Derek Lambert - The Gate of the Sun

Only one occupant of the house had been saved, the priest. Blast from bombs is as fickle as it is ferocious and it had bundled him on to the street, plumply alive beneath his shredded clothes. The priest who was due to report to Lance at the British Embassy that evening said to Ana, ‘It was a merciful release for your father.’ She walked over to the brass bedstead. ‘I prayed for their souls,’ he said. She covered the bed with a sheet because it was indecent to leave it exposed.

She said: ‘Why don’t you go out and fight like a man?’

Jesús, glancing up from an exercise book in which he was writing a poem, looked bewildered.

So did the children, Rosana crayoning planes laying bombs like eggs, Pablo who, at the age of eight, already looked like his father, arranging his shrapnel and his brass cartridge cases and his strip of camouflage said to have been ripped from a Ju-52 by the guns of a rat.

‘A little while ago …’

‘I don’t care about a little while ago. A little while ago was a long time ago. The priest was saved,’ she said. ‘Why the priest?’

‘I don’t understand.’

She told him.

‘Ana, the children.’

‘They have to know.’

Pablo stared hard at the piece of shrapnel lying in the palm of his hand.

‘Why the priest?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, pointing at the children and shaking his head.

‘I don’t expect you to. What would you know about living and dying? It’s written in blood, not ink.’

Jesús said to the children, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’

They began to gather up their possessions.

In the distance Ana could hear gunfire, the firework splutter of rifles, the chatter of machine-guns and the bark of heavy artillery.

‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I saw a peasant, a refugee, lie like Coll in front of a tank. The treads rolled over him, crushing him, but the tank blew up.’

‘You want me to get killed. Is that it?’

‘I want your children to be proud of you.’

The children remained absorbed with clearing up but Pablo’s bottom lip trembled.

Jesús stood up, knocking the bottle of ink over the scrubbed table. He fetched a newspaper and soaked it up. His fingers were stained blue. The children were silent, following him with their eyes. He walked to the door.

‘I hope the bottle of anis is full in the bar,’ Ana said.

He stood silhouetted against the fading, rain-swept afternoon light. He looked very thin – he didn’t eat as much as the children and, although he was only 32, he stooped a little, but still she let him go.

When she went to bed he had not returned.

In the morning she left the children with a neighbour and marched to the front with a platoon of women militia. They were dressed in blue, and they carried rifles on their shoulders and food for the men. They went first to University City, the model campus and suburb to the north-west of Madrid, near Tetuan, where Fascists who had crossed the Manzanares were fighting hand-to-hand with the militia and the International Brigades. They fought for faculties, libraries, laboratories, rooms. The walls of half-finished buildings swayed; the air smelled of cordite, brick-dust and distemper, and rang with foreign tongues. The Moors bayoneted the wounded; the Germans placed bombs in elevators and sent them up to explode among the Moors.

Ana shot a Moor wearing a kerchief as he raised his bayonet above a German from the Thaelmann Battalion of the 11th International Brigade who was bleeding from a chest wound. It was the first time she had killed. She took provisions to the British defending the Hall of Philosophy and Letters against the Fascists who had already taken the Institute of Hygiene and Cancer and the Santa Cristina and Clinical hospitals. Someone told her there was an English poet named Cornford among the machine-gunners. A poet!

She went about her duties coldly. She no longer thought about young men who knew nothing about each other killing each other. She thought instead about her grandmother and her father and her one-eyed brother who were dead, and she thought about the priest who was alive.

With the other women she descended the heights to a bridge across the Manzanares which the Fascists hadn’t crossed. The Moors were grouped at the other side, Foreign Legionnaires with red tassels on their grey-green gorillo caps behind them. Assault guards and militiamen held the east neck of the bridge, another inlet to the city. The guards were armed with grenades and rifles and one of them was firing a Lewis machine-gun. When Ana and her platoon arrived the dark-skinned Moors in ragged uniforms were advancing across the bridge while the militiamen fitted another magazine on to the Lewis gun. Ana knelt behind them, aimed her rifle, a Swiss antique made in 1886, and squeezed the trigger; the rifle bucked, a Moor fell but she couldn’t tell whether it was her bullet that had hit him because the other militiamen were firing, although without precision and she was dubious about the resolution of these exhausted defenders who had never wanted to be soldiers. There was no doubt about the resolution of the Moors trained by the Spaniards to fight bandits in Morocco: they ignored the bullets and stepped over the dead and wounded.

For some reason the magazine wouldn’t fit on the Lewis gun; it was probably a magazine for another gun; such things were not unknown. The assault guards and militiamen shuffled backwards. The Moors moved forward firing their rifles. A militiaman in front of Ana threw up his arms and fell backwards.

Ana shouted to the women, ‘Keep firing!’ But the militiamen were turning, running towards the women, blocking their view of the Moors. Ana stood up, aimed the ancient Swiss rifle at the militiamen and fired it above their heads. ‘Sons of whores!’ she shouted at these men who had been bakers and housepainters and garbage collectors. ‘Turn back!’

They hesitated.

‘ Mierda! ’ shouted Ana who never swore. ‘Have you no cojones ?’

She reloaded quickly and fired between them. A Moroccan fell. And the militiamen turned away from these women who were more frightening than the Moors and the machine-gunners, fitted the magazine to the Lewis gun, and, planting it firmly on the road surface, aimed it at the Moors who were almost upon them.

Chop-chop went the gun, piling up bodies that were soon too high and disorderly for the back-up Moors to navigate. Instead they retreated. The militiamen sent them on their way with a hail of bullets. Then they looked shamefacedly at Ana.

She looked across the modest river and thought: they knocked out one of Salvador’s eyes with a club then they removed the sight of the other with a bomb dropped as casually as boys drop stones over bridges. Couldn’t they have left my father to die in his own time?

She said, ‘Fix the next magazine.’ They nodded. Then she led her women back to their barrio in Tetuan. Jesús was standing in the yard.

He had acquired a gorillo cap and a bandolier which he wore over a blue shirt she had never seen before. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle. The children, hands tight fisted, observed him wonderingly.

She smiled at him. She felt as happy to see him there as she had in the days when her whole day had been taken up with waiting to meet him.

‘What game is this?’ she asked.

He looked a little ridiculous. He hadn’t found a jaunty angle for his cap; his ears were bigger than she remembered beneath it; the ink was still blue on his fingertips.

‘The game you told me to play,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that if we were all cowards there would be no wars?’

He straightened the stoop in his back and, so thin that she wanted to stretch out a hand and feel the muscles moving over his ribs, walked past her towards the killing.