by Dennis Bock
This last room was the dimmest of the four, with only one electric light hanging from the stuccoed ceiling. The air was stale and damp. Two unoccupied stools sat in front of the mural. The three people in the room were sitting against the opposite wall, looking at the medical scene, and now us, while sipping from the glasses they had brought with them from the bar. They were Spanish. I gestured to the stools, and one man nodded and shrugged. We sat down and listened to the not-so-distant bombs pounding through the walls. After a few minutes Kajsa stood and said, “Take my hand.”
I did, and rose to my feet, saying, “I think we’re at the end of the line here.”
She led me out of the room and into a smaller side tunnel. We moved down it perhaps ten feet, crouching, and stopped in front of a chair on which sat a wooden crate full of empty bottles. This alcove had, I supposed, been used for storage.
She moved the crate and chair, then pulled open the small door hidden behind. “What about this? Where do you think this goes?”
“A trap door leading down from the bar?”
“Well . . .” she said, but without finishing her thought she slipped inside.
I lit a match, stepped in after her and looked down a steep set of narrow stairs.
It’s difficult to understand the impulse that told me to follow your mother like that, but I did. I suppose I already felt drawn to her, though I was trying to resist it. As I’ve said, it was a very unusual night. We walked, slightly hunched, down the stairs and along a cramped passageway for twenty or thirty paces before another explosive thud shook us. We journeyed deeper under the city. I struck match after match and walked slowly so as not to extinguish the flame. Occasionally, out of the dark appeared a crate or box or shovel or a bundle of clothing. It was difficult to guess from such objects who came down here, when they last had or why. There was no one in sight. We shouted out but heard no one answer.
We found no rooms off the tunnel, as there had been in the basement of the bar. It was just a narrow passageway, bricked in a low arch like a wine cellar. The path must have curved gently, for we’d entered it, I was almost certain, in a westward direction and now, if I had any sense of orientation left, were heading east toward the Retiro Park and the Prado Museum. It was difficult to tell since we couldn’t see farther than a few feet in front of us. As we walked, the walls of brick around us grew silent. The bombs had stopped falling.
“I think it’s this way,” she said.
“Why? This might go on for miles.”
“We just follow the wall,” she said. “It’ll lead us out somewhere.”
We walked for some time, and then I struck the last match. We were walking side by side and I looked at her face in the dim light. The dying flame disappeared into my fingertips, and a perfect dark surrounded us. We heard only our quiet breathing and footfalls. When she lit a cigarette lighter, we saw a large door, pushed it open, went down another series of stairs hewn from the rock and entered a large, frescoed room with dozens of niches carved into the walls at different heights. Each one, not much more than a small ledge, held a funeral urn.
Kajsa let the light die. “Listen,” she said.
The silence and darkness were total. We waited a minute or two, listening for vibrations coming down from the streets above. The flame flicked on again and we passed under a low overhang and through another short tunnel into a second frescoed room, also devoted to the ashes of the dead. But each of these urns, instead of resting in a niche, had been afforded its own small vestibule with a bench in front. People construct the strangest shrines to honour their dead. I remember thinking that. A cross on a hill. A pyramid. The hushed reverence for the dead spirals out of control to establish these odd fabrications of rock and clay. There is something beautiful in that. But also something very, very lonely.
*
I am beginning to understand that Ho is a very odd boy. I never required thanks after I took him on, only discipline. That he seems as aloof as a cat is fine with me. He is a beautiful child, his dark-gold skin not yet hardened into the tawny hide of these mountain dwellers. The future awaits. He does not limp or scowl or weep at night, at least that I know. May his dreams carry him off through the dark.
There are worse places for dreams, I suppose. I imagine myself at his age, caught in this vile nightmare. How would I have stood up to the test? It is not a thought I like to contemplate. These children are amazingly tough and have earned my silent reverence. What did my father use to say? Children are the heritage of the Lord.
*
While I am thinking about it I will tell you about another encounter you might rightly call absurd. It was on a warm, overcast day in April of that same year, 1937, just over a year ago, though in memory it belongs to a different century. I was walking toward the Gran Vía in good spirits. The unit by then was collecting and distributing between one-half and three-quarters of a gallon of blood per day, and, on average, performing three transfusions in either Madrid or the hills north of the city. I had left the clinic before the usual hour, giving myself an extra few minutes to pick out a gift for your mother. What I had planned for that afternoon, beyond the purchase, was a brief shortwave radio address. The demands on my time were enormous then, but the address would be transmitted to North America and therefore be well worth the effort. It was, of course, an exercise relating to the war. I had been approached by the Spanish government, through the Ministry of War, and had agreed to their request.
We’d returned only the day before from the front lines near Guadalajara, forty miles northeast, where we had photographed bridges, roads and various other points of interest as regards communications. This trip alone would give me ample fodder for my radio address. But so would Madrid, I remember thinking. I could talk about the indiscriminate bombing of its neighbourhoods and the wanton killing of innocent women and children. It was known that the Fascist bombs falling over Madrid carried, as well as high. explosives, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, much like the French 75 mm shells of the Great War, in order to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible. Too many times I had seen the angelic, blood-spattered faces of children. Too many times had their small, crushed bodies been placed before me on my operating tables.
I would say this was no longer war as we had once known it to be. The Fascist war was directed at the women and children of this great society. If you were once neutral, believing this an isolated struggle between two abstractions, the carnage demanded that you think again. Ours was a struggle against a murderous machine that would not stop killing until the machine itself was destroyed. I remember how your mother’s thinking had begun to influence my own. This was a fight against nihilism, I would say, a fight for the very existence of hope. The machine was run by the mad dictators Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Never before in history had the nations of the world had so much at stake. Never before had these nations been so united against such bloodthirsty fanaticism.
Apart from a single patrol plane flying over the city that afternoon, the atmosphere was calm and relaxed. Buses ran, the cafés were busy, the streets alive with workers on their way home for the afternoon siesta. The street I walked along, Valverde Street, was relatively quiet. The clock at the top of the Telefónica building, which had just come into view, read one-thirty. Up there, beside the clock, two men stood with a 20 mm AA Oerlikon gun, waiting for the next group of Heinkels or the big Italian Capronis to power in from the south. For a moment the war might have been a thousand miles off. The smell of cooking meat and olive oil and wood and coal-burning fires filled the air. Seeing and smelling this I realized I hadn’t eaten that day, and, wondering if I might steal ten minutes out of my schedule, I saw the green door of a restaurant, with El Escondido stencilled over the big plate-glass window, open directly across from me. A man staggered out, bleeding from a cut above his eye and supported by two others dressed in black leather jackets. Another man followed. These three looked t
o be of the same ilk as those who had harassed me on my first day here—overeager, bored, stupid brutes.
Of course, it was quite possible that the man they’d apprehended was of legitimate political interest; yet it was just as likely, elaborating from my own experience, that he had failed to sneer deeply enough, or spit in disgust, when speaking of Fascism, or that an acquaintance with some axe to grind had denounced him as a member of the Fifth Column. When they put him in the car idling at the curb, they were careful to push his head down gently, almost gingerly, under the rim of the open door. It was an oddly caring gesture. I looked into the man’s eyes as his head went under. Then all the doors closed and the car started off down the street, stopped briefly for traffic, turned left and was gone.
A half block up along the Gran Vía I found the perfume shop that had been recommended to me. I made my purchase quickly enough, scented with lavender and mint, and was again on my way. Another ten minutes of walking brought me to the address I was looking for, an old building adjacent to a small dirt square and a crater hole covered over in planking. There was a hardware store and a small café at street level. I followed the stairs up to the third floor and knocked at number 3D. The door was opened by a thin, pale young man who looked terribly deprived of sleep, with large dark circles under his eyes. He introduced himself as Paco, then led me down a long hallway to a large room, where I met the producer of the radio program. Jorge looked to be in his mid-thirties, and he asked me how I was, if I’d had any trouble finding the place, then offered me a glass of wine. It was their lunchtime, he said, and would I join them? He produced a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese from under a desk. His English was precise but very accented. His reading skills, he explained, were superior to his conversational ones. “We have time to eat something,” he said, and gestured at the control panel behind him. “I will explain this later. Please sit.”
He cut pieces of cheese from the wheel and laid them out on a plate. He did this very delicately and rapidly. His thin fingers shook only slightly and he moved them quickly so I wouldn’t notice that he no longer had fingernails. They’d been bitten down to nothing. I had seen this many times in Madrid. His voice was smooth and clear, and after dividing the cheese he pulled a large red sausage from a bag under his desk, then slid the sausage and knife over the desk. His colleague joined us, and we tore the stick of bread into three pieces. I was very hungry, I told them, and would have eaten something on Valverde Street but for the commotion I’d witnessed at the restaurant, the man being taken away.
“Do you think they were police?” I asked. “They put him in a car and drove him off.”
“Yes. Probably.”
“What do they do to these men?”
He put a finger-gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
“He didn’t look like a spy.”
“Tell me,” he said, “what does a spy look like?”
“But what if he’s a cook or a dishwasher, just any man?”
“Then he has a big problem. But if he has nothing to hide, a release will be granted—unless they shoot him before they understand their mistake.”
When we finished eating we turned our attention to the business at hand. I spoke my address into the radio-microphone. It went well, though my hands shook as I read from my notes. Afterwards Jorge thanked me, and assured me I shouldn’t worry so much about innocent men getting into trouble. Naturally, there would always be casualties of this sort. Still, walking home, I couldn’t help but wonder about the man I’d seen being ushered into the car, the hand tucking him in so gently. The restaurant on Valverde Street was quiet now. Only a few old men were there. It all looked very normal.
*
I remember digging in the dirt as a boy. I suppose that’s not so unusual. Girls skip rope, boys get themselves dirty any way they can. So there I was, digging a hole and putting a cat down there and covering it up with a sheet of wood. This old tom was more trusting than your average cat and didn’t seem to mind. I put him in, slid the plywood over his head and heard a few meows, but that was it. The hole was a foot or so deep. On such a hot day he might even have enjoyed the coolness. There was room enough for a cat twice his size to circle around, roll over and have a nice nap. A few minutes later I pulled the wood away and bent down to haul him up into the sunlight. The look he gave me made me feel very stupid, the typical cat look laden with boredom. He was through doing me favours. Then he lifted up his tail, showing me his hindquarters, and sauntered off.
Well, today I remembered that episode because the tunnel your mother and I got trapped in has been winding through my dreams these last few nights. I am thinking about it now, and what strikes me is how long we were down there and how different everything seemed to me. Of course, I found out exactly how long and how different when it was all over, but just then it was difficult to tell. I remember thinking there was no such thing as time down there, and no such person as Norman Bethune. It was a strange feeling. We walked for what seemed hours, these odd thoughts circling round in my head and doubling back again. Being underground can play tricks on your perceptions. I have never been fond of it. Being underground strikes me as very unnatural. We walked forever, it seemed. Your mother and I didn’t talk much. I suppose we were a bit too outside ourselves for words. We passed through doors and small rooms of no description, mostly empty except for discarded construction tools and gardening implements, shovels and pickaxes and so on, and then I began to wonder if it was possible to die down here in this maze of darkness with this beautiful stranger. Could these tunnels loop back upon themselves? Had that necropolis represented more than the memory of the dead?
We felt the walls and on we walked, using the flame only when we became unsure of our footing or when we found another door.
Your mother reached for my hand in the dark. I couldn’t help smiling. The world was ending and here I was, smiling because a pretty girl was holding my hand. The Lord’s mysterious ways, as my mother would say. I felt the walls with the other hand, reading them as I read the inside of an open chest or abdomen. Now we were inside the entrails, and here I was smiling. I said, “Light, please,” and your mother lit up the cup of her hand, and then the lighter failed and the darkness grew deeper. I stopped. “Try again,” I said, but that was the end of our seeing. Neither of us let go of the other’s hand from that point on, and my smile fell away. After twenty paces I tripped over a shovel, almost bringing her down with me. Ten paces farther, I tripped over a bag of sand. We rounded a corner, then another, and finally stumbled onto more stairs, at the top of which was a storage room with a vertical sliver of light showing in the corner of a door at the far end. When I pushed the door open, dimly lit stairs and a handrail led us up to where the grey morning flashed before us. We had walked under the city to the Retiro Park, a distance of some ten or twelve blocks.
We stood in the early-morning light blinking at the Crystal Palace, a great glass structure set near the west end of the grounds and empty but for the light filtering through its panes. No one else was present. The park was ours. In the heart of the city, volunteers and Civil Defence teams were looking for survivors and extracting the dead from heaps of rubble. But we saw only ginkgo and birch and plane trees, benches and sky, tree sparrows and chickadees and white wagtails watching us from their branches. Behind us, encompassing the door we had emerged from, was a large rock garden on the edge of a small, mist-covered pond in front of the palace. The ducks floating on its calm surface were still sleeping, heads tucked under their wings. After the tunnels, the air was fresh. We saw no planes, no wisps of smoke from the bombings. The sky was quiet. Testing the door, we pushed through and stood there in the Crystal Palace and toasted with imaginary champagne an imaginary end of the war. It is something I thought you should know, and something to think about, that the first night I spent with your mother was under a burning city.
*
This morning I was awakened by the
sound of shuffling outside my hut. The boots making most of it belonged to five Japanese prisoners as ragged and hungry and young as the Chinese escorting them past my door. It is hard to imagine such men committing themselves to this wicked enterprise without being grossly coerced and manipulated. I cannot explain it, how people and nations rise up in the name of evil. I can tell you for certain, though, that these Japanese boys come not from the wealthy families of the generals and robber-barons they fight for here but from the unemployed and working classes they’ve been tricked into fighting against. On both sides, it is a sad waste of youth.
I have been thinking lately how to express my thoughts, not simply my needs, to Ho. I’m sure he is a clever boy in his own language. Jean Ewen—the nurse here (before she left)—told me only that he had family in Yan’an and enjoyed reciting the poems of Liu Bang of the Han Dynasty. It goes without saying that I’m unfamiliar with Han Dynasty poetry, so at least in my eyes, this marks this youngster as special. The things we don’t know perhaps impress us more than they should. Be that as it may, his practical abilities are what make the difference. With a straight razor, for example. On Sunday mornings the young poet sits me down and applies a steaming towel to my face with the strict authority of a Turkish barber. A smoother shave I have never known. Without a word he flutters about my head like a pigeon on a statue, efficiently hacking off a week’s worth of grey whiskers. In all this time—nine months and counting—I am relieved to report that he has never drawn blood, not so much as a nick or scratch. It is difficult now, tonight, as I exhaust this ribbon of its voice, to imagine a time when my beard could do without his clever, wordless razor.