Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He was impersonally ebullient. “This will be my chef d’oeuvre. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Marshal Zhukov. There’s a big move on to explain Russia to the American public, and we’re going to make a battle epic about Kursk. Do you know that was the greatest, the most decisive battle of the war, and nobody here has heard of it? Thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, cavalry—yes, believe me, they use horses! The Russian horses in their thousands beat the German horses in their thousands, because they bear cold better. This is a movie Eisenstein could make, but I’m in charge, and it’s going to be brutally beautiful, realistic and epic at once.”

  She marked time through his description of his Marshal Zhukov epic until she could find out exactly what was going on. She found out.

  “Louise, my precious, we all have many commitments. We have lived long and full lives, both of us, and we have old friends. I wish you had talked to me before you decided to pick up and transplant yourself.… But as adults, we can work things out to everyone’s mutual benefit. Trust me.…”

  It turned out that in Washington, Claude had another friend, a French singer in a local supper club. Claude was in the habit of seeing Monique in Washington, as he saw Louise in New York. Now he would have to divide his Washington time between them.

  Sitting there, growing chilled at the table in the restaurant of his hotel, where they had eaten together that first evening a year and a half before, she knew she could not oblige him. Why had she thought the relationship more serious than it was? Nobody had given her an emerald before. She was not used to expensive presents, so she had thought that meant more than it did to Claude.

  “But you do mean a great deal to me, Louise. I value your company. I adore you. Surely you know that.” Across the table he was as handsome, as charming, as ever. With the same gesture that had so often warmed her, he swept up her hand and pressed it against his heart. “You can’t doubt my love for you?”

  “Love is a word too widely used nowadays,” Louise said, freeing her hand. “I don’t think in this case, it quite applies.”

  “Darling, I know you never thought you were the only woman in my entire life. After all, we live three thousand miles apart. I’m a married man, even if I don’t know where my wife is.”

  “What I thought seems to have been largely wish fulfillment. That would be the most charitable view.”

  “Louise, when we’re together, you’re happy, I’m happy. That isn’t real? It’s real, it’s beautiful, and it’s something we can give each other again and again.”

  “Not me, Claude. I need a few illusions. Now that I don’t have them, the frost is on the pumpkin with a vengeance.” As he looked puzzled, she added, “Monique is an older commitment, and I bow out in her favor.”

  When Susannah finally left, the landlord gave Louise permission to paint and actually presented her with a couple of prewar gallons, for which of course he charged exorbitantly. Daniel helped her do the living room ceiling. When they stopped, they were both speckled with white, and had to help each other turpentine off the spots.

  “I’m trying to figure it out, how it feels to you,” he said. “The equivalent is if I found out Ann was sleeping with another guy two or three nights a month. My relationship with her was just as partial and just as distant as yours with Claude. I’d feel betrayed, even though I didn’t love her and I didn’t give her what she wanted.”

  “I did love Claude. In a minor way, but real enough. I understand why Abra confided in you.”

  “Because I’m here. That is, when I am.”

  “First, you have a reciprocal nature. You understand if you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening. Frankly, that’s unusual in a man. Reason two: you take an interest in relationships.”

  “My work is so … analytical, so devoid of personalities and faces, that I crave gossip as an antidote.”

  “Your work.” Louise smiled at him. “It doesn’t scan. It’s interesting how every time there’s a major battle in the Pacific, you work round the clock. And when I brought up the idea of doing a piece on your kind of translation work, the Navy stonewalled us dead. It’s none of my business.”

  “Right.” Daniel was startled. She had observed he was efficient at discouraging interest in what he did with a barrage of technical details about translating captured Japanese material that could put acquaintances to sleep in five minutes.

  With the sense of herself as an alcoholic deciding that one little drinkie wouldn’t do any harm, Louise gave in and asked, “Have you heard from your friend Abra? How is she doing?”

  “She likes London. Your ex-husband continues to drive her crazy. She’s forever convinced that he’s about to open up, to give her what she thinks she wants from him.”

  “You’re a little in love with her, aren’t you?”

  “In lust. Oscar Kahan must be an interesting man. I find that he and I have absolutely the same taste in women. I’d be quite happy with either of you. And like him, I think I prefer you.”

  “That’s very sweet of you. I’m only fifteen years older than you are.”

  “I’m mature for my age.”

  “Guess what, Daniel? So am I. Go home now. I thank you for the painting and I’ll make you supper after the paint smell wears off.”

  “Sleeping here will be unpleasant. There are no paint fumes upstairs.”

  “I’ll open a window. Good night, Daniel.”

  “In France, relationships of younger men and older women are taken for granted. If we were in France, you wouldn’t hesitate.”

  “You mistake me. I’d hesitate in Tahiti. And if we were spiders, I’d eat you. And if we were cranes, you’d do a dance. And if we were oaks, you’d forget about the whole thing, which is the best advice I can give you.” She suspected he was trying to cheer her up. Some men assumed that a pass was always flattering, but she would just as soon skip all the bowing and dancing around and resume their friendly chatter.

  “I never made a pass at Abra, although I admit I was attracted to her. Because she was in love with Oscar, why bother? But I suggest to you that we’re inevitable. We’re both busy and lonely, we’re right in the same building and we get along well. We’d be kind and affectionate to each other. What’s the point wasting time deferring what will be very nice when it finally works out?”

  She took Daniel’s elbow, steering him to the door. “A word of advice. In future, don’t tell any woman it’s inevitable you’ll become involved. Nothing could sound more boring! Thank you again, and good night.”

  But she was smiling. She smiled still as she opened windows and got into bed. She had lost something real from her life, but his little farce had distracted her, and of that she was appreciative. A hint of ersatz romance was cheering. Would that work as a plot? Better if the man being used as a distraction turned out to be more interesting than the lost one: but that was magazine fiction, not Louise’s life.

  ABRA 6

  Love’s Labor

  When Abra first arrived in London, she was shocked. London had always conjured up images of ceremony and status to her. They arrived at midnight in a city without lights, a vast plain of murk and rubble where an unbroken row of buildings appeared unusual. It resembled an elegant antique sofa whose springs were broken and whose stuffing was leaking out. Few shops had windows and in those few, empty boxes were displayed. Streets were interrupted by pits and hills of broken stone. Outside of every shop long lines seemed a permanent fixture, women carrying old shopping bags wherever they went in hopes of coming on some food.

  She was almost run down four times during her first week, on the worst occasion glancingly bruised by what she had learned by then to call a goods lorry. She continued to experience a sense of confusion about stepping off the curb for another couple of weeks, looking frantically in all directions including up, but finally she adjusted to British traffic patterns and was only in the same danger now as the rest of the populace.

  R & A Labor Branch operated out
of a town house on Brook Street, just past Grosvenor Square where the American embassy and several of the components of OSS were located, around a pretty park full of plane trees, occupied by an all-female barrage balloon unit. The balloons were put up to discourage dive bombers and low bombing runs. What they most resembled were large shiny bath toys, silver duckies, vast padded toy fish.

  Both she and Oscar had found lodgings within walking distance of work. She was surprised that they both could live in Mayfair near each other and the office. In Washington, people pursued a place to live the way they might have pursued conquest, glory, passion, a killing in the stock market in peacetime. If an apartment was found, one did not let it go casually.

  Here because of the blitz fancy flats went begging, although there was a shortage of housing for the working poor. Those who could afford to move to the country homes they also had, had long since done so. The estate agent had shown her six possibilities right off, and had she time to waste, could have shown her ten more. She was living in Culross Street, just off Hyde Park in a cottagey row that had probably been a mews, now apartments over garages. The garage below her housed a Bentley up on blocks; she lived above in four light and airy rooms. She removed the more froufrou decorations of the couple whose pied-a-terre it was in peacetime and put some effort into making it comfortable and mildly bohemian. Furniture was unavailable, since so much had been lost in the blitz, but London was secondhand heaven and she could find anything in the way of decorative bric-a-brac. She mixed art deco and Victoriana, both out of style and cheap, for exactly the effect she wanted. She would have repainted, but paint was unobtainable, as were most objects of daily life she had taken for granted: soap, curlers, pencils, matches, cups with handles, spoons, towels, sanitary napkins. She sent off a list to Karen Sue and one to her mother, deciding she would let them compete to assist her. Karen Sue won hands down with the bigger and earlier bundle. Oscar’s goodies arrived, she noted, from old girlfriends in L.A. and New York as well as from his mother and his sister Bessie. The arrival of a family parcel for Oscar always meant a feast.

  It was a pale gold October Friday and Oscar was making supper out of a parcel just arrived. On the way to his flat she bought yellow roses from a street vendor near the antiaircraft emplacements in Hyde Park. They reminded her of the old-fashioned roses that grew at the Scott summer home near Fort Popham. She experienced a moment of keen homesickness, not so much for her family as for that beautiful clean landscape of sharply etched firs, jutting rocks and cold surging water.

  He put his arm around her, affectionate as he often was. “What sexy-looking yellow roses. Like you.”

  She enjoyed bringing him flowers sometimes, courting him. In their relationship, he was the beloved and she, the lover, so she might as well act it out. Occupying the third floor of a Georgian town house on Chesterfield Hill, Oscar’s London digs were darker, too much mahogany and tall glowering furniture that looked as if it might topple on you out of dour spite. She particularly disliked a sinister eight-foot-high clock in the hall that occasionally missed a beat, like a failing heart, and rang quarter hours constantly. But the cleaning lady who had come with the flat insisted on winding it.

  He had traded candy bars from his mother’s parcel for fresh eggs Sergeant Farrell in R & A brought back from the country. Out of those precious eggs he was making an omelette, with unidentifiable cheese the color of aged erasers, to be relished with the coarse but tasty Sicilian red wine from the office. A shipment of local wine about to be loaded in Palermo had been commandeered and had arrived providentially in London from a researcher following the Allied forces into Sicily and now Italy. Their first course was real sardines from a tin his mother had sent, more precious than caviar in peacetime. With it they had one half tomato each, withered but real and red. One advantage of austerity was that he seldom now remarked he had tried to do a sauce the way Louise used to and failed.

  “Shall we celebrate the first loser out of the war?” He tilted his glass toward her. “We’ve been too rushed for the last month to pause and enjoy the victory.”

  “Oh, that’s why the Italian dinner. Here’s to the speedy exit of the other two.”

  “I know neither of us thinks it will be speedy. Scuttlebutt has it we hit Fortress Europa in the spring. May, probably.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, one down. We never got to celebrate.”

  “Because the brass never ask for the information they want in advance, but always just after they need it.”

  The phone rang. Wilhelm back at the office had turned up something interesting. When would Oscar be back in? Soon, soon.

  Labor Branch was the poor stepchild of the London espionage community, a far more glamorous mise-en-scène than that centered around the old National Institutes of Health building in Washington. Abra recognized the names: a board of directors for any university, corporation, bank or a fine old law firm could be whipped together out of the men’s room of any of the Grosvenor Square buildings that housed OSS. There was a younger, more liberal, often grubbier junior echelon, but they tended to be out in the field, exposed to fire and danger. A number of them had been in North Africa, and a great many of the types who got their hands dirty in actual fieldwork were either already in Italy or on their way.

  Espionage, or at least directing it, was obviously in the British view the work of gentlemen, and the Americans were pleased to taste that heady mixture of cynicism, noblesse oblige and international manipulation like the cocaine she had tried once in Harlem that went straight to her brain and lit it up till it crackled. The Labor Branch dealt with shabby anarchist metal-workers, with Schachtmanite bricklayers, with Communist railroad workers. Instead of the scions of the Mellons or the Du Ponts who flocked into the other addresses on Grosvenor Square, refugees in baggy patched jackets and the faded blue of the French working class, in Basque shearling coats redolent of sheep dip met with the representatives of the Labor Branch in East End pubs and dingy restaurants, when they were not trekking in and out of the Brook Street offices.

  Much of their work was tedious and minute, going over economic information, sometimes as obscure as bills of lading for ships and barges, for railroad freight cars passing from France to Germany. Some information went to the strategic bombing clearinghouse, because it revealed the movement of troops, the siting of hidden factories, ammunition dumps or oil storage facilities. One analyst could tell by the price of oranges in the Paris market when the Germans had the railroad freight system working, so that it was time to bomb again.

  One of their unwelcome recent conclusions was that bombing was not nearly as effective as internal sabotage. The French Resistance was not popular in London. For one thing, dealing with it meant dealing with General de Gaulle, who was perhaps only slightly less unappreciated than Hitler among the Allied brass. Neither Abra nor Oscar really understood why, although certainly he took himself seriously; but so did numerous little kinglets the British sheltered and fussed over, who did nothing whatsoever but fret when they could move back into their palaces and resume the good life chez lui.

  Perhaps the whole complexion of the Resistance made the Americans nervous. While there was a right-wing resistance, sometimes openly anti-Semitic, the bulk of the Resistance was well left of center and a large and very active part of it was Communist. Every so often they would be asked to assess the probability of a French Communist takeover during or after Liberation. So far the analysis of London R & A gave that little chance, but the brass did not seem to believe them.

  Everything Oscar and she had been able to piece together suggested that the Résistance-Fer, the organization of railway men, or cheminots, did a far better job than the air forces of stopping the trains by specific acts of sabotage, ranging from blowing up exact sections of train as the right cars went over the dynamite, to putting sand and gravel in gearboxes, or removing sections of tracks just before a troop train went through. Resistance workers were eager to provide this service, because they kept saying that the so-called precisi
on bombing was killing far more of their people than it was hurting the Germans, and might turn the population against the Allies.

  Oscar raised his glass again. “To our report. May it rest in peace, because the brass are surely not going to believe it.”

  “But wouldn’t they just as soon use the planes elsewhere?”

  “If you’re a surgeon, you don’t want to hear about a great faith healer. If you’re an organization that bombs, you don’t want to hear about the great work of a bunch of amateurs with a few sticks of dynamite.”

  “What’s the use of working so hard on it, then?” She flung out her arms melodramatically. She was not discouraged. The idiocy of bureaucracies amazed but did not daunt her. She just wanted to hear what he would say.

  “Once information exists, there’s a chance some political reason to use it may arise. You know, the Labor Branch is about the only source on conditions inside Germany, but they pay little attention to what we tell them. Even R & A exaggerates the effects of bombing.”

  “R & A Washington, you mean.” The London people felt unappreciated by Washington. Here everybody tended to connect a lot more—a life typified by interdepartmental, interagency organizations.

  “The brass keep thinking if they just dump more and more bigger bombs, it’ll win the war. But as far as we can tell from our labor sources, German factories are still producing not less, but more war matériel. We seemed to be locked into the kind of thinking—if you can call it that—that says a bomber is necessarily better than two guys with a crowbar and a screwdriver, because it’s technologically advanced and it costs more.”

  Maybe I’m in love with him because I find him always interesting to talk to, she thought. He was an excellent lover, but she wanted to make love more often than he did. He carried home the burdens of the job. She would have made love with him every night or every morning or both, but she was lucky to get him three or four times a week, and during stretches when they never stumbled out of the office till after midnight, they might only make love twice in a week.