metres to my right. I didn’t have time to even scream.
‘Shit,’ I said.
‘Shut up and shoot,’ said Mariano.
We fought for two and a half hours. The Moroccans stood their ground in front of us, but the firing was coming from both sides.
‘They’re coming in from the sides,’ I yelled. ‘What the hell do we do now?’
‘If you spent less time yelling,’ Mariano said calmly, ‘you would have already noticed that.’
Then he motioned behind us with his head. I turned. Shit, it was true. Two Russian tanks, our men, were coming down the path and behind them there was an entire company. Not bad. We emerged from the ditches shooting straight ahead, while the two tanks headed right into the water and then split in different directions. Fifteen minutes later you could have crossed the river walking on dead bodies and you wouldn’t have got your feet wet. They lost six hundred men and we took two hundred prisoners. We’d only lost two men and had one wounded. But we still had to hide that night in the cellar of our monastery because they came in with planes and cannon fire. It went on continually throughout the day and night. But who cared? Everything outside was shaking. But we were safe and calm, our bellies full. The brothers had a lip-smacking dark wine in their cellar. When the truck came to pull us out four days later, we were happy and a little drunk. We had learned that we’d thwarted an offensive with our action, so we’d been celebrating. When we got to the new camp near Tarragona, the brigade commander called Mariano into his tent for a meeting. He had a scowl on his face when he came back two hours later.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Up yours,’ he said.
He lay down on his cot, his face was so long it brushed his feet. He closed his eyes and went quiet like a mummy.
‘So,’ I insisted. ‘Are we going to make a night of it or are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
He showed me a crumpled piece of paper.
‘Service orders from Command,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant. They’re making you one too. They say that you fought well back at Ebro. Crazy shit. I can’t believe it.’
Shit was right. I’d been promoted. I was an officer now too. But boy was my buddy upset; he was practically shaking with anger.
‘You shouldn’t take it so hard,’ I stuttered. ‘You’ll always be the chief, the commander.’
Now what? His face had collapsed into a grimace.
‘Of course I’m the chief,’ smiled Mariano handing me another piece of less-crumpled paper. ‘See,’ he said. ‘You’re a lieutenant now too, but as for me, precious boy, I’ve been made a captain.’
Then he started laughing to make your blood curdle, that son of a bitch. He was still laughing when he told me that there was more. The whole platoon had been given a fifteen-day leave. By now the others had already heard and they were jumping for joy.
‘I bet that someone around here,’ he said looking at me meaningfully, ‘is going to go running off to Barcelona.’
Actually we all went – obviously. First thing when we got to Carl Marx headquarters we hit the kitchen and shored up to return to our life as gentlemen. They’d handed out a good supply of cigarettes and paid us on top of that. We all went walking together through Barcelona, showing off in our uniforms, looking for trouble in the bars and out on the street. I saw Mercedes on the second day, when we all went to visit our buddy in the hospital. This time she gave me a big smile, with her mouth and her eyes and heart.
‘How long are you staying?’ she asked, kissing my neck and stroking my scalp with her fingers. She was proud of me and my new rank. I felt that little by little she was starting to love me for real – not the way people love during war-time, defensively gambling, trying to cheat death. That kind of love clung to you like a flea on a dog.
I slept with her every night that she wasn’t on duty at the hospital. The Italians did some bombing but we never went down to the shelter. I admit that I’d started getting a taste for those shivers too. I was so happy that I almost forgot about the war. Alfonso was the one who had to come and remind me. He knocked on the door early one morning. It was still dark out. Mercedes and I were cuddling drowsily, my fingers stroking the hair between her legs.
‘You in there, Professor?’ called Alfonso from the other side of the door.
I struggled to stand and barely managed to put on my trousers. The minute I opened the door he burst inside excitedly.
‘Hurry up, won’t you? Don’t you remember we’re moving out today?’
Shit, he was right. I was about to tell him to hang on when Mercedes walked through the room naked.
‘Good morning,’ she said, heading over to the bathroom, a big smile on her face.
Alfonso was enchanted. He stood stiller than a statue, and I had to nudge him to make him shut his mouth and remind him that I was standing right there.
‘You look like you think you saw the Madonna.’
‘Quasi,’ he answered in Italian.
He was still thinking about it when we were on the truck heading back to Ebro.
‘Your Mercedes is really the best piece of ass I’ve ever seen.’
‘Except for your sister,’ I growled.
PART TWO
Chapter Twelve
A few months later, penning the story of Scholem’s visit to Paris in a letter, Benjamin’s tone was off-hand. ‘Our philosophical debate whose time was long due,’ he wrote, ‘proceeded in good form. If I am not mistaken,’ he added, ‘I gave him an image of me as something like a man who has made his home in a crocodile’s jaws, which he keeps pried open with iron braces.’ The image wasn’t far from the truth. For years now, Benjamin had been gathering adversity around him like a ‘pack of wolves’. The hunchbacked dwarf had never stopped chasing him and Benjamin knew that. However much trouble he took trying to foresee danger he always seemed to end up, with the uncanny precision of a sleepwalker, in the middle of trouble. Even his nostalgia, that coward, betrayed him making the happiest moments disappear from his memory. He started thinking that his life had been reduced to shards that endlessly piled up around him. The more he tried to look backward the more burdened he felt by harbingers of the future. The Angel of History spoke to him, sent signs that Benjamin interpreted quite clearly. He hardly marvelled at all when, on March 12, 1938, not a month after Scholem’s visit, Hitler invaded Austria. It was dumb fact that the world’s history and his own personal history should cross like paths in a forest. His son Stefan was at that very time studying in Vienna.
Stefan wore his twenty years poorly. He was an isolated and rebellious man, traits that were exacerbated by the absence of a good father. Stefan risked being trapped in the Reich’s newest territory.
