Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  This hiding place is less safe than it might seem, because the woman’s husband is a collaborator, whom we are to avoid at all costs. She has warned us about him. However, he is living in town with his mistress, she says, and pretty much leaves her alone. The house is a large rambling, partly XVIe, partly XVIIIe century sandstone pile, mostly closed off. The only men here are the grooms, others having been taken for labor in Germany. She is running the house with an old cook and a young maid, working in the gardens herself.

  Last night, she had us in the house to supper, saying that she was sure he was not going to show up suddenly. We sat in the kitchen and ate a large leek and potato soup and a salad from her garden. “You can’t trust the grooms. You mustn’t let them catch sight of you or hear you.”

  Daniela cast a look at the old cook, who was beating eggs at the other end of the vast kitchen. The woman noticed the look. “Oh, Denise lost a son to the Germans. She hates them. You’re safe with her.”

  “And the girl, Jeanne?”

  “Her mother is Jewish,” the woman said. “As am I.”

  She is probably in her midthirties, with that crow-black hair you read about more than you see, a fine clear creamy complexion, dark almond eyes, high cheekbones. She seems a woman accustomed to being admired, to being stared at, although she wears old clothes. In the daytime often her skirt is draggled with mud. Her hands are covered with small scratches and cuts and her nails are short. Daniela asked her, “Madame, are you, were you, an actress?”

  “Never. Until this war.” She laughed, softly. “You may call me Gloria. We ought to be on a first-name basis.”

  “Did you grow up speaking French?” Daniela asked.

  “I was born in the United States. I still have dual citizenship, for whatever good that may do me, which is nil.”

  “Oh, madame, I mean, Gloria, why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” Daniela asked, her eyes wide. I could see her thinking that if she had had that option for escape, she would have seized it. Daniela’s family had tried very hard to emigrate, but they lacked the credentials or funds to get into the few countries that would take Jews.

  Gloria laughed sharply. “To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me until several weeks after the Germans had arrived. After all, I had a French family, my life had been here for many years.”

  “You didn’t think of yourself as Jewish?”

  Gloria smiled wryly. “Not really.”

  “Do you now?”

  “It has become a fact. Only fools ignore facts. But what do I think of myself as, most? Angry, my dear, very angry.”

  I was not saying much, but I was thinking a great deal as we sat at the table. It was seductively comfortable in the big old kitchen. Since the raids that caught at least half our little cell, we have been running and hiding, running and hiding. Here we are relatively safe. We hope to receive new identification papers soon. We had three nasty terrifying weeks of sleeping in garbage bins, in an abandoned warehouse overrun by rats, before we were able to make contact with another group.

  When she speaks about not identifying as a Jew, I hear myself. I do not think that has really changed for this woman, but for me it has. Daniela feels thoroughly and proudly Jewish. It is part of her bones and also something she has affirmed, claimed, while for me it is something I have backed into, something I had thrust upon me. It is the same way I used to feel when I was discussing philosophy or literature with some fellow student, and suddenly he would put his hand on my knee, or put his arm around me. I would be saying, I, I think, I am a thinking spirit, and he would be saying, you, you body, you female body. It is not that I dislike my body, female as it is, but that was not how I was experiencing myself. Similarly, I considered being born in a Jewish family as a contingent peripheral part of my being, not part of my essence. Now it defines me. How can I come to master, to own, that definition?

  Hearing Gloria speak, I felt I was learning something troubling to me. If I am to be myself, entire, authentic, I must find a way of being Jewish that is mine. I must find an affirmation in this identity, as Papa and Daniela have. Now I understand his obsession. I understand him better and I understand Maman also, as I never did. If only I could tell each of them how much more fully I could love them now. I could give them, not the dutiful, selfish and perfunctory love of an adolescent, but an understanding love that would lighten their terrible burdens.

  I saw that both Daniela and Gloria were looking at me. Gloria smiled, that slight smile with the eyes burning she has, and touched my arm very lightly. “You’re exhausted, aren’t you? It must be monstrous to have to pick up one day and run, leaving your life, leaving everything you possess.”

  Then the phone rang and she was called. I kept thinking about what she had said, and at first I pondered class differences, how little I had to leave in the way of possessions. I do not even dare carry photographs of my family, for fear if I am taken, reprisal might be made. Then I started to think about our old flat on the rue du Roi de Sicile, and suddenly I was swept by fierce nostalgia for my little room up under the eaves, for the old teapot from Poland, for the dishes with their nosegays in blue on which we ate every day, for the sea gull café au lait bowls.

  When she came back, she looked imperturbable but said firmly, “Tomorrow my husband is coming. You’ll have to stay upstairs in the stables all the time he’s here and remain very, very quiet.”

  “You can depend on us,” Daniela said, and I nodded.

  “I don’t expect him to spend the night, but I can never be sure. If he didn’t stable his racehorses here when they’re not off at Longchamp or some other track, he probably wouldn’t bother visiting at all. But we must put up with him.”

  “It’s thoughtful of him to call before he comes.”

  “He must, if he wants dinner prepared and the house ready. We live simply here. He wants a luncheon for twelve tomorrow, so it suits him to let me know.” She smiled again, that faint quiver of the lips. “If he doesn’t call, someone else lets me know, so don’t trouble yourselves that he may suddenly descend.”

  The servants address her as Madame, but the grooms called her Madame la Baronne. We do not think we are the first people who have hidden here. Everything is too practiced, too prepared. The floor of our room over the stables is muffled with piles of old blankets and mattresses. The windows are blacked out. Ropes hang from the ceiling so that if you walk around in the dark, you know when you are approaching the stairs, and do not fall noisily and painfully down the open well.

  Also I heard the girl Jeanne giggling about a flier, till cook shushed her. The second night we slept here, I said to Daniela when we lay in the dark on the bed made up for us with a goosedown comforter, that I thought this was a stop on some underground railroad, and she agreed at once.

  Gloria and maid Jeanne came out to the stables with us when we went up to bed, carrying a jug of water, a bottle of wine, bread, fruit and cheese for tomorrow. Gloria showed us a hole where we can kneel on the bed and look out facing the house, while once again warning us to be absolutely still until we are told that he and his party have gone. Fervently we promised we would even breathe softly.

  “I wonder if anybody else got away,” I said, as one of us asks daily.

  “We may not know for years. That’s what it’s like nowadays,” Daniela said. “One day you see a friend and the next day they’re gone, as if they never had been. You don’t know if they were killed, if they went underground, if they were picked up and are being tortured. Unless you see that face again, you never know.”

  “I had so many plans, ambitions, ideas, Daniela. I thought that was what I was. Now my ambition is to survive.”

  “We have done better than that. We will again.”

  We stayed up talking, as we had so often in our old flat. Why do I feel safe? I just figured out it has to do with the feather bed in which we are sleeping. In our family flat, I always slept in a feather bed. Maman had three big beautiful ones from her own mother. I am
told when I was very little, I met Maman’s mother, on her way from Poland to the U.S. I have tried lately to remember her. The year the war began here, she died in that distant country, in the house where my sister Naomi now lives.

  Daniela knows a great deal about her family on both sides, telling me long tales as we hide about great-grandparents and aunts and uncles. I can barely list my mother Chava’s three sisters: her older sister Rose, who has taken Naomi in; her younger sister Batya Balaban, who was arrested in Paris with her entire family; the youngest sister Esther, only seven years older than me, who married another Balaban brother, the one with the mill, and lives still in Kozienice. Of my father’s family, from Alsace, I have some early memories, but they perished in a fire when I was ten and only Uncle Hercule survived, who had a restaurant till the Germans confiscated it. It strikes me how little interested in my family I was. Maman told tales, but the twins listened, not me.

  When we were hiding in the warehouse full of rats with the rain dripping on us, I felt glad for Naomi in that far, safe city. The more that comes to us down the pipeline about what is going on in the east, the less I can genuinely hope for Maman and Rivka. Sometimes I think that they cannot really kill the children. But I know better. Many people who did not raise their voices to object to anything done to Jews did seem a tiny bit upset at the deportation of the little ones, but Pierre Laval, who cannot stoop low enough to please himself when it comes to satisfying the Germans, said that he wanted the Jewish children out.

  As for Papa, I have not had word of him in a year. I do not know if he is alive, dead, in a camp or in prison. As for me, my chances are those of the others who run. Taking an active role, I have already survived dozens of those sweeps we call raffles, in which thousands of others have been taken, and survived even the arrest of my cell. I would prefer to be shot rather than perish in one of those camps, if I had a choice which I won’t. When I am realistic, when I am silent and talking only to myself and this journal, I say that my family will go on, but only because Naomi is safe.

  30 mai 1943

  After I had got in bed and was half asleep last night, suddenly Daniela whispered, “Do you trust her?”

  “Gloria, la baronne? Yes,” I said. “She doesn’t have to do this. She isn’t doing it for the money. She isn’t taking any, from them or from us.”

  “I find her cold.”

  “I think she runs on anger, now.”

  “A rich lady like that, she must have thought the war could not touch her. Married to a rich aristocrat.”

  “But, Daniela, none of us expected the war to land on us the way it has. We expected some trouble, but it’s beyond imagining. At your most paranoid, did you conceive we would be treated like cockroaches to be exterminated? Squashed underfoot? I don’t think I ever considered the power and the force of hatred as something that could wipe out the whole world, before these past few years.”

  Daniela was quiet for so long I almost fell asleep, before she said, “I used to think about love all the time, never about hatred. I detested those who were rude or nasty to me, I despised those I thought bigoted. But I never hated anyone, and I never imagined anyone would hate me.”

  “Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we’re not human. We’re not Daniela and Jacqueline. They don’t hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.”

  “If it’s not a personal hate, it’ll do. It kills us just as dead.”

  1ier juin 1943

  Early yesterday morning, we heard the grooms downstairs. Late in the morning, many voices, some speaking French, some speaking German, rose. We did not dare whisper or move. In such situations, inevitably some part of my body begins to itch until that is all I can think about, an itch of my nose or my scalp or my foot or my behind that fills my entire consciousness. They were laughing and jolly, admiring the horses and teasing about some horse on which two of them had placed bets. That was all in French.

  I know minimal German, but Daniela can understand some of it, from knowing Yiddish. She said later that in German they were joking about Gloria and some other woman—probably the mistress.

  After the stables emptied and we could look out the window, for a long time we did not see anything. In the afternoon, however, Gloria came out of the house with the party. She wore a black and white wasp-waist dress cut fashionably, I suppose. At any rate, it was elaborate and she looked distant and beautiful. If I had not heard her voice and seen her black hair, I would not have known her for the same woman. She looked like a high-fashion model, a creature molded of ivory and jet and marble. I could not really associate that image with the woman digging spring turnips and hoeing weeds, the woman who sat in the kitchen with us.

  The Germans were all in uniform. One man wore a Waffen SS uniform, but when he spoke, we knew he was French. That chilled me to the bone. Imagine a Frenchman, who might have been my neighbor, my teacher or my dentist, wearing the uniform of death. I kept fearing they could look up and see us at the peephole, but no one glanced in our direction. I knew we were not visible if they did, but I could not help but feel vulnerable. All day we kept to our featherbed, with the chamberpot beside us and the bread and fruit in bed. We would like to place the chamberpot farther away, as by now it has a bad smell, but we do not dare walk about. We have neither of us managed to get used to the stench, and that it is ours does not make it any easier, frankly.

  Toward evening they left for Paris, followed by a truck carrying one of the horses and a groom. Everything quieted. We got up cautiously and stretched our legs. We didn’t hear from Gloria. After a while we heard a car arriving and quickly we lay down again and were still. Much later we heard the car leave.

  In the morning still no one came to us. We saw Gloria, the cook, the maid and the other two grooms go off moderately dressed up. They drove an old-fashioned open carriage pulled by two of the horses who work on the farm, not the racehorses. They pull the manure wagon, and now, I guess, they serve as local transportation.

  We had eaten all the food, so we were very hungry by the time that Gloria and the other women came back. The grooms did not return with them, and the girl Jeanne came skipping to the stable to tell us we could come to the big house to eat.

  “We always go to church,” Gloria said, “all of us. It’s a good idea and we learn the local gossip. It’s a convenient way to communicate. Here are your new papers. I have by policy not examined them, so you should check them yourselves.”

  “Are we to move on soon?” Daniela asked.

  “Unless I hear otherwise, Tuesday night you are to walk out of here down to the main road and there a car will pick you up.”

  They know I want to go south, where Papa was last heard from, that we both want to be active and useful again. We don’t want only to hide but to join some other cell or network. We’ve been here long enough, both Daniela and I agree on that. We have recovered our strength. We are well fed and rested and ready to be on our way. This is only being in storage.

  “It must be hard on you, dealing with those German officers and the Waffen SS man,” I said. “Isn’t it dangerous too?”

  “They never consider this other than a pleasant place to visit, admire the horses and eat well-prepared French country cooking. They think they are liberal to eat at the table of a French-Jewish baroness, very liberal. They are amused, and my husband is extremely useful to them. The ones who will not sit at the table with me don’t visit him here. He has a blond mistress in the city who speaks German with the most charming lisp, I am told.”

  “How can you control yourself around them?” Daniela asked.

  “If I don’t, I won’t last a week. I am servile and silent. I set a sumptuous table and keep the wine flowing and stay out of the way—when they let me. They don’t always.”

  We both wanted to ask who returned last night, but we did not dare. It is none of our business, just as the condition of the papers she has just handed
over to us is none of hers. She will not learn our new names any more than she learned our old names. This precaution protects everyone.

  7 juin 1943

  I am writing this by flashlight in a shed we share with farm implements, many mice and one overworked grey cat, who is asleep beside me.

  Tuesday midnight we stood on the road carrying our small bundles of a change of underwear, our identity papers and bread and cheese. When we heard the engine, we hid in the bushes until the darkened car stopped and from inside came a whistle, the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. We scrambled out of the ditch into the car, whose inside light had also been turned off.

  “So, so,” said a male voice from the front seat once we were huddled in back, “hello, ladies. You’re bound for Limoges, eh? We can’t get that far tonight. We’ll drive till morning and then you have to pedal. We give you the routes, but you provide the muscles, eh, ladies? Good, good. Now, you know what I have for you? Chocolate. Real chocolate. A little piece for each of you.”

  Each of us carefully hid our chocolate away. We were not hungry Tuesday night, but soon we will be again, we know that. We thanked the cheerful man’s voice fervently. We never saw his face. We slept in the back of the car. Just after dawn, he left us at a crossroads, with a hand-drawn map we were to memorize and then destroy. We found the bicycles leaning against the fence of the last house in the town, just as he had told us we would. Daniela got on one and I got on the other and we set off.

  Shortly after noon, it began to rain. It rained on us for the next three days. Soon we were sneezing and running low-grade fevers, but we were making the distance each day we have to make from safe house to safe house. Finally Saturday the rain diminished and we were able to dry out a little.