by Marge Piercy
In winter every day at roll call, as they stood in the dark and the air that was ice in their lungs and that squeezed even the pain out of their hands and feel and faces, women fell over. Sometimes they died on the spot. If they didn’t, they were taken to be killed. Never fall. Keep standing, keep moving, and stay close to Maman.
When a prisoner threatened Maman, Rivka would bare her teeth like a rat and start swinging. When one of the guards or the kapos hit Maman or knocked her to the ground, of course she had to stand and look down. But she let nobody else touch Maman. Sundays and after the standing at attention in the evenings, sometimes Maman sang her Yiddish songs, “Schlaffen, mine yiddele, schlaffen,” as they picked the lice from each other, the lice that gave them ulcers and brought typhus that killed. “Tumbalalaika” with its magic questions. What can burn, burn and not burn up? A heart. Yes. Then the women ghosts would climb onto the slats and shiver and try to sleep. In the morning someone would be dead and a neighbor would grab clothing, a hidden scrap of bread and their shoes, fast, because shoes could be traded for bread.
Naomi woke aching, aching. Her stomach seemed to be shriveled to a hard green potato in her chest. Every night she tried to stay awake, but finally she slept and then sometimes she dreamed about school or Alvin or pigeons or people shooting each other, but sometimes, she was there, in the place of death, locked into Rivka’s body.
Sometimes she tried to bargain with G-d. Please, let them escape, let them out of the place of evil and I will be good. I won’t let Alvin stick his tongue in my mouth. I won’t let myself make up stories about Leib in bed at night. I won’t think about Leib in that way ever again and I won’t imagine that Trudi has an accident and dies suddenly, never once will I do it anymore. I won’t help Sandy cheat on tests in English, G-d, and I won’t feel superior to her and think how come I get A’s when it isn’t even my language. I won’t steal from the dime store anymore, even if Sandy and Alvin and Four Eyes all beg me to. I won’t even sneak any more looks at the gushy letters that Murray writes Ruthie, I promise.
If you just let me sleep and not know and not feel and not see anymore, please, I’ll be good. She would help Aunt Rose meekly and zealously for several days, scrubbing and cleaning and shopping fervently, keeping track of the red and blue points with extra care, running around the same as Aunt Rose did to find a little bargain or a shop that actually had a quarter pound of butter or a little piece of lamb. Detroit was always undergoing meat famines, when nothing but offal could be found, and not much of that.
Maybe for several nights she wouldn’t have the dreams, and she would try all of the time to be really good. She would even help Trudi with baby David, as if she didn’t get too much of babies at home. She strove hard and then she had a dream and she felt like a fool. G-d was mocking her. G-d didn’t care what lies she told him and so what if she was good for two whole days, big deal. G-d knew that inside she was no good, and that was all there was to it. To hell with it, which was a phrase she had taken to saying, although not at home. To hell with it. She affected a racy style and swore. Nobody knew what to make of Sandy and her at school. They did well in their classes. They were in college prep, but they were not middle class. Sandy had more clothes than Naomi, but they were both shabby in their washworn rayon blouses and skimpy cut skirts, next to the middle-class girls in powder blue sweaters and little pearl necklaces.
Sometimes Sandy and she wore oversized men’s shirts. Naomi had helped herself to two of Duvey’s last year, and lately she had persuaded Sharon to give her one of Arty’s with frayed cuffs. She didn’t care, because she rolled up the sleeves. Sandy and she had that shuffle all the fast girls used, and she could talk to guys out of the side of her mouth and pass comments with the glibbest. They watched the colored kids carefully and practiced jitterbug steps together, so they looked real tough out on the floor at the school dances after every scrap and paper drive. Mostly the girls danced together, but Naomi and Sandy frequently had partners. The Catholic girls passed rumors about them that they did it with all the boys, and the daughter of the Jewish dentist would not walk in the halls with them, for fear their reputation would rub off on her like greasy lipstick. The boys did not try any funny stuff with her, although out of respect for her or out of respect for Alvin, Naomi was not sure.
Clotilde asked her, How come you want to act like those V-girls? V-girls or Victory girls was what the girls who chased soldiers were called. Naomi couldn’t answer. Maybe it was a style she could carry off. She didn’t have the money to look like the popular girls who ran the clubs in school. Maybe if, like Clotilde, she had her maman, she would not need to act tough.
Sandy’s mother, Mrs. Rosenthal, did not like the way Sandy was acting now that she did not have to drag her baby brother around with her. She did not approve of the way they hung out with the boys on the corner or of Sandy’s wearing men’s shirts. She said the way the girls walked together on the street, shuffling, arms linked, chewing gum and laughing loudly, looked cheap. Mrs. Rosenthal said Naomi was a poor motherless immigrant who didn’t know any better and it was too bad that her aunt was too busy caring for other people’s children to have time to watch over those under her own roof.
Mrs. Rosenthal said Naomi was a bad influence on Sandy, making her look cheap too. Mrs. Rosenthal tried to talk to Aunt Rose, but Aunt Rose laughed and said couldn’t she remember what it was like to be that age? She said they were good girls and that was just the way they dressed. They’d grow out of it. Her own mother had thought she was wild because she went on political picnics with boys and girls together to hear Socialist speeches, and she could remember when parents thought it was immoral when boys and girls danced together instead of separately. Now parents thought jitterbugging was wild instead of the waltz or the two-step, but when those dances had come in, parents had considered them dangerous.
Mrs. Rosenthal got red in the face and said that maybe Aunt Rose didn’t care to see to her niece’s reputation, being too busy trying to make money off the neighborhood women, but she took being a mother more seriously and she was not going to let her beautiful daughter go to the dogs just because Aunt Rose didn’t have a sense of responsibility to her own sister’s child.
Aunt Rose said she had more of a sense of responsibility than Mrs. Rosenthal both to her neighbors who needed help and to her own sister’s daughter, who was being raised with a sense of responsibility, not spoiled and taught to spend her days staring in a mirror. Naomi was a good girl and smart enough to get her own homework done and help Sandy with hers, and Mrs. Rosenthal ought to be grateful to Naomi for carrying Sandy on her back through high school. This was no time for Jews to take on airs and try to pull rank on each other, with the Nazis killing them every day and the rest of the world indifferent. They must stick together and recognize they were all Jews and equal in the face of trouble.
After that, Naomi wasn’t welcome in the Rosenthal house, only thirty feet away from her own. They spent almost as much time together, with the gang and in school and coming and going. Sandy said her mother thought she was still a baby and was jealous because she had a true best friend. Her mother didn’t want her to have any fun.
Trudi was worried about Leib who had been wounded and was on his way home. Ruthie was worried about Murray, going from one island to another. All that fighting was distant from where she cared about; it would be a long time before it helped her family. She wondered if she would grow up and they would still be fighting the war. Maybe by then they would have run out of men, and like the Soviet Union, they would let women fight too.
Maman was coughing. She had a fever and the bloody diarrhea. She could not eat the soup and she was weakening. On the way out of the mountain to the barracks, she fell down in the black snow and the guard beat her with his rifle butt on the head and on the back. Rivka yanked her to her feet and supported her, half dragging, back to the barracks. Rivka was terrified. It was unlike the fear that she always felt. They were all afraid all of the time, because t
hey were not yet dead. They could still feel, and while you could feel in that place, you should be afraid.
Now each moment was the tooth of a saw blade cutting into her. Maman, you have to be well, Maman! Rivka begged inside her head.
In the morning she tried to get Maman up, tried to drag her, but Maman kept falling. Her fever was up. The kapo said she had to go into the Revere, the infirmary.
That morning Rivka stood at roll call alone for two hours, coatless, bareheaded in the iron air with rutted ice under her feet, and alone she marched into the dark hollow mountain roaring with machinery and echoing with blasting. Alone she worked, hauling broken stone out. Alone she stood in the line waiting and waiting, alone she ate the watery turnip soup.
She got permission from the kapo to run to the Revere, carrying her evening slice of bread she had saved, to pay Maman back for the half slices she had given Rivka of her daily slice. When she got to the Revere, a dirty barracks where the women lay on the bare earth, she could not find Maman. The nurse put her arms around Rivka. “Little one, they took her today. They said she was too sick to work anymore. They took her away.”
Rivka screamed. She fell to the floor and screamed until the guards kicked her and the kapo beat her unconscious with a stool leg. Then she crawled back to the barracks. Already Maman’s little scrap of blanket had been stolen. Rivka lay in her bed, hungry, hungry, for while she had been unconscious, someone had taken her slice of bread. Maman was gone and now she was truly and forever alone.
Naomi woke screaming. “Maman est morte,” she cried out. “My mother is dead!”
Rose told her she had had a nightmare, but Naomi knew better. Rose brought her warm milk with a spoonful of honey and nutmeg in it and wiped her forehead and told her that everybody had bad dreams. Rose sat on the side of her bed and sang her a song in Yiddish about daisies and then a song of riddles, that one Maman always sang. Naomi turned her face to the wall. She was sleeping in Duvey’s bed, and he was dead. He was down in the cold salt waters of the sea. Maman was dead. She herself deserved to die too.
JACQUELINE 8
Spring Mud, Spring Blood
30 mars 1944
Spring pricks at us, with its first soft airs stealing over the mud. The Garonne roars through Toulouse, fat with snowmelt. Every day the light grows longer and stronger, bloody at six o’clock on the bricks of our street. Danger and opportunity swell with the hard casings of the buds cracking open. Every day the Boches and the Milice pick off more of our people and every day more people join the Resistance. Eduardo, who is Spanish, says that people join when they think you are winning. He has just been among our maquis near Lacaune, helping to train new fighters. He is missing two fingers, but our best weapons instructor.
At nine each night, we listen to the oracle of the BBC, waiting for messages that give us specific targets to strike, railroad lines, factories, all in code, of course, and always waiting for that message that will propel us into the uprising that must come soon. From London the signal will be given to rise and attack, everywhere, at the same time that the Allies land their armies.
Being in love inside such a community of resistants is not the isolation I feared. I do not feel less close to Daniela or to any of the others; if anything, I believe I am more tolerant, more understanding of weakness. Physical satisfaction makes me better tempered, although Daniela laughs at me and says she doesn’t think anybody else has noticed such an alteration! She says they are not about to change my name from ginger to honey.
More and more agents are coming over the Pyrénées or being dropped to other Resistance groups. Papa’s group in Montagne Noire now has a British Jedburgh team, one of those three-person French-British-American teams they are sending us. Lev will not go to meet them. “The British are my enemies, the same as the Germans. The British put me in a rotten pisshole of a jail. Look.” Lev ripped his shirt from his pants and hiked it up his back. “That was what the British did to me, in Haifa, to try to make me talk.” His back is ridged with scars.
Jeff argued with him. “You have to take help from those willing to give it. I haven’t noticed the Russians parachuting us any supplies.”
“You think I’m a fool, I expect help from the Russians? Look, I trust the French Communists—up to a point—because like us they really want to fight. They aren’t waiting for the Lord de Gaulle to lay on his hands and tell us we can fire our rifles. But who trusts? Listen, Vendôme, in Palestine the line changed and the party on high in Mother Russia decreed that the party in Palestine and in Persia was to be all Arabs and we were superfluous. In fact, anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews were a sign of proletarian struggle. You expect justice where Jews are concerned?”
For Jeff, the struggles between Left parties are obscure and fanatical, akin to the struggles of Christian sects in the second century C.E. Since I grew up with the political arguments of Papa and his copains ringing in my ears, I have trouble imagining Jeff’s alienation from the frame of reference I take for granted. Americans seem to have a system where you belong to parties by where you live: if you live in Kansas, you are a Republican, and if you live in Georgia, a Democrat.
“Listen to me,” Lev was saying. “The Communists recalled their best Jewish organizers—workers, good fighting men and women—from Palestine. They shipped them to Russia, where they shot them. So you tell me I look for help from Russia?” Lev spat. “We make our luck, and I don’t forget all countries are against us. I never forget.”
1ier avril 1944
Yesterday morning, a peasant told Roger about seeing the Germans execute five people in the woods after forcing them to dig a trench. At dawn we went south of the city where he showed us the spot and we dug up the bodies. One was a railroad worker in the Résistance-Fer, an engine driver from Montauban. One was a young man nobody could identify. Two of them were the prostitutes, Bibi and Paulette, from near the station, who gave the Resistance money and hid our people. The last was the body of Larousse. All had been tortured. Their naked bodies were pitted with open sores, with burns, with bruises. Bones were broken in their hands and feet. The nipples had been cut from the breasts of the younger woman, Paulette. Larousse was missing the nails of his right hand. Something large had been thrust into his ass until his intestines had ruptured.
Daniela and I laid out the bodies in a nearby dairy. I washed Larousse’s body. Over Daniela’s protests, Lev photographed them. He said we must keep a record because afterward people will say it was simply the way war was, and he did not want anyone to forget what had been done to Paulette and to Larousse. Then we reburied them under a cairn of stones. Daniela was very silent. Afterward, as we wept together, she said she understood her brother’s decision, and finally she accepted it. It was better to die at once than to be tortured.
4 avril 1944
I keep dreaming about washing Larousse’s body. He was thin and cold as water. His ribs stood out. His body hair was fine as corn silk and pale brown. In death, his penis was half engorged, like a pink flower. His eyes, glazed over, would not stay shut. I keep wondering and wondering. Had he, in the great pain he endured at the end, regretted the good we did together? Or had it sustained him, or were they never balanced in any equation, the good that Larousse did and the evil that was done to him?
He was the brother I never had, and now he is destroyed. Never will the love he lavished in perfect care on the children we saved find a more personal outlet. What does it mean, that one person can do to another what was done to him? Did they experience a sexual thrill when they drove that club through his rectum? Did they laugh? Did pain move them when nothing else could? Do they really think they are of some higher being? His body is the answer to questions that ask themselves in me all of the time, when I sleep, when I wake.
I think too of Bibi, who was perhaps thirty-five, and Paulette, no more than twenty-five, who lived together and made their living out of their bodies, who had probably been lovers. Bibi had been abandoned pregnant and poor, Paulette had come fro
m Algeria—two Jews with dyed blond hair and garishly painted faces who were unfailingly polite and gentle with me. The railroad worker leaves a family of five. The young man was probably a British or American agent, but nobody knows. After the war, maybe he will be identified from the photograph. Now he is buried with the others, under the cairn.
Lev said that you could tell from the bodies that it was the Gestapo who tortured them, because they have certain practices they like to follow. He thought they learned torture from a manual, because they often did the same things in the same way. Of course, he said, there were individuals like Klaus Barbie who seemed to have some special passion for it, but by and large, they tortured by the book.
Jeff disappeared quietly when we were washing the bodies. Part of being in love is as if you have an extra eye or an extra heat-seeking sense such as pit vipers possess, so that you can track your lover. Whatever I am doing, I am aware with a little portion of my mind of Jeff. He said nothing, just quietly slipped off, but I knew he was being sick out back. I did not want to call attention, because if Jeff revealed his squeamishness, Lev would have one up on him. For all that they get along these days, there is still that male prickliness of place to consider. I felt sick with grief but not with nausea; the pain is what was manifest to me. Did the infinite pain of torture wipe out the life that led to it? Or does pain become finally meaningless, the weakness of the body caught in a place bodies cannot survive? I cannot seem to stop brooding on Larousse.