Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

Doubtless because of this mystery, historians or memorialists or reporters began to differ on this point. They all agreed, however, on the astonishing fact that not even the government, with those theoretically responsible for public order at its head – the Head of Security Ortega, the Minister of the Interior Zugazagoitia, the Prime Minister Negrin, least of all President Azaña – had the slightest idea what had happened to Nin. And when they were asked and they denied all knowledge of his whereabouts, no one, logically and ironically enough, believed them, even though they were, in effect, incapable of answering, according to Benet, 'because they knew nothing of the machinations of Orlov and his boys at the NKVD', who had acted entirely on their own account. Graffiti began to appear asking 'Where is Nin?', and often received the reply from the Stalinists 'In Burgos or in Berlin', implying that the revolutionary leader had fled and gone over to the enemy, that is, to his real friends Franco or Hitler. The accusations were so incredible and so crude (members of the POUM were described as 'Trotsko-fascists', exactly echoing the insults from Moscow) that, in order to defend them and make them acceptable, the socialist and Republican press found themselves having to support the Communist press: Treball, El Socialista, Adelante, La Voz, all of whom joined in the libel.

Certain historians in some collective work, I can't remember who they were now, maintained that Nin had been taken immediately to Madrid to be interrogated and that, shortly afterwards, 'he was kidnapped while being held in the Hotel de Alcala de Henares' – and despite being under police guard – by 'a group of armed and uniformed people who took him away by force'. According to these historians, during the supposed struggle between the police guarding him and the mysterious uniformed assailants (they didn't specify what kind of uniforms they were wearing), 'a wallet fell to the floor containing documents bearing a German name and various written texts in that language, as well as Nazi insignia and Spanish notes from the Franco side'. But the matter of the members of the International Brigade to which Tupra had referred was set out more clearly in Thomas and in Benet (it was probably the former's monumental The Spanish Civil War – I don't know why the devil I keep calling it a 'summary', it's over a thousand pages long – that Tupra would have read in his youth). According to Thomas, Nin was taken by car from Barcelona to 'Orlov's own prison' in Alcalá de Henares, Cervantes's birthplace very close to Madrid, but 'almost a Russian colony' at the time, to be interrogated personally by the nastiest and most devious of Stalin's representatives in Spain, using the customary Soviet methods deployed against 'traitors to the cause'. Nin's resistance to torture was apparently amazing, that is, appalling, bearing in mind that Howson mentions an unspecified – and one hopes unreliable – report according to which Nin was flayed alive. The fact is that he refused to sign any document admitting his guilt or that of his friends, nor did he reveal the names they asked him for, of lesser-known Trotskyists or of others entirely unknown. Orlov, enraged by his stubbornness, was at his wits' end; employed with him on this fruitless task were his comrades Bielov and Carlos Contreras (the latter was an alias, that of the Italian Vittorio Vidali, as Orlov was of Alexander Nikolski and Gorkin of Julián Gómez, everyone, it seems, had an alias), and all three of them feared the likely wrath that their persuasive incompetence would arouse in Yezhov, their superior in Moscow and the chief of the NKVD, so much so that Bielov and Contreras suggested staging 'a "Nazi" attack to liberate Nin' and to rid themselves in this picturesque way of their troublesome prisoner, who was also doubtless too broken and battered to be restored to the light, or even to the shadows, or even perhaps to the darkness. 'So, one dark night,' wrote Thomas as if he were the murmur of the river and the thread, 'probably 22 or 23 June, ten German members of the International Brigade assaulted the house in Alcalá where Nin was held. Ostentatiously, they spoke German during the pretended attack, and left behind some German train tickets. Nin was taken away and murdered, perhaps in El Pardo, the royal park just to the north of Madrid.' Benet, in his account – even more fluvial, or more intimately mingled with the river, a thicker thread of continuity, perhaps because he was speaking in my own language – said that Orlov had locked Nin 'in the cellar of the barracks in Alcala de Henares to interrogate him personally'. (One imagines that during the interrogations in the cellar, house, barracks, hotel or prison – it was odd how the historians were unable to agree on the nature of the place – they would have spoken Russian, which the interrogated man doubtless knew better – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky – than his interrogator knew Spanish.) Nin 'so exasperated Orlov that Orlov decided to kill him for fear of reprisals from his superior in Moscow, Yezhov. The only idea he could come up with was a "rescue" carried out by a German commando group from the International Brigade, supposedly Nazi, who killed him in a Madrid suburb and probably buried him in a little inner garden in the palace of El Pardo.' And Benet, unable to ignore the grim irony that the palace became Franco's official residence during his thirty-six years of dictatorship, added: '(The reader might consider the fate of those poor bones beneath the footsteps of that other staunch anti-Stalinist, when he strolled about there during his moments of leisure.)' And he went on: in the weeks that followed, as if under a curse – that of Nin's silence – Orlov's boys kept turning up in the gutters of Madrid, with a bullet in the neck or a whole clip of bullets in the belly.' That may have been the case with Bielov, but not with Vidali or Contreras (or, in the United States, Sormenti), who was, for a long time, leader of the Communists in Trieste, or with Orlov himself, who, no later than 1938, when he received the order to leave Spain and return to Moscow, had no illusions about the fate that awaited him there and so left, incognito, on a boat to reappear later on in Canada, going on to spend many years living a secret life as a respectable citizen of the United States, where he finally published a book in 1953, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (barely mentioning his own part in them, of course), and lending an occasional hand to the FBI in tricky espionage cases, like that of the Soble brothers or that of Marc Zbrowsky: how many useless things one learns during these unexpected nights of study. This, I have to say, led some rather simplistic, fanatical and frivolous exegete – I can't remember who, the books were still mounting up, I went to get some chocolates and truffles, I poured myself a glass of wine, I had wreaked havoc on Wheeler's west bookshelf, and his desk was in a terrible state – to conclude that Major Orlov had, from the outset, been an American mole and that most of the people he had executed in Spain as 'fifth columnists' were, in fact, pure, loyal reds, the victims of Roosevelt not Stalin. This particular Manichaean was certainly right as far as Nin was concerned, if not about the 'loyal' (if that meant being loyal to Stalin, he clearly wasn't), but certainly about being 'pure' and 'red'. And even if he wasn't an angel or a saint or merely harmless (who could have been in that war), his murder and that of his comrades (one historian puts in the hundreds and another in the thousands the number of POUM members and anarchists from the CNT who were sent to their graves by Orlov and his Spanish and Russian acolytes), these murders and the slander spread and believed by far too many – and which did not even cease after his physical annihilation and the crushing of his party – constituted, according to almost all the voices I heard in the pages of that silent night by the River Cherwell, the worst and most vicious of all the despicable deeds committed by one side against its own people during the War.