They fed him beans and cabbage and occasional chopped-up potatoes. It wasn't very good, and he always craved more than he got. But he wouldn't starve on these rations-not soon, anyhow. He'd been hungry often enough-too often-in the field to get excited about this.
Most of the Republican guards were men recovering from wounds. They couldn't move fast. But they carried submachine guns. If anyone tried to escape, they could send a hell of a lot of bullets after him.
Joaquin wasn't going anywhere, not right away. He was just glad to say alive after the disastrous raid on the Internationals. He was even more relieved to find himself untortured after being taken prisoner. Little by little, he started to realize not everything his superiors had told him about the Republicans was the gospel truth.
He didn't do anything about the realization, not yet. For one thing, it was still a newly sprouted seed pushing up through dead leaves and chunks of bark toward the light. For another, he was in no position to do anything about anything. He ate. He slept. He mooched around the camp, taking care not to get too close to the wire. Coming too close-or anything else out of the ordinary-would have made the guards open up on him without warning.
When flights of bombers droned over his foxhole to drop their deadly cargo on Madrid, he'd cheered. How not? Those bombs were falling on the enemy's heads. Well, so they were. One thing that hadn't occurred to him before he got captured was that those bombs were also liable to come down on the heads of prisoners of war.
The only spades the Republicans allowed inside the wire perimeter were the ones the captives used to lengthen their latrine trenches and shovel lime into them to fight the stink. The guards counted the spades before they doled them out, and made sure they got them all back every time. Joaquin had no trouble seeing why: they didn't want the prisoners tunneling under the barbed wire. But it meant the captured Nationalists had nothing but a few mugs and tin mess kits to dig scrapes in which to shelter when the bombers came by.
Joaquin had borne up when Republican planes bombed his positions. He'd always consoled himself by thinking his side had more planes with which to punish the godless foe. And he'd been right. The Nationalists did have more bombers… and they concentrated them against Madrid.
He'd always thought of bombing as a pinpoint business. That wasn't how Marshal Sanjurjo's flyers went about it. Madrid belonged to the Republicans. As far as the Nationalists were concerned, they could put their bombs anywhere and still hurt their opponents.
They could-and they did. Maybe they didn't aim as well as Joaquin thought they could. Or maybe they just didn't care. With antiaircraft guns shooting at them from the ground, with Republican fighters sometimes tearing into them, the pilots and bombardiers wanted nothing more than to get back to their airstrips in one piece.
Either they didn't know the camp for their comrades lay right in the middle of the city they were flattening or they didn't care. Joaquin would have bet on the latter.
You could watch the bombs fall from the planes' bellies. You could watch them swell as they grew nearer. You could listen to the rising whistle as they clove the air on their way down. You could watch fire and smoke and dust leap up and out as they burst.
You could, yes-if you were stupid enough. You could get smashed or chopped by flying fragments and rubble, too. Artillery fire and those earlier bombings from the Republicans had rammed one lesson into Joaquin: when things started blowing up, you got as low and as flat as you could. Even that might not be enough, but it gave you your best chance.
Most of the prisoners knew as much. They lay down in whatever tiny dips in the ground they could find. Those who had anything to dig with scraped at the hard, dry dirt as fiercely as they could. Some of those who didn't broke fingernails and tore fingertips in the animal urge to burrow.
Joaquin screamed when bombs went off nearby. That was as much instinct as the prisoners' frantic scrabbling at the dirt. Odds were the thunderous explosions kept other men from hearing his cries. And odds were his weren't the only shrieks rising up to the uncaring sky.
Were the guards on the other side of the wire screaming, too? Of course they were. Terror conquered Nationalists and Republicans with equal ease. And if some of the Republicans weren't calling out to their mothers or to God, Joaquin would have been amazed. You could tear the cassock off a priest or torch a church, but tearing the beliefs you grew up with out of your heart wasn't so easy.
Then two bombs smashed down inside the perimeter, and Joaquin stopped caring about anything but staying alive longer than the next few seconds. He got picked up and slammed down, as if by a wrestler the size of a building. Blood dribbled from his nose; iron and salt filled his mouth. He spat, praying the blast hadn't shredded his lungs. Were his ears also bleeding? He wouldn't have been surprised.
More bombs burst-mercifully, farther away. As if from a long way off, he heard screams full of anguish, not fear. He knew the difference; he'd heard both kinds too often. Whoever was making noises like that wouldn't keep making them very long-not if God showed even a little kindness, he wouldn't.
If the bombs had blown a hole in the barbed wire, the camp might empty like a cracked basin. Then again, it might not. The thought flickered through Joaquin and then blew out. He was too stunned to do anything but lie there with his sleeve pressed to his face to try to stanch the flood from his nose. How many others in here would be in much better shape?
The guards wouldn't, either… That thought also flickered and blew out. To try to escape, Joaquin would have needed more resolution than he owned right this minute. He imagined running this way and that, trying to find a gap in the perimeter. Imagining was easy. Doing wouldn't be. Even telling his rosary beads took as much as he had in him.
Guards came into the prisoners' enclosure to take away men who'd been killed or wounded. They didn't seem to treat the injured Nationalists any worse than stretcher-bearers and medics who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo would have. Seeing that, Joaquin decided the Republicans weren't just fattening him for the slaughter, so to speak.
He got another surprise a few days later: the International who'd captured him came to see how he was doing. He wouldn't have known the man by sight, not when the ill-fated raid came off in the middle of the night. But the fellow's slow, bad Spanish and the timbre of his voice were familiar. "Here I am!" Joaquin called from his side of the wire.
"Bueno." The International-the American, the Jew, he'd said he was-nodded back. "They treat you all right?"
Joaquin considered. "Not too bad. Could be worse." Lord knew that was true. They might have decided to see how many small chunks they could tear off him before he died. He'd feared they would do exactly that. And they still might, if he annoyed them enough.
"Here. Catch." The International tossed an almost-full pack of Gitanes over the barbed wire. Joaquin grabbed it eagerly. He could smoke some of the harsh cigarettes and trade the rest for… well, for anything you could get here. On this side of the wire, cigarettes were as good as pesetas, maybe better.
"Muchas gracias," he said. "You didn't have to do this. You must be a gentleman."
To his amazement, he saw he'd flustered the fellow from the other side. The Jew was ordinary, or a little homelier than that: short, kind of pudgy, with a big nose and not a whole lot of chin. "I don't want to be a gentleman," he said. "I don't want anybody to be a gentleman. Everybody ought to be equal, si?"
"Then how does anyone decide what needs doing?" Joaquin asked. "Once he does decide, how does he get them to go along?"
"Ah!" The International leaned forward till he almost pricked that formidable nose on the barbed wire's fangs. "Here's how…" Like an airplane climbing from a runway, the talk took off from there. MIKE CARROLL EYED CHAIM WEINBERG in mingled amusement and scorn. "You came here to fight the fucking Fascists, man. You didn't come here to convert 'em."