and soon after we were in the railroad station in Barcelona. A brief stay in the Karl Marx
Barracks and we were off for Albacete, and thence to the training town of Tarazona de la
Mancha.
Note: Schultz drowned, trapped beneath the deck. John Kozar was said to have swum
ashore with a pound of coffee in a paper bag in his teeth. In World War II he shipped out
on the Murmansk run, was torpedoed again, and froze to death in a lifeboat. (A.0.)
from Our Fight: Writings by the Veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936-1939. Copyright ? 1987 by the Veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Mart?n Espada
"The Carpenter Swam to Spain"
For Abe Osheroff
and the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
The ship hushed the waves to sleep at midnight:
Ciudad de Barcelona, Ciudad de Barceloniz.
In the name of the aristocrat strolling through his garden
Franco’s tanks crawled like a plague of smoldering beetles;
in the name of the bishop and his cathedrals
the firing squads sang a stuttering mass with smoke in their throats;
in the name of the exiled king and blueshirts on the march
bombers with swastika fins sowed an inferno
in village market places and the ribs of the dead.
At Guernica an ancient woman in black stumbled
across a corpse and clawed her hair;
at V?znar, where the spring bubbles, a poet in white shoes
coughed the bullets’ blood onto his white shirt,
gypsy sobbing in the cave of his mouth.
Ciudad de Barcelona: The ship plowed the ocean,
and the ocean was a wheatfield of bread.
And the faces at the portholes thinking: Spain.
In Espa?a, the carpenters and miners kneeled with rifles
behind a barricade of killed horses,
the peasant boys cradled grenades like pomegranates
to fling against the plague of tanks, the hive of helmets.
Elsewhere across the earth, thousands more laid hammers
in toolboxes, holstered drills, promised letters home,
and crowded onto ships for Spain:
volunteers for the Republic, congregation of berets,
fedoras and fist-salutes for the camera, cigarettes and union songs.
The handle of the hammer became the stock of the rifle.
The ship called Ciudad de Barcelona steamed
across the thumping tide, hull bearded with foam,
the body of Spain slumbering on the horizon.
Another carpenter read the newspapers
by the tunnel-light of the subway in Brooklyn.
Abe Osheroff sailed for Spain. Because Franco’s mustache
was stiff as a paintbrush with his cousins’ blood:
because Hitler’s iron maw would be a bulldozer,
heaving a downpour of cadavers into common graves.
The ship of volunteers was Ciudad de Barcelona,
Abe the carpenter among them, and for them
the word Barcelona tingled like the aftertaste of a kiss.
Two miles from shore, they saw the prop plane hover
as if a spectre from the last war,
the pilot’s hand jab untranslated warning.
Then the thud, a heart kicking in spasm,
the breastbone of the ship punctured
by a torpedo from Mussolini’s submarine.
In seven minutes, the ship called Ciudad de Barcelona
tilted and slid into the gushing sea, at every porthole a face trapped,
mouth round and silent like the porthole.
Eighty mouths round in the high note of silence.
Schultz, captain of the Brooklyn College swim team,
pinned below deck and drowned, his champion’s breaststroke flailing.
Other hands that could swim burst through the wave-walls
and reached for the hands that could not. The boats
of a fishing village crystallized from the foam,
a fleet of saints with salt glistening in their beards,
blankets and rum on the shore.
Abe swam two miles to Spain,
made trowels of his hands
to cleave the thickening water.
His fingers learned the rifle’s trigger
as they knew the hammer’s claw.
At Fuentes de Ebro, armageddon
babbled and wailed above the trenches;
when he bled there, an ocean of shipwreck
surged through his body. Today, his white beard
is a garland of clouds and sea-foam,
and he remembers Schultz, the swimmer.
Now, for Abe, I tap these words
like a telegraph operator with news of survivors:
Ciudad de Barcelona, Ciudad de Barcelona.
Reprinted from The Volunteer for Liberty (1998)
374