in the sun to the west, empty cornfields, vineyards, then the canal and the river and the Pindoque bridge which carried trains loaded with sugar from La Poupa factory to the railway to Andalucia. On the opposite side of the river the heights of Pingarrón where the Republicans were entrenched. But he still could not envisage where he was.
When evening had pinned the first star in the sky he opened the door and made his way towards the voice of the river.
The rabbit, one ear folded, stared at them from its hutch in the yard. It was a big problem, this rabbit. It was a pet and it was dinner. No, more – dinner, lunch and soup for supper the next day.
The rabbit, grey and soft, twitched its whiskers at Ana and the children.
‘I think he’s hungry,’ said Pablo, thereby encapsulating the rabbit’s two main faults – it was masculine and it was always hungry. What was the point in keeping a buck rabbit which could not give birth to other rabbits? What was the point of wasting food on an animal which was itself sustenance? Was there really any sense, Ana asked herself, in wasting cabbage stalks and potato peelings on a rabbit when her children were threatened by scabies and rickets?
But despite its appetite, despite its masculinity, this rabbit possessed two trump cards: it was part of the family, thumping its hind legs when the air-raid siren wailed and flattening its ears when bombs exploded, and it was available for stud to the owners of doe rabbits who would exchange a sliver of soap or a cupful of split peas for his services.
Ana regarded the rabbit with exasperation. Jesús would have known what to do.
But Jesús was at Jarama fighting the Fascists. Fighting and writing poetry – two of his front-line poems had been published in Mundo Obrero and one of them, a soldier’s thoughts about his family, hung framed on the wall among the formidable ancestors.
What would Jesús have done about the rabbit? Killed it? Ana doubted that: he would have departed, and returned, a curved smile of triumph on his face, with provisions mysteriously acquired. Like a magician, he never disclosed the secrets of his bartering but Ana suspected that he exchanged poems for provender – there were still wells of compassion beneath the brutalized streets of Madrid.
He had returned once, at Three Kings, with a doll for Rosana that he had carved with his pocket-knife in the trenches, and shining cartridge cases and studded fragments of a Mills bomb for Pablo’s war museum. But he had changed since Ana had sent him to war: he was still good with the children but with her, although gentle, he was wary and when they lay together in their sighing bed he seemed to be searching for the girl he had met and not the woman she now was. They hadn’t made love until they were married and they didn’t make love now; instead she held him until he slept and stroked his forehead when he whimpered in dreams of battle.
He was in the Popular Army, formed to bring order to the militias and Irresponsibles, but as he walked away from the chabola, stooping under the weight of the carnage he had witnessed, he didn’t look the least bit like a soldier. I am the warrior, Ana thought, regarding the rabbit speculatively, and he should be the provider.
Food! She turned away from the rabbit, allowing it one more reprieve, and went into the bedroom to fetch her shawl and her shabby coat and her shoes laced with string darkened with blacking. She hated the hunger that was always with her, because it was a weakness that distracted her from the Cause.
She left Pablo fashioning a whistle out of a cartridge case and Rosana painting a water colour of a harlequin in black, red and yellow, arm raised in a clench-fist salute.
As she crossed the yard the rabbit thumped its legs.
She went first to an old woman who lived on her own in a hovel that stood alone, like an ancient’s tooth, in a street of rubble. Here she made wreaths with paper flowers tied with black and red ribbon; the flowers were always red and she was always busy. Sometimes she possessed extra food with which the bereaved had paid for their wreaths, but there was none on view today.
‘Just a little bread,’ Ana pleaded, hating herself. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s stale; I can toast it.’ At least they had fires in the chabola, kindled with slats from the ceilings of collapsed houses and fuelled with furniture – a walnut writing-desk had burned for two days.
‘What have you got to offer?’ the crone asked. In her youth she had married a member of the CNT; when he had died she had become the mistress of a doyen of the UGT; now she believed that age was an amnesty for the past. Her face was blotched and hooked; in her youth it must have been sharp enough to cut down trees, Ana thought.
‘A poem?’
‘Ah, a poem. What a beautiful thought, Ana Gomez.’ Beneath her arthritic fingers scarlet crêpe blossomed. ‘Except that I cannot read.’
‘If I read it you will remember it.’
‘I would prefer jewellery,’ the crone said.
‘I have no jewellery, only my wedding ring.’
‘I have a little bread,’ the crone said. ‘A little rice. Admittedly with weevils but beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Ana Gomez?’
Ana twisted the gold band on her finger; she remembered Jesus placing it there.
‘I have money,’ she said.
‘Who wants money? There is nothing to buy with it.’
‘I will come back,’ Ana said. With a gun! ‘Tell me, do you make wreaths for Fascists?’
The crone gazed at her suspiciously. ‘I make wreaths for the dead,’ she said.
Perhaps one day she will make a wreath for Antonio, Ana thought as she stepped over a fallen acacia on a street scattered with broken glass. He had returned to the capital once, as furtive as a pervert, wearing a beret and filthy corduroy trousers and a pistol in his belt. He had crossed the front line, relatively quiet on the western limits of the city since the fury of November, leaving his blue Falange shirt behind him.
He had come to the chabola after dark while she was boiling water on the walnut desk blazing in the hearth. He brought with him cigarettes – the new currency of Republican Spain. He gave her six packs, then, sitting in Jesús’s rocking chair, said, ‘I went to the house; the neighbours told me that Martine and my daughter left several weeks ago …’ Even now he smelled faintly of Cologne.
‘She’s with the British,’ Ana said. ‘Waiting to be evacuated.’ She told him about Christopher Lance and his ambulance service to British warships waiting on the Mediterranean coast. ‘She’s well,’ Ana said. ‘The baby’s due at the beginning of March.’
Antonio lit a cigarette, an Imperial. His curls were tight with dirt and the skin across his cheekbones was taut; he was growing old with the war.
‘When will she go?’
‘Soon. There were many waiting before her.’
‘Is it still dangerous in Madrid for anyone who made the mistake of being successful?’
‘For the Fascists who exploited the workers? Not as bad as it was; the real pigs are all dead. As for the rest …’ Ana tested the water with her wrist as she had done when the children were babies. ‘They can’t even buy your perfume any more. Isn’t that sad?’
‘What
