A terrible silence fell when, on 26 January 1939, just a month after the start of the Barcelona offensive, the Nationalists entered the city. That night she went with Dimitri by train to a small town on the coast and came back with documents that said that she was legal guardian of Eugenia and Posa Rodrigez, aged twelve and three, orphaned daughters of unknown parentage. She suspected that documents obtained in such a clandestine manner might not stand up to close scrutiny, but with a million people on the move, who would care?
With the last months of unrelenting deprivation and anxiety, and constantly living with the knowledge that Catalonia must be the last battleground before the Republic was finished, Eve, feeling the rot of defeat seeping into her mind, was already prepared to leave with a group of other English-speaking refugees.
The few possessions they had – a few items of clothing, a couple of blankets and some strange dried meat that Dimitri had brought – went in a bundle which Eve slung over her shoulder. Posa and Eugenia wore warm undershifts made of the green silk gown that had travelled so far in Eve’s sponge-bag. Posa’s scarred and thin legs were encased in two pairs of Lady Margaret’s rainbow wool stockings. Eugenia, clad in Concha’s good boots, a long black skirt and a thick jumper and shawl over the silk, carried Eve’s haversack containing everything Eve now owned: the notebook written in Spain, her old journal, the keepsakes she had brought from England plus a new one – the gold star from Dimitri’s uniform.
The exodus from Spain was too hectic for any but the briefest of farewells with Dimitri. Their one farewell kiss, a brief brush of the lips on either cheek, given and taken four days before Eve left, revealed nothing of the wrench they both felt at parting. He smiled with his mouth only. ‘My heart is too much hurt.’ He gave her the gold star from his uniform. ‘I love you, very much I love you, Eve.’
There was a feeling of exuberance growing among those who had no fear of staying under the fascists, or who had been waiting for their coming, which eventually burst forth in a kind of mad joy that the war was ended. Many did not care who had won, only that it was over. Those fleeing before the Nationalists made up a steady procession, carrying their belongings, as Eve and Eugenia did, on their backs, or by any means available; as well as those on foot there were mule-carts and a few cars. All day and night the parade of fear and despair wended its way northwards in the direction of the border with France, through streets littered with documents and torn-up membership cards of the many and various left-wing parties and unions.
It was said that there were half a million refugees in that same trek, and that within a couple of weeks the Nationalists would have fought their way to the French border. Eve had no reason to doubt it.
They joined the trek of people as they passed by the harbour which was filled with masts and funnels of bombed shipping. The children had been marvellous, doing everything they were told. For the first stage of the journey, little Posa was hoisted up on a loaded mule-cart to sit beside an aged grandmother and two children, part of a family of Spanish women who had constantly warned their crazy old grandfather about giving the clenched fist and the ¡No pasarán! salute.
The first two days were the worst. Eugenia’s boots made her feet sore until Eve packed them with several pairs of socks. And although Posa was still very skinny, her dead-weight hanging from Eve’s shoulders was tiring. But Eve was fit, the sparse diet and being on her feet all day long had given her stamina. For miles she and Eugenia trudged along, holding hands, the young girl frequently looking up at her for reassurance.
On day three, after they had rested for a short while, Eve noticed Eugenia looking furtively over her shoulder.
‘There’s no need to worry, Genia. It is a long walk, and we shall be hungry and cold, but we will be safe. I shall never let any one harm you. If I tell you something, it is a secret, eh?’
‘Si, Eve, secret.’
‘Look.’ Eve opened her jacket a fraction and let Eugenia see the handle of a long, thin kitchen knife slipped into her belt.
After another four hours of walking, Eugenia said, ‘Is el cabron.’ Although Eve understood why an abused girl had taken to referring to men as bastards, Dimitri had dealt with it gently, referring to himself as el cabron: ‘Genia, come, el cabron brings can snoek for good fish stew,’ or, ‘El cabron and Señorita Eve will go drink coffee, come back. El cabron like hug.’ The most that Eugenia would ever offer was the tips of her fingers as a token of friendship. But over the days, when Dimitri had been helping them prepare to leave, Eve had noticed the girl becoming more at ease with him. With a bit of time and patience, she thought, they might draw out some of the poison of the horror of her family’s deaths and the subsequent rape.
‘Ruso el cabron,’ Eugenia whispered and again half-looked over her shoulder. ‘Eve, el amor, you understand?’ Eugenia covered her face with a corner of her scarf and looked around her suspiciously.
Eve’s heart gave a bound of excitement. Dimitri had made it! His plans were so fraught with difficulties that she feared all along that his mood might give him away to his fellow-officers, particularly Mintov with whom he worked closely. But they were all – these Soviet commissars – well trained in keeping their cards close to their chests. However, it was essential to be cautious, for Mintov was a solid product of the Soviet Republic.
‘I have come.’
Eve felt the blood rush to her face as his voice whispered close to her ear. ‘Dimitri?’ she asked in a low voice, not that there was any doubt, in spite of the peasant clothes and two days’ growth of beard.
‘No,’ he said quietly as he took Posa to carry. He spoke in perfect Spanish. ‘Josep Alier. You like for me to walk with you? If you will tie this little child on my back, I will carry her.’ It was the children’s acceptance of his sudden appearance that made Eve realize how used they must have become to him, but his transformation from Soviet officer to working man she found difficult to accept.
Eve looked at Eugenia. ‘Shall we take him with us?’
‘Have you a knife? Eve carries knife.’
‘Better than that, Genia, money. I am rich bastard.’
When she asked him why money was better than a knife, he told her conspiratorially that, although he would not be able to fight their way through the guards, he sure as hell could buy their way through. This seemed to be the guarantee Eugenia needed. ‘I take your hand.’
When they reached the pass leading into France there was a solid block of refugees. A few thousand at a time, they were allowed through. Although Madrid was hanging on by its nails, the Nationalists had already set up government under the dictatorship of General Franco.
Slowly, slowly, they were carried along in the dense tide of humanity. The closer to France they got, the slower the pace. There was nothing to be done except sit and wait, anxious that the French might decide to close the border again, fearful that the Condor Legion might decide to mow them all down as they waited.
Night-time on the road was the worst. Along with other groups they gathered what they could find to burn. Small fires flickered as far as the eye could see. They were sitting ducks, all packed along the one pass. An air attack seemed inevitable. Dimitri insisted that they would be safe now because the new dictatorship had nothing to gain by offending the League of Nations and attacking women and children.
‘You think that they won’t bomb us because there are mostly women and children in this trap? It hasn’t stopped them in the past.’ There was a fierce bitterness in her quiet voice.
Dimitri said nothing, but wrapped his big coat closer around the dozing Eugenia who was flopped against him.
Eve became aware of his hand, warm over her own, then of the strangeness of their situation: a soldier of the Soviet army – perhaps even an intelligence officer – disguised as a peasant, comforting a tormented Spanish girl, and an English woman truck-driver cradling a malnourished Spanish baby who had never had the strength to toddle a single step. She leant across the children and kissed him gently. ‘I love you very much, Josep.’
As night wore on, rumour and speculation heightened the tension but the attack never came. Eve thought that a more likely explanation than Dimitri’s was the rumour that the convoy of several large vans that had gone through the border post during the night were carrying paintings by Velazquez, El Greco and Goya en route to the Duke of Alba in London. Who knew such things? How did these rumours start? And yet, someone, somewhere, knew how to drive past the guards with scarcely a check.
There was also speculation that when they reached the border they would all be put on trains and sent back to work as slaves under the new regime; that the men and women were being separated on the French side, the men going to Argelès, and the women God knows where. Everyone hoped that they would be taken to Mexico – the haven most of them wanted to reach. In Mexico they would be welcomed. All these pretty Spanish girls, Eve thought, will be welcome anywhere. There were women who swore that they would rather go on the streets than return to Spain.
Only the children slept that night as Dimitri put forward his plan of how they would get through if they did not have permits that suited the guards. His own was quite authentic: Josep Alier was a half-Slav Spanish labourer. His fingernails were easily broken by delving into the rain-sodden rocky earth and his well-cared-for skin was soon rough and chapped enough to match his face.
The next day they reached the border. Although there was a great crush of people desperate to get through before it closed again, the guards still made an attempt to inspect every document thrust at them. Eve was so apprehensive that she trembled until Eugenia took her hand and squeezed it.
With no proper food and exposure to the wet and cold, the journey had set little Posa back weeks. She hung about Dimitri’s neck in a state of sick torpor.
They had arranged that Eve should hold back and not make any sign that they were together until he had spoken to a guard. What they had not arranged was that he should take Posa with him. Eve and Eugenia stood together and watched stiffly and silently from a distance. At first the guard waved Dimitri away, but Dimitri persisted, pointing over his shoulder at Posa. People around were becoming agitated until the guard took Dimitri into the guardhouse. What if he never reappeared? Eve felt the bile of hunger rise, burning her throat. What if they were separated? Eugenia would never stand another emotional shock, and Posa was so delicate that there were times when Eve felt that her frail life still hung in the balance. Without the children life would be unendurable. Without Dimitri?
She didn’t know. Until his sudden reappearance in the exodus from Catalonia, she had told herself that a line had been drawn under that affair, as it had been drawn under Ozz, Alex, Haskell and the scores of others whose light had burned so brightly in her life for a short while and then gone out. The chances of ever knowing what had happened to Alex and Haskell were slim.
But suddenly there was the possibility that hers and Dimitri’s story might have a different ending. What had prompted him to put everything at risk and come with her and the children? The three of them would have managed somehow, but his presence made all the difference. In the great thronging mass, the four of them had taken on an identity. People travelling alongside them supposed that they were a family. At this moment that was all she wanted in the world, to be a family with the girls and Dimitri.
The waiting seemed endless. Suddenly Dimitri reappeared, cradling Posa in his arms. It was apparent from his positive stride and the set of his jaw that he might have succeeded. Eve and Eugenia breathed sighs of relief and squeezed hands, then went forward to meet him.
‘Is OK. I have paid three gold rings and one good wristwatch for our sick child to be taken through to Friends.’
Dimitri had apparently been referring to Quaker Friends, for as soon as they were on the French side of the border, almost collapsing with relief, she saw a familiar face.
‘Sweet! Sweet Moffat.’
‘I say, if it isn’t…’
‘Yes,’ Eve quickly put in. ‘Señora Alier. This is my husband Josep and our children, Eugenia and Posa.’
‘My, my, if young Eugenia here don’t make me think how well you’ve kept your looks.’
Eve smiled wryly, but felt so old at twenty-one that she was sure that she could easily pass as the mother of a twelve-year-old.
‘Here, give me that wee thing. We have very little here, but at least the children can have a drink of warm milk and a bite of bread.’
Although their escape was now secure, they were still made to jump through bureaucratic hoops before they could get a train across France. Where, at the border, Dimitri had worked the miracle, in Paris it was Eve who was able to take over. The O’Dells accepted it as an everyday occurrence that a young woman who had left them nearly two years ago carrying a vanload of clothing, should return with two solemn children and a husband who spoke bad English with a Russian accent, and perfect Catalan.
Eve was as proud of them as though they had been her family. For two weeks, while arrangements were being made for all four of them to obtain the documents they needed to enter England, the children were fed and petted and taken shopping for clothes. Dimitri, although he accepted some better clothes than the rain-shrunken dank ones he had travelled in, decided to keep the beard.
Fran O’Dell took Eve to a beauty salon and then to buy some feminine clothes. Eve felt apprehensive and out of her depth to be suddenly in the midst of such luxury. It was time to consider the future. ‘Fran. I can’t go back home.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘You can?’
‘Of course.’
‘It seems such an awful thing not to want to go back to where you belong.’
‘Come here, sit down.’ Although it was still hardly spring, the tables were out on the pavements. Fran ordered cafe-au-lait and they lit cigarettes. ‘So, where is this place? The one where you belong.’
Eve stirred sugar into her coffee before she answered. ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel that I belong anywhere at the moment. Not with my relations. You said you understand.’
‘I was born as English as you, my dear, yet I am a Parisienne, and I shall always be. This is where I belong. If France goes to war with Germany, then I stay with France. One’s place in the world does not have to be where one’s mother happened to give birth.’
Eve, smiling, reached across the chipped enamel table and clutched the other woman’s hand. ‘You don’t know what a relief it is to hear that, Fran.’
‘But I do. Frankie had to tell me much the same thing. Before that I felt all sorts of a traitor loving France more than England. But I do. I should die if I had to go back there. I hardly ever do.’
‘My family will be hurt.’
‘Perhaps. But you may be surprised how easily the place you left has been filled. They would have to fill it. How else can any family keep going when one member is removed? Families survive deaths. Your family will survive your defection – I expect that they already have.’ She was probably right, but she and Ray had hardly survived Kenny’s empty place and she did not like to accept that they could do without her. Yet if she returned, she would be smothered. It would be like slowly drowning in warm honey. Would Dimitri survive? Had Ray? It was tempting to crawl back to the place where there were magic groves and strawberry fields, to unquestioning love and allowances made for all things.
But she had seen such pain and misery, hunger and fear in children that no one should ever see. She needed to go where she could try to come to terms with such overwhelming evil. She needed to digest her anger and bitterness and put it to some use. Above all she was responsible for two children who were victims of the war that they had never had any say in. They needed to be cared for by people who had experience of how they had come to be injured mentally and physically.
‘Do we have time to do some more shopping?’
‘In Paris there is always time for that, and it is good for the children if you are not always hovering over them.’
‘Do I hover?’
‘I’m afraid you do. You’d be surprised how well they manage when you’re away – if it is not too long. Posa is everybody’s sweetheart, but Eugenia is only yours – and Josep’s.’
Eve nodded. ‘She is. Dimitri is so patient with her.’
‘He has such a nice nature. Shall you marry him?’
‘Now that I’ve decided that I shan’t go back to England, probably not. In any case, why make changes to something that works perfecdy? Come on, Fran, drink up your coffee, I want to find a bank. I should have royalties from my writing piled up and I want to spend some. Where can we find summer clothes at this time of year?’
Fran laughed. ‘Now that April is around the corner, in almost every boutique and shop in Paris. Am I to take it that you have decided not to be the prodigal daughter returned?’
‘For now, yes. If Dimitri agrees. Hell, even if he doesn’t agree I’m going to take the children to visit the Lavenders.’
They stopped off in Cape Town. The days spent there were like a stay in Paradise. Dimitri and Eugenia held hands with Eve, while Dimitri carried Posa to the unconcealed amusement, or disapproval, of black nannies. They spent hours window-gazing and entering street cafes just for the joy of asking for the food they fancied and finding it brought to them. Seeing the way the Europeans used the blacks made Eve think of Enro Peters and the future he now saw for himself working for the freedom for his own people. An active Christian, he had written to Eve: ‘I shall work for my own people now, not with guns and fire, but with the vote.’ But, she had thought, wasn’t that where it had all started in Spain? A democratic revolution. Spaniards had voted for their freedom; yet it had turned into a tragedy so immense that it looked as though there might be no end in sight.
On midsummer day, as they were putting the children to bed in the hotel, she said, ‘This is my birthday.’
‘How old?’ Eugenia asked.
‘As old as my hair and a bit older than my teeth.’
Eugenia grinned. ‘So, how old is your teeth?’
Eve gave the girl a hug. There were times when she saw a glimpse of her own girlish self in Eugenia and promised herself that she would do her damnedest to see that the worst of Eugenia’s life was now in the past. ‘You, girl, are catching the Russian bastard’s sense of humour. My teeth is about eighteen.’
Out of the blue, Posa said, ‘Posa-Posa-Posa’, which left them speechless. It was a moment of great triumph. Dimitri said, ‘Say again. Posa.’ Once started there seemed to be no stopping her. The sudden appearance of something normal in the little girl was astonishing to them.
Looking out over Table Mountain later, Eve began to get cold feet. ‘Supposing it’s all a great disaster, Dimitri?’
‘It will not be.’
‘It’s not that, it’s the Lavenders. It’s all very well saying this and that in a letter, but are there really people who will give a home to people they know nothing about?’
‘Is it only Eve who has compassion for lost people, for poor children?’
‘But this is different.’
‘Is not. These people are good. They need to help, because of Ozz who died.’
‘Will they really be able to take to Spanish children?’
‘This son dies for, what you say?, for beautiful ideal of freedom?’
‘For the splendid ideal.’
‘Yes. Is splendid, I think too. If the children have food and love in new country, is not enough if there is not freedom. In my country I have plenty food always, warm things; in army I have good friendships. But no freedoms to say. Think, but not say. Even to think is now dangerous.’
She looked at him closely. It was almost like seeing him for the first time – not the exuberant lover, not the generous soldier who liked a good time, not the children’s protector, she was seeing a good man, an admirable man even.
Had she really met this good man so casually? At what point had they each made a choice that would lead them here? Had there been a choice, or was it simply serendipity? Chance? If not that, then Fate? She had met David as casually, and he had been the subject of her thoughts and dreams for a long time, yet what she felt for Dimitri was not at all the same. If Dimitri disappeared from her life it would matter very much.
‘Dimitri? Listen. When you said that you loved me…’
‘Is true!’
‘I know. I—’ She hesitated to say the words. She still wasn’t sure that she could handle such commitment. ‘I’m glad.’
He looked straight into her eyes, not allowing her to be evasive. ‘Tell me how.’
Why was it so difficult?
It was difficult because in telling him that she loved him, she felt a kind of failure. Until that day when he had joined the exodus from Spain, until he had picked up Posa and given Eugenia the protection of his arm as she slept in the rain, until he had put himself in danger of being exposed at the frontier checkpoint, she had been the independent new woman she had set out to make of herself. She had done it, thrown off the conventions of her class and escaped. She had vowed never to become like her mother and her grandmother.
‘I’m glad because, because I have fallen in love with you, Dimitri.’
‘Is wonderful, Eve. Say to me, “I love you, Dimitri”. Is this possible to say?’
It was possible. She went across to where he was sitting on the hotel veranda under the clear bright stars of the Cape Town night. She put her arms round his neck. ‘I love you, Dimitri. Truly, I do love you. I love you very much, Dimitri.’