He saw the flaming marches and cathedrals of light, the bonfires of literature and the Panzers on the streets of Prague – they’d been there a month now.
In the aftermath of the Italian invasion of Albania the governments of Great Britain and France have pledged to defend Poland and Greece if they are attacked…
‘It’s too late’, he thought.
Laura watched him carefully and listened. The broadcast ended, abruptly, in her view, and music began – strangely upbeat.
She remembered something she’d read earlier;
The allowance made at Munich for Mr Hitler to annex the German-speaking Czechoslovak territory of the Sudetenland saw the German army (Wermacht) take control of the entire country. Commentators who bitterly contested suggestions the Munich Agreement would satisfy German territorial ambitions were almost immediately vindicated by the invasion…
“Why did they give Hitler that country – Czecho-slo-vakia? It was not his to take. Did they think he was like a hungry dog; who if given food will no longer want to attack?”
Nathra smiled at her. “I think that was the most important reason. There are other, more complicated reasons too, but that’s the most important one – you hit the nail right on the head.”
He saw that it was quiet, two of the people in the place were well emersed in their meals and conversation and the third, sitting at the table closest the door by an open window, was reading a book and nursing his second coffee. He emerged from behind the counter and stood beside Laura.
“A quarter of a century ago – how long is that?”
“Twenty-five years. Come on.” She chirped instantly.
“Twenty-five years ago, the powerful countries in Europe had formed two alliances – two big agreements – that they would all defend one another if one was attacked. This was supposed to prevent war. What do you think it really did?”
“The Archduke was shot, and Austria declared war on Serbia, and then everyone fought in the war.”
“Of course, you already know about this – but the war was so terrible that some of the governments in Europe never wanted to fight again. This was a good idea, but it also meant they were prepared to do and allow many things in the hope it would help avoid a war.”
“So they gave the hungry dog some food.”
“But beyond that, some powerful people in Europe, and America too, don’t mind Hitler so much. Some people do business with him, some people say he saved Germany from the Communists – maybe later they’ll hope the Communists save Europe from him.”
The diner on his own looked up from his book, suddenly alert and interested.
“And some people think he’d act as a bulwark - what’s a bulwark?”
“A defence.”
“Good. Against the Russians. But you see, there are some dogs who are always hungry no matter how much you feed them. They just want to attack and attack. Hitler wrote a book in 1923 in which he said his party – the Nazi Party – would find living space for the German race. Living space. Did the rest of the world think they were going to build a new island somewhere?”
He held up one hand, flat, with the thumb pointing at the ceiling and the fingers straight out the window.
“People who make threats are generally stupid for a number of reasons. If someone tells you they are going to do something bad; you can and should prepare yourself. They should have stopped the Nazis before they even got started.”
A patron walked through the door and the bell rang as though marking the end of the round.
Franco in Madrid, Hitler in Prague, Mussolini in Tirana… Nathra managed to smile and welcomed the punter, swooping behind the counter, making small talk and committing the order to memory; all the while his mind on the other side of the Atlantic.
Laura slipped out without upsetting the bell and stood outside to feel the warm Spring breeze on her face, and to watch the street. In conduct, everyone seemed as they’d been the year previous – didn’t they know? She wondered. She wondered about the notion that there are people with whom one can not reason. The world grew smaller every year. When half of it is in flames, can the other half go on as before? Physically, perhaps – but psychologically?
Psychological was a word she’d picked up recently by eavesdropping on patrons in the diner. On trams and buses and in the street she would tend to be in company with one or both of her parents, apart, of course, from when travelling to and from school. People are careful with what they say around other adults, but those adults (unless they’ve long memories) would be surprised by what people are prepared to discuss in front of children. Laura had a strikingly innocent face, open and bright and honest, with large dark eyes. She would sit reading on a street car and people seated less then two feet away would speak in (inadequately) hushed tones of drunkenness, gambling, addiction, mental illness, bankruptcy, industrial strife, domestic violence and petty fraud.
Her father’s analysis of the world, articulated in a manner that distilled the complicated into clean copy, had taught and would teach Laura and her brothers many things; but she was also learning a great deal from the world itself, much of which she did not like.
* * *
Romero stood by Robert’s solitary window and stared out to the street below, still pulsating though draped by the twilight – which came late this time of year - then turned to the typewriter on the tiny desk.
“It is good your view is boring,” he said. “So you can do your work on this.”
Robert, who’d not typed a word in weeks, shrugged.
“It’s not always boring,” he offered with little commitment.
Romero grinned.
“And so the sheet is blank. But you are close to finishing, I think?”
Robert smiled “How did you know?”
Romero asked if he could sit down on the bed and Robert nodded quickly, almost embarrassed by the question.
“You have a certain air, carrying with you this atmosphere even to the yard – and to me… to me I see something important is to end, and you are finding the ending hard because you want it to be hard. When something continues, the possibilities remain infinite. The end is final, and all flaws of the endeavour are cruelly exposed, which will allow them to become regrets. Are you afraid to end it?”
“A little.”
“And you wanted to finish it before leaving here. You know once you finish, you can no longer use it as a reason when reasoning with yourself. Reasoning with yourself can be very difficult; and dangerous. It is easy to start with a conclusion and work backwards in search of excuses.”
“There’s no excuse, only a reason.”
“Love is the only reason; everything else is an excuse.”
Robert gave his silent assent. Romero turned out to the window again.
“I would have liked to introduce you to my wife and my son, but we never really had occasion for it.”
“And you didn’t want to mix work and family. Under the circumstances I can’t say that I blame you. What are their names?”
Romero smiled genuinely.
“Judith and Antonio – Tino.” He stood up. “But I have come to see you for a purpose. Have you eaten?”
They took the subway to the island and the upper east side; where Romero apologetically ordered Mexican food.
He spoke quietly after they moved away from the counter and took a seat in the narrow diner, which plunged away from the sidewalk and into a broader room at the rear; filled with smoke and poker players.
“I never eat Mexican away from home, but this is some training for you. Hopefully, with me here, we will get something respectable.”
Romero’s prophecy proved sound and Robert enthusiastically ploughed through his food. He’d not the heart to tell Romero he’d eaten an abundant amount of Mexican food in the past. Romero, for his part, had not the heart to tell Robert what he felt he must, and thus broke the habits of a lifetime by drinking with his meal; heavily
.
They talked of the grand matters at first, in order to avoid subjects of more intimate importance. Romero asked if Robert knew of the Russians smashing the Japanese army in Khalkin Gol, and asked him what he thought would happen next. Robert shared his notions openly, not cloaking his uncommonly advanced understanding of the world stage as was his usual practice. Whatever quiet illusion he had been building was soon to be dashed in the wind anyway, he knew, and in addition he respected Romero too much to play dumb (or, more accurate, to play quiet – he never played dumb). Romero, like all self-educated men, respected insight beyond mere rote learning, and he enjoyed Robert’s analysis on a cerebral level, notwithstanding its unrelenting grimness.
Toward the closing stages of their meal Romero lingered needlessly on pauses, gripping on to the end of words and now and then staring past Robert, who inevitably noticed, despite his best efforts.
“Are you, ah…” He began without knowing how to end.
Romero waved him away.
“I know I know. Listen…” He looked over his shoulder and laughed at himself, then, nevertheless, leaned forward and spoke more quietly still.
“I am leaving the city; pulling my son out of his school and breaking our lease. The lease was illegal anyway, so God damn that landlord. Damn him. We will go elsewhere; to farmland – but not some desolate place without schools or hope. I have plans.” He looked around again. “In another life, I’d have stayed here, spoiling for a fight – but I was reckless in another life, without two more lives to consider. Do you understand? So this is goodbye, and I tell you too, Roberto – take your love and run, even if it must be to Mexico.”
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, uncharacteristically.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Robert offered. “So why be so upset about it? Anyone in your position would do the same.”
Romero reached into his jacket, hanging behind him on his seat, and produced a passport, opening it and showing Robert.
Robert looked and, in want of something with more gravity, said “nice picture”.
Romero smiled.
“You see the date of issue? That was thirteen months before we crossed the border. Do you know why?”
“…”
“At home, there is another document; the birth certificate of my son – in America. But he was one year old when we came. The passport, and Judith’s too, reinforces the validity of the birth certificate, both are equally contrived.” He spoke with a measured emphasis, carefully stressing the words reinforces, validity and contrived, as though wary Robert may miss them in the haze. “But it does not end with these papers; the very records themselves, the official history itself – which is the only one that survives in the cold – has been written anew. No matter what happens, my son will never lose his right to live here.”
“Comely.”
“Of course. And now, you see how I repay him?”
Robert’s mind was expansive, always, but now outstretched – trying to find the catches, angles and missing links and uncovering only more questions.
“He did what he did for his own reasons, Mr Romero – and they’re a mystery to me for the most part, but a man like him, he’s a business man in the end, and members of his class are not practitioners of altruism for its own sake. I know you’ve worked for him some time now, and I’d say you’ve paid him back and more for this.” He tapped on the open passport as it lay on the table between their dishes. “Nothing is more important than the people you love.”
Robert turned his last few words over in his mind again and again and knew he could never have concluded otherwise.
Romero nodded, tiring. He wanted to be convinced, but it got to him, and while irrevocably decided upon his course of action, he remained bitterly ashamed.
* * *
Evo Fuentes, the youngest of nine, was born and lived and worked on land that was not and never would be his. Countless souls had done the same, as, no doubt, will countless more to come. His father had worked on the same land, for the father of the owner in Evo’s era. The unchanging relationships were materially as unnatural as they were ostensibly organic, and questioned privately by all those who worked to creat the vast wealth of the plant and publicly by no one in the country.
While Judah Bauer’s grandparents fled across Poland with the shadow of the Black Hundreds at their heels, Evo Fuentes cut sugar cane. Saha Omatec arrived with a skin of water flipped over her shoulder, large, but she carried it lightly, filling a clay cup and handing it to the cutters. She was small but strong. She moved quickly but gently, stepping between the cutters like a bird amongst buffalo. Evo watched much longer then he needed to, stopping even before cutters whom she would reach first. The water carrier in this heat was not an act of kindness from the lords; it was simply good business. A dehydrated cutter is a faint and thus slow cutter, and the dead cutter is the worst business model of them all. She arrived at him and showed no difference in her ritual; fill and pass, then take back, but as she turned to skip to the next cutter, she raised her eyes and met his a moment, then went on. She was young, he saw, perhaps nineteen like him. Evo went back to work, watching Saha Omatec move on down the wavering, shifting line, blurring in the distance as the heat simmered up from the parching soil. Perhaps she was a mirage, he thought, the moisture in his mouth already gone.
As the sun sank slowly, Evo headed a short distance away to his village, but it wasn’t his at all; not in the way villages had belonged to villagers for centuries. It was a modern man’s village – cheap, quick and rootless, built by the lords for convenience; also soulless. The water carrier had not left is mind since she’d first entered it; he’d not seen her before. New, she was; from the hills. He slept badly on the leaf-covered earth. The rest of his family was home, in their village.
He’d arrived back at the plantation shortly after sunrise and the same old ritual began again. He did not notice the repetitive strain or the soon to be fearsome sun, as his mind was only on the water carrier and waiting for her to arrive. As she approached the field with the skin over her shoulder, she was approached by the lord’s son Stefano – a pale serpent, rarely seen further outside than the vast front porch of his father’s house. He was tall and somewhere around twenty, but it was impossible to tell. He was all well-fed softness, but without the gentle expression of a cared-for child. He approached her with a swagger, a sense of entitlement. Evo watched, seeing it with revulsion, and had stopped working – a dangerous act. She shrugged off the serpent without contact, too quick for him and he too royal to go too far into the crop – he just laughed and turned tail, back to his castle.
Evo worked furiously to avoid the glare of the overseer, but when Saha came past him, he took a risk and spoke, quickly and quietly.
“That snake is poisonous. Stay away from him at night.”
She kept on as before, as though the words washed over her and smoked into the sun, but again looked up fleetingly, meeting his eyes, then moving on.
It was Sunday and he woke before sunrise from habit. The lords, out of fake piety, would not work the men on Sunday – though it agonised them to reduce productivity by one seventh. He walked through the still cool morning, and stopped by the stream nearest – which was far enough for it to already be heating up. He watched himself in the gently rippling water and frowned, wiping the beginning of sweat from his forehead. It was summer, and he was too much the European to bear it easily.
The water stopped rippling and the perfectly still surface reflected Evo with startling precision, and the bed of the stream was hidden – only the sky, leaves overhanging and his face remained. He thought himself unhandsome, though his father had been handsome. His father, Ignacio, worked the land as he knew nothing else, and Evo and all the family had done the same. His mother, Cedes, had been resilient and unusually happy right up until the day bandits cut her throat. Evo had been five years of age at the time, and his father – handsome man he had been – aged rapidly under
the weight of guilt. They had attacked her while she drew water at the village well. He had injured his back that day and so, for the first and last time, was the parent to remain with the children while the other fetched water in the evening.
Cedes had gone before but only at day. They had not stolen a thing from her as she had carried no thing to steal. Untouched in almost any other sense, with only some bruises on her left arm, just above the elbow, she’d been found metres from the well in the red-brown dirt and a pool of drying dark red mud – the handle of her shattered water pot in one hand and her throat in the other. No motive apparent, no suspect identified. Evo remembered the silent, listless and tearless funeral – weird and, in his mind, entirely in blacks and whites. His father barely spoke again and, within one year, perished of old age at thirty-seven.
Evo saw nothing of his mother in his own face; but her family could and did tell him countless times she was a saint. His father, without apparent roots, left few artefacts and anecdotes but much of his genes. He saw him now in the water and held his own throat. The water shattered now as a bird flying above dropped a small branch down to him and the image vanished; he reached down to drink from it and found it strangely sweet. He looked up and walked further. He knew the indian girls working the plantation lived far from it, walking a long way rather than risk living close to the white men and mixed-bloods in the workers camp; dangerous men with nothing but a perverted connection to the land.