Kitabı oku: «The Gate of the Sun»

CHAPTER 1

Difficult to believe on this February morning in 1937 that, as a new day was born in the sky, men on the earth below were dying.

Tom Canfield lowered his stubby little Polikarpov from the cloud to take a closer look, but all he could see were swamps of mist, broken here and there by crests of hills – like the backs of prehistoric monsters, he thought – and the occasional flash of exploding shells.

He nosed the monoplane with its camouflaged fuselage and purple, yellow and red tailplane even lower, as though he were landing on the mist over the Jarama river. Hilltops sped past, vapour slithered over the wings; he had no idea whether he was flying over Fascist or Republican lines, only that the Fascists were trying to cut the road to Valencia, the main supply route to Madrid, 20 miles north-west of the beleaguered capital and had to be stopped.

Three months ago he could not have told you where Valencia was.

Despairing of finding the enemy, he raised the snout of the Polikarpov, known to the Fascists as a rat, and flew freely in the acres between mist and cloud, a tall young man – length sharpened into angles by the confines of the cockpit – with careless fair hair that gave an impression of warmth, and the face of a seeker of truths. The mist was just beginning to thin when he spotted another aircraft sharing the space. He banked and flew towards it and as it grew larger and darker he identified it as an enemy Heinkel 51 biplane.

Enemy? I don’t know the pilot and he doesn’t know me. Why should we, strangers in a foreign land, try and shoot each other out of the wide sky? He adjusted his goggles which were in no need of adjustment and, with the ball of his thumb, touched the button controlling the little rat’s 7.62 mm machineguns.

Wings beat in the cage of his ribs.

He thought the German pilot of the Heinkel waved but he could not be sure. He waved back but he had no idea whether the German could see him.

His chest ached with the beat of the wings.

Tom learned to fly in the good days, in his father’s Cessna at Floyd Bennett Field, before his father was wiped out on Wall Street in the Crash of 1929.

Those were the days when, without pausing to spare good or bad fortune a thought, Tom had lived with his parents in a 32-roomed mansion at Southampton on Long Island, an apartment overlooking Central Park and a cabin at Jackman in Maine, near the Canadian border, where there was a lake stuffed with trout.

One day’s dealings on the Stock Exchange had erased these visible assets, and a lot more besides. Harry Canfield, self-made and bullishly proud of it, had suffered a stroke and his wife had mourned his convalescence with stoic martyrdom; the Cessna had been sold and Tom had quit Columbia Law School to earn a living.

Unprepared for routine labour, he had not prospered, succeeding only as a bouncer in a speakeasy until five Italians beat him senseless and concluding that period of his life share-cropping in Arkansas. By then he had lived in accommodation no bigger than a garden shed in a coal town in West Virginia and subsisted on soup made from potato peelings, and he had stood in a line in sub-zero temperatures in Minnesota waiting for a meal that had evaporated when he reached the head of the queue, and he had shared a brick-built shack in Central Park with commanding views of the blocks where the more fortunate citizens of New York still resided. And he had become rebelliously inclined.

When civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936, he and some 3,000 other Americans identified immediately and passionately with the Republicans – the workers, the peasants, the people – and crossed the Atlantic to help them fight their terrible, fratricidal battles. Some went through the Pyrenees, some reported to the recruiting centre of the International Brigades in Paris on the rue Lafayette.

Tom was interviewed in Paris by a chain-smoking Polish colonel with a shaven scalp and pointed ears who was reputed to have fought for the reds in the Russian civil war. He made notes in an exercise book with a squeaking pen in tiny mauve lettering.

What were Tom’s qualifications?

‘I can fly,’ Tom told him.

‘Aircraft?’ The colonel stared at him through the smoke rising from a yellow cigarette.

‘Boeings,’ Tom said.

‘Stearmans?’

‘P-26s,’ Tom lied because Stearmans were trainers and this shiny-scalped Pole with the exhausted eyes seemed to know his aircraft.

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘What’s the landing speed of a P-26?’

‘High, maybe 75 miles per hour.’

‘Politics?’

‘None.’

The colonel laid down his chewed pen. ‘Everyone has a political attitude whether they realize it or not.’

‘Okay, I’m for the people.’

‘An Anarchist?’

‘Sounds good,’ said Tom who had not thrown up on a cargo boat all the way from New York to Le Havre to be interrogated.

‘Communist?’

Tom shook his head and stared at the rain-wet street outside.

‘Socialist?’

‘If you say so.’

The colonel lit another cigarette, inhaling the smoke hungrily as though it were food. He scratched another entry in the exercise book. ‘Why do you want to fight in Spain?’

Tom pointed at a poster on the wall bearing the words SPAIN, THE GRAVE OF FASCISM.

‘Tell me, Comrade Canfield, are you anti-poverty or anti-riches?’

What sort of a question was that? He said: ‘I believe in justice.’

The colonel dipped his pen into the inkwell and wrote energetically. The rain made wandering rivulets on the window. Lenin smiled conspiratorially at Tom from a picture-frame on the wall.

‘You were born in New York?’

‘Boston,’ Tom said.

‘Why didn’t you go to Harvard?’

‘I went share-cropping instead.’

‘Please don’t play games with me. You see I, too, lived in New York. You’re no peasant, Mister Canfield, not with that accent.’

‘My father went bust.’

‘So why does the son of a capitalist want to fight for the Cause?’

‘Because bad luck is a two-edged sword, comrade. When we were rich I saw only the sea and the sky; when we went broke I saw the land and I saw people trying to make it work for them.’

‘And did it?’

‘I lived in a shack with a married couple with five kids in a coal town in West Virginia. Know what they paid them with?’

The colonel shook his head.

‘Coal,’ Tom said.

‘What were you paid in?’

‘Ideals,’ Tom said. ‘Do you have any objections to those, comrade?’ thinking: ‘Watch your tongue, or you’ll blow it.’

‘Why didn’t you join the Party?’

‘Which party?’

‘There is only one.’

‘You don’t reckon the Democrats or the Republicans?’

‘There’s not much to choose between them, is there? They’re all capitalists.’

‘What do you believe in, Colonel?’

‘In the class struggle. I believe that one day the slaves and not the slave-drivers will rule the world.’

‘Rule, Colonel?’

‘Co-exist. But please, I am supposed to be asking the questions. Do you believe in God?’

‘I guess so. Whether he’s Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Catholic. Or Communist,’ he said.

‘The Fascists believe they have God on their side. Maybe you should fight for the Fascists.’

‘Perhaps I should at that.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t allow that.’ The colonel almost smiled and his pointed ears moved a little. ‘You see, we need pilots.’ He leaned forward and made a small, untidy entry in the exercise book.

At first Paris was a disappointment. The inhabitants of the arrondissement where he was staying resented penniless mercenaries on their streets and the other foreigners taking part in the crusade, particularly the Communists, were hostile to an American who, although he had picked fruit in California and collected duck shit at the east end of Long Island for fertilizer, still possessed the sheen of privilege. He was either slumming or spying.

When one Russian on his way to Spain as an adviser – they were all ‘advisers’, the Russians – accused him in a café of being a spy he resorted to his fists, a not infrequent expedient when his tongue failed him. The Russian, a Georgian with beautiful eyes and a belly like a sack of potatoes, fought well but he was no match for the middle-weight champion of Columbia.

‘So,’ the Russian said from between fist-thickened lips, ‘if you’re not a spy what the hell are you?’ He picked himself up from the wreckage of a table.

‘An idealist, I guess.’

‘With a punch like that?’ The Russian shook his head tentatively and touched one slitted eye. ‘Are you reporting to Albacete?’ Tom said he was. ‘Maybe I will become your commissar,’ continued the Russian. ‘I would like that.’ Followed by other advisers, he walked into the rain-swept street.

When the Russians had gone the sturdy bespectacled man in the corner said, ‘So you pack your ideals in your fists?’

Tom, who was beginning to think that ideals could get him into a lot of trouble, said, ‘He asked for it.’

‘And got it. Where did you learn to fight like that?’ His accent was Brooklyn, as refreshing as water from a sponge.

‘Columbia,’ Tom said, sitting at the table. ‘Where did you learn to talk like that?’

‘A rhetorical question?’

‘Rhetorical, Jesus!’

‘I come from Brooklyn and I mustn’t use long words?’ He beckoned a waiter. ‘Beer?’

‘Fine,’ Tom said, examining a bruised knuckle.

‘You a flier?’

‘Am I that obvious?’

‘I can see it in your eyes. Searching the skies. My name’s Seidler,’ stretching a hand across the table. His grip was unnecessarily strong; when people gripped his hand firmly and looked him straight in the eye Tom Canfield looked for reasons – he had become wise in the coal fields and the orchards.

The waiter placed two beers on the table.

‘Are you going to Spain?’ Tom asked doubtfully because with his spectacles and the roll of flesh under his chin Seidler did not have the bearing of a crusader.

‘To Albacete. Wherever the hell that is.’

‘Why?’ Tom asked.

‘Because Spain seems like a good place to fly.’

‘You’re a pilot? Wearing spectacles?’

‘For reading only.’

‘So why are you wearing them now?’

‘And for drinking beer,’ Seidler said.

‘Okay, stop putting me on. Why are you going to Spain?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? Me, a German Jew, Hitler and Mussolini, Fascists in Spain … Or am I addressing a punch-drunk college dropout?’

‘I used to collect duck shit,’ Tom said.

‘Guano,’ Seidler said. ‘Best goddamn fertilizer in the world.’ He took a deep draught from his glass. ‘So your old man went bust?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Instinct,’ Seidler said tapping the side of his nose. ‘Who interviewed you? A Polak with pointed ears?’

‘He told you?’

‘Said you were a flier, too.’

‘A very stupid flier,’ Tom said. ‘Eyes searching the skies … Didn’t you have your eyes tested before you started flying?’

‘I’m short-sighted which means I can see long distances.’

‘So?’

‘I keep crashing,’ Seidler said.

After that Tom Canfield enjoyed Paris.

On 28 November Seidler and Canfield departed from the Gare d’Austerlitz on train number 77 on the first stage of their journey to the Spanish city of Albacete which lies on the edge of the plain, half-way between Madrid and the Mediterranean coast.

There were many volunteers on the train, French, British, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Russian advisers. Tom felt ill at ease with the leather-jacketed Russians: he had journeyed to Europe to fight injustice, not espouse Marx or Lenin or, God forbid, Stalin. But, as the train paused at small stations he was comforted by the crowds on the platforms waving banners, offering wine and, with clenched fists raised, chanting, ‘No pasarán!’ – they shall not pass. He was also cheered by the knowledge that he and Seidler were fliers, not foot soldiers; there is, as he was discovering, a pecking order in all things.

‘Tell me how you became a flier,’ he said to Seidler as the train nosed slowly past ploughed, wintry fields. Wine had spilled on his scuffed flying jacket, much shabbier than Seidler’s, and he felt a little drunk – happy to be here in Spain.

‘I wanted to join the Air Force,’ Seidler said, chewing grapes that a well-wisher had handed him and spitting the pips on the floor. ‘Actually volunteered, would you believe? I mean, do I look like Air Force material?’

‘It’s the spectacles,’ Tom said, but it was more.

‘They were polite. “Not quite what we’re looking for, Mr Seidler, but thank you for offering your services.” So I went back to selling books in a discount store on 42nd Street and learned to fly in New Jersey and waited for a war some place.’

Tom pointed at a miniature haystack on a church. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘A stork’s nest,’ Seidler said. ‘Did you leave a girl behind?’

‘Nothing serious,’ Tom said.

‘Parents?’

‘My father had a stroke after he was cleared out. They live in a small hotel in upstate New York. They didn’t want me to come out here’ – the understatement of the year.

‘And you’re obviously an only child.’

Obviously? He remembered the house on Long Island and he remembered avenues of molten light on the water with yachts making their way down it, and men dressed in shorts and matelot jerseys drinking with his father, fierce moustache trimmed for his 60th birthday, and his mother dutifully reading to him in bed. She had been beautiful then, an older Katherine Hepburn, with chestnut hair piled high. He had never told them that he hated boats and, when he was lying on his back on the deck of the yacht, he was imagining himself at the controls of a yellow biplane exploring the castles of cloud on the horizon.

‘But you’re not,’ he said to Seidler.

‘Two brothers, one sister, all gainfully employed in the Garment Centre.’

The train which they had joined at Valencia stopped at a station, little more than a platform, and a dozen militiamen climbed on board. They wore blue overalls and boots, or rope-soled shoes, and berets or caps – one wore a French-style steel helmet, and two of them sported blood-stained bandages. Although the war had been in progress for only four months they conducted themselves like veterans and one carried a long-barrelled pistol which he laid carefully on his knees, as though it were made of glass. They were all young but they were no longer youthful.

Seidler spoke to them in Spanish. They were, he told Tom, returning to Madrid which had miraculously held out against the Fascist onslaught.

As Seidler talked and handed out Lucky Strikes, which were taken shyly and examined like foreign coins, Tom spread a map on his knees and tried to understand the war.

He knew that the Fascists, or Nationalists, were drawn from the army, the Falange and the Church, the landowners and the industrialists; that the Republicans were Socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals and the working class.

He knew that, to protect their privileges, the Fascists had risen in July 1936 to overthrow the lawful government of the Republic, established in 1931, which was being far too indulgent towards the poor. He had read somewhere that before the advent of the Republic a peasant had earned two or three pesetas a day.

He knew that the Fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, had, with the help of German transport planes, invaded Spain from North Africa and that in the north, led by General Emilio Mola, they had swept all before them. But great swathes of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were still in the hands of the Republicans. No pasarán!

He knew that the Moors fighting for Franco took no prisoners and cut off their victims’ genitals; he knew that the heroine of the Republicans was a woman known as La Pasionaria.

He knew that on the sides of this carriage where, on the wooden seats, peasants sat with their live chickens and baskets of locust beans were scrawled the letters UGT and CNT and FAI, but he had no idea what they meant and was ashamed of his ignorance.

The plain rolled past; water and smuts from the labouring engine streaked the windows.

‘So what else have you found out?’ Tom asked Seidler.

‘That Albacete is the asshole of Spain but they make good killing knives there.’

The militiamen, Tom reflected later, had been right about Albacete. It was cold and commonplace, and the cafés were crammed with discontented members of the International Brigades from many nations drinking cheap red wine.

The garrison was worse. It was the colour of clay, the barrack-room walls were the graveyards of squashed bugs and the floors were laid with bone-chilling stone. Tom and Seidler were quartered with Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – seamen, students and Communists – but France was in the ascendancy: the Brigade commissar, André Marty, was a bulky Frenchman with a persecution complex; parade-ground orders were issued in French; many uniforms, particularly those worn resentfully by the British, were Gallic leftovers from other conflicts.

He and Seidler complained to Marty the day the commander of the Abraham Lincolns, good and drunk, fired his pistol through a barrack-room ceiling.

From behind his desk Marty, balding with a luxuriant moustache, regarded them suspiciously.

‘You are guests in a foreign country. You shouldn’t complain – just think of what the poor bastards in Madrid are going through.’

‘Sure, and we want to help them,’ Seidler said. ‘But the instructors here couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.’

Marty fiddled with a button on his crumpled brown uniform.

‘You Jewish?’ He sucked his moustache with his bottom lip. ‘And a flier?’ – as though that compounded the crime.

And it was then that Tom Canfield realized that Marty was jealous, that fliers were different and that this would always be an advantage in life.

‘We didn’t come here to march and clean guns: we came here to fly,’ Tom said. He loved the word ‘fly’ and he wanted to repeat it. ‘We came here to bomb the Fascists at the gates of Madrid and shoot their bombers out of the sky. We’re not helping the Cause sitting on our asses; flying is what we’re good at.’

Marty, who was said to have the ear of Stalin, listened impatiently and Tom got the impression that it was Communism rather than the Cause that interested him.

‘I want your passports,’ Marty said.

‘The hell you do.’

‘In case you get shot down. You’re not supposed to be in this war. Article Ten of the Covenant of the League of Nations.’

‘So what about the Russians?’ Tom asked.

‘Advisers,’ Marty said. ‘Give me your passport.’

‘No way,’ Tom said. Then he said, ‘You mean we’re leaving here?’

‘To Guadalajara, north-east of Madrid. You’ll be trained by Soviet advisers. There’s a train this afternoon. On your way,’ said Marty who could do without fliers in his brigade. He flung two sets of documents on the desk. Tom was José Espinosa, Seidler Luis Morales. ‘Only Spaniards are fighting this war,’ Marty said. ‘It’s called non-intervention.’

‘Congratulations, Pepe,’ Seidler said outside the office.

‘Huh?’

‘The familiar form of José.’

Tom scanned his new identification paper. It was in French. Of course. But he still had his passport.

At the last minute the Heinkel from the Condor Legion, silver with brown and green camouflage, ace of spades painted on the fuselage, veered away. Tom didn’t blame the pilot: the Russian-made rats were plundering the skies. Or maybe the pilot was no more a Fascist than he was a Communist and could see no sense in joining battle with a stranger over a battlefield where enough men had died already.

He banked and flew above the dispersing mist, landing at Guadalajara, which the Republicans had captured early in the fighting. Seidler was playing poker in a tent with three other pilots in the squadron’s American Patrol. He was winning but he displayed no emotion; Tom had never heard him laugh.

Tom made his reconnaissance report to the squadron commander – he was learning Spanish but his tongue grew thick with trying – debating whether to mention the Heinkel. If he did the commander would want to know why he hadn’t pursued it.

‘No enemy aircraft?’ asked the commander who had already shot down 11.

‘One Heinkel 51,’ Tom said.

‘You didn’t chase it?’

Tom shook his head.

‘Very wise: he was probably leading you into an ambush.’

Tom fetched a mug of coffee and met Seidler walking across the airfield where Polikarpovs, Chato 1-15 biplanes and bulbous-nosed Tupolev bombers stood at rest. It was cold and weeping clouds were following the Henares river on its run from the mountains.

The trouble with this war in which brothers killed brothers and sons killed fathers, he thought as they walked towards their billet, was that nothing was simple. How could a foreigner be expected to understand a war in which there were at least 13 factions? A war in which the Republicans were divided into Communists and Anarchists and God knows what else. A Communist had recently told him that POUM, Trotskyists he had thought, was in the pay of the Fascists. Work that one out.

They reached the billet and Seidler poured them each a measure of brandy. Tom shivered as it slid down his throat. Then he lay on his iron bedstead and stared at his feet clad in fleece-lined flying boots; at least fliers could keep warm. He had once believed that Spain was a land of perpetual sunshine … Sleet slid down the window of the hut and the wind from the mountains played a dirge in the telephone lines.

Seidler sat on the edge of his own bed, placing his leather helmet and goggles gently on the pillow; only Tom knew the secret of those goggles – the frames contained lenses to compensate for his bad sight.

He stared short-sightedly at Tom and said, ‘So how’d it go?’

‘Okay, I guess.’ He told Seidler, who had already recorded one kill, a Junkers 52 on a bombing mission, about the Heinkel. ‘I’m not sure I wanted to shoot it down.’

‘Know what I felt when I got that Junkers? I thought it was one of those passenger planes in a movie, you know, when Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn is trying to guide it through a storm. And as it caught fire and went into its death dive I thought I saw passengers at the windows. And then I thought that maybe it wasn’t a bomber because those Ju-52s are used as transport planes, too – 17 passengers, maybe more – and maybe I had killed them all. Kids younger than us, maybe.’