Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Naomi loved the sound of the word, disillusion. She imagined a veil being ripped away. “I am disillusioned,” she said out loud. After all, now she was a woman. She would never again pick her nose and put the boogers under the seat. She would master eating with the fork in the right hand the way Americans did. She would stop sneaking Murray’s letters from Ruthie’s underwear drawer and reading them. Now that she was a woman, she could no longer act like a child. Everything she did counted now, and she must start to behave properly and bravely and be bien rangée.

  She sat on the edge of Ruthie’s bunk and practiced sitting like a mature woman. The pad was uncomfortable between her legs. She wondered how she could run with it chafing her thighs. She peered at her face in the small mirror over the dresser they shared. She tried giving herself a languorous look, such as women threw at men in the movies. The words were hard for her to follow still. Then she squinched up her right eye, made her left eye big and round and bared the teeth on one side of her mouth only. That was her best witch face. Sometimes Rivka used to say maybe they would grow up and be witches. That sounded like fun.

  Had Rivka started? She closed her eyes and tried to feel her twin, but she couldn’t. Six o’clock. It was midnight in Paris so Rivka must be asleep. It would have been so fine if she and Rivka had each other to talk to: then she would know whether she was happy or displeased. When you have a twin, you are never lonely, unless you are separated, and then nobody ever understands what is missing but you.

  She had a moment of bleak anger at her parents for separating them. It had not been supposed to be for long. Papa had got an Ausweis that enabled him to travel to the Vichy zone along with papers and a carte d’identité belonging to a man named Antoine Saligny, who had business in the south. The Ausweis included a daughter, but only one. Antoine Saligny had suffered a heart attack before his Ausweis had come through, and Papa had bought the papers. He had intended to take Jacqueline, who refused to leave with the exams for her baccalauréat just coming up. Papa had chosen Naomi as the next eldest—she had been born fifteen minutes earlier than Rivka.

  Papa’s idea was to get a job in the Vichy zone and then to bring down the rest of the family. That turned out to be more difficult than they had imagined. There was no telephone service between the two Frances. The only mail they could send were postcards you bought and checked off a given message. In order to go back and forth, you had to get a permit. The Vichy French were rushing to pass anti-Jewish laws to equal the Nazis. When Papa saw a chance to ship her to the United States, he had decided to move her to safety.

  So Papa had stayed in the south of France while she found herself flying alone to New York where she was met by a woman from the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and put alone on a train for Detroit. She had never in her life been as miserable as those five days in which she had been on the plane going from airport to airport, to Casablanca and then to Martinique and then to New York, on the plane whose roaring filled her head for two days afterward. Her English had not proved to be as good as she had always supposed it, and half the time she could not tell what people were telling her to do or asking of her.

  Sometimes she felt cast out by her family. Why should she be the one to be separated? Since the new war began, she had no more letters from Rivka and Maman and Jacqueline. She had only those moments she could not demand but could only accept when she felt her twin sharply from inside her.

  Aunt Rose came in and kissed her. “All right, so I won’t slap you, Ruth wants me to be modern and American. But you be a good girl now.” Rose pinched her cheeks between her calloused and water-worn hands, smelling of onions. “Be a good girl for us and for your own mother, my dear sister Chava, who I know is always thinking of you.”

  Naomi nodded awkwardly. What was all this fervent wishing that she be good? Did G-d start counting when you had your first period? Maybe G-d didn’t get mad at anything you did until then, but then it counted, every thought and every deed and every mitzvah performed or failed. She felt dismayed at the prospect of having to be really good. She changed the subject intentionally. “Did my mother, Chava, start at the same age as me?”

  “You’re twelve, right? The same age. Chava was already pretty then, already smart. I was the sensible one, I had to take care for the little ones. Your aunt Batya was the silliest, the most boy-crazy. Esther, she was only a little baby when I left. She’s the one who married well. Both Esther and Batya married Balabans, from Kozienice also, but Batya married the handsome boy with no sense, while Esther married the one with the mill, and she keeps his books.”

  Naomi loved to persuade Aunt Rose to talk about the sisters. It made the connections real, that she was still in the same family however scattered they were across Europe and America.

  At supper when she sat down to the table, a soup of onions and potatoes served with the dark bread Aunt Rose had sent her to buy at the bakery, Uncle Morris looked at her with such a face of sadness and worry and amusement, she knew immediately Aunt Rose had told him. She wanted to throw down her spoon and rush out of the room. What restrained her was remembering how many such stupid scenes Jacqueline had put on, accusing Maman usually but sometimes Papa of being insensitive, of not respecting her, of making fun of her ideas. Bang. Down would go the spoon and back would go the chair and Jacqueline would storm off to shut herself in the salle de bains. What she did in there was a mystery. They would hear the water running wildly. When she came out she would look as if she had received some secret message; she would act smug, withdrawn, slightly exalted. She would look at them all sideways, as if to say, You who do not understand me will understand someday after I have done great things!

  Naomi resolved she would not become silly like Jacqueline. Ignoring everybody, she ate her soup. The blood was not particularly impressive. She had bled far more with a nosebleed, as had Rivka when they had been carving their names in a chestnut tree and the knife slipped. She said instead, since everybody kept glancing at her surreptitiously, “There’s something I’d like to know.”

  “What’s that?” Ruthie asked, at the same time that Uncle Morris said, “Are you sure you don’t want to wait till after supper and ask your aunt?”

  “Why does everybody think it’s funny or wrong if you want to be friends with a colored girl? Why does anyone care?”

  Everyone in her new family looked upset, as if she had asked about something even more embarrassing than periods. “Your uncle Morris will explain,” Aunt Rose said, while Arty and Sharon made faces as if the soup didn’t taste good. Naomi decided she was never going to understand how to be an adult, even if she did bleed now. Uncle Morris said he would talk to her after supper, as if she had asked about something dirty. She gave up and ate her soup. It occurred to her that whenever she felt Rivka lately, Rivka was always hungry.

  DANIEL 2

  The Great Purple Crossword Puzzle

  Daniel Balaban had always been a devotee of The New York Times crossword puzzle. During his years at City College, he had relished a competition with his cousin Seymour to see which of them could work it faster. The one done first would call the other to crow. However, he had never imagined that he would one day be working a giant crossword puzzle day and night under intense pressure with a sense of probable doom hanging over him.

  Of course cryptanalysis—deciphering codes, in this case, in Japanese—was not the same as working a crossword puzzle, yet at times it felt so, for everything in the structure they were creating was interrelated; when they discovered one tiny piece, it could change other pieces guessed at and now rendered certain or incorrect.

  In the spring when men from his program of crash Japanese instruction had begun to be called to Washington, Daniel had wondered increasingly what would be done with him. He had imagined interrogating prisoners on a tropical isle. Would he be sent overseas at once? He was in the second batch called up. In college he had been a C student, rarely roused to pursue excellence. Here he had outdone classmates who ha
d studied Japanese for several years. He had never thought of himself as stupid, but neither had he considered himself brilliant. His cousin Seymour was the intellectual and his brother Haskel, the all-A student. Now he viewed himself with a new respect for his mind.

  Then came the induction all at once and over his head into the OP-20-G office, where he was put to work on cryptanalysis with dispatch and a furious pressure from above. He was reminded of Haskel teaching him to swim by tossing him off the side of a pool at the Y. He was dropped into deep and choppy waters, in the midst of a fierce storm of incomprehensible office politics. Yet somehow he learned. He could not understand the purpose of this grim activity for some weeks, but he attempted to make his way.

  Daniel felt out of place when first posted to Washington, to OP-20-G. Half of the staff were Navy career men, Annapolis graduates who had spent time in Japan as part of their training. Half were civilians, men and women whose vocation and identity were bound up with Japanese language and culture. Several of them were nisei or partly Japanese, a few were married to Japanese, but he did not share the suspicion of everything Japanese-American that characterized most Americans and was, indeed, the official government position. After the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans, the Navy had to move their own nisei from the West Coast to Colorado, to protect them. Without them, the program would have been crippled.

  He moved into the first room he could find in the overcrowded city, with a family of noisy Kentuckians who drove him crazy. Finally one of the men in his section asked him if he would like to share a tiny apartment out near Maryland in the Third Alphabet of streets, a long way from the Capitol and from work, but an apartment that would be his and Rodney’s only. He accepted without seeing it. That was just as well, as it was dark, tiny and hot under the third-floor roof, a walk-up with a view of the next roof suitable for anyone wishing to launch an intensive study of pigeon mating habits.

  They had only two rooms and a kitchenette. Rodney, who had found the apartment, had already claimed the bedroom. Daniel got the Murphy bed in the living room. That felt just like home, for it was as lousy a bed as he’d had in the Bronx. He decided to leave the Murphy bed in its closet and sleep on a mattress on the floor. One corner of their living room thus consisted of his mattress with a heap of odd pillows on it, including the woven bamboo lion headrest he had always had on his bed since Shanghai. Over it he hung the scroll he had bargained for with a friend’s help in Soochow. “Very bohemian,” Rodney grumbled, but as he did not want to give up the bedroom, matters remained stalemated. Rodney scarcely spoke to Daniel unless drunk, when he would maunder on garrulously about his problems seducing women.

  Washington was not a vast cosmopolitan hive like New York and Shanghai, not a center of intellectual life like Boston. It was an overgrown southern city that moved at half the pace of New York. Many of the younger men and women went bareheaded, while everyone in New York wore hats. There wasn’t a skyscraper in town. Everything was segregated and marked for colored or white. It struck him as not only rude but silly, close to hysterical behavior. The colored population of Washington was large and seemed quite varied, although almost universally ill-housed, some in what were called alley houses, built behind the houses on the street in a teeming warren that made him think of the seamier parts of Shanghai.

  Every day he took the streetcar to the Navy Building at Eighteenth and Constitution Avenue, went past the Marine guards up to the third deck—the first thing he had had to learn here was to call floors decks, walls bulkheads and other Navy nonsense—and checked into signals intelligence. OP-20-G was not a quiet place of intense study, not a happy family, not a place where you were welcomed in and shown your part as a jolly cog in a great operation. It was a nut farm. People who had been there before the war seemed to feel guilty that Pearl Harbor was to some large extent a Navy fuck-up and thus a naval intelligence fuck-up. They worked in a frenzy. Their boss screamed, yelled, rushed them, hovered to make sure any conversation occurring was in regard to work and work only. In one corner sat the former head of the department, with Pearl Harbor hung around his neck like the albatross about the ancient mariner. No one wanted to look at him, and he seemed to have little to do besides an endless postmortem report.

  Daniel had no idea how he came to inherit being liaison, a fancy word for messenger boy, to William Friedman, but the previous contact person had been sent out to the Hypo unit in Pearl Harbor, where there was another cryptanalytic unit. Nobody explained that to him. Nobody actually explained that what they were working on were Japanese codes. The unit seemed to operate under the same assumptions with which he had noted Boston street signs were erected: as a notation to those who knew already, and with a clear suspicion of strangers, a rooted conviction that if you didn’t already know where you were, you had no business being there.

  William Friedman headed the Signals Intelligence Service in the Army, down one building along the Mall in another maze of rooms called the Munitions Building, up and back on the third floor there—where floors were floors. Daniel liked going over. Friedman was a paternal figure, not only to him but to his own people. He was not a jolly father but a cool, remote, omniscient father, who saw carefully to the training of his personnel. His desk and his mind appeared always in order. Daniel found the atmosphere in the Army signal intelligence unit at once bracing and soothing. They worked just as hard as the Navy, but the atmosphere was clear, rational and benign.

  Friedman was a small neatly made dapper man, a wearer of spats, elegantly tailored three-piece suits, shoes that shone not brightly, for the leather was too fine and supple, but with an inner glow, like old money: but Friedman was a Jew. He had been born in Kishinev, in what was now the Soviet Union, and emigrated as an infant. He spoke with no accent other than an o sound Daniel associated with Pittsburgh. Friedman was a genius. The very vocabulary in which Daniel’s new profession was discussed had been coined by Friedman, down to the term that described his job: cryptanalyst.

  Friedman had a wife, Elizabeth, who was almost as renowned as he was, generally ranked second in that profession they had mostly invented. They had been in Washington since the twenties, setting up codes for most government departments needing them, from the Army to the Treasury and Coast Guard and Colonel Donovan’s new swashbuckling intelligence operation. They had broken codes and served as witnesses in numerous trials. Friedman was reputed tight with his wife, crazy about her. No hint of scandal had ever touched their intimacy. But Friedman had been discharged from the Army before Pearl Harbor and was now a civilian. It was said that the strain of breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, called Purple, had caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and the Army had chosen that moment to punish him for his eccentricity and style. Whatever it was, there was something faintly sad about Friedman, Daniel thought, as if he had seen too much—a philosophical sadness underlying the austere and ceaseless brilliance.

  Friedman had looked hard at him the first time he arrived as errand boy, a shrewd glance Daniel suspected was related to the Navy having picked one of the few available Jews to send to Friedman. Then Friedman had seemed to take several mental steps backward and judge Daniel carefully in their next few encounters. Finally he had become interested in him: not friendly, exactly, although there was a friendliness in that regard. Friedman was a man who used formality as a weapon, as in this military milieu, he must often need protection. Jew-baiting and anti-Semitism were rampant in Washington. Daniel sometimes wondered whether only the small number of Jews kept the city from establishing a third category of lavatories and schools.

  It was the end of April before he began to understand what they were really doing, even as he noticed Washington changing around him, bristling with uniforms and suddenly years younger in its street crowds. Nobody read him into the large picture; it seemed to be policy not to. He had to infer the meaning of their work as he had to build up the meaning of the partially deciphered messages he must complete deciphering if he could and translate.r />
  The Japanese used a machine to do their coding for them, a machine with many rotors. None of them had ever seen this machine. Signal intelligence consisted of plucking radio signals from the air and noting them down. Friedman’s group had succeeded in building a working facsimile of the Purple machine late in the summer of 1940, and had begun to break the code. Purple was only one code. The Japanese army and navy used a multitude of other codes, which must also be broken. However, Purple was the diplomatic code, a mine of information on Japanese intentions and thought processes and observations worldwide. The Navy and the Army had been working on Purple decrypts alternate days, then sharing their results. Daniel spent his working life staring at clumps of letters that read like this:

  XYBLG IRGUB NZZCU IRFLB USKLM

  He was sorry when the Joint Chiefs decided the Navy should abandon Purple deciphering to the Army, because that meant he would not see Friedman regularly. He had a crush on the dapper little man with the formal manner and the air of not quite belonging. He was glad he had something good to carry to Friedman, the latest from the Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Oshima’s wires home to Tokyo were an excellent source of information on the Germans, for since the Tri-Partite Pact had been signed between Germany, Italy and Japan, the Nazis had been showing Oshima their preparations and war plans. The baron was the best agent the Americans had in Berlin. Through Oshima, they had known in advance that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union, Daniel learned, but American attempts to warn the Soviets had been stymied by Stalin’s absolute refusal to believe.