by Marge Piercy
Henri and I have a taste for those kind of cheap ironies, like having a weakness for too sweet but irresistible bonbons. Then he took my hand and looked into my eyes the way he does and told me he had worn the star for me. He said he could not stand it anymore and now that his head was shaved and he was disfigured, if I would not sleep with him, he might as well give up and go off to Germany like Albert, who is being drafted for labor there, but he would go as a volunteer, and at least make some money.
“You’re trying to blackmail me,” I said.
“It’s come to that,” he said. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’d even marry you, except it’s illegal, of course.”
“You wouldn’t offer unless it was, Henri, but never mind, I consider marriage about as attractive as being a prostitute, and I do not care to be paid for my favors.”
“It’s your romanticism and sentimentality that drive me mad,” he said.
“How can you think about fucking?” I asked him, using the vulgar word intentionally. “Here you can hardly sit up, you couldn’t manage to walk down the stairs to the street, and you’re rabid to deflower me.”
“I can do that, even if my legs were cut off. Give me a chance.” He kept pulling at me.
I realized what I have known for a time, that either I have to stop seeing Henri or I have to go to bed with him. I have kept him at bay for more than a year, but he is getting more importunate. I am not in love with him (or anyone else) but I am fond of him. I suspect I am basically a cold person as far as romantic love and romanticized sex go. I think it is self-hypnosis. I watch the women around me falling in love with what might as well be large playful or small scrappy dogs, amazed at how the brain simply turns off when the hormones start pumping through the body.
Marie Charlotte, who used to be my best friend and who was once mistaken for a Jew because she always went round with me, is now in love with a German lieutenant. Because he is one of the supreme conquerors and an officer, her family are permitting him to court her. They say it is honorable. I know all this because Marie Charlotte still waits for me and motions for me to follow her to our old gossiping spot in the little park Georges Cain right by our old lycée. There we sit among the broken statuary or under the ancient fig tree, as we used to. I decide again and again I will ignore her, but when I see her, I remember how close we were, and I cannot cut her off.
I am putting off saying what I did. I extricated myself from Henri’s rather tight embrace, trying not to injure him. Then I sat down on a straight chair across the room. I was trying to figure out if I should leave and never see him again, but I like Henri a great deal, and without him and my other friends, we would be much hungrier. Rivka is so thin it worries me. By her age, I had begun menstruating and so had Maman, but Rivka has not started and her breasts are tiny as strawberries. She needs the extra food I bring home. What does it matter, finally? We may all be shipped off to unknown danger. I like Henri better than any man I have met, so why not him? I will always wonder what it is like otherwise, and never know.
Sitting in that chair, I said to him in a straightforward manner: “All right, Henri, listen. I will sleep with you. But not today. Recover from your beating first.”
“But I’m recovered enough, I swear it, for that I’m recovered enough.”
“But I swear I could not enjoy having sex with a man whom I was terrified every instant I would injure worse than the Fascist punks have. Do you want me to enjoy this, or don’t you care?” A low argument, but one I did not doubt would be effective.
He assured me he was avid for my pleasure and intended to render me delirious with joy just as soon as I place myself in his bed. I reminded him that Albert is being called up for labor service at the end of the month. I do not care to have Albert as a witness. Privacy matters to me.
“You’re just putting me off.”
“Henri, have I ever before promised to sleep with you?”
He agreed that I had always refused.
“Now I am promising. After Albert leaves for Germany, you’ll be healthy and hairy again by then—”
“You don’t love me without my hair.”
“Right now you look like an onion. But then I will do what you ask.”
“That’s less than a month.”
I knew I had persuaded him. I also felt I had given God a chance to save me if God wants to, and fate, if fate is so inclined. So, my diary, I have given my promise. It is not that a simple membrane rather inconveniently placed means anything to me. It is that I feel myself to enjoy a certain clarity which I do not encounter in most women. They are always doing or refraining from actions or believing or disbelieving or coming or going because the man they are stuck to wants it that way. If I have to start sleeping with Henri, I am going to try to remain calm and clearheaded and never to believe because we put our bodies together, that makes him more intelligent than he is or some great genius.
6 juillet 1942
Today I kept my promise to Henri. The day Albert left, and we went to see him off, I got my period. I view it as my body’s last attempt to stave off the inevitable. Today I had no further excuses. As must have happened to Scheherazade eventually, I ran dry, and my moment of truth arrived, but my king Henri did not show mercy.
I was too apprehensive to feel much except discomfort and some slight pain, but I imagine I will become accustomed to the sexual act and learn to enjoy it. It would be foolish not to, since I am obliged to perform the act; I might as well acquire some skill and involvement in it. I have many questions I wish to ask Henri, but I have observed that asking intelligent questions or wanting to discuss merely points of observation during the act tends to deflate him, so I will wait till he feels more confident with me.
I wanted particularly to examine his penis carefully, but while he wanted me to handle it, he did not seem to feel comfortable about my wish to explore it as an unfamiliar object. I imagine there will be time also to satisfy my curiosity in that regard.
I felt no ecstasy and the actual intercourse was on the painful side. I am bleeding heavily, just as if my period had come back, which is what I told Maman. Our bodies are so peculiar these days, with the diet or lack of it, that we are surprised by nothing out of the ordinary in terms of aches and pains and irregularities.
I am pleased that I can detect in myself no alteration in my feelings toward Henri. I do not feel visited by love as by an angel swooping down, I do not dream of him at night (I dreamed recently of Papa and constantly of food, and last night I dreamed I was taking an enormous hot bubble bath all by myself) and I do not have any more longing than usual to see him. I enjoy his company as before. Perhaps my worst fears will prove unfounded.
I made him use a condom, although he argued that pulling out before he came was sufficient, and that he was skilled at determining that point. I remember all the stories I heard at school about girls who got pregnant because their boyfriends were supposed to practice coitus interruptus, but didn’t interrupt themselves fast enough. I will not budge on this point.
14 juillet 1942
I have just had the worst fight with Maman of my life. Henri has been giving me all sorts of presents since last week, six eggs, two kilos of potatoes and a whole shopping bag of green vegetables from his uncle’s farm and finally a chicken. I thought Maman and Rivka would be very pleased. I’m sure they were, but then yesterday Maman started in about why was this generosity being visited on us. I turned her off with a joke and shut myself up in my studies.
Then this morning she stood in front of me with her arms on her hips and said, “Yakova, do not lie to me. Are you sleeping with this Henri?”
“Mother,” I said, “first of all, my name is Jacqueline. That is my legal name, that is the name I use and that is the only name I answer to. Calling me Yakova is simply a ploy to try to make me feel like a child.
“Second, I never lie to you. I have too much respect for both of us. When you have asked me in the past, I have always answered truthfully. I wo
uld prefer you not question me on the subject, as it is my own decision and private to me.”
“Are you sleeping with him?” she repeated.
“Yes I am,” I said.
She slapped me and called me a whore! She said she did not want his food and she went so far as to throw some potatoes on the floor. She told me I was confined to the flat and was never to see Henri or any of those low-life friends again. I said that was total nonsense and that I had an appointment with him that I meant to keep. He was my friend, who had been beaten out of solidarity with me, and we could use all the friends we could get. I did not tell her that Céleste and Henri and I were expecting to pick up copies of a new clandestine newspaper today as part of the illegal celebration of Bastille Day.
She slapped me again, repeatedly, and I believe she was totally out of control. We both commenced to shriek at each other like real whores in the street. Finally I locked myself in the bathroom for half an hour until I had regained control, during which time she pounded on the door until the neighbors must all have heard her. Then I packed a few things into my old knapsack and came over to rue Royer Collard, where I remain.
I am furious with her. She made absolutely no attempt to understand my point of view, thus demonstrating a complete lack of respect for my judgment and my character. Her tirade was ugly and insensitive. The simple truth is, if I did not have Rivka and Maman to worry about, I would probably never have become entangled with Henri. That reminds me that I must keep Henri from reading this diary, as I do not think he is as scrupulous in such matters as I had always supposed Maman to be. Now I wonder, frankly.
As of tomorrow, by the way, the idiots have new ideas how to torment us. We are forbidden to go into restaurants, cafés, libraries, museums, to use public telephones, and we are supposed to ride only in the last car of the Métro. We are forbidden many shops altogether and only supposed to shop between four and five, when everything is sold out anyhow, on certain days. While I am staying with Henri, I have removed my yellow star, as of course our cohabitation is forbidden, and I am not about to go home until Maman apologizes for the way she slapped me (repeatedly) and the unfeeling names she called me. I am quite firm about this. I have done nothing shameful and I am not ashamed—except of how she is treating me!
This is not a good solution, as if I stay with Henri, I must remove the yellow star, but my identification—for which we are standardly asked twenty times a day—has JUIVE stamped on it in big red letters.
I have become somewhat more accustomed to having sex with Henri. He always asks me if I have come, and I say truthfully that I don’t think so, but that I don’t know what it would feel like if I did. However, I have begun to enjoy the preliminaries. Kissing and caressing need not be viewed as necessarily sentimental pleasures, but taken on their own for their sensual content, I find.
Living with Henri is not comfortable, however. I have my routines with Maman and Rivka. It is easier to study at home and I could only take with me what I carried on my back. I miss my books, my easy chair, my café au lait cup with the sea gulls that Papa’s copain Georges brought back from Denmark. Henri is not much of a housekeeper, and the WC in the hall is disgusting. This building is composed of tiny one- and two-room apartments, several let to prostitutes whose clients thunder down the steps all night. I am going to give Maman a day or two to cool off, and then I will appear, my own sweet reasonable self, and see if we can make peace.
The scene haunts me in its irrational ragged quality, the violence loosed in both of us—her striking me and throwing down the potatoes, and the violence of our emotions. I wonder why I could not remain calm, which had been my intention, but the more she grew excited, the more excited I grew in return, a vicious loop. Every time I think of that ugly scene, I am aghast at how we acted, how we lost our dignity and how we failed to communicate. I am resolved that we will be at peace again, but on decent terms.
16 juillet 1942
I almost cannot write. I have been weeping so long my eyes are swollen and raw and my sinuses completely blocked.
Maman and Rivka have been taken away in a bus by the police—not by themselves but with thousands and thousands of others. They sealed off five arrondissements yesterday and continuing today, the French police—apparently almost a thousand of them from what we have been able to learn—arrested huge numbers of Jews, including men, women, children, old people, little babies, pregnant women, everybody. The police forced people to leave with just what they could carry and loaded them on the old green buses. One paper says ten thousand Jews were arrested, another paper says eighteen thousand, another paper says twenty-eight thousand. All the papers think it is a wonderful idea and are full of praise of the New Europe cleansed of such lice as ourselves.
I am too sick and exhausted to write anything else.
18 juillet 1942
All of my efforts have been spent trying to find out where Maman and Rivka are being kept, and what is going to happen to them. I do not see how they can touch Rivka as she is born here, a French Jew from birth. Maman was naturalized twenty years ago. It turns out to be very dangerous to try to find out where Maman and Rivka are, because of course my name too is on whatever list they are using to pick people up, and that I escaped was only due to a quarrel. I wish I was with them, lending my level head to the circumstances and figuring out the best strategy to pursue.
It is incredibly hot this week, la canicule. Paris is not designed for fierce summer heat. Henri’s room is simply too hot to sleep in. We have been getting up and going out very early, down to the river where it is a little cooler. There is danger in being on the streets when so few are about. Henri has begun working over his black market connections to get me new identification—Aryan, as they say.
But new identity cards will cost a lot. I have no money at all. I am discovering I dislike intensely being dependent on Henri, and Henri too is astonished how fast the situation developed. I do not think he wants me living with him, although he has said nothing. At first he thought it was great, but now the ramifications of the situation are beginning to impress themselves upon him. Here he is stuck with me, a Jew, in hiding, no means of support, kicked out of school, weeping constantly.
19 juillet 1942
I have discovered where Maman and Rivka are imprisoned. They took everybody with children to the Vel d’Hiv, a glass-roofed track with big grandstands where bicycle races are held in the winter. I have learned thousands of people are being confined there. Perhaps they are sorting through everybody’s identity cards. Rivka was born here, and Maman was naturalized when she was eighteen, and married moreover to a native French Jew. I am counting on hearing that they are released, but so far no one seems to have been let go. I cannot learn what they are being held for.
20 juillet 1942
I ran into Daniela, so she escaped too. She said she had word via the network just before it happened, so that she and her parents fled their flat at 3 A.M. with nothing. They slipped out just ahead of the police dragnet.
She says that I could pass with good identification, and that she knows where to get it. In the meantime I must have money. Once I have non-Jewish identification, she can get me a job in a hospital, badly paid but sufficient to live on. I must come up with the money for the papers fast.
I went home and asked Henri to tell his father that he had made a young girl pregnant, and to ask him for the money for an abortion. I felt his father would give it to him, along with a lecture neither of them would believe a word of. Henri was frightened but agreed. He is feeling very out of his depth. He did not even want to have sex with me. This is not a stable situation in my estimate.
Daniela has agreed that we must try to find out what is happening to our people in the Vel d’Hiv. We have formally disbanded the school. We both believe that creating visible Jewish organizations is just lining up to be picked off. Daniela says that we must resist, but so far she has not said how. I consider that a lot of hot air, the equivalent of an angry and powerless c
hild saying to someone who has hurt her, I’m going to get you. I’m going to show you.
21 juillet 1942
What little we have been able to learn is terrifying. They say at least one hundred thirty bodies have been carried out of there, including two pregnant women who apparently died in labor. We hear that at least fifteen thousand people, including five thousand children, are being kept without food or water. I cannot believe this, I cannot believe the French police are doing this to my mother and my sister, and yet I cannot disbelieve. I cannot eat or sleep. I am keeping a vigil.
Henri goes today to talk to his father. At this moment I do not care if I live or die. If I had not given in to Henri, I would never have quarreled with Maman and I would be with her now. I feel as guilty as the Nazis, I feel as if somehow I did this to Maman. I wish a large truck would run over me in the street.
Maman is right. I am nothing but a whore, fucking for potatoes and eggs and a few kind words in the midst of a city seething with hatred. Among all the people who were on the streets and saw whole families being carted away by the police, no one tried to help, no one tried to stop them. I have heard that some of the neighbors yelled encouragement at the police including the Laroques whose dog we always fed when they were out of town.
Six days without food or water so far, how can they survive? Maman is strong, but she is thirty-nine and made of flesh and blood. Rivka is wiry but still a child and already malnourished.
