Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He obeys me, which Lev would never do, and for that too I am grateful. I also know that whatever mandate he was given, it surely did not include shepherding Jewish children illegally into Spain. His government has been opposed to this project all along, and their State Department puts every obstacle in our way. He is doing this on his own, I know, and as it turns out, he has been useful. I never like leaving the children alone as I go forward. Still, I am often exhausted because I walk parts of the route three times, while everybody else has enough trouble tramping it once. Sometimes I lack the extra energy for carrying a large exhausted child, which is another place he steps in.

  17 décembre 1943

  Raizel is dead. We had to scratch out a shallow grave and lay her in it and leave her to the wild animals. When I awoke at dusk, she was not with us. She had gotten up and wandered away and lain down by herself, and she was dead. Dead of the cold? I have never lost a child before.

  I find grief in myself, perhaps even something as tainted as spoiled pride that I should lose one of my children and also something just as rotten: anger. Why did she wander away? I accuse her in my heart of giving up on life and of choosing to die. Choosing to join her mother, her father, her grandfather and grandmother, her brothers and sisters and the baby, her whole village. Turning and slipping into death. Shin. I will have Gimel, everything! At least Hey, half, but I am aiming for Gimel. And Gimel I want for these children, whose world has burned.

  It is getting harder and harder to pass the children through. The Germans and their accomplices are crazy, simply. If they want to win a war, you would think that would be their priority, but they care more to tie up huge numbers of men trying to keep a few children from escaping. Those children have no military importance, alive or dead. Now the ratlines which move downed fliers out, I can understand their passion to unravel those, because it takes money and time to train a pilot. None of these children represent a second’s danger to the Third Reich.

  The tracks we leave in winter are dangerous. We will have to return a different way and we must keep moving. They can rest only while I scout ahead and I must sleep no more until we have crossed into Spain. We can take five minutes rest on each hour and that will have to do all of us.

  18 décembre 1943

  The six children are safe. Jeff and I are rapidly descending the Pyrénées, making much better time. We scout carefully as we go. Now we are on the way to a rendezvous with Papa. He is in the Montagne Noire, mountains less than half the size of these but noble enough, to the east of Toulouse. It is extremely cold and this will be a very short entry as I can scarcely write. We sit by a tiny fire. When we stop, we lie in each other’s arms to keep warm. There is no choice. We would freeze, apart. I thanked him for not taking advantage of the situation, and that made him laugh. “How could I?” he asked me. “I’d probably get frostbite on the part that matters.”

  I liked his being able to laugh about it. He asked me to call him Jeff, which is his real name, and I promised to do so when we are alone.

  The first night of Chanukah 1943

  We are in Arfons, in the Montagne Noire, where we are to meet Papa whenever he in fact appears. Tonight is the longest night of the year. I cannot imagine why I am extremely nervous about seeing my own father. Perhaps it is simply the length of time. Nevertheless I am nervous, perhaps because in some way I expect him to judge me. Now that the day approaches, I am glad that Jeff is with me, because it dilutes the intensity of the meeting. This is a small grey village built around a square, the same fish-scale slate roofs I see when I am crossing the Pyrénées. The local people say the Germans seldom come here, unless raiding for food.

  We are put up in rooms over a restaurant. The food is plentiful anyhow, as they also traffic in the black market here. Some patriots sneer at the black marketeers, but in truth, many Resistance people are involved, because it is a sector of the economy which the Germans cannot control. Whatever food is on the black market is not available to them, who ship out of the country three quarters of what is grown here for themselves and leave us hungry, and the money made there is invisible money and can go directly to support the Resistance.

  I have the back room which opens onto the fields of snowy stubble, while Jeff has one immediately next to me. Two of the waitresses have doubled up in the next room. Normally one of them lives in my room, and Jeff’s room is the spare room, for guests and often now for Resistance people passing through. Both the waitresses have been making a big play for Jeff, not even bothering to ask if we are together or not. What opportunists!

  They eat well here. Even though my stomach is shrunken, I find it is easy to stretch it again. We eat and eat. We help in the kitchen and make ourselves useful. The kitchen is run by a stout woman with a peppery temper and a strong right arm, and we both attempt to stay on the lee side of her.

  Perhaps there are no Jews in Arfons, yet even if I were back in my old apartment on the rue du Roi de Sicile, I know there would be no proud candles proclaiming our identity tonight. The first candle unlit tonight. All across this deep dark night, I think of all the candles of lives blown out.

  22 décembre 1943

  I hardly know how to describe what I did last night, but I will go on being honest. I think as long as I live, I will always wonder if Maman read my diary about Henri, if that precipitated that dreadful quarrel. I only wish there were a chance of her reading this, but I am writing in code now anyhow. I would give anything to see her!

  I have become lovers with the American, Jeff. It was I who made it happen; shamelessly I got up half an hour after we had gone to bed in our respective rooms and I went tiptoeing along the hall to his room. It was noisy downstairs, someone singing and the cook shouting in the kitchen and banging of pots and cutlery. Fortunately his door was unlocked and although his candle was out, when I said his name softly and ready to bolt, he sat up. I was astonished at myself as I went to him and kept thinking that I could not really be doing this, and knowing perfectly well that I have been coming to this decision for days.

  He got out of bed at once. “Is something wrong?” He lit his candle and took his automatic from the bedside table.

  “No. You don’t need that with me,” I said, beginning to laugh.

  I thought that I would have to explain, after putting him off for so long, but he came right to me and began to kiss me, so I did not have to make clumsy overtures. I thought I had better say something, so I remarked, once we were undressed and in bed, “I am not a virgin, by the way.”

  “By the way, good.”

  I was startled. “I didn’t think that was supposed to be good.”

  “Did you find your first time ecstatic?”

  “Of course not. It was painful, to say the least.”

  “This won’t be,” he promised, and it wasn’t. In fact I found myself forgetting how awkward I always found placement of the bodies and instead of permitting, I was wanting. That was new and more interesting. My body seemed to take on a life of its own. I begin to understand what the poetry and the moaning and fussing arise from. It was as if my body were growing from within and taking over and demanding. I actually wanted to put him inside me. He had a condom, which was convenient. After we had finished, I decided I did not care whether the whole house knew we are lovers or not, so I stayed and slept there. It was cosy and warmer. He sleeps like a kitten, curled up. Sometimes he seems very young, the way Americans are, and other times like a wizened old man who has given up on what he had wanted. But not now.

  I thought it might be strained in the morning. I woke first and I got up to pee and that woke him. When I came back to bed, he sat up and held out his arms to me. Then it was as if a fist clenched and unclenched in my belly, my womb perhaps, as in the Bible it says her womb moved? Anyhow, I wanted to also and we made love again. Then I went down and brewed us café au lait and found some bread in the kitchen and butter and strawberry jam made without sugar, because nobody has any, but it is still good.

  I brought it
all up on a tray and crawled into bed with him and we talked and talked. We are telling each other our lives. His hands are like a woman’s hands, not like a man’s. I mean they feel what they touch. They don’t grab but caress. He says he has eyes in his fingers. He lost his mother at twelve. There is sadness in him at the core, sweetness and then sadness. I cannot believe I have done this, but I have chosen him.

  On the other hand, maybe I just want to dilute things more. Maybe I want another man who has a claim on me standing there when I see Papa. I always view myself with a somewhat jaundiced eye, ever since the quarrel that sent me from Maman’s house. I also think that losing Larousse makes me more needy. Whatever my motives, I chose wisely. It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover, if he knows how—at least that is my conclusion.

  The oddest thing is that from that first moment I experienced orgasm with Jeff, I thought to myself, oh, this, yes, and it felt terribly familiar. It felt at once strong and completely familiar, although with Henri I never had anything of the sort, as if the body knew all along.

  I told him I do not love him, but I like him strongly and I chose him. He says he also chose me. He says women have been telling him since he was fifteen that they love him, and he has never been quite sure what they meant except that they usually wanted him to set up housekeeping with them. He says that he wants us to be together and I should not tell him anything I don’t mean. I liked that. I told him the same.

  24 décembre 1943

  They all went out to midnight Mass, but we stayed in the kitchen by the fire. The door opened and first a boy with a Sten gun came in. He was about sixteen and big as a polar bear standing on its hind legs and just as shaggy. Jeff said, “I recognize that gun. That’s one of the load I brought in, isn’t it? Don’t wave it about, you’ll scare the mice.”

  “Lapin is here,” the enormous boy announced, after he had searched the house. That’s what they call Papa, because he has escaped the Germans so many times. Then the boy/bear whistled and Papa came in.

  He has a beard, dark curly blond. He looked the same and different. He had a German rifle on his back which he leaned against his chair and came to peer at me and then hug me. He felt very cold and bumpy, his jacket on, with an ammunition belt and a canteen and all kinds of hardware clanking and sticking into me.

  “You’ve grown like a weed, you’re almost as tall as I am! You’ve grown up, Jacqueline.”

  “Rivka is tall too,” I said. “I saw her when they were marching into the cattle cars to be deported to the camps.”

  He sat down abruptly. “Your mother?”

  “Her also.”

  “At least they didn’t get you.”

  “Not yet.”

  “When were they deported?”

  “Last year at this time.”

  He rubbed his chin and said nothing for a while. Jeff was standing by the fireplace looking ill at ease so I decided to make matters worse and introduce them. “Papa, this is Vendôme—”

  “The American commandant.” Papa leaped out of the chair to shake hands with Jeff. “We are overjoyed to have you with us, but we need more arms. We need them desperately. They must drop mortars. We have nothing heavier than a machine gun, and only seven of those. We have nothing to use against armor.”

  “I can only pass messages on. I have no authority to command weapons for you, or believe me, I would. It’s dangerous for you to be so lightly armed, I understand. But back in London, they don’t understand.”

  “Vendôme just helped me take a group of children to Spain, Papa—”

  “In this weather?”

  “One of our best people was caught, and the children could not stay where they were. They endangered everyone. I have been taking children over the Pyrénées for months.” I suppose I was sounding rather stilted, but I was boiling inside.” Vendôme is also my lover.”

  That dropped like a bomb that falls and does not go off and you wait to see is it on a time delay, so that if you raise your head it will kill you. I believe both Jeff and Papa were far more embarrassed than I was. Jeff startled babbling, “She really shouldn’t be still taking the children through because her description is all over the border and they have a price on her head. But we had no serious problems.”

  No serious problems. Only my first dead child. I said nothing, as I knew his nervousness was speaking. For all he knew, perhaps Papa would pick up his rifle and shoot him to avenge the family honor. I was quite sure Papa would do nothing of the sort, although clearly he himself did not know quite how to behave.

  Instead Papa said to me, “I am proud of you, the work you’re doing. You have to judge when it is too hot for you to stay down. When it gets dangerous, you should come into the mountains with us. It’s a hard life, but I think you would manage just fine.”

  “She’s tough and fit,” Jeff said. “I should say I am not married and that I am very serious about your daughter.”

  Papa laughed, wiping his eyes. “She has a hard head. You don’t look Jewish?”

  “People always say I don’t, Papa, but he isn’t, and don’t start on me again about that.”

  “Have I said anything? After the war, we’ll straighten everything out. You’re in the Jewish underground and not Jewish?” Papa motioned for him to sit at the table. I was still standing. The boy with the Sten gun was on guard by the door. It was not embarrassing to talk in front of him any more than it would have been to talk in front of a large dog.

  “I don’t think they knew what they were sending me into, but it doesn’t matter. We all fight the same war.”

  I pulled out the third chair and sat. Papa opened the cupboard as if he knew where to look and brought out some armagnac and two glasses. Then he looked at me and brought a third. “Are you Catholic?”

  “I’m nothing. I’m not even a Christian,” Jeff said.

  “L’chaim.” We all clinked glasses. Papa said, “If the mother is Jewish, the children are Jewish. What would you think of that?”

  “I have no tradition I want to hand on to them, except that they should want to be free and use their eyes.”

  I have slept with this man two times and we have children already. Suddenly I felt compassion for both of them, trying to deal with each other and with me, who am not easy. “He’s a painter, Papa. A real one.”

  “What do you paint?”

  “Landscapes.” He grinned. “And your daughter.”

  I knew it was all right. Papa was focused on Jeff and not on me, and I have forgiven him, and punished him a little too, I know that. Now I could look from one face to the other and feel warmth in me that was not of the armagnac, but of my heart and my joy. With just the light of the little lamp burning and the fireplace, they both looked fine enough to melt anyone’s bones.

  Papa was thin under his heavy leather jacket and his clanking hardware. His beard makes his eyes burn from his face. We have the same coloring and the same nose. We have the same stubbornness too. I was sure he would have to like Jeff because I want him. I almost thought Papa would marry us off while he was here tonight, but he restrained himself. Perhaps he still hopes for a Jewish son-in-law. Perhaps he only hopes we will all survive. Perhaps like me he dreams of a different society afterward. Next time I see him, I will ask him. All too soon another armed man knocked on the door, a code knock, Beethoven’s Fifth, and the boy with the Sten gun and Papa prepared to leave. I went to the door with them but they just melted into the night and were gone into silence before I could speak again. Then and only then I began to cry.

  BERNICE 6

  In Pursuit

  The P-47 felt all engine to Bernice. The monstrous engine with its huge gleaming propeller blades blocked her view forward, so she had to maneuver in S-curves down the runway to see for takeoff. The first time she had flown at P-47, during a training course for pursuit aircraft at Brownsville, Texas, she had felt overwhelmed, frightened. She was given no time to get used to the power of the beast, because there was room in the little canopy fo
r only one. Her first flight had been alone as all afterward would be.

  The P-47 was a descendant of the plane in which Jacqueline Cochran had won races and set records before the war. The fighters were the fastest planes of all, the most advanced aircraft available, and she was flying them all the way from Long Beach, California, to Newark, New Jersey.

  She was glad to be out of Romulus, where the local commander had mistrusted the WASPs and tried to keep them from flying anything but trainers. Actually, Lorraine and Helen back at Romulus were flying fighters now too. However in Great Falls, Montana, they had to hand them over to men. There the commander had dictated that women could not be trusted in Alaska, because there were too few women there and too many men who had not seen a woman in years. Alaska was forbidden to WASPs, and at the Canadian border, the women had to get out of the fighters.

  Bernice was glad she had been reassigned, although she missed the tight group that had been her family for months. Flo had been transferred to Long Beach with her, but often they did not see each other for a week at a time.

  February in Long Beach was perennial summer, but she flew into winter as she made her way east. She could not believe how fast the flight was in the pursuit plane. Commercial flights took two or three days to get from coast to coast, but she could reach Newark in one long day, weather permitting. Weather forbidding, it once took her five days. Gradually the white would overspread the landscape beneath her. If she took a more southerly route, she would fly for hours over areas that were white and then areas that were clear, browns, greys, sepia tones, the dark green of pine. She felt enormous power and clarity as she sped above the landscape that from a plane always appeared orderly, arranged, even the wilderness neatly sculptured and mowed. Then the clouds moved toward her in their serried rows and she was alone in a world of sunlight above, or tossed and bounced and shaken in high columns of swirling grey.