Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“You’re a lot of fun.”

“So are you,” he said, without my sarcasm. “Are all London working girls as nice as you? No painted nails? No tight skirts?”

I decided to ignore that. “When I was growing up during the Great War, my mother said that a cloud of evil had descended on Europe. Do you think—”

“That’s happening here? What an odd way to put it.”

I relayed every detail of what I’d seen the night before, including Alma’s explanation. “She’s right, of course. I wouldn’t be so concerned if she hadn’t woken up this morning an even more fanatical revolutionary. Out of pure zeal, she’s giving it away today.”

“So much more sensible to do it for money.”

“If the transaction is a fair one.”

“Spoken like a true Englishwoman—all moderation and sweet reason.” He lit another cigarette. “I’ll worry about Hitler devouring your country some other night. Tonight, I’d like to take you back to my room.”

“I’m indisposed.”

He took my hand. “In my room is one of those huge Victorian showers. You know the kind? Like a big monkey bars with steam blasting you from every direction. We could put it to good use.”

“All right,” I said. “If you promise to stay off politics.”

I was surprised to find myself alone in the bed. He was an early riser, I told myself. I got up, made a toga with the sheet, then found my way into the enormous bathroom. He was at the mirror, his back to me. He’d cleared a patch on the steamy glass and was briskly shaving himself. A towel protected his stiff collar.

“You’re up early.”

“Got things to do,” he said. He didn’t even look at me.

Nostalgically, I glanced at the shower, remembering last night. “When do you go back to the front?”

“I’m not going back,” he said. The razor slipped along his cheek. He was bleeding but seemed not to notice.

“You’re deserting ?”

He grinned at his cut. “I’m not a coward. I’m going to fight for Franco.”

I stood there, my jaw dangling, I’m sure. He watched his blood turn the shaving lather pink. “Go on, now,” he said. “Get back on the job and stay there.”

I certainly wasn’t going to let him see how disturbed I was. I stepped back into the room and started getting dressed. I could attend to my morning functions in the lady’s room of the hotel lobby.

Instead of taking a cab, I walked to St. Mary’s, my mind filled with all the things I wished I had said. The more I walked, the more bewildered I became. I thought I knew Gary’s type: a recently baptized militiaman so on fire with brotherhood and justice, he’d die smiling for the cause. What could have changed him in a night? In one, single night?

I rounded the last corner and saw the house there as always, the shudders and blinds tight against the morning sun. The sheer familiarity made my skin prickle. I ran to the door.

I knew that something was wrong as soon as I heard the silence inside. I looked in the parlor but found no one there. I walked down the hall, then opened the door to the loggia, just a crack. The little woodstove was dead. I opened the door the rest of the way and found Jacinta on the wicker sofa. She was staring fearfully into the middle distance. Upon seeing me, she burst into tears.

It was some time before Jacinta could win her breath back from her sobs. But eventually the story came out. Dozens of militiamen had queued up outside once the word of free services had gotten out. All of them were dirty. Many were syphilitic. A citizens’ committee came and tried to shut down the infirmary for the day. The girls went out into the street, to jeer at the committee for being bad comrades. Eight or ten men were loitering at the corner.

Jacinta stared at the floor as if a shell were lying there, waiting to explode. “Those boys shot the committee members, one after another. I tell you, Vida, not one comrade survived.”

“Is Alma alive?”

Her expression was full of pity—pity for me, I realized. “After they shot the comrades, they told Alma to get back to work, to make sure Constantina and Esmeralda worked hard, too. If the whores told anyone about their sickness, the men would come back to kill them.”

“We’re not diseased!”

Jacinta shook her head. “You still don’t understand. Alma and the women who touched her spread disloyalty, just like a fever. It turns good militiamen into the murderers of their comrades. I told you the skeletons were just the beginning.”

My mouth was as dry as sand. “You’re talking rubbish, Jacinta.”

“No one can find his bones,” she said hollowly. “Constantina put them in here by the stove, but they could not be found.”

“So? Someone—”

“I think he is back in his grave, growing the flesh to walk the earth again.”

I thought of Gary’s change, of how complete it had been. Would the same thing happen to the next man, and the next? I couldn’t work anywhere. Beneath my skin, I could feel the busy soldiering of bacteria. I suddenly understood why Gabriella had killed herself and why that irate militia captain had called her a traitor. With no hope of a husband and no belief in other work, she had simply chosen a quick death over a slow one.

“Where is Alma?”

Jacinta almost smiled. “She is spitting back at the Fascists. They think they have given her a sickness, but they have given her a weapon, to turn back on the Fascists.” She added something in Catalan, but I had no trouble with her meaning. Alma had gone to the front.

I was sitting on a gun crate in a trench, the notebook and pencil in my hand part of my ruse. I was posing as a lady correspondent in pursuit of a story and a friend. We were a hundred yards as the crow flies from the line of Fascist redoubts. I had learned that Alma, when she had stopped here, had claimed a sister was working in a brothel in Huesca, a town three miles inside the Fascist lines. She had convinced them to let her pass, so she could find her sister and bring her back.

One of the soldiers fed a dried rosemary branch to the fire in the middle of the trench. Overhead, between the planks supporting the trench, the dark indigo sky was thickening to black. I watched three men climb out of the trench, to go dig for potatoes in no-man’s-land. I waited fifteen more minutes and then told a comrade who was laboring over a cookfire that I was crawling to the next trench, to continue “my story.” She gave me two ovoid objects, a little larger than goose eggs, which turned out to be bombs. She showed me how they had two pins, a stiff one to be removed shortly before the approach of danger and a loose one to be removed seven seconds before detonation. She advised me to crawl all the way.

I shouldered my rucksack, then clambered up the ladder and slithered over the sandbags of the parapet, onto the ground. Even in the dark, I could sense that the valley between me and the Fascist lines was a wasteland: bullet-chipped stones, forlorn weeds, a few dwarfed and withered oaks. I could just make out the flag of the Fascist redoubt. The road to Huesca was off to the right of that, I’d been told. I started crawling.

I had gone only a few yards when I noticed an awful, fecal smell. I was burrowing into soil little cleaner than a latrine. In no-man’s-land, I found my special, private fear, a dread of nightsoil and festerment. There was no reason to be here, I told myself. I could take the train to Toulouse and then down into Fascist Spain. I lay there without motion and actually considered doing this. My fear that Alma was demented got me moving again. She needed me. She’d better need me. I would keep her from staying too long in one place. We would work one village and then another, moving on just before the Fascists realized that we were turning their men into traitors.