Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Oscar grinned but his teeth looked as if they would like to bite something, her perhaps. “To give that very young man credit, he said nothing, but that made Abra suspicious. What happened to your French director?”

  “I like Daniel better. He has a more affectionate disposition. How can you justify referring to him as my very young man? I’d have thought Abra was the same age.”

  “I would never disagree that she’s too young for me. It’s a little wearing.”

  “And I thought it was austerity and the war effort!”

  “Louise, you are not a bitch. Do not attempt to sound like one.”

  “I have that side too, Oscar. I have many sides.”

  Oscar got up lithely and came to stand directly in front of her. His knees touched hers. She found herself holding her breath. “Let’s go to bed, Louise.” He took her hands. “Let’s have something nice from the chance of being together, here, now.”

  Her damned body was lapping like a fire at the underside of her skin. “Oscar, we can’t. I can’t hurt Abra that way.”

  “Oh, this time you aren’t busy being faithful to somebody else?”

  “It isn’t that sort of situation. But I can’t hurt Abra.”

  “Abra and I don’t have an exclusive relationship. She hasn’t asked for that or expected it, and I haven’t either.” He drew her to her feet. “Louie, Louie, come to me, be with me.”

  “Oh? Does she make much use of her freedom? Oscar, that situation’s too depressingly familiar. I can’t add to her woes.” She pressed her hand firmly against his chest, keeping her elbows straight, holding him off. “I don’t enjoy one-night stands, not even with an ex-husband.”

  He let her go and strolled to the little table, picking at the remains of her toast. “Denied even the barest crumbs,” he said, but sounded amused. “Oh, Louie, we do strip off perhaps at least one coat of nonsense each time, don’t we? Stay in London. You have plenty to write about here.”

  “As soon as they give me leave to go, I’m on my way.”

  “Hmmm. By the way, are we still expected to go on supporting Mrs. what’s her name? Or is the flying goy picking up the tab now?”

  “We’re still supporting her, as I’m sure you can guess.”

  “I wish at least she’d married money,” Oscar said, running his hand through his hair. “I’m making on paper just about my salary, but without speaking engagements and consulting and royalties, I’m hurting. I suppose everybody is during the war.”

  “Don’t bet on that. A lot of people are doing just fine.”

  “With the paper shortages, all of my books but one have gone out of print.”

  “Oscar, I’m all right financially. Why don’t I take over two thirds of her expenses, and you kick in one third?”

  “Can you do that?”

  She nodded. The size of printings was severely limited, hurting her last collection of stories, but her nonfiction book about women on the home front had been considered important and allowed a run that had made it a best-seller. Best-sellers were sprouting like radishes. People would read almost anything. As a correspondent, she was well paid. Her writing during the war had expanded her base of readers. She had the same readers for her fiction and a new set for her reportage. In England, she was still known almost entirely as a writer of romantic women’s fiction, which sold well enough here, and her British colleagues appeared astonished she should wear the hat suddenly of a war correspondent. Nonetheless she was scheduled to be interviewed on the BBC that afternoon about women in the American war effort, on which she had been touted to them as an expert.

  The conversation on economics dampened Oscar’s ardor, as she had hoped, and he shortly departed, not however without saying he would be by that evening around nine to see her.

  “Impossible,” she said. “I’ll be in the tubes. I’m doing interviews with people who’ve been living there for years. Imagine, keeping house in a subway station with your whole family, on the platform. I’m also supposed to visit one of those new super deep shelters.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said firmly and grinned at her.

  “Call first,” she said, and saw him to the door, where he turned and quickly kissed her.

  She wrote up her stuff for cabling as she went. It would all have to pass British censorship and then American, but at least she intended to dispatch as much as she could and to remain caught up with her interviewing, so that if transportation and the go-ahead appeared, she would not lose the stories she had been pursuing in London. The truth was, if she had not been promised France and the Army, she would have been happy covering the scene in Britain for months. Every day she discovered new material. She wanted to do something on women air raid wardens. Being a warden in London was a far cry from the easy job it was in the States. It meant being out in the raids and investigating each incident, beginning the rescue work, the recovery of bodies or fire fighting. She liked the fire fighter who had been acting as her guide, and wanted to focus on just such spunky women.

  Her phone was ringing off the hook, because it seemed just about every journalist she knew and half her old friends from New York were coming through London on their way to France or back from Italy or off to North Africa. Everytime she left the hotel, she heard a male voice calling her name. Had she been in the mood for taking a lover, she would have had a wide choice, but she simply wanted to file her copy quickly.

  She never got to write her story on women air raid wardens, because she was told to report to a field north of London. There, after only fourteen hours, she was fitted on a transport among piles of drugs and medical supplies and shipped to France, with her pack to sit on and her typewriter under her feet.

  The air was turbulent over the Channel and at one point the plane dived straight down in a terrifying rush to avoid some obstacle or danger invisible in the blinded cabin. Even in July, it was cold in an unpressurized cargo plane, a version of the Liberator called the C-87. She was frightened and wondered sharply what the hell she was doing, transported with drums of sulfa dust and crates of bandages to the place where people were killing each other. She imagined herself back in Washington, curled in her bed with Daniel. She felt crazy to be here and not there. She even regretted that she had not fallen into Oscar’s arms. He had been right when he said that that would have given them something to carry away. He had been right, she thought, pressing down on her typewriter to keep it from hitting her in the chin and trying to fend off rolling drums of sulfa.

  Louise crouched under the lee of a broken stone wall, plastered to the crotch of her baggy Army pants in rich Normandy mud. She was technically in the front—practically the whole lodgment area was so classified, but she had not yet got up to the real front. She was spending several days with the medical corps, covering their operation. She was sleeping in a tent with nurses, but now she had come forward from the field hospital to a battalion aid station.

  The corpsmen stationed here responded to calls over the field telephones, to bring in the wounded on litters or occasionally by jeep. The wounded were taken from this shell-blasted farmyard to a collecting station, where they were moved by ambulance to the field hospital. If the wounded were not in shock or screaming, she interviewed them. She got the name and rank first, then the hometown. In the Army that was what officers tended to ask the men too. Where are you from, soldier? Then she asked them if they were married, or if not, did they have a girl at home?

  Some of them were surprised to see a woman in the battalion aid station, but many were too dazed to notice, and some assumed she was a nurse. Usually they did not realize she was a woman unless she spoke to them. In her mud-encrusted boots and leggings, Army trousers, sodden trench coat and helmet, she looked like any other GI.

  For the nurses themselves she developed enormous respect. They lived in the mud and worked around the clock. They were called officers but treated often like kitchen slaveys, viewed back home as being of dubious morals. When she finished her piece on the medical system as it
carried along a typical soldier, she intended to focus on nurses. In the meantime, from her journeyings back and forth along the line from the wounding to final deposition, she was about to select a few soldiers to pursue through the process, the kind of personalized piece she had been sent over to write.

  Her nose ran constantly and she had a sore throat. It was cold and wet here. She had put on her long underwear the first chance she had had to undress, although that had not happened till she had reached the field hospital. There the nurses had taught her how to wash herself in her helmet. The feet were the most important part of the body to wash and try to dry. Back at the field hospital, she had a cot to lie on, but here she had only her bedroll. With the ack-ack guns going off all night and the German planes coming over, the shelling that never let up, no place was quiet enough for prolonged sleep. After eight days in Normandy, she was already like the GIs in that her first desire was for sleep, even an hour of sleep curled up in a trench or now in the lee of a broken stone wall, waiting for wounded, and her second desire was to be dry and her third was for hot food. She ate the same K rations or C rations as everyone else.

  The countryside was dark green rolling hills studded now with dead cows rotting, with high bushy hedges of hawthorn and sumac where snipers loved to lurk, apple and cherry orchards crossed by meandering narrow roads lined with high thick impenetrable hedges, the more important ones paved with asphalt, the lesser ones of gravel. Everywhere lay unburied corpses of people and animals, or hasty mounds where several bodies had been thrust under a coating of mud or sod. On every side stood roofless houses and wrecked machinery, exposing its scorched guts.

  One of her uses to all the Americans was that she spoke reasonable French. That afternoon an old woman who had refused to leave her home gave Louise a wheel of Camembert and explained to her that the Boches had not mined the fields the way they were supposed to, because the local commanders, who had been having an extremely easy war in Normandy before the invasion, had been persuaded by the farmers that if they heeded Rommel’s orders for mining the fields, the cows could not go to pasture and there would be no lovely Camembert for the Germans. The Germans had done quite enough mining in general, Louise thought, and thanked the local cows personally, although by now, most of them were dead. She brought the cheese to the battalion aid station where they ate it on the hard crackers that came in K rations, although two of the medics made faces and said it stank. Louise saved their share for her nurses.

  The first night she slept in a dugout with the men in the field, she was frightened. She was afraid to seem friendly and took care where she placed her bedroll. By now she did not worry. They were too exhausted, too frightened, too battleworn to think of sex. They appreciated her presence. They wanted to be written up. They wanted people back home to know as much as she could tell. They liked her coming up to the action, and they gave her the driest spot to sleep in. She was developing a fine maternal air with them, for many were Kay’s age or younger. The only times she was propositioned were by a correspondent and by an officer back in headquarters. The farther forward she went, the simpler became the thoughts and feelings: fear and survival and sometimes, anger. A persistent sniper could arouse hatred that Louise understood, after the first time she saw a soldier shot from a hedgerow as he was fixing a flat on a jeep.

  It was a slow and sneaky war among these hedgerows. She did not think the entire area in Allied hands was more than twenty miles across. It seemed to her she had been there for months. She had always been chilled and wet through, she had always sniveled, she had always rejoiced when the sunshine dried them and the air was balmy and the grass made good bedding, she had always been so short of sleep that any quiet moment sucked her under, she had always dreamed of beds and hot water as the ultimate pleasure. Daniel? Oscar? They were in another universe. She was closer to the men coming off the line with their glazed eyes and rotting feet. She was closer to the stretcher-bearers who lay in the mud snoring like homeless dogs. She was closer to the nurses, with one of whom she stumbled to the latrine that night as shells lit the sky amber going over high, yeeeow, yeeeeow. The ground shook under them from shells landing closer. They both heard the two-noted mutter of a howitzer coming at them. They dove for cover and ended up in a pile of kitchen garbage mixed with human debris from the operating room. A stench of cordite and rotting meat filled her head. Louise threw up. They went back to their tent together and the nurse handed Louise a damp towel to wipe her face.

  NAOMI 8

  The Voice of the Turtledove

  Rivka was under the earth. She was a slave in the cavern of the troll king. Rivka had been taken under the mountain where she worked in the dark making evil things that she spoiled as often as she dared. They were like huge metal insects that flew, but Rivka had only to check one tiny part with a micrometer. Naomi dreaded night when she slipped into Rivka’s body in the noisy filthy cave under the mountain and worked while hunger tore at her and her fingers and toes bled. Rivka never saw the sun or the sky or trees. The walls of the cave were brown and wept. She thought of herself as being inside the belly of a huge reptile. Maman was dead, but Naomi was still joined to her twin who lived like a grub inside the cold dark earth, always gutted with hunger, shaking with cold, hollow with exhaustion, till sometimes the death always just under her feet seemed like a soft warm bed.

  “It was all mud,” Leib said. “Thick mud, dark as chocolate pudding. It got into everything, your bedding and your food and your teeth and your mess kit and your boots and your rifle. Every step you were fighting it. Everything turned the color of shit.”

  Sometimes Leib talked compulsively to her. The doctor had ordered him to walk every day, and when she could, she walked with him. He was supposed to be building up his muscles to control his new foot, but it hurt. When the pain started, he talked. When it got really bad, he shut up. His new artificial foot was heavy and awkward, so he could not move naturally. They walked block after block of Detroit with heavy full-bosomed elms meeting over the asphalt streets, roses blooming in yards, the little victory gardens on the sides of houses, glimpsed in back, in front where the square of lawn used to be. When Leib withdrew into silence, she passed the time looking into yards to see what people grew. As soon as Leib started talking again, she turned back to him.

  He liked her company. Everybody said she was his favorite. She baby-sat David often but Trudi spent little time with her now. To save for a house, Leib encouraged Trudi to work full time at the hospital until he was better and could get a job.

  “I’m never going back on the line,” Leib told her, as they walked in the hot afternoon. Whenever they passed a sprinkler turning, she walked into the water so that its brief drops would cool her before they evaporated. “It’s okay when you’re drawing lots of overtime, but then what? You never get rich on the line. You just get old.”

  Naomi thought how tired Uncle Morris was when he got home, how exhausted Ruthie was. “It’s hard,” she said. “But I’d take it if I could get it, because it’s good money.”

  “Good money, my ass,” Leib said. He did not watch his language with her when they were alone together, but talked to her the way the kids talked to each other. She felt as if Leib alone of all the adults treated her as an equal. Of course they weren’t really equal because he was years older and he had been to war and had a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He even told her how he had been wounded, stepping on a mine. She felt immensely proud as they strolled together through all the streets of the neighborhood and far beyond. He chose her as his friend, Leib, the best-looking man in the whole neighborhood in spite of his foot, and who cared about his foot anyhow? He was a hero, and he chose her. She wanted so passionately to please him that sometimes she felt as if she were burning up with that wish, her skin all prickling, her elbows and knees sticking out like spines with that sole desire, to please him.

  When they walked together through all the green residential streets and the noisy business streets, she enjoyed his height l
ooming over her, his size, his handsomeness. All reflected on her. It was a completely different feeling than sauntering with Alvin. Kids in the gang shuffled along, they shoved each other and the guys assumed postures to look tough. They were pretending, but Leib was real. With him, she was almost real too.

  “We came into Naples like kings. Those little fuckers were starving. You never saw so many hungry people. I thought Detroit when Ruthie and me were in school was one sad place, but we would’ve looked like rich guys to these people. They didn’t have holes to crawl into, just the dirty rags on their back. No water, no electricity, no gas, no food, not two walls standing together. Yet in three weeks, guys were minting money in the black market, hand over fist.” Leib spoke rapidly, emptying himself out. “You could buy and sell everything from cigarettes, meat, women, booze, jeeps, trucks, drugs, you name it.”

  Sometimes she wished she could slow him down. She felt too young, too naive, to be as helpful to him as she wanted to be. He had suffered. He had been torn and wounded and used. Nobody but she saw what he had gone through. Trudi was too involved with plans, with little David and the house they would have. Ruthie was cold to Leib and scarcely looked at him. Naomi wanted to do nothing but look at him, his leonine head against the burning sulphur yellow sky of summer, his hair growing out to cover the scar in his scalp, for he had had a skull wound also. She wanted to look and look at him with her heart swelling in her as if it would fill up her body. She wanted to remember every word he said to repeat to herself later so that she would understand, she alone, and could help him.

  “After Africa, we thought we’d be sent home. We had hard fighting. Nobody back here knows how bad Tunisia was. At first we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. They were slaughtering us, just running over us with their tanks. Then we learned or we got killed. We thought when we took Tunis finally they’d bring some other poor bastards over or call up some of those guys who had it easy way back behind the lines. We couldn’t fucking believe it when they stuck us on the damned landing craft and we had to take Sicily. Now I think they’ll make the same poor bastards fight all the way to Berlin. Okay, I saved my buddies when I came down on the mine, but I saved myself too. Better no foot than no body.”