None of this surprised Julio, because his true friends, his true comrades on the other side, had also never asked anything of him before accepting him. They were so sure of the rightness of their cause, so persuaded by the incontrovertible, universal value of the ideas they promoted, that they welcomed newcomers with almost evangelical warmth, confident that their desire to join was sincere. That night, in the house of the Sánchez Delgado family, Julio Carrión believed he had found the flipside of that zeal, that innocence, and he felt at home, safe in this dining room with its dark wood furniture, its walls hung with copper engravings of religious scenes, where grace was said before dinner and afterwards they had cakes and a bottle of their best brandy to toast the war as though it were a party. Eugenio’s parents - his father, short and slight with a little moustache that made him look like a rat, his mother more handsome, blonde and heavyset - were not simply friendly, they were affectionate, almost paternal, towards him. Both took it for granted that their sons were not going to war, they were headed for victory, and Julio found that he was infected by their utter confidence, convincing him that he might not even see combat.
His own father did not share their optimism. The following day, before he signed up to his new comrades’ party, with Eugenio as his only character reference, Julio went to see his father in Torrelodones since he needed his signature to enlist. He was sorry that Eugenio had insisted on coming with him, since Benigno was cold, silent and disconsolate. A week earlier he had discovered that his wife had died of pneumonia in the penal colony at Ocaña. He had not even known she was in prison, because he had made no enquiries about her, nor about his daughter, since they left. If he said nothing of this to Julio, it was not to spare him anxiety, but because he would have been ashamed to go into embarrassing explanations in front of this stranger in the blue shirt.
By this time, Julio Carrión González did not think about his mother every day, but the brief, intense flashes of memory, of lost tenderness and affection, still hurt him deeply. Although the world was so warped it made him forget the unforgettable, banishing the recent past to some vague frontier where with every passing day the colours faded, against his will, he would still happen on Teresa González, see her in the eyes, the hands, the gestures of other women; women walking with their teenage sons who could not know that the mere sight of them, the difference in their height, or perhaps simply a fleeting caress, could suddenly make him feel unbearably alone. At such times, Julio Carrión, who had never stopped loving his mother, despised himself for his weakness, for he lived in a world in which she had never existed, had not been the woman she was nor he her son. But Teresa González had existed. And Julio would soon discover that he was not the only one who knew it.
‘How’s things?’
‘Fucking great.’ Julio returned Romualdo’s smile. ‘You?’
‘Great.’
They both laughed as El Casi, the Sevillian who had shot at one of Pepe Stalin’s Andalusian cousins in Orléans, told everyone to be quiet in a hysterical, terrified whisper.
‘Shut the fuck up.’ He did not say another word until they had covered half the distance between the Polish prison camp and their own. ‘If we get caught, we’re dead.’
‘To say nothing of the bollocking I’ll get from your brother,’ Julio said to Romualdo who was walking beside him.
Only when they were close enough to the camp did El Casi dare to laugh along with them.
‘How did it go?’ asked the sentry they had bribed to get out as he pocketed the other half of his money. ‘What are the Polish women like?’
‘What Polish women?’ Julio stared at him as though he didn’t understand. ‘We just went out for some fresh air.’
‘Yeah, yeah . . .’ the sentry gave him a sardonic smile, ‘I’m sure.’
‘You’d better be sure.’ Romualdo’s tone was categorical.
Julio’s girl had not been very young, but she had been pretty enough. She had auburn, almost red hair, pale eyes and she was big boned, which did much to disguise her skeletal thinness. This alone was enough to make her attractive compared to the shorter, more delicate women who had no way of concealing their emaciated bodies, their desiccated hands stretched out imploringly to new recruits, who gave them whatever they had, sweets, fruit, bread, sometimes even cigarettes.
‘They have women here!’ The rumour spread the day they arrived in Grafenwöhr. ‘Thousands of them, a whole camp full.’
That afternoon, they had unpacked their German-issue kitbags, laughing as they tried on the uniforms, the flannel undershirts that came down to their knees and the long socks that all but came up to their armpits. ‘What the hell is this?’ ‘What do we need so many brushes for?’ ‘What about these strips of fabric?’ ‘They’re ribbons for your long hair.’ They found out that the women were Polish prisoners and that German High Command forbade any contact with them. The penalty for infraction was harsh, something they did not really understand, any more than they understood why they had been issued with so many brushes. So, in spite of the fact that simply going near the Polish camp was considered an offence, from their first day they had flouted the rules, making the most of the few hours they had after afternoon drill to wander over, taking the most circuitous route, to the wire fences through which a thousand arms snaked out towards them. The Spanish officers chose to consider this breach of discipline a harmless prank, although Julio and Eugenio did not know it would be the cause of the first rift between them.
‘What did she say?’ El Casi asked the elder of the Sánchez Delgado brothers anxiously as he watched him walk back from the wire fence where he had spent some time talking to one of the prisoners.
‘I don’t know what to tell you . . .’ Romualdo scratched his head. ‘Given that she doesn’t speak much French and neither do I . . . Now, if that swot over there would just help us . . .’
Julio realised Romualdo was talking about Eugenio, but his friend did not even turn his head, carried on walking beside Francisco Serrano Romano, nicknamed Pancho, a quiet lad from Estremadura who looked much younger than his nineteen years, and of all the soldiers was the most generous to the Polish women.
‘What’s with you? Don’t you eat?’ Romualdo had asked him one day as he watched Pancho stuff bread and fruit into his pockets.
‘Not much.’ Pancho shrugged. ‘It’s just that where I come from, we’re not used to eating much.’
Everybody, including Pancho, laughed at this.
Julio and Eugenio had grown accustomed to this precocious lad who had no interest in talking about anything but the war, about the regiments, the number of soldiers in each, their history, battle plans, and consequently rarely said anything on the walk to and from the Polish camp. That afternoon, Eugenio was almost as silent while his brother and El Casi walked behind, whispering in low voices.
‘What are you two talking about ?’ Julio finally went over to Romualdo. ‘Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?’
‘No, because there’s nothing going on,’ Romualdo said, then stroked his chin. ‘Say, Julito, do you speak French?’
‘A little . . .’
‘How little?’
Although it had been a long time since he had spoken French, as long, in fact, as it had been since he had seen his mother, he spoke it fairly well, so he was the one who handled the more delicate negotiations, those things that could not be communicated in the universal language of gesture and mime. It was not very complicated. The Polish women did not want money - money was useless to them in the camp - but it was easy for the soldiers to buy soap, cologne and especially food. Aside from paying whichever woman they had chosen, they would also have to bribe the prisoners who had been entrusted with patrolling the camp at night and the women who kept the German guards occupied while they crawled into the camp through a sort of supply hatch. But in the end it was cheap. In all, the Polish women would cost them less than half of what they had to pay the Spanish guard to keep quiet about their nocturnal sortie.
‘Right, there’s only one thing missing now . . .’ Julio handed Romualdo a piece of paper with a list of what the prisoners had asked for and the date of the next new moon.
Eugenio had not heard the bear hugs, nor the belly laughs of his brother and El Casi as they welcomed Julio Carrión into the brotherhood, but he sensed it, and by the time they returned from their afternoon visit some days later, everyone knew.
‘So you’re all going to do this?’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘Even you, Julio? When is it happening? Tomorrow, when there’s no moon? Big fucking men, aren’t you!’
‘Shut up, Eugenio.’
‘I will not shut up, Romualdo. I don’t take orders from you. Certainly not after this . . .’
‘Here we go,’ Romualdo gave a contemptuous laugh, ‘from the man who goes to communion every day . . .’
‘A man doesn’t need to go to communion every day to be disgusted by what you’re doing to a bunch of poor Polish women, dying of starvation . . .’
‘Wait a minute, little brother.’ Romualdo took a step towards his brother. ‘Those poor women are enemies of the German people, remember ? Be careful, or you’ll get yourself locked up as an enemy sympathiser . . .’ At this, El Casi laughed, and, turning to look, Romualdo noticed Pancho. ‘And what’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ Pancho said calmly, ‘but I think your brother is right.’
‘Well, well . . .’ Romualdo laughed. ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves another member of the God Squad!’
‘No surprise there - he’s permanently fasting!’ El Casi joked.
Things went no farther that afternoon. Julio, who agreed with Romualdo, avoided Eugenio that night, and made sure that they were not alone together the next day. Later, when it was all over and he slipped into bed with the scent of the woman still on his skin, he felt so powerful, so sated, that he stopped worrying about anything except the winks, the complicit smiles, the clever comments of his comrades. By dinner time the following day, the news had reached some of the officers, who shook their heads in a mixture of indignation and indulgence while insisting that the escapade was not to be repeated. In the meantime, Eugenio acted as though they did not know each other until Julio, finally worn down, spoke to him on the train that took them to Nuremberg every Sunday on their afternoons off.
‘Tell me something, Eugenio,’ he said, sliding into the seat next to him before Pancho could do so. ‘Are you never going to speak to me again?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ Eugenio stared at him for a moment as though they had just met, and then turned to look out of the window. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t much feel like talking to you ...’
‘But why? That’s what I don’t understand. What do you think? You think I behaved badly? Well, you’re wrong . . . I took her soap, potatoes, apples, chocolate, I even brought her a bottle of perfume. She’s probably the happiest woman in the camp right now.’
‘What about you?’ Eugenio turned round so quickly his glasses almost flew off his nose. ‘What kind of person are you, Julio? That woman risked her life, don’t you understand that? She risked her life for your apples and potatoes . . .’
‘Nobody forced her to . . .’
‘Nobody? You forced her to, you and my fucking brother, and that other idiot. You forced them because they were desperate, so desperate that they were willing to risk their lives for a couple of fucking apples. If you were caught, you’d have got a telling-off and a couple of days in a cell, but they would have been killed, they would have been executed because they’re prisoners of war, don’t you get it?’ Eugenio fell silent, then shook his head. ‘I don’t understand you, Julio. Romualdo, yes, because Romualdo is an animal, but you . . .’
‘For goodness’ sake, Eugenio,’ Julio Carrión was more surprised than offended, ‘what is this? I just don’t think it’s that serious. We’re not Germans, we don’t have to be like them. All we did was get laid, nobody was hurt. It might be a sin, I won’t argue with that, but it was good for us and it was good for them too . . . I’m beginning to think your brother was right. I mean, which side are you on?’
‘Listen, you bastard !’ Eugenio shouted, jabbing his finger at his friend. ‘I’m going to tell you something, and I’m only going to tell you once. Don’t you ever doubt me, because I know exactly which side I’m on. Better than you do, better than anyone, got that? I’m on the side of civilisation, the real socialist revolution, I’m against communism because it’s inhuman, criminal, it’s madness and has no respect for God or man.’ He paused for a moment and pushed his glasses back up his nose, then carried on. ‘I know that they are making mistakes and they will go on making mistakes, because our task is not an easy one and the enemy is powerful. The women you slept with may or may not have been communists, but whatever they were before the camp doesn’t matter. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t have been locked up. All I’m saying is that now they are just a bunch of poor, lonely, desperate women, and you have no right to abuse them the way you did.’
Julio Carrión González got up from his seat, convinced that he had lost a friend, an ally, that Eugenio would never trust him again. He could not understand this overblown, puritanical tirade, which did not raise the slightest doubt nor the first hint of regret in his mind. The reason he was worried about losing Eugenio’s friendship was very different. Julio was not yet sure of himself, and the company of this God-fearing, loyal, honest lad, whose only friends were Julio and Pancho, had offered him some kind of guarantee. That afternoon, on the train to Nuremberg, he was certain he had lost that friendship, but for them the war had not yet even begun.
At the end of August, when they began the bizarre, exhausting journey towards the front - nine days by train and more than thirty marching, covering almost forty kilometres a day - the incident with the Polish prisoners began to fade, the happy, golden days spent in Grafenwöhr unravelling like the threads of a dream. Exhaustion quickly overcame physical pain, dulling their senses, then weighing like a millstone on the heroic expectations of those who had enlisted in the most powerful army in the world only to discover that trains and trucks did not cover even half of their path to glory.
Eugenio could not comprehend it, just as he could not comprehend that they were to be robbed of the glory of marching into Moscow, being instead dispatched to the north, while Latvian volunteers, better adapted to the cold, had been dispatched to the Ukraine. In his struggle to endure this unending series of disappointments, the exhaustion sapped the strength from his delicate body more cruelly than it did the others. The younger of the Sánchez Delgado brothers armed himself with dogma. His eyes burned once more with the simple, unadulterated fervour Julio had first witnessed in Madrid; these eyes did not see the yellow stars, like cattle brands, on the chests of the thousands of Jews they passed in Grodno, Vilna and Minsk. Julio silently watched over him for some sign of mutiny or dissent; he knew that Eugenio did not like to see such things, no one liked to see them, not even him, but no more was said about the ‘mistakes’ which great causes necessitate.
It was at this point, however, that Julio discovered just how honest Eugenio Sánchez Delgado was, because when he began to feel contempt for himself, he once more treated Julio as a friend, mistakenly believing that he was no better than Julio. Finally, at the end of October, as they were camped out on the banks of the Voljov, Julio realised that the precautions he had imposed on himself since leaving Madrid, the permanent state of watchfulness that made him think twice before saying a word, were as extreme as Eugenio’s sackcloth morality.
‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?’
The comment caught him unawares during their first shared sentry duty. He would never have suspected that Romualdo was sensitive to the landscape, but it was true, it was beautiful here with the leafy bank of trees and the shifting light of a late autumn sunset.
‘Yes, it is . . .’ Julio replied, ‘especially now when nothing’s moving.’
&nbs
p; Neither of them could imagine how much they would come to hate this placid river, which would soon become their own stretch of hell.
On the far side of the river were the Russians, who until now had been retreating, leaving cities and villages at the mercy of the German Army, leaving the slender, graceful towers of Novgorod as defenceless as the crude wooden houses with their pitched roofs. They had marched through countless villages and no one had spoken to them as they passed, and so they had come to the Voljov, this calm river whose verdant banks and tall trees made it a beautiful place to rest, but it was just one more river, it could have been any river except for the fact that it was here that the Russians had decided to stop.
That afternoon, as they gazed at the scene, both men were convinced that this front was also temporary, contingent. If the Russians had retreated this far before their arrival, it seemed logical that they would now retreat even farther. This was the opinion of most of Julio’s comrades, and he did not argue with them, though from time to time he thought of the taxi meter running, the four-and-a-half-peseta fare that separated Franco from Puerto del Sol.
‘God knows where they’re going to send us,’ said Romualdo, looking up at the leaves on the trees, ‘once we cross the river . . .’
‘Probably to Leningrad,’ Julio suggested, ‘it’s close.’
‘I think I’d rather go to Moscow.’
‘Your brother said the same thing.’
Romualdo went back to looking at the river, but a moment later he smiled, then turned to Julio and stared at him.
‘You said Leningrad . . .’
‘Well, that’s what it’s called, isn’t it?’
‘No. The Germans call it Sankt Petersburg, so I guess we should too.’
The Frozen Heart Page 37