Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  The glass in the street made her think of Kristallnacht, one of the only German words she knew because Papa had explained what that meant, a word that sounded like fairyland but meant only people beating up on Jews and breaking their windows. Would that start here? Or were colored people the local Jews, the ones they picked out to beat up when they got excited and started running around in the streets?

  She was impatient to ask Ruthie, who would explain everything, but she would not see Ruthie until very early tomorrow morning, unless she snuck out of bed when Ruthie came in at eleven-thirty. Sandy just repeated rumors. Four Eyes was taking advantage of the fear to say dirty things. She wished she could talk some more to Clotilde who, being a foreigner like herself, looked at things with different eyes.

  When it was Naomi’s turn to read, she could hardly focus on the words. She became aware she had been thinking in French again, and she could not remember how to pronounce the squiggles on the page. As she was struggling to read, suddenly she became aware of a murmur around her and that Miss Cahootie had stopped frowning at her.

  She peeked cautiously from behind the book. In the doorway a woman stood whom she identified without hesitation as Clotilde’s mother, because she did not look like any of the other colored women Naomi had seen. Like Clotilde she was tall and straight and wore a little gold cross, with her hair up in a bright kerchief. She was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt, like Ruthie had worn at the department store, and she was standing diffidently just inside the classroom door, motioning to Clotilde. “I’ve come to take my daughter home.”

  Miss Cahootie did not ask her if there were a family emergency or how she could take her daughter out of school. She simply stood aside as Clotilde’s mama took her arm and then motioned to Lizzie White to come along too. “I told your mama I’d bring you along home till she can get off work, my child.”

  The other colored children forlornly watched Lizzie and Clotilde prepare to leave. Then little Janie McDougall, who was the tiniest girl in the whole eighth grade class, ran after Clotilde’s mother. “Mrs. Dumoullet, can I go with you too? Please? My mama’s in the foundry working. She gets off at four, and I wouldn’t need no lunch.”

  Clotilde’s mother motioned her along. “You come along too. We don’t want to worry your mother.”

  “Naomi, you were reading. Why did you stop?” Miss Cahootie glared. Not five minutes passed when Four Eyes Rosovsky’s father loomed at the door, still with his butcher’s apron on. “I need my son today.”

  By ten o’clock half the class was gone. When Sandy’s mother appeared, Sandy whispered to Naomi, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll take you too.”

  She felt unreal leaving school at fifteen after ten with Mrs. Rosenthal, carrying the lunch not eaten and the homework not handed in. As they walked, a car full of white youths passed them and screamed at them to get off the streets, because the niggers were coming. Then a car with a colored couple passed, and some older kids on the corner began throwing rocks. One of them broke the side window into streamers of glass. They could hear sirens, sirens, and the air smelled of smoke.

  Morris did not get home at three-twenty, the way he always did. Aunt Rose was pacing, praying aloud in Yiddish. She had tried to keep Ruthie from going to work, but Ruthie had insisted she had to go. She said nothing was wrong down at Wayne, the white and colored students in class today as always, and no incidents. Now they were both out there, in the sea of smoke and violence.

  Uncle Morris finally walked in at five-thirty. He cut short Rose’s passionate upbraiding. “We had a meeting to discuss what the union can do. Then the police put up a roadblock we had to drive around.”

  “I was worried sick!”

  “We have to respond. There was that Packard hate strike not ten days ago. All those worker preachers are stirring up the men. There’s been fighting in Inkster.”

  “And at the Edgewood,” Naomi chimed in. Alvin had told her about goyim and black gangs fighting over control of the amusement park.

  “We voted not to close the plant. We can’t let it happen. Most of our Negroes stayed out today. They’re scared, and I understand. White hoodlums are beating up Negroes all over the city.”

  “Why not close it down?” Rose wrung her hands. “Stay home with us till it’s all over.”

  “We don’t want to make it worse than it is. Better those rednecks should go to work and do something useful, than run around the city looking for people they can abuse. Down in the crowds on Woodward, Gerald L. K. Smith’s Cross and Sword is being sold with their Jewish conspiracy headlines and some of the local Klan offshoots are handing out down-with-the-Jews leaflets.”

  Naomi felt as if she were pretending to help with supper, pretending to iron the yellow dress, pretending to help take down the wash from the backyard lines. She was huddled far into her body with her hands drawn up to hide her face so that she would not see. She said to herself, it does not concern me. It is the special madness of the goyim and the colored of this place, who tear at each other. All people want to be blaming someone, for the weather, for the war, for the lack of money, for the Black Death, as Papa had told her, killing Jews because of germs that rats spread. Somewhere people must be safe. Which people?

  She envied Clotilde her mother who rushed to carry her home to safety. Everyone in the school could see who was really loved. If it were not for Mrs. Rosenthal, she would have stayed in school all day. At the end of the day she was sure a handful of kids were still there whom no one had cared enough to fetch. She would have been among them.

  When Aunt Rose sent her to the bakery to get a loaf of rye bread, she met Alvin and he told her that they had had an easy day. At one the principal had decided to close the school. Those who wanted to stay till their parents came to fetch them could wait in the girls’ gym. The gym teacher offered to stay till the last kid was safely picked up.

  Alvin was embarrassed because nobody had come for him, but she felt as if she was just as abandoned, because if Sandy had not spoken to her mother, she would have sat there herself. Alvin explained his mother had been working and then she had been too scared to come out, but they both knew his mother was pretty useless, acting like a kid herself chasing after soldiers and partying with them.

  They were standing on the corner talking when they saw a bunch of guys chasing a colored man down the sidewalk. “That’s Mr. Bates,” Naomi said, grabbing Alvin’s arm. “From school.”

  “No sir.” Then Alvin craned for a better view. “Shit, you’re right.”

  They did not know the young men, high school age or older, who were chasing Mr. Bates. Then they caught him. One tripped him. He caught hold of the lamppost to keep from falling. Then he turned to face the pack, holding up his hands in a show of harmlessness, but they closed around him. One hit him in the belly and another started bashing his head against the lamppost. Mrs. Fenniman in the bakery began to scream that she was calling the police, but the boys did not run off until Mr. Bates lay on the sidewalk with blood all over his head. Even then one turned back to give him a final kick in the ribs.

  Naomi made herself walk forward. Alvin followed her. “Is he dead? Did they kill him?”

  Mr. Bates was always carrying out the trash at school to the incinerator and cutting the weeds in the schoolyard. He would whistle hymns while he was working. He called all the girls Missy and all the boys Bo. Now he lay on the sidewalk looking broken, fearfully hurt and bleeding. Naomi was terrified but she knelt to examine him. “He’s breathing.”

  People had made a detour around the gang and now around the body. Mrs. Fenniman from the bakery came out. “The police don’t pay any attention or help. The poor man. I’ll call an ambulance. Help me pick him up.”

  Alvin said, “If somebody’s knocked out, I don’t think you’re supposed to move him.”

  “Bubkes,” the woman snorted. “We should leave him in the street to be stepped on?” She spat, glaring at the passersby. “If I dropped dead in the street, I know who would step
on me. Come on, you’re a starker, you can help me get him up.”

  Mr. Bates was groaning now. Blood ran all over his face and his hair was matted with blood and dirt. Between them, they carried him into the bakery, where the bakery woman brought him a chair to sit in. His lids fluttered. When he opened his eyes, he winced back when he saw white faces. “Mr. Bates,” Naomi said hesitantly, “you know me from school. Mrs. Fenniman is calling an ambulance.”

  “They won’t take us at the hospital. How bad am I hurt, Missy?” He pawed at his face, stirred but could not rise.

  Mr. Fenniman came to the door of the salesroom from the back. Naomi got him to show her where the sink was and a clean dishtowel. She wiped the blood off Mr. Bates’s face. He was badly beaten, but the worst wound was in his scalp. Alvin, who was hanging back warily, peered at the cut. “You’re going to need stitches.”

  Mrs. Fenniman said, “I haven’t been able to get an ambulance. They’re all out, but they took the address. Can we call anyone for you?”

  Then Naomi remembered. “Please, a loaf dark rye, my aunt Mrs. Rose Siegal sent me to get.” She counted the coins out of her pocket.

  When she left the bakery, Alvin was waiting for her in the next doorway. He took the loaf to carry it. “Everybody’s crazy. Wow! We better not even tell anybody we helped a shvartzer, even Mr. Bates.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “He’s a nice man and he works hard.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like that? Them just beating on him?”

  “Yes.” Naomi walked more slowly. “But it wasn’t colored people they were beating.”

  That night she could not sleep for a long time. The air was hot and filthy and damp. She imagined lying underwater. She imagined being a fish. But fish were always being eaten. She imagined being a tree, a tall strong tree, but trees were chopped down. She imagined being a polar bear. That was good. She was alone in a wilderness of ice. She did not mind being hungry, because she was huge, strong and alone.

  The hunger was the worst. She thought about food all the time except when she was in pain from a beating or dreaming about escape, through the electrified fence where the bodies hung, past the towers, across the plain. They were never alone, always with hundreds of others standing, running, picking up rocks and running more, pushing to get at the ditch latrine, pushing to get the watery soup, pushing for space on a dirty wooden slab. To be alone with Maman was the only pleasure, sometimes accomplished on a Sunday afternoon briefly behind their barracks. She was standing outside. On her arm, a spindly grey twig covered with sores, dirty and disgusting as a run-over alley cat dying in the gutter, the ash came down, the black oily ash she hated to smell and feel, that soaked into their skin and their lungs and lay on them always like the shadow of death. She shivered in the wind waiting because it was very early morning and they were standing all in a row while their numbers were called and they stood until some of them fainted and were beaten or taken off to where the pillar of black smoke rose, from which the black ashes fell like deadly snow.

  JACQUELINE 6

  Catch a Falling Star

  6 juillet 1943

  Daniela and I are settled in Toulouse now. We are living over a garage where we share a room that gives on a side street, with a view of a plumbing supply warehouse, all built of the red brick they use so much here. We live with M. and Mme Faurier, both naturalized Jews born in Galicia, but who have good false French identities and no accents. That is, they do not sound Polish or Yiddish but speak with a thick Toulouse accent, which to my ears is quite pleasant although Daniela finds it coarse.

  Both Fauriers work in the garage, where besides cars he has taken to repairing appliances, bicycles, anything with moving parts. I saw him repairing a wagon the other day, whose axle had broken. She keeps the books and runs all over looking for parts, which are harder and harder to find. They have two girls, eight and eleven.

  Daniela’s chest has not quite cleared and she stays in Toulouse doing our local counterfeiting. She made mayoral seals for various towns out of dried potato, but now she has linoleum to work with. She has become very proficient. The local Resistance has good contacts in some mairies, so we can get the blanks right from them, but for others, we have to acquire them more roundabout.

  Daniela is also busy as a nurse, since many refugees arrive sick, and often the escapees are wounded or have been tortured and maimed. People we spring from the camps generally have deficiency diseases, parasites, such ills as paratyphoid and the various strains of typhoid that come from desperately poor sanitation. The inmates organize the camps as best they can, but the physical conditions defeat them.

  Me, I do not stay in Toulouse. With you, dear diary, in my blouse I go trekking the paths through the mountains. I will confess to you alone how my heart stopped when I first saw the Pyrénées. I was imagining mountains as in the Dordogne, green, steep but comfortable mountains with red ochre or limestone cliffs here and there. I saw before me a wall of rock, going up from a few conical foothills, up and up and up into permanent snowcapped peaks with glaciers hanging there, snow in June and forever. How can I go over those myself, I thought in terror of what I had blandly promised, let alone take children—children!—over? Impossible. But it is precisely the impossible we have to accomplish to save lives. So we do it.

  Right now I am with my seven children camping without a fire near the town of Ustou. We take them as far as we can safely by train and in what vehicles are available; then we walk over the mountains into Spain. There is no easier way, as the roads are all patrolled by the Germans and they shoot on sight. They have guardhouses and patrols but the border is long and wild and many trails cross. The regular guides who take escaped prisoners, refugees and downed pilots across are Basques around here, or nearer the coast, Catalans.

  Lately the way I have been working is to take the children over alone and meet my Spanish Basque guide just the other side of their border, where he takes over. We try to walk twenty kilometers a day, but in rough country, often we cannot manage anything like it. I carry the smallest as much as I can, but she is five and not a feather on my shoulder. The others in this flock, fortunately, range in age from nine to fourteen and are far better able to march along. Friday I must bring my children over the border to Spain, where I expect to meet the Basque guide who takes them on and a representative of the Joint (the American Joint Distribution Committee from which comes, illegally, much of our funds), who will see that my children go on safely and survive.

  Some I forget, some I will always remember. They are all my charges. If I daydream, if I doze, if I become distracted, they will die. It is the future, the reluctant whimpering, weeping future I carry on my shoulder as I go panting along the rocky trail that always seems to climb far more than it descends. The smallest cries for her mother. Her mother is already dead, shot in Gestapo headquarters in Lyon. Her father has been deported. I lie and promise her that her mother is waiting on the far side of the mountains. If she is quiet and we all climb the mountains like good children, then she will find her mother on the other side of the Pyrénées.

  I feel guilty lying to her, but it is the only way to save her, to keep her from crying and calling out. She knows about being caught. All the children understand that, even this little five-year-old. Sometimes she makes me think of the twins, because she has tight brown curls, but her eyes are blue and she seldom smiles although today the flowers beside the path made her smile. She still grips a Pyrénées geranium as she sleeps with her head in my lap. I am ashamed how grubby all the children are, but I have no way to keep them clean or to dry them properly. One of the reasons I cross them here rather than nearer to the sea where the way is often less steep is that the rivers up here are cold and swift but narrow and can often be crossed from rock to rock. Downstream it is necessary to swim, and too many of the children cannot. They suffer from the cold and the wet clothes afterwards, and they look at me so pitifully, but I must rush them on, always pushing them harder than they belie
ve they can endure. Every hour I let them rest for five minutes, but then they do not want to rise again. Their little feet bleed. I carry a supply of bandages and plasters, but that helps only feebly. Parts of the route we can travel in the daytime, but others, like the frontier itself, must be crossed at night, unless clouds make fog on the mountains, some but not too much to find my way. At least there is no problem with water, until we climb above the tree line.

  As I walk, I repeat that old litany of Daniela’s, eyes on stalks, ears perked forward and back, listen to the inner voices too and trust your gut. My children, stolen from the death’s-head legions. Shall I too one day have a child? Could I trust the world that much? Sometimes I feel as if I am a child too as I trot over the hills with them, hardly more capable than they are of what is demanded of us. Not that I should give you the impression I am dreaming of marriage and family. Only that being around the little ones makes me think, on the contrary, how casually people bring babies into this world, how often a birth is celebrated, when perhaps it should be mourned. Yet I grow attached to these grubby morsels of flesh, even when they are wicked and punch each other and steal each other’s bread.

  When I look at Gitel, a girl just turned fourteen, I realize how out of date is my picture of my sister, Naomi. I saw Rivka only for that moment at the viaduct as she and Maman were being marched to the railroad cars, but even then I noticed how tall she is. I am sure that she was taller than Maman. Gitel already has little breasts and a wariness with men not that of a child. She watches the other children for me and moves with a sadness which is different and more thoughtful and more permanent than theirs.