I was so nervous that I didn’t notice much of what was going on, or didn’t understand it, with that dim light and the low voices. But I could see Stalin well; he was seated at the middle of a long table, chatting with someone, very informal, smoking and laughing, and I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was actually seeing him, the flesh-and-blood man, unmistakable, like a member of my family — he reminded me of the time I was a little girl and saw my father standing among a group of men — but also very different, I don’t know how to explain it; he looked as he did in the pictures we’d seen everywhere forever, and yet he wasn’t much like them, he was older and smaller, and I saw his short legs beneath the table and his crossed boots, and when he laughed, his face filled with wrinkles and his small teeth were chipped, or black from tobacco, and his uniform was a little big on him, but precisely for those reasons I was more moved than I’d expected, and in a different way, because I thought I would be seeing a giant at the peak of his strength but it turned out that Stalin was a tired old man, the way my father was at the end of his life. Fragile even though he’d had the enormous strength it took to rebel against the czar, oversee the birth of socialism, and win the war against the Nazis; you could see that all those years of effort and sacrifice had worn him down, like the years in the mines and in prison wore my father down, and I thought he looked as if he hadn’t slept well, and every so often he’d seem to be somewhere else while someone was talking to him or as he listened to a speech, until I felt sorry for him, for the sickish color of his skin and all those years with no rest, clear back to when he was a boy in the times of the czars and they deported him to Siberia. Later my mother said to me, “You should have seen your face when you were looking at him, your mouth was hanging open, and you’d have thought you were seeing a movie star.” But then something happened as I stared at Stalin, not taking my eyes off him as if no one else were there. I wanted to remember all the details of his face and felt sorry for him, he looked so exhausted, and the uniform jacket on him was so big, then I felt a stab, like an electric shock. Someone was looking at me, coldly, with rage, for my bad manners in staring so openly at Stalin, a small, bald man seated near him, wearing those old-fashioned glasses they call pince-nez, and a bow tie and high celluloid collar that were just as old-fashioned. I turned to ice and still get shivers down my spine when I think it was Beria, but I wasn’t afraid of him because he was the chief of the KGB, it was those eyes, which cut through the space separating us. He was studying me as you would an insect, as if saying, “Who do you think you are to be staring at Stalin like that? How did you get in here?” But there was something beyond that, and I was so stupid in those days that I didn’t realize what it was, although instinctively I felt repelled, the way I did by those men who stared at me when I lived in the girls’ residence and didn’t understand why they breathed so hard and never took their eyes off me and brushed against me in the trolley.
As I’m sitting here, memories come back, and it seems unreal that so many things happened to me, that I was in such faraway places, at the Black Sea and in Siberia and the Arctic Circle, but I’m far from things here too, Madrid is a long way from Moscow. I don’t know Madrid as well, I’m afraid to go outside with all those cars and people, afraid of getting lost and not finding my way back, especially since the time I was mugged just outside the front door, thrown to the ground, my purse snatched, and I lay there on the sidewalk screaming, “Thief, thief,” but no one came to help, though now that I think about it, I probably shouted in Russian because of the problem I have with the two languages, speaking in one and thinking in the other. I always dream in Russian, and about things that happened there, or happened many years ago when I was little, before they sent us to the Soviet Union for a few months, they said, and then until the war was over, but the war ended and they didn’t send us home, and soon another war broke out and then it was impossible, it seemed the world was coming to an end. They evacuated us and sent us a long way away, I don’t know how many days we traveled by train, days and weeks, always in the snow, and I thought, I’m getting farther and farther away from Spain, from my mother and father, although I almost didn’t remember them, I even began to feel a little hostile toward them, I’m ashamed to say, because they shouldn’t have let me get on that boat, leaving me alone again, as they did when they went to their union or Party meetings. My brother and I were left alone all night, he crying because he was afraid or hungry and I rocking him in my arms, although I wasn’t much older, such a scared little boy he was and weakly because of our bad diet, but how strong and brave he became later, when at twelve he went out with me to sell the Mundo obrero, the Worker’s World, that was when we still lived in Madrid. He told me, “Don’t be afraid of those fancy young guys, because if they come after us I’ll protect you,” and later, when he was just twenty and a pilot in the Red Army, he came to see me and lifted me off my feet and whirled me around as he hugged me, so handsome in his air-force uniform and the red star on his cap. Then he came to say good-bye because his squadron had been ordered to the Leningrad front, and he never stopped laughing and singing Spanish songs with me, and he inspired all the girls in the school to be nurses for the troops. That night I went with him to the station, and when the train was pulling out he hopped down and hugged and kissed me again, then jumped back on the train and grabbed the handrail as if he were swinging onto a horse, and he waved goodbye with his cap in his hand, and I never saw him again. That’s the strangest thing about life, something I can’t get used to, that you have someone you’re close to and who’s always been there, and a minute later he disappears and it’s as if he never existed. But I know my brother died a hero, that he kept attacking the Germans when his plane had one engine on fire, crashing it into the enemy artillery, a hero of the Soviet Union, and his photo was published in Pravda looking as handsome as a movie star. I sit here thinking about him, the memory comes without my doing anything, as if I opened the door and my brother calmly walked in, with that smile and poise of his, I see him before me in his pilot’s jacket and imagine we’re talking and remembering things. I tell him everything that’s happened to me since his death more than fifty years ago, how the world has changed, how everything we fought for has been lost, everything that he and so many like him gave their lives for, but he never loses his good humor, he scratches his head beneath the cap, pats my knee, and says, “Here, now, woman, don’t go on so.” Sometimes I’m awake and see him standing before me as clearly as in my dreams, but strangest of all is not that he’s come back or that he’s still a boy of twenty, but that he speaks to me in Russian, so fast and perfect and without an accent, because Russian was really hard for him, worse than for me at the beginning, when people spoke to me and I didn’t understand, and not understanding was worse than being cold or hungry. Now it’s the other way around, sometimes I don’t understand Spanish, and I can’t get used to how people speak, so loud and curt, as if they were always in a hurry or angry, like the man the day I was mugged, who helped me get up and stand because I was in pain, thinking, “What if my hip is broken? What if they have to put my leg in a cast and then I can’t go out? Who will come help me?” The man said, “Damn it to hell, señora, I’ll go with you to the station to file a complaint, because we need to crack down on those bastards, it had to be one of those goddamned moros who hang around here.” I thanked him but kept my dignity and said, “No, señor, it wasn’t a moro who attacked me, he was white as snow, and besides, you shouldn’t call them moros, they’re not Moors, they’re Moroccans, and as for the complaint, that will have to wait, because the important thing to me right now is to get to the protest: this is May Day.” The man looked at me as if I were crazy, “Well that’s up to you, señora, whatever you say,” and I thanked him and went on to the protest, limping, but I went, and when it was over, some comrades took me to the police station in their car and I filed the complaint, but I’m not one to miss a May Day, even though it’s not the same anymore, each time fewer people come and it’s all so watered down, there’s just a few red flags and raised fists, and not even those marching in the front, right behind the banner, know the Internationale.