Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

His family disapproved of his infatuation with things Chinese. His father, his mother and his sister Judy had lived in China like a family of cats standing on a log in a brook, keeping dry, keeping out of the world flowing past. Daniel planned to rejoin his uncle Nat, who loved China as he did. That was his consuming fantasy.

  He fell in love with a Trotskyist and tried very hard to be one too, because her body was silky and she had a rich sexy laugh and a good hard mind he enjoyed striking ideas against. She did not enjoy the arguing as much as he did, and gave him up for someone whose politics were stronger and whose lust appeared just as strong. He was learning that love for him was like fireworks, heat and light but little damage. His lust did not diminish, although his infatuation often did. He fell in love with trivial things, a laugh, a turn of leg, a smile; no wonder that interest dissipated quickly.

  He made friends with his cousin Seymour, a year older and a Communist who tried to recruit him. “You’re a dilettante,” Seymour told him. “Nothing moves you or everything moves you.”

  Mr. Pao thought that was a reasonable way to be. “True goodness is like water. Water helps the ten thousand things without itself striving. Water flows down into the low places men despise, for water is in the Way,” Pao quoted from the Tao Te Ching.

  Daniel did not know if he truly wanted to remain so watery. He imagined wondrous passions that would obsess him for longer than two weeks. Only the wife of the doctor had sustained his interest, but she was reported to have run off with an Englishman who had been supposed to be an agent but who turned out to be a conman, leaving huge debts. Uncle Nat’s letters were full of disasters of incomprehensible proportions, bodies falling like leaves to make the bloodiest of compost as the war went on and on. The Japanese now controlled Shanghai. Uncle Nat described a last contingent of a thousand Polish Jews straggling in to safety. Many refugees were stuck in Shanghai, which required no visa, no passport, no papers, no certificate of rectitude or of past or present splendor. The war was impoverishing them all, Nat reported. Soon he would only be a yang kueitze, the insulting term for a penniless foreigner.

  In Hongkew, Uncle Nat wrote, amid the wrecks of bombed buildings and rubble fields, there was a chamber orchestra, several theaters and an ongoing war of cultural snobbery between the Jews of Vienna and the Jews of Berlin. Daniel was nostalgic. His parents sang the litany of how smart they had been to leave. Only his teacher Pao Chi shared Daniel’s fascination with what was going on in China.

  Daniel worked as an usher in a local theater. Summers he waited on tables in the Catskills. The only time his obsession encroached on his university life was when he was asked to address the Progressive Club about the situation in China. His speech was not a success, for his confidence, often leonine one on one, vanished when he saw those bland anonymous faces. After graduation, the only job he could find was serving subpoenas.

  Still he felt that his rotten speech had paid off when his economics professor gave his name to someone in the Navy, who called in the spring of 1941 to ask him if he might not be interested in a special crash course in Japanese being mounted at Harvard that summer. The Navy was training Japanese-language officers. Most of the students would already know some Japanese but others, like himself, were being recruited for their knowledge of Chinese. Daniel privately thought that was an example of white stupidity, because although the written languages shared many characters, the spoken languages had not as much relationship as Norwegian and Italian. Their assumption rested on a typical American attitude that if you knew one of those funny heathen languages, what was the problem learning another?

  Since he could not rejoin his uncle, this sounded more interesting than the only other option he saw, which was to go on serving subpoenas for his father’s pinochle buddy. He felt as if he were personally oppressing every petty criminal and wayward spouse and luckless witness and suspected bookie on whom he served papers. Twice the servee had taken a swing at him.

  So, on to Harvard. For a City College boy, it would be a look at how the top five percent lived. His parents bubbled joy. Judy was marrying a nice Jewish dentist, Haskel was finishing medical school, and now their boy was going to Harvard. He knew that a crash course at the Yenching Institute was not exactly going to Harvard, but it beat pounding the pavements of the Bronx looking for people who hoped he would not find them.

  His days at Harvard were pleasant. He started in the elementary class, but once he had his teeth into Japanese, he moved up rapidly. He drove his roommates crazy by insisting on speaking Japanese from the time he woke until he fell asleep. By October he was progressing markedly and had been moved ahead. He took long walks along the Charles, across Cambridge, into Mount Auburn cemetery. Sunday night he ate Chinese in Boston with buddies from the program, showing off by ordering from the menu in Chinese. Many of the restaurants were Cantonese, of course, which he could not speak. Someday he would learn: after the war in China, when he could return.

  Still if he could not go to China, Boston would do. His roommate mocked him for preferring Boston to New York, but New York to him did not mean Manhattan, but the lower reaches of the Bronx. His attention centered on the demanding and intense classes. He worked hours too long for romance. Although he looked with sharp and frustrated interest after the Radcliffe girls on their bicycles, he found his life civilized and realized he was happy. Finally something besides an infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.

  JACQUELINE 1

  In Pursuit of the Adolescent Universal

  14 mai 1939

  Marie Charlotte is definitely my best and dearest friend, and the only person in the world in whom I dare confide my most secret thoughts and wishes. Suzanne has proved her perfidy, and I shall never, never be foolish enough to trust her again. I am ashamed of myself for being such an idiot as to tell her about that little conversation with Philippe in the Musée Carnavalet. Who would have imagined she would have gone straight to him and begun saying in that loud vulgar voice of hers so that everyone could hear it, I hear that Jacqueline is your dear friend, your girlfriend now.

  I am the unluckiest seventeen-year-old in my entire deuxième classe at lycée Victor Hugo. Marie Charlotte has only one younger sister making her life miserable, but I have two: double trouble, twins, and completely wicked. I count my blessings that Maman is not vulgar and would never dress the twins in those disgusting identical dresses. In fact Maman is always careful to give each different clothing, but the little beasts think it is funny to try to confuse people. Today Renée went out in Nadine’s sweater and skirt, and Nadine wore Renée’s, and the little beasts thought it was amusing to pretend to be each other all day long. They communicate by grunts like savages or dogs and sometimes I swear by telepathy.

  Maman simply refuses to understand that it is humiliating to have to haul those brats along to the park or to the cinema. They are forever pulling pranks and dashing around like the worst tomboys and skinning their knees and laughing, very loudly. In addition they call each other Rivka and Naomi, such embarrassing ghetto names I could smack them. Saturday Maman made me take them along when I went to L’Etoile with Suzanne (that slut) and my dear Marie Charlotte. During the scene where Gabrielle falls into the arms of her lover, François, those wretches smacked their lips and giggled. I was humiliated. I will not go out to the cinema if it means taking the twins along, and I am going to make that clear to Maman! Sometimes when Marie Charlotte and I sit on our special bench in the little park Georges Cain near our lycée, the little beasts sneak up on us to listen.

  I believe in the universal, not the accidental particular. Being born in this house on the rue du Roi de Sicile (which name I have to admit I still derive an irrational pleasure from inscribing, for its incongruously romantic sound), in the IVe arrondissement near the Métro stop St. Paul, is simply a matter of coincidence and has no lasting importance. Similarly that I am called one thing—Jacqueline Lévy-Monot—rather than Marie Charlotte Lepellier has no real significance. I want to
find what is true, lasting and universal in human life, rather than sitting in my little corner repeating to myself some few phrases of so-called popular wisdom as silly as any other superstition, as Maman does, saying, “Nor a shteyn zol zayn aleyn,” only a stone should stay alone, as if we were not crammed in together. The labels we apply to one another keep us from penetrating to the truth, and we must rip them off our own eyes as well as banishing them from our view of others. The parochial mind is the greatest obstacle to progress, I believe, and I wrote an essay to that effect which won second prize, a Petit Larousse dictionary which I employ every day.

  I strive with that romantic weakness in me, for instance that likes the name of our narrow street, which is after all a dingy thoroughfare of some antiquity but little architectural merit, lined with shops and businesses such as the furriers where Maman works with little overcrowded flats like ours piled above. On our ground floor is a kosher butcher. The street of the King of Sicily indeed, where the old stone entrance halls dark as little mine shafts stink of urine, where machinery roars and sewing machines whir day and night. The King of Sicily must have had run-down heels and patched his coats as Maman does ours.

  How will I ever survive the desert of time that stretches out before me bleak and endless till I shall be on my own as an adult and not have to explain myself morning, noon and night to my family? A family is an accidental construct, a group of people brought together by chance and forced to cohabit in insufficient space. If it were not for my tiny room on the top floor, a floor up from our flat, I would suffocate!

  15 septembre 1939

  We have been at war for two weeks, but life does not seem all that different. Everywhere royal blue blackout material is going up, in case we are bombed. Maman worries that Papa will be called up. I have embarked on the première classe in my lycée, Victor Hugo. I have two students I am tutoring after school, immigrants whose French is poor, one sweet ten- and one fat eleven-year-old who can sleep with her eyes wide open. No one has ever awakened that brain, which is encased in her head like a turtle basking in the sun. I intend to open its shell! The ten-year-old is my cousin, Maman tells me as if announcing a great dessert, although I lean over backward to show no favoritism from such a quirk of randomly tossed genes. From Kozienice, Maman says, with absurd excitement: some dusty town in Poland where Maman happened to be born, a mistake she was intelligent enough to rectify by moving to France at sixteen. Aunt Batya looks older than Maman though she is the next youngest sister, dowdy as a peasant.

  Sometimes I feel called to be a teacher, because I have the gift, and I believe it is as much a gift as that of acting, which I believe I also truly possess. Maman tells me that all young girls want to be actresses because they imagine it is glamorous. I know that to assume a different character is hard work. Maman imagines that I am more naive than I am. Both gifts require understanding others and both require a species of humility. Maman thinks that it is egoism that makes me want to be an actress, but I see it as a kind of self-abnegation, wherein my own personality is subsumed under the character of Bérénice, Phèdre, Juliet.

  To teach literature is in a way also to enact it. Both gifts interact and complement each other, but I suspect that having two gifts is as bad as having none. Maman said something cruel to me when I spoke to her about my doubts about pursuing the vocation that I feel. She said I took being pretty far too seriously. Since then I have embarked on a discipline intended to prove at least to myself how mistaken she is in her estimate of my seriousness. I have refrained from looking in the mirror all week. When I comb my hair, I shut my eyes and do it by touch. No one in the family has noticed my new discipline, but that is perfect with me, as I am sure if I explained, I would be mocked for my efforts.

  I never understand what people mean by calling me pretty, for when I look into my eyes I see despair, exaltation, joy, pity, an intense probing curiosity, compassion, an aloof questioning spirit; chaos and struggle. Marie Charlotte is pretty. Hers is a calm pure nature in which certain ideas come to rest and she is content with them, as I am content with the furniture in my little room under the eaves. But I think my face is as changeable as my soul. Perhaps only through acting can I reveal those depths and heights, those tempests that rage invisibly, shaking me profoundly. When others call me pretty, they believe they are flattering me, but I feel diminished, invisible behind the mask that they and not I create.

  21 février 1940

  Papa has been called up, and we are all shaken. He is very cheerful and says not to worry, that it is just like going away to camp. It is true that being at war has been peaceful so far and I think the sensationalistic reporting of the early weeks has faded away before the reality of modern war, which seems mostly a matter of arguing and sitting. The terrible icy weather continues, the harshest winter I can remember, as if nature were mourning our idiocy in this long farcical drôle de guerre.

  I have felt estranged from Papa in recent times, but now I wish that we communicated better. Our differences are in reality a matter of Papa choosing to limit himself culturally, while I am trying to expand. I don’t think we have ever forgiven each other for the fight about the Farband picnic last summer. I know I was right, but perhaps I stated the matter too baldly. After all I have nothing in common with a bunch of gawky plain lifers simply because they’re Jewish. Being Jewish is a matter of accident too. I was born Jewish, but what does that mean? As a religion, I find it absurd. As dietary laws, archaic! I am told those Polish refugees the Balabans from Kozienice are my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, but I cannot even communicate with them about the simplest matters, about tables and chairs, let alone about my ideas, my feelings or my aspirations.

  I don’t understand Papa’s involvement in Poale Zion. The notion of all of us picking up and moving to the Orient to become date farmers is a fantasy I cannot take seriously for five minutes. Papa has always been a Socialist, but he has been involved in the folly of Zionism for the last two years. I suspect he will come home from the army without that baggage. He needs more contact with intelligent Frenchmen who discuss modern ideas. His intelligence is greater than can possibly be used in his factory work, and therefore his thinking tends to become undisciplined.

  Papa has great energy, which is sometimes wonderful and sometimes embarrassing. I still do not know if I admire him or not for what happened last fall, when we were waiting in the crowd for the mairie to open its doors and when it did not happen for twenty minutes, everyone was still waiting and grumbling. And Papa just walked up to the head of the line and pushed the doors open. They were unlocked all the time!

  Nonetheless for him to talk about meeting boys “of my own kind” struck me as vulgar and tasteless, as well as insensitive to who I really am. I do not understand what some future tractor driver can possibly want to say to me or what Papa imagines I would have in common with him. It’s one of those monomaniac obsessions. Sometimes when Papa and his copain Georges are together, all they can talk about is who is Jewish. It reminds me of that slut Suzanne after she slept with her equally vulgar boyfriend, walking down the street and speculating who’s a virgin and who isn’t.

  Maman is very frightened and will need a great deal of soothing and comforting, I can see. The twins bawl and cling. I feel like the only one in the house with a cool head!

  16 juin 1940

  Really, the Germans are here and it is no massacre or bloodbath, although they have made us put the clocks forward an hour so we are on German time. It has been quiet, orderly, scarcely a shot fired and everyone feels a little stunned. I saw some well-dressed people cheering the German troops as they marched past. They seem clean and well behaved on the whole. I think our fear has been pumped up by the newspapers which have nothing else to do but try to create sensationalism. I am sure Maman is ashamed of having sent the twins south to Orléans with her boss M. Cariot.

  I am committed to seeking out the universal, because only in that way can we rise rigorously out of the slough of the accidental particular
. I find patriotism not only a refuge of scoundrels but of idiots and those who like to buy their thinking ready made each morning in the vacuous newspapers. Every decade or so governments create wars and whip up a frenzy, so that we will not notice the shortcomings of our own side and will not question the assumptions of our society and demand more rational institutions and laws. I am sure that the Germans aside from speaking another language will turn out to be different from us mostly as we are different from one another, as individuals. We are two countries side by side that seem to have nothing better to do than to invade one another every few years, butchering a great many young men and tearing up the countryside in the process. I suppose what we would discover if we had the courage to examine reality instead of repeating old clichés, is that the Germans are people like ourselves who are good, bad, indifferent in the same measure as we ourselves are.

  If only we knew where Papa is, we would probably be quite calm. I was crossing the rue de Rivoli this afternoon and I bumped into a German soldier in the crowd, a lieutenant, I believe. He touched his cap and smiled at me and stepped back out of the way—not at all the brutes dashing out babies’ brains we have been led to expect. So much for the enemy being fiends. There has been no raping or looting I have heard of. The gendarmes are back on the street and the stores are opening up again.

  29 juillet 1940

  Papa is back! First the twins, and then him. He escaped from the POW camp where he was being held. He said that they were beginning to sort out the Jews from the others, although I think that is just their obsession with purity and schemata. They like everybody in neat pigeonholes. He was working on the garbage detail when he escaped from the camp and threw away his uniform. I hope he does not get in trouble from his impetuousness. He wanted to come home, but they say that soon the Germans will release all the prisoners of war anyhow.