Laia and I stood on the highest bit of wall we could scramble up. We could just make out the roofs of Asco, 5 kilometers south. Somewhere on the winding river between here and there, my grandfather, Bob, Tiny, Christopher, Marcel, Hugh, Carl and the other two Americans had crossed to go into battle. The temptation to read on was almost overwhelming, but I had resisted.
“Now we know where to go next,” Laia said.
“Down to Asco and then along the valley to Corbera and Gandesa.”
“Exactly. We shall follow in your grandfather’s footsteps.”
“Are there buses?” I asked.
“Yes, but I have a better idea.”
“What?”
Laia’s face broke into a mischievous smile. “You’ll find out tomorrow.” She jumped down off the wall and headed back toward town. “Come on,” she shouted back at me, “I’ll buy you a plate of snails.”
“Did you say snails?”
“You’ll love them,” she said with a laugh. “They’re a local delicacy.”
As I trotted after Laia, I thought of something else Grandfather had mentioned in his journal. “Do you think the nurse in Barcelona that he keeps thinking about was Maria?”
Laia stopped and turned to me. “I was wondering that too. Do you think so?”
“It’s possible. I hope he mentions a name soon.”
“Something else I was wondering,” Laia said. “The beret must be the one in the suitcase.” I nodded. “But your grandfather says that it was special to Marcel and it was only on loan. I wonder why he never gave it back.” We walked the rest of the way down the hill in silence.
As it turned out, we didn’t get our snails right away. Our landlady was waiting for us by the guesthouse door. Without giving us a chance to say anything, she grabbed my arm and led us off down the street, babbling something over her shoulder.
“What’s she saying?” I asked Laia, who seemed to find my predicament vastly amusing.
“She told you to come with her.”
“As if I had any choice,” I said.
“There is something she wishes to show you. Something from her childhood.”
I groaned. What was there about her childhood that could possibly interest me? I silently prayed that whatever it was, it didn’t involve hugging and bursting into song.
The old woman hurried us along about three blocks and stopped in front of a black wrought-iron gate. Above the gate was the silhouette of a plane with bombs falling from it. On one side was the word Refugi and on the other Antiaeri. A narrow passage led to a heavy black door in the hillside.
“Is this an air-raid shelter?” I guessed.
“Yes,” Laia replied, and then we were through the gate and at the door.
A man almost as old as our guide appeared from a small room, and he and the old woman spoke rapidly. I caught the woman saying something about Brigadas Internacionales, and the old man stared hard at me. When she had finished, he stepped forward and grasped my hand. “Gracias por su abuelo,” he said as he pumped it up and down.
“He’s thanking you for your grandfather,” Laia said.
“De nada,” I replied, hoping that I’d got the expression for “Don’t mention it” correct.
Obviously feeling that I was her exclusive property and that I had spent enough time with the old man, our landlady hustled me forward. The man produced a huge key, and as he unlocked the door and hauled it open, I was left to marvel at how everyone here seemed intent on thanking me profusely for something I had nothing to do with.
When the door was open, the man pulled a switch beside a large black box on the wall and lights flickered on all along a brick-lined tunnel. The roof was rounded and the tunnel seemed to end in a room carved out of the natural rock. The woman hustled me along.
The room, and other rough corridors leading off it, were lined with modern information boards showing maps, pictures of planes, different types of bombs and ruined buildings. There were also old pictures of the tunnels lined with people—men, women and children—sitting against the walls and staring at the camera with worried expressions. I wanted to look more closely at the pictures and have Laia translate the text for me, but the old woman was talking again and Laia was struggling to keep up.
“She spent many days and nights here when she was a girl,” Laia said. “During the war there was a lot of bombing. You could feel the ground shake and stones fell from the roof.” As Laia was explaining all this, the old woman jumped up and down and waved her arms in the air to simulate the ground moving and things falling down. “It felt like everything was going to collapse on top of you, and if you survived, you didn’t know if you would have a house to go back to. You could hear the bombs fall above.”
The woman was leaping around now, screaming, “Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Obviously unimpressed by my stunned reaction, she dragged me aside to one of the information boards and dramatically pressed a black button. A TV screen sputtered to life with images of black planes, bombs falling and exploding, burning buildings, walls collapsing and bodies, looking like limp dolls, scattered through the rubble in the streets. On the soundtrack, sirens wailed and explosions roared. As suddenly as it had begun, the audiovisual display ended, leaving us standing in overwhelmed silence.
“La guerra,” the woman said quietly.
“The war,” Laia translated, unnecessarily. Even I knew that much.
As if returning to life, the woman plucked at my sleeve and led me to another board. This one was mostly taken up with a picture of people in the tunnel. She peered at the picture and pointed an arthritic finger at a little girl huddled in the middle distance. She wasn’t clearly in focus but looked to be about five or six. She peered nervously out from between two adults, presumably her parents.
“Esa soy yo,” the woman said.
I didn’t need Laia to translate. “That’s you?” I asked.
The woman nodded vigorously. “Tenia cinco años.”
“You were five years old.” The woman grinned broadly to reveal a row of yellowed teeth. She grabbed my hand. I thought I was off on another excursion to her past, but she did the same to Laia. Spouting a long string of Spanish, the old woman forced us to hold hands and shoved us down the corridor toward the daylight. As we emerged, blinking at the brightness, I asked Laia what the woman had said.
Laia gave my hand a squeeze that sent shivers down my spine. “She said the war is over. Go and be young.”
The next morning, I texted DJ. hru bro? up the mntn yet? ig stories 2 tell. hag1. Then I suffered through our landlady’s tearful farewell and promised to come back one day. I followed Laia to find out what method of transport she had in mind. We stopped outside a well-lit storefront. Lined up on the sidewalk outside were several brightly colored scooters.
“Scooters?” I said.
“Yes,” Laia said proudly. “They are cheap to rent, and on them we can go wherever we want, not just where the bus goes.”
“But I don’t have a full license,” I said. “I can’t rent one.”
“Yes, you can,” Laia said, smiling. “If we get small scooters, fifty cc, we only have to be sixteen years old and we do not need licenses. We will not be able to win a race with a Porsche, but we have time.”
Half an hour later, we were puttering through the narrow streets on bright blue scooters. I was a bit wobbly to begin with because of the weight of my backpack, but our machines were really easy to drive—they had electric starters and automatic transmissions—and they were cheap, only about $150 for four days. We made a brief stop to buy some sausage and bread before I followed Laia out of town into the hilly, dry countryside. As the sun rose higher and I watched Laia’s dark hair fly out from under her helmet, I reflected that I had never felt happier. “Thanks, Grandfather,” I murmured.
After we turned inland at Asco, the road was hillier than I had expected and dry. The only things that seemed to grow here were olive trees and grape vines, and they were pretty boring to look at after the first few thousand. I entertained myself wondering if Grandfather had walked over this or that hill.
After 15 kilometers, I ached all over and was getting tired of almost being sucked out into the middle of the road every time a huge truck roared past inches away from me. I was relieved when Laia turned off past a collection of stone buildings, and we came to a stop in front of some sort of memorial.
“This is the Memorial of the Camposines,” she explained. “It is dedicated to the soldiers of both sides in the battle.”
I slid off my scooter and gratefully dropped my backpack to the ground. Laia did the same but much more gracefully. She took a printed sheet from her pack and looked at it. “This is a memorial in two parts. That part,” she said, indicating a concrete wall lined with colored information boards, “tells the story of ten soldiers who fought around here. They symbolize all who fought here. The other part”—Laia pointed to a set of steps disappearing round the corner—“is not open to the public. It is an”—she frowned in concentration—“an ossario, a place where the bones of the dead are kept.”
“A graveyard,” I suggested.
“Yes,” Laia agreed hesitantly. “Bones are still being found in the hills around, so they are brought here for burial. Soldiers from both sides lie together.”
I took a step toward the information boards, but Laia stopped me. “I have a suggestion. I will read the boards while you read the next pages of the journal. Then you can look around while I read.”
“Sure,” I said. I was happy enough to sit and get on with the journal, but I felt a bit like I was being ordered about. I was getting used to the country and feeling more comfortable traveling. I appreciated everything Laia had done and was doing—I would never have found out half as much without her—but a part of me wanted to have more say in what we did. I’d escaped one big brother; I didn’t want a big sister. Still, now probably wasn’t the time to say anything about it. I retrieved Grandfather’s book from my pack and sat on one of the wooden benches looking out over the wide valley.
JULY 25, SUNSET
How do I start? What can I say? How do I describe this day?
We are halted in an olive grove on a hillside south of Asco. To write this, I am fighting exhaustion, the fading light and a strange weakness that comes from the release of tension. I have been elated, terrified, shocked and confused many times today, and my memories are little more than a series of images and feelings that I am not even certain come back to me in the right order, but I will try to tell what happened as best I can.
We went down to the river before dawn. There was firing from the other side, but the Catalans who crossed overnight had achieved complete surprise and pushed well over the first hills. We crossed eight or nine at a time in small boats that followed ropes strung over the river. Shells exploded up and down the river, sending tall columns of water into the dawn sky, but they were fired from far away and did no damage that I saw. The only casualty near me on the crossing was a young Spanish soldier who stumbled getting out of the boat, fell and broke his wrist. He was immediately ferried back across. Would Hugh say he was lucky?
There was a wonderful feeling standing on the far bank, a place that had been enemy territory until a few hours before. Men milled about, collecting equipment, piling supplies and organizing themselves into units for the advance. Engineers were already beginning to construct a rough pontoon bridge over the river.
Tiny kept us together and moved us away from the chaos of the river. We found a pile of captured rifles, German Mausers, and those without one helped themselves. Not much ammunition, but at least I now have a weapon. Passed a column of Moorish prisoners. They were being herded none too gently by some Spanish soldiers and looked sullen and downcast. They were an exotic sight in their red fez’s and turbans, and wearing blankets over their uniforms.
As we stumbled up the first ridge, we suffered our first casualties. A random shell exploded to my left, almost deafening me but killing two men and wounding several, including one man who had his arm torn completely off. I saw it spiral through the air and land 10 feet from him.
I can’t believe I wrote that so casually. Back home, something like that would be a major disaster, and I would have been horrified and sickened. Here someone simply applied a tourniquet, and the man and the other wounded were led or carried down to the boats. Have I become a monster, or is it the tension of battle? Oddly, the explosion and the man and his arm seem much more vivid and real now, many hours after, than they did at the time. Then it seemed at times almost as if I was simply an observer. Someone who has paid their nickel to watch a moving picture show.
Anyway, Tiny checked that everybody was all right (I found a piece of shrapnel wedged in my backpack), and we continued. We trudged over a couple of low hills, seeing quite a lot of abandoned Fascist equipment and more lines of prisoners. Shells still exploded here and there, but we were well spread out and I don’t think they did much damage. We could hear firing in the distance and see the smoke from much heavier artillery fire.
Word came that we were to stop for a break and we drank and ate some sausage and bread. I was shocked to see that it was early afternoon. I would have sworn that we had crossed the Ebro only an hour or two ago, but the day was half done.
We sat and waited for orders for a long time. As we eventually collected our packs and set off again, a squadron of dark shapes flew over, heading toward the river.
“Heinkel one-elevens,” Hugh commented, shading his eyes against the sun and squinting up. “Not as fast as those Italian Savoias, but they can carry more bombs. I don’t envy the boys working on the river bridges.”
We watched them pass in silence. “They were like a flock of big black birds,” Bob commented afterward. I didn’t reply, but I was glad we had crossed early enough in the morning to miss them.
The rest of the day was spent in a boring march, spread out over the country so as not to offer a tempting target to the planes that shuttled back and forth above us all the time. “Not one of ours,” Hugh commented bitterly every time a flight passed over.
I find it hard to believe all the things I have seen today, not just the river crossing or the shell exploding. Almost every moment of today I saw something new and different, and often something dreadful that would have shocked me into a panic back in the old world. Even on what I called this afternoon’s “boring march,” I saw bodies, wrecked artillery pieces, a burned-out farmhouse surrounded by dead goats, and groups of our own wounded heading back for the river. The last were filthy, exhausted and bloodstained, and the less severely wounded helped or carried the others, but everyone cheered us as we passed and gave the clenched-fist salute. I wonder if I will be able to go back to worrying about the boring “normal” world after this is all over.