The Foreign Correspondent Read Online Free PDF Page A

Weisz and McGrath got out and stood by the car. In the hard wind that blew down from the mountains, there was not a sound to be heard. McGrath took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her shirttail, squinting as she watched the column. “Dear God,” she said.
    “You’ve seen it before,” Weisz said.
    “Yes, I’ve seen it.”
    Sandoval spread a map across the hood. “If we go back a few miles,” he said, “we can go around it.”
    “Where does this road go?” McGrath said.
    “To Barcelona,” Sandoval said. “To the coast.”
    Weisz reached for a pad and pencil. By late morning, the sky had closed in, with low gray cloud above the high plain, and a ribbon of road that wound across it, wound east, toward Barcelona.
      
    The censor, in Castelldans, didn’t like it. He was an army major, tall and thin, with the face of an ascetic. He sat at a table in the back of what had been the post office, not far from the wireless/telegraph equipment and the clerk who operated it. “Why do you do this?” he said. His English was precise, he had once been a teacher. “Can you not say, ‘moving to reposition’?”
    “An army in retreat,” Weisz said, “is what I saw.”
    “It does not help us.”
    “I know,” Weisz said. “But it is so.”
    The major read back through the story, a few pages covered in penciled block print. “Your English is very good,” he said.
    “Thank you, sir.”
    “Tell me, Señor Weisz, can you not simply write about our Italian volunteers, and the colonel? The column you describe has been replaced, the line is still being held at the Segre.”
    “The column is part of the story, Major. It must be reported.”
    The major handed it back, and nodded toward the waiting clerk. “You may send it as it is,” he said to Weisz. “And then you may deal with your conscience in whatever way suits you.”
      
    26 December. Weisz sat back against the faded plush seat in a first-class compartment as the train chugged slowly past the outskirts of Barcelona. They would be at the border crossing in Port Bou in a few hours, then France. Weisz had the window seat, across from him a pensive child, next to his mother and father, a fastidious little man in a dark suit, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. Next to Weisz, an older daughter, wearing a wedding ring, though no husband was to be seen, and a heavy woman with gray hair, perhaps an aunt. A silent family, pale, shaken, leaving home, likely forever.
    This little man had apparently followed his principles, was either an ally of the Republican government or one of its minor officials. He had the look of a minor official. But now he had to get out while he could, the flight had begun, and what awaited him in France was, if he was unlucky, a refugee camp—barracks, barbed wire—or, if his luck held, penury. To avoid train sickness, the mother reached into a crumpled paper bag and, from time to time, dispensed a lemon drop to each member of the family; the small economies had begun.
    Glancing at the compartment across the aisle, Weisz could see Boutillon, of the Communist daily L’Humanité, and Chisholm, of the Christian Science Monitor, sharing sandwiches and a bottle of red wine. Weisz turned to the window and stared out at the gray-green brush that grew at the edge of the track.
    The Spanish major had been right about his English: it was good. After finishing secondary school at a private academy in Trieste, he’d gone off to the Scuola Normale —founded by Napoleon, in imitation of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and very much the cradle of prime ministers and philosophers—at the University of Pisa, probably the most prestigious university in Italy. Where he’d studied political economics. The Scuola Normale was not particularly his choice, but, rather, had been ordained at birth. By Herr Doktor Professor Helmut Weisz, the eminent ethnologist, and Weisz’s father, in that order. And then, according to plan, he’d entered