by Marge Piercy
She had no choice, finally. Rysia was stateless, but so was she. She had delayed returning to France, in part because she would never forget the way she had lost her country and her citizenship under Vichy as under the Germans. No, she was as stateless as Rysia. She belonged to no one but the friends who had survived and who were going, as Jews, to make a place where Jews could never be stateless. Into her head came no images beyond Daniela’s fantasy of the apricot trees in bloom. It did not matter. Europe stank of blood. She knew she was not so much going toward as going away from, but she was going in the only company she cherished. The war had taken from her everyone she loved, but it had given her Rysia back for the New Year, it had preserved Lev and Vera alive. It had cast up Ari, whoever he would be to them.
But first, she must find her only living sister—who perhaps no longer spoke French. Who perhaps would resent her, remembering only childish antagonisms. Who perhaps liked living with a rich American family and would resent any effort to haul her off into danger and poverty. She did not know, but she had to go face-to-face and find out. At the least, she would recover her journal, which had so much of her old life stored in it. Memory had become a religious function to Jacqueline, and she studied how to keep it intact and powerful.
The love she found in herself was not the love that Ari sought but deeper and more primitive, tribal, familial, sisterly, motherly. That she could give. That she would give. She would give her strength, her love, her knowledge, her history, herself. They would cobble a family together out of refuse and rubble; they would scavenge their debris into a life.
ABRA 11
The View from Tokyo
They had married in haste and informed the two families at their leisure, which, as the letters arrived whose anguished shrieks distance comfortably diminished, seemed wiser and wiser to Daniel and to her. They were installed in the Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, middle-level members of the bombing survey, civilians again. The hotel had stood through the bombing as well as the earthquakes it had been designed to survive. Tokyo was a ruined city. Whole residential areas consisted of squatters’ huts of refuse patched together. Charred safes that had held valuables still stood with no house remaining above them.
Daniel’s family back in the Bronx was sitting shivah on him. Abra’s mother wrote that her father had almost had a heart attack and that she was disinherited. She also heard from Ready, who had married Karen Sue and was not inclined to indignation, and Roger, who was. “You will find to your rue,” he wrote in his flourishy script, “that doors will be closed to you that formerly swung wide, that hearths that welcomed you in will turn you cold away. Formerly your name on a card could admit you to the best clubs and secure you courteous attention. What kind of attention can you expect with a name such as Balaban?”
Daniel’s uncle in Shanghai sent a present of exquisite silks and a sweet letter, along with a photograph of his family. It seemed that during the war years, Daniel’s aunt had died and his uncle had married a Chinese woman. In addition to the stalwart older Balaban children, he posed with a new set of toddler offspring. He was not about to lecture Daniel on his marriage. “The Balabans have always been adventurous,” Daniel said. “I suspect we took in some Tartars on the way. Do you mind being disinherited?”
That made her laugh. “I’m not my father’s heir, and we’re not the wealthy side of the family. I have a trust fund from Grandfather Scott, and one from Grandmother Woolrich. I came into that this year. It’s invested in blue-chip stocks and produces a steady eight thousand a year. It won’t make us rich, but it gives us a base we don’t have to worry about.”
“Every day I learn new things about my wife. Do you have any other hidden assets?”
“Lots,” she said, “but they’re not generally regarded as negotiable.”
Daniel and she did not suffer as much as many people would have, she felt, from the disapproval and rejection of their families. They believed that time would bring the parents round. Both had left home early and definitively. She felt they were already far more important to each other than their families had been to either of them since puberty. Both of them had had the sense for years that their families did not really like them as they were, and that the less about their lives that was known in the old home, the better it was for domestic tranquillity.
They had just spent two days in Kyoto, which had never been bombed and was just as beautiful as Daniel had anticipated. Traveling with him was perfect. He spoke the language, he understood, he rapidly picked up the proper forms of behavior. He was interested in seeing everything, but what interested him most was their mutual experience. It was not the pool, the garden, the rock, the temple, but that he and she were seeing and knowing together with exchanged comments the pool, the garden, the rock, the temple.
How lucky she was that he had been hidden away in cryptanalysis all through the war, or someone would have grabbed him. She had married him because she loved him, but what shallow love that had been she already understood. Now that they were together she was falling in love with him in a new way that made her feel as if everything before had been practicing scales, exercises to develop the hands, the eye, the mind. Partly what she loved was how much he loved her.
Daniel was affectionate and passionate; and hers. He was not sloppy or uxorious in public, but unfailingly courteous and attuned. They were a team. They did not hold hands and coo, but worked together efficiently, excitingly, enjoying their competence, their intelligent communication and complementary skills. Abra had learned a great deal about munitions and the economy of war; Daniel knew a vast amount of and about the Japanese.
But his affection was novel, a man who cared warmly, who expressed that caring readily and without forethought or rationing. At first she had silently but constantly compared him with Oscar. Indeed Karen Sue had remarked to her that she obviously had a thing for Jewish men; perhaps she did. Or perhaps what she had wanted in Oscar and never gotten was exactly what was supremely haveable in Daniel. Now she rarely thought of Oscar except in connection with London during the war. He had ceased to exist as a force in her psyche. He was superannuated.
When Oscar sent them a fine camera as a wedding present, she was pleased merely. She had no trouble writing him an honest thank-you. Daniel was briefly suspicious, but she made him understand that Oscar liked to make family of everyone.
Theirs was, she thought, a relationship of equals at last, at last, and having had this, what woman would settle for a rationed dependency? Daniel knew far more about food and art; she handled their finances and began to take a greater interest in money in general. She was astounded daily upon waking, upon reflecting during the workday, upon retiring beside him at night, to discover how actively happy she was. Not that she thought him perfect. He had no taste in clothes, no sense of how to dress himself to display his charms and to give clues to others that would inculcate respect. He broke the back of books he read. He failed to clean the basin after he shaved, and frequently left the toilet seat up so that when she rose in the night to pee, she fell in. He sang, abominably, in the bath, the shower and while brushing his shoes. These small flaws reassured her. A whole warring sector of life had come to peace and was planted over in roses and wheat. Mine, she thought frankly, when she looked at his handsome head, his slender remarkable hands, his crisp hair. Mine. Me. Us. She would take on any enemy with him and for him, she was sure of that.
An air letter came from New York:
My dear nephew Daniel,
I hope you don’t be angry that I write you. I know how it is with you and your parents but I am so grateful for your help in coming to this great and beautiful and safe country I want you should know how I feel. You should keep in the mind too that I am here and seeing your parents and can let you know how they are and let them know how you are because you shouldn’t forget they care about you in spite of present quarrels and troubles.
I got a job as bookkeeper in the diamond district and I am studying English
in the night school to become citizen and speak and write better. I thank you a hundred times for your help and I will be a good friend to your parents. When you have grandchildren for them, then they will soften. In the meantime mazel tov to you and your lovely bride. Your sister just had a baby boy they named Sherman. I never heard of such a name except for a tank. Be well and come back well.
I wish I could send you a wedding present, but I am saving to bring over other people who need help. But when you come back to this country, I will celebrate with you and give you a present then.
Your loving and grateful aunt,
Esther Balaban
“We should send her a present,” she suggested. “What would she like?”
“I never met her.” Daniel stuck his lip out. “I didn’t exactly move heaven and earth to bring her over. I’m feeling mildly guilty. My parents did the whole thing. We’ll send her a kimono. They fit anybody.”
The next day they were scheduled again for Hiroshima. It had been set up three times before, and each time canceled. They couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about. After all, Abra had been looking at bomb ruins for years, first unofficially and then in an official capacity. But this time finally the cars arrived and off they went, with the rest of their party of eight. It was a crisp clean November day when Mount Fuji was clearly visible with fresh snow farther down each week and the leaves displaying fine ancient-looking washed-out tints on the ground, the last chrysanthemums still raising golden and bronze withered manes.
They lay in the bed side by side, untouching and silent. They stared at the ceiling that moonlight whitened to bone.
“No, besides the enormity of it, it is different,” she said. “What you’d see with what I suppose we’ll have to call old-fashioned bombs is that it’s so arbitrary, fate with a nasty sense of humor. A baby is thrown through the air and lands on a mattress. A young man is decapitated by flying glass. A grandmother hides under the stairway, and that’s the last thing standing. In a row of houses, one is missing like an extracted molar. It’s a capricious evil, do you see?”
“Death on the human scale. Death you can grasp.” Daniel’s voice was a croak.
“There nothing’s left. Not an ant. Not a weed. Not a butterfly. Not a mouse. Nobody was lucky. It’s flat as a pane of glass. It didn’t matter who took shelter and who didn’t.”
“I can’t get my head around it,” he said. “The void. A force that turns people from breathing flesh into an image on stone, like a photograph.”
“It is different, isn’t it? Whole families, whole communities, wiped out. Not some, not half, all. It’s something new under the sun, Daniel.”
“They kept saying it was like the sun. The sun came down. We can’t live inside the sun.…” His voice died away. They lay in silence.
She fell into a jumpy reverie, images of the day flashing before her, frozen, stark. Had he fallen asleep? His breathing was too shallow. Finally she could not endure the silence, in which their love, their life, all lives felt acutely fragile. “People in that hospital are still dying. Not just burns. I was talking to the nurses. Some kind of death rays go on killing people.”
“Radiation,” he croaked.
“Madame Curie!” she said, sitting up.
“That’s right. She discovered radiation.”
“Handling the radium. It killed her, slowly.”
“Will they all die, everybody from Hiroshima? Everybody?” He sat up too.
“Does anybody know? I don’t think anybody knows anything.” The moonlight floated on the air like ash. “I remember when the bomb was dropped, I was glad, because I figured that would end the war, hooray.”
“This isn’t what I thought it would be like after the war. After Fascism.” He lay down again. After a long silence, he said, “No wonder they kept putting us off. I can’t sleep.”
“I feel as if I’ll never sleep again. Imagine the fireball, the moment of blast. Do you think they really knew what they were doing when they dropped that thing? Another at Nagasaki still to be seen.”
“You said they, not we.”
“Nobody asked me for permission.”
“O brave new world, that has such creatures in it. Moloch in person. The angel of death appeared in the sky too bright to gaze upon.” Daniel flung himself from side to side. “I took a sleeping pill. Should I take another?”
“It won’t work.”
“I have such a strange feeling, Abra, as if God’s finger is on me, and I’m an agnostic through and through.”
She leaned on her elbow over him. She laid her head softly on his chest, feeling his heart beat. “God’s finger? We are getting Biblical.”
“We have to do something about it. I feel as if I looked out through a vast eye and saw the future of the world in a plain of ashes, of sand turned to glass, flesh vaporized, time itself burned up.”
“What can we do?”
“First, put our opinions in the report if we can.”
“It might be a matter of politics,” she said. “I used to be good at that. When we’re back in the States. If we do go back.”
“If we do.” He sighed.
“People back home don’t know anything about the bomb. It’s just a matter of making them see. Nobody knew.”
In spite of the sleeping pills, they lay awake all night. They watched dawn spread over Tokyo, already beginning to rebuild amid the rubble. Abra wondered about his uncle in Shanghai. Surely when their work here was finished, they could manage a visit. They had been invited to a Japanese home for the first time the coming weekend, and that should prove interesting too. They were both stunned by what they had seen, and she did not think they would forget. Nonetheless, between them they drew on enormous energy, and the world was noisy with invitations like birdsongs that filled the remaining trees of Tokyo. At Hiroshima, there had been no birds.
NAOMI 10
Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain
The telegram was there when Naomi arrived home from school. Her overcrowded high school was still on half sessions, so she was always home by one-thirty. Normally she got to the bakery by two and worked till they shut at six-thirty. Then she ran home, where they were waiting dinner for her. But today that part of her day, the least fraught, the simplest, was cleft through. She sat in a kitchen chair to read the telegram while Aunt Rose and Sharon in their aprons pulled up chairs to face her expectantly.
The telegram was in garbled French from Jacqueline from Toulouse in southern France and said that she was coming to Detroit via New York, leaving Marseille on the first of December, the earliest she could book passage.
“My sister’s alive,” she said.
“Your twin?” Aunt Rose asked, beaming. She let out a long gusty sigh.
“No.” She did not explain that she never called Rivka her sister. Rivka was, had been, part of herself. The better part. The good half, or the half she was only good with. “My older sister Jacqueline.”
“I thought the Germans had shot her?”
In answer Naomi lifted the telegram. “She’s coming here. I can’t make it all out.”
“Where will we put her?” Sharon asked, frowning. Arty was still in Europe in the occupation forces, and after Ruthie got married, Sharon had moved Marilyn into Naomi’s room. She was six, attending kindergarten in Naomi’s old school. Marilyn was thin for her age, prone to sinusitis and sore throats, a sharply observant but reticent child whom Boston Blackie had adopted as his own.
Rose rubbed her hands together, considering. “There’s always room. We’ll put Marilyn in your room, and Jacqueline can share her sister’s room.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to stay here,” Naomi said weakly.
“Why wouldn’t she want to stay with mishpocheh? Is she rich?”
“I don’t even know where she’s getting the money to come,” Naomi said.
“Ketsale,” Aunt Rose said. “This is big news for you but we can talk at dinner. You’ll be late to work, you don’t hurry.”
She did not tell Leib, because she had got in the habit of trying to stay out of his way. She no longer felt that mesmerizing love like a mountain over her. What did she feel? She felt bound to him, powerless. She felt used. She felt anger, sometimes a cold sour fury, something spoiled inside her. She knew she must tell him eventually, but that telegram had given eventually a deadline. She had no idea how long it would take Jacqueline to reach Detroit from Marseille, but December first was only two weeks away.
Still she let the two weeks pass, always hoping, always praying, running to the bathroom twice as often, staring at her cotton panties and demanding that a spot of blood appear. She begged G-d to give her her period as a birthday present. Instead she was given a new coat, a warm winter coat in red wool of which the family was enormously proud. She began to have morning sickness. Everyone complained about how long she was taking in the bathroom, how vain she was becoming. Twice she could not make it to the bathroom. Once she ran into the alley. Another time she vomited in her room and cleaned it up with Marilyn watching with big eyes. Then she had to pretend to spill part of her bottle of Evening in Paris from Woolworth’s to cover the sour smell.