The Communist's Daughter Read Free

should think. He offered the two visitors a limp hand, the very portrait of the noble Iberian. I believe Kajsa’s Spanish surprised him. The way it held his attention was unusual, though I suspect her beauty may have had something to do with that. He was a little man with black, slicked-back hair. In fact he looked a bit like photographs of the Andalusian poet García Lorca. Appearances being shallow, however, Dr. Calebras certainly did not possess the great artist’s sense of poetic fraternity and political idealism.

    â€œDo you have an average travel time,” the woman asked, “based on your trips up to the Guadarrama Pass?” I now presumed your mother was another journalist, asking a question like that.

    They called for a second interview the following morning, and after some persuading I agreed. It was mid-evening when I arrived at the Cervecería Alemana. It was my first break in eighteen hours. I could have worked another eighteen and still left things unfinished. Kajsa was standing at the bar with Pitcairn and leafing through a Spanish newspaper. She was more beautiful than she had seemed the day before. She wore the same jacket but different trousers, I think. She pushed her thick bangs back over the top of her head, folded her newspaper under her arm and greeted me with a handshake. Pitcairn slapped my back and thanked me for making time for him.

    They began by having me describe my day, which had begun with a visit to half a dozen basement hospitals. Then came meetings with officials from the Ministry of War regarding supplies, I said, that were rarely available. I had performed three surgeries that day as well, and spent three hours on blood collection and storage.

    When I finished speaking I turned to Kajsa. “You’re with the
Daily Worker,
I take it?”

    â€œOh, I tried my hand at writing when I was a student,” she said. “I’ve got more sense in my head now.”

    â€œGood sense and ideals,” I said, “don’t often go hand in hand.”

    She said she was with the
Mujeres Libres,
the Free Women of Spain. This was an organization of anarchist women that helped get prostitutes off the streets. They pulled them up from their misery and found them honourable work in the textile industry or in the city orphanages. The bombing raids made sure there were always lots of motherless children for the reformed ladies of the night to take care of. “From a life of hell to a life of helping,” she said. She’d been studying in London but left university when she saw how pointless it was when compared with the real issue. When I asked what she considered this to be, she said, without a pause, “Nihilism. A passion for destruction.”

    â€œI see you have read Turgenev,” I said.

    â€œWould you both please stop?” Pitcairn said. “We’re not dead yet. So let’s forget about gloom and doom and the class struggle, shall we? I’m a bit done with the revolution for tonight.”

    Soon after exiting the café we found a long, narrow street lined with bars and anaemic plane trees that barely reached past the first balcony of the adjacent buildings. This was Huertas Street. I think your mother called it “charming,” or something along those lines, and it was. In a tavern called Casa Alberto I drank my first glass of absinthe. It was green and turned milky white when the water was added. I didn’t like it much. “Go on,” she said. Its taste and effects seemed terrifically overrated. I drank another, impatiently. Your mother, who wasn’t a drinker, told me to send it back when I said it tasted more like formaldehyde than liquor, but it wasn’t that bad and I drank it anyway.

    All the bars were busy. It was close to midnight. I was feeling the alcohol by now. The street seemed to be moving in slow motion. Groups of people were singing, chanting in deep, low voices, marching up and down