Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She remembered when Sharon had discovered that Marilyn thought that voice pouring like heat from the radio was G-d speaking. Sharon and she had tried to explain the difference between President Roosevelt and G-d, but she was not sure they had succeeded.

  She looked around the shop, where men and women were openly weeping and others were smiling, those tight smiles of private pleasure. With a great lurch the line started and everybody rushed back to their positions. After all, there was still a war on.

  The last Saturday in April, they all went to the movies to see Since You Went Away with Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones. Naomi was there with her boyfriend Alvin, sitting off to the side. After the Donald Duck cartoon about hoarding, the newsreels came on. It was the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, one of those camps she had read about. A terrible silence settled in the theater. Living skeletons stared from eyes as big in their gaunt heads as the eyes of nocturnal monkeys, of lemurs. Creatures of starvation and misery clutched their bones together staring without hope or recognition. Hills of bodies. Bodies heaped like garbage in a vast dump. Bulldozed graves. Mountains of worn shoes.

  The Metro lion was roaring when out of the corner of her eye, Ruthie saw Naomi wandering up the aisle. Alvin looked after her, uncertain. Ruthie jumped up. As she had guessed, Naomi was not going to the women’s room. She staggered from the theater and stood in the street, buffeted. Ruthie took her limp arm.

  “I knew they were dead,” Naomi said, tears streaming down her face. She stumbled and fell against a parked car. Two men began to laugh at them, assuming Naomi was drunk. “It’s my fault. I let go of her.”

  Naomi wasn’t making sense, but Ruthie could smell the guilt. “It isn’t your fault. The Germans, they’re the ones who did it, and they’d have done it to you if they caught you. If your mother died in a place like that, then her last thought must have been, at least one daughter of mine is safe, may The Name be praised.”

  Naomi sat down on the curb, head hanging over the gutter. In a thickened voice she asked, “Why me? I’m the wrong one. I don’t deserve!”

  “We all deserve life. Let’s go home.”

  Alvin was standing uneasily behind them. “What’s wrong? Why did she leave?”

  “Her mother and sister were taken to such a camp.”

  Alvin whistled. “Holy cow.”

  Between them they bundled Naomi to her feet. Though it was only eight o’clock, the streets were already full of drunks, a couple screaming obscenities at each other, an aged colored man with a bottle muttering about blood, a clutch of prostitutes at each streetlamp. They got her around the corner and onto the residential street, but the sight of a bed of rotten tulips upset her freshly. Naomi slid from their hands and fell to the brown grass. A killer frost the week before had withered the spring flowers as they were opening, blasting the blossoms on the fruit trees. Alvin and she hoisted Naomi up between them again and bore her weight forward, her feet sometimes taking awkward steps, sometimes dragging. They had to stop frequently to rest, for she was dead weight. “Naomi, you’re not alone,” Ruthie said insistently. “You have us. We’re your family.”

  “No, not alone,” Naomi repeated and laughed wildly at the same time she was still weeping. Snot ran down her face with her tears and she breathed with open mouth, looking swollen, drowned. “I hate myself! I’m the wrong one, the bad one!”

  “Naomele, the Nazis aren’t G-d. They don’t reward or punish, they just kill. The duty you have is to live your life and be happy for your sisters and your mother and your father, live out their lives too. See for them, learn for them, love for them, have babies for them.”

  Ruthie felt an odd pang as she spoke. Would Murray ever return? Would he come back to her real, not made of paper, of idle words, of strange dots on the blue bulge of the globe? Would she ever bear children of her own, or would G-d punish her for her fall, her trespass, by denying her fruitfulness? She was twenty-three. At her age, Rose had borne two children; at her age, Bubeh had already given birth to her own mother, Rose. But she had no babies, no husband. Only Naomi, who was growing up much too fast.

  When they got Naomi to the house, she sent Alvin home and put her to bed. Somewhere in the cupboard must be the tea Grandma used to brew for nervous troubles and crises. Valerian she had grown with its rosy flowers on high stalks among the low thyme and parsley, boneset and mint. Ruthie sniffed at the old tea tins full of homemade remedies until she found the one she thought she remembered, then brewed up the tisane for Naomi. It should be made with honey, but they had none.

  Naomi grimaced at the bitter taste but drank it obediently. The tears slowed. Ruthie sat with her until finally she fell into a troubled sleep.

  Now that Ruthie was working only five days a week, she had been trying to spend more time with Naomi. At first it had seemed to her that she had lots of free time, working only a forty-hour week and taking three classes, but instantly everyone around her lunged forward to fill that time. Rose needed help. Clothes had to be mended, for they wore out much faster than they could be bought. The victory garden had to be replanted, although the hardiest crops, peas and coles, had survived the frost.

  Sharon wanted to talk about Marilyn and Clark; Trudi wanted to talk about her pregnancy, little David’s prodigies of understanding and what Leib thought he was doing, hanging around with Fatty from that bar and Moose, who had something to do with numbers. Morris wanted her involved with him in organizing pressure to permit more refugees into the country, in changing the laws so Jews could enter. Only Leib seemed as pleased to avoid her as she was to stay away from him. That ghastly summer day seemed to have exhausted his old lust.

  She was pleased she had got Naomi into the bakery. The Fennimans liked Naomi, and it kept her out of the upstairs apartment. Yet Ruthie could sense something wrong in Naomi, ever since the arrival of the letter about the death of Naomi’s father and sister. Yes, Naomi was in deep mourning for her family, and that would take years to work itself out. Ruthie understood mourning. Naomi was doing well in school, taking college prep plus typing courses, as Ruthie herself had done. Would things be any better for Jews after the war? Just lately, it had seemed to her as if the spurts of hate that splashed over her at work had lessened in intensity, but that might be because the worker-preachers who talked the most against Jews and Negroes were leaving as the war economy wound down. She was determined to put Naomi through college, although she herself would be laid off soon enough, she expected.

  Vivian brought that up as she drove them to work. “Anybody else been noticing all the stuff in the papers about why we ought all to go back home and hang it up in the kitchen?”

  Rena said, “Are you the girl he wants to come back to? Are you smelling good these days? Are your hands smooth? Are you looking like a movie star or are you looking like a truck driver? Ha. You think the union going to stand up for us?”

  “Nuts,” Vivian said. “They still address us Brothers and Sirs. All these years, they aint noticed we’re ladies, they won’t start helping now.”

  “So what’s going to happen to us? I got my rating. Are they going to turn us out?” Rena asked.

  Ruthie felt guilty listening to the other women. She would quit happily, because there was going to be a proliferation of social work jobs and she was going to walk right into one. Vivian and Rena needed the money.

  “They just can’t throw away all our skills. We good. They been telling us that. They think I’m going back to scrubbing floors for fifty cents an hour, they’re crazy mad. I got two kids to support, and payments to make on the mortgage.”

  “I got the house to pay off, three kids and my mother. I’m dying for Jake to come home, but we never had it easy on his pay,” Vivian said.

  In the long silence broken only by the mutterings of the old engine, each of the women contemplated her deepest worries against the war’s slow anguished ending.

  V-E Day came midweek, an announcement, a postponement, a verification, a more detailed announcement amid the
slow relinquishment of disbelief. Detroit smelled of new leaves, of sulphur, of rain, of lilacs, of smoke. Cars honked and people flooded into the streets, but Ruthie’s heart was not in it. Her war was not over. Her man was not coming home, if he was still her man. His war was heating up.

  They were all standing on the sidewalk watching the cars go by tooting and waving when Ruthie saw Leib put his hand on Naomi’s shoulder and squeeze hard, a proprietary grip. Naomi winced but said nothing, standing under the weight of his hand with a look on her face of resignation, of a private oblivion. Ruthie frowned and something stirred in her, something coldly suspicious. Of course Leib touched women more than he should, being the grabby type. But that look, that resignation, she did not like at all.

  She turned to Rose, but Rose was holding Clark up to see while he kicked and struggled. Sharon was bending over fussing with a broken heel. They were a shabby lot, her family, all except Trudi who had on a new maternity dress of a virulent hard pink Ruthie found she could not look at long without seeing green when she shut her eyes.

  Trudi noticed. Trudi was watching, and her face grew hard.

  LOUISE 11

  Open, Sesame

  Louise found herself in a wrecked dusty world where the wind carried ashes. The people were sullen and puzzled. They did not have the gnarled cheeriness of the London poor under attack. For years these wars had brought prosperity to the homeland. They had eaten well and dressed well and dreamed in Wagnerian myths when the rest of Europe lay down in the cold, hungry. They had had losses, but away, in the distant and heroic armies. Even in the bombed cities until the last two months of the war, the people had been well dressed, well fed; the milk was delivered, the butter came to the table and the trolleys ran more or less on time.

  The center of Berlin was a wasteland of rubble, of dust every breeze lifted and dashed, gritty, into the eyes and mouth. Monumental architecture created an obstacle course of fallen columns and blocks of masonry, boulders dividing the stream of pedestrians. Fresh graves marked every plot of earth, where Russian and German soldiers had fallen and been buried, where civilians had been caught in crossfire. Behind the occasional intact facade on state buildings, nothing stretched but ruins. Papers, the work of a vast bureaucracy, blew everywhere, good for nothing but starting fires. The streets had to be trodden carefully, because broken glass drifted like fallen leaves, with small dagger sharp arrows borne on the sandpaper wind.

  She could not encompass it, quite. She felt as if she had passed out of the twentieth century into a barbarous medieval dance of death. Barbarossa under the mountain had waked, put on his armor and summoned his people to the glory that was Valhalla. Smashed vehicles littered the streets pockmarked by shells. The real coinage was butts. Tips were left in butts, workmen were paid in butts, butts were bartered for food. Nobody she met had ever been a Nazi, not them. That was somebody else.

  For months she had traveled with the troops of the First Army, under fire with them, trapped with them in the Ardennes, crossing the Rhine with them, sometimes back with the artillery and sometimes up in the front that was a meadow, a stream, a shattered street lined with what had been apartments. She had eaten their rations and slept in her bedroll on the ground, in barns, in an empty ammunition carrier, in headquarters in farmhouses and hotels, in nurses’ tents and in crates that had shipped small planes. She had come to know many of them, and she had seen some of them wounded and some of them die.

  Now that bond was broken. The war was finished here. Most of her colleagues had already scrounged transportation to the Pacific, to the battle raging on Okinawa and to the expected invasion of Japan that would follow, to the fighting that continued in the Philippines, in China and Burma and Southeast Asia.

  She was unwilling to follow. This had become her war and she could not change her focus. Back in Hadley, Kay was pregnant. When the bombardier, her husband, had been transferred from England to Saipan, apparently there had been the opportunity during his furlough. Louise would be on hand for the birth, but the baby was not due till January.

  She had informed her tenants that she would be in New York by August first. That gave them and her plenty of time to prepare for that return, the prospect of which made her queasy. She decided not to stay on for the war crime trials in Nuremberg, although at night when she lay in bed unable to sleep, she reconsidered her decision endlessly. Would that help her encompass what she could not yet grasp? Her imagination seemed to have seized up and halted abruptly.

  She slept badly and could not remember her dreams. She felt bodiless, sexless, external to her own and other lives. Her job had been to report on the war; now what was she doing? Dawdling in the presence of a vast evil-smelling corpse. She lingered in Germany filing stories on the occupation, on the German underground Himmler had founded called Werewolf, on the only remaining shtetl in Europe—the community created by surviving Jews in the former SS barracks at Bergen-Belsen—on the survivors and their ill-treatment under the occupation of the Third Army. Patton was openly anti-Semitic and called the Jews animals. She was persona non grata in Patton’s domain, but she was still going to Bavaria in the morning, because she had been tipped off about a strange cave there.

  She was headed by jeep with George Monroney from AP, his photographer and hers toward Eisenach, the birthplace of Bach. She had little idea what they were supposed to see there, as the approach had been mysterious. Lately OSS, fighting for its postwar life under the hostile new President, had taken to planting stories about its exploits. Both George and she were suspicious of this jaunt, but they wanted to get out of Berlin. It was no doubt OSS propaganda, but might be of interest.

  The autobahns were lined with pedestrians trudging east or west, carts pulled by women or men or scrawny farm animals, townspeople, peasants and displaced persons, slave laborers and camp victims like walking dead, grey skinned and skeletal, all pouring somewhere. Most of the corpses that had strewn the landscape when she had arrived had been buried, but here and there, the decaying body of a horse gathered ravens. In some places that stench of death she had come to know far too well hung in the air. It was true that a dead man or a dead baby smelled no different than a dead pig. No trains ran and no postal delivery existed, no government to speak of, no newspapers, no radio, no phone.

  In Eisenach an OSS sergeant met them, to shepherd them on to a little town, Merkers, where the Kaiseroda Salt Mine was located, apparently their goal. He seemed extremely nervous. They passed massed tanks, artillery, armored cars. “Was there a pocket of resistance here?” she asked.

  “No,” said the sergeant. “Please save your questions till we’re inside.”

  The entrance to the mine was protected as if it were Allied Headquarters; they were passed through four different portals of scrutiny before they finally entered the mine itself. George wriggled his eyebrows at her. “This had better be good. What have we got, the real Hitler?”

  At last they entered the metal gates to the mountain and were met by an OSS Captain North, who led them into a small office and lectured them before a map of the mines. The rumor of the existence of a cache of Reich gold here, the captain said, wielding his stick like a professor or one accustomed to giving briefings, was heard by an OSS emissary. The information had been passed on to the OSS detachment with Patton, but at first no one could find the mine or verify the rumors.

  Finally a British prisoner of war turned up who had been used by the Germans to unload and store gold. He pointed out five entrances to the mine and said he had penetrated to the 1400-foot level.

  When the Americans finally entered the mine, they found—and at this point they were motioned to their feet and marched to the first large room—half a billion reichsmarks. “At prewar evaluation,” the captain said, not consulting any notes, “that is approximately $125 million, cold. This was, you understand, simply dumped here in transit. Now we may proceed.”

  A quarter of a mile into the mine, they arrived at what had been a steel vault door, now blasted thro
ugh. The Army Corps of Engineers had had to open the vault, the captain explained, turning on the lights. Everything seemed to work perfectly in the mine, the elevators, the lights, the ventilation. The air was dry and cold. They had entered a vast room, about half as wide as it was long. Captain North provided the statistics: 150 feet by 75 feet. The floor was hidden by rows of numbered bags. “Seven thousand four hundred and fifty-eight,” the captain announced, pleased with his own memory.

  As Louise gave a tentative kick to a bag and the photographers set off their flashes, the captain continued: “Each contains gold in the form of bars or coins. Bales of paper money are stacked along the right-hand wall, please notice. The paper money amounts to two hundred seventy-five million reichsmarks, approximately sixty-eight million, six hundred thousand dollars at the prewar exchange rate. We have counted eight thousand, one hundred ninety-eight gold bars, each weighing thirty-five pounds. We have inventoried one thousand seven hundred sixty-three bags of gold coins in single denominations and seven hundred eleven bags of gold coins in denominations of five and ten. Shall we move on, gentlemen?”

  I am at last a gentleman, Louise thought. In the presence of so much gold I am gilded and desexed. She marched along while her cameraman recorded. She was experiencing mild claustrophobia as they penetrated deeper into the mine. She picked up a shard of crystal, salt to her tongue but clear as glass.

  Next came precious stones, many still unevaluated. Captain North was apologetic. The stones would have to await the arrival of experts from Amsterdam. In fact, the entire treasure was about to be moved to what was considered a safer place. They looked at bags of platinum, of foreign currencies, boxes holding several millions pound sterling, dies for printing bank notes. They wandered rooms that were invisible picture galleries, full of paintings, properly stored the captain hastened to inform them, statues, vases, tapestries, engravings, etchings. They passed crated work by Van Dyck, by Raphael, by Rembrandt, by Dürer. A few paintings were carefully uncrated for the photographers by two privates under the direction of a lieutenant with a museum degree, while the party proceeded deeper.