Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  One outstanding thing about these WASPs was that they were engaged in their own romance. The country might know little and care less, but they were heroines in their story, and they shone with that confidence and that energy. Here in their barracks, they did not have to play at primness. They told the raunchy jokes she usually heard from men. They laughed, they drank, they danced with each other and they seemed for the most part pleased with themselves. Louise was surprised how relaxed she felt. Bernice sat beside her. They were among the two people the least drunk in the room, although both of them had been drinking steadily all evening.

  “Do you like Washington?” Bernice asked her. “I’ve only been there once.”

  “It’s a younger town now. Everybody used to idle along in the southern way, two-hour lunches, gracious living, servants at your elbow. Now it’s a short-tempered town in a hurry. I’ll never really like it. Too much manners and power hunger, too little art and intellect.”

  Helen stood in front of them, her face flushed, her hair tousled. She had been dancing with Mary Lou. “If you could stay any age forever, what age would you choose?”

  “Right now plus a couple of months,” Bernice said. “Once we get into the cockpit of those fighters.”

  “Twenty-five, twenty-six, I think,” Louise said.

  “That’s sad.” Bernice looked her in the eyes. “To want to go back. I can’t think of anything I want to go back to. I want to hurry on forward.”

  “But that’s as sad in its way,” Louise said defensively. “I’d not like to feel my life as I’d lived it wasn’t full and rich.”

  Waiting in the stuffy terminal at Detroit City Airport and then on the windy field to board, and then in the plane to take off, and then looking out into grey nothingness on the long trip to Washington, she pondered that judgment. Perhaps Bernice was right, and she was ruining her own life by looking back to what had been. It could not be taken from her, but it also would never be given back.

  Kay was an adult, Oscar had gone and she was alone with another thirty to forty years. She had better arrive at some way of living that did not involve telling herself lies about what was going on, as she had with Claude. She was a victim of romance, as much as those girls falling for uniforms and imagining heroes and saviors, marrying men they had known for a total of twenty hours and knew less about than they did their milkman or dentist.

  Why couldn’t she take Daniel seriously? He had been courting her since she moved in. He was charming, bright, helpful. That he was almost as much younger than she as Abra was younger than Oscar need not deter her any more than it had Oscar. Why couldn’t she accept a sexual friendship, without needing talk of Love? She was a creature of romantic myths and expectations, those manufactured dreams. The war had given her a chance to work in the journalism she had always longed for, while revealing to her its shortcomings, but she had not escaped from the suppositions of her fiction.

  She would try to make herself more pragmatic. Oscar was again too much on her mind of late. Claude had disappeared from her consciousness, except as a measure of how thoroughly she could delude herself when she so desired. If Daniel represented only a short-term solution to a problem that would always remain, that did not mean she should refuse to consider him.

  Pragmatism: to appreciate a room that remained stationary, a comfortable chair, a good bowl of soup, a hot bath and a clean bed. To appreciate, perhaps, a young man who cooked her Chinese dinner upstairs. There was something in that: some threat, an approaching danger, provoking an appreciation of small domestic joys hitherto taken for granted. Bracing herself as the plane bounced like a square ball down a long stairway of clouds, she began to imagine a short story that would chart such a transformation.

  She would call it “A Bowl of Soup.” Chicken soup, or was that too ethnic? A bowl of vegetable soup? Alphabet soup? Her mother used to make a potato soup she had loved, but that was ethnic too. What soup did Americans eat? Transformation stories always grabbed people. Inspiring, they would call it, and they would be right. She must change her life.

  JACQUELINE 7

  The Chosen

  8 décembre 1943

  Larousse has been caught. I thought I was hardened, but I have wept all night and I find myself unable to think of anything else. We are trying to find out where he has been taken, but he does not seem to be in any of the places we have infiltrated. So far, no news from Margot except that the Milice ambushed him, that they beat him, that he did not talk and that the Gestapo came and took him away in a van.

  Seven children are waiting in Limoges, brought in on that two A.M. train we use. Of that batch of twenty, seven have been placed in homes, in friendly convents, on farms. Six were taken to Le Chambon, the Protestant village of refuge in the mountains near the Swiss border that Larousse has often talked about. But the seven remaining cannot be passed off as French and were scheduled to go out through Spain. I must take them. They are in danger where they are hidden and bring danger to everyone around them. How can you explain away seven Jewish children?

  The day after tomorrow I leave to pick them up and deliver them all the way through. Lev is huffy about it. He says with my picture all over the border, it is dangerous and I have to change my appearance. I said I will grow a mustache, but he did not find that amusing. Vendôme wants to go with me, but I said he would be a bigger nuisance than any of the children.

  9 décembre 1943

  What a day. Lev insisted I had to go to a hairdresser near Place Capitole at dawn before she opened for business to change my appearance. She was a fast-talking lady with a cigarette pasted on her lower lip, her own hair plastered up in a ridiculously elaborate pompadour with a wilted-looking silk camellia aloft, but she was no nonsense I will admit when she looked at my hair. She said that making me a straight blond would not look natural, with my hazel eyes; she decided on what she called ash blonde and a look she said was a pageboy bob.

  When I turned to the mirror, I was extremely annoyed, but then I said to myself, Larousse is probably being tortured and I am put out because this woman has made me look like a tart. Daniela says that is not true, but she is kind. I said to myself, if I had become an actress, I would have had to assume many appearances and no doubt dye my hair, so why the fuss? This is simply a role. Besides, the woman told me it would begin to grow out soon.

  Lev and Vendôme stared at me when I came in to the garage, where they were amusing themselves while M. Faurier worked on the gazogène truck which lost its clutch. “She’s a problem,” Lev said to Vendôme, shaking his head as if I were not there and could be talked about like a faulty engine. “She’s too beautiful and it calls attention. Now it’s worse than before.”

  “Not worse,” Vendôme said. “But the same. It would be the same if she wore a paper bag.”

  I marched over to Mme Faurier’s desk. “Fine. I will solve that problem now.” I took out her scissors and headed for the bathroom.

  Lev caught my arm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going to give myself a useful scar.”

  He twisted the scissors out of my hand and threw it to Vendôme, who came scowling. “You’re an idiot,” Vendôme said. “Nothing makes someone easier to identify than a scar. It can’t be hidden. Hair can. So can beauty. Rub dirt in your face, rub ashes in your hair, put on a dirty babushka and a filthy rag of a coat and look down and sullen.”

  “I will,” I said, and thanked him. He actually came through with the best advice yet, and I took it at once. I am much better pleased with my appearance. I walked along rue Columbette for two blocks and no one looked at me. Vendôme is not stupid, for his mind is less conventional than Lev’s and his ideas can surprise. I feel almost invisible. I should have asked Vendôme how to disguise myself before I let that hairdresser mess with me.

  He was waiting in the garage tonight when I got in from my errands. “If you need to disguise yourself further, put a few wads of cotton batting up between your gums and your teeth. It will distor
t your face. Also, redden your nose a little. It brings it forward.”

  “Why are you dressed like that?”

  He was wearing baggy much-mended pants, a ratty beret with oil stains, a chewed-looking scarf and a filthy and ragged shirt. He walked with a more pronounced limp than usual and leaned on a stick of the rough kind you see shepherds use. On his feet he did not wear his good boots but sabots, those wooden clogs I always wear now. He grinned. “I’m sleeping down here tonight, in the garage.” There’s an old divan against the far wall, and it wouldn’t be the first night one of our people spent there.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  I said nothing, but I am determined to slip out in the morning silently. If he is hanging around with the intention of accompanying me, that is not going to happen.

  Upstairs Daniela was sitting up in bed in her nightgown waiting for me, the candle still lit in its saucer. “If they can catch Larousse, they can catch anyone,” she said, her dark eyes strained in her worried face.

  “So what else is new? I have imagined so many times being caught, I cannot become more afraid or more careful.”

  “For you to go is reckless.”

  “For me not to go is selfish.”

  There was nothing more to say. We kissed each other good night. I am writing briefly, and now will blow out the candle.

  11 décembre 1943

  Before dawn I slipped down the outside staircase but he was waiting just inside the big doors of the garage and came after me. “No!” I stopped.

  “Yes,” he said cheerfully and took my arm. “We are to go together and then to visit your father on the way back.”

  “I don’t like having decisions made over my head.”

  “We are all soldiers in the same army, taking orders,” he said as if he did not plot this with Lev.

  “Why do you want to go with me? Getting seven children across the mountains in winter, it’s no fun. Not exciting men’s stuff. A lot of blowing noses and pushing them along and lying up in the brush waiting for dark.”

  “If anything happened to you and I wasn’t there, I’d blame myself for the rest of my life.”

  “The rest of both our lives are likely to be short and busy. I think of Larousse unceasingly, but I don’t wish I’d been along when he was caught.”

  “While I see you, I know what’s happening to you. You’ve never felt that way about anyone?”

  Daniela, I thought at once.

  We walked briskly out of town to board the local train in the outskirts, intending to get off outside Limoges and proceed by bicycle from there. That way we can avoid the serious identity checks. We rode third class, in a carriage with a little stove at one end and wooden seats back to back in the middle. All the seats were taken, and the places near the stove, so we stood together at the far end.

  It seems to be a custom when women of the Resistance are escorting escapees and downed fliers, to pretend to be lovers with them, but this has never been my habit. I believe that acting as lovers in public actually draws people’s attention and they look at you more carefully than they might otherwise. The women look at the man to see whether they find him attractive and at the woman to judge what he sees in her. Whereas if you act as if you are a bored and sullen couple with little to say, nobody pays attention. That is my theory.

  Therefore we talked little on the train. It stank in the compartment. When the doors opened a cold wind blew in, but the air at least was fresh. It was fatiguing standing for hours. He put his hand over mine on the bar and occasionally supported me with his other arm. I was hungry, as I had eaten only a piece of dry bread in the kitchen, not wanting to wake anyone, but I had a good lunch Mme Faurier had packed for me. Shortly after eleven, when there was a long delay because of damage to the tracks from bombing, we sat on the embankment and ate the cheese picnicking in the snow.

  “What do you dream of?” he asked. “What do you imagine if you could have anything?”

  “My mother, my sisters. Daniela and me safe. All of us together eating a big feast at our own table. Roast chicken stuffed the way Maman used to do. The special soup she would make of eggs without shells from inside the chicken. Her cabbage soup with the shinbone. My own bed, my books, my old diaries, my little treasures.” I stood, shaking the snow off. “But of course none of that is possible. Nothing shall be as it was. To tell you the truth, I didn’t appreciate my life when I had it.”

  “Maybe you still don’t.”

  “Appreciate my life? Oh, I have an immense will to live. Fierce.”

  “Appreciate what the people around you offer you.”

  “I love Daniela more than you seem to think I do.”

  “I wasn’t speaking for Daniela.”

  When he approaches mushiness, I always change the subject. Men seem to feel an obligation to talk a certain amount of nonsense with a woman, although he would not dream of boring Lev or Roger with such moonshine. “You must dream of home too.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the life I had. No, I see before me here the life I want.” His eyes were glittering. He fits in with the crowd in the train better than I expected him to. Unlike the British agent, whom we dressed in appropriate clothes but who wore them as if they were somebody else’s, Vendôme is at ease among the peasants and workers in third class. Like a woman, like the poor, he is used to being uncomfortable, to standing and waiting, to taking what he can get. I never thought Americans were like that. Yet he is a painter and went to college. He says that was free because his father was a professor, the father he feels totally estranged from. He is close only to his sister.

  “Will you not tell me I remind you of her? Men always say that.”

  “Not at all. My sister is a big strong woman who loves to fly planes. I only wished you would adore me the way she does.”

  “Come, we’re to get on again.” The train was preparing to move. “Oh, you want to be adored? Why, I wonder? What do people get out of that fixated attention? It seems that once you had it, it would be boring.”

  “Of course. What I really want is a love of equals.” With that he got on and left me to follow.

  I will admit I was almost sorry that the conversation broke there, because it was growing interesting. I had a moment of worrying whether he was going to try to make me sleep with him, as every time men have talked about love, that is what they meant. In the presence of seven children, it should not be difficult to avoid his importuning, but afterward, it may be a problem. Still, he is more engaging to talk with than Henri was. Daniela remarked that he was interested in me that first week, to which I replied, nothing could be more boring than his interest. Daniela said, Besides, he is impossible because he is Gentile.

  Henri wasn’t Jewish either. Does it matter to me? I don’t want to get involved with anyone that way, but he is working with us. The Nazis would treat him just like a Jew if they caught him. So that would not matter, finally, if I were interested, which I am not, not at all. He is always drawing me, which feels odd. He does not draw anybody else, but draws the cemetery, the canal, the river, the vineyards and hills. In one recent painting he has painted himself and me in a vineyard, small figures, me looking off to the mountains and him behind looking at me.

  Anyhow, we reached Limoges by nightfall and I left him talking to the local Resistance and hurried off to organize my children for tomorrow morning.

  16 décembre 1943

  This crossing has been extremely difficult. The rivers are frozen solid, so I am crossing them lower in the mountains than usual. Also I fear trying to take one of the high routes, with the snow already deep and storms coming daily.

  Vendôme has made himself useful. He is one of those people who talks to children very much as he talks to adults, and as he generally speaks gently to adults, this seems to work fine. Children sense right away when adults are putting on an act.

  We have two adolescent boys, twelve and fourteen, a girl fourteen, a girl ten, a boy nine, a boy of seven and a girl
of eight. This afternoon as we lay up in a thicket waiting to cross on the ice after dark, I had them play with a dreidel I have along, because Chanukah is coming and I never know how long storms may delay us. But when the eight-year-old, Raizel, was playing and she got Shin, where you lose and pay, she began to cry. Pearl, the fourteen-year-old who mothers her, immediately began soothing her, but I worry about Raizel. She is weightless as a dried leaf, colorless, of a stupefied sadness. Pearl says Raizel saw her family killed before her eyes, then was left for dead in a pile of bodies. She has a bad scar on her shoulder and another on her ribs, which are easy to count, believe me. She never plays, so I was happy when she was drawn to the dreidel. Bad luck.

  We sleep in piles with the children to keep them warm, and thus far Vendôme has not given me any trouble. He is a pleasant traveling companion because he does not complain of the weather or the short rations or the cold wind, and he always notices the landscape carefully, which is important. “He is so handsome,” Pearl said to me. “You must love him.”

  “Why must I? Why should a face be that important in anyone’s life?”

  “Because you’re pretty, you can be fussy.” Pearl touched my hair. “I want to be loved, I don’t care why. I just want someone to love me and tell me to stay.”

  I think at fourteen she has already had an unhappy affair. War is an absolute disrupter. At fourteen she is a century older than the two boys or than I was at her age. Nobody can give her her childhood back. But she has immense will to live; if I bring them through safely, she will make it. She tags after Vendôme, who accepts her adoration tactfully. I worried when I saw her press herself against him, but he just put his arm around her and turned her to look up at a hawk circling high overhead. Up in the mountains frequently I have to go ahead to scout the way, and I must leave him alone with them. He dislikes that intensely, but I point out to him again and again, the children are the priority. We are here to save them.