Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Is he married, honey child?” Karen Sue asked. It was always her first question.

  “I never get involved with anyone in my field. I have an exogamous personality.” She had got to use her line after all.

  “Then what do you talk about?” Djika asked scornfully. For the last two years, she had been enjoying an unhappy but fulfilling affair with a married professor, Stanley Beaupere. Although Abra was chary with details, Djika pressed upon both of them the exact words of Stanley Beaupere, demanding full intellectual attention and analysis. As his marriage unraveled, its seamier side was picked stitch by stitch for Djika’s audience of two.

  Djika was a refugee from Danzig, although it was hard to think of her as such. While Djika viewed herself as living almost in squalor, she actually lived more poshly than Abra, if less poshly than Karen Sue. Djika combined fervent Catholicism and fervent socialism, the former shared, the latter unshared with her family.

  Djika was bright, and Abra valued her for that hard European-educated intelligence that seemed at once more pointed and broader-based than Abra was used to among her colleagues; she also found it a great convenience to be friendly with the only other woman in her department. At least she had someone to slip off to the ladies’ room with. She had met Karen Sue at political parties, gradually realizing that she was the hostess. Not only did Karen Sue seem to grasp everything about clothes, designer, cut and fabric, but she was the only woman Abra knew who read The Wall Street Journal every morning, speculated in stocks and bonds and seemed to understand what she was doing. The contrast between Karen Sue’s fluffy belle airs and her financial acumen amused Abra, who admired expertise per se. She had even enjoyed listening to John talk about lobstering, until she had asked all the more interesting questions.

  She thought several times of telling Karen Sue and Djika about her proposal, but each time she did not speak. Why? She did not care to introduce the subject of Hank’s anti-Semitism. She really had to get along with Djika, and she had her suspicions about Djika’s attitudes. She also did not feel as if it would be in good taste to mock Hank, who after all had meant to do her an honor, however she had perceived the proposal. On consideration, it became her to keep her Sunday to herself.

  Abra’s first impression of Oscar Kahan was that he was smaller than she remembered from the conference, that he seemed to occupy more space than he did because of his energy. As he rose to shake her hand, his palm was firm and hot to the touch, his skin ruddy, hair curling on the back of his hands.

  “We’re conducting a series of interviews with refugees who were active in the unions or active politically in Europe. Your German is adequate?”

  “Adequate is the word for it.”

  “We’ll try it out. What I want is someone to interview the women. Some of the questions I’m interested in having answered are personal, and I suspect we’ll get further with a woman asking them.”

  “May I ask why you aren’t hiring a refugee to do the interviews? Look, I’m delighted you’re willing to give me a try …”

  He gave much more impression of having a body than did her own Professor Blumenthal, tall, built like an umbrella bent at the end. Of medium height with a bit of a paunch, Oscar Kahan was broad shouldered. His hair was abundant, thick and curly, worn a little long. He grinned at her, shrewdly, she thought. “A good point. But any refugee who could interview them knowingly would also have a position. It’s an intricate situation politically, and I don’t want someone who thinks they know the answers asking the questions. I want a naive questioner—relatively, I mean. Innocent is perhaps more like it—innocent of activity and opinions in the maze of German parties before and after the onset of the Third Reich.”

  He wore a red tie pulled awry as if someone had begun strangling him with it. His jacket was good Irish tweed, but looked as if he were carrying half a library and his lunch in the pockets. She decided she would ask Djika for any gossip about her new employer. She found herself frankly curious, looking into the glittering dark eyes, even darker than the hair. “When shall I get started?”

  “Now. Today. What I want you to do is read through these notes on interviewing procedures, and then come back to me with your questions.” He pointed to his anteroom. “Read out there and bang on my door when you’re ready.”

  Two students were sitting outside, eager young men. They gave her the baleful glare of those kept waiting for the object of their desire. Through the door of his inner office she heard the brisk cadences of his voice, deep, clear, pushed a bit as he spoke with the first. The remaining student was joined by another. They eyed her jealously from time to time, because she looked as if she belonged. The door opened, the student inside was ushered out, flushed and still jabbering earnestly over his shoulder.

  As she read through the notes he had given her, clear, well organized, exciting even as guidelines to the interviews she would be doing, the students came and went, male and female, tall and short, well and poorly dressed, all passionate, avid for their hero’s time. On every one he focused that beam of attention momentarily, making them feel bright, fascinating. These were his regular office hours. He gave himself to each in turn and then thrust them out into the cold boring world. They stumbled away, still engrossed in the conversation that continued in their heads, where they captured his attention not for five minutes, not for ten, but permanently. Abra understood. She was intrigued herself. It would all be more amusing than she had suspected.

  NAOMI 1

  Naomi/Nadine Is Only Half

  The boots hit the pavement in cadence. Maman held Rivka in the doorway against the wall, so that she could not see. When she started to protest, Maman shushed her harshly, holding her pressed to the cold stone. Through a grille a concierge stared at them with hostile beady eyes, a toad in a cage waiting to be fed flies. “Get out, you don’t belong here,” the concierge called to them. “We don’t want your kind pushing in here.”

  Maman ignored the concierge, still holding Rivka hard against the cold stone of the wall. Still the boots clacked by, making the pavement rattle like a kettledrum.

  When Naomi woke, she heard Ruthie stirring in her sleep in the bunk under her with soft grunts. Boston Blackie was sprawled sleeping across her feet, for she had enticed him up the past months from Ruthie’s bed. She heard the furnace laboring in the basement underneath, Uncle Morris shoveling coal, the hot air rising with a whoosh as the heat began. Then she clambered down to stand over the hot air register, her icy clothes laid out last night. She would warm her underwear, her pleated plaid skirt and long socks and white blouse and red cardigan sweater, her oxfords: new clothes Aunt Rose had taken her to buy downtown at Sam’s Cutrate Department Store where Ruthie worked. Different clothes than she would have worn at home.

  If she woke too quickly—if there was a loud bang outside, a truck backfiring, the garbagemen clanging cans—then she woke in a panic in the dark and did not know where she was and she might cry out in French, “Maman, qui est là? Maman, tu es ici? Rivka!” But she could always feel that Rivka was not there. At home they had slept all their lives in a three-quarter bed in the alcove off the salle à manger, a bed which folded into a divan. Rivka was always curled into her side. If one of them woke in the night and padded off down the corridor to the WC, then the other would tiptoe after. Now when she woke, she clutched the cat to her.

  The first nights here in the house of her aunt and uncle in Detroit back in June, she had fallen out of the upper bunk, because she had kept rolling over in the dark trying to find her twin. Everyone here, they met her and they saw only her, but she knew better. She was only half. In the night sometimes she felt her other half. She knew by now not to say that to anyone, even her good cousin Ruthie, whom she called aunt for respect and affection, who would comfort her, who would coddle her, but who would not understand. She was already too strange. She was fighting hard to fit in.

  She was growing used to the sounds of the night here. It was a noisy, nervous night, a skin that cou
ld never quite form. In Paris maybe night had used to be like that, but she remembered too the quiet dangerous time when the city was emptied of traffic, which had never really returned. All the people rich enough to own autos jumped in them and drove away from the German army. All over her neighborhood you could hear dogs and pigeons. Then she and Rivka had been sent away with Maman’s boss, the furrier, in his car south away from the Germans into a massive jam of cars and wagons, to be shot at by the planes.

  Naomi never spoke French anymore, except to Boston Blackie when they were alone. Then he purred. She felt as if all sorts of old rags that had been good dresses and scraps of paper that had been precious books and fragments of broken crockery that had been the dishes with the yellow and blue flowers they ate on daily, all floated in her loose. They thought her slow at school. She would look at the thing she was tying on her foot and first would come the French chaussure, and then would come the Yiddish shich, and her mind would spin in emptiness and then finally if she were lucky would come the English, shoe, oxford.

  At first the kids had made fun of her because the English she did speak was the wrong kind. She said ahnt for ant and bahth for bath, but not three times. She imitated. She tried hard and often missed, but she was grateful. The Siegals had taken her in, which meant less for them. Someday her papa would appear and carry her off and take her back to Maman and Rivka and her older sister Jacqueline. Papa had a motorbike, and that was how she saw him coming, roaring and sputtering through the streets of Detroit.

  She had three first names now. She had always had two, Naomi at home, her Hebrew name, and Nadine at school and on her papers. The way her new family pronounced Naomi made it into a new name: Nay-oh-me, but here she could use her Hebrew name everywhere. Now she must say her last name was Siegal, rather than Lévy-Monot, for she was supposed to be adopted, but Papa had said that was just a formality to fool the immigration and she would always be his daughter. Siegal was what her papers said, just the same as Ruthie Siegal, Uncle Morris Siegal, Aunt Rose Siegal, and her other cousins, Duvey and Arty. All papers now were lies. That was how you crossed borders. If you were a Jew, you could never tell your real name except to another Jew, and often not even then. Naomi knew she must work hard every day imitating, so that no one would notice she was a refugee.

  Papa was in the south—not what they meant here when Uncle Morris said rich Jews went South for the winter. That meant Florida. She did not believe there were any rich Jews. She had heard of them, but never had she met any. All the Jews of her Paris neighborhood worked in small factories, in small shops. They worked for furriers or in dress shops or as tailors or bookbinders; they sold leather goods or yard goods or fish. The closest was Papa’s older brother Uncle Hercule who owned a restaurant in Alsace, until the Germans came and took it from him. The Germans had invaded and the strong French army she had learned about in school, the great Maginot Line, had gone away like a line on paper erased, and Papa had been kept a prisoner.

  South really meant to Naomi the light, the scents, the heat of Provence. August they used to go to Fréjus, near the Mediterranean, where there was a little pension with bougainvillea growing over the terrace where they had their breakfast, Maman, Papa, Rivka, who in the world was called Renée, and her. Yakova, who insisted on being called Jacqueline even at home, would still be sleeping. Everyone always said first about Jacqueline that she was pretty and second that she was sensitive, but Rivka and Naomi thought she was mostly a pain. She and Rivka loved the way the bees crawled in the flowers, but toward the end of breakfast they got impatient. Maman and Papa always dawdled on vacations, les grandes vacances. Rivka said the bees sang because flowers tasted like ice cream to them. The ice cream in the south was better than the ice cream in Paris, and on vacation they always had ice cream. Even Jacqueline liked ice cream. She said love should be like ice cream, but she didn’t think it would be.

  Ruthie was stirring below her. Her slender legs poked out, feeling for the fuzzy battered slippers she called mules. Pulling around her the plaid flannel robe a size too small, she crossed the room and peeked around the shade to look at the weather, tucking her hands into the opposite sleeves. All Naomi could see of her was the robe pulled tight around her full high buttocks and the dark hair half hidden behind the shade. From her moan, Naomi thought the weather must displease her. “It snows?” she asked.

  “Is it snowing?” Ruthie corrected patiently, smiling over her shoulder. “Anyhow, tsatskeleh, it is. Do you know how to make a snowman?”

  Naomi was already wriggling down. It was darker in December back home in Paris, but here it snowed far more. Once at home the snow had been four inches deep. Papa had taken them to the park Les Buttes Chaumont and helped Rivka and her to build a fort. “Will you show me?” Thinking about the park with its artificial mountain in the middle and the high exciting bridges to it, over the water and with a view past the trees of the apartment houses around, the waterfall she and Rivka could walk under and the waffle vendors and the carousel made her want to cry.

  “It’ll be too dark after I get home. This weekend. If the snow sticks that long, and it looks as if it’s going to this time.”

  Ruthie worked at Sam’s downtown in better dresses, $3.98 and up, so she got clothes at discount. Ruthie had taken college preparatory in high school, hoping there would be money, and slowly she was taking evening classes at Wayne, going there on the Woodward trolley four nights a week. Ruthie had also studied typing and stenography all through high school, but she could not get an office job. Only Jewish firms would hire Jews, and there weren’t many Jewish businesses looking for young secretaries. Naomi had heard Ruthie tell Arty that she considered putting down Protestant on the applications, but she figured they could tell by her name or her appearance. Besides they would figure it out when she took the holidays off.

  In the kitchen Aunt Rose had made oatmeal, set over a pot of hot water to keep warm. Uncle Morris had eaten earlier and gone off to the Chevrolet plant. Duvey was still sleeping. The Great Lakes were closed now to shipping and he was laid off. He worked the ore boats. Her other cousin Arty ate breakfast in the upstairs flat with his wife and their two little children, but everybody ate supper together.

  Their wooden house seemed large to Naomi, so that at first she had thought they must be rich, her American family; the apartment of the Lévy-Monot family in Paris was only three rooms, aside from the salle de bains and the WC: the tiny kitchen, the big salle à manger where the girls slept at night, which also served as a living room, and their parents’ bedroom. Jacqueline had used to sleep in the salle à manger too, but Maman had arranged to rent one of the former servants’ rooms on the top floor under the eaves for Jacqueline when she turned fifteen.

  Here the Siegals shared a two-story wooden house with a porch out front and an additional covered stairway with little porches in the rear, onto the alley. The house had been built behind another house, wooden too and three stories tall with a little yard between, hers to play in with Sandy Rosenthal from the bottom-floor flat in the big house and Sandy’s little brother Roy. A big elm tree loomed overhead like a whole forest. She had never had a tree of her own before. The nearest trees at home were in a little park near the lycée where Jacqueline had gone.

  Here nothing was tall unless they went downtown, where there were very high buildings called skyscrapers, high as the Eiffel Tower but solid. At home almost every apartment building was six or seven stories tall. Here the buildings were any size at all, as if they had all grown to different heights like people, but most had only two or three stories. People seemed to build however they felt like it, different kinds of houses, of wood even, like theirs. At first Detroit had felt like a makeshift toy town, houses that might suddenly fall down.

  That made her think, as she ate her oatmeal with brown sugar, about how when her parents had talked of Madrid falling she had imagined an earthquake. She had seen an earthquake in an American film, with the words in French at the bottom, that Papa had taken
her to see, but he had ordered her not to read the words, so that Rivka and she could practice their English. She had thought the walls would fall, but by the time Paris had fallen, she was ten and a half and knew better. As she ate, Boston Blackie sat beside her chair hoping for a handout. He would eat anything, even oatmeal.

  “Mama,” Ruthie was saying, “you can’t go out in the snow. You’ll just make yourself sick wandering all over.”

  Aunt Rose was a round woman, plumper than Maman and years older, one of the four sisters from Kozienice, Poland. Her hair was still a patent leather black, but her face was seamed like a prune. Uncle Morris had come over when he was twelve and everyone said he spoke just as if he had been born in America, but Aunt Rose, who had not come to the United States till she was eighteen, spoke with an accent that gave her away. She had a low rich voice that Naomi loved, when Rose was not shouting, that made her think of rich winter desserts. Clove, chocolate, cinnamon.

  “I am just going to the Farmer’s Market to see what’s special today. Two little rides on the trolley. It’s Wednesday, the hard middle of the work week. I thought a piece beef for gedempte flaish, at least a stew.”

  “Mama, do me a favor. Buy the meat at the corner.”

  “At the corner is two cents more every pound.”

  “Mama, today in the snow, go to the corner. Please. For me.”

  “Sure,” Aunt Rose said, passing her hand over the head of her only daughter. Naomi knew that Aunt Rose would wait till Ruthie had taken the Woodward Avenue trolley to work and then she would go off herself with her shopping bags to find as much as she could for what money she had. “Don’t forget to take the nice lunch I packed for you.”

  Naomi put the very last of her oatmeal down for the cat, who ate it rapidly and quietly under her chair. They understood each other well.