Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “The United States.”

  “OSS or M-2?”

  “I’m a lieutenant in the American Army. I was captured in Tunisia and taken to the prison camp at Chieti. I escaped as the Germans were moving the prisoners to Germany.”

  “Lieutenant, if that’s what you are, we want all the details of the spy ring you’ve been running. What kind of information was our little secretary giving you?”

  “I only met her last month. What she was going to give me was information on how to get to Spain. What it said I don’t know, because you read it, I didn’t.”

  His interrogator nodded and the guards began again, smashing him in the face time after time until he could not help screaming. One of them kept pounding his ear until he thought the eardrum was burst. He could not hear anymore on that side. “I can’t hear, I can’t hear,” he moaned, spitting blood and pieces of a tooth. His mouth hurt too much and the tongue was too injured for him to be able to tell what teeth were broken. He wished to pass out again, but he didn’t. How long do I have to hold out, he asked himself, how long? Pain and pain and pain and pain. I don’t get used to it. It is bigger than the world. It is a sea inside and outside. It’s everywhere. I want to die. I want it to stop.

  “Where do you say you’re from? Where are your other spies? We want to hear all about how you send your messages out. Where’s your radio?”

  While they had him on the floor, one of them ground his boot into his belly and then his balls as the other stomped his right hand.

  The phone rang. His interrogator picked it up. “I said no calls … Bah. All right. Good evening, Herr Sturmbansfuehrer. Yes, I was just interrogating … He says he is an American lieutenant.… We didn’t think. Yes, Herr Sturmbansfuehrer, first thing in the morning. Of course. Thank you, Herr Sturmbansfuehrer, thank you. We’d be very pleased, thank you.” He put the receiver back in its cradle and cursed for several minutes. “All right, pack him back into his cell. The SS wants him prettily packaged for them, after we did all the work. They want all of them in the morning.… Put him on ice and bring me Margot Foulac. We’ll have another session with her and then I have further instructions.”

  As Jeff was dragged along the hall, his head banging freely on the floor, he cried out as he passed the women’s cells, calling Jacqueline by name, although he could not speak clearly. There was no answer from within. After they had thrown him in his cell, he heard them opening a cell down the hall and he heard a woman’s voice cry out as she was struck.

  He lay on the floor where he had fallen. They had not bothered to put cuffs back on him. The Gestapo in the morning. He remembered with extraordinary clarity the corpses of Paulette and of Larousse, like a Grünewald crucifixion. Could he really hold out? How long before he would begin telling them about Jacqueline? About Lev? About the children hidden in the mountains? About exactly where the maquis were encamped in the Montagne Noire? How long? When they pulled his nails out one by one? When they attached wires to his genitals and burned them off? When they put him underwater and used the almost-drowning? When they forced the baton or broom or whatever it was straight up his ass and burst his intestines? When would he begin to say everything, everything, to stop the pain?

  They would all die. Margot, Jacqueline and himself, who knew how many others they had caught, they were all going to die against a wall, but why wait, why play their game of endurance?

  He did not talk, the Resistance said with pride about Jean Moulin and countless others. No, they let themselves be tortured to death. If very lucky, they finally were shot after digging their own graves. He would not play that role. He had always hated those games men played of who could be manlier, who was tougher. Zach played those games, not Jeff.

  He had his own way out from the pain that never stopped, from his kidneys that hurt as they were burst, the teeth broken in his mouth, the terrible pain from some unknown organ ruptured in his midsection, the blood still trickling from a deep cut on the back of his head, the blood half choking him from his injured tongue. OSS had given him an exit visa.

  They had at some point broken two of his fingers, stomping on his hand, but the two middle fingers only. He had the quick—and what he labeled at once irrelevant—thought that without the fingers being set soon, he would not be able to hold a brush. He could still reach back in his mouth and loosen the cap on the molar. Finally he held it in his hands, the L-pill they had equipped him with. Zach and he had used to make jokes about it, the capsule of potassium cyanide. They called it the doom cocktail, the little pill that will. He did not wait to think any longer. If he reconsidered he would not do it; then the pain would go on and on and on. He bit the pill, releasing a bitter metallic taste. A wave of nausea choked him but he swallowed the small pill along with a mouthful of saliva and blood. It would be fast, they had assured him back in London.

  It was.

  RUTHIE 8

  Almost Mishpocheh

  Life was tighter at home without the income from Rose and Sharon. The city had closed them down, although two neighbors, little Mrs. Entemann and Mrs. Rogovin, had come to court to swear they had given money only to cover the costs of feeding their babies. Finally the judge had levied a fine and a warning. It was a hardship to the neighborhood. Mrs. Entemann had to get up at five A.M. to take her children to her mother’s on the streetcar and then hurry to work. Mrs. Rogovin quit her job; it was that or leave the baby alone.

  Ruthie, always attuned to her mother and her father, noticed that Rose had lost some position in their relationship. No longer bringing in money, she catered more to Morris. She was humiliated at having been before the court. Although Morris insisted that the laws were made by the affluent to control the working class, and therefore no shame attached to trying to get round them, Rose was frightened. She had a record. She launched into heroics of household economy, making soap from fat and lye, walking miles to find what her family needed or wanted, waiting in line after line.

  Sharon no longer had the rent for the upstairs apartment. Never having worked outside the home, she seemed frightened at the idea, half titillated and half offended. Ruthie, who had brought in money since she turned twelve and began baby-sitting, found Sharon’s attitude exotic. Sharon seemed to view going to work in the five-and-dime or a factory as another woman might view the possibility of becoming a prostitute. In his letters, Arty took a similar line.

  Rose snorted. “My own mother worked, I worked when I was younger, my bubeh was a button maker. Where does Arty get his fancy-schmancy ideas, his wife is a dollbaby? Sharon should get off her tuchis. She feels too sorry for herself, if you ask me.”

  “I can’t pay the rent,” Sharon moaned, sitting at Sunday dinner with her face in her hands. At once Clark set up a wailing in response. Sharon clutched him to her bosom, looking, Ruthie thought, quite manipulatively forlorn. “Whatever will I do?”

  Ruthie said, “They’re hiring at Briggs, on the night shift.”

  “You know I can’t do that, with my little babies, and Arty would be furious. He says he’s not risking his life fighting a war for me to go out and get a job like a man.”

  Only Morris smiled at her, pinching her cheek. “Don’t worry, Sharonke, you can always move downstairs. We have plenty of room.”

  Rose looked at Ruthie, and Ruthie looked back at her mother. They did not think they had lots of room. They were enjoying the silence in the house these days. Naomi studied harder and her grades had recently improved. Rose’s energy, no longer pouring over a houseful of her neighbor’s little children, was focused on Naomi. She was fed like a heifer for a state fair. She was monitored as to the holes in her clothes, the stains, the seemliness of outfits. Her homework was watched over. Her nails were examined for cleanliness.

  “Maybe we could sublet the apartment just till Arty comes home.”

  Naomi piped up. Ruthie had thought she wasn’t listening, her eyes on her plate. “Trudi needs a place. Now that Leib’s home, they’re real crowded with baby David in that little
room. Trudi and her mother are fighting every day.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Sharon said. “I’ll see if they’ll agree to move out when Arty comes home. They say for sure the union will get him his old job back on the line.”

  Ruthie clasped her hands, suddenly cold, in her lap. “Don’t you think you’d feel funny, somebody else using all your own things and breaking half of them?” She decided to be honest. “I’m not terribly eager to have Leib living upstairs.”

  “Shush,” Rose said. “You had your chance at him, and now he’s married to your friend, and you have your own young man. What’s past should be bygones. Trudi needs a place of her own too, a mama with a baby and her husband home with a foot missing, poor boy.”

  Morris frowned at her. “It’s not like you, Ruthie, to be so unfeeling for a friend in trouble. In misfortune, we find out who are our true friends.”

  Ruthie was blushing, her hands wringing invisibly in her lap. How could she explain that she did not trust Leib, did not want him close to her? She suspected her father and mother were right, that she was being mean. Maybe she envied Trudi her husband and baby. Maybe she did not want to witness her friend’s happiness and taste even more bitterly her own loneliness. Maybe she was refusing to extend compassion to Leib. She felt she could say nothing more, but that she was always expected to make a sacrifice, were one called for; that her putting others first had come to be taken for granted, for everyone’s convenience but her own.

  Rose was saying, “This way, we can use Sharon’s allotment for the family and hold on to the flat. Sharon, you get Leib to write the check to you and then you write the check to the landlord. When he comes around the last of the month, you be upstairs. That way he can’t raise the rent and when Arty comes back, you can move right back in. With strangers, how could we make such a good arrangement for our boy?”

  “Maybe they won’t want to,” Ruthie said softly, but she did not believe that. Trudi was fighting with her mother and Leib was goading her on, as he despised living in her parents’ house. Trudi was still working at the hospital part time and Leib had his disability checks.

  By July first, it was all arranged. Sharon moved downstairs into Duvey’s old room and Naomi was shunted back to Ruthie’s. The children would share Duvey’s double bed with their mother, as once Arty and Duvey had shared it.

  The first Sunday in July, Ruthie, Naomi and Morris helped them move in. Limping badly, Leib moved slowly, awkwardly. He lifted the boxes easily from the truck they had borrowed from a man who had been in the moving business with his father, Misha the Bear, but then he could not carry them up the steps. Ruthie knew how strong, how sure, how agile he had been, and her heart went out to him. A foot missing. She began to imagine what it would be like to have a piece of your own body permanently taken from you and a hunk of metal stuck there without feeling, without fine control.

  The day was hot and muggy, overcast. For fear of rain, they worked as quickly as they could. Naomi was up in the truck pushing boxes forward toward Leib. When she came on something light, she ran upstairs with it. She was trying hard to make herself useful, Ruthie noticed. Naomi said to Leib, “I can baby-sit David for you, when you guys want to go out. I mean if you don’t want to take him over to your mother’s or Trudi’s mother’s house. I’m good with David, you ask Trudi.”

  “My mother moved in with my sister in Flint. She couldn’t keep up the rent by herself,” Leib said to Naomi. He was relaxed with Naomi, not speaking to her as if she was a silly child. Maybe war had changed him; maybe being wounded had changed him. Then he went on like the old Leib at once: “As for that witch Trudi calls her mother, I wouldn’t let her change the bottom of a son of mine if she promised to lick it clean.”

  Naomi giggled. She turned to grab another box. It was light, so she slipped past and carried it up.

  Leib leaned toward Ruthie. “So, we’re to be neighbors, mishpocheh practically. Who would have guessed?”

  “I think Trudi and Naomi cooked it up between them to escape Trudi’s mother. They were fighting a lot, no?”

  “A lot is no word for it. I wouldn’t fight with her—I wouldn’t stoop to that. This is pretty much a dump.” He cast his eye over the rickety wooden house. “Although I’ve seen people living in caves, in holes in the earth, in little shacks you wouldn’t keep rabbits in. I’ll tell you all about it,” he promised, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  She ducked away at once, then felt as if she had overreacted. Maybe he just needed to lean on others sometimes. She had been told by women at work that when men came back from war, they could not talk about it. Sometimes, the women said, they were crazy. They woke up screaming. They couldn’t make love anymore. They were mean and broke things and screamed at the children. They came back idiots or monsters. What they would never do is tell you what had made them that way. But Leib’s tone was conversational. Maybe when Murray came back, he too would want to confide in her, to share experiences.

  She hefted a box marked GLASS, BE CAREFUL!! Upstairs the baby was crying lustily and there was a thud of something falling. Ruthie hurried. Trudi was directing everyone where to put the boxes down, changing her mind every few minutes. Sweat rolled down Ruthie’s back. Surreptitiously she glanced at her watch. She had a great deal of homework to do. Summer term had just begun, and although she had fewer classes, they were more concentrated. She could not help much longer. She wondered what could possibly be in all the boxes, and why some of them couldn’t stay at Trudi’s parents.

  Leib and Trudi took a full week to unpack and settle in. When Rose and Ruthie were alone, Rose said, “How those two young people carry on! They yell and scream at each other and throw things. Then they’re turtledoves half an hour later.”

  “Were you and Tata ever like that?”

  “Never,” Rose said with a shake of the head. “We screamed at the bosses, not at each other. What did we have to scream at each other about?”

  “Well, what do they fight about?” Ruthie felt ashamed of her own curiosity, but it was as if she had a window into somebody else’s marriage. She had that special wondering about Leib that came from the possibility that she might, in another life, have married him herself.

  “I try not to listen. I mean, should I spy on them to gossip in the yards like a yente? They fight about money. They fight about where the sofa should stand. They fight about whether they ought to eat chicken or fish. They fight about who yelled and made the baby cry.”

  Ruthie smiled. “Well, it doesn’t sound serious. I suppose it’s just their way. Some people can’t tell anyone else is really there if they don’t pound on them.”

  “I’m sure.” Rose made a gesture of washing her hands. “But I wouldn’t care for all that noise myself, not in my bedroom, not in my kitchen. Enough trouble comes in from outside and down the street roaring.”

  The rest of the month went smoothly enough. They were all getting used to being in each other’s hair. Ruthie dreamed of the small apartment where she would live, sometimes with Murray, and sometimes when he felt too far from her to be real, with just Naomi. It would be blessedly quiet. If Leib and Trudi worked on the line, they would not crave the excitement and noise of screaming at each other. They would crave silence pouring through the ears unctuous and healing as the warm oil Bubeh used for earaches. There would be room, space, light and silence. She could read without staving off fifty interruptions, without consciously blocking out sounds and crashes and childish tantrums.

  Clark was becoming spoiled, she thought; Sharon favored him and sometimes made a scapegoat out of Marilyn, the older. Clark had a habit of wanting whatever Marilyn had, and Sharon’s usual response was to order her to give it to her baby brother. Fortunately Marilyn would be starting kindergarten in the fall. Especially since Arty had gone to the Army, Sharon had made a pet out of Clark and carried him around, although he was four and big for his age.

  The second week in July, she got the first letter from Murray after a gap of three weeks. H
e had been wounded and was writing from the hospital, but he said he would be out in a week or so, not to worry. In the meantime, he didn’t mind at all having a rest and missing one invasion. She was upset by the letter. He’d been wounded while she had not even known. Several women in the factory told her they knew at once when something happened to their men, but she had been wrapped up in classes, work and her family, while across the world, he had almost died.

  Ruthie decided she had been silly to worry about Leib upstairs; aside from the house being more crowded, Leib and Trudi’s presence meant the entertainment for the family of overhearing their pitched battles and spending money for Naomi, who baby-sat for them regularly. Ruthie missed going over to Trudi’s on Sundays to talk and knit together. Leib was around most of the time. Besides his disability pension, he had a year’s unemployment. The balloon company he had worked for was still out of business, so he couldn’t return to his old job, and Ruthie did not know and thought it insensitive to ask whether he could still work on an assembly line at all.

  Once a week, Leib had to go to a local hospital to have his prosthesis checked. On the whole he did not seem crushed. He was still a good-looking man, and limping down the street in his fatigues using a cane, he drew feminine glances as he always had.

  Thus Ruthie had almost forgotten her nervousness on a Sunday when everybody in the family went off to a union picnic on Belle Isle: everyone except Ruthie, who had to study, and she found out, Leib, who was unwilling to go but had urged Trudi to take the baby and enjoy the respite from the heat. Ruthie discovered this when Leib appeared at the door of her room, where she lay on the bunk in a sundress, the fan trained on her, reading a government report on housing problems she was using in a paper.

  Her first thought was relief she had not taken her dress off. Only lethargy, had prevented her from undressing further, as she would have had to get down from Naomi’s upper bunk, where she had fancied there was a little more air. Now she landed on her feet in thirty seconds, embarrassed to be caught on her back. “Leib, is something wrong?” She stood before him barefoot, still clutching the Government Printing Office tome, while he loomed over her. How enormous he was; she had never liked that feeling, a wall of male flesh hemming her in.