That moment seemed to last a lifetime. All three knew what Eugenio and Julio should do, and all three knew that they would not do it. Julio and Eugenio knew that Pancho was not the first nor would he be the last, that one more desertion does not change the course of a war. Julio and Pancho knew that Eugenio would never kill a friend. Eugenio and Pancho did not know that Julio would never kill someone who might be useful to him at some point.
‘Go,’ Eugenio said, lowering his rifle, ‘go on, you fucking traitor !’
Pancho started sideways across the river, turning back at every step, still pointing his gun until he knew he was safe. Then, standing on a boulder halfway across, he stopped, tied a white handkerchief to the barrel of his gun and took out his identity card.
‘I’m not the traitor, Eugenio,’ he yelled, ‘you’re the traitors. Traitors to your country, to your independence, to the law your generals swore to uphold. Long Live the Spanish Republic! Long Live the People’s Glorious Struggle!’
‘Fuck you, you bloody Red!’ Eugenio raised his rifle and was about to fire when Julio stopped him with a furious swipe.
‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ He took Eugenio’s gun. ‘Now you decide to fire? If you were going to shoot him you should have done it before, moron. What are you trying to do, wake everyone up so they can all come down here and see that we let him escape? You want the both of us to end up in front of a firing squad ?’
Eugenio shook his head, then he started to cry, and there was so much grief and despair and loneliness in those tears that for an instant Julio Carrión González was a child again and he hugged his friend until Pancho was on the other side of the river, until Pancho’s cry, ‘Tovarich, spanski tovarich! Don’t shoot, I’m coming over!’, faded into the distance.
‘I’m going back, Julio.’ For Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, who would go on to fight for months at the Leningrad front before his battalion was repatriated, the war ended that night. ‘Hitler can go screw himself, I’m going home, I don’t understand this war . . . You saw him, didn’t you? You saw how much he hated us. But still he was able to befriend us, march with us for thousands of kilometres, fight alongside us, save our men when they were wounded, shoot his own comrades . . .’ His last remark seemed incomprehensible so Eugenio felt compelled to explain it. ‘The people he thought of as his own - Russians - people from a different country, who speak a language he doesn’t even understand, “my comrades”, he called them. How much hatred does it take not to break down, to be a Spanish soldier fighting for the Russians against his own people?’
Julio Carrión did not answer straight away. ‘I don’t think he’s fighting for the Russians, Eugenio.’ He spoke slowly because he needed to be certain of what he was saying. ‘And I don’t think he hates us personally, or that he hates the Spanish. I think that what he hates is Franco, the Falangists, the Nazis . . . He’s fighting with the Russians, but not for the Russians. I think he’s fighting for Spain.’
‘For Spain?’ Eugenio attempted a sardonic laugh. ‘But Spain isn’t even involved in this war!’
‘Really?’ Julio smiled. ‘Then what are we doing here? We’re allies with the Germans, and they don’t have many allies. And if Germany loses the war . . .’
‘Then we lose too . . .’
‘That’s what he must be thinking. And if that happens, then his comrades - his real comrades, the Spanish republicans - will have won. That’s why he’s on their side.’
Eugenio squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them again there were no tears.
‘I’m going back, Julio,’ he said simply, ‘I’m going back.’
Well, I’m not, thought Julio Carrión González. Pancho’s desertion had triggered something in his mind. He had just discovered that, although it was still a threat, his past might well turn out to offer him security against the future, because regardless of who lost the war, he could win, and being on the winning side was all he cared about.
‘Eugenio, can I ask you a favour?’ A couple of days later, while they were resting in their dugout, he had already begun to fashion a plan. ‘The other night, that thing with Pancho . . . I’ve always thought I wouldn’t be wounded, that nothing would happen to me, but if something does happen . . . In the bottom of my kitbag there’s a leather-bound Bible, it’s quite beaten up, you can hardly make out what it says on the spine. It was my father’s Bible, he gave it to me when we went to see him the day before we enlisted, I don’t know if you remember . . .’ Eugenio nodded. ‘Well, it occurred to me . . . I don’t have any brothers here, not like you, so if anything does happen to me . . . I don’t know why I’m asking, I’m not really religious or anything, but . . . would you bring that Bible to me?’
The subject was never mentioned again, the war went on, ever the same, ever worse, the interminable marching, the cold, the frost, the corpses, the blood, the lice, orders to advance, orders to retreat, major offensives that melted into nothing, resounding victories that never came. It was brutal, monotonous, mind-numbing, but its cruelty did not prevent them from fulfilling their promises. The day Julio found out that Romualdo had woken at dawn with frostbite, he did not waste time finding Eugenio. There was only one thing to do, and he knew it, others in his division had done it before: he loaded his pistol, headed straight for the small field hospital and screamed that he would gun down anyone who amputated so much as one of Romualdo Sánchez Delgado’s toes.
When Eugenio found him, he still had the pistol trained on the puzzled German doctor, who, through an interpreter, repeated over and over that the Führer’s army would provide Romualdo with first-class prosthetics free of charge.
‘Tell him I’ll kill him,’ Julio said to the interpreter, his eyes still locked on the doctor’s face.
In the end, the doctor shook his head, disappeared and came back with two ampoules of yellowish liquid which the Spanish nurse recognised immediately.
‘It’s to stop him getting gangrene,’ she explained as she injected Romualdo first in one leg, then the other, ‘but I’m not promising anything.’
Some days later, Julio Carrión guessed where he was when he saw the same woman’s face, but the first thing that he saw when he woke in pain was his father’s Bible.
‘That lunatic friend of yours brought it in the day before yesterday, the one who was with you when you were raising hell,’ the nurse said, smiling. ‘He said it meant a lot to you. There’s a letter from him inside, I guess because he is one of the ones on his way home.’
‘What happened to me?’
‘You have a head injury. It didn’t seem serious, but then you lost consciousness and it’s taken you quite a while to come round. How do you feel ?’
‘My head hurts. A lot.’
‘Take it easy, I’ll give you something for the pain. And don’t worry, I’ll send you to Riga with the next convoy. Your brother’s friend will be going with you - the one who came in with frostbite.’
‘Romualdo?’
Nine months later, in the Spanish War Hospital in Riga, Julio Carrión said the name again when he recognised the back of the head of a lieutenant who was moving an armchair to the window to enjoy the illusory October sun.
‘Julito!’ Romualdo recognised the voice before he’d even got to his feet, ‘It’s good to see you, macho!’
‘What are you doing here?’ Romualdo had a spectacular bandage around his neck and a smaller one on his left hand, ‘When I heard, I couldn’t believe it. You do know that if you stop getting yourself wounded, they’ll discharge you and send you home. Or maybe you’ve fallen in love with Riga . . .?’
Romualdo laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying life here in the rearguard . . .’
Julio smiled. His friend was right, his life was better than it had ever been.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘in my case, the neurologist let me go home.’
‘Yeah, I know . . .’
Julio gestured to the stripes on Romualdo’s uniform. ‘They’ve promoted you again?’
‘Yeah, at this rate, by the time the russkis kill me, I’ll be a colonel ...’
They had been injured at much the same time, on a front even harder and crueller than the hell of Voljov. Romualdo had originally contracted frostbite in the last week of December 1942, Julio had been wounded on 1 January 1943. Their twin misfortunes had spared them certain death in the slaughterhouse of Krasny Bor, but now they found themselves once more in the very same hospital to which Romualdo, having been discharged six months earlier, had just returned.
‘La Luna?’ Julio suggested as they stepped outside
‘La Luna,’ Romualdo happily agreed.
‘Have you had any news of Eugenio?’
‘He’s got a girlfriend apparently. A student, pretty ugly too, from what Arturo said in his letter . . . Otherwise everything’s fine, he’s back at university and it looks like they’re going to appoint him head of the Spanish University Syndicate, because obviously he’s a hero these days, but I don’t know . . . My mother is the one who usually writes, and she makes everything sound wonderful because she wants me to come home too.’
The Luna bar, which was owned by a disabled Spanish veteran who had married a Latvian girl, was almost full, but the Spanish soldiers at the tables were in no mood to sing or call for a guitar. Almost all of them were drinking alone and in silence, neither talking to their comrades, nor paying attention to the few painted ladies who would get up from the bar and wander slowly round the room.
‘Well, this looks cheerful,’ grumbled Romualdo, thinking back to the cheering and excitement of the previous winter.
‘What do you expect?’ asked Julio.
‘I don’t know . . .’ His friend fell silent as they were served the drinks. ‘Apparently the Germans are developing some secret weapon, some kind of paint, well, not paint exactly but some kind of coating that makes tanks invisible.’
‘Invisible tanks?’
‘Well, something like that, I don’t know . . .’ Romualdo stared at his glass. ‘I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently the paint or whatever surrounds the tanks with a kind of mist that makes them invisible. One of the captains told me, and he’s on good terms with the Germans . . .’
Julio looked at him and lifted his glass; he knew what he was hearing. Secret weapons, miraculous bombs, magic aeroplanes, uniforms made from bullet-proof fabric. He had been away from the front line for a long time but even he had heard stories like this, the old wives’ tales that had proliferated since Stalingrad, the battle that was to have secured them victory but which had ended in disaster and defeat. But he simply smiled and sipped his drink. War reveals another side of a man, and Julio Carrión González had come to respect Romualdo Sánchez Delgado, a man he would never have trusted in peacetime.
‘Apparently we’re being shipped out,’ his colonel had whispered to him in that same bar less than twenty-four hours earlier. ‘It’s not official yet, but they’re about to give the order. We’ve known for a long time that Madrid doesn’t want us here any more, since things started turning ugly back there.’
Colonel Arenas glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
‘I think it’s disgraceful, but then they didn’t ask for my opinion.’
‘I think so too, Colonel, you know that.’ Julio leaned forward, placing both fists on the table, and his superior officer gave a satisfied smile.
‘Even the generals in Madrid realise that they can’t ship us all home at the same time, because obviously that wouldn’t look good. So they’re thinking about leaving a couple of battalions of volunteers who will work directly with the Wehrmacht . . . The Blue Legion, they want to call it, have you heard about it?’
‘No, sir.’ This was the truth.
‘The thing is, if they disband the division, that means disbanding General Headquarters, which is tantamount to leaving thousands of soldiers on their own in the arse-end of nowhere. Anyone who joins the Blue Legion will be considered a German solider, so officially Spain won’t be involved in the war. They’re intending to leave a detachment of the Guardia Civil in place, but they’re just here as Military Police - they never do anything that isn’t in the rule book . . .’ Arenas was studying Julio as though seeing him for the first time. ‘And the way things are going now, we might have to bend a few rules, know what I mean?’ Knowing what was at stake in this comment, Julio did not blink, but held the man’s gaze. ‘That’s why I thought I’d suggest to High Command that they create a new posting, and I thought you would be good, because it’s a job that would suit you down to the ground.’
Twenty-four hours later, sitting at a table in the same bar, Julio was replaying every word.
‘OK ...’ As Romualdo raised his glass, he decided what he would tell his colonel. ‘Let’s drink to invisible tanks.’
Julio Carrión González was not on board any of the three trains that repatriated the Blue Division in the last months of 1943. At the beginning of 1944, he was the most mysterious Spaniard in Riga. He had a small but comfortable apartment in a magnificent building in the most elegant part of the city, a sizeable income to judge from the way he squandered money, but no job, no responsibilities and no position that anyone knew of. He wore civilian clothes, though both his Spanish and his German uniforms still hung in his wardrobe, he enjoyed no particular diplomatic immunity or protection, but he was well known to the Guardia Civil responsible for order among the volunteers who had decided to stay, and was also familiar in a number of the offices at Wehrmacht headquarters.
‘What I’m offering is not a cushy job, believe me . . .’ Colonel Arenas had detailed the disadvantages of the post after Julio had accepted the position. ‘Or maybe it is, it certainly could be, but it’s also very dangerous. After I leave, the Spanish Army will officially have no presence in Riga. So you will cease to exist. I’ll give you a safe conduct before I leave, but I don’t know how long it will be valid if the war drags on. By the time I get back to Madrid, the pansies from the ministry may well have cancelled the operation, so I can’t give you any guarantees. At worst, you might find yourself completely isolated here a couple of months from now. If that happens, it’ll be up to you to make your own way back. And I don’t know if the Germans will be much help, if we double-cross them.’
‘At your service, Colonel, don’t worry about me.’
Julio Carrión González was one of the few Spanish soldiers in Russia who had no wish to go home, and the only man wounded in combat who was prepared to lend a hand at General Headquarters in Riga instead of making the most of his convalescence, getting drunk every night in La Luna. ‘I can’t just stand by and do nothing, Colonel, while my comrades at the front . . .’ Arenas had been so impressed by this display of gallantry when he first met Julio, that he had offered him a job as an aide-de-camp until the doctors pronounced him fit to go back to the front. Julio Carrión González knew that this would never happen, since the doctor had advised him that if he continued to suffer the savage migraines resistant to all painkillers, he would have to be sent home, and Julio had had every intention of continuing to pretend to suffer from them.
Working with Colonel Arenas, Julio discovered that life in the rearguard was tailor-made for someone like him. After a year and a half at the front, he was as dazzled by Riga as he had been by Madrid when he had first arrived there from Torrelodones. War seemed remote in the streets and the boulevards, the cafés and the restaurants of this picturesque city, which, though small, had cosmopolitan ambitions and which boasted a flourishing black market. In Riga there were ample opportunities to grow rich.
And so, when his convalescence was finally over and he was definitively refused permission to return to the front, Julio quickly auctioned off his seat on the train home. Colonel Arenas, who knew nothing of Julio’s financial motives for staying, interpreted his reluctance to return as proof of his devotion to the cause and authorised the change which his assistant had requested: ‘Don’t make me go back now, Colonel, let me stay here, let me d
o what I can to help my comrades . . .’
Arenas never regretted having acceded to his aide’s request. He liked Carrión, he was funny and immensely likeable, constantly telling jokes, making strings of coloured handkerchiefs appear from his pockets. Carrión knew all the best places, the liveliest bars, the finest restaurants, the most discreet brothels, he knew where to get cigarettes, brandy, perfume, even morphine. It was a pleasure to take him to the receptions and tourist excursions organised to entertain high-ranking officers, since all were charmed by the young man. But Colonel Arenas, an upright, generous, almost gentle man, was no fool. It was because of this, and because he suspected that his protégé might well be capable of doing anything to get ahead, that it occurred to the colonel to leave a man behind in Riga, a covert link between the volunteers of the Blue Legion and himself and in turn a link with the Spanish High Command. If Carrión had refused the position, he would have abandoned the whole idea. But he had known that Carrión would accept.
What Colonel Arenas would never know was that Julio Carrión González would step off a train at Orléans on 25 April 1944. The retreat of the German Army from the Eastern Front was so sudden that it put an end to Julio’s plans of getting rich, and robbed him of the almost limitless funds in the account maintained by the War Office in Madrid. But in the hotel where he found a room for the night, no one asked for explanations.
At the time, Europe was teeming with Spaniards - civilians and soldiers, exiles and volunteers, men and women fighting for one side or another. There were so many of them in Orléans that it did not take him long to find them. By the time he did, he had bought himself some cheap French clothes and in his pocket was the JSU card which he had hidden between the flyleaf and the cover of his father’s Bible three years earlier, on his last night in Madrid. At the time, he had thought it might prove useful if he was captured by the Russians. Now, he had other plans.
The Frozen Heart Page 39