The train that chuffed into Tortosa for the fighters had seen better days, better years, better decades. The locomotive wheezed asthmatically The cars seemed to be missing half their windows. Once Chaim squeezed inside, he discovered the compartments had nothing but hard benches. He was lucky to get to sit down at all; the Internationals were packed in tight as sardines, without the benefit of olive oil to grease the spaces between them.
"Boy, this is fun," he said to nobody in particular.
"Scheisse," declared the tall, skinny, blond German wedged in beside him. "My ass." The guy looked as if he ought to belong in the SS, but his heart was in the right place. He took a pack of Gitanes from his breast pocket and offered it to Chaim. "Zigarette?"
"Thanks," Chaim said. He shared the red wine in his canteen with the young blond fellow. They talked in a weird mixture of English, German, Yiddish, and Spanish. The German's name was Wladimir-he insisted on the W at the front, even if it sounded like a V-Diehl. Chaim could think of only one reason why a German his age would be called Wladimir. "Your folks name you for Lenin?"
"You betcha," Diehl answered, a phrase he must have picked up from an American. "They tried to help the Red revolution in Bavaria. My father, I think, was lucky to live. They fought Hitler's goons in the streets when the Nazis were new and no one thought they would ever amount to anything. My father and mother have been fighting the Nazis longer than almost anyone." He spoke with somber pride. And well he might: among the Internationals, that was something to be proud of.
If anything, the locomotive seemed even wheezier pulling out of Tortosa than it had coming in. Chaim knew why: it was pulling all these cars stuffed with soldiers. And it had to take the long way to Madrid. If the Republicans hadn't recaptured the corridor to the sea from the Nationalists, there would have been no direct route through their territory from the upper Ebro to the city. They would have had to go to Barcelona, take ship, land in Valencia or some other port, and then head west from there. And they probably would have arrived just too late to do the cause any good.
Nobody bothered to feed the Internationals on the train. Along with the wine in his canteen, Chaim had enough bread and garlicky sausage to keep from getting too hungry for a couple of days. He'd been in Spain long enough to assume inefficiency would rear up and try to bite him in the ass. Wladimir carried stewed beans and smoked herrings instead. They swapped some of their iron rations. What Chaim got was no better than what he gave away, but at least it was different.
They didn't go very fast. Again, he was anything but surprised. It wasn't all the poor spavined engine's fault. The Spanish railroad net had been ramshackle to begin with, at least by American standards (and German ones-what Wladimir had to say put out more high-pressure steam than the locomotive's boiler; Harvey Jacoby'd known what he was talking about, all right). Two and a half years of war, two and a half years of bad maintenance-often of no maintenance-did nothing to improve matters.
Everybody had to get out and walk a couple of miles outside the little town of Villar. Jacoby and other International Brigade big shots promised that another train would be waiting at the depot. Chaim marched past a break in the track. Fascist saboteurs? Or just an ancient railroad line coming apart at the seams? He couldn't tell. He wasn't sure it mattered. Any which way, the line was fucked up.
And sleepy Villar might never have seen a train since the beginning of time. A few small boys stared at the Internationals as they slogged up to the yawningly empty depot. None of the other locals seemed to want to show their faces. Chaim would have been angrier had he believed the officers' promises to begin with. He'd been in Spain too long to trust anybody or anything any more.
The train did show up…fourteen hours later, in the middle of the night. The locals had emerged by then, to offer food and drink at inflated prices. The Internationals proposed a different bargain: if they got fed, they wouldn't sack the town. Upon hasty consideration, the people of Villar agreed. "God protect us from our friends," Wladimir said, and Chaim nodded.
When somebody shook him awake, he didn't want to get up. He really didn't want to get on another train. As usual, nobody cared what he wanted. He managed to snag another seat. It was hard and cramped and uncomfortable, but inside of ten minutes he was snoring again.
He dozed till an hour past sunup. Not even artillery bursts around the station as the Internationals disembarked in Madrid got him very excited. It was a big city, and it already looked like hell. The Nationalists had battered it with guns and bombs ever since the war was young.
But the International Brigades were here to do what they'd done before-to help make sure Madrid stayed with the Republic. And, somewhere, Chaim would find a warm place to sleep.
Joaquin Delgadillo didn't know what to make of Major Bernardo Uribe. His new battalion commander was recklessly brave. You had to be, to keep going forward into the shelling the British laid down in their defense of Gibraltar. Uribe hadn't hung back. He'd even won Sergeant Carrasquel's grudging respect-and Carrasquel gave no other kind.
But if the major wasn't a maricon, Joaquin had never seen anybody who was. Uribe smelled of rose water regardless of the hour. He was always shaved smooth as a woman-this among soldiers for whom scruffiness was a mark of pride. And he exaggerated the Castilian lisp into something beyond both effeminacy and self-parody.
If he ever tries rubbing up against me, I'll break my rifle over his head, by God! Delgadillo thought. But Uribe never did. Virile machismo virtually defined the Nationalist cause. Major Uribe cared nothing for machismo-unless it made him hot-but in his own strange way he was worth more to Marshal Sanjurjo than a lot of hard-drinking, hardwenching officers.
"We are going back to Madrid," he told his soldiers, flouncing atop a kitchen table he was using for a podium. "We are. We'll take it away from the Republican beasts once and for all this time. And do you know what I've heard? Have you got any idea, my dears?" He waited expectantly, one hand cupped behind his ear.
"What is it, Senor?" the soldiers chorused, Joaquin loud among them.
"I've heard the International Brigades are back in Madrid. Isn't that jolly?" the major shrilled.
"No, por Dios," Sergeant Carrasquel muttered beside Joaquin. "They may be a bunch of fucking Reds, but they can fight. I ran up against those cocksuckers in '36, and once was plenty, thank you very much."
Up on his rickety platform, Uribe turned the sergeant's argument upside down and inside out: "People say they make good soldiers, and I guess that's true. But they're a pack of filthy, godless Communists. They kill priests and they rape nuns for the fun of it. The sooner we kill every one of them, the sooner we make Spain a clean place to live again."
Some of the Nationalist soldiers cheered. Most of those, Joaquin saw, were men new to the battalion. How much did they know about hard fighting? Sergeant Carrasquel, who knew as much as anybody in the world these days, did some more muttering: "That's all great, but how many of us are those assholes going to kill?"
"Victory will be ours," Major Uribe insisted. "Ours! Spain's! Germany and Italy have other scores to settle. But we-the honest people of Spain, the pious people of Spain-we will give the Red Republic what it deserves.?Muerte a la Republica!?Viva la muerte!"
"?Viva la muerte!" the troops shouted back. Long live death!-the battle cry of the Spanish Foreign Legion-sounded ferocious when they yelled it. In Major Uribe's full-lipped mouth, it seemed more like an endearment.
Uribe, of course, was not speaking for himself alone. He was passing on orders he'd got from the officers above him. If those officers said the battalion was going to Madrid, to Madrid it would go. The only other choice was desertion. And if Marshal Sanjurjo's men caught you after you sneaked away or-ever so much worse-went over to the Republic…They wouldn't waste a cigarette on you before they stood you against the closest wall. They might not even waste a firing squad's worth of bullets on you. Why should they, when they could bash in your skull with a brick or hang you upside down, cut your throat, and bleed you like a stuck pig?