me how you became a flier,’ he said to Seidler as the train nosed slowly past ploughed, wintry fields. Wine had spilled on his scuffed flying jacket, much shabbier than Seidler’s, and he felt a little drunk – happy to be here in Spain.
‘I wanted to join the Air Force,’ Seidler said, chewing grapes that a well-wisher had handed him and spitting the pips on the floor. ‘Actually volunteered, would you believe? I mean, do I look like Air Force material?’
‘It’s the spectacles,’ Tom said, but it was more.
‘They were polite. “Not quite what we’re looking for, Mr Seidler, but thank you for offering your services.” So I went back to selling books in a discount store on 42nd Street and learned to fly in New Jersey and waited for a war some place.’
Tom pointed at a miniature haystack on a church. ‘What the hell’s that?’
‘A stork’s nest,’ Seidler said. ‘Did you leave a girl behind?’
‘Nothing serious,’ Tom said.
‘Parents?’
‘My father had a stroke after he was cleared out. They live in a small hotel in upstate New York. They didn’t want me to come out here’ – the understatement of the year.
‘And you’re obviously an only child.’
Obviously? He remembered the house on Long Island and he remembered avenues of molten light on the water with yachts making their way down it, and men dressed in shorts and matelot jerseys drinking with his father, fierce moustache trimmed for his 60th birthday, and his mother dutifully reading to him in bed. She had been beautiful then, an older Katherine Hepburn, with chestnut hair piled high. He had never told them that he hated boats and, when he was lying on his back on the deck of the yacht, he was imagining himself at the controls of a yellow biplane exploring the castles of cloud on the horizon.
‘But you’re not,’ he said to Seidler.
‘Two brothers, one sister, all gainfully employed in the Garment Centre.’
The train which they had joined at Valencia stopped at a station, little more than a platform, and a dozen militiamen climbed on board. They wore blue overalls and boots, or rope-soled shoes, and berets or caps – one wore a French-style steel helmet, and two of them sported blood-stained bandages. Although the war had been in progress for only four months they conducted themselves like veterans and one carried a long-barrelled pistol which he laid carefully on his knees, as though it were made of glass. They were all young but they were no longer youthful.
Seidler spoke to them in Spanish. They were, he told Tom, returning to Madrid which had miraculously held out against the Fascist onslaught.
As Seidler talked and handed out Lucky Strikes, which were taken shyly and examined like foreign coins, Tom spread a map on his knees and tried to understand the war.
He knew that the Fascists, or Nationalists, were drawn from the army, the Falange and the Church, the landowners and the industrialists; that the Republicans were Socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals and the working class.
He knew that, to protect their privileges, the Fascists had risen in July 1936 to overthrow the lawful government of the Republic, established in 1931, which was being far too indulgent towards the poor. He had read somewhere that before the advent of the Republic a peasant had earned two or three pesetas a day.
He knew that the Fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, had, with the help of German transport planes, invaded Spain from North Africa and that in the north, led by General Emilio Mola, they had swept all before them. But great swathes of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were still in the hands of the Republicans. No pasarán!
He knew that the Moors fighting for Franco took no prisoners and cut off their victims’ genitals; he knew that the heroine of the Republicans was a woman known as La Pasionaria.
He knew that on the sides of this carriage where, on the wooden seats, peasants sat with their live chickens and baskets of locust beans were scrawled the letters UGT and CNT and FAI, but he had no idea what they meant and was ashamed of his ignorance.
The plain rolled past; water and smuts from the labouring engine streaked the windows.
‘So what else have you found out?’ Tom asked Seidler.
‘That Albacete is the asshole of Spain but they make good killing knives there.’
The militiamen, Tom reflected later, had been right about Albacete. It was cold and commonplace, and the cafés were crammed with discontented members of the International Brigades from many nations drinking cheap red wine.
The garrison was worse. It was the colour of clay, the barrack-room walls were the graveyards of squashed bugs and the floors were laid with bone-chilling stone. Tom and Seidler were quartered with Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – seamen, students and Communists – but France was in the ascendancy: the Brigade commissar, André Marty, was a bulky Frenchman with a persecution complex; parade-ground orders were issued in French; many uniforms, particularly those worn resentfully by the British, were Gallic leftovers from other conflicts.
He and Seidler complained to Marty the day the commander of the Abraham Lincolns, good and drunk, fired his pistol through a barrack-room ceiling.
From behind his desk Marty, balding with a luxuriant moustache, regarded them suspiciously.
‘You are guests in a foreign country. You shouldn’t complain – just think of what the poor bastards in Madrid are going through.’
‘Sure, and we want to help them,’ Seidler said. ‘But the instructors here couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.’
Marty fiddled with a button on his crumpled brown uniform.
‘You Jewish?’ He sucked his moustache with his bottom lip. ‘And a flier?’ – as though that compounded the crime.
And it was then that Tom Canfield realized that Marty was jealous, that fliers were different and that this would always be an advantage in life.
‘We didn’t come here to march and clean guns: we came here to fly,’ Tom said. He loved the word ‘fly’ and he wanted to repeat it. ‘We came here to bomb the Fascists at the gates of Madrid and shoot their bombers out of the sky. We’re not helping the Cause sitting on our asses; flying is what we’re good at.’
Marty, who was said to have the ear of Stalin, listened impatiently and Tom got the impression that it was Communism rather than the Cause that interested him.
‘I want your passports,’ Marty said.
‘The hell you do.’
‘In case you get shot down. You’re not supposed to be in this war. Article Ten of the Covenant of the League of Nations.’
‘So what about the Russians?’ Tom asked.
‘Advisers,’ Marty said. ‘Give me your passport.’
‘No way,’ Tom said. Then he said, ‘You mean we’re leaving here?’
‘To Guadalajara, north-east of
