Mouth dry, Fujita ran forward, hunched over as low as he could go. The Russian Maxim guns needed only a few seconds to snarl to life. Bullets coming toward him, bullets snapping past him from behind… He’d been places he liked more. Less? Maybe not.
He tripped over something and fell full length in the snow. Two bullets, one coming and the other going, slammed together about where he’d just been. They fell beside him, sending up a small plume of steam. He hardly noticed, and had no idea how lucky he was.
He got up again and stumbled on. Not all the Japanese soldiers who’d gone down would get up again. If you lost a regiment taking a stretch of ground not very wide and even less deep… He called down elaborate curses on Shinjiro Hayashi’s learned head.
Some soldiers had wire cutters. Some of them stayed unwounded long enough to get up to the vicious stuff and cut it. More Japanese soldiers, Fujita among them, pushed through the gaps and rushed the Russian trenches. A Red Army man popped up like a marmot. He aimed his rifle at the sergeant. Fujita fired first. He missed, but he made the Russian duck. With a cry of “Banzai!” Fujita leaped into the trench after him.
The Russian shot at him from almost point-blank range. He missed anyhow. Fujita lunged with the bayonet while the Russian was working the bolt. The point went home. The white man screamed and dropped the rifle. Fujita stuck him again and again, till he finally fell over. Even then, he kept thrashing on the cold hard ground until the sergeant shot him in the head. People could be awfully hard to kill.
Little by little, paying a price, the Japanese cleared the Russians from three or four rows of trenches. No, not much left in the dead men’s pockets, though Fujita did get some Russian cigarettes-a little tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. He lit one. The smoke was harsh as sandpaper, but he didn’t care.
Senior Private Hayashi sidled up to him and spoke in a low voice: “If clearing a space two hundred meters by fifty meters costs most of a regiment…”
“Oh, shut up,” Fujita exclaimed. He tried to blow a smoke ring.
Spain was miserably hot in summer and miserably cold in winter. Coming as he did from New York City, Chaim Weinberg had reckoned himself a connoisseur of both extremes. He had to admit, though, that Spain went further in both directions than his home town.
Spain seemed to go all-out in everything. American politics matched one side of the center against the other, and endlessly played the game of compromise solution. Communists like Chaim couldn’t get a serious hearing there. And so he’d come to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to do what he could for the left-wing Republic against Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, who held more than half of it.
He’d sweltered. He’d frozen, the way he was freezing now. He’d argued in English, in Yiddish that often did duty for German, and in bad Spanish. The Republic ran on argument no less than on gasoline and high explosives. He’d learned to drink wine from a leather sack and to roll his own smokes. He’d killed. He’d been wounded. He’d got laid. If you were an excitable young man who hadn’t done most of those things before (sweltering, freezing, and arguing came naturally), Spain could look a lot like paradise.
But if this was paradise, it needed rebuilding. Sanjurjo’s men, and the Italian and German mercenaries who fought on their side, had done their best to knock Madrid flat. Their best was good, but not good enough. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Hardly any windows were glazed. Craters in streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere in town an adventure.
Chaim didn’t care. The Madrilenos carried on as if the war were a million miles away: as well as they could when going hungry or huddling in a cellar while bombs rained down didn’t distract them. If the wine reminded him of vinegar or piss, if the cigarettes tasted of hay or horseshit or other street scrapings, well, so what? You could still get drunk. Whatever else went into the cigarettes, they had enough tobacco so you didn’t think you’d quit.
And the people… Everybody called everyone else tu. The formal Usted hadn’t been banned in the Republic, but anyone who used it might get sent off for reeducation. Women acted like men, in the shops, in the streets, and in bed. Yes, Chaim had got laid. If you couldn’t get laid in the Spanish Republic, you weren’t half trying.
Prisoners from the other side who were brought into Madrid had to think they’d landed on Mars. Where the Republic jumped on class and sex distinctions with both feet, under the Fascist regime they got enforced more strongly than ever. Enforcing the ruling class’s dominance was what Fascism was all about.
Almost by accident, Chaim had got the job of reindoctrinating those prisoners. His Spanish still wasn’t the best, but it did the job-and if he was fluent in any part of the language, it was Marxist-Leninist jargon. Besides, Spaniards were absurdly respectful of foreigners. The Fascists even respected Italians, for crying out loud! Prisoners assumed an American had to be a political sophisticate. Chaim knew better, but didn’t let on that he did.
The POW camp was in a park near the center of Madrid. When enemy planes came over at night, they dropped their bombs more or less at random. They bombed their own people, too. Sometimes they blasted the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. That led to escapes: POWs on the loose in Madrid weren’t much shabbier than anybody else, and looked, acted, and sounded like any other Spaniards. It also led to casualties.
Chaim still wasn’t sure whether Joaquin Delgadillo, a man he’d captured himself, was the one or the other. Delgadillo wasn’t in the camp any more. Chaim knew that. But whether the Spaniard had got away after a bombing run or been blasted into unrecognizable scraps of meat, the guards had no idea. They only shrugged. “One or the other,” they chorused.
“But which?” Chaim demanded. “Differences are important.”
“One or the other,” the guards said again. They didn’t get it. Maybe they needed to listen to his harangues, too.
Someone on this side of the wire listened intently to what he told the captured Fascists. The authorities wanted to make sure he preached only good, pure, true Communist doctrine. Heaven-the heaven he didn’t believe in-help him if he showed himself out of step with what Moscow decreed to be so… or, worse, if he showed he’d fallen into the Trotskyist heresy. There were times when the old Inquisition had nothing on the Republic, though Chaim didn’t think of it like that.
He didn’t not least because his minder was one of the best-looking women he’d ever set eyes on. La Martellita-her nom de guerre meant the little hammer -filled out overalls in a way their designer never intended. Midnight hair. Snapping eyes, coral lips, a piquant nose… He was in love, or at least in lust.
La Martellita looked at him as if she’d just found half of him in her apple. If she didn’t like what he said, she might be able to have him shot. He didn’t care. If anything, the aura of danger that fit her as tightly as those overalls only made him hotter.
He didn’t even know her real name. She wouldn’t tell him, and he hadn’t found anybody else who knew. One of these days, he would. And then, casually, in just the right spot, he’d call her by it. And then what? Chances were she’d tell him to fuck off. Even rejection, coming from her, seemed sweet.
Which was a good thing, because rejection and criticism were all he got from her. He did try to be more careful with the doctrine he preached to the prisoners. He didn’t want to die at the hands of his own side. He didn’t want to die at all. He aspired to be shot at the age of 103 by an outraged husband. He’d come to Spain to fight the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, not its friends.
When he said as much to La Martellita, she curled her kissable upper lip. “Then you shouldn’t deviate from the Party line,” she said, as if she were a bishop complaining about a priest’s sermon.