In the event the city should be abandoned, Karkov was to poison them to destroy all evidence of their identity before leaving the Palace Hotel. No one could prove from the bodies of three wounded men, one with three bullet wounds in his abdomen, one with his jaw shot away and his vocal cords exposed, one with his femur smashed to bits by a bullet and his hands and face so badly burned that his face was just an eyelashless, eyebrowless, hairless blister that they were Russians. No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.
Robert Jordan had asked Karkov how he felt about the necessity of performing this act and Karkov had said that he had not looked forward to it. "How were you going to do it?" Robert Jordan had asked him and had added, "You know it isn't so simple just suddenly to poison people." And Karkov had said, "Oh, yes, it is when you carry it always for your own use." Then he had opened his cigarette case and showed Robert Jordan what he carried in one side of it.
"But the first thing anybody would do if they took you prisoner would be to take your cigarette case," Robert Jordan had objected. "They would have your hands up."
"But I have a little more here," Karkov had grinned and showed the lapel of his jacket. "You simply put the lapel in your mouth like this and bite it and swallow."
"That's much better," Robert Jordan had said. "Tell me, does it smell like bitter almonds the way it always does in detective stories?"
"I don't know," Karkov said delightedly. "I have never smelled it. Should we break a little tube and smell it?"
"Better keep it."
"Yes," Karkov said and put the cigarette case away. "I am not a defeatist, you understand, but it is always possible that such serious times might come again and you cannot get this anywhere. Have you seen the communique from the Cordoba front? It is very beautiful. It is now my favorite among all the communiques."
"What did it say?" Robert Jordan had come to Madrid from the Cordoban Front and he had the sudden stiffening that comes when some one jokes about a thing which you yourself may joke about but which they may not. "Tell me?"
"Nuestra gloriosa tropa siga avanzando sin perder ni una sola palma de terreno," Karkov said in his strange Spanish.
"It didn't really say that," Robert Jordan doubted.
"Our glorious troops continue to advance without losing a foot of ground," Karkov repeated in English. "It is in the communique. I will find it for you."
You could remember the men you knew who died in the fighting around Pozoblanco; but it was a joke at Gaylord's.
So that was the way it was at Gaylord's now. Still there had not always been Gaylord's and if the situation was now one which produced such a thing as Gaylord's out of the survivors of the early days, he was glad to see Gaylord's and to know about it. You are a long way from how you felt in the Sierra and at Carabanchel and at Usera, he thought. You corrupt very easily, he thought. But was it corruption or was it merely that you lost the naivete that you started with? Would it not be the same in anything? Who else kept that first chastity of mind about their work that young doctors, young priests, and young soldiers usually started with? The priests certainly kept it, or they got out. I suppose the Nazis keep it, he thought, and the Communists who have a severe enough selfdiscipline. But look at Karkov.
He never tired of considering the case of Karkov. The last time he had been at Gaylord's Karkov had been wonderful about a certain British economist who had spent much time in Spain. Robert Jordan had read this man's writing for years and he had always respected him without knowing anything about him. He had not cared very much for what this man had written about Spain. It was too clear and simple and too open and shut and many of the statistics he knew were faked by wishful thinking. But he thought you rarely cared for journalism written about a country you really knew about and he respected the man for his intentions.
Then he had seen the man, finally, on the afternoon when they had attacked at Carabanchel.They were sitting in the lee of the bull ring and there was shooting down the two streets and every one was nervous waiting for the attack. A tank had been promised and it had not come up and Montero was sitting with his head in his hand saying, "The tank has not come. The tank has not come."
It was a cold day and the yellow dust was blowing down the street and Montero had been hit in the left arm and the arm was stiffening. "We have to have a tank," he said. "We must wait for the tank, but we cannot wait." His wound was making him sound petulant.
Robert Jordan had gone back to look for the tank which Montero said he thought might have stopped behind the apartment building on the corner of the tram-line. It was there all right. But it was not a tank. Spaniards called anything a tank in those days. It was an old armored car. The driver did not want to leave the angle of the apartment house and bring it up to the bull ring. He was standing behind it with his arms folded against the metal of the car and his head in the leather-padded helmet on his arms. He shook his head when Robert Jordan spoke to him and kept it pressed against his arms. Then he turned his head without looking at Robert Jordan.
"I have no orders to go there," he said sullenly.
Robert Jordan had taken his pistol out of the holster and pushed the muzzle of the pistol against the leather coat of the armored car driver.
"Here are your orders," he had told him. The man shook his head with the big padded-leather helmet like a football player's on it and said, "There is no ammunition for the machine gun."
"We have ammunition at the bull ring," Robert Jordan had told him. "Come on, let's go. We will fill the belts there. Come on."
"There is no one to work the gun," the driver said.
"Where is he? Where is your mate?"
"Dead," the driver had said. "Inside there."
"Get him out," Robert Jordan had said. "Get him out of there."
"I do not like to touch him," the driver had said. "And he is bent over between the gun and the wheel and I cannot get past him."
"Come on," Robert Jordan had said. "We will get him out together."
He had banged his head as he climbed into the armored car and it had made a small cut over his eyebrow that bled down onto his face. The dead man was heavy and so stiff you could not bend him and he had to hammer at his head to get it out from where it had wedged, face down, between his seat and the wheel. Finally he got it up by pushing with his knee up under the dead man's head and then, pulling back on the man's waist now that the head was loose, he pulled the dead man out himself toward the door.
"Give me a hand with him," he had said to the driver.
"I do not want to touch him," the driver had said and Robert Jordan had seen that he was crying. The tears ran straight down on each side of his nose on the powder-grimed slope of his face and his nose was running, too.
Standing beside the door he had swung the dead man out and the dead man fell onto the sidewalk beside the tram-line still in that hunched-over, doubled-up position. He lay there, his face waxy gray against the cement sidewalk, his hands bent under him as they had been in the car.
"Get in, God damn it," Robert Jordan had said, motioning now with his pistol to the driver. "Get in there now."
Just then he had seen this man who had come out from the lee of the apartment house building. He had on a long overcoat and he was bareheaded and his hair was gray, his cheekbones broad and his eyes were deep and set close together. He had a package of Chesterfields in his hand and he took one out and handed it toward Robert Jordan who was pushing the driver into the armored car with his pistol.
"Just a minute, Comrade," he had said to Robert Jordan in Spanish. "Can you explain to me something about the fighting?"
Robert Jordan took the cigarette and put it in the breast pocket of his blue mechanic jumper. He had recognized this comrade from his pictures. It was the British economist.
"Go muck yourself," he said in English and then, in Spanish, to the armored car driver. "Down there. The bull ring. See?" And he had pulled the heavy side door to with a slam and locked it and they had started down that long slope in the car and the bullets had commenced to hit against the car, sounding like pebbles tossed against an iron boiler. Then when the machine gun opened on them, they were like sharp hammer tappings. They had pulled up behind the shelter of the bull ring with the last October posters still pasted up beside the ticket window and the ammunition boxes knocked open and the comrades with the rifles, the grenades on their belts and in their pockets, waiting there in the lee and Montero had said, "Good. Here is the tank. Now we can attack."
Later that night when they had the last houses on the hill, he lay comfortable behind a brick wall with a hole knocked in the bricks for a loophole and looked across the beautiful level field of fire they had between them and the ridge the fascists had retired to and thought, with a comfort that was almost voluptuous, of the rise of the hill with the smashed villa that protected the left flank. He had lain in a pile of straw in his sweat-soaked clothes and wound a blanket around him while he dried. Lying there he thought of the economist and laughed, and then felt sorry he had been rude. But at the moment, when the man had handed him the cigarette, pushing it out almost like offering a tip for information, the combatant's hatred for the noncombatant had been too much for him.
Now he remembered Gaylord's and Karkov speaking of this same man. "So it was there you met him," Karkov had said. "I did not get farther than the Puente de Toledo myself on that day. He was very far toward the front. That was the last day of his bravery I believe. He left Madrid the next day. Toledo was where he was the bravest, I believe. At Toledo he was enormous. He was one of the architects of our capture of the Alcazar. You should have seen him at Toledo. I believe it was largely through his efforts and his advice that our siege was successful. That was the silliest part of the war. It reached an ultimate in silliness but tell me, what is thought of him in America?"
"In America," Robert Jordan said, "he is supposed to be very close to Moscow."
"He is not," said Karkov. "But he has a wonderful face and his face and his manners are very successful. Now with my face I could do nothing. What little I have accomplished was all done in spite of my face which does not either inspire people nor move them to love me and to trust me. But this man Mitchell has a face he makes his fortune with. It is the face of a conspirator. All who have read of conspirators in books trust him instantly. Also he has the true manner of the conspirator. Any one seeing him enter a room knows that he is instantly in the presence of a conspirator of the first mark. All of your rich compatriots who wish sentimentally to aid the Soviet Union as they believe or to insure themselves a little against any eventual success of the party see instantly in the face of this man, and in his manner that he can be none other than a trusted agent of the Comintern."
"Has he no connections in Moscow?"
"None. Listen, Comrade Jordan. Do you know about the two kinds of fools?"
"Plain and damn?"
"No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia," Karkov grinned and began. "First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls. Then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool.
"Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. That is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool."
"But why do people trust him here?" Robert Jordan asked.
"His face," Karkov said. "His beautiful gueule de conspirateur. And his invaluable trick of just having come from somewhere else where he is very trusted and important. Of course," he smiled, "he must travel very much to keep the trick working. You know the Spanish are very strange," Karkov went on. "This government has had much money. Much gold. They will give nothing to their friends. You are a friend. All right. You will do it for nothing and should not be rewarded. But to people representing an important firm or a country which is not friendly but must be influenced-to such people they give much. It is very interesting when you follow it closely."
"I do not like it. Also that money belongs to the Spanish workers."
"You are not supposed to like things. Only to understand," Karkov had told him. "I teach you a little each time I see you and eventually you will acquire an education. It would be very interesting for a professor to be educated."
"I don't know whether I'll be able to be a professor when I get back. They will probably run me out as a Red."
"Well, perhaps you will be able to come to the Soviet Union and continue your studies there. That might be the best thing for you to do."
"But Spanish is my field."
"There are many countries where Spanish is spoken," Karkov had said. "They cannot all be as difficult to do anything with as Spain is. Then you must remember that you have not been a professor now for almost nine months. In nine months you may have learned a new trade. How much dialectics have you read?"
"I have read the Handbook of Marxism that Emil Burns edited. That is all."
"If you have read it all that is quite a little. There are fifteen hundred pages and you could spend some time on each page. But there are some other things you should read."
"There is no time to read now."
"I know," Karkov had said. "I mean eventually. There are many things to read which will make you understand some of these things that happen. But out of this will come a book which is very necessary; which will explain many things which it is necessary to know. Perhaps I will write it. I hope that it will be me who will write it."
"I don't know who could write it better."
"Do not flatter," Karkov had said. "I am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature. Just now, I am very busy on a study of Calvo Sotelo. He was a very good fascist; a true Spanish fascist. Franco and these other people are not. I have been studying all of Sotelo's writing and speeches. He was very intelligent and it was very intelligent that he was killed."
"I thought that you did not believe in political assassination."
"It is practised very extensively," Karkov said. "Very, very extensively."
"But-"
"We do not believe in acts of terrorism by individuals," Karkov had smiled. "Not of course by criminal terrorist and counterrevolutionary organizations. We detest with horror the duplicity and villainy of the murderous hyenas of Bukharinite wreckers and such dregs of humanity as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and their henchmen. We hate and loathe these veritable fiends," he smiled again. "But I still believe that political assassination can be said to be practised very extensively."
"You mean-"
"I mean nothing. But certainly we execute and destroy such veritable fiends and dregs of humanity and the treacherous dogs of generals and the revolting spectacle of admirals unfaithful to their trust. These are destroyed. They are not assassinated. You see the difference?"
"I see," Robert Jordan had said.
"And because I make jokes sometime: and you know how dangerous it is to make jokes even in joke? Good. Because I make jokes, do not think that the Spanish people will not live to regret that they have not shot certain generals that even now hold commands. I do not like the shootings, you understand."
"I don't mind them," Robert Jordan said. "I do not like them but I do not mind them any more."
"I know that," Karkov had said. "I have been told that."
"Is it important?" Robert Jordan said. "I was only trying to be truthful about it."
"It is regretful," Karkov had said. "But it is one of the things that makes people be treated as reliable who would ordinarily have to spend much more time before attaining that category."
"Am I supposed to be reliable?"
"In your work you are supposed to be very reliable. I must talk to you sometime to see how you are in your mind. It is regrettable that we never speak seriously."
"My mind is in suspension until we win the war," Robert Jordan had said.
"Then perhaps you will not need it for a long time. But you should be careful to exercise it a little."
"I read Mundo Obrero," Robert Jordan had told him and Karkov had said, "All right. Good. I can take a joke too. But there are very intelligent things in Mundo Obrero. The only intelligent things written on this war."
"Yes," Robert Jordan had said. "I agree with you. But to get a full picture of what is happening you cannot read only the party organ."
"No," Karkov had said. "But you will not find any such picture if you read twenty papers and then, if you had it, I do not know what you would do with it. I have such a picture almost constantly and what I do is try to forget it."
"You think it is that bad?"
"It is better now than it was. We are getting rid of some of the worst. But it is very rotten. We are building a huge army now and some of the elements, those of Modesto, of El Campesino, of Lister and of Duran, are reliable. They are more than reliable. They are magnificent. You will see that. Also we still have the Brigades although their role is changing. But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline. We are making a huge conscript army without the time to implant the discipline that a conscript army must have, to behave properly under fire. We call it a people's army but it will not have the assets of a true people's army and it will not have the iron discipline that a conscript army needs. You will see. It is a very dangerous procedure."
"You are not very cheerful today."
"No," Karkov had said. "I have just come back from Valencia where I have seen many people. No one comes back very cheerful from Valencia. In Madrid you feel good and clean and with no possibility of anything but winning. Valencia is something else. The cowards who fled from Madrid still govern there. They have settled happily into the sloth and bureaucracy of governing. They have only contempt for those of Madrid. Their obsession now is the weakening of the commissariat for war. And Barcelona. You should see Barcelona."
"How is it?"
"It is all still comic opera. First it was the paradise of the crackpots and the romantic revolutionists. Now it is the paradise of the fake soldier. The soldiers who like to wear uniforms, who like to strut and swagger and wear red-and-black scarves. Who like everything about war except to fight. Valencia makes you sick and Barcelona makes you laugh."
"What about the P.O.U.M. putsch?"
"The P.O.U.M. was never serious. It was a heresy of crackpots and wild men and it was really just an infantilism. There were some honest misguided people. There was one fairly good brain and there was a little fascist money. Not much. The poor P.O.U.M. They were very silly people."
"But were many killed in the putsch?"
"Not so many as were shot afterwards or will be shot. The P.O.U.M. It is like the name. Not serious. They should have called it the M.U.M.P.S. or the M.E.A.S.L.E.S. But no. The Measles is much more dangerous. It can affect both sight and hearing. But they made one plot you know to kill me, to kill Walter, to kill Modesto and to kill Prieto. You see how badly mixed up they were? We are not at all alike. Poor P.O.U.M. They never did kill anybody. Not at the front nor anywhere else. A few in Barcelona, yes."
"Were you there?"
"Yes. I have sent a cable describing the wickedness of that infamous organization of Trotskyite murderers and their fascist machinations all beneath contempt but, between us, it is not very serious, the P.O.U.M. Nin was their only man. We had him but he escaped from our hands."
"Where is he now?"
"In Paris. We say he is in Paris. He was a very pleasant fellow but with bad political aberrations."
"But they were in communication with the fascists, weren't they?"
"Who is not?"
"We are not."
"Who knows? I hope we are not. You go often behind their lines," he grinned. "But the brother of one of the secretaries of the Republican Embassy at Paris made a trip to St. Jean de Luz last week to meet people from Burgos."
"I like it better at the front," Robert Jordan had said. "The closer to the front the better the people."
"How do you like it behind the fascist lines?"
"Very much. We have fine people there."
"Well, you see they must have their fine people behind our lines the same way. We find them and shoot them and they find ours and shoot them. When you are in their country you must always think of how many people they must send over to us."
"I have thought about them."
"Well," Karkov had said. "You have probably enough to think about for today, so drink that beer that is left in the pitcher and run along now because I have to go upstairs to see people. Upstairs people. Come again to see me soon."
Yes, Robert Jordan thought. You learned a lot at Gaylord's. Karkov had read the one and only book he had published. The book had not been a success. It was only two hundred pages long and he doubted if two thousand people had ever read it. He had put in it what he had discovered about Spain in ten years of travelling in it, on foot, in third-class carriages, by bus, on horse- and mule-back and in trucks. He knew the Basque country, Navarre, Aragon, Galicia, the two Castiles and Estremadura well. There had been such good books written by Borrow and Ford and the rest that he had been able to add very little. But Karkov said it was a good book.
"It is why I bother with you," he said. "I think you write absolutely truly and that is very rare. So I would like you to know some things."
All right. He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew. But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple.
"What do you do sitting there?" Maria asked him. She was standing close beside him and he turned his head and smiled at her.
"Nothing," he said. "I have been thinking."
"What of? The bridge?"
"No. The bridge is terminated. Of thee and of a hotel in Madrid where I know some Russians, and of a book I will write some time."
"Are there many Russians in Madrid?"
"No. Very few."
"But in the fascist periodicals it says there are hundreds of thousands."
"Those are lies. There are very few."
"Do you like the Russians? The one who was here was a Russian."
"Did you like him?"
"Yes. I was sick then but I thought he was very beautiful and very brave."
"What nonsense, beautiful," Pilar said. "His nose was flat as my hand and he had cheekbones as wide as a sheep's buttocks."
"He was a good friend and comrade of mine," Robert Jordan said to Maria. "I cared for him very much."
"Sure," Pilar said. "But you shot him."
When she said this the card players looked up from the table and Pablo stared at Robert Jordan. Nobody said anything and then the gypsy, Rafael, asked, "Is it true, Roberto?"
"Yes," Robert Jordan said. He wished Pilar had not brought this up and he wished he had not told it at El Sordo's. "At his request. He was badly wounded."
"Que cosa mas rara," the gypsy said. "All the time he was with us he talked of such a possibility. I don't know how many times I have promised him to perform such an act. What a rare thing," he said again and shook his head.
"He was a very rare man," Primitivo said. "Very singular."
"Look," Andres, one of the brothers, said. "You who are Professor and all. Do you believe in the possibility of a man seeing ahead what is to happen to him?"
"I believe he cannot see it," Robert Jordan said. Pablo was staring at him curiously and Pilar was watching him with no expression on her face. "In the case of this Russian comrade he was very nervous from being too much time at the front. He had fought at Irun which, you know, was bad. Very bad. He had fought later in the north. And since the first groups who did this work behind the lines were formed he had worked here, in Estremadura and in AndalucIa. I think he was very tired and nervous and he imagined ugly things."
"He would undoubtedly have seen many evil things," Fernando said.
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