Authors: Stephen Hunter
Everybody laughed. God, Julian.
Julian’s true enemy, however, wasn’t fascism or party politics or even war in general: it was time. Julian was the only one of them who could vanquish time. He could turn the months into weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours. He could rip through the numbers on the clock and the pages of the calendar; he could make them forget where they were and how long they’d been there and how long they
would
be there. That was his special, most lovely gift. And as Florry settled into the troglodyte life it was Julian who freed him from his
bondage to the calendar: and when Florry looked at such a document in what seemed to be his third or fourth week on the line he was stunned to discover that not only had January turned to February but February had turned to March and that March was soon to turn to April. It was, however, still 1937.
“Ain’t we low on wood?” Commissar Billy asked, part of the ritual of the sameness of days. “Whose bloody turn is it to scrounge some up?”
“I’ll go,” said Julian, shucking his blanket.
“Here, I’ll come along,” said Florry, grasping his first chance to confront Julian alone.
“Stink, you do have a use then, don’t you?”
But it wasn’t a joke. The night was coming and without wood there’d be no fires and no warmth. But by this time there was damned little wood. The ground behind the trenches had been picked clean for hundreds of yards.
With their comrades’ best hopes along as baggage, and a godsend from Bob the Nailer—sprang! the bullet rattled off the rocks a goodly distance away—the two clambered out of the trench and began to wander about the thickets and over the hills that lay behind them.
Florry steeled himself toward the hatred he felt he properly ought to feel and set out to trap Julian into some sort of acknowledgment of his treason.
“I say, Julian, I hope when the revolution’s secure here, it’ll move to England. Chance to set things right at last.”
“You do?” said Julian. “That’s a bit lefty, isn’t it, old man? I think it’s a revolting idea. I mean, Billy Mowry is a natural-born leader but if he tries to take my mother’s coal mine from her and give it to some committee, I’m afraid I’d have him hanged from the nearest willow.”
“But justice is—”
“Justice is ten thousand a year, free and clear, and lots of pretty, idiotic young ladies with whom to do nasty, lascivious things. That’s justice, old man. No, inside this revolutionary, there’s a Tory who’ll inherit a nice little chunk of England some day.”
“Well, why on earth are you here, then?”
“Why, I just wanted to
count
, thank you very much.”
“You always counted, Julian. If anyone counted, Brilliant Julian did.”
Julian drew a great charge out of that!
“Hah!” he laughed. “Yes, that’s what everybody always
said
, which just goes to prove how bloody little everybody
knew!
Bloody Brilliant Julian, everybody’s favorite cleverboots. Lord, Stinky, how I hated that boy. That’s why this war is such a godsend. I wasn’t the young beauty anymore, except of course to Mother. But to the rest of the world, I’d become an adult with little crinkles on my pretty face. How awful. I kept expecting to do something great—great beyond my little book of absurdly famous verses—and the others kept expecting it too. Yet it somehow never
happened.”
“But, Julian, everybody loves you,” Florry found himself saying, half in admiration and half in hate.
“Oh, not
everybody
, Stink. Even Brilliant Julian’s picked up his enemies. If you only knew.”
“What enemies?” Florry pressed. “Who could hate Julian?”
“I’ll never tell,” Julian said coyly.
“Unburden yourself, old man. Bob the Nailer could prong you at any mom—”
“I say, Stink, speaking of unburdening, have you had a woman recently?”
“Julian!”
“I thought not. Your type never does. Too bloody noble or decent, or some such. Listen, chum, take it when it’s offered, that’s my advice. You can sort it all out later. Take it when it’s offered. That’s all you owe anybody.”
“Actually,” said Florry, feeling that Julian had somehow maneuvered him into spilling
his
secrets, but unable to stop himself nevertheless, “yes, I did. I met a young woman on the boat. We had an adventure together. We ended up … well, in the—”
“In the sack. Stink, boy, that’s the way! And what’s this lovely creature’s name? I may look her up myself, you wouldn’t mind, would you?”
“Sylvia. Sylvia Lilliford,” Florry confessed uneasily. “I’m actually rather gone on her. I thought I might even
marry
her if it all works—”
“Marry her! Good heavens, you can’t be serious. Why, I absolutely forbid it, not until I’ve had my way with her. I shall steal her from you, Stink. I’ll make her mine, you’ll see. Tell me, does she have nice fat titties? Which way do they point? When she scrunches them together for you do they seem somehow
bigger?
I’ve noticed that—”
“Stop it, damn you.” Florry was surprised to discover the passion in himself. “You’re being quite unpleasant.”
“Oh, look what I’ve gone and done. I’ve made the poor lovesick bastard angry with me. Florry, mate, your Julian’s only jesting, surely you can see that, can’t you?”
“You shouldn’t speak of her that way.”
“Ah, Stink, you’ve more Eton in you than even a prig like me, who was born to it. God, I envy you your illusions. Listen, here’s a smashing idea. Suppose we all go on furlough together. That is, the three of us. To some
little seaside place. We can have a nice holiday. I’ll pay for it. I swear to you I’ll not touch the lady. I may even bring one along for myself, a dusky dark Spanish girl with a mustache and titties the size of cabooses. And she and I will drill ourselves dizzy while you and your Sylvia have tea and discuss Auden. It will be delightfully civil—Hello, what’s this?” He had stopped suddenly and pointed off, and Florry followed his finger into a mass of brambles where there seemed to be a kind of bundle or something.
It was a statue of a saint—and it was wood.
“A saint. The Lord has sent us a saint to rescue us our trespasses,” Julian preached.
“It looks old,” said Florry. “It could be worth a fortune.”
“Up here, it is worth more than a fortune,” said Julian, in theatrical reverence. “It’s worth a night in front of a warm fire, which is as rich as a trench rat ever gets. A saint has brought us the gift of fire. We thank thee, O Lord, in your munificence.”
And Florry felt his chance to pin down Julian slither away.
There was to be an execution. It seemed that a patrol had captured three Fascist soldiers and their officer digging potatoes in no-man’s-land. The soldiers, peasant louts without politics, were rapidly converted to the Republican cause. The officer, after interrogation, was to be shot.
“Oh, won’t it be fun. We’ll actually see one of them die. Oh splendid,” sang Julian. And as it happened, the shooting was to occur on a day after Julian and Florry had undergone sentry-go and so they were free to watch the fun. Uneasily, Florry acceded to Julian’s demand. The next morning, after a few hours of sleep, they
followed a path through untended orchards, unplucked rows of corn, fields of hypertrophied mangoes and sugar beets, now pulpy beyond use. The war had come just before harvest and the fruit and vegetables lay everywhere, rotting and corpulent. It was something Florry hadn’t noticed before, and now, a little bleary from fatigue, he saw the unharvested bounty as a sort of curse on their enterprise. He was surprised to discover how nervous he was.
When they at last reached the great house, it was almost too late. Crowds of soldiers milled excitedly in the courtyard, but nobody quite seemed to know what to expect. At last, they located a higher officer stretched out upon a chaise longue in the orchard, his muddy riding boots splayed listlessly before him as he wrote in a notebook with furious intensity. In fact, his wrist and the tight grip on an old pen seemed the only thing intense about him: his knuckles were white as the pen flew across the creamy pages of the book.
They stood, waiting to be noticed, but for the longest time no such recognition came, and at one point Julian took a breath as if to speak, but the man halted him with a finger raised suddenly like a baton, without bothering to look up.
At last he lifted his eyes and confronted them. His face was one of those ancient, wise creations that only wars or revolutions seem to manufacture: it was a mass of fissures and erosion, all pain, fatigue, and thought. All the lines in it pulled it downward, as though gravity had a special influence.
“Yes, comrade?”
“Would you be Steinbach?” asked Julian.
“I would.”
“I’m Raines.”
“English, are you?” The man spoke with a sort of vague European accent. He was balding and thick and looked almost like the abandoned tubers they’d seen rotting in the fields. His belly bulged tautly through his open, sloppy tunic. Under the tunic and against the pressure of the stomach there stretched a thick, dirty wool turtleneck sweater which, at his neck, seemed to catch and contain his jowls like a cup placed under a spigot.
“Yes. Yes, I am, comrade—”
“And your friend?”
“English too, comrade.”
“Now, what is it, Comrade Raines?”
“We’ve come to see the show,” said Julian arrogantly, perhaps at his worst. “Nobody out there knows where it’s to be held. Could the comrade perhaps inform us? It’s good to watch one’s enemies perish.”
“You’re very bloodthirsty. The poet, eh? ‘Achilles, Fool,’ isn’t that it?”
Julian was pleased.
“I am he. The world’s fifth greatest living poet.”
“I would have put you seventh, I’m afraid, comrade. In any event, the ‘show’ will be held out front in just a few minutes. You shan’t miss it. I hope you enjoy it.”
Florry’s eyes had beheld Steinbach’s and made an extraordinary discovery. One of them was glass: a dead brown orb floating in a sea of flesh. It’s what gave him the queer, vexing look, as if he were somehow not quite respectable. And the other eye seemed doubly bright, as if to compensate for what was not there.
“You,” Steinbach suddenly said to Florry, having caught the pressure of Florry’s studious glance upon him, “are you a poet, too?”
“No, comrade. A fighter.”
“A believer in the revolution?”
“Yes.”
“A public-school revolutionary!” Steinbach laughed. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Steinbach went back to his notebooks and Florry simply stood there for some time before it occurred to him they had been dismissed. At last he turned. But as he turned, he was astonished to notice what the fellow had been laboring so passionately over in his notebooks.
“Did you see that?” asked Julian. “He was drawing pictures of bridges. Damned curious. Perhaps he was an architect or some such.”
“Coolish fellow. Not exactly inspirational.”
“Something of a legend, however. The intelligence nabob. You’ll see.
Seventh!
Now sixth I would have accep—”
At that point a flatbed truck pulled into the yard, and the soldiers were drawn to it as if it were to distribute candy or mail.
But instead, after just a bit, a delegation emerged from the stable. At the center, Florry could see a puffy-faced young lieutenant in Fascist gray. His hands were tied behind him. He was led roughly along.
“Julian, I think I’m going to head back. I’m not sure I can watch—”
“Oh, you must, chum. Really, it’ll be a smashing experience. It’ll give you something fabulous to write about. I may even incorporate it into my new poem.”
“I’ve already done an execution piece. I’ve already seen an execution.”
“Why, you are an expert, then.”
Yet Florry thought he’d be physically ill. The fat
officer was tugged to the truck, and a dozen or so rough pairs of hands pushed him up where he stood, his knees quaking. He was weeping.
“Fascist pig!”
“You bloody bastard!”
“Blow ’is fookin’ brains out!”
The cries rose.
“I wonder who the lucky chap is gets to pull the trigger,” Julian said.
“Really, this is—”
At that point, somebody climbed aboard the truck. It was the stout, one-eyed Steinbach who’d been drawing bridges in the orchard.
“Death to Fascists,” he shouted.
“¡Viva Cristo Rey!”
shouted the tied man, as Steinbach pushed him to his knees. Steinbach had the revolver out and with a cinematic flourish showed it to the crowd, drawing their cheers. He cocked it and Florry, stupefied and mesmerized, watched the physics of the thing: how the fluted cylinder ticked in the light as the hammer’s retraction drew it around so that a charge was placed beneath its fall.
Steinbach pushed the pistol against the quaking officer’s spine and fired. The sound of the shot was muffled in the intimacy between muzzle and flesh. The man pitched forward on the truck bed, face a sudden blank. Steinbach stood over him and fired three more times into the man’s body. Florry could see black splotches where the spurt of flash scorched the uniform. The cheers were enormous.
Steinbach leaped off the truck with surprising agility. “Take the dog away,” he shouted. Meanwhile, the smoking body lay flat and inert on the truck, its total
death like an ugly charm that kept the crowd away. Florry watched as Steinbach strode through the men and went back to his chaise longue. He sat down again and began to draw.
“What a piece of work is Steinbach,” said Julian.
The sound of a shell awakened Florry, and he bolted conscious in a shower of dust. He was back in his bunker. He blinked in the flickering candlelight, barely remembering his final collapse into an oceanically vast and dreamless sleep.
“Easy chum,” said Julian, close by.
“What time is it?”
“Near dawn.”
“Good God, I’ve missed sentry-go.”
“No matter. Schedule’s off.”
Julian, in the candlelit bunker, semed queerly agitated.
Florry hauled himself up from the warmth of his sleeping blanket and sat back against the earth wall, amid a welter of hanging water bottles, bayonets, bombs, and knives, and asked for a cigarette.