"Bite me," Chaim answered. "The more of those guys we win over, the better."
"You know what Mencken said about that kind of shit," Mike persisted. He quoted with relish: "'I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.'"
Chaim didn't want to listen, especially since Mike hardly ever read anything that didn't follow the Party line. Why now? "Who cares what a reactionary says?"
"He may be a reactionary, but he's a damn fine writer." The other American sounded a little defensive, or more than a little.
"For an enemy of the people." Chaim trotted out the heavy artillery.
Mike breathed heavily through his nose. "Okay. Fine. Have it your way. But if you're back at that camp blabbing about dialectical materialism when you're supposed to be up here fighting, Brigadier Kossuth'll skin you alive. He'll call it desertion, not conversion."
He was right, which didn't make Chaim any happier with him. If anything, Chaim only got angrier. "Hey, you know better than that. When did I ever miss action?"
"That time just after you got here, over near the Ebro."
"Oh, give me a break! I was down with dysentery, for cryin' out loud. You never got a case of the galloping shits?"
"Not to where I couldn't grab my rifle."
"Terrific," Chaim said. "Grab it and shove it up your ass-bayonet first." He was ready for a brawl. Mike was bigger than he was, and looked to have more muscles, but all that mattered only so much. Land a guy one in the pit of the stomach or in the nuts and all the muscles in the world wouldn't do him a goddamn bit of good.
But instead of pissing off the other American, Chaim made him laugh. "All right, already," Carroll said, as if he were a Landsman himself. "But watch yourself, okay? You really are making like this one Nationalist is more important than the rest of the struggle."
"Nah," Chaim said, even if Mike was right, or nearly right, again. He'd come to see the effort to reeducate Joaquin as a representation of the larger fight against Fascism. He realized that, just because he saw it that way, other people wouldn't necessarily do the same thing. Some of those other people were officers who could tell him what to do and land him in hot water if he didn't do it or if he wasn't around to do it.
"What do you see in the guy, anyhow?" Mike pressed. "He's nothing but a dumb kid off the farm. If he came from the States, he'd be a hayseed from Arkansas or Oklahoma or somewhere like that. He'd be a hardshell Baptist, too, instead of a Catholic."
Chaim's knowledge of Arkansas and Oklahoma was purely theoretical. So was his knowledge of the differences between one brand of Christianity and another. Catholics went to fancier churches, and their bishops dressed the way rabbis would if rabbis were crazy faggots. What more did you need to know?
(Thinking of rabbis reminded him of his brief fling with starting a shul. Just as Kossuth had predicted, he hadn't stuck with it. Now he had this new cause instead. Always something, but never the same thing for very long.)
Besides, he was sick of soldiering. He'd seen enough, done enough, lived through enough, to have its measure. If the Internationals needed someone with a rifle to get up on a firing step and shoot at Sanjurjo's men, the Republican equivalent of a fellow like Joaquin Delgadillo would do. Chaim had discovered the joys of… well, of preaching. If it was a smaller moment than the one St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, the difference was of degree, not of kind.
He might have preached better with more fluent Spanish. But he might not have. He had to keep his ideas simple and direct, because he couldn't say anything fancy or highfalutin. Even staying simple, he fumbled for words and verb endings. Joaquin-and, soon, other Nationalist prisoners who'd started listening to him for no better reason than to pass the time of day-threw him a line whenever he needed one. If anything, that made him more effective. His audience was, and felt itself to be, part of the show.
And changing minds-winning converts-turned out not to be that hard, no matter how little H. L. Mencken might have cared for the process. Chaim had a solid grounding in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin. The men to whom he preached seemed to have no ideology at all.
"Well, why did you keep fighting for Sanjurjo, then?" he asked a Spaniard who wore a patch over his right eye socket. He knew the fellow would have fought with desperate courage, too. The Nationalists might serve a vile cause, but they served it bravely.
"Why, Senor?" A Spanish shrug was less comic, more resigned, than its French equivalent. "I was in the army. We had an enemy. What else was there to do but fight?"
"You were oppressed, in other words. That's why you fought," Chaim said. No matter how lousy his Spanish as a whole was, he knew words like oppressed. "How do you get rid of oppression?" He answered his own question: "You have to struggle against it, not for it."
"But how, Senor?" the soldier asked. "If we didn't do what our officers told us, they would have shot us. And if we tried to come across the line, chances are you Republicans would have shot us. It is a bad bargain."
It was a bad bargain. The natives on the two sides hated each other too much for it to be anything else. Their higher-ups did, anyhow. Ordinary soldiers sometimes had a more sympathetic understanding for the poor sorry bastards who filled out the ranks on the other side. Sometimes.
"Officers who oppress can have accidents," Chaim said. "Officers who oppress ought to have accidents. They deserve them."
The Nationalists listened to him without surprise. Things like that had happened in every army since the Egyptians went to war against the Assyrians. Anybody who made his own men despise him needed eyes in the back of his head. Even those weren't always enough to save him.
"Your real problem was, you never wondered if Sanjurjo's officers had the right to give you orders," Chaim said. "Who set them over you? God?" He smiled crookedly. "They want you to think so."
"Who makes officers for the Republicans?" Joaquin asked.
"Mostly, the men choose them. We do in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion," Chaim answered. "Just about all the Spanish Republican units do the same thing." He told the truth-for the most part. Sometimes the Party wanted certain men in certain slots… but the will of the Party was the will of the people. Wasn't it?
The Nationalist prisoners muttered among themselves. Finally, one of them asked, "But what if these men make bad leaders?"
"Then we get new ones," Chaim replied. "What if your officers make bad leaders?" None of the prisoners tried to give him an answer. He and they all knew what the answer was. If a Nationalist officer made a bad leader, his men were stuck with him. Most armies worked that way. Chaim pressed the advantage: "You see how much better the Republican way is?"
They didn't say no. They weren't in an ideal position to say no, but Chaim didn't let that worry him.
Neither did his own superiors. As Mike had prophesied, he got a summons from Brigadier Kossuth. The Magyar eyed him impassively. "So," he said. "Now you are a propagandist instead of a soldier?"
"No. And a soldier," Chaim said, wondering how much trouble he was in.
Kossuth's lizardy tongue flicked in and out. "Soldiers we can always find," he observed. "Propagandists are harder to come by. Do you want to go on reeducating the Nationalist prisoners? That might be useful."
By which he could only mean You'd better want to go on reeducating them. Since Chaim did, he answered, "If that would help the Republic, sure I'll do it."
"Good. We understand each other." Kossuth was dry as usual. Chaim wondered what would have happened to him had he said he'd rather stay at the front. Nothing he would have enjoyed: he was sure of that. The brigadier seemed surprised to find him still standing there. "Dismissed," he said, and Chaim beat it. Moscow or Barcelona might replace Kossuth, but an ordinary lug could only obey him. Maybe Chaim wasn't so different from the Nationalists who needed reeducating after all.