Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  For the first time in his life, he felt useful. Enrolled. Engaged. People lived or died, ships with a thousand men on them survived or went down because they did or didn’t decipher and translate a Japanese message correctly. They could not teach the American brass how to fight night battles or how to use their radar or how to respond aggressively and fast to the chance to fire on a Japanese vessel. One of the admirals in the Pacific was always withdrawing to refuel his forces whenever an engagement loomed. Intelligence could only offer opportunities. They could warn the Marine pilots of impending raids, for those pilots were scrappers who took advantage of any chance they were given. Daniel felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life.

  He was like a man who has lost forty pounds and taken up systematic exercise looking at photographs of his former flabby self: he felt disgust. How could he have drifted along weakwilled and passive? He had been a child until he arrived here.

  At night he went home to the tiny apartment on the third floor. The pressure was less extreme this fall, except during battles. Enough new people had arrived so that they were divided into three watches, covering the entire twenty-four hours. Nonetheless, their hours of work reflected the level of crisis in the waters off Guadalcanal. When the fleets steamed off to refuel and repair and regroup, he went home at normal suppertime. During periods of heavy naval engagements, he worked through the night. Half a world away, day was night and night was day, but the volume of traffic overwhelmed them and they slogged on.

  Rodney was not the roommate of Daniel’s dreams. He was a tolerable-looking man who thought of himself as handsome, as he had been raised to believe everything about himself was perfect. He was tall and blond, his complexion pasty or beet red with the sun; he had rabbit teeth and watery eyes. Daniel found the observation of Rodney shaving almost more than he could take in the morning without cracking up. Rodney ogled himself. He drew up his chin and threw himself glances of arrogant hauteur, of smoldering passion, of frank approval.

  Rodney smoked a meerschaum pipe. During the week, he never drank, but when Saturday night arrived, he seemed to have the policy of continuing until he was maudlin. Daniel had never heard an opinion out of his mouth that he found interesting.

  Downstairs an apartment of girls moved in. One was dark, willowy and engaged, flashing a diamond the size of a pecan. One was a short brown-haired southern-sounding girl who made eyes at him on the stairs, but disappeared permanently before he had made serious contact. The third was a tall blond with a down-east twang who went swinging along the street with a walk he appreciated, fast, sexy, covering ground. She was not around much, but she had a charming wide-eyed smile. She told him her favorite brother was Navy too.

  “What happened to Dixie?” he asked her.

  “Gone abroad,” she said and did not pause to elaborate. She was off down the street running because she saw a cab stopping and if you had a need for a cab and a chance at one in Washington, you did not dally or stop to say your farewells.

  He expected a third roommate but none appeared. He learned when Down East went to work, contriving to walk to the bus with her. “Are you looking for someone else to move in?”

  “We wouldn’t have to look hard around here, would we? No. It’s a tiny place for two people—just like yours, I imagine—”

  “Why imagine? Come up and visit us. Borrow a cup of something.”

  “I don’t know,” said Down East with a flash of her cornflower blue eyes, “that you have anything that I need, Ensign.”

  “My name is Daniel. Daniel Balaban. What does the A. in front of Scott stand for?”

  “Abra. You’re from New York?” She waited for his nod. “I lived there. Actually I’ve only sublet my apartment, because after the war, I’m going back. It’s the only vital place.”

  “I liked Boston better. Boston and Shanghai.”

  That intrigued her. She raised a single eyebrow at him. Then the bus arrived, ending their conversation. On the overcrowded bus, Daniel thought, staring into the blond head tucked below his nose, sodomy would be easy but conversation impossible.

  Many new people arrived in the OP-20-G office from the two language schools and from other far reaches of the Navy, the universities and civilian life. Daniel, now made a lieutenant junior grade, supervised three yeomen and began a tentative affair with Ann Korobuso, hedged around with her prohibitions. She would not come to his apartment. With the anti-Japanese feeling endemic in Washington as well as the rest of the country, she did not like going out. She would only permit him to visit her at her apartment observing a list of precautions when her aunt, with whom she was living, was safely and surely out. She was always a little nervous.

  Ann was the offspring of a nisei father and a woman of Norwegian ancestry from Seattle, now divorced. Her father had been put in a camp in Missoula, Montana. Ann lived with her mother’s sister, who had a civil service job in the accounting office at State. Her aunt Elinor was kind to her, she said without conviction.

  He found her beautiful but reserved. Sadness clung to her like the sandal-wood perfume she used. He enjoyed her company, yet he enjoyed leaving her and escaping the sighs, the veiled glances, the enigmatic retreats. He knew that he either had to save her or offer her little indeed, and he opted for the latter. Her enthusiasms were those of an American woman her age, so that at times she reminded him of a blighted Judy. Only her exotic appearance and her knowledge of Japanese redeemed her from boring him, that and their ability to talk shop together. They tended to be on the same schedule and did not have to field questions from each other on what they were doing. Rodney was always having to break dates with women when a crisis arose, and his lame explanations never seemed to make amends.

  Ann read movie magazines, ladies’ magazines, serials about plucky women who made do. Her favorite author was one he had never heard of, a fluffhead named Annette Sinclair. Once he arrived to find Ann in tears. He was terrified that something had happened to injure or frighten her, that some new menace had stretched out to touch her father in the camp, her mother who was remarried with small children in Nome. All that had happened was that she had read one of Annette Sinclair’s dopey stories in which the man deeply wounded the woman who loved him, accusing her wrongfully of infidelity when she had only been trying to save his job.

  It was a very partial romance, perhaps encompassing two or three evenings of intimacy a month, then another couple of teatimes or polite suppers under the maiden aunt’s suspicious glances, lunches at a table in the cafeteria with other decoders and translators. If anyone else guessed their affair, they paid no attention. Ann never cast him obvious glances. She was too polite, too reserved, too shy to transgress against proper office demeanor. Often he forgot she was there. His work absorbed him.

  In the hall, on the way to the bus, he flirted with Abra Scott. He tried to figure out why she fascinated him. She was moderately pretty; Washington was jammed with girls just as pretty. Her features were too angular, her face a little too long for beauty.

  It was the way she held herself, the way she moved, that raised his temperature. She was what they called spirited, with a racy air that intrigued him. She seemed to be involved in her own adventure. He did not think of her as innocent, the way he thought of Ann as victim. Neither was she sultry or sluttish. He had the feeling that she did what she wanted, when she was sure she wanted it. Obviously she liked his company. If he was not downstairs when she arrived, she loitered to wait for him. Although she flirted with him and let him take her arm as they strolled to the bus, she would not see him. She would not come upstairs and only invited him in when her roommate needed help carrying a trunk.

  Several times when she was off to a party in a dress that left her arms bare, he noticed her smallpox vaccination scar, a rosy star in the flesh of her upper arm. Each time he wanted to touch it, to bring his mouth to it. Whenever he imagined being in bed with her, he remembered tha
t scar on the honey gold skin of her arm. All through the fall he associated a light ferny odor with her body, but one day she changed her perfume, and after that she wore a more distinctive musky floral.

  A number of mornings she did not show up at all. He learned not to wait, because he would be late, and she would not appear. He decided she had something going, although he could not figure out who the lucky guy was. The Army uniform, the sergeant, belonged to Susannah, the dark-haired roommate with the rock. Otherwise many young people came and went. They had occasional noisy farewell parties to which he and Rodney were sometimes invited.

  Both girls were working for the government, but he could not figure out who or what they were involved with. Like him, they volunteered no information. Some of the men who came to their parties were in uniform, but many were not. A lot of them seemed to be ex-academics. Sometimes Abra came home from wherever she worked at suppertime, and sometimes, like himself, she arrived much later or even in the middle of the night—and the same with the engaged woman, Susannah.

  Naval engagements and the Japanese buildup on Guadalcanal took them over completely at work. Even with all the new people, they could barely keep up with the flood of intelligence. It was crazy, he thought, how in this room in a former girls’ school in Washington they read messages from half a world away and told Marine pilots at Henderson Field when and where to bomb and warned the Navy that the Japanese were preparing to send a force against Guadalcanal and knew more accurately than the ships slugging it out in Ironbottom Sound with incredible losses exactly which Japanese ships had been hit badly enough to hurt them and which were only scratched. He felt sometimes as if he were up in the tower of an immense battleship. He liked that image. They were obsessed with the fighting, but they viewed it from the reverse side. He could still remember when Martins, who was following transmissions from the Shugai cried out, “Damn, they got us.” Then realized what he was saying. Because them was us, and us was the enemy. Daniel simply pretended not to hear, as had everyone else around them, because they understood. Watching the war through Japanese eyes, sometimes they passed over.

  Over in Africa, Allied forces had landed in Casablanca, but that fighting was unreal to Daniel, because he was not a part of it. He made a faint effort at following the rest of the war, but the fighting that engrossed him was Guadalcanal; there was little in the papers, intentionally he was sure, because of the high risk of failure, and yet he felt that was where the war was being won or lost and that the issue was up for grabs.

  One of the men who had requested a transfer out of the cryptanalysis division into field intelligence had been killed on Guadalcanal. He had been left wounded on a sandbar, where a fleeing marine had seen the Japanese bayonet him. Suddenly policy in the department changed because it occurred to the brass that guys like Daniel knew secrets that could change the war. If the Japanese had interrogated Cory instead of bayoneting him, would they now know about Purple and the other decrypts? Wouldn’t they have found out that the Americans were reading the naval codes? Wouldn’t they change all the ciphers to a completely different system?

  No one from the cryptanalysis section was to go into the front lines again, that was the new ruling. If Daniel had sometimes fantasized about what he would do in combat, now he knew his combat was to remain mental. What he carried in his head was a weapon the Navy was finally learning to value, knowledge worth a carrier or two.

  As he had learned in the Yenching Institute at Harvard that he had a brain, so he was learning here that he could be useful. He was beginning to trust himself. Now his earlier enthusiasms and attempts to escape the tedium of what was expected could be perceived, if he chose, as apprenticeship for what he was doing. And that was in the fullest and most honest use of that word, intelligence.

  JACQUELINE 4

  Roads of Paper

  11 novembre 1942

  Today the Germans poured across the border to the unoccupied zone, and now we are one country again, united miserably under total Nazi control. I wonder how Papa is—if he is well or ill, if he is free, if he has been caught, if he has been deported. Daniela and I sat up late tonight discussing the news. Now I am writing this in bed under the covers.

  We have two rooms in the XIe arrondissement, some blocks from the Jewish quarter. This is a French-born working-class sector, many Communists here and supposedly some resistance, although we have seen few signs of it aside from an occasional slogan on a wall or a creative defacement of one of the endless posters telling us of executions, reprisals and new laws hemming us about ever more tightly.

  Maman and Rivka are in Drancy, reachable by train if I was permitted in through the Gare du Nord nearby. I can sometimes get a food package to them and we are able occasionally to pass messages in and out with M. Tiefelbrun of the General Union of French Jews, the GFIU, who tries to act as liaison between those inside and those outside.

  Daniela and I both have good false identification. I was easy to outfit, because as they say, I can pass. I took on the identity of a young woman who died in a bus accident. Her name was Jacqueline, which makes it easy for me. I am now Jacqueline Porell. She is a year older than I am—or than I was, perhaps I should say.

  Daniela’s papers say Paula Guerlain. If we keep her hair very short, it does not curl as much. Daniela is very dear to me. Without her friendship and her guidance, I would never have survived this long. I think after Maman and Rivka were arrested, I would have given up and walked into a dragnet. For a Jew to survive, you have to want to all of the time; that is not sufficient, because you also need papers and money and friends and luck, above all, luck. But without that hard-glinting, ever-wary willpower, we have no hope of survival. Eyes in the back of the head, Daniela says. Eyes on stalks. Ears perked forward and back.

  Daniela is shorter than I am and much darker. I took after Papa more than Maman, which right now is lucky. Daniela’s hair is naturally kinky, dark brown. She has enormous wide-set very dark eyes with lashes she could paint with, a strong nose, a strong chin and a large sensual mouth. Her figure is much fuller than mine, although she is not at all plump. She is strong as a little horse. Even on our dreadful rations, she can run up the six flights to our room and barely be out of breath at the top, while I am dragging myself up and puffing. She was studying to be a doctor and is now working as a nurse.

  We work in a hospital ten blocks away. There we have managed to disappear a number of Jews by pronouncing them dead. We have a little conspiracy of a doctor, several nurses and orderlies. We kill people on paper and then bring them to life under new names. We use the hospital facilities to counterfeit papers. Antoine Moussat—who used to be a professor at the Ecole des Etudes Orientales and was involved in our short-lived school—does the counterfeiting.

  Besides our occasional work passing people through the hospital, the other task Daniela and I have taken on is to distribute some of the beautifully fabricated papers Moussat produces. We change the identities of up to three people a week. Some are rare individuals who escaped from a camp; others are simply Jews or Resistance people needing to be somebody else. We can hand out a complete sheaf of identity cards: birth certificates, work permits, certificates for repatriated prisoners, baptismal records.

  The hard cases are when we need papers that will cover people obviously not French-born, and then we have to search the prewar issues of the Journal Official for names of naturalized non-Jews. My friend Céleste, who is not even Jewish, does this work. She is forever in the libraries doing research for us so that we have good identities. Then if the police call a mairie to check on a suspect’s identity, the records confirm it. Since her beating, Céleste has been committed to defying the Nazis.

  Handing over the cards is always touchy, because that is the likeliest time for us to get caught. One of us goes and the other watches from a safe distance. We take turns, Daniela and I. Are we scared? Of course. But we are illegal beings anyhow. We might as well do what we can, because our chances are not good even if we sit
still. At least this way we feel we are striking back.

  I do ask myself why I do this, and the answer is, to make amends to Maman and Rivka. I often wish I could see just one member of my family again, although best would be all of them. I wonder how Naomi is doing in the U.S. I hope they do not mock her because she speaks English so poorly. I’ll bet now that she wishes she had studied and not played around so much when she should have been practicing grammar and conversation. Neither of the twins were scholars. I always enjoyed excelling at school, but they never cared, although I think they are probably bright, or perhaps I just expect them to be bright because they are my sisters. I don’t care anymore if they are bright or stupid, I only wish I had them back.

  My own English is kept up because Daniela has a little radio we listen to under the quilts every night. Of course it is illegal—illegal for us to have a radio at all, for they insisted all Jews turn in our radios months ago, and illegal to listen to the BBC at any time—but just about everybody who has a functioning radio does it. We huddle under all the quilts and listen to the broadcasts in French but also to those in English. Daniela and I live in a state of anxiety that a tube will burn out and we will be cut off from our oxygen supply, real news of what is happening outside France—and even inside, sometimes.

  I love Daniela the way, I believe, the twins loved each other, as if she is my sister, my other self. Without her, I would have given up and perished. When she is the one to make the delivery of false IDs, I hate it. I cannot lose anybody else. I prefer when I am the one. I am not as terrified then, although my heart beats fast. I have imagined being arrested so many times that it feels almost boring. At first I could think of nothing else but the danger. A roaring filled my head till I could scarcely catch my breath. Now except for the accelerated heartbeat in my throat, my wrists, my chest, I remain cool and observant.