"What you say is true, Senor." Delgadillo had learned to slow down a little to give Chaim a better chance to stay with him. "But how can things be different? How can anyone do anything about it?"
"Land reform," Chaim answered at once. "There are no landlords in the Republic." There were no live landlords in the Republic, not any more. "Peasants own their lands. Sometimes they form collectives, but no one makes them do that." Plenty of Republican enthusiasts wanted to impose collective farms, as Stalin had in the USSR. Oddly, Soviet officials discouraged it. They didn't want to scare the middle classes in the cities and towns.
"But what about the holy padres?" another prisoner asked. "Haven't terrible things happened to them?"
"They sided with the reactionaries, or most of them did. They wanted to go on living well without working," Chaim said. "Progressive priests follow the Republic." There were some. There weren't very many. He didn't go into detail. His job here was to persuade, after all.
"The priests say God is on Marshal Sanjurjo's side. They say the Republic is the Devil's spawn," the prisoner said.
"?Y asi?" Chaim asked. And so? "What do you think they will say? No one says God fights for his enemies, but Satan is with him. No one would be that stupid. But do you believe everything the padres tell you?"
"They're holy men," the Spaniard said doubtfully. He wasn't used to questioning assumptions. He probably hadn't imagined assumptions could be questioned till he started listening to Chaim. Exploited, indoctrinated… Was it any wonder that, when the people of Spain found out they could overthrow the system that had been giving it to them in the neck for so long, they often threw out the baby with the bath water?
"How do you know they're so holy?" Chaim asked. "Are they poor? Do they share what they have with people who are even poorer? Or do they suck up to the landlords and piss on the poor?"
"Some of them are good men," the captured Nationalist answered. "Perfection is for the Lord." He crossed himself.
As long as their grandfathers had put up with it before them, a lot of Spaniards would put up with anything. They would be proud of putting up with it, in fact, because their grandfathers had before them. Well, Eastern European Jews had put up with pogroms for generation after generation, too. Chaim's grandfather had-and, no doubt, his grandfather before him. But Chaim's father had got the hell out of there and hightailed it for the States. And here stood Chaim in a bomb-scarred park in Madrid, not screwing around with the Talmud but preaching the doctrine of Marx and Lenin and Stalin.
"Some are good, eh?" he said.
"Si, Senor," the prisoner replied with dignity. People here had immense dignity-often more than they knew what to do with.
"Okay," Chaim said, and then, remembering which language he was supposed to be speaking, "Bueno." He tried a different approach: "Isn't it true that most of the priests you call good favor the Republic?"
That made the prisoner stop and think. It made all the prisoners listening to him stop and think, in fact. They argued among themselves in low voices. One man threw his hands in the air and walked away in disgust when the argument didn't seem to be going the way he wanted. The rest patiently went on hashing it out. They had plenty of time, and they weren't going anywhere.
Chaim squatted on his heels and smoked a cigarette. He wasn't going anywhere, either, not right away. He owned more patience than he'd had before coming to Spain, too. If army life, and army life in the land of manana at that, wouldn't help you acquire some, nothing would.
He'd given the little cigarette butt to Joaquin and lit another smoke-and got almost all the way through that one-before the POWs came to some sort of consensus. The fellow who'd called priests holy men came up to the edge of the wire. "It could be, Senor, that you have reason," he said gravely. "Many of these men, the ones who did most for the poor, did favor the Republic. Some got into trouble for it. Some ran away to keep from getting into trouble."
"And what does this mean, do you think?" Chaim inquired.
Instead of yielding as he'd hoped, the Nationalist prisoner only shrugged a slow shrug. "?Quien sabe, Senor?" he said. "Who can be sure what anything means? Very often, life is not so simple."
In spite of himself, Chaim started to laugh. Only in Spain would a prisoner answer a political question with philosophy. "Muy bien," the American from the International Brigades said. "What does this mean, then? Italy and Germany can't help Marshal Sanjurjo any more. England and France can help the Republic. Who is likely to do better now?"
"?Quien sabe?" the Nationalist repeated. "We were winning before. You are doing better at this moment. But who can say anything about manana?" Several long, strongly carved faces showed somber agreement.
The response only made Chaim laugh harder. The prisoners gave him fishy stares, wondering if he was mocking them. He wasn't, or not for that. "This is Spain, the land of manana. I was just thinking about that. If you can't talk about it here, where can you, Senor?"
They had to talk that over, too, before they decided how to feel about it. It was almost as if they had their own little soviet here. Chaim didn't tell them that; it would have scandalized them. Slowly, one at a time, they started to smile. "We did not think men from the Republic could joke," one of them said.
"Who says I was joking?" Chaim answered, deadpan. The POWs thought he was joking again, and their smiles got broader. He knew damn well he wasn't. He grinned back at them all the same. THE BROWN BEAR in the cage stared out at Sarah Goldman and Isidor Bruck through the bars. He looked plump and happy. People in Germany might have to shell out ration coupons for everything they ate, but the zoo animals remained well fed. Germans were uncommonly kind to animals. Everyone said so.
When Sarah remarked on that, Isidor looked around. No Aryans stood close enough to overhear him if he kept his voice down, so he did: "They think Jews are animals, so why don't they treat us better?"
Sarah stared at him in something not far from amazement. She would have expected a crack like that from her father, not from somebody her own age. But she didn't need long to figure out why the baker's son would come out with it. If being a Jew in National Socialist Germany didn't bring out gallows humor in people, what the devil would?
Isidor took a chunk of war bread out of his jacket pocket. He tossed it into the bear's cage. The animal ambled over to it. Sarah wondered if he'd turn up his nose at it-he probably got better himself. Animals were harder to fool than people. But he ate the treat and ran his blood-pink tongue across his nose.
A guard bustled up. He wore an impressive, military-looking uniform. "Do not feed the animals! It is forbidden!" he said importantly. Then he saw the yellow stars on their clothes. He rolled his eyes (Aryan gray, not brown and therefore of questionable breed). "You should be in cages yourselves! Obey, or things will go even worse for you!" Sarah was afraid he would grab the billy club on his belt, but he turned on his heel and stomped off.
"If we were in cages, do you suppose anyone would feed us?" she asked bitterly.
"Some people would-if they came by when nobody could see them do it, and if they were sure the guard was somewhere else," Isidor said.
"Yes, that sounds about right." Sarah remembered the Germans who'd sympathized with her after she had to start wearing the star. She also remembered that no one had told the Nazis they shouldn't make Jews wear stars to begin with. "They wouldn't keep us out of cages, though. Not a chance."
"You bet!" Isidor looked around. "I wish we could do something to the people who're putting the screws to us. All I ever wanted to be was a German, and look what I've got." He brushed his hand across the yellow star.