Part of it, Theo judged, was something else altogether. Had the Wehrmacht men knew more, they likely would have celebrated less. Adi had more in common with some of the soldiers in Polish uniform than he did with them. Most of the Poles wouldn’t have been happy about that, either. Theo cracked a smile. Not only had his side won, he shared a joke with only one other man out of the whole crowd.
Dr. Alvarez clucked like a laying hen. “You really should not leave hospital so soon,” he insisted.
He’d been trained in England, all right; any American would have said leave the hospital. Chaim Weinberg noticed, but he didn’t care. “Doc, you’ve said you’re not gonna do any more carving on me, right?” he said.
“Yes,” the hand surgeon answered with a reluctant nod. “But you have not done enough exercises to give you the full strength and dexterity possible in your hand.”
“So I’ll keep doing ’em once I get to the front,” Chaim answered. “And I’ll do other stuff with it, too. You gotta understand, Doc-I’m just sick to death of laying around here on my butt.”
“Lying,” Alvarez said.
“No, honest to God, it’s the truth.” Then Chaim realized what the doctor meant. He started to laugh. Wasn’t it a hell of a note when a foreigner knew more about your language’s grammar than you did? He went on, “I’ll be okay-I really will. You can’t tell me the Republic doesn’t need another soldier who doesn’t halfway know what he’s doing, either. ¡Viva la República!”
“¡Viva!” Dr. Alvarez echoed. He had to do that much. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to report him as a Sanjurjo sympathizer. If his actual politics lay on the Nationalist side, Chaim no more wanted to know about it than Alvarez wanted him to find out.
One way the surgeon could have kept him in Madrid would have been not to give him any clothes. The filthy, bloody uniform in which he’d come here had long since been thrown away-or, more likely, burned to prevent contagion. But they fitted him with a pair of dungarees and a peasant’s collarless cotton shirt. That would do to get him to the front. They’d issue him a new uniform there … or maybe they wouldn’t, if they didn’t happen to have one. If they didn’t, he could wear this in the trenches till it got too ragged to stand. It wasn’t as if he’d never been ragged before.
When he stuck his good hand in the pocket of the dungarees, he found a small roll of pesetas in there. He started to thank the surgeon, then clamped down on it. By the look in his eye, Alvarez wanted no thanks and would have denied putting the money in there. Some people were like that: they didn’t care to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they could be nice.
A couple of the nurses kissed Chaim before he left. One of them was halfway cute, or more than halfway. Why couldn’t they have been a little more friendly when all he could do was lay there-no, lie there-in bed like a sack of peas, dammit?
He was sweating before he’d walked even a block. Part of that was Madrid’s fierce summer heat and the blazing sun overhead. And part of it was that he’d spent too goddamn long lying there like a sack of peas. He hadn’t realized how far out of shape he’d got.
Madrid itself kept the hectic gaiety he’d always found here. Buildings without damage were scarce, glassed windows scarcer. Nationalist, Italian, and German bombers had pounded the Republican stronghold since the civil war started in 1936. Madrileños repaired, rebuilt, and carried on.
Chaim needed a little while to orient himself. He hadn’t been at his best when they brought him to the hospital, which was putting things mildly. And the building, like most here, had boarded-up windows. So he hadn’t known where he was. Now that he did …
Luckily, Party headquarters was only a few blocks away. The first person he saw when he walked in there was La Martellita. She was hurrying across the lobby with a fat folder of papers squeezed between her arm and her sweetly curved side. She saw him, too-with no great delight. “What?” she said. “They turned you loose?”
“Afraid so,” he answered.
“And so you came over here to bother me?” She jumped to a natural conclusion.
But he shook his head with more dignity than he could usually muster. “Sorry, querida, but no. I came over here to ask where I could get a ride up to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
“Oh,” La Martellita said in a different tone of voice. That was business. She told him what he needed to know. The bus depot wasn’t far, either, for which he was glad. Then she asked, “And your hand-it’s better?”
“It’s good enough.” He showed her he could bring thumb and forefinger together. He tried not to show her it still hurt. His pride was of a different sort from the Spaniards’ flashy variety, which didn’t mean he had none.
“It’s still not pretty,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’ll never be pretty. Así es la vida. You, now, you’re pretty.”
Flattery got him nowhere. He hadn’t expected it would. Hoped, sure, but not expected. “Go find your bus,” she told him. “If you stay here very long, you won’t find anything but trouble.”
He blew her a kiss as he turned to go. “Hasta la vista. Say hello to my son for me.”
She headed for the stairway without answering. He suspected Carlos Federico Weinberg wouldn’t get the hello. Sighing, he walked out and trudged over to the depot.
Every last bus in the Republic would have been junked for spare parts in the States-except the ones old and strange enough to go straight into a museum. The ancient French ruin he boarded might have rushed troops from Paris to the Marne in the darkest days of 1914. It wouldn’t have been fresh from the factory then, either.
It rattled. It farted. It stank of gasoline-something was leaking somewhere. At least half of what should have been teeth on the gears in its transmission were only memories. Its shocks weren’t even memories, because Chaim didn’t think it had ever had any.
But it still ran. The maniac behind the wheel drove with a cheerful disregard for life and limb: his own, his handful of passengers’, and those of anyone else unfortunate enough to come anywhere near him.
Heading north and west was getting a picture of how the war had gone. The Nationalists came within a whisker of taking Madrid. They pushed into the northwestern suburbs, and onto the campus of the university. Little by little, the Republican forces had driven them back, till now the front lay well out of artillery range. As the bus clattered along, craters in the ground-sometimes craters in the road-got fresher and deeper. Less grass grew in them. The rusting hulks of burnt-out armored vehicles from both sides grew more modern and dangerous-looking.
After a while, brakes screeching, the bus shuddered to a stop. “The sector of the Internationals!” the driver shouted. He undid the wire around the handle that held the door closed. Chaim got out.
A lot of so-called Internationals nowadays were Spaniards. Casualties and time had thinned the foreign Marxists’ ranks, and the bigger European war meant few new volunteers came here. But the ones who were left, Europeans and Americans, were uncommonly hard to kill.
“What do you need?” asked a man who spoke Spanish with some kind of guttural Central European accent.
Chaim held up his much-scarred, much-repaired left hand. “I’m just over a wound,” he answered. If the other fellow had trouble with his crappy Spanish, he figured Yiddish would be the next thing to try. If you knew German, you could cope with it. “Where do I find the Abe Lincolns these days?”
The Central European followed him. The guy pointed up and to the left. “They’re over there. So you’re back for more fun, are you?”
“Fun? Oh, of course.” Chaim flexed the fingers that still worked. “Any more fun and I’d be dead. Round that got me killed one of my friends.”
“I’m sorry,” the other man said. “We all have stories like that by now. Well, go on. Buena suerte.” Chaim nodded as he headed up toward the line. Good luck was as much as you could hope for, and more than you usually got.