Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “It means you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing.”

  “I’m paying attention to drawing. I have to keep up my practice, or how will I draw quickly what I have to?”

  “You think this is a game. The only joker here is you.” Putting up with him is the price we pay for getting a good radio. Moreover, he brought in three hundred thousand francs. He is a goose, but he lays golden eggs, as I said to Daniela. I could see when it dawned on him he was with the Jewish Resistance. He seemed to consider it amusing.

  Lev scolded me for leaving him, but I reminded him about the refugees that need new identities locally, and he backed off. “All right,” I said as I was getting ready to brief Larousse on the new route. “I will baby-sit the clumsy American until he can dance on his ankle again, but I want to learn to use the weapons that arrived. Daniela and I want to learn how to shoot. That’s our price.”

  I thought Lev was going to spit blood, but Larousse said to him, “Come on, old man, the maquisards on Montagne Noire have women with them too, and the best shot in the whole corps franc is the woman called Dalia.”

  Lev blew out his lips. “Dalia is forty-four and tough as a Camargue horse. With Daniela’s temper, she’ll probably shoot me. Jacqueline here could blow her foot off. Then I’ll be lynched by the lovelorn men of Toulouse.”

  “If you think that’s flattery, you’re mistaken. It’s disgusting,” I said.

  Larousse, who is my defender since I kept him from walking into that trap in the station, said, “The best spy system the British still have running is headed by a woman. Young and pretty too, and you can believe me, because I met her in Marseille when I sent those plans of the base out.”

  “What do you know about young and pretty, Boy Scout?” Lev sneered, but he has arranged for Daniela and me to begin our training next week. We have to train without live ammunition, as we have none to waste.

  16 août 1943

  I forgot to say Vendôme draws well. He told me today he is an artist. “Was,” I said bluntly. “In another life. In this life, if you don’t want to die quickly, remember you are nobody you were. What you wanted then, you can’t have now, so you’d better forget it to survive. Remember when you fail here, you bring others down too.”

  Daniela thinks it is funny how I talk to Vendôme, but to me, he is just a large clumsy walking wallet. We needed what the plane dropped—all except for him. But the men feel differently. I notice that Lev worried that maybe this man would take over, and he likes the fact that the American broke his ankle. He is very sympathetic because it means the man is no rival for power.

  Some of the other men hang around him begging for news, as if he were an oracle on the war. Why do they think one American spy knows the real inside dope on the war? I’d just as soon listen to the BBC. What I missed most in the intervening months Daniela and I were hiding and wandering was that old radio we had to leave in Paris. Now we listen with the Fauriers.

  Finally at supper tonight, Vendôme decided to be charming and thank Daniela and me for taking care of him. After the business with the sketching at the window, I was in no mood to be charmed. “That’s all right,” I said. “We’re being paid. We’re going to learn to use those guns you brought us, along with the men.”

  “Oh.” He twisted his mouth as if words were sour. “The romance of the gun.”

  “No romance. I used to pride myself on being philosophically nonviolent.”

  “It just didn’t survive a war, did it?” He is looking at me as if he is amused, trying to put me in my place, as younger than him in years but, dear diary, never in experience.

  “I saw my mother and my little sister marched off to the killing camps like cattle into a cattle car. What I have learned is simple. When somebody wants to kill you, they do it—unless you can stop them.”

  “So you kill them first?”

  “First? First was ten years ago. Sometimes to be able to act is enough to save yourself.” By that time I was too angry to talk further. All Americans are naive, I think. They always fight their wars over here, which keeps them from understanding what war is. It’s just something they drop in to, like this amateur. Afterwards they go home, as from a job, and for them everything is like it was, the house, the garden, the car, the bank, the, family. We are stuck with the consequences.

  RUTHIE 5

  Candles Burn Out

  During the race riot, Trudi had been caught and buffeted in a street brawl. “I’m glad my baby was born, or I’m sure he would have been marked!”

  “My bubeh used to say that was nonsense, Trudi,” Ruthie said, knitting away madly on the sweater she was making for Morris. If she worked hard in the little time she had to spend with Trudi, she might have it done by fall. “She saw my grandfather, her husband, beaten to death before her eyes in Kozienice. Not only did she not lose her baby, but Esther, the last daughter, was smart and pretty and certainly the only one who ended up with money. Think of that!” Ruthie laughed, although the story was of pain, because she was imitating her bubeh’s manner, whom Trudi had known, and that made her feel good, almost as if her grandmother were in the room.

  “If I’d known what giving birth is like, I don’t know that I would have agreed to it.” Trudi, who knitted much better than Ruthie, was turning out a roll of blue wool in a flutter of clicking needles. “When I say that to my mother, she gets mad and calls me wicked, but I went through the wringer.”

  “But you’re glad to have baby David.”

  “Of course! And I’m glad to be able to wear a dress not made for a hippo. It’s great to walk around the house without steering myself like a zeppelin. Leib is kvelling because it’s a boy. My mother knew because he was so active inside.”

  “A girl sleeps more? Not in this life. My father gets to take an occasional nap. My mother hardly gets five, six hours sleep a night.”

  “Aren’t you sorry you didn’t get married when you had the chance?”

  “So I can have a baby too?” Ruthie smiled.

  “Ruthie, what you did with Murray, you don’t have to be married to have a baby.”

  Ruthie knitted awhile in silence. “Trudi, do you ever have trouble feeling that Leib still exists, that he’s real?”

  Trudi gave the cradle where David was sleeping a push with her foot. “Are you kidding? The Christians may do this all by their lonesomes, but among us, it takes two.”

  “I’m serious. How often do you really think about Leib?”

  “Ruthie, I knew Leib for practically my whole life. I know him in a way you don’t know Murray. And you don’t forget your husband the way you forget a boyfriend. You’re one flesh.” Her hand rested on her belly.

  “I haven’t forgotten Murray one bit!” Ruthie said defensively, yanking at her knitting. “I haven’t looked at another man since I met him, and that’s the truth.”

  Ruthie was always exhausted, but that did not mean her sleep was sound or sweet. Sometimes the factory noise vibrated through her bones still. Sometimes her mind seemed to move like an assembly line from thought to thought, blurred and anxious. Sometimes she lay staring at the dim light reflected off the ceiling and worried about her life.

  She was losing her sense of Murray. The letters helped some, but a month or two months could go by without a letter. She wrote him every other day, but often she pieced words into banal empty notes, nothing but what Naomi had said or the gossip at work. She wrote again and again that she loved him and he wrote again and again how much he loved her, but she did not feel as she read his letters that they were any longer particularly addressed to her. They were to a woman. Some woman. Any woman. His letters stressed his sexual longing, but her sexuality was disconnected.

  It was not that she was attracted to other men, although men at work had tried to start something with her. Her body was turned off. A large switch had been thrown and the machinery of attraction would not engage. She was only polite with those men. She had no time for them.

  “Do you ever have any t
rouble feeling connected to your husband?” she asked of Vivian and of Rena. Joann’s husband was a streetcar conductor, overage to be drafted.

  “Jake writes real good letters,” Vivian said. “It’s like him coming home from work and talking to me. I always loved suppertime, because that man can make a story out of buying a paper. It’s the same way with his letters. Always a joke, some character he met, some place he’s been.”

  “Bobby’s not much of a letter writer,” Rena said, “but Joey is the spitting image of his daddy. Every time I look in his eyes, it’s his daddy looking back. And Nancy has her daddy’s smile. Besides, when you live with your old man’s family camping on your doorstep, they don’t let you forget a thing about him. They’re a close-knit family, and they took me in. That’s why I never worry about my children. I got seven baby-sitters free.”

  If Murray’s parents did not insist on pretending she would go away if ignored, maybe she would feel a stronger connection. Even Murray had stopped urging her to spend holidays with them, for she had finally written that they never invited her and would not respond to her invitations.

  She had no interest in going bowling or dancing. If she had any unbudgeted moments, she wanted to be with her family. At twenty-one, her youth felt far behind her. If she asked herself if she was happy, she hardly knew what the question meant. She was often afraid. Afraid for Murray. Afraid for Naomi.

  Since Duvey died, and she had not been able to mourn him, death hovered on the edge of her field of vision. The city seemed nothing but sharp edges, explosive traps, pits, minefields, quicksand. Typhus was reported epidemic in Willow Run, from the poor sewage. Diphtheria and TB were rising in the city. Syphilis was supposed to be rampant. Even the activities that seemed the healthiest, like going swimming, held the threat of polio.

  She knew she was not living in a plague city, but perceived dangers licked at the hot dirty air. She knew that those in danger were people who faced the enemy, who tried to find shelter from bombs in a shattered city, who fled down roads and were strafed, who were herded into concentration camps. Yet she never felt safe. Never.

  She could sense the same uneasiness in Naomi, and that made them draw closer. The race riots might have alarmed Trudi briefly, but they had deeply terrified Naomi. Naomi confided in Ruthie about a Negro friend she had, and how dangerous the city was for her friend. Naomi seemed to feel that most people were violent and mean when they dared to be. Instead of looking forward to high school in the fall, she seemed to dread it. Alvin was always hanging around now, but Naomi and he did not seem crazy about each other. Alvin was quieter too these days.

  Morris was home less, for he had become involved in agitation trying to rescue Jews from Europe. He was less active in the union, because he felt that all they worried about were hourly wages and a closed shop, instead of being willing to deal with issues of power and control. “They loved us Socialists when they were organizing, but now that they’re established, they don’t like us asking questions.”

  He kept bringing home articles about what was happening abroad. He said that every Jew in Europe, every Jew, was in danger of being killed. He said there might be no Jews left at all if someone did not act. Mama tried to calm him, but he was obsessed, as he used to be with the union. He wanted Ruthie to go to the meetings with him, but she could not. He tried to get Arty to go, but Arty worked swing shift and didn’t want to get involved. “Tata, you’re an American. You should act like one. You couldn’t even talk to half the people you’re worrying about. You got more in common with a Polack or a hillbilly who works on the line with you than some ignorant shtetl Jew who never saw a car in his life.”

  Ruthie glanced at Naomi, as often listening to everything but silent, standing in the doorway.

  “That’s who I was born from, Arty. That’s where what brains you got come from. Don’t judge by the dirty black clothes. They can’t afford better, and they wouldn’t spend their money on their backs anyhow.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do at these meetings? Change government policy? Turn Congress around? I read the papers the same as you. Every time a bill is introduced to bring in refugees, little Jewish kids even, the same senators and congressmen threaten to close the door altogether. Better to leave well enough alone. If you have the will, if you have the green stuff, you find a way. Didn’t we get Naomi in?”

  “They closed that loophole afterward. Few get out and fewer get in here.” Morris sighed.

  “Besides, you come back from meetings and half the time it’s Jews fighting each other.”

  “We got seven organizations and each one hates the other worse than Hitler. Some international Jewish conspiracy. We can’t even agree to meet in the same room. That’s what gives me the sharpest pain.”

  It was Sunday afternoon. Morris was about to go out to yet another meeting. Naomi leaned against Ruthie on the couch, where Ruthie was studying. Ruthie kept her left arm around Naomi while she took notes with her right. Naomi was taller than Ruthie but she hunched herself up as if she could become a baby by willing it and thus entitled to Ruthie’s lap.

  Ruthie closed her eyes to rest them and concentrated hard, trying to call up Murray’s face. She kept seeing the photo beside her bed, the one she had taken the last day with Morris’s Brownie box camera. In it he looked dwarfed in his uniform standing next to a picnic table. In one photo the shadow of his cap fell over his face, but in her favorite, he had taken his cap off and held it to his chest, smiling over it at her.

  I say I love him, she thought, but I hardly know him. I was embarrassed before Trudi. I thought my love superior to hers, more intelligent, more profound, but she loves Leib just as she did, while I’m lost in doubt. Murray is in danger, while I who am comfortable and able to get the education we both dreamed of, I forget him from a kind of mental laziness.

  Real loving must be a hard discipline that I have yet to learn. From somewhere in myself, I must find the energy. I owe him a love that is living and whole and vivid. That is made every day fresh like bread. That is what I must render to him.

  Her arm tightened around Naomi, who snuggled closer. The house felt vast and quiet around them, huge without the children and babies. Sunday afternoon was boring for some people, but Ruthie could have wished it to last all week, just so she could sit quietly and study and spend time with her family. Then she could try to locate her feelings, her own thoughts, her own self that the incessant battering noise, the frenetic rush, the nagging exhaustion of the week buried and dulled in her. Maybe she could not remember Murray because she hardly had time to be Ruthie.

  She was still sitting there with her arm around Naomi when the phone rang. It was Trudi. The baby was sick with a high fever and she was standing in the emergency ward of Henry Ford, waiting to see a doctor. Could Ruthie run over to her house, take the key from under the flowerpot and turn off the oven her mother had left with a meat loaf roasting in it? “And think of me here and pray for baby David, he looks so miserable!”

  Ruthie had no trouble shutting off the oven, but the prayer she doubted would mean much from her. Sometimes she felt as if G-d had died with Bubeh, leaving her to manage as best she could, with merely human help. Baby David was well by the next morning, the fever departing as suddenly as it had come, but Ruthie assumed that was the nature of the germ. She no longer felt on intimate terms with G-d.

  BERNICE 5

  The Crooked Desires of the Heart Fulfilled

  Bernice had grown used to the ferrying life, picking up new planes to be delivered wherever they were needed from San Diego to Hansen Air Force Base near Concord, Massachusetts. Her navigation skills were excellent; she had only gotten lost once, then found her way again after the storm had passed. Her group of ferry pilots had a home base at the field in Romulus, Michigan, and sometimes when several of them were there at once, they went into Detroit for a night out. Most of the time, Bernice was on the road, flying, seeking lodging and a meal, or slogging her way back to Romulus on overcrowded p
ublic transportation.

  In some small towns, some small airports, people were friendly, but in others, they were deeply suspicious of a woman flying a military plane. Some air bases welcomed a WASP as they were now called, but others treated her as if she were a tramp. When she had walked into one mess and sat down at a table with the local officers, the colonel in charge ordered her to sit elsewhere.

  Perhaps they were right, she thought, gazing down on the flat rectangles of Michigan, pale green and dark green and blue green, puddled with lakes like little tears in the fabric. Perhaps women flying planes were necessarily subversive. She felt a sense of power that few men would ever experience. She felt strong, independent, free—in spite of working in a military context with orders given, a schedule to keep to, irrational rules hemming her round.

  The week before, she had had a peculiar experience at a South Carolina field. When she had landed in the rain, they had taken her for a man. She had not quite realized what had happened, except that she was being treated more respectfully than she was used to. When one of the mechanics slapped her across the back she realized their mistake; and had not corrected it. Had stood taller. Had lowered her voice in reply as she swung off the field. She had remained a man at that field the next morning. She kept waiting for them to guess, but they never had. She had not told any of the other WASPs about it, maybe because Lorraine was always teasing her about being too big and masculine.

  She stopped envying Jeff. She felt that her love for him had cleared like a stream no longer contaminated, without the taint of envy for his freedom, his opportunities. No, having what she wanted made her more generous. Her father might not think she was a better person, but that was because he was concerned only with his convenience.