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sidled up to him and spoke in a low voice: “If clearing a space two hundred meters by fifty meters costs most of a regiment …”
    “Oh, shut up,” Fujita exclaimed. He tried to blow a smoke ring.
    SPAIN WAS MISERABLY hot in summer and miserably cold in winter. Coming as he did from New York City, Chaim Weinberg had reckoned himself a connoisseur of both extremes. He had to admit, though, that Spain went further in both directions than his home town.
    Spain seemed to go all-out in everything. American politics matched one side of the center against the other, and endlessly played the game of compromise solution. Communists like Chaim couldn’t get a serious hearing there. And so he’d come to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to do what he could for the left-wing Republic against Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, who held more than half of it.
    He’d sweltered. He’d frozen, the way he was freezing now. He’d argued in English, in Yiddish that often did duty for German, and in bad Spanish. The Republic ran on argument no less than on gasoline and high explosives. He’d learned to drink wine from a leather sack and to roll his own smokes. He’d killed. He’d been wounded. He’d got laid. If you were an excitable young man who hadn’t done most of those things before (sweltering, freezing, and arguing came naturally), Spain could look a lot like paradise.
    But if this was paradise, it needed rebuilding. Sanjurjo’s men, and the Italian and German mercenaries who fought on their side, had done their best to knock Madrid flat. Their best was good, but not good enough. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Hardly any windows were glazed. Craters in streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere in town an adventure.
    Chaim didn’t care. The Madrileños carried on as if the war were a million miles away: as well as they could when going hungry or huddling in a cellar while bombs rained down didn’t distract them. If thewine reminded him of vinegar or piss, if the cigarettes tasted of hay or horseshit or other street scrapings, well, so what? You could still get drunk. Whatever else went into the cigarettes, they had enough tobacco so you didn’t think you’d quit.
    And the people … Everybody called everyone else
tu
. The formal
Usted
hadn’t been banned in the Republic, but anyone who used it might get sent off for reeducation. Women acted like men, in the shops, in the streets, and in bed. Yes, Chaim had got laid. If you couldn’t get laid in the Spanish Republic, you weren’t half trying.
    Prisoners from the other side who were brought into Madrid had to think they’d landed on Mars. Where the Republic jumped on class and sex distinctions with both feet, under the Fascist regime they got enforced more strongly than ever. Enforcing the ruling class’s dominance was what Fascism was all about.
    Almost by accident, Chaim had got the job of reindoctrinating those prisoners. His Spanish still wasn’t the best, but it did the job—and if he was fluent in any part of the language, it was Marxist-Leninist jargon. Besides, Spaniards were absurdly respectful of foreigners. The Fascists even respected Italians, for crying out loud! Prisoners assumed an American had to be a political sophisticate. Chaim knew better, but didn’t let on that he did.
    The POW camp was in a park near the center of Madrid. When enemy planes came over at night, they dropped their bombs more or less at random. They bombed their own people, too. Sometimes they blasted the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. That led to escapes: POWs on the loose in Madrid weren’t much shabbier than anybody else, and looked, acted, and sounded like any other Spaniards. It also led to casualties.
    Chaim still wasn’t sure whether Joaquin Delgadillo, a man he’d captured himself, was the one or the other. Delgadillo wasn’t in the camp any more. Chaim knew that. But whether the Spaniard had got away after a bombing run or been blasted into