He turned away from the window and stared at the scab left in the stone where an old cross had been beaten down from the wall. It was, he now saw, a room of death. What was a cross except a way to kill a man in slow, horrible agony, a long day’s dying. Maybe that’s why the Jews could never make sense of it: worship an execution device. Strange, these Christians.
He might not be the first Jew in this cell. Others, four hundred years ago, may have been held here, facing the same choice he would face: renounce your faith of die. Which was really, renounce your faith and die. They would have been men like his father, men of decency but without weapons. What would they, having squandered their gifts for analysis and dialectic on the Talmud in five thousand years of hushed, devotional study, have made of their torturers?
Levitsky felt it sliding away. He had trained himself so hard over the years to a certain pitch of revolutionary toughness: to see only what was real, what was important. Always to move to the heart of the issue. Always to be without illusion. Never to waste time in pointless bourgeois memory, nostalgia, and sentiment. To be, after the Great Lenin, a hard man. Now, when he needed them most, these difficultly acquired disciplines had simply vanished.
He sat down, under the mocking cruciform. The crucifiers were coming. It was another memento mori, teasing him, a monument to the dead—
“The sleep will have done him some good,” said Comrade Commissar Glasanov. “He’ll see the hopelessness of his situation. He’ll see the inevitability of surrender, the rightness of it. You know, Bolodin, I’m somewhat disappointed. I had expected something more impressive.”
Lenny nodded as if a stupid man.
“These old Bolsheviki, at least they were realists. They understood what was required.”
They reached the end of the corridor in the yellow morning light. The door, solid and massive, lay before them.
“Open it,” said Glasanov.
Lenny took the big brass key and inserted it into the hole and felt the tumblers yield to his strength. He pulled the door open. They entered.
“Well, Comrade Levitsky, I hope—” began Glasanov, halting only when he realized Levitsky was gone.
10
ON THE RAMBLAS
FLORRY SLEPT FOR A DAY AND A HALF IN A ROOM ON THE sixth floor of the Hotel Falcon, which he and Sylvia chose, in their delirium, on the strength of one of Julian’s pieces, which had described it as the “hotel of the young and bold.”
When he finally stirred from his dreamless sleep, it was night. Someone was with him in the room.
“Who’s there?” he asked, but he knew her smell.
“It’s me,” she said.
“How long have I been out?”
“Quite some time. I’ve been watching you.”
“God, how boring. I’m ravenous.”
“There’s a curfew. You’ll have to wait for morning.”
“Oh.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine, Sylvia. I’m rather pleased to be alive, come to think of it.”
“I am too. Robert, you saved my life. Do you recall?”
“Oh, that. Good heavens, what a terrible mess. I think I was saving my life and you just happened to be there.”
She sat on the bed.
“We’re all alone.”
She was very near.
“Do you know, Sylvia,” he said, “I’m rather glad I met you.” Then, surprised at his own boldness, he took her to him and kissed her. It felt like he always knew it would, only better. She stood up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m undressing,” she said.
He could see her in the dark, a blur. She was quickly shedding her garments with a kind of athletic simplicity.
She stepped out of her chemise and he could see her breasts in the dark and sense their weight. They were very small and pearshaped and lovely. Her hips were slim, her belly flat and tight. She walked to him and he could smell her sweetness. She had his hand.
“Touch me,” she said, moving it to her breast. “Here. Feel it. Hold it.”
It was warm and full. Beneath it, her heart beat. She was so close. There was nothing else in the world except Sylvia.
“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he could hear himself saying.
Their mouths crushed together; Florry felt himself losing contact with the conscious world and entering a new zone of sensation. Sylvia was tawny, sinewy, and athletic—very strong, surprisingly strong as she pulled him to the bed. Florry was surprised that in his fumbling rush in the moon-vivid room and among the thunder of images and feelings and experiences that raced across him he didn’t want to miss anything, anything at all. Her breasts, for example, upon which he suddenly felt as if he could spend a lifetime. They were a marvel of economy and grace. He wanted, strangely, to eat them, and he tried eagerly.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, sprawled beneath him. “Oh, God, Florry, that feels so good.”
She became increasingly lyric yet increasingly abstract: he was astonished that she had enough sense to talk—for she continued, in a froggy voice, to comment upon events—when language had been banished from his mind.
He put his hand into her cleft, feeling the moist surrender, the eagerness, and it was quite something, the extent to which she’d become smooth and open and liquefied to him; her whole body had liquefied and then began to tense and arch and crack like a whip.
And then there came a time to shut her up at last with a kiss and it felt as if he were at the center of an explosion, so plummy and sweet, so crammed-full, so bloody perfect, like a line of poetry against his skull.
“Hurry, darling,” she whispered. “I can’t wait. God, Florry, hurry.”
He raced on to the act’s finale, entering her and falling through into a different universe.
“Do it,” she commanded, and he completed the exchange, sinking in further, rising to gather strength to sink again. It had become a thing of rising and sinking: high, off, and distant followed by the giddy plunge, the surrender to the gravity of pleasure, and then climbing back up again.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she was saying and the last bond of restraint snapped and the whole universe seemed to transmute into a phenomenon of optics: lights, lights, lights, lights. He felt a screeching moment in which he seemed at last to slide beneath the surface, while at the same time exactly clinging to her as she was to him, as if in recognition that each had only the other in protection against the world.
* * *
“Do you know what’s odd?” Sylvia asked the next morning. “It’s the history. It’s everywhere. Can you feel it? One is actually at the center of history.”
Florry nodded dreamily, although at the moment he would have preferred to find the center of his overalls. They were roomy, Spanish things of one huge piece, rather like an aviator’s or a mechanic’s suit. They were of worn, rough, blue cotton, and they had been donated to the cause of his depleted wardrobe by the POUM, which turned out to control the Hotel Falcon.
POUM stood for the Party of Marxist Unification, in the Spanish, which was more colloquially and less tendentiously translated into English as the Spanish Worker’s Party; its initials were everywhere in the city, as it was one of the largest and most enthusiastic of the several contending revolutionary bodies within Barcelona proper, but it did not quite control the city. It did not even control itself; it did not control anything. It was something more than a splinter group but perhaps not quite a mass movement on the scale of the gigantic union organizations that had dominated Barcelona for so long. In a sense it simply was, in the way that a mountain is there. It was more a monument to a certain pitch of feeling than an actual political movement: it stood for how things would be, as opposed to how they had been. Florry understood it to be loosely affiliated with the Anarcho-Syndicalists, another large, dreamy, semi-powerful group, equally enthusiastic, equally long on vision for the next century while short on vision for the next day. In fact if the POUM and the Anarchists stood for an
ything beyond a set of vague words like victory and equality and freedom, they seemed to stand for having a smashing time while trampling the rubble of the old.
Down with what was; what would come simply had to be better, even if nobody had any good idea what that was. The POUMistas, nevertheless, had taken control of the Falcon, here on the Ramblas. What was more, they sponsored the largest of the militias, the Lenin Division, now entrenched outside of Huesca two hundred fifty miles to the east in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the closest authentic “war” to Barcelona.
But Florry, still sluggish after the business of the night, understood what she meant.
“Yes, it is odd,” he replied. There was something particular in the air, and to come to it, straight out from tidy England, was to feel its power in a particularly undiluted dosage. They’d heard the theories all these years, the fashionable arguments, the intellectual fancies spun in cigarette-smoke-filled rooms, the shouted dreams, the fevered visions. The optimism of it was like a virus, the hope like a fantasy. Yet here it was, or at least one early model, clearly clunky, a wheezing, puffing, whirling gizmo, but the thing itself: the classless society.
“It fills one with hope,” Sylvia said. “It’s how things could be; it’s how they should be.”
Florry nodded, unsure of the feelings in his own heart just then, but somehow in agreement with her. They sat in the sunlight at a table at the Café Moka, which occupied the ground-floor corner of the Hotel Falcon, surprised at the warmth and sunlight of January, which in its way was oddly appropriate. They sipped café con leche and watched the parade. For the revolution was a parade.
Down the Ramblas, a wide thoroughfare that ran a mile from the Plaza de Catalunya to the port, in never-ending columns, the revolutionary masses tramped. To watch it, one felt, was almost a privilege; it was quite a moment for the tired old world.
“God, look at them,” Sylvia said, her face flushed, her eyes vivid.
“It’s the biggest parade there ever was,” said Florry, speaking the truth, but leaving unsaid and unanswered the question of ultimate destinations.
And for this parade, Barcelona had tarted herself up in a new garb, as if part of the joy were in the costumes; the whole population had become workers, it seemed. It was, for the first time in the history of the world, fashionable to be a worker. Everybody wore the blue monos of the working class, or the khaki of the fighting militias. Even the prosaic public transportation contrivances wore costumes: the trams up and down the Ramblas moved like vast floats, pulling their cargo through the crowds; all wore a gaudy red-and-black scheme and all of them sported the giant initials of their particular political affiliations. At the same time the autos and trucks had been liberated to political purpose and they, too, wore their allegiances as proudly as old guardsman’s chevrons. It was a Mardi Gras of revolutions, a reveler’s revolution. The air was full of confetti and music and history. Festive banners flapped from the balconies of the buildings to the leafless trunks of the trees of the Ramblas or were strung in crudely painted, sagging, dripping majesty from balcony to lamp pole, offering a cheerful variety of exhortations to the duties that still lay ahead.
THEY SHALL NOT PASS
FASCISM WILL BE BURIED HERE
TO HUESCA! TO HUESCA!
UNITE, WORKERS
IN UNION, LIBERTY
DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE!
Huge portraits from the revolutionary pantheon hung everywhere, heroic, kind, knowing faces, the faces of saints. Florry knew the key figures: Marx and Lenin, the woman called La Passionaria, an intense intellectual fellow named Nin, head of POUM; and some other Spaniards whom he didn’t recognize. Only the Soviet Man of Steel, Stalin, was missing, unwelcome down here among the unruly libertarians; but he held great sway not half a mile away at the vast Plaza de Catalunya, where the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, under Russian guidance, had taken over the Hotel Colon and turned that ceremonial space into a small block of downtown Moscow.
There was noise, too, on the Ramblas, noise everywhere: a din of singing and gramophone recordings, the clash of a dozen different tongues, Spanish and Catalonian the most popular only by a narrow margin, the others being English, French, German, and Russian. The air had filled with sunlight and the dust and the noise and the smell of flowers and petrol and horses and sweets. Sensation piled atop sensation, sight atop sight.
“It’s like a new world,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a different world altogether. It’s like some year in the future.”
Florry didn’t know what to say. The extent of her passion somewhat astonished him. She had not referred to last night.
“I want to believe in it so much,” Sylvia said. “It explains so many things to me.”
She was quite right, of course. So pure was the sense of revolution, the ether of justice deferred for so long but arriving at last, that to breathe it was to endorse it: the joyous madness of Starting Over, of Doing Right, of the Just State. To be in the birthing room of history, as a new age attempted to wrench itself into life! Florry, sitting there, could feel the sentiment move through his bones.
Yet even now, in the blooming ardor, with the mood of purpose as heavy as perfume all about him, Florry could not prevent the coming of doubts. How much, one could ask, of all this was simple illusion. Parades, speeches, leaping peasants: the future?
Or was the future old Gruenwald removed by the police for reasons unknown? What about poor, drowned Witte, lost in the night, and the hundred unknown Arab crewmen sucked under the black water?
“Your face is so long, Robert.”
“I was thinking of Count Witte.”
“Dead and gone,” she said. “The poor man.”
“Yes.” He reached over and took her hand.
“I was also thinking of us, Sylvia. Not of history, not of progress or justice. No, us. Is that fair, Sylvia? Do I have that right?”
“I like it when you touch me,” she said. “I like it very much.”
“Here we sit, Sylvia, in the brave new world. And you tell me you like it when I touch you. Are you part of my illusion, Sylvia? Tell me, please. Am I misreading you? Am I weak and sentimental and seeing things that aren’t there?”
Her face clouded in the sunlight. There was a particular burst of music from somewhere, so loud it made him wince. A haunted look came to her face.
“I just wonder if there’s time for us,” she said. “In all this.”
A troop of khaki cavalry was moving down the Ramblas, the horses’ hooves clattering on the cobblestones. From this distance, they looked fierce and proud, a conceit of glory and destiny.
“I like you so very, very much. I just want time for this. Not the revolution really, but the experience of it. I’ve never been anyplace so exciting, I’ve never been so close to history. I never will again. I want some time to … to have my experiences. That is what I came for, for my experiences. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Well, Sylvia, I suppose I do. Still, the truth is—God help me for finding the courage to face it at last—I suppose the truth is that I love you. Comical, isn’t it? Well, let’s do be grown up about the whole thing. Yes, let’s do be friends.”
“Last night was wonderful. Do you see? But there’s so much more to it than just the simple business of how we feel.”
“I suppose there is.”
“There’s so much to do still.”
Florry said nothing. Yes, he had things to do, too.
“Your friend Julian has joined up. I talked to some of the party members. He no longer represents his little magazine. Now he represents the People. With a capital P, one supposes. He’s joined the POUMista Lenin Division. He’s out in the trenches at Huesca. He’s in the war. God, Robert, now there’s a man.”
The admiration in her voice almost killed him.
“Well, Sylvia,” he heard himself saying, “well, then you may get your introduction to the great Julian after all. Because I shall be there, also.”
“Yes,”
said David Harold Allen Sampson, “yes, I suppose you are Florry, even if you don’t have the item.”
Sampson turned out to be a youngish, gray chap with flat eyes and a vaguely chilly manner, though handsome in a certain pampered way. He had a toneless, measured BBC announcer’s voice and when he talked he tended to look away, into space, as if fixed on the stars. He looked as if he’d seen nearly everything there was to see in the world, even if he was only thirty.
“I say, Sampson, with the ship sinking and people dying all about, one would hardly have headed down to one’s cabin to dig up Tristram Shandy.”
“It’s your rudeness that convinces me. Only Eton could teach it and the bloody Bolshies haven’t got good enough yet to turn out bogus Etonians. Yes, I suppose I must believe you are Florry.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. They sat on hard chairs at a marbletopped table in the dark and smoky interior of the Café de las Ramblas, an old-fashioned place of high Mediterranean style much favored by the English press in the wearying heat of the afternoon when the Spaniards laid aside their furious revolution for the age-old custom of siesta.
“And now you propose to go off to the front. As a common soldier, no less. God, Florry, one would think after that awful experience with that damned boat, you’d want nothing but two weeks in hospital.”
“That’s not important. What’s important is Julian.”
“Good heavens, they didn’t tell me you were cut of such heroic stuff,” Sampson said, manfully restraining his excess enthusiasm.
“I simply want to get the business over.”
“I shall so inform them. We shall see what they say.”
“I certainly am not going to wait about,” said Florry, “for the major and his fruity assistant to make up their minds. I’m going to the Lenin barracks first thing tomorrow. Is that understood?”