I can explain everything,’ muttered Benjamin, watching a dog go into a flowerbed at the end of the path.
‘Of course you can explain. But how do you explain it to me, Walter?’
Benjamin looked up and tried to smile now.
‘Do it for a friend,’ he said. ‘It’s the last favour I’ll ask.’
Scholem didn’t blink for a long, a very long minute.
‘Okay, I will try,’ he answered.
Walter looked at him hopefully. He was struggling to keep down another thought that he knew should surface – he had to hide it. Just a little while before this he’d scolded Adorno when he left for New York. ‘You have to stay,’ he told him. ‘You have to stay here. If we all leave, Europe will cease to exist.’
But now he’d reneged even on himself. He sat with his gaze cast down, and pushed the pebbles around with his toe. The park was slowly emptying. Beyond the gate, the street lights of rue de Fleurus had already come on.
‘It’s late. I have to go,’ said Scholem with a sigh.
That was the last time they saw each other.
Chapter Ten
You know, we didn’t have a chance of winning and we should have admitted it back then. Think about it. While Franco was attacking Aragona, Hitler swallowed Austria whole – in a single night. While everyone – France, England – they all just shut up, sat back and watched. This whole line we got handed of non-intervention. If it weren’t also a tragedy it would be a farce. It wouldn’t have even taken much; a child could have seen it. Hell if Mussolini and Hitler weren’t going to intervene. After Austria, people started admitting it, but didn’t concede it. As if no one could see what the Germans were up to. Everyone was too busy fawning over them. Adolf pointed and everyone else saluted. Even Stalin. And believe you me, the idea that he was our ally should have been looking dubious by then. France opened its border for a while, just enough time for us to get some arms in, but then they closed right up again. Europe was abandoning us. And then what did they go on to do?
Don’t look at me like that. I know this is the sort of stuff you say afterwards. The situation was not perfectly clear back then and in any case it wasn’t like we could just open the battle up to those sons of bitches. We didn’t have any choice back then.We had to fight anyway, and all we could do was pray for god knows what – a miracle. Or that no one had the last word yet.
After the retreat, Mariano and I walked around Barcelona as dejected as could be. During the day we hung around headquarters waiting for the platoons to be reorganised and for someone to tell us what to do.At night, lucky us, we’d be with Ana María and Mercedes. But something had changed, though I didn’t know what.You could see it in the way we smiled, the way we talked. It was just like before but wrapped in a sadness that wouldn’t go away if you scraped it. Mercedes and I kept up like before but something was prickly between the other two. Then they had a fight one evening when we were heading to the movies near Paralelo. Mercedes and I were walking ahead. Ana María must have said that she didn’t love him anymore or something like that because suddenly we heard Mariano screaming from behind us, ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there? Admit it.’
‘Yes,’ said Ana María. ‘So what if there is?’
I turned and saw Mariano, fist digging into his curls, staring at her.
‘I’m the one who should be asking so what. I’m out there freezing my ass on the front and you’re running around, and meantime, you ugly bitch, you’re sending me messages. “I think of him all the time, send him my love.” What a tramp.’
‘Messages? What messages? What are you talking about – when ever?’ she started to say.
Oh god, I thought, now I’m going to get dragged into it. I squeezed Mercedes’ hand hard and we walked ahead. The only reason I got out of that was because Mariano had already gone too far, twisting his hair and glaring like that. He wasn’t accustomed to broken promises, and that’s why he fell to pieces so quickly. He was begging, sweating, ranting.
‘What about all those things you said about free love?’ we heard him say.
‘Precisely. It’s free,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want to be with you. Do you get it or not?’
We never got to the movies and over the next days my buddy’s mood was so ferocious that he’d have poisoned you if he bit you. I ended up sneaking around with Mercedes so that he wouldn’t suffer seeing us together. Brimming with anger and hungry for revenge, he ended up doing everything he could to get transferred into an offensive strike unit. He told them that he wanted to lead a counter-offensive commando squad to run raids and sabotage the enemy’s line before our guys even got there. It was a way of committing suicide, that’s what it was. But amazingly they took him seriously because of his merits on the field. In late April, they green-lighted his project. He threw himself into the preparations and I didn’t see him for days. I took advantage of the time to visit Mercedes. By now we’d become used to the air raids; my soldier kept up his work and she got so excited when the planes passed low overhead. It was going well with us and would have kept going that way if Mariano hadn’t caught us one afternoon eating ice cream in a café on the Ramblas.
‘I’ve been looking for you for three hours,’ he said.
It was a clear May evening, a light breeze swept the air, so softly it seemed to be strolling. Mercedes shifted in her seat and grabbed my hand under the table. She knew what was going on. Mariano didn’t even sit down. Standing over me like a grenadier, he stared right at me, avoided Mercedes’ eyes.
‘I’m all set,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving the day after tomorrow with my division. I picked out my men, guys with balls.You’re on board, right?’
What could I say? I looked at her for help but her expression gave away nothing. I knew what she was thinking though – it’s fine to have fun and take advantage of every instant. But when it comes time to fight, only a coward hangs back. And I would have said the same thing. To keep living this quasi-life would be a sentence to cowardice and mediocrity.
‘Okay,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at headquarters.’
The light from the street lamps on the Ramblas was shining against an almost black sky. A few stars twinkled on. That sky was so beautiful it made you curse the day the damned war started. There were people crowding around us, soldiers, mothers with their children about to go in for dinner, idlers. A van passed, anarchist flags waving, full of recruits heading for the station.
‘Let’s go home,’ Mercedes murmured. I put my tongue in her ear and a hand on her ass. ‘If they bomb us tonight, it won’t matter,’ I said quietly.
Chapter Eleven
We spent two weeks training in a quarry near the Pyrenees and then set off.We travelled by Russian Sturke jeeps, three of them, for a day, then through the night with our headlights off, and half of the next morning. There were sixteen men in our unit. I drove the first car with Mariano, our captain. With us rode: a Swiss cook, our look-out Jimmie, a blond Irishman, and Alfonso, Italian, second sergeant. He was a bit of a fool but was a genius with explosives. The rest of the unit was in the other cars: two Andalusians, a Galician, three Americans – one black – two German Communists and who else have I forgotten? Right, the Englishman and Jan, he was Dutch and a mortar expert. Then there was Lech, a short Pollack – a bundle of nerves he was and an ace at gunning down planes. Mariano had chosen his men well; they were all adventurers, sure, but they were good companions too. Most importantly, they were good with weapons, could move from grenades to machine guns without blinking and then change again to rifles, knives, pistols.
Right before noon, we came to a village that had been bombed to the ground. There was no one there except for some rabbits, goats and chickens picking through the rubble. We caught a jackass and two mules and loaded them up with arms and provisions and started climbing