Midnight in Europe: A Novel Page 5

  His turn. He rattled on for a time, Barcelona, the law office, but the three feet between them began to feel like an abyss. Finally the conversation slowed, and threatened to stop. Ferrar was growing desperate, he wanted to see what lay beneath the wool dress. Then, coming to the rescue, Chantal stretched her arms out and said, “I am tired of sitting, may I see the rest of your apartment?”

  He showed her the tiny kitchen, then the living room where French doors led out to a narrow balcony with a waist-high balustrade of ornamental ironwork. It was meant to decorate the building’s exterior but Ferrar liked to have a cigarette out there on warm nights. “Would you care for a breath of fresh air?” he said.

  He opened the French doors, stepped out on the balcony, then took her hand to help her over the three-inch threshold. They stood side by side and, because Ferrar’s apartment was on the fifth floor, looked out over the rooftops of the city. “It is so beautiful,” she said.

  “Paris,” he said.

  The cold night reached them, Ferrar put his arm around her and she leaned against him and said, “That’s better.” When he pressed gently on her shoulder she turned to face him and they kissed. A formal kiss, nothing fancy, and once again. Her arms circled his waist and she held him tight, her head on his chest. What happened next was unplanned, spontaneous, Ferrar didn’t think about it, simply found himself doing it. He slid a hand down the soft wool of her dress, reached under the hem, rested the hand on her leg, and after a few seconds moved it slowly up the back of her thigh, waited at the top, then continued, working his fingers beneath her panties and running his hand over the silky skin of her bare bottom. “Tiens,” she said, breathing hard. The word meant well, well—mock surprise. And now they kissed again, and this time they meant it.

  The poetry of lust describes many inspirations: the moon, a stray wisp of hair; but only now and then cites haven’t done it for a long time. Thus Chantal and Cristián, heading for the bedroom in a hurry—he barely remembered to close the French doors. Once there, she started to undress, until he said, “Could I do that? I really like it.” She let her arms hang down, eyes closed, a sweet smile on her face, as he did his awkward best at stripping her naked. That done, she turned slowly in a pirouette so he could look at her. Then she took his clothes off, much better at this game than he was, and they got in bed. Where she asked him, voice tightening with anticipation, to lie on his back.

  Greedily she pushed his knees apart, getting him out of her way, and took him in her mouth, thumb on the bottom, two fingers on top. Ferrar felt both a rush of pleasure and a stab of anxiety; if this continued he wouldn’t last long. A ten-second lover? Oh no, not that. He believed in foreplay and lots of it, but she had other things in mind. Sensing his predicament, she let him go, lay on top of him, and whispered in his ear, “Let me have my way.” Well, all right, chivalry took many forms. And, after a Gitane, he had his way with her: low moans that grew louder and longer, then a sharp gasp.

  They talked. She had been married for a time, “but he went away.” He too had been married, a disastrous, fourteen-month marriage when he was twenty-two. She came from another émigré family, was very seductive and sexy until the wedding night, when she froze. And, despite all the patience and tenderness he could muster, stayed frozen. Eventually they divorced, he heard that she had remarried, he wished her nothing but happiness, perhaps he’d just been the wrong man for her.

  They were quiet for a bit, then she said, “There is something I should confess, Cristián, I hope you will forgive me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I lied to you in the taxi.”

  “You did?”

  “There was no friend who needed a place to make love. I live with my sister and we share a bedroom. I knew you wanted me, and I surely wanted you, so I made up a story, trying to get you to take me back here.”

  “I am glad you did it.”

  “Yes? I was afraid you’d tell me I’d been a bad girl.”

  In the darkness, their eyes met once again, and the night went on.

  •

  At seven in the morning he walked her across the square to the taxi stand by the rue Bonaparte. The January dawn was just arriving, two angry red streaks across black clouds. “Will you have time to change?” he said.

  “Just, if I’m quick about it, I don’t teach until nine. Of course, I should have spent last night correcting homework.”

  “They won’t mind, will they?”

  “I think not,” she said. Then gave a single snort of laughter and said, “Maybe I will tell them exactly how I passed the evening—just to see the looks on their angelic little faces.”

  They reached the center of the square, and a flock of pigeons, which had been feeding on baguette crumbs, took off into the sky. “Cristián?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not involved in that horrible war in Spain, are you?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know why. Since you told me you were Spanish I’ve been wondering about it.”

  “All the time?”

  “Don’t tease me, I am someone who worries. And it’s a frightening war … those awful scenes in the newsreels.”

  “It is very bad. There is nothing worse than a civil war. In time they stop fighting and someone declares victory, but a civil war never ends.”

  When they reached the taxi stand he said, “What is a good time to telephone?”

  “These days I don’t get home until seven—I’m directing the school play.”

  “Then I will call after seven.”

  He held the taxi door for her, they kissed goodby, one cheek then the other, and she climbed into the backseat. As the taxi chugged off he waited until it turned the corner. Heading back to his apartment he thought, Should I have told her the truth? Because he was in fact going to involve himself in “that horrible war,” at least on what he put to himself as the Paris Front. Surely not dangerous, yet still he had lied, had known it was wiser to lie. This bothered him and ruined his walk across the square.

  11 January, 1938. His appointment with the head of security at the embassy, Colonel Zaguan, had been set for six in the evening, after work on a normal day. The Spanish embassy, on the avenue George V, had been the grandest of mansions, all columns and turrets in pale stone, given to Spain as a gift by King Alfonso XIII before his abdication in 1931. An embassy clerk took him upstairs, knocked at a door with no number or title on it, then led him into the office.

  Colonel Zaguan, in military uniform, rose from his chair, addressed him as señor, and thanked him for coming. The colonel had a narrow face, cheeks lightly pitted, and small, quick eyes—very dark, almost black, which made him look cunning—slicked-down black hair, and a thin mustache above thin lips. After Ferrar was seated, Zaguan held out a silver cigarette case and said, “Would you care for a Ducado? I get them from Spain.”

  Ferrar took one and lit it.

  “I will require some information from you,” the colonel said. “For the records … as a lawyer you will understand the importance of records.”

  “Of course.”

  “May I see your passport, señor?” Ferrar, like all the Paris émigrés, always carried his passport because the police, once they got you to say something in French, demanded to see it. And if you didn’t have it with you, deportation could be fast and brutal. Clearly the colonel was aware of this.

  Ferrar handed over his Spanish passport, the colonel took a fountain pen from a marble stand and began to write the details in a notebook. When he was done he laid it on his desk for a moment. Ferrar was silent. Zaguan then handed it back to him, saying, “Sorry, I almost forgot.” After a pause for a smile he said, “Please tell me the date of your birth, and where, and the names of your parents and other family.” Watching the colonel’s eyes, Ferrar realized he was reading from a sheet of paper laid flat on top of an open desk drawer, where the person on the other side of the desk couldn’t see it.

  When F
errar had finished answering the questions, Zaguan said, “Thank you. Now, can you tell me something of your politics?”

  “My politics?”

  “That’s right. For example, would you call yourself a communist? Or, better, would your friends call you that, if they were asked?”

  “Certainly not,” Ferrar said.

  “Perhaps a socialist? Or a social democrat? A conservative? What would they say, your friends?” His eyebrows rose and he made a soft, interrogatory sound.

  “I don’t know what my friends would say, Colonel. I believe in parliamentary democracy, as practiced in France and Great Britain, and I am an anti-fascist. But I don’t spend much time on politics.”

  The pen scratched as Zaguan wrote down his answer. “And are you married?”

  “I was, I’m not now.”

  The colonel was eager for Ferrar to elaborate, but Ferrar had nothing further to say.

  “Are you a Catholic, señor?”

  “I am.”

  “Observant?”

  “Yes, I go to mass with my family on Sunday mornings.”

  Zaguan moved on to Ferrar’s schooling, then his work. As the questioning went on and on, Ferrar’s answers grew shorter and less informative.

  Zaguan, a sympathetic lilt to his voice, said, “I know it’s a bother to give out all this information, but we need to know the backgrounds of the people who work with us. In Europe, these days, there are those who, misrepresent themselves.”

  Ferrar nodded.

  “Since you will be working with the Oficina Técnica, you will be learning, ahh, sensitive information. I know I don’t have to tell you that you must not talk about what you do. Yes? You agree?”

  “I do.”

  “And I must warn you that you may be approached, in all sorts of clever ways, by people who wish to learn what they ought not to know. Should something seem not quite right to you, it would be best to report this to me. And only to me.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” Ferrar said.

  Zaguan didn’t like the answer, but could not counter. “In addition,” he said, “if you happen to discover information which might be of use to the Republic, please don’t hesitate to inform me. Even the smallest detail may turn out to matter a great deal.”

  Ferrar nodded. The colonel wrote something in his notebook.

  “I’m sure you are tired after a long day, Señor Ferrar, so I will thank you for your patience. And, in the future, we may visit again, from time to time, just to make sure everything is going well.”

  They said goodby. Ferrar, once out on the avenue, took a deep breath. What had Molina called the colonel? A difficult fellow. He was certainly that. And he’d been, Ferrar sensed, on his best behavior.

  NATIONALIST FORCES ATTEMPT TO RETAKE TERUEL.

  Thus the newspaper headlines on the morning of 17 January. At the beginning of the war, Franco and his generals had chosen to be called Nationalists, their war cry Viva España, while those who remained faithful to the elected government called themselves the Republic and answered their enemies with Viva la Republica! Such names were useful for politicians and journalists, such names were an element of the propaganda contest that always accompanies the guns, such names were weapons in what is called political warfare. But, in the province of Aragon that day, the warfare was not at all symbolic.

  Just before dawn on 17 January, a heavy silence lay over the town of Teruel, the silence of a blizzard. A certain Captain Romar, whose company occupied the basement of the Bank of Spain building, had been ordered on a reconnaissance patrol, so he lit the stubs of a few remaining candles and prepared to distribute the last of his company’s ammunition. This company had been fighting since the Army of the Republic’s attack on Teruel in mid-December, back then there had been two hundred men in the company, now there were twenty-eight. Still, they had captured the town. Franco’s forces had been staging counterattacks for three weeks, and had broken through the Republic’s defense lines two miles outside the city. Now, battalion headquarters had told Romar, Franco’s forces were about to attack the town itself.

  By the flickering light of the candles, fixed in wax puddles to the lid of an ammunition box, Romar sorted bullets by calibre. The Army of the Republic, forced to buy its armaments abroad, had to use ten different calibres for their Mauser rifles, so Romar was fortunate in that his men needed only two: the standard 7mm cartridge for the Spanish-made Mauser 93s, and the 7.7mm for the Mauser 98 manufactured in Germany—the numbers indicated year of design, 1893 and 1898.

  Romar separated the bullets only with difficulty, the temperature was eighteen degrees below zero and his fingers did not work well. Still, he persisted, and when he was done each man had forty-one cartridges. If they were engaged by the enemy the fight would not last long; they would have to surrender and then, a long tradition on both sides in this war, they would be shot. But, orders were orders. There were surely supplies headed in their direction, somewhere among the six hundred vehicles snowbound out on the road from Valencia to Teruel. But they would not arrive soon—four feet of snow had fallen, filling the trenches, and it continued to fall, the silence of the blizzard broken now and then by the sighing of the wind.

  Romar’s company had a few tins of sardines; these he decided would be shared out before they left the basement, and some of the men still had cigarettes. Romar stood, which meant he had something to say, and the men ranged around the walls of the basement, turned their faces toward him. “We will leave in twenty minutes,” he said. “First we will eat, have a smoke, tend to our rifles. Remember, this is a reconnaissance patrol, so if we see these bastards don’t shoot them, stay hidden. After we go out the door, no talking. Quiet … very quiet. Questions?”

  One of the men said, “And which bastards are these?”

  “The battalion commanders want to know that. They believe we face the Moors, or possibly legionnaires.” He meant Franco’s Moorish mercenaries from Morocco, or members of the Spanish Legion, something like the French Foreign Legion, which Franco had expanded by emptying the prisons. At the mention of the word “legionnaires” the man who had asked the question turned his head and spat.

  Romar was well respected by his men. Two years earlier, when the war started, he’d been an eighteen-year-old mechanic at a textile mill in Barcelona and, when half the army joined up with Franco, the government had armed the labor unions, creating anarchist and socialist militias, who worked out their political differences by shooting each other. Now the government had absorbed the militias into the army, and some of the militiamen, like Romar, turned out to be natural officers who led well.

  Outside, the main street of Teruel lay in ruins. A month of artillery fire and bombing had smashed the buildings into piles of bricks. There was no trace of wooden beams or furniture, every scrap of wood in Teruel had been burned in fires as the soldiers attempted to stay warm, to stay alive. On both sides of the street were snow-covered stacks of frozen corpses—four thousand soldiers and civilians had tried to defend the town from the Republic’s attack, now they were dead.

  Romar led his company toward the western edge of Teruel—his guess was he’d find the enemy about a thousand yards beyond the town. They walked in single file, every few minutes Romar rotated the men at the head of the line, who sank in the snow up to their knees as they broke trail for the company. By the time they reached the end of the street, the company was exhausted, their faces past numbness, burning with cold. Even in the blizzard the darkness had begun to wane as the dawn arrived.

  Then, from the southwest, a muffled boom. “Mierda,” Romar said under his breath. This was, he suspected, Italian artillery, one of Mussolini’s contributions to the fascist cause. There was another report, and another, as the barrage progressed. Which way was it walking? In the distance, the snow exploded and Romar called out “Down!” The men lay flat for a time, but that was as much as they saw—the barrage continued for twenty minutes, then stopped. The men were, for the moment, safe, but the barr
age was likely being used to soften up the defenders for an advance by infantry, so the counterattack was real.

  The company walked for another ten minutes and then, as the forest on the edge of town came into view, Romar signaled and again they went flat. That’s where the enemy would be hiding. Of course Romar could barely see the forest through the swirling snow, to him it was more like a gray shadow. For a time, he waited to see what might come out of the tree line. Another barrage started up, this one well away to the north. Romar was about to wave his men forward when a soldier came running from the forest. One of Romar’s men fired twice but the man kept running, then he was joined by others, struggling through the snow, some falling then getting up, some had thrown away their rifles.

  Romar held up a hand, stop firing. For this was not an advance by the Moors or the Legion, and this was not an organized retreat—this was headlong flight in panic. One of the running soldiers saw Romar’s company and waved violently, go back, then called out, “Get away! Save yourselves!” Romar’s company stayed where it was as the last men in flight disappeared in the direction of the town. Then they saw a group of men in Moroccan caps, rifles ready, move out of the trees. The company fired a salvo of rifle bullets, two of the Moorish soldiers fell, the remainder melted back into the forest.

  Romar’s company had stayed too long, there was no possibility they could retreat back to Teruel, they moved too slowly in the snow and the Moorish troops would shoot them in the back. So Romar led the company to one side, south of west, then forward into the forest, on the flank—Romar calculated—of the attacking Moors. They could hear gunfire, the Moors shooting at the retreating soldiers, and shouted orders, but they could see nothing. Then they heard the hammering of a heavy machine gun. Romar tried to figure out where it was, then saw a yellow muzzle flash through the trees.