A Necessary Action (2 page)

Willi Mohr fingered his glass, thought for a moment and then asked: ‘What have you brought me down for?’

The guard threw out his hands, smiled apologetically and said: ‘Orders.’

He emptied his glass in one gulp and waited patiently for the other man to finish his drink.

Then they walked on, in exactly the same formation as before, out of the town, along the perfectly straight, newly-gravelled
road. On each side grew small, gnarled olive trees with greyish-green, satiny dusty leaves.

The guard-post lay about three-quarters of a kilometre beyond the last houses. It was quite a modest place, a long, low, stone building with three or four very small windows. A yellow and red flag hung limply at the side of the entrance and under it a civil guard was busy dipping the inner tube of his bicycle-tyre into a bowl of rusty-brown water. His bicycle was standing nearby, upside-down, with its front wheel removed.

The sudden darkness in the porch was such that anyone coming in from the outside was almost unable to distinguish the objects around him. The civil guard knocked on a door and opened it at such an angle that Willi Mohr could not see inside the room. Someone inside spoke, swiftly and concisely and with a marked lisp, indicating that the owner of the voice came from another part of the country. The guard shut the door from the outside and gave the arrested man a nudge in the back as a sign that he should proceed forward. At the farthest end of the entrance hall he unlocked another door; beyond it were three steps leading down to a long stone-paved corridor. A weak electric light bulb spread an uncertain light over a row of narrow doors reinforced with iron. The civil guard went on to the last one, opened it and pushed him over the threshold. Then the door was locked and the key turned in the lock. The cell was very small, at most five or six foot square, the walls whitewashed and the contents consisting of a wooden bunk fastened to the wall and a galvanized bucket. There were no windows, but from an aperture in the ceiling a faint light filtered through a small square of thick, opaque glass. Willi Mohr walked the three steps from the door to the wall and back again. Then he leant against the wall and thought.

A few minutes later steps were heard in the corridor, the key was turned and the door opened. The civil guard who had arrested him came into the cell with a jug of water and a worn grey blanket. He put the blanket on the bunk and the jug on the floor, beside the bucket.

He let his eyes wander from the arrested man to the bunk and said: ‘You’d better sleep.’

Then he left.

Willi Mohr got the impression that the blanket and the water-jug and the advice constituted a kind of extra favour, in return for the drink in the square.

As no one had bothered to search him, at least he could smoke. And he had his belt too, so he could hang himself if he wanted to.

‘If there’d been something to fasten the noose to,’ he said to himself, with a slight smile.

This talking to himself was a habit he had taken to lately. Sometimes he caught himself talking to the cat and the dog too. Mostly the cat, as it seemed more intelligent and more thoughtful.

When he felt in his pockets he found he had cigarettes but no matches. He went over to the door and banged on it with his fists. Nothing happened. Probably not due to nonchalance but quite simply because no one heard him.

After a while, he resigned himself and lay down on the bunk with the thin blanket folded up under his head. It was quiet in the building. Before he fell asleep he looked at his watch. It was five minutes to three.

When Willi Mohr opened his eyes again, it was dark in the cell. He could feel the raw, damp chill coming from the stone walls and he realized that he had woken because he was cold. At this time of the year the days were hot but the nights surprisingly cold.

He lay on his back on the wooden bunk and his shoulders and the small of his back ached. With difficulty he raised his arm and had to hold his wristwatch right up to his eyes to be able to see the luminous figures. It was ten o’clock. He had already been here seven hours and evidently no one had bothered about him. It was deathly quiet and he could not even see the aperture in the ceiling.

He must have slept with his mouth open, because his tongue felt dry and stiff and his throat and mouth were sore. When he sat up on the bunk and felt round for the water-jug, he got cramp in his calves and whimpered loudly as he stretched out his toes and slowly extended his contracted muscles.

He found the water-jug and drank. Then he got up on his stiff legs and went over to hammer on the door with his clenched fists. He did not stop until it began to hurt. It was still quite quiet.

Willi Mohr shook his stiff body and sat down on the bunk. He
drew up his legs and crept into the corner with his back to the wall, the thin blanket round his shoulders. He thought about the fact that he did not know what he ought to be thinking.

During the hours that followed, he hammered on the door three times, but somewhat listlessly, without energy or indignation. Now and again he drank from the earthenware jug and about every tenth minute he changed his position when some part of his body began to ache. He tried to think up different tricks to stop himself constantly looking at his watch, but it didn’t help. He was much too keyed to waiting and the time went unendurably slowly.

‘This is going to be difficult,’ he said. ‘You’ve no prison routine.’

He must have dozed off in his corner, for suddenly he was conscious of the fact that he was awake and could not have been so a moment earlier. The cell was no longer dark, but was filled with the weak yellow light from an electric light bulb which seemed to be set behind the piece of glass in the ceiling aperture. Steps and voices could be heard and someone lifted the little flap outside and looked at him through the spy-hole. The key was turned and a small civil guard whom he had not seen before opened the door. A tall officer in a green uniform with gold braid on the sleeves and a broad band round his cap appeared in the doorway. He looked at the man on the bunk, irresolutely and a little questioningly, and then exchanged a few words with the guard. They spoke Catalonian between themselves.

Then he took a step into the room and smiled in a strained manner.

‘You won’t have to wait much longer now,’ he said.

The officer seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he added politely: ‘I hope it hasn’t been too uncomfortable for you.’

He glanced with irritation at the galvanized bucket and the dirty blanket, turned round quickly and left. The guard locked the door.

Ten minutes later the small guard returned and said: ‘Come.’

At the steps at the end of the corridor, Willi Mohr said: ‘What happens now?’

The man in uniform replied at once, without a moment’s hesitation.

‘You’re going to be interrogated by Sergeant Tornilla.’

‘Was that the man who was here?’

‘No, that’s the chief, Lieutenant Pujol.’

The civil guard knocked on the same door that the other guard had held ajar ten hours earlier. Then he opened it wide and stepped to one side. Willi Mohr shrugged his shoulders and walked into the room. The door was shut behind him, from the outside.

The room was not so small as the cell, but on the other hand it was not much larger. It contained four pieces of furniture, a small desk, a filing cabinet, a black armchair and a rickety wooden bench with room for two people. But the room still seemed full to overflowing. There was no window, but on the wall behind the desk hung a large photograph of the Caudillo in a heavy black wooden frame. Under the portrait sat a man writing in the circle of light from an electric ceiling light with a green glass shade.

When Willi Mohr came into the room, the man at once put down his pen and rose from the armchair.

He saluted meticulously, held out his hand and said with a smile: ‘My name is José Tornilla. Pleased to meet you. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’

Willi Mohr stared at him with clear blue eyes and shook the man’s hand mechanically.

So this was Sergeant Tornilla, the man with a lisping voice, the man who was to interrogate him, after letting him wait for ten hours. Middle-height, slightly plump, brown eyes, moustache, military cap with tassels, well filled to the fore, white shirt, strap diagonally across his chest, cheeks smooth from his razor, white teeth, well-manicured nails, well-brushed, faultless, straight out of the book of instructions. A nob. A blown-up gasbag.

Thought Willi Mohr.

Sergeant Tornilla walked round the desk and pulled the rickety bench a bit nearer. He smiled even more broadly and made an exaggeratedly polite gesture towards it.

‘This,’ he said jokingly, ‘is the accused’s bench.’

He articulated very clearly.

They sat down opposite each other. The man in the armchair went on smiling. He had his elbows on the desk and slowly pressed first his fingertips and then his whole hands together. As if he had happened to think of something important, he suddenly parted them, got out a cigarette packet from somewhere behind the ancient manual telephone and held it out. Bisonte, Spanish Monopoly cigarettes of American type.

Not so bad, but unjustifiably expensive. Snob cigarettes, thought Willi Mohr.

He took one and almost before he had had time to put it to his lips, the other man had stretched across the desk and lit his lighter.

Willi Mohr inhaled the smoke. It stung and hurt his throat.

Sergeant Tornilla turned his lighter upside-down and said genially:

‘Austrian. Contraband—even in the police …’

He put it away, again pressed his fingers together and smiled. Willi Mohr noted that the man had never taken his eyes off him since he had come into the room.

Sergeant Tornilla went on smiling. It was quiet in the room for at least thirty seconds. Then he exploded into a long stream of words, speaking in a low voice, intensely, with a much more marked lisp than before.

‘Verstehe kein Wort,’ said Willi Mohr.

It was true. He had quite literally not understood a single word.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sergeant Tornilla, ‘I was forgetting you were a foreigner.’

He turned a leather-covered frame so that his visitor could see the three oval portraits, a fat woman with a fan and an elaborately embroidered shawl and two small boys in sailor suits.

‘My family,’ he said proudly. ‘My wife and my two sons. They’re eleven and nine now, both born after the war.’ He paused for a moment and raised his right forefinger as if replying to a question that had never been put.

‘No, not here. In Huelva. My wife and I, our families come from Huelva. These photographs weren’t taken here, nor in Huelva. In Badajoz. Duty, you see. One is often moved. My sons
were seven on these photos. Both were photographed at their first communion, Juan and Antonio.’

He pointed at the photographs, one after the other, and repeated, as if he were learning a lesson by heart:

‘Juan … Antonio … They go to school here now. When they’re older perhaps we’ll be moved to a bigger town—with better schools.’

He offered another Bisonte, lit it and went on talking.

Willi Mohr felt as if in some way he was unable to resist this man on the other side of the desk, neither his flow of words nor his unwavering eyes. He was tired and dirty and ill at ease, painfully conscious of the fact that he had not washed for a long time, that his trousers were stiff with turpentine and spots of paint and that his faded brown shirt was impregnated with dried sweat, that his fair hair was dirty and dishevelled and wild, and that despite his long thin body he would feel small if this man in uniform got up.

And he was hungry too.

‘… this is a district where there is always plenty of time. There’s a saying here which says that one is waiting for the boat. There’s a lot to that, much more than you would at first think. You go down to the harbour, perhaps several miles, and you wait. In the end a boat always comes, and then it goes again and you go on waiting. If anyone asks what you are waiting for—then you are still waiting for the boat, perhaps the next boat, perhaps another boat. Some don’t even go to the harbour, but they are waiting all the same, for the boat, or something else. It’s difficult for a stranger at first, but gradually you learn to wait. Sometimes—and in certain situations—it has its advantages.’

Silence. Sergeant Tornilla had stopped smiling.

‘That’s what it’s like. Here and in many other parts of our country. People here are good and simple people. They demand nothing, but they earn their living in calm and order. Perhaps they are poor, many of them, but they are happy or will be happy when all the unpleasant and worrying things they’ve gone through have vanished from their memories. When they’ve been taught to learn what is right. They’re already well on the way. What they need is firm faith, an orderly rhythm of life and sufficient work so that they can live. They only want to live, like
most people. They have already got or are going to get what they need. All other influences, all alien influences, only do them harm. Once many of these people were led into disaster, by leaders who weren’t leaders—but criminals. Not all of them were criminals, it is true, for some of them were fools. They weren’t any good at taking responsibility; they were only any good at dying. It takes courage to take responsibility. It doesn’t take any courage to die, but it takes courage to kill, just as it takes courage to take responsibility. By the grace of God, there were some courageous people at that time.’

Silence.

Cigarette.

Smile.

The lighter and its blue gas flame.

Willi Mohr made a discovery. He had understood what the man had said, all the time, except at the beginning. Suddenly he knew why he had understood. Sergeant Tornilla was not speaking one language, but two. Into a framework of everyday Spanish he had woven a number of German expressions. The linguistic effect was not awkward or bizarre, but fluently comprehensible.

‘You speak German.’

‘Yes, some. And where did I learn it? In Russia. During the war. Division Azul—The Blue Division. The Vitebsk pocket … encirclement … everything. Very instructive, in many ways.’