The Fighting Man (1993) (2 page)

His father was in the middle of the road. It was as if his father was marooned on an island in a river, and waved his stick at the bus that careered towards him. He understood. His father had needed the stick for three years now to take the weight from an arthritis-ridden knee. The driver had lost control of the bus, one of those shipped in from Hungary many years before.

He heard the warning shouts of the men from the coffee house and then only the blare of the bus horn.

He ran.

He bundled open the inner door of the apartment and the outer door. He charged down the two flights of the staircase. He bullocked past old Marta who knew nothing. The sunlight of the pavement caught at his face. There was the crash as the bus came to rest having scraped two parked cars. He saw his father.

He would have thought his father a big man, but the impact of the bus wheel had shrivelled him. His father lay in the road near the rubbish-filled gutter, so small and so still.

The face was whitening with the pallor of coming death, the breath was short spurts. There seemed to be no pain. He knelt by his father and slipped his arms under the knees and around the shoulders. Some of those who had waited at the tables were yelling at him that his father should not be moved, and he heard and ignored the call that one had been sent to find a telephone to ring for an ambulance. Down the street he saw that others were prising open the door of the bus driver’s cab. He carried his father, so small and so still and so lightweight, across the street and across the pavement. The crowd opened for him. When he glanced back he saw the boots and fists raining on the driver of the bus.

Up the staircase, his father’s feet hitting the unpainted ironwork of the stair rail. Through the opened outer door, and through the inner door, and across the day room and through the door of the room where his father slept.

They came behind him in silence, the cronies of his father. He laid his father on the tousled sheets of the bed. He crouched by the bed and held his father’s hand.

It was the room of a life gone by.

On the wall above the bed was a picture in colour, taken from a magazine, that showed the stern jowl face of Leonid Brezhnev. It was the room in which his father had wept into his hands after hearing on the radio of the death of the Party. On the table beside the bed was a photograph in a cardboard mount with a facing of yellowed cellophane of a group of men in combat fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. It was the room in which his father had spread the maps that were torn at the creases, and planned the return to his homeland. On the chest beside the open window was the black and white sketch drawing, framed in dulled silver, of a woman large with middle age who carried a girl child astride her hip and who held the hand of a young teenage boy. It was the room in which his father made a display of flowers each year in a water-filled jam jar for a fast-dug grave beyond the defence ditches of a faraway village.

He heard the wail cry of the approaching ambulance locked in traffic.

It was where it ended. It was where the life of a fighter slipped. It was where an exile had dragged out the last years of betrayal. It was where the dreams alone ruled. The breathing was regular now and the eyes rolled slowly as if to find the source of comfort that held his bony hand. They were behind him, the old men who had fled with his father when the gunships had destroyed the village, and quiet as if they dared not break the spell of peace as a son held a father’s hand. The feet of the ambulancemen clattered on the flooring. He didn’t look over his shoulder, he shook his head. None of them, the old men, had the courage to intervene. It was the slipping of power, the exchange of authority, command ebbing from father to son. He heard the voices behind him tell the ambulancemen that they were not needed, that the victim of a road accident was beyond help. They were only foreigners, it was not important to the ambulancemen whether they left with their stretcher empty.

The words were few.

‘You must go back . . .’

There was phlegm at his father’s lips.

‘. . . before it is too late you must go back . . .’

He took a dirtied handkerchief from his pocket.

‘. . . you must take back what was taken from us . . .’

He wiped the mess from his father’s mouth.

‘. . . fight fire with fire . . .’

He held tight to the hand.

‘. . . it is dead here, finished. You must go back and they will follow you because you are my son. The masses will follow you . . .’

He sensed the supreme effort.

‘. . . you will need a fighting man. Without a man who knows how to fight them you will have no possibility, none. Take a man to be close to you who can fight, a man who understands the mind of our enemy. Make them cry for mercy as you march through the villages and towns and cities, and give them nothing . . .’

He heard the failing whisper.

‘. . . I will watch for you. Fire with fire . . . Take a fighting man . . .’

After the silence, gently as he would have touched a girl’s body, Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez closed the lids of his father’s eyes. He stood upright. It was what they had dreamed about, all of the old men who followed his father into exile. He was twenty-three years old. He turned to face them. There was the authority in his voice.

‘I will go back. It is what my father wanted. I am the son of my father. The masses will follow me as they followed my father. I will return.’

He could see it in them, in the shift and hesitation of their eyes. They had been too long in exile, ten years less a month, too long dreaming of a return across the sea to the village in the triangle of the mountains. He was the son of his father. They were fat, nervous, without spine. They pleaded to be led, to find again their youth. He stood beside the bed on which his dead father lay. None had the courage to tell him that time had moved and that the past was spent. They looked into the certainty of his features.

‘I will go back.’

1

They might as well have brought the taste, smell, of the dead fish into the bar with them.

The taste, smell, was as strong as when they had reached the bar a little more than two hours earlier. The draught from the poorly fitted windows and the beer swilling in their mouths had failed to remove it. The atmosphere of dead fish was around them and through them. If there had been other customers in the bar then the landlord might have suggested, only suggested, that they should go and wash up first and change from their work clothes. He’d kept his peace because they were his only drinkers on a foul night. The rain was in from the west, sometimes merging with hail when the wind strengthened. The rain, and sometimes the hail, and always the wind hit at the windows and wet rivers ran down the wallpaper below them to the newspapers that were folded to catch the damp. There was supposed to be a man coming in to fix the window frames and replace the rotten wood, the landlord would say each evening as he bent to place the newspapers on the floor, and he’d been saying that since last winter. They were both of them on their fifth pint of beer, extra strong, high alcohol content, and the bigger of the two men took a whisky chaser with each of his pints. They weren’t loud drunk. They were miserable drunk. They had come straight from the cages of the salmon farm across on the far side of the loch. They had been out on the heaving walkways round the cages, working with flashlights, sometimes bothering to use the safety harnesses and sometimes not, and they had come to the bar with their trousers wringing wet where the sea water came in above their boots, and with their hands still slimed with the fish scales. The scales, the bright life gone from them, had peeled onto the table where they sat close to the fire and they left them, dull and opaque, flotsam amongst the stained beer mats. The problem was double bad. There was the increase in the lice, immature and adult, that fastened to the bodies of the caged fish. And there was the effect of the chemicals that they poured into the pens to kill the lice and which stressed the fish to death. Too many dead fish sliding into the dead hole at the bottom of each cage. Too great a number of wasted fish, too much wasted money, too many wasted hours. They didn’t have to chew on the consequences of having so many fish dragged by the suction tube out of the dead holes below the cages. It was bloody damn obvious . . . The farm was up for sale, the owners who had once thought it was a pretty little investment to finance a salmon farm in the Highlands and Islands had lost their patience and nerve. No buyer in sight, the market saturated. The business was going down the dead hole as fast as the young farmed salmon that could not take the predatory lice and the stressing chemicals.

The fire was going well. There would always be a good log fire as long as the man who had promised to come and fix the windows stayed away. The wind came some of the time with a thin whistle through the gaps in the frames of the woodwork. The wind was enough to shift the curtains on the window nearest them, flutter what had once been heavy velvet. They were hunched over the table. Neither had spoken for a full quarter of an hour. They lit cigarettes, they drank, they dragged on the cigarettes, they slumped, they squashed the glow from the cigarettes into a filled ashtray.

There was the sound of a car on the gravel beyond the window, going slowly, as if feeling its way through the darkness of the storm night. The shorter man looked up. It might have been his training to have been aware of a stranger’s car. A local would have powered into the car park and snapped to a halt. For years he had been taught to be aware of what was out of place. No strangers came to a bar late on a bad night before the holiday season. His eyes seemed to clear. He looked past the head of the stag mounted above the wide fireplace with the fur manged at the neck, and past the smoke-darkened glass that protected the stuffed salmon that had been wild and caught thirty-eight years earlier and that encouraged the futile sportsmen who travelled up from London, and past the wide wing span of the preserved golden eagle which had lost most of its tail feathers at the party three New Year’s Eves back. He saw the turning lights between the moving drapes of the curtain.

The bigger man, the one with the whisky chasers, who called himself Rocky, muttered, ‘What you going to do?’

The shorter man swerved his eyeline back from the lit curtains. ‘Look for something else.’

Rocky snorted. He was from Glasgow. His accent was harsher than that of the men and women who had lived from birth in the cottages and bungalows beside the lock. ‘That’ll not be easy.’

‘I think I know that.’ He heard car doors slam shut, and then the sound of the car pulling away fast.

‘You’ll have another, ’course you will. Nothing to do but get pissed up . . .’

The shorter man nodded. He seemed not to care whether he had another drink or not. His nostrils wrinkled at the smell of dead fish and he wiped his tongue hard round the inside of his mouth to try to lose the taste of dead fish, without success. He was watching the door into the bar.

His training was always to watch a door for the entry of strangers, but the training was for a life that no longer existed.

Rocky lurched to his feet, noisily lifted up the empty glasses. ‘You’re a miserable sod, don’t you know . . . ?’

The shorter man watched the door.

It was seven days since they had left the Campeche quarter of the Old City of Havana. It would be their last place of calling, and if they were turned down again then they would be flying back to Cuba in failure. One of them, the one who led down the dark corridor of the hotel that ran past the reception to the door of the bar, slipped into his small wallet the receipt from the taxi driver. They were blank-faced, none of the three of them showed an expression of anticipation nor a fear of further failure. For each of them it had been a huge journey, beyond the limits of what they could have imagined before the funeral. They had gone the day after the burial of the man they had followed into exile so long before. And each of them, because they had been told it individually and then together by Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez, understood that they had been chosen for the mission of importance because older men, travelled men,
Ladinos
, had doubted the possibility of what they were charged to achieve, and wrung their hands and murmured the excuse and sidled away. The one who led, who spoke English the best, paused in front of the door that was marked ‘Bar’. They were each dressed in the same style, narrow shoes of thin black leather, white shirts and gaudy ties, and suits that seemed too large for their bodies. Each wore a wide-brimmed hat . . . They had flown from Cuba to Madrid, and been rejected. They had taken a second aircraft, sat stiff and belted in through gales and turbulence, to Frankfurt in Germany, gone to the address given them, and again been rejected. They had gone by coach to Louvain in Belgium and sat in an office that was decorated with photographs of smiling white men in combat uniform who carried machine guns and rifles and posed beside the bodies of dead black men, and again been rejected. They had taken a ferry boat across grey seas to England, and been sick before landfall, and had made their way to London, and been laughed at before they had again been rejected. Making their way out of the door of the London office they had been called back, and a name had been scribbled on a piece of paper and the name of a village and the name of a nearest town. They had thought, each of them, that after the rejection they had been played with by the broad-shouldered man with the paratroop emblems tattooed below the hair on his forearms.