The Second Son

Two more rifles appeared in the window, more threats, more screams, when a voice by the Mercedes shouted, “I will remove the explosives!” Everything fell silent.

Hoffner looked out and saw a soldier standing upright, his arms raised high. He held his rifle in the air and tossed it to the ground in front of him. He was staring up at the window.

“I will remove them,” he shouted again. “Take the women inside.”

A low wind moved across the grass. The soldier stood firm, his legs like thick stalks planted on the rise.

Slowly the rifles pulled back, and the voice said, “Get the explosives.”

The soldier made his way up. He raised the first of the bricks above his head and moved back to the car. He turned and repeated, “Take the women inside.”

This time the women were permitted to climb through. The soldier placed the explosive in the car and began to make his way up again.

Twenty minutes later, Hoffner sat with Mila and the large captain and the smell of piss as the cars made their way down the hill. No one had said a word. Her eyes remained empty, her face unmoving. Her breathing was quieter, but it was a stillness without calm. Hoffner had taken her hand-she had let him-but there was nothing in her grip.

A ditch in the road jolted them high off their seats, and Mila said, “You have a traitor in Toledo.” The sound of her voice jarred, even as her eyes remained empty. “A man who hides guns for the fascists. In crates. Thick crates.” The captain started to speak, and she said, “His name is Rivas. I have the address. You must find him and shoot him.”

They found Rivas. They found the wires from Bernhardt and the papers from Hisma. And they shot Rivas and his wife and his son, all three against a wall outside the house. There was no talk of the women at the Alcazar, nothing of explosives, only silence, as the large captain beat Rivas with such savagery that he was forced to prop the man beside his wife before stepping back and shooting them. There was blood on the captain’s trousers when he returned.

Mila and Hoffner saw the blood. They said nothing.

Georg was no longer in the city. A guard at one of the barricades had remembered the large camera and the German papers. He remembered because Georg had put him on film. It was two days ago. Georg was heading west.

The large captain told them that the Mercedes would stay in Toledo. The town of Coria lay within Nationalist Spain; there was no point in taking the car. Not with CNT-FAI scrawled across its doors. They found an old Ford for them, two seats, with a cracked windscreen and no paint on the side.

It was nine hours to the first of the Nationalist outposts. The large captain wished them good fortune and went to clean his trousers.

Hoffner drove, dirt and rock and distance ahead of them, and somewhere the darkness to come. It was hours of unbroken silence.

Finally Mila spoke. “I killed him.” She was staring out, her voice brittle like sand. Hoffner felt it on his cheek.

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

“The wife and the son.”

“No.”

“The girl fell and I-”

Hoffner brought the car to a sudden stop. The dust rose up, but she refused to look at him.

He had repeated the words a thousand times in his head, but still they caught in his throat: I brought her to this. I alone. She is guiltless; she will always be guiltless.

“There is nothing,” he said, “no moment you can point to and say, This is why a man is dead. Not now. Not in this Spain. This wasn’t for you.”

“No.” She continued to stare out. “You don’t understand.” At last she turned, her eyes clear and focused. “I saw the girl fall and I chose for Rivas to die. I would choose it again. The wife. The son. This isn’t guilt, Nikolai. I feel no sadness or despair. This is what it is to be in Spain; I know this now.” She stared across at him. “What I don’t know is if you can see it and choose to stay with me.”

Hoffner stared into the eyes, dry and spent. And he saw hope. Hope for himself. He had never imagined it.

“There is no choice,” he said. “I love you.”

He took her in his arms, and her face came up to his own. He knew he had given himself to her, and nothing as fleeting as doubt would ever enter his mind again. So he waited and let the unbearable sentiment of it take him. He kissed her. He felt the slenderness of her waist, the need in her hands as they pressed deep into him. And he found his breath and pulled back.

“I love you,” he said again.

She waited. “I’m glad of it.”

Hoffner clasped the wheel and took the car back onto the road.

There was a village i

In Coria, he told her it would be better if he went to the headquarters alone: no need to explain a woman or the second Safe Conduct. It would be a German looking for Germans. She agreed, but they both knew he was doing it for her. She would sit in a church and wait.

At the headquarters Hoffner met little resistance. He was shown to a sergeant, who escorted him to a lieutenant, who finally took him to see a captain. The man was on the top floor, and when he turned from the window, he struck Hoffner across the face with such force that Hoffner went careening into the arms of the waiting lieutenant.

The captain-recently arrived from Zaragoza, and with a red mark below the eye that he wore like shame-smoothed back his hair and waited for Hoffner to regain his feet. He struck him again.

“Where is the woman?” Captain Doval said.

Hoffner straightened himself up. His mouth was full with blood. He turned and spat and said, “What woman?”

Doval struck him a third time. “Not so clever now.” He turned to the lieutenant. “Get this filth out of here and start looking for the woman.”

His cell smelled of mint. It made no sense. The walls were more mildew than stone, and the bars along the window peeled up in petals of iron and rust. There was a pot in the corner for his shit, and a cot with two chains holding it to the wall. For twenty minutes a day, a strip of sunlight crept up along the iron door, settled on the bolt, and then vanished, leaving behind a mist of heat and decay. At night there were screams, muffled cries of “?Madre!” and “?Socorro!” and always the sounds of a single shot and laughter.

Save for the pain from his beatings, Hoffner felt remarkably at peace. It was time now to sit and wait and die, and while Doval might have thought this a kind of torture, Hoffner lay with his back against the wall and understood that here, at the end, there was nothing to regret. He might have come up short in finding Georg, but the boy was alive.

Doval was proof of that. Hoffner had no doubt that Doval had made the second call to Berlin. He now knew what a fool he had been. If Georg were dead, Doval would have paraded the boy out, just to see Hoffner’s face. Georg was alive. As was Mila. These were pleasures Doval would never have denied himself.

Isolation, then, and the sometime wailing of a distant voice were all the solace that Hoffner needed. He was having trouble closing his left eye, and his hands were swollen, but such was the price for a quiet mind.

To be fair, it had taken him a day or so to get to this point. The first night had been a struggle not to lose himself. They had marched him out three times to a wall, set him against the wet bricks, and placed a blindfold over his eyes. Someone had fired a shot. Standing there, Hoffner had waited for the pain. Surely there was pain, he thought, and yet, could it be this quick, this deliberate? A guard had laughed and said, “You’re not dead, not yet,” and a hand had gripped his arm and taken him back to his cell. There, two others had spent a good hour battering his face.