Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Some Marine nisei came up with bullhorns and called in Japanese for the civilians to surrender, that they would not be hurt. The Jap soldiers were yelling at them too from the caves where they were holed up. At least everyone didn’t look terrified. Some kids were playing catch in a circle. From the brush, he watched them for a moment, there on the cliffs with the wind whipping the girls’ black hair and the sea rising up the horizon so blue it hurt his eyes, and then one of the children missed. As the grenade exploded and the children were torn apart and their burst bodies hurled through the air, the men around him all groaned as one and Murray understood what game the children played.

  A woman dressed in a sea green kimono looking like a big shiny butterfly ran with her baby in her arms to the cliff and hurled herself over, crying out something. A family group, father, mother, two little boys, went forward together holding hands and leaped off. Murray could hear more bullhorns from below the cliffs, where gunboats were circling. More and more people were running forward. He saw a man swing an infant through the air and dash its head against a stone. Then a woman took the corpse and shuffled slowly toward the cliff to walk off into space and fall.

  An older woman unbound her long iron grey hair as if getting ready for bed and then stepped off the cliff, primly holding her skirts together as she fell straight down. A man grabbed up a baby and ran off, his legs still wheeling in the air as he seemed to hang a moment and then plummeted. The women’s fall was slowed by their kimonos billowing around them, so there was a ghastly incongruous grace to their descent, as if they were large blossoms in lavender, in maroon, in pale gold, in sky blue floating.

  As he stared, a woman carrying a little girl ran back and forth, back and forth, frantic as a trapped puppy with her ivory kimono glinting in the sun. She would run up to the edge of the cliff and then embrace the little girl she held and turn away. She did this over and over until finally she backed from the cliff, swung around and began running straight toward the brush where Murray’s company was dug in. “Come on,” the guys started yelling to her, “that-a-girl, come on!”

  A machine gun sputtered from the caves. The woman jerked as the bullets tore through her, almost cutting her in half. She fell and lay crumpled, red soaking the ivory of the kimono. Neither she nor the child moved again.

  “Bastards,” Reardon said. “Killing their own women. They just ain’t human. We’ve got to clean those yellow bellies out of there.”

  They did eventually clean the soldiers out of the caves, but it was too late. Hundreds of women, men and children leaped from the cliffs. The sea below was so choked that the propellers of the boats were blocked with flesh. Murray felt numb. Standing among the bodies that littered the grass at the cliff tops, he looked down into the sea of bodies below and again he vomited. How can we see all this and go on living?

  A moment later he was following Jack uphill, where one of the new guys, called Tiny because he was six feet four and broad, was shouting that he had found a cache of booze in one of the caves. What all the men wanted more than anything else was to be dead drunk, and Murray felt at one with the guys around him. Never before in his life had that happened to him. Always he had been odd man out, the intellectual, the sensitive one, the Jew; but now he felt as if he were part of an animal bigger than himself, an ant in a colony who moved to the same chemical signals as the ant beside him and the ant before and behind. Sake called them. Sake promised numbness. If he would never forget the sight of that ivory kimono glistening as the woman ran toward them carrying her daughter and then the bullets tearing through her flesh, if he would never forget the green kimono floating like the wings of a Polyphemus moth as the woman turned and turned in the air plunging toward the sea and the rocks, if he would never forget the children in the sunlight tossing the dark ball between them until they all blossomed into fire and burning flesh, then the sake promised that soon, soon, he would remember but not feel.

  They knew they were breaking regulations and did not give the faintest damn, as they uncorked the bottles, squatting in the cave where the corpses still lay in their blood puddled around their weapons. They knew that there were still hundreds of remnant soldiers sniping in the brush. They did not give a shit. I am one of them, Murray thought, drinking the sake down and feeling its warmth spread in his belly. I am no more, no less. The best is not to feel anything.

  Wearily, Jack winked at him—contact less exhausting than speech—and he winked back. Some of the men were going through the pockets of the corpses, looking for souvenirs. The gunny, Reardon, stooped into the cave and shook his head at them. Then instead of giving them hell, he reached for a bottle and sagged against the far wall, shoving the remains of a kid whose legs had been blown off aside with his boot. “Aw shit,” he said. “This is one asshole island.”

  JACQUELINE 9

  An Honorable Death

  9 juin 1944

  I can scarcely write because two of my fingers are broken and splinted, and my left arm is in a sling, but here I am on Montagne Noire. Sometimes I think surviving is a duty; sometimes, a fate. Jeff has not arrived yet. I am awaiting news. It is a nuisance to be disabled at a time as busy and critical as this, as the battle for France goes on everyplace!

  Two of the guards raped me. The third one didn’t. The others said he was queer, but he said he was afraid of catching a disease, that I was probably a prostitute the American had picked up. I didn’t believe his reason and neither did the other two, because they laughed at him. When they took me back to the cell, they were still making jokes while he opened a different cell. I knew from what he said that they had found out Jeff is American, which puts him in danger of being shot as a spy.

  I knew the cell was different because, first, I had counted the doors going in, and second, this cell was on the right, not the left. I lay on the floor where they threw me. Then I crawled up on the straw mattress. Through the window I could see only pale lavender sky. I will admit I was crushed with despair and horror and I wept for a long time, until my eyes were sore and my sinuses blocked. I had nothing to wipe my nose on but my dress, already smeared with blood and their filthy semen, and my own urine, for I had wet myself when they tried to force me the first time.

  I lay on the cot a long time like a stepped-on bug, blaming myself for our walking into their trap. I should have known. I berated myself bitterly for being distracted with our argument, with his presence. The presence of a man you love is a constant demand for attention, even when such attention is dangerous and inappropriate, and I am no more able to resist that demand than any other woman. I heard them taking someone out. They might come back again for me at any moment. I saw Maman and Rivka going hand in hand to the deportation train, and I had to act. I sat up and felt myself over. My face was covered with blood from my nose. It was sore and swollen but I did not think it was broken. Mostly I was bruised. My vagina was bleeding. I wished they had left me my underpants. They had been so busy raping me, they had not yet beaten me badly, although I was sure that would come later. I began examining my cell.

  The door was firmly locked, solid wood set in a metal frame. The outer wall of the ancient building was made of stone. I scrambled up to hang on the bars and peer out. My cell overlooked a side street from one floor up. When I had looked out of the window of the cell I had been in before, I had looked into a courtyard. I began to wonder if the guard who had not taken part in the rape had perhaps done me a little favor, because the side street was much better than the courtyard, if I could get out. It was far to jump, but not suicidal. I could survive it, I knew I could.

  I managed to scramble up and crouch on the narrow window ledge. A sentry passed below about every ten minutes, although not with regularity. Finally I figured out sometimes he just came to the corner and looked and did not bother walking the length of that side. Several times he stopped just around the corner on my side and smoked. I could smell his cigarette.

  The glass had long since broken on that window in one of the many air raids
that eliminated glass all over the city. Pressing my head cautiously against each gap in the bars, I found that the bar nearest the right hand had the largest gap between bar and wall, as if it had been pushed somewhat awry while the cement was still wet. The stone was not completely square. High up, the gap was even wider. It did not look large enough for a big cat to wriggle out, but I thought of the space a baby is born through, and I thought it was worth trying. But not yet. It was still the long pale mauve twilight. I was playing a game all this time of being perfectly still whenever the sentry was near and then working feverishly on the bars when he was around the corner.

  I heard the gate at the end of the hall crash open and I flung myself down and ran to my cot. My heart began pounding so loudly my body shook. This time I listened to where they went. It was Margot they were bringing back, and then they took Jeff. He called out to me as he was taken down the hall, but I did not want to call the guards’ attention to the fact that I was in a different cell than they had put me in originally, so I did not answer. Maybe the guard who had put me in here would also help Jeff. I felt bad at not answering Jeff, but I feared, irrationally but powerfully, that if I spoke and he heard my voice, he would instantly know I had been raped.

  I took off my belt, with its brass buckle. I scrambled back up onto the narrow ledge and worked on the opening, taking care that no dust from my rubbing fell out the window. Whenever I saw or heard the guard approaching, I stopped. I knew that he could not see into the darkness where I was crouching, but nonetheless, when he was near I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe. I tried to forbid myself to think about what was going to happen to us and simply to focus all my energy, all my strength, on escaping. The sentry seemed so close as he passed, the top of his head only ten feet below me, I felt as if he could smell my fear. I thought that fear tasted just as my dry mouth tasted, of old blood and something tinny. I doubted first whether I could get through the narrow gap between stone and bar, and second, whether I could do it in under ten minutes. Otherwise he could hardly miss me hanging in midair over his head.

  I made no impression on the rock, of course, but the mortar was weaker. I suppose altogether I scraped off about .7 centimeters. I felt every minute space gained made it more likely I would be able to wriggle through. My fingers were bleeding by now and I still had no idea if that narrow space would pass even my head.

  It was finally dark when they came back with Jeff. I heard him cry out something in the hall, but I could not make out the words. They took Margot away again. I was sure my turn would come next, before I ever had a chance to try my plan. It did not seem like much of a plan, but it was all I could think of, and I had to try something. I had to. I crawled up on the ledge again. I realized that my clothes were only going to get in the way.

  I hopped down and stripped, feeling more naked than I ever have in my life. I tied my dress and slip, my sabots into a bundle, which I placed carefully on the ledge so I would not drop it. I began trying to work my head through as soon as the sentry had passed. Then he called out something to another. When I heard shooting, I froze, but nothing more happened.

  Then came my wonderful piece of luck. Planes arrived over Toulouse to bomb the railyards and the foundries. The ground was shaking and dust rising. The sentry disappeared. I forced my head through. It felt as if I had skinned myself and broken my jaw but there I was hanging over the street with my head through the bars and my clothing in a bundle on the ledge. I pulled it through so that it was on the outside with my head. I continued forcing myself through, wishing I were skinnier than I am. I wriggled and wriggled. Whenever I let myself panic, I got stuck. My own sweat helped lubricate me. I was sweating heavily, partly from exertion, for never have I worked so hard as I did to force my body through. My breasts hurt. They were bruised already from the guards. I thought my arms would rip from their sockets, but the hardest part was my hips. Finally I lunged and then fell, clutching the bundle. That was how I broke my arm. I lay stunned in the street while the sky bloomed with vast zinnias of flame, red and gold and incandescent white, the clusters of rockets from the antiaircraft batteries, the searchlights crisscrossing and wheeling in arcs, the rosy fall of a bomber and then the tower of flames where it went down in the city. I was dazed. My hip hurt so, I thought I had broken it too.

  Lying there in the dirt and my blood, naked and filthy and torn, I felt like some small fierce creature of the night, a weasel, a stoat, something tiny and lithe and close to the ground with sharp teeth and an immense will to live. I had to get up in spite of the pain. I did not know how many bones I had broken but I could not care, I could not care. I pulled on the dress somehow, stepped into my sabots and crept along the building toward the street in front. I was afraid to head toward the back, as that was the direction the guard had run in when the raid started. I hobbled along the street, but no one was about except a fire truck going by.

  I went straight to the house of a cheminot nearby. I could think of nowhere else to go, and I knew that once the raid was over, my chances of escaping in my bloody dress were slight. I felt ashamed, as if anyone looking at me could tell I had been raped. I could smell my stench, of their semen, of blood, of sweat, of urine. I banged on their door, but did not make too much noise as I did not want neighbors to hear. Then I realized because of the bombing, no one could hear me, no matter what I did. They live near the yards and all their windows were long ago smashed and the walls of the house itself cracked. I finally pushed on the old packing crate that serves as window curtains and fell into their kitchen with a great clatter, which brought the wife at once.

  Now I am at the base in the Montagne Noire, with my people again. We are waiting word. Neither Jeff nor Margot seems to have been able to escape and I want to know where they are being held—the Milice barracks or Gestapo headquarters on rue Alexandre Fourtanier. Daniela set my arm and splinted my fingers. I am not much good. I couldn’t shoot a gun to save my life, although it may come to that too. I am covered with hideous bruises and abrasions. My nose is swollen purple as a turnip. But I am proud that I escaped. Here in the high clean beech forest, I slowly recover.

  I wish we would get news of Jeff. I fear for him. I am afraid they will beat and torture him. I have nightmares in which I am laying out his body, as I did Larousse, and each time I wake weeping. When I am wide awake, images of tortured flesh haunt me. I worry about Margot too, but I cannot pretend I feel her danger as keenly. I tell myself that Jeff was well trained and that if a civilian, a woman, can escape, surely he can too: not in the same way, of course, since he could never have wriggled through, but perhaps when they move him. One thing I dread is telling him about being raped, how he will take that.

  10 juin 1944

  The Milice shot Margot. That was the fusillade I heard from my cell. They did not want the Gestapo to know about their leak, to interrogate her about Milice headquarters, so after they had questioned and beat her for several hours, they shot her in the courtyard of the prison. We think the Gestapo has Jeff. We must find out.

  They did not know who I was when they were raping me, but now they know I am the same organizer of the trips across the Pyrénées they were hunting earlier. My wanted poster has gone up everywhere, but I am told that they get torn down as fast as they go up. Like Papa, I have a price on my head. Papa is trying to find out where Jeff is being kept. I am impatient to know, so that we can make plans to break him out. Oh, Eduardo brought a new recruit to me, a construction worker who told me that the way I escaped is called the bar of freedom and was done wherever they could get away with it when the prisons were being revamped after the Nazis arrived. The workers would move one bar after it was inspected but before the cement hardened.

  11 juin 1944

  Papa came to our tent to tell me, while Daniela was changing the dressing on my hip. He is dead. The Milice killed him. There is nothing more to say, nothing. I cannot believe he is dead, but it is so, Papa insists. We cannot even recover the body.

  21 juin 1944 />
  Both Papa and Daniela gave me a talking to, that I must get myself together and set an example, that I cannot continue to give way to my feelings. Grief, Daniela says, is a luxury. Did I not urge her to think about the living when her brother killed himself with his own grenade? It seems to me I was insufficiently sympathetic then, but Daniela denies that. Papa orates somewhat more. He says we are at war and cannot pause to mourn or remember our dead until we have won. He asks me if I should have wished Jeff to collapse if I had been shot alongside Margot.

  Papa said one thing is sure: Jeff did not talk before they killed him. No more arrests have followed. Mme Faurier has taken over running his agents from outside Lacaune, and the two operations are separate now as that know-it-all, the British radioman, keeps saying they should have been all along. Mme Faurier will continue to transmit through Achille. We will leave him hidden in the Lacaune Mountains. Here the maquis have that British radioman who communicates with London for them.

  Many separate maquis groups have gathered here to fight the Germans, not only the Jewish Army and scouts but many local groups. There is some tension, but mostly we all get on. The Jewish squadron is actually admired for our discipline and our training: Lev is responsible for that. Every day one of our people says to me how much they miss Jeff’s style and his energy. People have also been giving me drawings he left various places. I have been looking at them too much and I have decided I must hide them away. I know I am failing in my work. If I only escaped to weep and lie in my tent and walk on the mountains alone trying to imagine how he would have seen these landscapes, I should have died at the hands of the Milice too, as he did, as Margot did. The only time I feel some respite from his death is when I climb one of the old logging roads that rise steeply among the beech and holly. Purple columbine grows in the paths. Giant glistening diamond-backed black slugs slide everywhere, devouring the wildflowers. The world is peaceful noplace, but here it is whole. Cuckoos keep calling. I climb till I am exhausted.