A Forbidden Love

by Kerry Postle

  ‘I won’t be back until much later. Out for the rest of the evening, I’m sorry to say. Please excuse me Luis, Maria.’

  ‘Oh, not at all, Doctor.’

  ‘Please, be careful Papa.’

  There was no resistance, only gratitude in the young couple’s eyes.

  It was still light when the doctor stepped outside into the street. The air was warm and heavy but he inhaled deeply at any rate. An unstoppable force had filled the apartment and he knew that it was only going to suffocate him if he got in its way. Relief to be away from it steadied his breathing. He stood with his back against the old, wooden door and laughed.

  He’d left his daughter and Luis de los Rios alone. He didn’t know if they would end up with one another forever, that was up to them, but he could see that they were right together. Always had been. Even when they were in Fuentes de Andalucía. And if they belonged together he wanted to make the path, that had in truth been spectacularly perilous to this point, as smooth as possible. War, geography, family, circumstances – gargantuan obstacles – had all failed to block their way. And he, for one, would do so no more.

  He wanted to give them some time, to talk, and say, and do, all the things that needed to be said, and done. And if they still wanted to be together after that, well then, he would give them his blessing. As he walked off, into the sunset, he laughed some more.

  Chapter 58

  Malaga, 1943

  Dear reader,

  I’ve written many letters in the course of this novel and so I thought it only fair I write one more to you.

  The first thing is that yes, Luis and I did get married, with my father’s blessing.

  The second thing is that no, we don’t have any babies, though not for lack of trying. We’d like some, but to like and to have inhabit completely different worlds.

  As for Lola and Richard, let’s just say the Second World War has complicated their plans.

  Life’s like that – uncontrollable, or at least, beyond the control of man and woman. Yes, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about life, it’s that it’s as haphazard as a game of cards where you have no say in the cards you’re dealt only in the way you play them.

  I’ve written over three hundred pages and as I look at the pile of sheets on the desk before me, I feel quite giddy. It’s as if I’ve performed some magic trick with the cards in my hand; with a shuffle here and a sleight of hand there, I’ve given it order and meaning. What was random now has sense. I say again, we cannot choose what life throws at us, but we can choose how we shape it, what we do with it, and that’s what I’ve done here.

  Not that any of this reads like the work of a Calderón or a Cervantes. Though I wouldn’t know as I’ve still not managed to finish a single thing by either. Nor is it likely to appear on any highbrow reading list, with all the romance that’s in it. Still, I hope you don’t think any the less of it, or me, for that. Rather I hope you see it for what it is: a story written by an ordinary person of, I confess, unexceptional qualities, who makes many mistakes, loses loved ones, but who is destined, for whatever reason, to live through and survive extraordinarily desperate times.

  So many people died between 1936–1939, so many women, so many girls … brutal, meaningless deaths. It’s not for the likes of me to express the horror of murderous acts I cannot comprehend and do not wish to visit. But it is my duty to tell a tale that I do know, of a simple friendship with a fourteen-year-old girl, and to shout about the shocking truth of what happened to her. The crime perpetrated against Paloma has to be acknowledged, as well as the joy and love she brought into the world. I am ordinary in so many ways, yet extraordinary in one particular: I am alive, and as such destiny has assigned me a very special role – to dedicate my novel to Paloma and the thousands of nameless girls who were killed during the Civil War. Loved and lost but not forgotten.

  I have tried to be truthful, to show myself as the ridiculous, vain girl I used to be, and sometimes still am. That I have spent too many pages on myself proves that. Perhaps you haven’t liked me very much. Neither did I for many of the years I was writing about. But that’s not what’s important. I now see that I’m no better than other people, but I have also learnt that I’m certainly no worse. My only crime, if you can call it that, was that I called for a friend when I was sixteen; sheer wilfulness, I admit. But I did not kill her. My behaviour was thoughtless and selfish; it was not a murderous act. I was a girl at risk myself that day, but, by some coincidence, my life was saved. Paloma’s wasn’t. That I still had a life seemed like a sin to me for so many years. But then you know all that.

  Now I see that war is the real culprit and all those who commit crimes in its name.

  Perhaps that’s why my story has a happy ending: not to exonerate myself (although it does that), but to show that war cannot crush the human spirit completely. It’s a celebration of the power of love and hope after all, and I don’t apologise for it. When all the cards were stacked against me it was love that endured.

  That’s not to say there’ll be a happy ever after. That’s not to say there won’t. Life still has some cards to play and our daily lives in Malaga are hard. Food is scarce. My favourite street cat has disappeared, no doubt in someone’s pot. Father tells me there are camps where the authorities take people suspected of left-wing sympathies. There’s a rumour that Manu has been taken, along with thousands of others, to work on a new monument outside Madrid. Spain has a long, treacherous road ahead. That Father only tells me these things when Luis is not around should tell you how fragile our lives together still are.

  But as I look out through my window and see the oranges on the trees, hear the children play their games, catch guitars break young girls’ hearts, watch the birds soar in the limitless blue of the sky above … I can’t help but rejoice in all the infinite, precious things in life. They’ll always be there no matter what happens. And so, dear reader, remember, it’s not the hand you’re dealt that counts, it’s how you play it. And on that note I’ll end.

  Maria

  Acknowledgements

  I thank Simon, Joe, Tom and Harry for their unwavering support and for not minding when they recognise themselves in my work. I hope to make you as proud of me one day as I am of you.

  My heartfelt thanks also go to Charlotte Mursell and Dushi Horti for their contributions to this novel set in the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War started with a coup in July 1936 which heralded the death of democracy in the country as Nationalist forces fought to take back power for Church, army and the landowning classes. Societal divisions were wide, politics polarized, and this led to the cruellest of wars, often pitting neighbour against neighbour, father against son. That’s why I chose to introduce Cecilia and her family and present them in relation to Luis and his. The Alvaros I placed in the middle, as intermediaries between the two.

  The civil war also turned Spain into a theatre where the competing ideologies of fascism and communism struggled for supremacy. Hitler and Mussolini put their weight behind Franco’s Nationalists while Stalin bolstered the dying Republic. Many lives were lost in battle.

  Yet a politics of fear pursued by the Nationalists in newly occupied areas meant that many civilian lives were lost too. Punishment of Spanish citizens in general was legitimized by the officers in control, and the punishment of women in particular was meted out with ferocious zeal. Republican women suffered greatly. The catalogue of crimes committed against them makes for a horrifying read. Many had their heads shaved, others were given castor oil to make them soil themselves, while torture, rape and beatings were commonplace. Then there were the killings.

  It was a specific incident that occurred in Andalucia during the Spanish Civil War that was the trigger for this novel. A truckful of girls, some as young as fourteen, were taken away by Nationalist troops from the village of Fuentes de Andalucia and driven to a nearby finca. There it is said they were raped, killed and thrown down a well. The troops then returned to the village, waving thei
r victims’ under garments from the tips of rifles like victory flags. I wanted to acknowledge this horrific crime. But I also wanted to celebrate the life that was lost, Paloma’s life and the lives of all the girls like her, while through the character of Maria I wanted to apportion blame where it was due.

  With Maria I imagine that I have created a character that very few people other than myself will much like, but even in her immature, self-centred view of the world, she is not responsible for the outrages that are committed in the novel. War and those who control it are.

  I’m indebted to the following works for informing my work. All errors are entirely my own.

  The Spanish Holocaust, Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain (pp 158-159 in particular which refers to the abduction of the girls and women from Fuentes de Andalucia), Paul Preston

  Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made, Richard Rhodes

  No Pasaran! Writings from the Spanish Civil War, Pete Ayrton

  Don Quixote, Cervantes. The butt of my jokes for so many years. One day I may even get round to reading it.

  Turn the page for an exclusive extract from The Artist’s Muse …

  ‘woman is soulless and possesses neither ego

  nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will.’

  Otto Weininger, Sex and Character

  Vienna, 1903

  Prologue: Vienna

  Modelling. The first time I did it, I didn’t like it. But Hilde told me to look as if I did. Or, failing that, to do as I was bid. I was only a child yet the future of my family – now living in Vienna, due to circumstances that I will reveal to you in due course – would depend on how well I got on in Gustav Klimt’s studio one gloomy Tuesday afternoon in November 1907. And Hilde, already successfully established as one of Klimt’s favourites, knew how much I needed – my family needed – this job.

  Monday 4th February 1907

  We had arrived in Vienna, city of hope, some nine months before that fateful afternoon in the studio, yet I remember it vividly even now. It was a brutally beautiful February day when we made the journey into the big city. As we set off, we must have made a strange sight. Katya was ten, Frieda eight, and Olga only seven, while I – the oldest and biggest of us – was twelve.

  I, and even Katya, looked like giants, our young girls’ bodies bursting out of what we had on, exposing uncovered skin at wrist and ankle to the harsh cold of an Austrian winter’s day, while Frieda and Olga, wearing big-sister cast-offs, swept the floor with their hems. Our shoes, squashed-toe small or hand-me-down loose. But we dared not complain for fear of upsetting our mother whose life had now become a veil of tears, the tangible evidence of which she wore with the pride of the recently bereaved. It was hard to lift it up to see what she’d been like before.

  Yet I for one was pleased to be going on this adventure. I had never been on a train before and the second the doors slammed shut, the whistle blew, and the engine started to hiss and puff its way out of the station, I was hypnotized. As I looked through the frost-framed windows, so the train took me on a mesmerizing trip past ice swords hanging from snow-tipped trees, single magpies frozen on walls, field upon field of virgin-white snow increasingly disturbed by man the closer we got to the city – and then there was bustle.

  We had arrived in another world. We stumbled out of the carriage, our belongings slapping down on the stone platform like dead dogs behind us, our eyes taken this way and that by the coming, going, dashing, crashing, and hurtling in every direction of the bodies now swarming around us. Overwhelmed and in the way, we shuffled, dodged, and collided our way out of the station, the mist of the new gradually lifting to reveal, to my delight, a world of possibilities.

  Velvet bows and fur trims whispered to me of riches. Well-soled, perfect boots tapped out the rhythms of success. Education and employment would be ours in this twinkling land of plenty.

  I failed to notice my mother’s face, grief-grey, her brow furrowed by the yoke of responsibility, as she led us out into the cold Vienna air.

  Like ducklings, we followed her, single file, climbing onto a busy tram, which drove us round the Ringstrasse. Grand and wide, it encompasses Vienna’s heart, and it shone that day, like a band of gold encrusted with monumental jewels shimmering against a heavy sky. Transfixed, I dropped my head against the window, the plump whiteness of my cheek squashed flat against its glass like a suction cup while my mind conjured up a waltzing world of sparkling interiors and sweeping staircases as dazzling façades danced before my eyes.

  And I let myself dream of an opulent world, full of luxury, laughter, and ease, of all the magic I would find within this golden ring, encircling as it did this capital of empire. For a little girl like me, with her imagination full of grand balls and princes (who weren’t going to die in the night), the Ringstrasse was an ideal place to be.

  The tram juddered. It veered to the right, crossed over connecting lines. But my cheek, momentarily squelched out of position, soon settled back into place while I now marvelled, dribble trickling down my chin, at the mannequins in ballgowns in the glittering window displays of a shopping street. Back in my innocent dream world once more I wondered which dress I would wear to the ball in the house with the sweeping staircase.

  Yet in a second, with the blast of a klaxon and the scream of a horse, the spell was broken. Followed closely by the impact.

  Your world, the way you see it, can change in an instant.

  With the dull thud of metal and wood on flesh I was violently shaken out of my reverie. Something terrible had happened. Within seconds, hordes of people, shouting out excitedly in unrecognizable languages, appeared out of nowhere. It was as if they had pulled themselves up through the cracks in the cobblestones, their sewer-drenched poverty tainting the golden streets of the city of my dreams. Replacing fur-trimmed coats with filth-edged jackets; taffeta ballgowns with worn, ripped clothes.

  What did they want? Why were they shouting? The travellers on the tram stood up to find out, blocking my way, though sounds of ugliness pushed their way through. It was only when the tram pulled away that I saw the encircling crowd: baying hounds around their weak and injured quarry. I heard a voice say, ‘’E’ll not get as far as the knacker’s yard,’ but I had no real grasp of what it was that I saw that day, even though I sensed its menace. I dream about it still.

  However, if the accident had disturbed me, it was clear, from her trembling fingers, that it had disturbed my fragile mother more. She placed a shaking hand on my shoulder. It was time to get off.

  She stood up; we followed, watching her exhausted frame nearly collapse as she struggled to lift her bag off the tram. I rushed to help her though she pointed me to little Olga who’d been lifted off the tram by a foreign-looking young man with a thick moustache and a wavy mop of dark hair, a book in a foreign language peeping out of his coat pocket. I said thank you and he nodded. I suspect that he wasn’t a true Austrian.

  ‘I’m so proud of you, Wally; you’re such a good girl.’ My mother sighed heavily when we’d all made it to the pavement. She gently pushed the hair away from my eyes, before kissing me on the head with a barely audible, ‘I can manage now. Please don’t worry.’ But she couldn’t. And I did.

  As we stood there, an old, well-dressed man approached us. Cupping his hand over his mouth, he spoke quietly into my mother’s ear, his eyes roaming furtively over Katya, Olga, Frieda, and me. She found the strength to turn down his kind offer of help that afternoon but as I watched her I wondered how long it would be before she buckled.

  It was clear that she was – we all were – going to find it hard to survive in this place of extremes. My poor, sweet, weak mother, her light frame resuming her heavy walk, tears rolling silently down her face, leading us to our new lives with all the enthusiasm of the condemned to the gallows. We knocked on the door of number 12 Favoritenstrasse. We waited for Frau Wittger to open the door with the chipped black paintwork. We had arrived in V
ienna.

  Chapter 1

  The wind is cutting and the trees bare. It will not be easy. But I am twelve years old. We are at number 12 Favoritenstrasse. And I take this as a sign. It is time for me to stand tall, grow up, and look after the people I love. Mama knocks on the door. I stand behind her, holding myself as upright as I can after dragging two deadweight bags – mine and Olga’s – all the way from where we got off the tram.

  It’s difficult to even stand (and as I glance round at Olga, whose head is against my skirt, Frieda who’s sitting on her own bag, and Katya who’s standing protectively behind the two of them, I see that I am not the only one of us having trouble), yet I grit my teeth knowing that I will be able to remove my boots with gaping holes in their soles very soon. And I will be strong. No one has come to answer the door to us yet. As I lean past Mama I wonder whether I have grown or she has shrunk since we caught the train from Tattendorf. Either way, one of us has changed. I knock on the door with more force.

  As I wait for it to be answered, Mama fidgets and turns the scrap of paper over and over in her hand. She reads it again, just to make sure we’re at the right address and when Frieda asks, ‘Is this it?’ Mama looks to the heavens. I just think: twelve and 12. How could it not be?

  Then the door collapses inwards. It’s pulled back with a force so fierce I expect to see cracks in the white plaster of the walls that surround it.

  An elderly man, once he’s picked himself back up, stands in the doorway, stopping momentarily to draw a flask to his thirsty lips. He’s so close to us that I can’t fail to see that he has an oversized red nose from which veins trace across his cheeks like tributaries on a map; the whites of his eyes are yellow. He looks the worse for wear, no doubt due to the liquid contents of his flask, which he attempts to drain by holding it upside down until he’s drunk every last precious drop within. He is an intriguingly strange and disturbing sight on this cold and wintry day.