The Communist's Daughter (31 page)

Will I place this package in your young hand and say, “Wait till you are older”?

The question is this: When will you be old enough to understand me, yet still young enough to forgive?

*

The war exists. It is a raven hanging in the clouds over Tu Ping Ti and over the whole of this magnificent land. It picks at holes in the stomach and strips of unclaimed flesh. Tired, I ask myself what difference one man can make. On a beautiful autumn night. I wonder how I ever got it into my head that I might hold down every man who refuses to offer his blood. Can I teach the world how things should be done? Can I change the ways of these people, so backward and noble? Yet those questions pose another: Could I bear to be away from this place? The answer is no. Of course not. But that isn't good enough. There is no real answer.

I pick at the truth like some weakened bird of prey.

With each page I can't help but think I reduce myself yet another degree in your estimation. Why? Perhaps I can't stop myself now. Will you hang on long enough? Have I nothing left to recommend me? Perhaps I know in my heart of hearts that you will never lay eyes on your father's words. Has this solitude led me so wide from my original path that I'm afraid to say what I set out to do? Which was what—to sway you? Elicit forgiveness? Embolden myself? Record the facts? Now none of this matters. The enemy encircles us, bearing down from the north, east, south and west. Their hungry machines eat away at this small oasis with each passing day. The noose closes.

Yet here I am. More important is my desire to surround myself with the thick blanket of these memories. Only that. I wait for these hours of escape. It warms me, this simple act of memory and reconstruction. I am sustained. I have a voice in this silent land. I return to this darkened house chilled and hungry but almost peaceful. Every night it's the same. A lonely man's imagined dialogue with the portraits of you and your mother. On occasions when the war becomes everything, I can hear myself and the anger in my voice, the exhausted frustration. Then I stop writing, alarmed that I'm talking only to myself. Is the great Bethune talking to himself? Is this what I have become? Does Ho listen? Does he scurry off to find Mr. Tung to aid in his eavesdropping? I go days without uttering anything but barked commands and threats of discipline. I send people from my sight like an enraged schoolmaster. Even my own voice sounds strange to me now, as do the things that bring me pleasure. Steamed potatoes mixed with eggs and sugar, for example. This is Ho's current specialty, which he brings to me wearing the proud face of a master chef. He really is something. This morning, though, I thought I detected a smirk of recognition not very well camouflaged by a smile. The nerve! I think. The little bastard. The servant poisons his king. Is that what these dizzy spells amount to? What secret does he throw into this hash?

*

I imagined the terror that would have plagued your mother as she bore down upon that struggling mass within her, knowing that once her body had completed its birthing she would be wheeled out and placed against a wall, or shot there in her bed, still with the warmth of your exit burning on her flesh. It was unimaginable. I could imagine nothing else. It possessed my thoughts. I stood at my hotel window and watched New York City below, wandering in my mind through the maze of possibilities. It was a world of indifference I saw below me, both to the death of your mother and to the war that claimed her. It was one and the same, a tragic absurdity that these people simply didn't matter. If the death was not in your house, you didn't bother with it; if death was busy elsewhere, all the better. I could not tolerate these images flooding over me. I imagined the agony of your birth, which your mother knew would signal her own death.

I know now how unjust were my first thoughts toward you, the result of a madness that took hold of my vile heart.

How can I even write them now? Only with the belief that you will never see this. Only with the comforting thought that I will fail in this task and my secrets will remain.

When a child is born we offer expressions of joy, hearty handshakes, even the odd cigar. Here is evidence of nature's generosity, this simple miracle providing an opportunity to live one's life over again and to correct one's errors and to embrace what one failed to cherish the first time around. These are thoughts a man might possess in normal times, but I felt only the terror of your mother's last days. For me, this was the embodiment of that betrayal of Spain.

I could not drive these thoughts away. For months they tormented me. From New York to Seattle, to Vancouver, then on board the
Empress
and finally into the vastness of this land, I was a man haunted by the terrible fact that I could feel rage against the innocent child whom I'd left behind.

I imagined it again and again. Your mother glancing over her shoulder as the door swung open. This at the Alemana, at our table. Were these the men who would take her away that last time while I carried my film between Montreal and Toronto?

Was I staring up at that documentary and thinking of your dear mother when they pulled you from her womb?

*

This is how I see it. The murderers released her after that first detention, allowing her back out into the world to lead her tormentors into a buzzing hive of plotters.

The Alemana tavern was busy by nine o'clock. The pale-yellow plaster walls were trimmed with dark oak and hung with cinema and bullfight posters. The zinc bar ran perpendicular to the street, with white dishes of cheese, sardines and olives, baskets of bread covered by a damp cloth.

By now the news of Bethune's ouster is old news. Pitcairn knows of the embarrassment. And he knows well enough, too, that his association with the woman sitting before him might facilitate his own speedy repatriation. Perhaps he'll go to New York, where his press credentials won't be revoked for talking with a Swedish national of dubious allegiances. I imagine his kind mouth twisting as he listens.

“I'm tired,” she says, “I'm always tired now.”

This perhaps is when she first mentions the tenacious pregnancy, the one believed at first to have been terminated as a consequence of a vigorous pace up a steep mountain trail.

His eyes narrow, the first question marked by the entrance of another trio of drinkers. “Does he know?”

“No. And he won't. He thinks the child—”

“I'm leaving for England next week. If I could get word to him—”

“He knows as much as he needs to know. If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing will happen. Go to France. Leave tonight.”

“If anything happens—”

“Nothing will happen if you leave.”

“If it does, take the baby. They won't hurt the baby.”

She pushes her chair back. Its wooden paws drag loudly over the stone and sawdust floor. Heads turn. Beside them sits a young couple, infinitely less complicated, innocent as birds, really, silenced by this start. She rises and walks across the room. She might just be showing now, but hiding it cleverly under a loose sweater. Her friend, the newly appointed guardian, wonders if it could possibly come to that, a woman as formidable as this embarrassed by an unwelcome pregnancy.

Then, two months later, another round-up. Did she lead them to anyone? Those men, the same bunch who'd picked me up, by now would have grown bored. Were they surprised to see the growth in her belly? The little spy Bethune had left behind. The Communist's son or daughter. What negotiations would have ensued? We will spare your child, just tell us some names. Your child shall be looked after. Only some names for the sake of the child, no? We will wait for the child to come. Your child buys you three, maybe four weeks of life. The child of a miracle-worker, a good Communist. But you, we're not so sure of. Only a few names and perhaps it will see its father one day. Together they will remember you. Your legacy in exchange for a few names.

*

I knew nothing of this. I thought you'd died in the hills above Segovia. I knew only my anger. I'd been pushed out of Spain. I made do with what remained.

With that propaganda under my arm, I toured North America like some tweed-suited evangelist, eloquent, righteous, unforgiving—the very picture of my father. It was my rage that carried me. I didn't know what was happening back there. I had no contact with anyone. I had no idea where your mother had gone. The letters I wrote her in care of the Santander disappeared, swallowed by the war.

I presented that film in auditoriums, union halls, arenas, churches and theatres across Canada and America, and then, exhausted by my own righteousness, slipped back to brood quietly in the dark and watch how those scenes, so familiar, so devastating, played before the eyes of enraged Montreal, shocked Toronto, indignant New York, sympathetic Chicago. I was a huckster of ideals, nothing more, a travelling one-man circus, an itinerant used-car salesman. This was how I attempted to ease the anguish after my humiliating defeat. By working. By fighting harder.

Every night for four months I stared up at images of the opportunity that had been denied me, the place where I could do the most good, the war that so quickly became the symbol of my infamy, considering this black-and-white testimony the lasting document of my shame. And after the lights came up I would again rise to address the audience in the practised preacher's tones that could barely contain the anger mistaken every night for my seething hatred of Fascism and a passion for democracy.

Every day I arrived in or departed from a new town. Every presentation was as draining as if it were my last, me gasping as if I breathed with only one lung. I was a husk. I wrote nothing but pained letters to your mother. Painted nothing. I stayed half drunk. Thought of nothing but the treachery that had befallen me, of the Brutuses who'd slain me with their lies and conspiracies. I brooded, how I brooded. But was the focus of the hatred that had united Sise and Sorensen in cowardice to denounce me to the Party simply that they didn't like my methods? Imagine being surrounded by fallen neighbourhoods and screaming, dying children while your peers, these petty bureaucrats, are satisfied with nothing more than a gentle demeanour, a soft touch, the obsequiousness of an apprentice waiter. You will not find that here, I guarantee it, not in China!

There were occasions, I believed, when the audience sensed this moral panic, when, judging from the empty shine of the collection plates, I felt they'd seized upon my collapse—after the last drop of blood had been drained from my body, my lungs crushed with the effort and passion of my speech—by making donations that were nothing less than an insult to every man, woman and child in Spain and, above all, to me. And so here it was in Sudbury, northern Ontario, so close to the fields of my youth, that I was roundly snubbed, ignored and belittled by a crowd of seven hundred whose generosity totalled $22.40. $22.40! Did they know the true nature of my raging? Had the rumours already begun? I paced nervously backstage as these blackguards mingled, surely sniggering at my public shame.

What does a man do in this circumstance? Or when he's trapped in the mud with a wounded comrade? He fights back. He lifts the man upon his shoulder and returns him to safety. He does not accept his fate. He argues for it. He fights. He walks stiffly back to the podium and berates the hundreds who remain for their petty selfishness, their adipose greed, their Fascist sympathies. Yes, this is what I did—that man I barely recognize now, whose breathless audacity shocks me still. He retakes centre stage and announces to the departing crowd's embarrassment that Spain is nothing if not the staging ground for the gathering war in Europe that shall consume the lives of our sons and daughters. The insult of $22.40 shall forever be connected to this miserable village! Spain is not simply a war of principle to suit your caprices, and it shall not be denigrated with the small change of a panhandler. This war is being waged deeply within each of us, and for each of us the enemy—in case you weren't listening the first time—is our darker nature, our selfishness, our comfortable denials. This is a struggle to restore man to his noble self! And on I went before that fearful, shocked crowd, ranting feverishly, and perhaps half drunk, I don't recall. But up the ante I did.

Ship. Plane. Automobile. Each journey was the same, yet each destination offered the slightest glimmer of hope. Would it be in Quebec, or the Maritimes, in Chicago, or in the towns and cities of California, on the Prairies, or in British Columbia that the film would speak in a new voice and transform itself into a kind of love story—to set the record straight and right the wrong? I waited and each time listened to the opening, always crushingly the same and, as I was myself, unable to be transformed into something more.

Your mother appears once in the documentary, a beautiful face caught for a moment, laughing in joyous union with the fighting men and women of Castile. Is it a party? A victory celebration? Was your mother giddy with love?

And then the painting, like a man on a stretcher, being evacuated from the Prado.

The delusional rage left me, for a time, in Toronto. Here I was the returning hero, a god fallen from the clouds but still god-like as he walks through the crowds and is lifted upon strong backs in triumphal celebration. How lovely it was, and how schizophrenic. Upon my arrival at Toronto's Union Station I was greeted by a sea of five thousand working men and women who waved me on as our car motored up Yonge Street to Queen's Park, where I mounted a makeshift stage and delivered my pronouncements from Europe. But a week later it was back to the same pleading anger, the same thinly disguised passions, the same pathetic wanderings.

And then, in January, I sat down in a hotel bar in New York with Pitcairn.

He told me of you and how I'd find you.

*

The evening casts magic over my village, this fairy-tale idyll of Asia—a spell of coppery light. The stream in the valley below rushes blindly on, its slashing music slipping up to the ears of the child soldiers who sit perched on the moist rock, its current cleansing the blood from these mountains.