Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He was twenty-three. Sometimes he looked and sounded that; sometimes he sounded like a man in his forties. She thought that if Claude had selected Ari as a bodyguard as well as a driver, he could have done far worse. She suspected Ari could do more than take care of himself.

  Very early they set out on the bicycles. Public transportation was on strike and nothing was working, neither the electricity nor the trains nor the apparatus by which food arrived and garbage departed. Finally even the overloaded phones had gone out. If you wanted news, you set off on foot or on bicycle to see what was happening.

  Louise was pleased she had spent all those Sundays bicycling with Daniel, because she kept up with Ari far better than Claude did, who got off to a wobbly start and huffed along quite out of breath before they had gone ten blocks. Of course they were all pushing extra loads. She had her knapsack and her typewriter, although she had abandoned her bedroll because she could not balance any more on the bicycle; but Ari and Claude had the camera equipment to manage between them.

  The streets were crowded. As many stores were open as were closed. The day was already heating up. She was dressed too warmly. She felt conspicuous pedaling down a Parisian street in her American uniform; it struck her as dangerous. At the bottom of the knapsack were rolled up a summer dress and a heavier one, bound by rubber bands. Her clothing was attracting too much attention. She slowed down and waited till Claude came alongside. “I had better change.”

  “When we arrive,” Claude mumbled, red in the face and panting. He was pedaling doggedly, but several times Ari had to pull over to wait.

  Obviously Ari was the person who knew where they were going, and Claude was only following him. When they came across the first of the barricades thrown up in a working-class district, Claude called to Ari to stop until he could shoot it. While he was occupied, Louise went into a café and changed in the toilet. The old lady sitting there asked her what the uniform was and when she said she was American, said she didn’t have to pay for the toilet. That was good, as Louise had very few francs. She had been bartering soap and cigarettes. When she gave the woman a piece of chocolate, the woman stared at her with such an expression Louise thought she might burst into tears. She had always thought to work as a rest room attendant in France, it was a prerequisite to be impassive except for an aura of disapproval. Then the old lady very carefully divided the chocolate into three parts, each perhaps one inch across. “For each of my grandchildren,” she said. “How excited they will be!”

  When Louise emerged, Claude was still shooting, a group of children and adults around him in front of the barricade made out of a burnt car, paving stones, old signs, mattresses, an upright piano. Everyone wanted to pose with the dozen rifles they had, plus two elderly shotguns and a stockpile of Molotov cocktails. No one expected the truce to last. Raggedy improvised tricolors hung off the balconies and windows, along with red flags and occasionally the black flag of anarchism.

  “Come, there will be plenty to shoot,” Ari urged Claude. “Let’s get going. You missed the siege of the Préfecture, with tanks. The Germans are still evacuating by the external boulevards. But the SS is staying and say they will fight to the death. Rol—the Communist chief—is down in the catacombs, where the phones still work.”

  They pedaled on. Claude and Ari decided to drop her at Paris Soir, the offices of a collaborationist paper which had been taken over on Sunday by the clandestine paper Combat. Ari said that all the underground papers had come up during the weekend and seized offices and printing plants. Most writers and editors who had been praising the Nazis fulsomely were evacuating with their masters or had gone into sudden retreat in the countryside. The offices were on the rue Réaumur near Les Halles, which the Resistance had taken over to set up soup kitchens.

  She had a little trouble overcoming the skepticism of the Combat staff, but finally she hauled out her smelly uniform and threatened to put it back on. She showed her credentials to everyone until somebody who could actually read them turned up. Then they let her have a desk. She got to work at once. Fortunately the recently clandestine journalists were pleased to answer her questions. Von Choltitz had been ordered by Hitler to blow up Paris, but he was negotiating with the Resistance through the Swedish consul.

  A courier arrived, reporting that heavy fighting had broken out at the Buttes-Chaumont train tunnel and at the Prince Eugene barracks near the place de la République. She wavered what to do, then decided to go along to Buttes-Chaumont. Everywhere barricades were going up out of sandbags, café chairs, broken furniture, manhole covers, dismantled signs. Sporadic gunfire sounded. Far from keeping off the streets, everyone in Paris seemed to be on the sidewalks or hanging out the windows. The whole population was too excited to remain inside. The paving stones had been dug up, pissoirs dismantled, some black Citroëns set afire. One of the men explained that black Citroëns were the favored car of the Gestapo, and nobody not in bed with the Nazis had a car any longer.

  She followed the pack on her bicycle. Several times they were halted at barricades. At one, wounded were being treated from a recent shootout with armed collaborationists. Louise asked as many questions as she could, scribbled notes and pedaled off madly after the pack. When they did finally reach the park—the railroad tunnel ran under it—around six, the fighting was winding down. The Resistance had captured the trains that had been parked there and a load of ammunition from the tunnel. There was little to see besides corpses and burning cars.

  The reporters invited her to have supper with them. Nearby one restaurant was still in business, and they all piled in. Louise realized she still had no money, so she bartered a pack of American cigarettes to the reporters to pay for her meal. They began to be a little friendly, full of questions about when the Americans were coming and what things were like in the United States and in England. Coffee was a dreadful broth made of toasted acorns, the wine rough and unready, her supper one fried egg and rutabaga soup. As they were eating, the manager announced that no one else could be served because he was out of food.

  They were putting out their paper when Ari appeared around ten. “We’ll go to Claude’s,” he announced. “We’re all staying there.”

  “Claude still has an apartment?”

  “His mother is Rumanian and they were Hitler’s allies. She managed to get an Aryan card, so she hung on through the war and kept his boys. Simone, his wife, they let out Thursday, when the political prisoners were released—those the Boches didn’t kill before they left.” He made a slitting motion at his throat, grinning without mirth. “Even when the Boches were rushing out en masse Thursday, they shipped one last load from the concentration camp in Drancy. So recently! Even at the end, with the walls falling on them, they kill Jews. The Gestapo too cleaned house and now in all the cemeteries are little mounds of fresh earth and under them quicklime and bodies with no identification. People are digging them up trying to find their husbands, their wives, their children. Will we ever know for sure who lived and who died?”

  Something in his voice made her ask, “Did you find your family or your girlfriend?”

  “I found someone who saw my family deported. Let’s go.”

  “Does Claude really want us to come visiting? He hasn’t seen his wife in years.”

  “They have room.” Ari winked. “Claude said you were his friend in America, so I told Simone that you’re my friend. I’ll take you there and then I have to look for Daniela. The Resistance took the Hôtel de Ville, the City Hall, already. I’m hoping someone there has information.”

  “Thank you for coming back for me.”

  “It’s nothing. Tomorrow everything’s going sky-high. I just hope we don’t end up with a bloodbath like Oradour or the Vercors. But the more people pour out, the better. They can’t shoot down five hundred thousand people, true?”

  The apartment of Claude’s mother was in the XVIe arrondissement, full of ornate heavy furniture that proclaimed its worth in tonnage, with an occasional spindly antique b
y contrast with more curves than comfort. Glass étagères displayed collections of snuffboxes and music boxes. The mother was a wrenlike woman in black, four feet ten and weighing perhaps eighty pounds who wore around her neck a lorgnette, the first Louise had seen outside a cartoon. She was taking the invasion in good spirits, pleased to have her son and daughter-in-law returned to her. In all the splendor, everyone was eating a watery cabbage soup and ersatz bread, one slice apiece, in a salon lit by three candles and three only, as there was a candle shortage in Paris and the power was out.

  Louise felt her presence had to be intrusive, but she wasn’t the only camper. Claude’s wife, streaked as if her black hair had been painted white with a brush, her eyes enormous in her thin face, her hands covered with burns, had brought home from prison four other women equally gaunt and staring. Among the rotund mahogany pieces the size of sedan cars, they were drooping as if an enormous wave had cast them up here with the life beaten out of them. Claude seemed to settle down. He spoke differently here, softly and diffidently, almost cooing. His two teenage sons looked at him and looked away. They seemed not to know what to say.

  Why did he let me come? she wondered, but realized he had no idea until they were actually in Paris where his wife was and whether she was alive or dead; similarly, he had no idea whether his mother had been shipped off to a camp. Maybe he had permitted her to come as padding between himself and the ugly realities he might encounter. Tomorrow she would find another place to stay. Claude seemed largely unaware of her presence, as of the four other released prisoners. His two sons stared at him and he at them. The younger, Roland, was fourteen and the older, Jules, sixteen. They seemed unsure what attitude to take toward their father. With their mother they were overjoyed but shy. She had been in prison two years.

  Claude was appalled to discover both sons were armed and had already been involved in skirmishing. The older boy, Jules, paid no attention to his father’s arguments but simply picked up his rifle, his grenades, some bread and a demi-bottle of red wine and went off to take up his duties for the night at a barricade. Roland did not so much entertain as terrify his father by describing how students at his lycée had made Molotov cocktails out of sulphuric acid and potassium chlorate from the chemistry lab. Simone did not seem to find her sons’ activities unusual and confined herself to ordering them to be careful. Claude was going to have trouble adjusting to his family. She stayed against the wall, invisible in the family turmoil, with one of the released prisoners slumped beside her, with tears appearing against her cheeks as if they were condensation on a stone wall, while her eyes remained shut.

  The next day Louise was in the Hôtel de Ville interviewing the Resistance authorities when the Germans attacked. The telephone was working again, functional even into the American sector and beyond. She was able to file a story. She had just got it off when the first shell landed. Cautiously she peered out. Four Panther tanks were in the enormous plaza in front of the Hôtel de Ville that stretched from the rue de Rivoli to the Seine. They had just lobbed a shell to blow up the iron gates. From nearby windows people were firing at the tanks, doing no damage. Another shell hit the ornate facade and a ton of assorted statuary cascaded into the plaza. Below her, Louise heard screams and the sound of falling plaster and masonry. Under her feet the floor lurched. Was the building surrounded? Gunfire was general all about them but she could not tell who was shooting.

  While she was peering down, a woman came running at the tanks. Her dead-on frantic rush was riveting, as if she meant to throw herself down and appeal to their mercy or fling herself in their path. From above, her wide scarlet skirt looked like a flower. She ran pell-mell all the way up to the one that had been firing and smashed a Molotov cocktail against the turret as she was cut down by machine-gun fire from the others. The tank burst into flames. Suddenly the other three Panthers turned and clanked out of the square. Louise could not believe that one woman, lying in a puddle of her own blood on the stone pavement, had saved the Hôtel de Ville, a formidable number of Resistance officials and Louise herself, but the tanks continued retreating. The woman’s hair had been brown, her age perhaps seventeen or eighteen. Her face was intact, but her body had been torn like a paper sack. Another woman knelt over her, weeping. A life combusted in one act of bravery.

  Just as if she were a tourist arriving in Paris, Louise went to the Left Bank hotel where Oscar and she used to stay. All the little Left Bank streets, too narrow for tanks to penetrate, were held by the Resistance. Whenever German tanks or personnel carriers passed on the Quai, they sprayed the streets with machine-gun fire. Medical teams were set up in every block and Resistance people directed pedestrian traffic between the bursts of firing. From the hotel, she called the baron, hoping she could find out where Gloria was. She asked for the baron, gave her name, and heard clearly through the phone the exclamation, “Impossible. C’est une espèce de tromperie.”

  The maid reported that the baron had gone on an extended trip.

  “Actually it was the baronne that I desired to speak with. She’s my sister-in-law.”

  Again the maid repeated clearly what she had said. Most certainly the maid was not covering the mouthpiece, so that Louise suspected she was the benefactor of a miniature uprising at the baron’s. Indeed the maid said quite simply, “Excuse me, madame, but he says to hang up.”

  Gloria had a house in Maisons-Laffitte. She called there and got the cook. “Ah, madame, I remember you and your charming husband and your little girl who cried to ride the horses. The house is closed up except for me and the grooms.… Oh, madame, they took her away, the Boches.… The Gestapo, madame, they took her in March. Not a word since. But I pray for her.”

  She continued to use the Combat offices as her base. She was their pet American, proof that the troops would arrive. It was ten at night when a phone call came that the first tanks of the French armor had entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans. The city sputtered with the crack of rifles, pistol shots, shells bursting, booming explosions and the grinding roar of tanks and half-tracks and trucks. It was hard to believe anyone in Paris was sleeping, for in spite of the fighting, sporadic everywhere and heavy in places, the city was pouring into the streets.

  They could not get near the Porte d’Orléans, but soon the tanks approached as she stood in a crowd of people screaming for the best parade they had ever seen, three and only three Sherman tanks decorated with flowers, with tricolors, laden with women and children hanging off the turrets. People were singing the “Marseillaise” and embracing each other if they could not reach the tankmen. No more tanks appeared, although the soldiers assured the crowds there were lots more on the way, for they had outraced the others. They were headed for the Hôtel de Ville, followed by thousands of Parisians through the warm and smoky night.

  The rest of the tanks did not arrive until early morning, when they entered Paris from three different directions. The streets had been crowded since she arrived in the city, but now they were mobbed. Even in hospitals, people were at the windows and up on the roofs. Armed resistants mingled with mothers pushing baby buggies and couples strolling arm in arm. Everywhere flowers rained down or were crushed on the pavement.

  The French armor had broken their columns and tanks were rumbling down streets all over the city, heading to seize the railroad stations or ministries, and in many cases, finding them already occupied by the Resistance. She followed one half-brigade that trundled along accompanied by several thousand people toward the Quai d’Orsay across the Seine from Le Petit Palais. The Grand Palais was in ruins from a recent shelling. On the way, she saw Claude’s older son Jules and his group marching along with a group of German prisoners. The French armor seized the German barracks at the Avenue de la Tour-Maubourg without opposition and then had a quick fierce battle outside the foreign office at the Quai d’Orsay. When the tanks rumbled up to ministries, the crowds erected barricades to prevent counterattacks and then stormed the buildings and took them over.

&nb
sp; At the foreign office, after the initial battle, everyone thought the way was cleared and people started surging in. Shots rang out, sharply, and then automatic weapons fired on the crowd. A suicide squad of Germans lay in wait and opened up on people rushing the steps. All around Louise people fell. She rolled down the steps and took cover behind a tree. Then she crawled and ran back through the park, bullets whining around her. Beside her, an old woman fell on the tricolor she was carrying. Louise stooped over her. Shot through the head. Grey matter oozed with blood through the exit hole. She dodged on, taking refuge behind a stone wall that ran between the park in front of the Foreign Office and the street, the quai bordering the Seine.

  She was pinned down by fire and lay in a stupor, realizing how exhausted her body was while her mind still raced. She felt foolish and naked, stomach to the sidewalk behind the stone wall in the summer dress she had put on so that she would not be so conspicuous in Paris. All round her vast spaces yawned, Les Invalides to the right, the Seine behind and across it open spaces stretching to the distant Louvre. She was protected unless a shell landed, as she watched the Resistance fighters storm the building until the street and the park were littered with bodies lying smashed in their blood.

  Finally tanks began to shell the building. One of them was hit by mortar fire and burst into flames, the men inside screaming as they burned. She could hear equally fierce fighting from the rue de l’Université at the rear of the same ministry. She had followed a parade and fallen into a battle. Fragments of masonry fell around her and one struck her in the shoulder. At first she thought her arm broken, but it was only badly bruised. She crawled backwards away from the explosions, feeling the heat of a fire on her back. Behind her wall several wounded men and women had taken shelter. Louise crept over to help apply a tourniquet.