miles from the front, as a curtain of smoke covered the other shore of the lake, after the intense Soviet artillery shelling to weaken the German defenses. A firing of seventy tons of metal per minute, which in four days of uninterrupted bombardment had launched thirty-five thousand projectiles.

  The propagandist placed a sign behind them, above the cane roof from which hung transparent icicles, calling people to the popular war against the Bolshevik troops. The profiles of Hitler and Franco, superimposed on a Blue Division flag, remained martially impassive to suffering and sacrifice.

  “The generalissimo looks good. And the führer is tan in that portrait. It looks like he’s been summering in Mataró,” said Pedro Recasens, with jaded cynicism. He was one of the tank’s crew members. He was struggling to light a match so he could smoke a cigarette.

  The lieutenant nodded with an understanding smile. He felt a special fondness for that corporal, recruited by force to fight in a war as absurd as all wars. They had met in the camp in Poland, while they were being trained under the supervision of Nazi officers. Nobody talked about their past. The past didn’t exist. Only that war. But in spite of that, they had forged a friendship that went beyond the simple camaraderie of soldiers and above the hierarchy of the army.

  “That Hitler reminds me of a Jew from Toledo that I know,” said Recasens, giggling.

  The army photographer pretended not to hear the irreverent comment. If he knew the undisciplined behavior of those Spaniards unworthy of wearing the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Hitler himself would have ordered them shot instead of driving them to the Leningrad front. But in spite of their lack of discipline they were experienced soldiers, they had fought three years in the Spanish Civil War, and they would be very useful when they started the last Soviet offensives.

  “Lieutenant, could you ask your men to adopt an appropriate pose? Something military and enthusiastic would be sufficient.”

  The lieutenant silently observed the frightened faces of the peasant family they had pulled from their miserable hovel to dramatize the scene. There were no men left in the town; the muzhiks, the guerrilla fighters, had been taken prisoner and shot right on the spot. The corpses, almost buried by the snowfall, appeared where they had been shot down, like bundles thrown in the whiteness. A strong wind scratched the silence of that phantasmagorical place that combat, repression, and typhoid fever had left deserted.

  “Let’s get this farce over with already,” exclaimed the lieutenant, spitting onto the ground. “You guys, get the tank over here, and smile like they were going to send you back to Spain tomorrow. I said all three of you! Pedro, get down right now and get with the others.”

  The men obeyed without enthusiasm. The photographer forced a young Russian woman to take the Spanish li
eutenant’s arm. One after the other, he made the necessary impressions on the plates that he immediately stored in cloth sheaths. The officer avoided looking at the young peasant who was holding his right arm, but he felt her gaze like boiling water being poured onto his beard, which for the last four days had been frozen.

  “Spanier?” the peasant woman asked. She was asking him if he was Spanish, and she didn’t ask in Russian, but in German.

  After ten minutes, the photographer deemed that he’d gotten enough images. He gathered the camera and loaded the sign of Franco and Hitler into a small truck. The peasants ran to take refuge in their shacks. But the woman didn’t move. She kept staring at the lieutenant.

  “Spaniard, kamaradenn…,” she stammered as she called the lieutenant behind the cabin, putting forward a toothless and prematurely aged smile. She slid aside the bit of woven esparto grass that served as her coat and revealed a long, pale neck and the neckline of almost imperceptible breasts, one of which she pulled out with her right hand, showing a cracked, sharp dark nipple while her left hand made the gesture of bringing food to her mouth.

  “I have a can of potatoes,” said Recasens, searching nervously in the bag that hung across one shoulder, without taking his lusting eyes off the woman’s nipple. The other members of the tank crew came over, surrounding her like Siberian wolves, gray wolves beneath an intense snowfall.

  The lieutenant moved to one side, leaning on the wall of frozen piles, as his men took turns, their pants pulled down to their knees, penetrating the woman stretched out on the dirty, frozen ground, each of them leaving some food next to her. There were no sounds except for the slight panting of the men pushing urgently, and the muffled noise of the explosions in the distance that lit up the sky in blue and violet. The snowflakes fell intermittently on the bodies extended on the ground, on the labored breathing, on the food that the woman covered with her forearm without looking at the men who, one after the other, possessed her.

  When the last of them was motionless on the woman following a humiliating discharge of vapor and sound, Lieutenant Mola gave the order to depart. While his men silently went into the tank, he went over to the woman, who remained lying on the ground, with her legs open and her dress lifted above her knees. It was a brightly colored dress, a spot of spring in that wintry hell.

  She looked at him with a bottomless gaze, without reproach, without forgiveness. She extended her arms toward him and opened her legs a little more, closing her eyes. Her lids were soon covered with snow, as was part of her ruddy face, and her empty breasts were like old wineskins. She looked like a cadaver, a cadaver petrified by the winter in a desperate gesture of survival.

  Fernando Mola lowered his pants, leaned over her, and penetrated her.

  “Look at me,” he asked of the woman. She didn’t understand the language but did understand the pleading tone of that voice. They looked at each other with nothing in their eyes. Two dead people trying hopelessly to give each other life as the snow fell on Russia.

  In late December the order to move on toward the vanguard positions came. The trench Fernando and his men occupied was depressing. On a wooden platform were extended the mattresses of thick cloth that made up the waterproof floor. They slept in leather sacks, with lined capes, Eskimo hoods, and gloves on, plus skis and snowshoes for the snow. They nourished themselves by disemboweling fish they caught by carving a hole in the frozen water with sharp knives. There they spent most of their time, feeding a stove with birch logs. During the long night they kept watch on the enemy, who, at some points, was only a third of a mile away. With a whisper into the campaign telephone they communicated their positions to command, and then they sent a dog with an explosive charge attached to its belly. Those dogs were trained to eat beneath tanks. When they let them go, the hungry dogs ran across the fields to the Soviet tanks. The Russians shot at them from their positions, and many dogs exploded before reaching their objectives, but some managed to get beneath the caterpillar tracks of the tanks and then blow them up.

  From their hiding spot, Fernando and Recasens would place bets, as if they were watching a greyhound race, to see which dogs would reach their objective. The cruelty was an unconscious part of their day-to-day, and watching a dog die with its belly torn open was always more fun than listening to the constant shrieks of the wounded dying in the open field all night long.

  Every once in a while, when the bombing seemed to lessen by some effect of its own destructive impulse, Fernando would leave the hole dug in the ice and approach the frozen shore. Atop a heap of black earth hardened by the freezing temperatures, he could calmly smoke a cigarette, watching the landscape without putting himself in too much danger. Melancholy was painted in colors of blue and rose in those latitudes filled with large swampy areas and much forest. The Russian paratroopers with their quilted coveralls, armed with their PPSh-41s, hung from the fir trees, shot down by the Spaniards of the Blue Division. In the distance, on one of the shores, he could make out the battery of a battleship trapped in the ice, waving the red flag. That was a ghostly war, with three hours of light, where all notion of day and night was lost.

  Fernando was tired. And it wasn’t the lack of sleep, the hunger, or the cold that was eating him up inside. That desolate, smoking landscape was like the one inside of him. Publio and his father had chosen to send him to his death in that landscape because in its vastness, in its brutal expanse, the war would devour him without leaving a trace. Yet that frozen land, which would serve as the shroud for thousands of dead, didn’t seem to accept his suicide. He was still alive, when others, anxious to return, had fallen as soon as they’d reached the front.

  The war had changed him. He was no longer passionate about literature, nor a fevered idealist, convinced and visionary. Sometimes even the image of his mother faded, and he had to go back to the letter he had received in Germany when he was in training with the army almost two years ago. It was from Andrés. It was a short letter, in a child’s hand, that explained that their mother had turned up murdered in an old quarry. The killer of their mother was none other than his former teacher, Marcelo Alcalá. They had executed him in the Badajoz jail.

  His father didn’t bother writing to him about it, nor did he take the time to answer his telegrams. He didn’t even give him leave to go to the burial. The only thing that Fernando had left of his mother was that photograph that Andrés had sent him with the letter. A portrait in which his mother looked like a movie actress, smoking in her picture hat. He kept it in the inner pocket of his army jacket like a talisman. His brother’s cramped, irregular handwriting and the photograph of his mother were the only things that linked him to his past. The only reason he had to not go crazy like his younger brother had.

  The last letter from Andrés was discouraging. It was written from a mental institution in Barcelona, where the Mola family had moved. Things were going well for their father; he was one of the ministers closest to Franco. But according to the letter, that didn’t leave him time to take care of Andrés. So his little brother had been admitted to an institution to be cured of his frequent anxiety attacks. That was what his illness was euphemistically called. It hurt Fernando to read that letter filled with pain. He felt that his brother was defenseless, that so far from him and their mother he would be irremediably lost into the depths of insanity, and Fernando would be unable to do anything about it.

  While I waste away in this padded room, you are in battle, fighting against the hordes, fighting tooth and nail like a hero. I ask Publio about you when he comes to visit, but he tells me nothing. Papá doesn’t even come to see me, he must think my sickness is contagious. Nobody talks about you. It’s as if you were already dead, but I know that you are alive, and that you will come back. I love you, Fernando.

  Your brother who dreams his life away.

  Fernando folded the well-worn letter and put it away. Andrés couldn’t understand, he couldn’t even imagine, that this barbaric scene wasn’t heroic in the least, but miserabl
e, cold, and stank of burned flesh. It isn’t heroic to see a soldier with his legs amputated even if an Iron Cross is hanging around his neck; it isn’t heroic to rape children and impale their parents. It isn’t heroic to cry during a bombardment with your face sunk into the mud.