Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Don’t you hate me? Are you disgusted? I murdered a man.”

  “You killed many men. That’s what they made you a marine for. So one of them hated you personally,” she said firmly. Make him strong. Make him clear again. “About that one you can feel good, because he meant to have you killed. Right? You wouldn’t be here with me, ever.”

  He fell asleep clutching her in the middle of the new bed. She lay awake, staring at the ceiling. A killer, she thought, feeling fear solidify in her belly. That’s what they took him and trained him to do. Now I lie with a man who killed and killed and who weeps about it. Always in him will be this old blood reeking. It should not have happened to him, it should not have happened. But to whom, then? Who deserves this burden? To whom should this blood come home?

  JACQUELINE 14

  L’Chaim

  While working for the Americans in Frankfurt, Jacqueline moved into a house where survivors who had managed to buy or scrape together enough papers to escape the DP camps were living. It had been part of a row of brick houses that a bomb had sheared off, so that rooms and corridors opened into rubble, but they boarded up those false entrances and lived in the rest. Oddly, the plumbing worked, although they had no heat or any way to cook but an iron camp stove they set up. It was an improvised existence, full of stratagems and scavenged objects.

  One of the women, a Polish Jew named Mindele, asked her why she didn’t go back to France. “It’s safe there,” she said. “You must be crazy to stay around here.”

  “I’m trying to find my sister, who was in Dora.”

  “Ah.” The woman nodded. They understood the search for relatives. Now she was comprehensible to them, but they all urged her to marry the handsome soldier who was working for the JDC.

  “You don’t understand. He was the chassen of my best friend.”

  “So you should marry him for her. Were you sterilized?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re blessed. They did that to me. You must marry your friend’s chassen and make children for her, for all of us.”

  “We don’t love each other.”

  “That kind of love.” The woman shrugged. “You were in Auschwitz. You know what counts. To eat, to live, to be free. And to make children to replace the dead. To bring joy back into the world.”

  The survivors knew much about each other that nobody else could. She translated for the Americans and tried to help other survivors, to protect them from contempt and bureaucracy and the continuing brutality of the German police and the occupation MPs. The Americans liked her because she spoke English with an American accent and they thought she was pretty. They were fooled by little devices that hid the skull underneath. They were a people who went much by surfaces, which is why they liked the Germans, who had mostly had a comfortable war until the last few months, and why they despised the survivors from hell as quarrelsome, ill-dressed, ugly ingrates, whose very existence caused them problems.

  The Americans put in requests to locate people that she had to give priority, while the survivors, called Displaced Persons and lumped with those who had voluntarily come to Germany to work for the Nazis, could not get out of the camps to find if their parents, their children, their spouses were alive. A young American woman came from Bad Nauheim asking about a German Jew who had been an OSS agent. Jacqueline could see that the woman felt concerned through her brusque veneer. She traced the agent Marlitt Speyer to Mauthausen but there she disappeared, probably into a common bulldozed grave. The woman did not want to accept that answer. Frankfurt was full of people trying to find spouses, family, friends, full of people trying to organize (in the camp jargon she thought in still) papers, a job, a deal, emigration, people trying to reclaim or bury their past and seize a new future, mostly elsewhere.

  Ari continued to see her regularly until he went off on a mission he did not explain, the first of August. That relieved her of the awkward position of having a gentleman caller who was not. The night before he left, they walked by the river together. “You’ve put yourself back together remarkably,” he said. “I have to say, when I found you in the hospital, I thought you were a mental defective. You sounded retarded. You looked like a middle-aged child and you talked like one.”

  “What a sweet and flattering tongue you have. Daniela said you were blunt.”

  “When I get back, we should get married and go to Israel together.”

  She laughed. “You and the women in the house. Why? Losing your fiancée and my best friend is no reason. I’m not for marrying. I may have begun to look like a woman, but I am not. I’m a revenant. A ghost.”

  “You may have been a ghost two months ago, but you’re a woman now. I finagled a look at your hospital records, so I know they didn’t sterilize you.”

  “Ari, you’re good-looking and you’ll find plenty of women who’ll want to make babies for you.”

  “But not Gingembre. Not a beautiful woman who fought with the maquis and saved eighty children from death and has the best hands for plastique. I’ve been annealed myself, Jacqueline. I’ve been turned into a soldier. That’s what I know how to do. We’ve learned a set of peculiar skills, but where I’m going, there’ll be a use for them. In another life, I would have been the scholar I set out to be. In this life, I know more about how to kill than how to dispute Halakah, but I choose who and why I kill.”

  “You’re attracted to me because of my connection with Daniela. Yes, we have that in common, but you draw the wrong conclusions!”

  “Jacqueline, listen. I was engaged to Daniela when I was nineteen. The last time I saw her was in 1942. I came back for her. I would have married her, but she’s far more real to you than she is to me. That’s not my fault. What I found was you.”

  “I understand. From twenty to twenty-four makes a lot of changes in a normal life, when they used to have those. I’m twenty-three going on seventy myself.”

  “You’re young, you need a real life. We’re both alone. Desperately alone. Let’s save each other.”

  “I stay here because I’m still hoping to find my sister. Working in the DP office for the Americans, I have access to the maximum information. If she’s alive, I’ll find her. And maybe get a valid address for Naomi.”

  Not all the Americans were naive and easily fooled. One woman who was a journalist, an American Jew, would ask her sharp questions and publish the answers, so she soon got herself into trouble with the occupation authorities. Jacqueline did not think she would last long. She wore a captain’s uniform, but she explained she was not really in the Army. She arranged for Jacqueline to give testimony to a fact-finding mission of the new American president. Jacqueline called her Louise La Rouge, for she had auburn hair and a temper too, though used, Jacqueline noted, not to blow off steam but to effect changes. La Rouge ran herself into the ground trying to improve conditions in the detention camps.

  La Rouge knew what Jacqueline was looking for. One day in August she sent to Jacqueline a woman who had been at Dora, in the Tunnel, who remembered Rivka. “It was on the march. They marched us on foot with no food, guarding us with machine guns.”

  Jacqueline could only nod. She felt frozen. All this time, like Ari, she had known but she had hoped.

  “She and another little girl tried to escape. They ran into the forest, but the SS tracked them with dogs.”

  Jacqueline took the woman by the shoulders, restraining herself from shaking her as if she could force a different truth out. “Are you sure they caught her? Are you sure she’s dead? In the confusion she could have slipped away. One body looks like another.”

  The woman only nodded, her eyes asking Jacqueline not to insist on the details. “Yes. But she died quickly.”

  “Since July 1942? No, she died very slowly.”

  They embraced each other. Jacqueline carefully wrote down the woman’s name, she did not know why. She had begun a new journal, but there was little in it besides vocabulary in her different languages and notes for people to interview, contacts, n
ames, addresses.

  La Rouge came to see her briefly, looking pale and worn. “I was in the hospital. Really, I’m all right now.” Outside in the street, a captain was waiting for her in a jeep. “I know you want to look for your sister in the U.S. Here’s my New York address. I’ll be there in two weeks. I may be able to help you come over.”

  Jacqueline knew La Rouge was carrying a hundred requests, messages, dossiers, promises. “Soon it will be time for me too to leave here.” Jacqueline kissed La Rouge on both silky cheeks. Always she smelled of perfume. La Rouge gave her a raincoat, as if offhandedly, and then picked her way through the rubble to the waiting jeep. The raincoat fit her, so could not ever have fit La Rouge, who was shorter than Jacqueline. It was a good trench coat with a wool lining.

  Lev came to see her at the office just after an American holiday they had in early September. She was astonished how absolutely delighted and moved she was to see him. He felt like family, a brother she had often quarreled with but her own blood. He brought with him a frail woman who walked on a crutch. She had lost her toes to frostbite. “This is my wife, Vera. I found her in the camp near Linz in the Austrian zone. We’re on our way back to France. Why don’t you come with us?”

  “I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t belong anyplace.”

  “We’re going to Palestine as soon as we can,” Vera said. Her voice was extremely soft, as if something were wrong in her throat.

  “I must testify in some trials. We have a bit of cleanup work in Toulouse. I can’t tell you how astounded I am that you’re alive. We buried somebody as you.” Lev shook his head wonderingly, fingering his beard. “A body torn apart by grenade. We found your journal.”

  “My journal? Did you keep it?”

  “I sent it to your sister in Detroit. I told her you were dead.”

  “But you have her address?” She hugged Lev and wept. She managed to get off for the rest of the day and they went back to her house where no one would bother them when they talked of the living and of the dead. Among the requests Lev had received that awaited his attention back in Toulouse was locating the grave of Lieutenant Jeffrey Coates, late of the OSS. His body was to be shipped back to his family in the States. Would Jacqueline object? Should he perhaps neglect to locate the grave?

  She shook her head. “It was so long ago, Lev. He belongs to his family, not to me. If I could have Daniela’s body, I would take that with me, but I don’t know where I’d take it.”

  He seized her hands in a strong grasp. “You’re a survivor. You know how to fight and some nursing too. You’ll be needed in Palestine. The British forbid us entrance. But we’re getting in, the aliyah bet. You have no other place to go, Jacqueline, unless you want to go to America.”

  “I’ve been working with the Americans. They don’t understand. They know nothing about politics. They confuse Socialists and Communists. They think Zionists are Communists. They like the Nazi industrialists because they’re clean shaven and efficient. They don’t understand the Russians at all, because they’ve never been hungry or invaded or bombed.… The women in my house, they want me to marry Daniela’s fiancé in her place. Maybe instead I’ll take her place in Eretz Yisroel. Maybe I will. But I have to see my sister first. I have to get a visa from the Americans to let me go find her and then I’ll decide. Naomi’s the only family I have left.”

  “We’re all your family. If you go to America, you think about what I’ve said. If your heart moves you, come with us. We won’t be going until I finish in Toulouse, maybe by the Gentile New Year.”

  After Lev and Vera left for France, she waited for him to send her Naomi’s address and she considered what he had suggested. She should follow them to Toulouse. Where else did she have to go?

  She was walking through the rain back to her house one evening wearing the raincoat La Rouge had given her. She was crossing a rubble field grown high in weeds between two rows of standing houses, when she saw a big burly woman seize a child. A pack of the wild grubby youths who infested the town ran taunting and screaming away. Jacqueline did not like the way the woman was shaking the waif, and stepped nearer. She had to speak German nowadays often enough, and she barked out a query.

  “A thief!” The burly woman held up a cabbage. “I’m calling the police right off. These damned thieving foreign trash!”

  “I’ll pay for the cabbage,” Jacqueline said in that same loud harsh voice. A cabbage. Once she would have killed for that. She was back in the camp among the slave laborers and as they lay three to a bunk, they murmured recipes in the dark. “And this is how I make my own gefilte fish. First I buy a live carp and I bring him home from market, one with bright eyes and a sharp nasty look that shows he is strong …” “In making the strudel, touch is everything. I use only a slab that has been in my family for generations, marble and hollow in the center with use.” Why was she thinking of that? The way the girl stared at her, her spiky red hair soaked with rain, mouth opened, tears forming in her eyes. Weeping now. Jacqueline’s gaze dropped to the shoes bound on with rags, and then she knew Rysia. Those were the shoes Rysia had pulled off a dying woman and fought another slave to keep.

  In front of the woman neither of them spoke to each other, not until Jacqueline had paid for the cabbage and drawn Rysia away by the elbow. Jacqueline asked in Yiddish, “Where have you been? Nobody in the hospital knew. Why didn’t you find me sooner?”

  “I didn’t know you at first. You look so different! It is you?” Rysia was dragging on her arm, staring at her. “Let’s find someplace dry and eat the cabbage.”

  “I have a house. We’ll go there. You can eat with us.”

  “I’ve looked and looked for you! All I knew was that you were in Frankfurt working for the Americans. They told me that at the hospital. I’ve looked for you in all the camps, everyplace! I’ve been here for weeks and weeks looking for you! I thought they lied and you were dead.”

  Only after Rysia had gobbled a whole pan of soup and a loaf of bread could she settle herself to talk. She propped her hands on the packing crate table, water heating on the camp stove for a little real coffee Jacqueline got from her American bosses, and stared at Jacqueline.

  “I went with you, but they let me go in a week. You weren’t conscious and I was afraid to stay in Germany. Slowly I made my way home to my village Ceppany, near the Rába River. When I got there, the war was over. In the village, other people, Gentiles, were living in my parents’ inn and running the mill. They didn’t welcome me. They claimed they’d bought it and it was theirs. There were no Jews left! An old teacher of mine told me to go to the Soviet soldiers and demand the mill back. She said they would do justice.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I thought, what do I know about running a mill, and I was frightened of the people. I heard of another Jew who had come back in the next village and then just disappeared. I didn’t want to be the only Jew in Ceppany. I hung around, but nobody wanted me there. Some Russian soldiers gave me food and tried to make me go to bed with them, but I told them I was only eleven. I think everybody was mad they didn’t rape me, because they had raped others. Finally I decided I couldn’t stay, so I started back to look for you. It was hard. Everything now is cut into zones with border police. The Russian commandant had given me papers, but I discovered that if I showed them at the entrance to the American zone, the Russians wouldn’t let me out or else the Americans wouldn’t let me in. I kept trying for two weeks along the border. Finally I threw away all my papers and went through in a load of potatoes.”

  “You know what tomorrow is? It’s Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rysia. L’shanah tovah tikatayvou. May we be inscribed for a good year.” She put her arm around Rysia. “Don’t worry, we’ll organize what we need. Now, come meet my housemates. They’ve all been in the camps, you’re safe here.”

  When they went to bed that night, Rysia lay in her arms clutching her, shuddering with fear and fatigue. “I was so afraid you had died in hospital, died like everyone else. Then
I was afraid I’d never find you, that you’d gone back to France. I looked for you for so long, in every street. Every day I looked for you. I gave up hope but I had nothing else to do. I’m afraid I’ll be arrested. Jacqueline, I have no papers.”

  “We’ll fix that. Daniela was the best counterfeiter, but I’m not useless myself. I know every little racket going here. Once we get you papers, I’m going to take you to Toulouse, where Daniela and I were in the Resistance. We have friends there. I have to get a temporary visa from the Americans to go find my sister Naomi in the U.S.”

  “When you get your real sister back, you won’t want me.”

  “I have lost my other sister, my mother, my father, my best friend, my lover. How can only one sister make all that up?”

  “I’ll go where you say, but don’t leave me there alone. I can’t stand being alone.”

  “We’ll make a family. We know who each other really is. Only you and I are alive to tell what we’ve been through and the mountains of the dead behind us.”

  “Do you think I’ll ever grow up? Ever be a woman like other women?”

  “You’ll be a better woman than other women. We’ve been each other’s mother, we’ve been each other’s baby, we’ve shared the last scrap of bread.”

  “And that apple, remember that apple,” Rysia said. “A whole orchard inside it.”

  Beside her Rysia fell asleep, still holding tight. She could not extract herself to find a more comfortable position, but she did not mind lying awake. It would be the New Year. Rysia and she would go to the river and perform tashlich, throwing the crumbs in and throwing the sins away. Her sin had been quietude and despair. Her sin had been emptiness. L’chaim, life, was the toast they would drink tomorrow. She knew the worth of her friends, how strong they were, how utterly to be trusted with death and with life and rebirth. She would follow them into the war they were entering. She had no other family, no other land or loyalty, no other home.