Either they didn't know the camp for their comrades lay right in the middle of the city they were flattening or they didn't care. Joaquin would have bet on the latter.
You could watch the bombs fall from the planes' bellies. You could watch them swell as they grew nearer. You could listen to the rising whistle as they clove the air on their way down. You could watch fire and smoke and dust leap up and out as they burst.
You could, yes-if you were stupid enough. You could get smashed or chopped by flying fragments and rubble, too. Artillery fire and those earlier bombings from the Republicans had rammed one lesson into Joaquin: when things started blowing up, you got as low and as flat as you could. Even that might not be enough, but it gave you your best chance.
Most of the prisoners knew as much. They lay down in whatever tiny dips in the ground they could find. Those who had anything to dig with scraped at the hard, dry dirt as fiercely as they could. Some of those who didn't broke fingernails and tore fingertips in the animal urge to burrow.
Joaquin screamed when bombs went off nearby. That was as much instinct as the prisoners' frantic scrabbling at the dirt. Odds were the thunderous explosions kept other men from hearing his cries. And odds were his weren't the only shrieks rising up to the uncaring sky.
Were the guards on the other side of the wire screaming, too? Of course they were. Terror conquered Nationalists and Republicans with equal ease. And if some of the Republicans weren't calling out to their mothers or to God, Joaquin would have been amazed. You could tear the cassock off a priest or torch a church, but tearing the beliefs you grew up with out of your heart wasn't so easy.
Then two bombs smashed down inside the perimeter, and Joaquin stopped caring about anything but staying alive longer than the next few seconds. He got picked up and slammed down, as if by a wrestler the size of a building. Blood dribbled from his nose; iron and salt filled his mouth. He spat, praying the blast hadn't shredded his lungs. Were his ears also bleeding? He wouldn't have been surprised.
More bombs burst-mercifully, farther away. As if from a long way off, he heard screams full of anguish, not fear. He knew the difference; he'd heard both kinds too often. Whoever was making noises like that wouldn't keep making them very long-not if God showed even a little kindness, he wouldn't.
If the bombs had blown a hole in the barbed wire, the camp might empty like a cracked basin. Then again, it might not. The thought flickered through Joaquin and then blew out. He was too stunned to do anything but lie there with his sleeve pressed to his face to try to stanch the flood from his nose. How many others in here would be in much better shape?
The guards wouldn't, either… That thought also flickered and blew out. To try to escape, Joaquin would have needed more resolution than he owned right this minute. He imagined running this way and that, trying to find a gap in the perimeter. Imagining was easy. Doing wouldn't be. Even telling his rosary beads took as much as he had in him.
Guards came into the prisoners' enclosure to take away men who'd been killed or wounded. They didn't seem to treat the injured Nationalists any worse than stretcher-bearers and medics who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo would have. Seeing that, Joaquin decided the Republicans weren't just fattening him for the slaughter, so to speak.
He got another surprise a few days later: the International who'd captured him came to see how he was doing. He wouldn't have known the man by sight, not when the ill-fated raid came off in the middle of the night. But the fellow's slow, bad Spanish and the timbre of his voice were familiar. "Here I am!" Joaquin called from his side of the wire.
"Bueno." The International-the American, the Jew, he'd said he was-nodded back. "They treat you all right?"
Joaquin considered. "Not too bad. Could be worse." Lord knew that was true. They might have decided to see how many small chunks they could tear off him before he died. He'd feared they would do exactly that. And they still might, if he annoyed them enough.
"Here. Catch." The International tossed an almost-full pack of Gitanes over the barbed wire. Joaquin grabbed it eagerly. He could smoke some of the harsh cigarettes and trade the rest for… well, for anything you could get here. On this side of the wire, cigarettes were as good as pesetas, maybe better.
"Muchas gracias," he said. "You didn't have to do this. You must be a gentleman."
To his amazement, he saw he'd flustered the fellow from the other side. The Jew was ordinary, or a little homelier than that: short, kind of pudgy, with a big nose and not a whole lot of chin. "I don't want to be a gentleman," he said. "I don't want anybody to be a gentleman. Everybody ought to be equal, si?"
"Then how does anyone decide what needs doing?" Joaquin asked. "Once he does decide, how does he get them to go along?"
"Ah!" The International leaned forward till he almost pricked that formidable nose on the barbed wire's fangs. "Here's how…" Like an airplane climbing from a runway, the talk took off from there. MIKE CARROLL EYED CHAIM WEINBERG in mingled amusement and scorn. "You came here to fight the fucking Fascists, man. You didn't come here to convert 'em."
"Bite me," Chaim answered. "The more of those guys we win over, the better."
"You know what Mencken said about that kind of shit," Mike persisted. He quoted with relish: "'I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.'"
Chaim didn't want to listen, especially since Mike hardly ever read anything that didn't follow the Party line. Why now? "Who cares what a reactionary says?"
"He may be a reactionary, but he's a damn fine writer." The other American sounded a little defensive, or more than a little.
"For an enemy of the people." Chaim trotted out the heavy artillery.
Mike breathed heavily through his nose. "Okay. Fine. Have it your way. But if you're back at that camp blabbing about dialectical materialism when you're supposed to be up here fighting, Brigadier Kossuth'll skin you alive. He'll call it desertion, not conversion."
He was right, which didn't make Chaim any happier with him. If anything, Chaim only got angrier. "Hey, you know better than that. When did I ever miss action?"
"That time just after you got here, over near the Ebro."
"Oh, give me a break! I was down with dysentery, for cryin' out loud. You never got a case of the galloping shits?"
"Not to where I couldn't grab my rifle."
"Terrific," Chaim said. "Grab it and shove it up your ass-bayonet first." He was ready for a brawl. Mike was bigger than he was, and looked to have more muscles, but all that mattered only so much. Land a guy one in the pit of the stomach or in the nuts and all the muscles in the world wouldn't do him a goddamn bit of good.
But instead of pissing off the other American, Chaim made him laugh. "All right, already," Carroll said, as if he were a Landsman himself. "But watch yourself, okay? You really are making like this one Nationalist is more important than the rest of the struggle."
"Nah," Chaim said, even if Mike was right, or nearly right, again. He'd come to see the effort to reeducate Joaquin as a representation of the larger fight against Fascism. He realized that, just because he saw it that way, other people wouldn't necessarily do the same thing. Some of those other people were officers who could tell him what to do and land him in hot water if he didn't do it or if he wasn't around to do it.
"What do you see in the guy, anyhow?" Mike pressed. "He's nothing but a dumb kid off the farm. If he came from the States, he'd be a hayseed from Arkansas or Oklahoma or somewhere like that. He'd be a hardshell Baptist, too, instead of a Catholic."
Chaim's knowledge of Arkansas and Oklahoma was purely theoretical. So was his knowledge of the differences between one brand of Christianity and another. Catholics went to fancier churches, and their bishops dressed the way rabbis would if rabbis were crazy faggots. What more did you need to know?