by Betty Burton
Alexander said nothing. It seemed to Eve that it was Dimitri and not Alex who was the senior member of the panel or committee or whatever it was that the people who had just left the room constituted. ‘I will explain to Miss Anders if maybe you like to eat. Cantina has snoek from USSR, good pie, much el ajo.’
Alexander rose. ‘I’ll try to find some corned-beef sandwiches; everybody’s breath smells like coal-gas without any more el garlico. I’ll see you before you leave, if you don’t mind, Eve.’
With Alex gone, Eve felt at a bit of a disadvantage. If she had been the one to lay down the rules for last night’s encounter, the rules here were very different. However, Dimitri Vladim made no attempt to change his earlier formal address. ‘Mrs Alexander is embarrassed. You come to door, she does not know Miss Anders is connected with enquiry.’
‘Please, Major, no more flannel. Why is everyone so touchy? What did Sophie Wineapple die of? Plague? Typhoid?’
‘No, no, no. She drink… take? I forget what is the word,’ he moved papers about, searching, but did not find what he wanted. ‘Químico? No…’
‘She took poison?’
He nodded. ‘No. I cannot think of correct word. It is work of commissar to understand. She is good nurse, good. Why?’
‘Why should she kill herself? I have no idea.’
‘Is my job to discover truth if possible. Understand questions?’ He indicated the empty chairs.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you. I make… atonement for your anger. Is right word, atonement?’
‘Make amends? Put things right? Atonement is too strong, but I still think that you could have handled me a little more gently instead of pouncing on me.’
He frowned a little and then smiled. ‘You did not handle Dimitri so gently, Miss Anders.’
She eyed him, a hint of a provocative smile at the comers of her mouth. ‘You want me to make… atonement?’
‘That would be most satisfactory, Miss Anders.’
‘Damn it, Dimitri, what are we doing playing love-games in a room where you’ve been holding an enquiry about a woman who took poison? There are times when I can’t believe the way I behave. What I shall be like when I have been here another year, I hate to think.’
‘Another…?’
The half-asked question hung in the air. Another year? Since she had been moving about the country daily, close to the war zones, seeing the growing dearth of even the most basic necessities, doubts had been growing in her unconscious mind. Now, when she came to think of a year hence, she could see the muddle of it all. How could the Republic keep going unless some of the democratic nations came to its aid?
Another year?
All the pieces suddenly fell into place. The Republic would not last another year. It was Dimitri who had made her realize this.
She could hardly get out of the hospital grounds fast enough. The tram she rode back into the city was slow, giving her time to look and think, mostly to think about what had happened at the hospital. What right had they to question her like that? It had been almost an interrogation. Who were they anyway? Why was Alex taking part? The whole episode was distressing.
Suddenly she felt hot. Her pulse began to race and her hands to tremble. Her heart thumped and raced as though going out of control. Perspiration was cold on her forehead. It was as though oxygen had gone from the air. If she did not get out quickly, then she would lose control. Pushing her way to the exit, she jumped off as soon as the tram slowed down, and held on to some railings.
This was not the first time that she had found herself panicking over nothing. In an air-raid, or under gunfire, or when negotiating a narrow pass with a drop on one side, she was calm and cool-headed. Alarm seized her when she least expected it; a terrible, frightening dread would surge through her body until she would have to fight against the urge to run.
A man of about fifty, wearing a beret, thick fisherman’s jumper and workman’s trousers and boots, peered at her through round-rimmed glasses. ‘¡Cuidado! ¿Mai? ¿Enfermo?’
Her mind was sluggish. ‘No. Just a bit unwell… ah…’
‘Will you listen to that? English, the only language I understand. Are you not well?’
‘I just came over a bit faint. It was probably the coffee I had earlier, it tasted stewed to death.’
‘That’ll do it every time. Full of caffeine, y’know. D’you think you should sit for a bit? You could come along with me… it’s just here on the comer, the canteen… cantina. Y’see I’ll get the hang of the Spanish given time.’ He held out a hand. ‘Michael O’Dowd. Pleased to meet a body who isn’t speaking in tongues.’
‘Eve Anders.’ His kindly concern and warm Dublin accent were calming.
‘So are you coming wid me? I have t’be there, t’lift the sacks around for the girls. You need a reviver.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘You’ll not, you’re as pale as a ghost and I’ll be for ever wond’ring if you didn’t fall under a bus if I don’t see the roses back in your cheeks. Ah, you’re smiling already. That’s better. Look, we’re nearly there.’ By now he was gently holding her elbow and guiding her along the pavement.
Outside the closed doors of a municipal building was a queue of mostly women and children who closed ranks and followed the man with their eyes as he nodded and raised a hand. ‘¡Hola! ¡Hola! Buenos tardes. Am I right, or am I saying something shocking? One morning I wished them all a Merry Christmas.’
‘Michael, oh good, you’re here. There’s been rats in again…’
‘Madge, Madge, will you just hold your horses a minute. This is Eve, she’s from England, and she’s in need of a cup of camomile.’
The woman was tall and thin, with short hair like a man. ‘Dear man, why didn’t you say. Sit you down, my dear, and we’ll have you on your feet in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
Eve was suddenly crying. ‘I’m sorry. I feel such a fool.’
‘Ah, go on, have a good cry while you’re at it,’ Michael O’Dowd said. ‘Tears is good remedies, I use them all the time. Now you just sit there and drink Madge’s brew, then if you’ve not’n better to do, you can give us a hand.’
At once, so it seemed, everything that had gone awry when she was on the tram, slid back into place. She was back in a world that she could make sense of.
So it was of this chance meeting that Eve wrote for the first short article that would start her brief career as a freelance correspondent for a London newspaper, and very soon for several others in English-speaking countries.
‘We were so hungry…’
It is Wednesday and the food situation in this city is as bad today as it was Tuesday, Monday and all the days that have preceded it for months and months. Two hours in a queue for a single onion, ‘not big enough to make tears’. That is what food-shortage can mean. But a single onion can brighten a thin stew.
Wednesday is the day I came to know something of the lives of the people of Barcelona.
A single onion and a turnip can be the basis of a stew, a little salt, a chilli and plenty of water. The Republic can survive on stew warmed with a determined spirit. None shall pass! And they mean it. ¡No pasarán!
Wednesday is the day I saw hunger at close quarters. I spent this Wednesday helping distribute milk rations and bread. The cantina is run by members of the Society of Friends. On duty today were Madge Pickawa from Exeter, Mike O’Dowd from Dublin, Helene du Bois from Tours, and Rachel Rozen from I never found out where.
Celeste, two Isabellas and Maria are housewives in Barcelona who come here every day to cook whatever is available, to clean, to knit socks for babies and darn elbows for orphaned children.
The cantina is housed in the courtyard of a municipal building. There is a huge canvas suspended beneath the courtyard’s glass roof. It was originally intended to keep out the sun, but now serves as protection from splintering glass when the city is being shelled.
A child of eight, a thin boy, faints while waiting in li
ne for his milk ration. Yesterday he had only turnip for lunch, then a little rice and some lettuce for supper. The cup of milk in the courtyard is the little boy’s breakfast. Women fuss over him. He says: ‘We have no bread because we have eaten the ration. We were all so hungry.’
A girl. Older, maybe thirteen, but self-possessed as a woman. Madge Pickawa says that she comes every day to collect her family’s allocation of milk. She wears severe black like a widow, and she stands serenely, waiting, her long, fair hair, scraped back from her high golden-brown forehead, is tied with a black bow and falls to her waist. In a year or two, she is going to be a beautiful woman. I wonder why the women push her to the front of the queue. Is she the daughter of someone important?
‘Marita? Marita is in a hurry and must get back to her children.’
‘She looks young enough to be at school.’
‘Marita is a schoolgirl, she is fourteen. Since her mother died last month, Marita is the mother of her brothers and sisters. She is worried to leave them alone in the house, because of the air-raids. She has so much to do, we see that she goes first.’
E. V. Anders – Barcelona, 1937
It was late afternoon when she got back to the Paradiso. She found Alex, wrapped in an old sheepskin jacket, sitting hugging her knees. ‘It’s bloody cold. Want to share it? I sent the little botones for something to drink. I asked for tea, but he brought wine. Gave him a good tip too.’
‘What did you give him?’
‘I don’t know. Money. He’s the bellboy, you give him money, he’s supposed to bring you tea.’ She sounded crotchety and imperious and was smoking furiously. Eve had seen her in this sort of mood on other occasions.
‘Alex, there are times when I could cheerfully strangle you.’ Alexander looked quite shocked at the tone of her normally polite driver. Eve didn’t give her a chance to reply but hurried off through an archway that she knew led to the kitchens and through which she and Dimitri had come in quietly last night. Dimitri had given the botones three cigarettes. Eve now gave him another two and, holding up two fingers, bargained with him.
When the tea with little dishes of milk and sugar arrived, Alexander said, ‘Why wouldn’t he do that for me?’
‘Because you treated him like you’re inclined to treat the rest of us at times. Hell, Alex, you don’t know very much about the people with whom you are supposed to have thrown in your lot, do you? A bellboy isn’t here just to please you.’
‘I know that.’
‘You need to stop being lady of the manor.’
‘Who says I was lady of the manor?’
‘Your entire style says it. When I held open the door for you, you got into the Mercedes but you didn’t see me, you didn’t say, “Thanks, Eve.” You took it for granted that I would shut the door behind you.’
‘Did I do that?’
Eve nodded, handed her a cup of tea and offered her milk and sugar. ‘It’s the way you are. You stick your head in the engine of a truck, talk with a roll-up pinched between your fingers, but that doesn’t make you one of Us, one of the Popular Front, one of the common people.’ Eve smiled. ‘And you just took that tea as though you’ve had a maid all your life.’
‘I have. When Carl, my husband, wanted to rile me, he would call me Baroness von Alexander.’
‘Your husband?’
Alexander nodded. ‘He’s in a concentration camp somewhere over there.’ She pointed in the general direction of the west, to where the front line now sliced the country almost from top to bottom – the greater portion being behind the fascist line.
‘I’m sorry. That must be very tough for you.’
‘Not as tough as it must be for him.’ She plucked at the woolly coat collar. ‘Carl’s mulatto, a half-caste. The Generals do love the mixed-races don’t they?’ she said bitterly. ‘Not true mulatto – American Negro and Swiss. Carl’s mother is Swiss. Odd things happen when people fall in love. If they execute him, I wouldn’t have any reason to live.’
You can be so wrong about people.
It seemed suddenly not to matter a damn that Alex’s manner was irritatingly imperious. Her husband was a black man and he was in the hands of people whose dream for the world was of a pure, white race.
‘I’m so sorry, Alex, I never knew. My little nigglings about driving the Vipps must have been a pain in the neck, with that…’
‘I’ve always conceded that you have a point. OK, it may not have appeared like that, but you really don’t see the whole picture. There are some visitors, MPs like Pollitt, who probably wouldn’t mind at all being bumped around in the back of a pick-up truck, or being delivered to Madrid with a load of onions, but if we were to offer an onion-ride to an American Senator – no matter how Democratic – he’s not likely to come back and then aid stops coming this way.’
‘But if he’s driven around in style, he might think that we don’t want the aid.’
‘Human nature being what it is, things don’t usually work like that, Eve.’ She smiled and took out her paraphernalia for making cigarettes on a little roll-up machine. ‘Thank you for the tea. And thanks for the lesson on etiquette, or is that not the word one should use now.’
‘The word is, good manners, Alex. Which is what etiquette is supposed to be. I believe the silly rules came about when people who wanted to be important started to put tall things on their heads.’ Alexander looked sideways at Eve, offered her one of the two cigarettes she had produced, and put a flame to them both. ‘Explain, please.’
‘Once a human being sticks something on his head – makes himself taller, more important, etcetera – he makes sure that everyone realizes that this makes him something special. But that’s not enough; give a man a high hat and he’ll add a rosette and then a plume and then a whole bunch of plumes. Then it’s high boots, spurs, long tail-coats, swords and bucklers, breast ribbons and medals. It is impossible to approach such a man with mere good manners; one needs to know the rules. I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.’
‘Etiquette.’
‘Oh yes, good manners.’
Alexander suddenly burst out laughing, spilling a little of her tea over the coat. ‘Leave it. If Carl ever claims it back, I shall remember to tell him that story.’ Her cigarette had gone out, so she applied the long flame of her lighter again and sat quietly until, apparently apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Who is Anders? What is she?’
Eve was more prepared than she had been a few weeks back to fend off questions about herself. ‘She’s a truck-driver, a good one, given half a chance.’
‘Ozz thinks that you should have the overhauled Bedford.’
‘He’s right, I should.’
‘Who will drive the Vipp?’
‘You could. You don’t have to be a mechanic to prove yourself one of Us.’
‘Us?’
‘Ordinary people.’
‘So, Anders is one of the people?’
‘Anders is a truck-driver.’
‘OK, you win. You can have the Bedford and go on supplies, but not based at Albacete.’
Eve’s heart leapt. ‘You mean it, Alex? Wow! Thanks a million. Have some more tea.’
They sat side by side with Alexander’s, or rather, Carl’s, sheepskin motoring jacket round their knees, talking inconsequentially about the condition of the hotel and whether it ever was Paradiso, until Alexander in her sudden, point-blank way asked, ‘Was it with you the major slept last night?’
‘You have some cheek! What sort of a question is that?’
‘A concerned one, for goodness’ sake. Vladim did not return to his room until morning, or should I say, slunk to his room. I may not be much of a senior aid-worker, but it’s what I am. You are assigned to me, and I don’t want anything unpleasant to happen to you.’
‘Nothing unpleasant did. Nothing will. I can take care of myself very well.’
Alexander went silent, frowning and fiddling with shreds of tobacco, nipping them off, balling them and flicking them into a flowerpot
. ‘Something unpleasant did happen to the American nurse.’
‘Major Vladim hinted that she committed suicide.’
‘He shouldn’t have.’
‘He didn’t know the word. He said químico which I thought meant chemist or chemical. I suppose it must have been Aspirin?’
Alex shook her head. ‘Wineapple was pregnant, many weeks so… She tried to abort it with a drug.’
‘That’s awful! And it killed her? It wasn’t suicide, it was accidental?’
‘She’s still dead.’
Eve remembered grim stories of knitting needles, penny royal, concoctions brewed in back-streets, young girls and women dying of septicaemia, bleeding to death, incomplete abortions.
‘Is that why that matron asked me about Sophie haemorrhaging?’
‘Probably.’
Eve remembered now how concerned she had been when Sophie had got straight up from her sickbed and insisted upon riding strenuously over some rough terrain. Was that what she had been trying to do that day? ‘She was a good horsewoman. She said that she was practically born in the saddle. What a terrible waste. What about the man? Wouldn’t he marry her?’
Alexander began rolling again, but Eve forestalled her and offered her one of the few Spanish cigarettes she had left. ‘What about the man? Oh, yes, what about him? That is what we should all like to know.’ Eve waited, knowing that Alex had more to say. Alex was angry, she drew deeply on the strong cigarette, pulling in her cheeks and sending out a plume of smoke like a small volcano erupting. ‘She reported that she was raped. All that she would say was that her attacker smelled of antiseptic.’
‘Someone who worked at the hospital?’
‘Possibly. Probably. Who knows now?’
‘She must have told someone then?’
‘Another nursing sister with whom she shared a room. She thinks it was a man Wineapple knew, maybe even worked with. Possibly a doctor, possibly Russian or Slav. That is the extent of our information.’
‘Why must it have been someone she knew?’
‘Because her friend says that she wanted Wineapple to report him, but she said, who would believe her word against his. No one would believe a respected man would be capable of it. Which may well be true. I mean, who would believe that somebody one worked with every day would heave himself on to you like some wild beast? So, when you turned up today, I think we hoped that you knew something, hoped that she might have said something to you.’