I will give you one: because I am alive.’
The guard rubbed his dented nose and looked at his colleague for help. His companion said: ‘Papers?’
‘Of course.’ She made no move to show them.
‘If you will forgive me,’ the first guard said, pointing at her cheap red skirt and white blouse, ‘you do not look as though you live here. Do you, perhaps, work for a capitalist?’
Ana spat. The assault guard took a step back.
‘I hope to find work. I have to feed my children and my husband who is the leader of a militia group. But not with a capitalist: with a foreigner. Now if you will excuse me.’ She stepped between them, continued up the street, turned into number 11 and mounted the stairs.
The man who let her into the small apartment was thin with a strong nose and a small moustache; he laughed a lot and he wore a check jacket.
She asked if it was safe to talk. This made him laugh and she began to wonder if this was truly the man who had supposedly whisked prisoners from gaols past the guns of waiting murder squads.
She said, ‘I have heard that you help people on the death lists.’
He stared at her and for a moment she glimpsed the wisdom which he was at pains to conceal.
‘But you, señora,’ he said in his accented Spanish, ‘are not on those lists. You, surely, are a woman of the revolution.’
She told him about Martine and the children, one unborn, and she told him about the priest. She added, ‘If anyone knows I came to you for help I will be killed.’
‘No one will know,’ he said and this time he didn’t laugh. ‘But what am I to do with your sister-in-law and her daughter and your priest?’
‘Hide them in your embassy?’
‘Most of them are in a private hospital and it’s stuffed full already.’
‘Please, Señor Lance.’
‘I will make inquiries.’
‘La palabra inglesa,’ she said. ‘The word of an Englishman. That is all I need to know.’
‘But …’
‘You have made me very happy,’ she said when, hands spread in submission, he laughed; she laughed too.
He made a note of the addresses where Martine and the priest were staying and led her to the door.
‘One last thing, Señor Lance. If anyone asks, I came for a job cleaning your apartment.’
She walked into the sunlit street where, behind shuttered windows, families lived in twilight.
Madrid was doomed.
How could it be otherwise? The Government had packed its bags and on 6 November fled to Valencia, leaving behind a sense of betrayal – and an ageing general, José Miaja, who looked more like a bespectacled monk than a soldier, in charge of its defence. Radio Lisbon had broadcast a vivid description of General Francisco Franco entering the city on a white horse. And the foreign correspondents viewing the Fascist build-up to the final assault from the ninth floor of the Telefónica on the Gran Via were predicting its capitulation.
By the first weekend in the month the Fascists – Moors and crack Foreign Legionnaires mostly – stormed down the woodland parkland of the Casa de Campo crossing the bridges of the Manzanares – what was left of it after the long hot summer – and scaling the heights beside the palace. Could an ill-equipped, ill-assorted ragbag of militia, sleepless and hungry, skulls echoing with explosions, some armed with canned fruit tins stuffed with dynamite, defend itself against 105 mm artillery and the German bombers of the Condor Legion?
Some thought it could.
Among them La Pasionaria who, dressed in black and fierce of face, preached courage to dazed fighters in blue overalls.
Among them a young sailor named Coll who tossed dynamite beneath Italian tanks rumbling towards the centre of the city, disabled them, proving that tanks weren’t invincible, and got himself killed.
Among them children digging trenches and old women boiling olive oil to pour on Fascist heads and younger women defending a bridge vulnerable to enemy attack and tram-drivers taking passengers to the battle front for five centimos.
And their belief given wings by the spectacle of Russian fighters, rats, shooting the bombers out of the cold skies and the soldiers, many wearing corduroys and blue berets, steel helmets on their belts, who materialized on the Sunday 8 November, singing the Internationale in a foreign tongue.
Russians, of course. Word spread through the bruised avenues and alleys: relief was at hand. Except that they weren’t Russians at all; they were 1,900 recruits of the 11th International Brigade, Germans, British, French, Belgians and Poles; Communists, crooks, intellectuals, poets and peasants.
But they armed the ragbag of defenders with hope.
The Ju-52 bomber looked innocent. It had split from its formation and, with the November-grey sky temporarily free of Russian fighters, it was looking for a target with grotesque nonchalance.
Ana noticed that it was heading in the general direction of her old home but only vaguely because at the time she was preoccupied with an argument with her husband.
Jesús was writing about the war for the Communist newspaper Mundo Obrero and providing captions for the fine, fierce posters the Republicans were producing.
She kicked off her rope-soled shoes and said, ‘So how was the housekeeping today?’ Rosana, who was eating sunflower seeds in the corner of the room, spitting the husks into a basket, turned her head; she was ten years old and sensitive to atmosphere.
‘I got some rice,’ he said. ‘A few weevils in it but we don’t get enough meat as it is.’
‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that you have to write for a Communist newspaper.’
‘I write for the Cause. In any case, isn’t La Pasionaria a Communist?’
‘She is for the Cause,’ said Ana who knew she was a Communist too.
‘She is a great woman,’ Jesús agreed.
‘Fire in her belly,’ said Ana who had just taken food and brandy to the high positions overlooking the Casa de Campo where, on 1 May, her brother Antonio had announced his betrayal. She had also crossed the Manzanares to the suburb of Carabanchel, and taken rifles and ammunition from dead men in the trenches to give to the living and she had taken a dispatch through the centre of Madrid, through the Gran Via, Bomb Alley, where she had seen a small boy lying dead in a pool of his own blood, and the corpse of an old man with a pipe still stuck stiffly in his mouth.
‘But a Communist nonetheless,’ Jesús remarked.
‘So?’
‘It was you who were complaining that I write for a Communist newspaper. It would be a terrible thing, would it not, if we fell out within ourselves. Communists and Anarchists and Socialists
