Guernica

  Miguel shook his head numbly, still several steps behind Dodo.

  “How do you get such information?”

  “How does he get anything?” Renée laughed. “He’s clever.”

  “We have a network of helpers—sympathizers, Resistance,” Dodo said. “Sometimes it’s a barmaid overhearing drunken Nazis, or an officer who is trying to impress her; sometimes it’s a maid at a hotel where an officer is staying while on furlough who manages to go through his papers after making the bed. Sometimes there is information in a letter home from a soldier that happens to get opened at the post. You’d be amazed by the bits and pieces we can pick up.”

  “Patroia?” Miguel asked, still trying to process the information.

  “Yes, yes, Miguel,” Dodo said. “And now we’re working with a Belgian group that is relocating RAF fliers who have been shot down, working to get them back to England. They’re very brave. They pick up the crews, sew them up if they have to, hide them, forge papers that are good enough to get them through Paris and down here. Then we move them across the border into Spain. Once they’re across the river, helpers take them down the line to the consulate in Bilbao, where they arrange to get them on a boat out of Lisbon or Gibraltar.”

  The German occupation had changed so many elements of their work. The gatherings at Dodo’s apartment stopped as the inner circle was pulled tighter for security reasons. The chance to add a trustworthy blood relative like Miguel felt like a blessing—but also a serious responsibility. Despite being older, Dodo had seen Miguel as an equal as early as their teen years because of Miguel’s physical and emotional maturity. In some ways, Miguel was the wise older brother. This, though, was Dodo’s world, and although he knew Miguel could take care of himself, he wanted to do everything possible to keep his brother from suffering more pain.

  “All this is why Papa is so proud of him now,” Renée said, turning to Miguel. “Even if he is too big and a bit conspicuous, he never tires and he always seems to find a way.”

  Dodo accepted the compliment with a lengthy kiss. Miguel looked puzzled.

  “He was quick to learn the paths and the signals we’ve used forever,” she said. “Stacking stones or notching tree bark. And he worked out a perfectly natural identifier of our ‘brotherhood’—the beret. All smugglers wear berets. It does not mean everyone in a beret is a smuggler, but he’s certainly no guard and he’s no patrolman. He might be someone who has turned informer, true, but Spanish guards and Nazis will never wear them.”

  “So,” Dodo interjected, “you’ll have to start wearing one again.”

  “I haven’t worn one since we were fishing together,” Miguel objected.

  “I know, but you’ll start again and get used to it or one of our friends might decide to drop a rock on you in the mountains some night.”

  Dodo called the dog to his side and placed him on his lap.

  “We’ve put Déjeuner to work, too,” Dodo said, petting the strange little beast, the obvious product of a series of crossbreed liaisons. “If I’m walking in public with a flier, another healthy young man, then it’s suspicious. They might wonder: If these two aren’t in the service in some capacity, then maybe they’re Re sistance. If Renée and a young man have a dog on a leash, they’re merely enjoying each other’s company and getting a little exercise for lepetitchien. And Déjeuner is the perfect little dog of the Re sistance.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he all the while pretends he knows nothing of the charade.” Dodo laughed. “There’re other things: Walking with a limp is good, too, or bent over with a bad back. The crippled are not likely to be carrying illegal goods over mountain passes. There’s a human sympathy that takes over.”

  “At least it does with the French and Spanish,” Renée said. “You can’t count on it with the Nazis.”

  “What about bad hands?” Miguel asked.

  A calm overtook Charles Swan. He felt as if he had broken free from hell’s torments and was ascending peacefully to heaven. Except that he was headed in the other direction, floating to earth through the sublime tranquility that attends the end of chaos. A flock of Messerschmitts had caught him in a frantic fire fight and his Blenheim had broken apart as metal screamed around him like the death howl of a giant mechanical animal.

  He now floated in a flawless sky without a sound except for the pulse hammering in his ears. Silence. Sudden silence, he thought, oddly flashing on his favorite readings from Lewis Carroll’s Alice story when he was young.

  Anon, to sudden silence won,

  In fancy they pursue

  The dream-child moving through a land

  Of wonders wild and new,

  In friendly chat with bird or beast—

  And half believe it true.

  He had never quoted that verse for Annie, his bird-talker, and he decided he would have to tell it to her when he returned home. Annie, yes. Home. The place that isn’t war. Of course, there was no place that wasn’t war anymore. But it was at least life alongside war. Life and Annie. He scanned downward for the first time. There was no sign of his plane or his squadron or the gnatlike fighters that had arrived in a lethal, buzzing cluster.

  The mission was nothing out of the ordinary; they were to bomb troop positions and tank formations in southern Belgium. But fighter defense was heavier than Charley had seen, and half the group had been shot down or forced to turn back before his Blenheim was set upon. The first wave must have put out his dorsal turret, as he couldn’t hear return fire. He dipped from the second wave, but the instincts that allowed him to react to the threat of one attack caused him to bank slightly into direct fire from another pair of fighters on the other side, and he could hear bullets bite the metal skin of the fuselage. It took only the span of several racing heartbeats for the plane to disintegrate. He signaled for his crew to bail out, but both the bomber and gunner had been killed in their positions, and when the craft started spiraling, he knew he’d never maintain flight.

  As the earth eased up toward him, he took a quick inventory. His crew was dead. Nothing he could do about that. Fisher was single, the son of a vicar (a Fisher of men, they kidded), but Maple-stone had a wife in Dover. He would have to contact their families at some point, he thought, hoping that he would arrive at their doorsteps and tell them in person rather than them having to learn the news through an impersonal post.

  The air collecting in the parachute caused the cords to whisper. He wasn’t going home tonight. Fisher and Maplestone certainly weren’t. The crews that made it back tonight would say nice things about them, lift a toast, and then make jokes to relieve the pain. They all had done it, trying to create distance between themselves and the friends that had died last month and last week and yesterday. There wasn’t time to grieve or you’d never take off again. You could remember them all later, after the war, all at once, and for a long time.

  Focus, Charley, focus. Below was a pastoral land overrun by the enemy. He had no weapon, no survival kit, no food or water. A knife, a map, and a picture of Annie and Blennie. Trying to calculate the drift caused by the wind, he pulled at the cords of his parachute to guide himself closer to a small cluster of trees. It would either give him quick cover or break his back if he got caught up in a limb. He floated in just short, though, and when he collided with the ground, a jolt of pain caused him to make another entry in his mental inventory.

  A German bullet had gouged a deep furrow through his right thigh.

  CHAPTER 25

  The march up the River Nivelle valley in his brother’s wake gave Miguel the clarity of mind to order his thoughts. Dodo had been uncharacteristically quiet, having learned the value of silence when exposed in public. The path to Sare had been rutted by footfalls since medieval times, and it followed a gentle grade through fallow pastures and shady woodlots. They had no reason to skulk on a more sheltered route because they were merely two men on a hike, carrying no contraband and having no subversive intent. This was orientation.

  “Sare
is the hub of our business,” Dodo said, “with spokes of trails heading toward the border up every small watershed. Sometimes we arrange for herders to raise a ruckus up one pass to draw attention while we go through another.”

  “Do we have to go up there?” Miguel asked, gesturing with his head toward the peak of La Rhune, rising into a cloud cap above them.

  “Only as a last resort. Don’t worry, you’ll get enough terrain to get that heart pumping.”

  After lunch with Renée’s parents—more delicious peppers and sauces, roasted chicken, and cake—Miguel’s lessons in the ways of the smugglers continued as Dodo led the way toward the border.

  “You look good in your beret,” Dodo said.

  “Makes me feel like vomiting.”

  “No, no . . . no seasickness up here,” Dodo said, and after a pause, he added, “I’m glad you’re here, Miguel. We need your help. We’re getting more British fliers coming down; we need to keep Renée in town and off the trails as much as possible, and we need to keep me out of town equally as much. She’s so good at getting everybody off trains and into safe houses; it’s more important than having her hiking around in the hills. Nazis look at her and their first thoughts are not of the Resistance.”

  “How do I help?”

  “I lead and you follow,” Dodo said. “Sometimes we’ll have one guest and sometimes as many as four or five. I want you to be the trailer, keeping everybody up to speed and watching for patrols coming up from behind—mostly shepherding the stragglers.”

  “I think I’m up to that.”

  “The one thing I had to learn first was to slow down,” Dodo said. “As much as I wanted to race, this is a matter of pace and timing and of staying together. Anybody who’s in a hurry draws attention. Nature doesn’t rush; we have to move steadily.”

  Dodo led Miguel up the east side of La Rhune, following a rill that cut a small wedge into the hillside.

  “You’ll want to follow the water,” Dodo explained. “It’s found the best path for centuries, and there’s normally better cover there. But the brush is sometimes thicker. If it’s a good, dark night without patrols, getting out at the edge of the trees and brush is not a bad risk if it helps you make up time. If the moon and patrols are out, stay covered or stay home.”

  “But you’ll be there leading all the time, right?”

  “I hope so,” Dodo said. “But you never know. Here’s where it gets tricky.” Dodo led him out into an exposed meadow that took up the better portion of the eastern ridgeline. Granite boulders cluttered the slope, looking like sun-bleached skulls of long-dead giants, turning this into a hiker’s nightmare.

  “It’s hard to tell from here, but there are paths through the rocks,” Dodo said, gesturing with a sweeping hand. “Which is good for us and bad for them. I’ll show you the signs and the markings. Always, always stay on the paths and make sure the guests do, too. Getting off the path means a broken ankle or leg—or maybe worse, depending on how you fall or trip.”

  “And we’re going to be going through here in the dark?” Miguel asked.

  “Dark . . . darker than you can believe—and sometimes wet, too,” Dodo said. “Our safest times are when it’s darkest, which means cloudy nights, which means rain sometimes. The rocks get slippery in the rain, and if you slip on a boulder up here, you might tumble all the way down to Sare.”

  Dodo laughed. Miguel did not. He looked down. The wrinkled valley, of varying hues of green in the afternoon sunlight, made him think of being in the hills above Guernica, and of fishing with Justo, and of logging with Mendiola’s mule. And at the moment he had that thought, he heard his mule whiffle.

  “Meet the noble pottok,” Dodo said, pointing across a meadow at a group of the sturdy little Basque ponies that have run wild in the Pyrenees for generations. “The old-timers used them quite a bit when the loads were heavy. The night workers have a great love for them. They work hard, never complain, are sure-footed, and they have the delightful ability to fart whenever border guards are near.”

  A group of six, including a foal, grazed, oblivious to the presence of humans. The newborn romped around its mother with abandon, and Miguel wished he could simply stop to watch.

  “I first met some alone on the mountain one night, and they had me convinced they were mountain bears about to kill me,” Dodo said.

  Even with the daylight and his brother to follow, Miguel found it difficult to stay on the trail and not be diverted into a cul-de-sac of boulders. Without explanation, Dodo led him off the ridge and into a forest of beech trees, which seemed like a city park to Miguel, with no undergrowth to entangle them or boulders to trip on. It was beautiful and cool, and a small white butterfly bobbed ahead of Miguel along the path. A flock of sheep appeared along the trail, with their muffled bells and melancholy bleats sounding like an ambling chorus. A shepherd stepped out from behind a tree, Miguel never having noticed his presence.

  “Ami,” the shepherd said, addressing Dodo as “friend.”

  “Eh, ami,” Dodo returned.

  “New herder?” the man asked. He was dressed exactly as Dodo, carrying a makila, with a bota slung across his chest.

  “Oui, my brother,” Dodo said. Names were not used. “He is going to help tend the flock. Are there others about?”

  “No, quiet,” the man answered. “But it is early.”

  They nodded to each other and the man locked eyes with Miguel, held an index finger under his right eye, and winked. It was to say, Welcome to the brotherhood, my friend, but if you see me outside these hills, I am a stranger to you.

  After clearing another ridge and dropping into a glade, Dodo stopped to show Miguel a small boulder-covered cave in which they cached bottles of Izarra and tins of cheeses. They could hide inside if necessary.

  “There’s a cave we spent the night in once that winds back into the hills for half a mile,” Dodo said. “It’s been there since the cavemen shared it with bears. Our guests were not very happy with the chirping of thousands of bats hanging from the roof. To keep their minds off that, we told them stories about how the spirit of Mari and the lamiak lived in there, and how for so many years the witches held meetings in there until they were burned at the stake.”

  As usual, Miguel never knew how much of Dodo’s commentary to believe, but he hoped that spending the night in a bat-filled cave would not be a part of his new job.

  “Are there fish in here?” Miguel asked as they walked parallel to a stream.

  “The best fishing is up in the forest of Iraty, I’m told,” Dodo said. “Since when do you care about fishing? I thought you despised fishing.”

  “I like it when I’m not in a boat—fishing in rivers and streams,” Miguel explained. “Maybe some time when we’re not working we can go to the Iraty and I can show you how to fish streams.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Justo taught me.”

  “How is Justo?” Dodo asked, his first direct question about Guernica and those living there.

  “Still strong,” Miguel said.

  “Even with one arm?”

  “The number of arms has nothing to do with it.”

  Dodo let the subject hang as they started to descend a ridge. “We’re in Spain now,” he said. “Down there’s the Bidassoa. The river is always the biggest problem. The Spanish guards mostly sit on their asses on the south side and wait for us to come to them.”

  “The river?”

  “It cuts a gorge west of Vera, closer to the source, with steep slopes and a strong current,” Dodo said, laying out the terrain and pointing to the forest below them. “As it gets toward Irun, it widens and slows, depending on the time of year and volume of flow. It’s easier to cross below, and that’s why there’re guard shacks down there at every bend in the river.”

  “How do we cross?”

  “We row in a boat that a farmer leaves for us, or we wade, or we swim,” Dodo said. “Probably wade and swim now, since a boat is too obvious these days.”


  “Dodo?”

  “What?”

  Miguel held up his partial hands. “I don’t know if I can swim anymore.”

  Dodo hadn’t considered that. He thought of challenging his brother to a rematch of the Loop but remained quiet.

  Aside from his solitary walks through town in the early morning and late night, and his work trying to keep Errotabarri from falling apart, Justo spent much of his time in Bilbao, a short train ride away. He enjoyed helping his brother at the Basilica de Begoña and visiting Sister Incarnation at the hospital. He owed much to these two, and it felt good to get closer to his baby brother and to the nun he so admired.

  Sister Inky humored Justo by allowing him to act as her enforcer with stubborn patients. Assisting his little brother, Father Xabier, was more difficult. Now that Justo was back on his feet, the priest felt that it no longer seemed appropriate for him to go around sweeping up the rectory and doing work on the grounds.

  In truth, Xabier had become a visible political figure, as his connection to exiled president José Antonio Aguirre had made him a target of some scrutiny for Franco’s security and intelligence forces. Xabier knew he was being watched and he feared this might endanger his brother. It would have been better if their meetings were less obvious for a while. But he so enjoyed Justo’s presence that he could think of no tactful way to discourage his visits.

  Justo was not surprised that Xabier had grown increasingly political. He had become known as a force in the Basque consciousness, an anti-Fascist voice when so many had been silenced. As assiduously as Xabier kept his pulpit free of politics, many parishioners still sought his opinions on the state of the Basque Country, Biscaya, and Spain. Most frequently, he was asked, “Have you heard from Aguirre?”