After the services the priest was available for anyone who wanted to talk. Few ever did. Bernie hung back as the prisoners filed out, then muttered to the guard. The soldier looked at him in surprise, then led him to a little room at the back of the hut.
Bernie felt embarrassed going into the priest’s room. Father Eduardo had removed his robes and was dressed once again in his black sotana. His plump face looked young, a scrubbed child’s. He smiled nervously at Bernie, gesturing to a chair before his desk.
‘Buenos días. Please sit. What is your name?’
‘Bernie Piper. Hut eight.’
The priest consulted a list. ‘Ah, yes, the Englishman. How can I help you, my son?’
‘I have a friend in my hut who is very ill. Vicente Medina.’
‘Yes, I know the man.’
‘If he could have a doctor, something might be done for him.’
The priest shook his head sadly. ‘The authorities will not allow a doctor here. I have tried, I am sorry.’
Bernie nodded. He had expected that. He went over the words he had rehearsed during the service.
‘Sir, do you believe forced conversions are wrong?’
The priest hesitated a moment. ‘Yes. The Church teaches that a conversion to Christianity that is not genuine, a form of words, has no validity.’
‘Vicente is an old Left Republican. You know they are strong atheists.’
Father Eduardo’s face set. ‘I do. My church was burned by the mob in 1931. The police were ordered to do nothing; the Left Republican Azaña said all the churches in Spain were not worth one Republican life.’
‘Vicente can do you no harm now.’ Bernie took a deep breath. ‘I want you to let him die in peace when the time comes. Don’t try and give him the last rites. With his beliefs that could only be a mockery.’
Father Eduardo sighed. ‘You think we press dying men into forced conversions?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘How bad we must seem to you.’ Father Eduardo looked at Bernie intently. His thick glasses enlarged his eyes so they seemed to be swimming behind the lenses. ‘You were not brought up a Catholic, Piper?’
‘No.’
‘You are a Communist, I see.’
‘Yes.’ Bernie paused. ‘Christians believe in forgiveness, don’t they?’
‘That is central to our faith.’
‘Then why can’t you forgive Vicente what his party may have done and leave him in peace?’
Father Eduardo raised a hand. ‘You don’t understand at all.’ His voice had that pleading note again. ‘Please try to understand. If a man dies having denied the Church he will go to Hell. But if he repents and asks forgiveness, even at the very end, after the worst life, God will forgive him. When a man is on his deathbed it is our last chance to save his soul. A man then is on the brink of eternity. Sometimes he can see his life and his sins truly for the first time, and reach out to God.’
‘A man then is at his weakest point, terrified. And you know how to use that. What if a man takes the sacrament then through sheer fear?’
‘Only God could know if he was truly contrite.’
Bernie realized he had lost. He had underestimated how deeply the priest was buried in his superstition. His natural compassion was just a flicker on the surface.
‘You’ve an answer for everything, haven’t you?’ he asked heavily. ‘Endless twisted logic?’
Father Eduardo smiled sadly. ‘I could say the same of your faith. The edifice Karl Marx built.’
‘My beliefs are scientific.’
‘Are they? I heard about the cave that was discovered in the hills, the prehistoric paintings. Figures of men chasing extinct animals, was it not?’
‘Yes. They’re probably priceless and you’re going to destroy them.’
‘That wasn’t my decision. But you believe these people lived as Communists, don’t you? Primitive communism, the first stage of the historical dialectic. You see, I know my Marx. But that is a belief, you cannot know how such people lived. You too live by faith; a false faith.’
It was like the psychiatrist again. Bernie wanted to hurt the priest, make him angry, as he had the doctor.
‘This is not some intellectual game. We’re in a place where sick men are denied doctors and worked to death by the government your church supports.’
The priest sighed. ‘You are not a Spaniard, Piper, how can you really understand the Civil War? I had friends, priests, who were caught in the Republican zone. They were shot, thrown from precipices, tortured.’
‘And so you take revenge on us. I thought Christians were supposed to be better than most men.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘What does the Bible say – by their fruits shall we know them.’
Father Eduardo didn’t get angry, his face was sad and burdened. ‘What do you think it is like for Father Jaime and me,’ he asked quietly, ‘working here among people who killed our friends? Why do you think we do it? For charity, to try and save those who hate us.’
‘You know if it is Father Jaime who comes to Vicente he will enjoy what he does. His revenge.’ He stood up. ‘May I go now, please?’
Father Eduardo raised a hand, then dropped it wearily to the desk. ‘Yes. Go.’
Bernie got up.
‘I shall pray for your friend,’ Father Eduardo said. ‘For his recovery.’
THAT EVENING Establo ordered a cell meeting. The ten Communists gathered around Pablo’s bed, at the farthest end of the hut.
‘We need to strengthen our Marxist faith,’ Establo said. Bernie looked into his face as he used that word. It was stern, severe. ‘The discovery of these paintings has made me think. We should have classes on the Marxist understanding of history, the development of the class struggle through the ages. Something to bond us closer together again; we need that with another winter upon us.’
One or two of the men nodded but others looked weary. Miguel, an old tramworker from Valencia, spoke up.
‘It’s too cold to sit around talking in the dark.’
‘And what if the guards find out?’ Pablo said. ‘Or someone tells?’
‘Who’s going to lead these classes?’ Bernie asked. ‘You?’ He could sense the meeting was going against Establo; he should have made this suggestion before the cold nights sent the men shrinking back into themselves.
The scaly head turned in Bernie’s direction, eyes bright with anger. ‘Yes. I am the cell leader.’
‘Comrade Establo is right,’ said Pepino, a hollow-faced young farmworker. ‘We need to remember what we are.’
‘Well, I for one haven’t the energy to listen to Comrade Establo lecturing us on historical materialism.’
‘I have decided, comrade,’ Establo said menacingly. ‘I’ve been elected, I make the decisions. That’s democratic centralism.’
‘No, it isn’t, I’ll take your orders against the feeling of this group when a properly constituted Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party tells me to. Not before.’
‘There is no Central Committee any more,’ Pepino said sadly. ‘Not in Spain.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You should watch your mouth, inglés,’ Establo said softly. ‘I know your history. A worker’s son who went to an aristocrat’s school, an arriviste.’
‘And you’re a petit bourgeois drunk on power,’ Bernie told him. ‘You think you’re still a factory foreman. I’m loyal to the party but you’re not the party.’
‘I can expel you from this cell.’
Bernie laughed softly. ‘Some cell.’ He knew at once it was the wrong thing to say, it would put them against him, but his head was spinning with exhaustion and anger. He got up and walked back to his bed. He lay down, listening to the mutterings from the other end of the room. Someone shouted to them to be quiet, people wanted to sleep. Shortly afterwards he heard the pallet creak as Establo lay down opposite him. He heard him scratch, felt his eyes on him.
‘We are going to consider your case, compadre,’ Establo said softly. B
ernie didn’t reply. He listened to Vicente’s rasping gurgling breath and wanted to howl with sorrow and rage. He remembered Agustín’s words that he had puzzled over. Better times. No, he thought. Whatever you meant there, you were wrong.
HE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. He lay on his bunk in the cold, not tossing and turning but looking into the darkness. He remembered how, in London, the Communist Party’s theories of the laws of class struggle had seemed to him like a revelation, the world explained at last. When he left Cambridge he had helped out in his parents’ shop at first, but his father’s depression and his mother’s complaining disappointment that he had thrown Cambridge away stifled him and he left and took rooms nearby.
The contrast between the wealth of Cambridge and the bleak shabby poverty of the East End, where unemployed men lounged on street corners and there were stirrings of a home-grown fascism, angered him more than ever. Millions were unemployed and the Labour Party did nothing. He kept in touch with the Meras; the Republic was a disappointment, the government refusing to raise taxes to finance reforms for fear of angering the middle classes. A friend took him to a Communist meeting and at once he felt, this is the truth, this is exposing how it all really works.
He studied Marx and Lenin; their harsh prose was a struggle at first, different from anything he had read before, but when he understood their analyses he saw that here was the uncompromising reality of the class struggle: iron hard, as his party tutor said. Only Communists had the ruthlessness to destroy fascism, capitalism’s last attempt to stave off its own destruction. Bernie slogged for the party, selling the Daily Worker outside factory gates in the rain, stewarding meetings in half-empty halls. Many of the local party members were middle-class, bohemian intellectuals and artists. He knew that for many of them communism was a fad, an act of rebellion, at the same time as he realized he felt more at home with them than the workers. With his public-school accent they took him for one of their own; it was one of them, a sculptor, who got Bernie his job as a model. Yet there was still a part of him that felt rootless, lonely, neither proletarian nor bourgeois, a disconnected hybrid.
IN JULY 1936 the Spanish army rose against the Popular Front government and the Civil War began. In the autumn the Communists started appealing for volunteers and he went to King Street and signed up.
He had to wait. The formation of the International Brigades, the routes and meeting points, was taking time. He became impatient. Then, after another fruitless visit to party headquarters, he disobeyed the party for the first and only time. He packed his bags and without a word to anybody he went to Victoria and caught the boat-train.
He arrived in Madrid in November; Franco had reached the Casa de Campo but so far he was being held, the citizenry of Madrid keeping back the Spanish army. The weather was cold and raw but the citizens, who five years before had appeared gloomy and listless, seemed to have sprung to life; there was revolutionary fervour and fierce enthusiasm everywhere. Trams and lorries full of workers in blue boiler suits and red kerchiefs passed by on the way to the front, ¡Abajo fascismo! chalked on the sides.
He should have reported to party HQ but it was late in the day when his train arrived and he headed straight for Carabanchel. A group of women and children were building a barricade at one corner of the Meras’ square, tearing up the cobbles. Seeing a foreigner, they lifted their hands in the clenched-fist salute. ‘¡Salud, compadre!’
‘¡Salud! ¡Unios hermanos proletarios!’ One day, Bernie thought, this will happen in England.
He had written to Pedro and they knew he was coming, though not when. Inés opened the door of the flat; she looked tired and weary, greying hair straggling round her face. Her face lit up when she saw him. ‘Pedro! Antonio!’ she called. ‘He’s here!’
There was a rifle in pieces on the salón table, an ancient-looking thing with an enormous muzzle. Pedro and Antonio stood turning parts over in their hands. They were dusty and unshaven, their boiler suits streaked with earth. Francisco, the consumptive son, sat watching in a chair, looking barely older after five years, thin and pale as ever. Little Carmela, eight now, sat on his knee.
Pedro wiped his hands on a piece of newspaper and rushed to embrace him. ‘Bernardo! My God, what a day to arrive.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Antonio is going to the front tomorrow.’
‘I’m trying to clean this old rifle they gave me,’ Antonio said proudly.
Inés frowned. ‘He doesn’t know how to put it back together!’
‘Maybe I can help.’ Bernie had been in the OTC at Rookwood. He remembered annoying the other pupils by saying military knowledge might be useful when the revolution came. He helped them put the rifle together. Then they cleared the table and Inés brought a cocido.
‘Have you come to help kill the Fascists?’ Carmela asked. She was wide-eyed with excitement and curiosity.
‘Yes,’ Bernie said, putting a hand on her head. He turned to Pedro. ‘I should report to Party HQ tomorrow.’
‘The Communists?’ Pedro shook his head. ‘We are beholden to them now. If only the British and French had agreed to sell us arms.’
‘Stalin knows how to fight a revolutionary war.’
‘Father and I have been digging trenches all afternoon,’ Antonio said seriously. ‘Then they gave me this rifle and told me to get a night’s sleep and report for action tomorrow.’
Bernie looked at Antonio’s thin boyish face. He took a deep breath.
‘Do you think there might be a rifle for me?’
Antonio looked at him seriously. ‘Yes. They want as many fit men as can hold one.’
‘When do you have to report?’
‘At dawn.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Bernie experienced a strange leaping sensation, excitement and fear together. He gripped Antonio’s hand, found himself laughing; they were both laughing hysterically.
BUT HE WAS frightened when he rose with Pedro and Antonio at dawn. When they went outside Bernie could hear shell-fire in the distance. He shivered in the cold grey morning. Antonio had given him a red scarf; he wore the jacket and slacks he had arrived in with the scarf round his neck.
In the Puerta del Sol officers in khaki called the men into lines, leading them into the trams that were lined up one behind the other. As they rattled out of the centre the men were tense, gripping their rifles between their knees. At first it was like a normal journey, but as they travelled east there were fewer people, more militiamen and army lorries. When the tram jangled to a halt at the gates of the Casa de Campo, Bernie could hear ragged gunfire. His heart was thumping wildly as the sergeant shouted to them to disembark.
Then Bernie saw the bodies, half a dozen dead men laid in a row on the pavement, still wearing their red kerchiefs. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a body – his grandmother had been laid out in the room behind the shop before her funeral – but these men, whose faces were as still and grey as hers had been, were young. One boy had a round black hole in the middle of his forehead with a tiny drop of blood underneath, like a teardrop. His heart banged like a hammer and he felt a cold sweat on his brow as he followed Pedro and Antonio into a disorganized crowd of militiamen.
Pedro was led off to a digging detail and Bernie and Antonio and twenty others, some with rifles and others without, were ordered to follow a sergeant into a half-dug trench, men with spades pausing to let them by. Sandbags had been piled high on the side facing the Casa de Campo, from where sporadic gunfire was audible. Things were chaotic: men running to and fro, lorries sliding and slithering in the mud. The men leaned back uncertainly against the sandbags.
‘Jesus,’ Bernie said to Antonio. ‘This isn’t an army.’
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Antonio said. ‘Here, hold this, I’m going to take a look.’ There was a ladder next to Antonio and before Bernie could stop him he had started climbing up it.
‘Stop it, you crazy bastard, you’ll get hit.’ Bernie remembered Pa saying that was how thousands of new recruits had died on the W
estern Front: taking a look over the top.
Antonio rested his arms on top of the sandbags. ‘It’s all right, they can’t see me. Christ, they’ve got field-guns and everything out there. Nothing’s moving—’
Bernie swore, put down the rifle and climbed up the ladder, grabbing at Antonio’s waist. ‘Get down!’
‘It’s all right.’
Bernie took another step up and grabbed Antonio’s shoulder, and that was when the sniper fired. The bullet missed Antonio’s head but hit Bernie’s arm. He gave a cry and the two of them tumbled together down the ladder into the trench. Bernie saw the blood welling up through his jacket and passed out.
A SPANISH commissar came to visit him in the field hospital.
‘You’re a fool,’ he told him. ‘You should have reported to Party HQ first; you’d have had some training.’
‘My friends said they needed every man in the Casa de Campo. I’m sorry.’
The commissar grunted. ‘You’ll be out of it for weeks now. And we will have to billet you somewhere when you get out of here.’
‘My friends in Carabanchel will look after me.’
The man looked at him askance. ‘Are they party?’
‘Socialists.’
The man grunted.
‘How’s the fighting?’ asked Bernie.
‘We’re holding them. We’re forming a Communist brigade, bringing in some discipline.’
BERNIE SHIFTED in his bunk, trying to warm his legs. In the next bed Vicente was making a horrible gurgling sound in his sleep. He remembered his weeks of convalescence in Carabanchel. His attempts to convert the Meras to communism were unsuccessful. They said the Russians were destroying the Republic, talking of cooperation with the progressive bourgeoisie while bringing in their secret police and spies. Bernie said the tales of Russian brutality were exaggerated, and you had to be hard in war. But it wasn’t easy to argue with a veteran of thirty years of class struggle like Pedro. Sometimes he began to doubt whether what they said about the Russians could all be lies, but he put those thoughts from his mind; they were a distraction and in the midst of this struggle he must stay focused.