Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Then Captain Spinnaker handed him a sealed envelope. Inside that envelope was another, also sealed. He began to expect that inside that would be another and another, until finally in the innermost packet would be a small pill, the instruction EAT ME, and he would turn into a butterfly.

  Instead inside the second envelope was a note scrawled in a handwriting quite familiar.

  Old Jeff:

  Hear you had a thing going with an alligator you met at a wrestling match. Sorry to interfere, but Mother needs you, and alligators are notoriously fickle.

  You should find this outfit a bit more congenial intellectually and socially. Do get through the training. Trust no one and keep your mouth shut unless opening it to imbibe. Assume you are never free to make an ass out of yourself until you are out of training, when like the rest of us you can do so with impunity and great frequency.

  Z

  That large Z did not stand for Zorro. So Zach was behind the sudden letter of inquiry from Captain Cunningham and his transfer. Jeff wondered what Zach had gotten him into this time; but what Zach had gotten him out of was clear in his mind and he blessed his friend, wherever he was.

  This new assignment, however wrapped in mystery that had an element of old boys’ games in it, seemed the first rational decision the Army had made about him. Everyone in his group had command of at least one European language. He spoke French excellently and could function in Spanish, Italian, German and Greek. In addition he knew France as well as he knew Italy and Greece. His OSS instructors seemed uncertain whether they were teaching him to be a spy or a guerrilla combatant, but he felt either task was likely to keep his brain functioning and his body alert. In Alabama, he had been dying.

  The intermittent fever vanished in the healthier air of Washington. They had classes during the day and exercises at night, stumbling through the woods to sneak up on sentries waiting for them, attempting to seize an outbuilding supposed to be an enemy command post or blowing up with dummy charges a shed supposed to be an ammunition dump. They ambushed vehicles that passed along the nearby road and chased each other through the woods and over the golf course growing up in knee-high grass. They practiced laying mines in the walls of the swimming pool.

  It was not exactly an interesting landscape, the white clapboard officers’ lounge and mess, the garages and hastily thrown up Quonset huts and outbuildings expanded to new uses, but he found himself sketching the oaks in front of the verandah, the glint of sunshine on the long lolling leaves of the magnolias. No one called him pansy when he sketched.

  Of the men in his group, he preferred two. Carey had been a poet published in little magazines, Aaron had been an engraver. Both were fluent in French, and the engraver Aaron knew Dutch because he had been Dutch, a Jewish refugee whom relatives had sponsored into the United States after he had managed to escape to Sweden. He had lived in safety for one year. He was five feet six, solidly built with carroty hair that reminded Jeff of his nurse, Betty Jo, and catlike topaz eyes. He was a striking-looking fellow but had no casual palaver. Even in the killing exercises, he was brisk but phlegmatic.

  Carey talked enough for all of them. He had taught English in a girls’ school in upstate New York, which he considered the North Pole. He came from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, although his mother, he told them whenever possible, was a Culter from Roanoke. He had been engaged to be married to his second cousin once removed, whom he had used to ride with, but she had dumped him and eloped with a Navy flier. He was absolutely delighted to be back in civilization, which began in Maryland and ran out after North Carolina, except for Savannah, which he did consider civilized, and perhaps Charleston, although he had dreadful relatives there, very yappy, like dogs.

  Jeff thought that Carey was probably what Zach had taught him to call queer, but from him Carey only wanted a brotherly attention. Jeff had had sex with men occasionally, starting with mutual jerking off in a hayloft at thirteen. The only time he had really made love with a man was with Zach. He did not find sex with a man sensually pleasing and he suspected Zach did not find him compellingly attractive. Zach liked them rough and tough. He thought Zach had seduced him as a way of explaining his preferences and as a kind of droit de seigneur. Jeff loved Zach in his own way, and that brief bout of sexual connection when he had been twenty had been part of his education. Once in a while when he was down and out and drifting, he’d had sex with a man as a way of paying for a ride or a night’s lodging. Having fucked men was part of his understanding, a code he had learned that made sense of things that would otherwise have slid past him.

  So almost by default he had two buddies. Many of the men in training with them he thought of as future old boys: they belonged to the same fraternity. This ex-country club had a different atmosphere than the brutality and lowest common denominator steamroller of his first enlisted experiences, or the nitpicking and nastily competitive worm wiggling of officers training. Brains were not necessarily something to be beaten out of you. Maybe this was the misfits’ service, he would think, and then notice the corporation lawyers and younger sons of bankers swarming through.

  He was taught to use weapons not included in basic training, to kill silently with knife, fingers and even with a folded sheet of newspaper turned into an improvised dagger and stabbed into the stomach or the jaw just under the chin. They were taught to operate radios, to communicate in code, to read maps, to observe. Where were the arsenals? The storage depots for weapons and ammunition and oil? The tank facilities? Which railway lines were in active use, and what moved on them when? The anti-aircraft emplacements? Jeff was a poor radio operator, his transmissions slow and full of errors. He hated Morse code.

  He excelled however at a test they were given when photos were flashed on the screen for twenty seconds with the subject’s name, age, occupation and address printed under the face. The photos were then shown again for thirty seconds in random sequence as the students wrote down everything that could be recalled about that person. Jeff did not confuse the faces. “You look, but you do not see!” their instructor berated the students, but he did not say that to Jeff.

  He started working with watercolors, a halfway house. He painted along the Potomac. He wandered the countryside in Virginia and found himself beginning to think in oils again, the colors, the texture.

  Jeff was gradually getting some notion of the structure of OSS. It had started out as another organization altogether, the COI—the Coordinator of the Office of Information—but because Robert Sherwood and Wild Bill Donovan had not gotten along, now there was an Office of War Information handling propaganda and there was the organization whose long arm had saved him from the swamps, the Office of Strategic Services.

  OSS had a branch, SI—Secret Intelligence—that ran spies. His branch was Special Operations and he supposed he would find out soon enough exactly what they did, with whom and where. R & A was the Research and Analysis branch, full of academics. MO—Morale Operations—generated what was called black propaganda, aimed at undermining enemy spirits. X-2 was counterintelligence. Another branch worked on secret weapons, invisible inks, gadgets.

  His two months of training passed swiftly. Then he was granted forty-eight hours’ leave before he was scheduled to take ship to England. He had to change trains in New York, and as he was hurrying from Pennsylvania Station to Grand Central, he wondered if he wasn’t being foolish. Perhaps he should spend his last weekend with the woman he was sure he could find in New York. But no, he wanted to see Bird and he even wanted to see his father.

  The temperature was hovering around a hundred; sweat drenched his uniform. He had to stand most of the way to Boston, but on the bus to Bentham he finally got a seat. OSS was looser than the rest of the Army, and he had actually been able to leave early and get a jump on his weekend.

  He had wired home. The Professor and Bernice were both on the platform waiting. He felt grubby and half cooked, but Bernice handed him his swimming trunks and threw his gear in the back of the truck they
had borrowed. “What happened to the Austin?”

  “It’s up on blocks for the duration. Bernice has an absurd idée fixe you would want to go straight to the pond to swim,” his father said.

  “That’s the only thing that would revive me. Whose truck is this?”

  Bernice, who was driving, answered. She was sunburned and grinning. “It belongs to a friend of mine at the field. You don’t know how good it was for him to lend it to us, gas and everything! All I have to do is work on the wing of his plane where the fabric is damaged.”

  “Bernice is flying for the government three days a week,” his father said with intense gloom. They bounced along in the cab of the pickup, squeezed together on the bench seat.

  Bernice had written him all about her flights. “I’m getting a commercial license, Jeff, I really am. But I don’t have enough hours for the WAF. They’re only taking the best women pilots, women with hundreds more hours than me. But I’ll get a commercial license this fall.”

  Lying on his back in Round Pond hearing the cries of the children like a flock of bright parakeets in the shallows, he felt memories pushing in. He was used to this pond and this swim was one of an open-ended series, forming a continuity with a hundred others over the years. He was seven-year-old Jeff splashing with his mother and sister. He was thirteen-year-old Jeff diving off the pier and gashing his hand open on a broken bottle. He was sixteen-year-old Jeff making out with Hilda Garfinkle in a canoe about to tip. He was nineteen-year-old Jeff lying on a raft with Zach and two girls from Smith drinking his first martinis, mixed by Zach. He was twenty-one-year-old Jeff under a quarter moon fucking Harriet Hacker on the Fourth of July while the fireworks went off across the water. He was twenty-five-year-old Jeff home recovering from a dose of the clap and a beating.

  Will I die? he asked, and then, Sure, he answered himself. Everybody does. He tried to imagine his death and all he could come up with was a feeling of sinking into deep water, managing to remain awake as he fell asleep.

  He thought briefly again of getting laid, and had begun to run over the list of potential candidates in the town, when he turned and began a purposeful crawl toward the raft where Bernice was sunning herself. The Professor was sitting on the shore at a picnic table reading. It was Bird’s company he needed, but he could not really talk to her here. He remembered how voices carried over the water, remembered coming out of the water to hear behind him that little redhead out on the raft telling Zach she was afraid she was pregnant.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. “I’m hungry. You have to feed me up.” What he wanted was the two of them closeted in the kitchen, so he could begin to tell her how he had almost died in Alabama, how he had been swallowed up in mindless inertia. How demoralizing it had been to lose his energy, his vision, himself. How he had first stopped painting and then stopped drawing and lastly even stopped thinking like a painter. Who else could hear him confess that he had been losing all he valued in himself, that he had come to see himself as a fragile construction over a swamp of minor urges and exceedingly minor needs and irritations?

  If he ceased to paint, he lost his past, which became not the wanderings of a misunderstood and unfashionable painter but simply the empty travels of a bum. If he ceased to paint, he lost his future, for who wanted to imagine a life doing odd jobs in odd places? He had never believed he could ever stop painting, yet he had. That frightened him.

  He wondered if he should ship his French easel. OSS was generous with the luggage an officer could send. Probably too bulky. He would take the more expensive colors. Talking to her, with her good mind embracing his life, truly seeing it, he would come to understand. And accept. And go on. He would again feel himself to be a child of destiny and fortune, and the luck that had plucked him out of the swamp of inertia and the slough of despond, the luck momentarily called Zach, would assume other forms and beckon him forward.

  JACQUELINE 3

  A Star Shaped Like Pain

  31 mai 1942

  They have ordered us to begin to wear a yellow star at all times. We have to trade our precious textile coupons for the stars, as if we wanted such a thing or were willing to suffer cold and wear rags to afford such a star. JUIF it says in big black ugly letters, just in case anyone is too dense to grasp the point—any of the six points. The shade of yellow is particularly strident—and I never wear yellow. All of us over the age of six have to wear them on the streets and everywhere.

  I have avoided going out more than I have to, but today I am determined to resume what passes for my normal life. We are being excluded from classes at the Sorbonne, so there goes my education. A letter came. The government of France in the interest of racial purity etc. I am writing this at the breakfast table over a big mug of some weed we have brewed up with a tiny bit of skim milk added. It tastes like the grass soup the twins used to make on summer vacations, to feed their dolls. No matter how people stare in the streets, I am going to do what I must and what I decide.

  Same day: I felt immensely conspicuous, as if I were wearing a sign, LEPER, and indeed, people act that way. I have never had the sense of so many people looking away from me, pretending not to see me. That isn’t the worst. The worst was those who turned toward me and either swore at me, threatened me or in one case, a nasty brute of a man who pushed me off the sidewalk. If the truck coming along the street had not veered, I would have been run over, for I sprawled right in front of the wheels.

  5 juin 1942

  Times like these make you value your friends. Just when I accuse myself of hanging out with my zazou friends just because I don’t want to be relegated to the ghetto, and they are the only ones tolerant enough to put up with a Jew, they do something that makes me feel how real is the friendship of at least Céleste and Henri. They showed up at the café Le Jazz Hot yesterday wearing big six-pointed yellow stars with GOY on them. Then on the way home, they were caught by a bunch of those Fascist PPF youth. They tore Céleste’s clothes, throwing her down in the street, kicking her and breaking two ribs. Henri they took and shaved his head and beat him until he is a mass of bruises.

  They are always beating up the zazous anyhow. A lot of young people are dressing like my friends, in dark glasses, loose jackets and tight trousers with their hair long and oiled, to drive the Fascists crazy. They say zazous are the ultimate decadents and that’s why France lost the war, because we are all rotten and corrupt and jazz has destroyed our minds.

  I stood in line from 5 till 8 A.M. this morning for bread. I am exhausted and I have decided to take a nap after I finish my philosophy lesson. A group of us who have been forced out of our classes are meeting three days a week. A third-year student is lecturing us from her class notes and Daniela Rubin is recruiting others. Professor Moussat, who was just denounced as a Jew and kicked out of the Ecole des Etudes Orientales, is going to lecture on Buddhist thought. I am not as fascinated as I might have been a year ago, but at least it is an education in something other than how to scrounge food scraps. Daniela and I are the energy behind this attempt, setting up a little school through which we hope to circumvent the attempt to keep us ignorant! She is a year older than me and had been planning to become a doctor. Oh, Daniela told me what happened to that Jewish Boy Scout who was going to secure us new identity cards: shot. He was part of a network smuggling Jews out of France to safety elsewhere. Now I am sorry we were not nicer to him, but we were suspicious.

  After I finish my lessons, I am going over to visit Henri, although I feel very strange these days as I go uphill past the Sorbonne from which I have been driven. The reaction of our “fellow” students was along the lines of, Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish. They could have shut down the school, if they cared to strike over our dismissal. I wish I could bring Henri a present, but we have long since finished the little treats Naomi sent us.

  On the street yesterday I was suddenly struck by how now you can tell someone’s politics by their weight. That is, those who collaborate with the Germans are all plump and heal
thy-looking. They are eating real food—butter, eggs, chicken, even meat sometimes—and they have soap to wash with and some even have warm water. The rest of us are getting thinner and gaunter and dirtier. We Jews are the thinnest and most raggedy of all. We would be much worse off if it were not for my black market connections through Henri and Céleste.

  6 juin 1942

  If I trusted Maman even a little less, I would not dare make an entry today. But she has never invaded the privacy of my diary, and I don’t believe she ever would. Nonetheless, I think it a good idea to carry it with me after this, just in case.

  I did go see Henri, in the rue Royer Collard. He was in bed, sitting up with a great bandage around his head, his eye black and blue and hideously swollen, and his jaw swollen too where the PPF thugs had broken a tooth.

  These Fascist games of beating up people in the street in packs appeal to some like a drug. It is a license to hurt with impunity. Henri says it is a form of infantilism gone amuck, but I think it is more sinister than that. Henri maintains that nothing is more sinister than armed babies in groups who want what they want when they want it and grab for it. He says that there were many people passing in the street, and nobody intervened, and that a flic came by, but when he saw who was doing the beating and who was the beaten, he turned and discreetly strolled away.

  Albert was out this afternoon, making a deal for eggs. Henri and Albert share a room paid for mostly by Henri’s father. His father, who runs a nightclub and never married his mother, gives him money. Henri says the nightclub is full of Germans, not only the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed here, but soldiers who come on leave from all over Europe for what they call Paris Bei Nacht. The Nazis have changed the names of the Sarah Bernhardt theater and every street in Paris named for a Jew and persuaded (easily) every publisher in Paris to stop publishing Jewish writers and to purge their lists, and there they sit slurping champagne and stuffing themselves every night in Henri’s father’s club and fifty similar while Offenbach’s Can Can is played again and again as they ogle the spicy dancers. They can’t have a cancan without music written by a Jew, so they pretend ignorance.