Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (15 page)

None of this interested me particularly, but it was mentioned by everyone, with a greater or lesser degree of attention and knowledge, with either sympathy or antipathy towards those who had been purged: Orwell, Thomas, Salas Larrazabal, Riesenfeld, Payne, Alcofar Nassaes, Tinker, Benet, Preston, Jackson, Tello-Trapp, Koestler, Jellinek, Lucas Phillips, Howson, Walsh, Wheeler's table was now heaped with open books, I didn't have enough fingers to keep all those places and hold a cigarette, luckily, though, most books had an index of names, Nin being referred to as Andreu or Andres depending on the writer. Nin was arrested in Barcelona on 16 June and disappeared immediately (or, rather, was kidnapped), and as he was the best-known of the leaders, both in Spain and, above all, abroad, the fact that his whereabouts remained unknown became a brief scandal and, later, a long, possibly eternal, mystery which remains unsolved to this day, and which now, I imagine, not many people will be particularly bothered about resolving, although some foolish, dishonest novelist may yet turn up (unless he already has, and I don't know about it) and take it upon himself to reveal the answer: according to the bibliographies there has already been a film, half-English, half-Spanish, about those months and those events, I haven't seen it, but it appears, fortunately, not to be entirely foolish, unlike all those clichéd Spanish films made about our War, bland and fallacious, vaguely rural or provincial and very sentimental, and which are always applauded in my country by right-thinking people, the professionally compassionate and the career demagogues, who get a very good return on them.

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.

I remembered that Tupra had also said: 'The truth is that, initially, everything tends to be believed. It's very odd, but that's how it is,' I remembered his words while I continued to read snippets from one book and from another: to crown all these mad calumnies, a book was published in 1938 by a certain Max Rieger (surely a pseudonym, possibly of Wenceslao Roces, whose name I knew because, later on, he translated Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind),
supposedly a Spanish version based on the French translation by Lucienne and Arturo Perucho (the latter was the editor of the Catalan Communist organ,
Treball),
and with a 'Preface' by the famous, more-or-less Catholic and more-or-less Communist writer José Bergamín — oh dear, these mixtures — which, under the title
Espionage in Spain,
collated all the tall tales, falsehoods and accusations hurled at Nin and at the POUM, presenting them as true and bona fide, sanctioning them, repeating them, elaborating on them, documenting them with fabricated proofs, embellishing them, adding to them and exaggerating them. I remembered once hearing my father talk about this prologue by Bergamín as an act of rank indecency, justifying as it did the persecution and slaughter of people from the POUM and denying its leaders the right to any defence (Bergamín was pushing at an open door there: for this had already been denied to quite a few people, tortured and imprisoned or executed without trial), one of many acts of indecency committed by various Spanish intellectuals and writers from both sides during the War, and even more afterwards by those on the winning side. I read one dishonest, incompetent commentator — it may have been Tello-Trapp, but it could have been someone else, I had begun rather randomly taking notes on bits of paper, poor Peter's study was rapidly becoming a complete tip — who tried to excuse Bergamín, because he had known him in person ('a charming, fascinating man', 'a worthy Don Quixote, a lover of truth') and because he loved his poetry, 'profound, pure and romantic' and 'the lamp-light glow of his voice' — I gulped down another chocolate and a truffle and some wine to recover, I wondered how he could possibly come out with such schmaltz and still go on writing — but the preface in question, which I found widely quoted elsewhere, left no room for its author's salvation: the POUM was 'a small treacherous party', which had not even turned out to be 'a party, but an organisation for spying and collaborating with the enemy; that is, not an organisation merely conniving with the enemy, but the enemy itself, part of the international fascist organisation in Spain . . . The Spanish Civil War revealed international Trotskyism at the service of Franco in its true colours as a Trojan horse . . .' The duplicitous commentator could only regret and condemn this prologue, but 'we do not know', he said, if its author 'wrote it while in the sway of the Communist Party, or in good faith', when the most likely and obvious answer is that he wrote it perfectly freely and in the worst possible faith; as the almost always considered and objective Hugh Thomas remarked: 'He could not possibly have believed what he wrote.' The text of that 'lover of the truth' makes a good pairing with the poster or vignette which, according to Orwell and others, circulated widely in Madrid and Barcelona in the spring of 1937, and which showed the POUM taking off a mask bearing the hammer and sickle to reveal a face stamped with a swastika. My father was not exaggerating when he spoke of rank indecency.

That was when I noticed that Wheeler also kept on his well-stocked shelves, in six large bound volumes, the part-work brought out, under the title
Doble Diario de la Guerra Civil 1936-1939
('Double Newspaper/Diary of the Civil War 1936—1939') by the newspaper
Abc
between 1978 and 1980, that is, between three and five years after Franco's death. Before that, such an initiative would have been impossible, for it consisted of a facsimile reproduction, in two colours, of whole pages, columns, editorials, news items, interviews, advertisements, gossip columns, articles, opinion pieces, reports, from the two
Abcs
in existence during the War, the Republican one in Madrid and the pro-Franco one in Seville, in accordance with whichever side had prevailed in those two cities at the start of the conflict. The one published by the Madrid office was printed in red ink, and the one in Seville in blue-grey, so it was easy to follow their vision or version of the same events — though they never seemed like the same events — according to the press on either side. I was tempted to look up the issue corresponding to the spring of 1937, although the incidents relating to the POUM would have taken place mainly in Barcelona. Rather tired now and rushed, I did not find much at first glance. But one of those few news items made me momentarily set aside the larger tomes — one book always leads to another and another and they all have something to say, there is something unhealthy about curiosity, not for the reasons usually given, but because it leads inexorably to exhaustion — and to ask myself foolishly about Ian Fleming, the creator of Agent 007 and author of the James Bond novels. The note in question appeared in the Madrid
Abc
of 18 June 1937 and was, as far as the newspaper was concerned, probably of secondary importance, for it took up only half a column. The headline read: 'Various important POUM members arrested'. I read it very quickly and then carelessly pushed various books on to the floor to make room on the table for the old electronic typewriter I had noticed lying covered up and dumped in a corner, and transcribed the whole article. I didn't even dare think about what would happen if Wheeler or Mrs Berry woke up and came downstairs to discover the chaos into which that clean, tidy study had been plunged, and in far too brief a period of time to justify such anarchy: dozens of books taken from their shelves and left wide open and scattered about the floor, even a disrespectful invasion of Wheeler's two decorative lecterns with their dictionary and their atlas and their respective magnifying glasses; the plates of chocolates and truffles strewn willy-nilly, with, as I noticed in some consternation, the consequent and inevitable chocolate crumbs and smudges left behind on a number of pages; the glass and the bottle of whisky and the can of Coca-Cola that I had brought from the fridge as a mixer, and a beaker containing a few half-melted ice cubes, one or two or even three drops spilled and doubtless rings left on the wooden surface, it hadn't occurred to me to get a coaster; both my ashtray and Peter's filled to overflowing and, who knows, an ugly, yellowing nicotine mark in some highly conspicuous place, or even the odd scorch mark on certain key pages; my cigarettes and my lighter and my matches and an empty pen cartridge floating around or half hidden, perhaps an ink stain made while I was replacing it; and now a typewriter with its cover off and sheets of papers, scrawled on or typewritten, in English or in Spanish depending on the quotes. I would have the devil's own job putting everything back in its place, in order to leave the room just as it had been before these ruinous, impromptu, nocturnal studies of mine.