Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  None of the men seemed to find his sketching odd. As they were mounting their bicycles, Roger said, “I think you should keep your limp. A limp explains why you haven’t been taken for the work draft.”

  Gilles was quieter spoken than Lev, a married man with four children. He had been born in Lithuania, but had arrived young enough for his French to pass as native. His wife was a more recent immigrant. Roger was tall, hunched over, with a round head with oversized spectacles, a shock of prematurely greying hair. He had been a teacher but had lost his job when all the Jews were fired and had worked in a tannery since. His hands were stained dark. He talked less than the other two. Although he was older, he deferred to Lev, whom he obviously worshiped.

  Lev produced sandwiches of goose pâté on thick bread, a bottle of dark red wine. A golden October light made bluish shadows under the plane trees. A wind had knocked some of the seedballs loose and they too cast little blue comma shadows. Grass in the meadow beyond was the color of wheat, but plumier, airier. Doves were gurgling and cooing nearby. They heard a train whistling on the tracks beyond the trees, perhaps a mile away. He accepted the pain in his ankle without rancor. Crickets chirped in the grass; the air was crisp and the light, languid.

  They finished with a pear apiece, female bodies, sweet. He thought of her hair brushing him as she had bound his ankle for support. Luckily his pants were loose and baggy. Her hair carried a scent from his childhood, of newly washed laundry dried in the sun.

  The farmhouse was built of grey stone under a red tiled roof, with a barn set at right angles and open on three sides, walled with hay. The sons were sixteen and eighteen. Only the eighteen-year-old Theo looked like the parents. The sixteen-year-old Alain had a slight accent and was smaller boned than any of the others. A black draped photograph of a young man stood on the mantel: the older brother, who had been taken prisoner and was reported as shot escaping. His widow lived with them and did the cooking, as the mother was crippled with arthritis. They were peasants, hardworking, ham-handed, extremely curious and personal in their questioning (How is it you never married? And your sister never married either? What does your father say? Will he marry again?), looking sixty at forty and forty at twenty-five, but setting a table that would have shamed a four-star restaurant at home.

  They ate, drank, lay down, although Jeff was far too excited to sleep. He sat by the dying fire, a cat slowly approaching, black with yellow eyes, and then leaning on his leg and then climbing in his lap. She was pregnant and purred loudly, rubbing her cheek against the side of his hand until he agreed to pet her. Would they blow up the train? Would he die this night? He felt nervous in a fine-tuned way, the same as when he was going to bed for the first time with a woman he really wanted or on a hot streak painting and knew he had it. His fingers wandered the cat’s fur in compulsive jerky caresses as he went over the steps of their simple plan. He checked his Browning .38, his knife sheathed against his right leg, the fuses.

  Roger, who probably had not slept either, came down just as Jeff decided it was time to get his party moving. They set off through the wan moonlight. Theo faded away to stand guard down the tracks with a Sten gun. Alain they placed on the nearby road to watch and signal any trouble. They did not arm him, as he was only to give warning if necessary, then hide in the brush. With a shotgun, Gilles went up the tracks to guard them from that end. Lev and Roger squatted to watch as Jeff placed the plastique and set the fuse.

  They had allowed half an hour, but Jeff was done long before that and whistled the others in. They marched single file toward the farm, but then Theo led them up a rough track, difficult for all of them but Theo who bounded ahead like a goat who could see in the dark. They came out on a little ledge from which they could watch the lights of the train down below, the curve of tracks. Jeff remembered traveling all night with Bernice, sitting up in a darkened couchette staring at the night landscape of southern France, north from Marseille, and realizing how like a Van Gogh it looked. The train was coming fast. The engine passed, the first few cars must now be over the explosives, but nothing happened.

  Jeff wondered if they would ever trust him again if the plastique did not work. He was still wondering when the sky lit up, first a burst of fire followed by the sharp whack of an explosion, and then explosion after explosion made the hillside shudder and loose rocks rattle down.

  “Come, we must get home now before the patrols come,” Theo said and led them precipitously downhill, leaping from boulder to root before them in the stifling dark.

  “It was so beautiful,” Alain murmured. “Better than any fireworks. Once in Cologne I saw a fireworks on the river—”

  “You’re not to mention that,” Theo said sharply.

  “I know. I’m sorry. But it was so beautiful. Flowers of fire and waterfalls,” Alain said dreamily. “I would like to do this often.”

  Another peasant came to warn that the Milice were checking identity cards and stories on the highway, but Theo led them before dawn by dusty and unpaved country roads into Gemil, where they climbed back into the truck and headed for Toulouse. Jeff felt satisfied. Gilles would soon know the exact extent of the damage, but they could guess it had been considerable. He would be at work on time.

  They lay in the back of the truck, the logs pressing down on them as the truck huffed and lurched and swayed. “A little while longer and they would have married you off to the widow,” Lev said to Jeff.

  “The younger kid Alain isn’t theirs, is he?”

  “German Jew,” Gilles explained. “Larousse placed him there two years ago. He escaped on his own from a transport after his mother died. Larousse noticed him in Marseille going through garbage.”

  “You’ll be wanting a woman soon,” Lev said. “There are two whores, Bibi and Paulette by the station, who are good to us. They pass us information and give us money. You’ll like Paulette, she’s young.”

  “I’ll wait awhile.”

  Lev laughed sharply. “For what you have your eye on, you’ll wait longer than awhile.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Don’t worry, she probably hasn’t noticed. You’d have to take your pants down and wave it at her. Then she’d just turn up her nose and hand you a blanket.”

  “She’s not involved with anyone?”

  “She’s involved with everyone,” Roger said, “but not as you mean.” He sounded as if he were delivering a rebuke to a dunce of a student.

  “She’s a nice Jewish girl,” Lev added. “Go see Paulette. She’ll take care of you.”

  He felt as if he had suddenly banged against a large No Trespassing sign. He did not bother saying that it was after all up to Jacqueline, as so far she had shown no signs of responding. The mannerisms, the little charades and poses other women had found irresistible, she simply walked through as if they were white noise. He was going to have to woo her in some totally new way.

  Gossip about the big train wreck was all over Toulouse and pressure came down. A meeting scheduled with a representative of the regional coordination of the Resistance, the FFI—Forces Françaises de l’lntérieur—was put off and moved to a suburb south of Toulouse, near a big bend of the Garonne where the wine merchant, Jeff’s putative employer, had a house on a hill with a magnificent view of the river, the railroad, the highway and all approaches. A week later, Jeff along with Lev, Roger, Jacqueline, Daniela and six others met with Captain Robert, the FFI representative. He told them about a deal over the border in Spain where some Basques had got hold of guns they could buy. Lev memorized the details. They would figure out who should go and how. Captain Robert was a short, stout fast-talking man who had been a captain in World War I, then a Renault salesman. The captain had procured the Renault rebuilt by M. Faurier, who ran the garage where Jacqueline and Daniela lived. Captain Robert said he had come in part to meet the new Commandant Américain, for whom he had many questions, which Jeff fielded as best he could. He had no idea when OSS would send more arms and could only promise he would ke
ep asking.

  As the meeting was breaking up, Captain Robert guided Jeff out onto the terrace. “You’re to go to meet the maquisards. Lapin sent for you. And he wants to see you too,” he said to Jacqueline.

  “Is that my father?” Jacqueline asked brusquely, her face going white and rigid.

  Captain Robert seemed embarrassed. He nodded. “Lev will make arrangements for transportation. I have the meeting coordinates.”

  “Does that mean the place and time?” Jacqueline’s usually fine speaking voice was acidic. Jeff watched closely. “He has taken his sweet time arranging this.”

  “Both the Boches and the Vichy rats have a price on his head. They have been chasing him since forty-one. Lapin, he moves fast and he goes to ground well, but no one would say that meeting with him is easy or safe. Probably he didn’t want to endanger you.”

  “He protected my mother and sister so well.” Jacqueline turned away, leaning on the low parapet where the last full-bosomed pink roses—flat, crammed with petals, the way Redouté had painted them—were blooming. Below, the river shone like a bronze scythe, full of soil from the day before’s storm, riffled with rapids. The land was a green plain stretching to the wall of mountains, an enormous busy sky like one of Turner’s stacked above, the sun setting ruddy against clouds stained with green and violet. Daniela seized her hands and said something softly. Jacqueline shook her off. Daniela again went after her, as the men drifted back in, ignoring Jacqueline, discussing the means of buying the Basque arms. Some of Jeff’s money would go for that, it was assumed, and he saw no reason why not.

  He moved in on Jacqueline, who sat on the parapet with her arms folded tight against her breasts. “This man, Lapin, is your father?”

  “You heard.”

  “You haven’t seen him in a long time?”

  “In forty-one he sent one of my sisters to America to relatives. He never came back to Paris. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “If he’d been with you, do you think he could have kept your mother and sister from being deported?”

  “Yes! How do I know? He was an escaped prisoner of war. And he was active in the Resistance already. He got involved in his war and left us to survive as we could.”

  Daniela had her arm around Jacqueline, pulling her head against her shoulder so that Jacqueline was off balance, her neck stretched and her shoulder lowered to the shorter woman’s height. Both their legs dangled off the wall side by side. Jeff sat on Jacqueline’s left, taking her cold hand between his. “Were you close to your father?”

  “When I was little. Later we fought. I thought his Zionism provincial and naive. I was wrong. He was prescient. But I’m still angry.”

  “Angry because he didn’t save your mother, whom you couldn’t save either? Or angry because you’ve been waiting in Toulouse for four or five months, and he only just has sent for you?”

  Daniela, surprisingly, winked at him, but Jacqueline glared. Then she frowned and considered. “Perhaps it is both,” she said with fury and almost pedantically exact pronunciation. “Perhaps it is both vanity and pain. But it hurts.”

  “I’ve had such a sore relationship with my own father, I can sympathize. But I must say, yours sounds more interesting than mine.”

  “Interesting! Who wants an interesting father?” Jacqueline snorted. She shook back her hair. “Of course I will go.”

  He hoped it would be a long and slow journey. Daniela and she sat embraced while his body imagined the impress of hers, his hands clenched on his knees. He must ask the wine merchant if he could return here with his paints, which had been produced for him as he had requested, from some hidden local supply. In all respects but one, he was well taken care of. In middle air the swallows turned and twisted and shot themselves like arrows across the gathering clouds: as fast as she was, as fierce in their concentration, as difficult to attract.

  NAOMI 6

  A Few Words in the Mother Tongue

  In September, Naomi entered Central High, mixed racially as her grade school had been and with a reputation for being rough. She saw the first day that there were local styles. The tough girls had a shuffle. They slouched along swinging their hips and hardly lifting their feet off the floor. Naomi could do that. They wore dark or blood red lipstick, bobby socks, saddle shoes, sloppy jo sweaters, and the ones who went out with servicemen boasted of it. They picked the soldiers and sailors up in bus and train stations, but had to watch out for the policewomen who were on guard to arrest the girls on morals charges.

  Alvin was in her algebra class. They were both taking college prep: Latin 1, Algebra 1, English 1, Social Studies 1, Biology 1, boys or girls gym, first aid for her and a military prep course for him. In Algebra the desks were set up in doubles, and Alvin sat right down next to her, glaring around daring anybody to speak. Two Polish girls from their graduating class started passing notes calling her Mrs. Sobolov, but it was nothing to the rest of the class, who didn’t know them yet.

  Naomi looked sideways at Alvin, trying to figure out why he had picked her. It was extremely bold. Boys never came right out in public and indicated an interest in a girl, except to tease or mock. She did not know if she wanted to be claimed, but Alvin was a big boy, even taller than she was growing to be, and broad-shouldered. His hands and feet no longer seemed to belong to somebody else. She remembered Aunt Rose saying about Alvin, when he had started hanging around that summer, “You can tell how big a puppy will be when you look at the size of his paws. This one, he’ll be a shtarker, a moose like Leib.”

  Suppose the Germans did come and they were running away. Alvin was big enough to hit somebody. She imagined them hiding together. The landscape was France. She had never seen the countryside here. She did not know if there were mountains. The papers talked about harvests and labor shortages on the farms, so she had to believe there were real farms, although as far as she could tell, Detroit stretched horizon to horizon.

  What she treasured about Alvin was that he didn’t like fighting. He fought when he had to, for no guy could get through school otherwise, but he didn’t seek it out. She decided that if Alvin could be so forward, so could she, so in Latin, she sat with Clotilde in the double seat, where they could whisper and pass notes in French.

  Not only did he sit with her in Algebra, but far more blatantly, he waited for her after school to go home on the bus. They did not get off together because he lived three blocks farther, and he had to get home too. So Alvin stood with her on the bus, and then Sandy caught up with her as she got off, and they walked home together. Sandy called Alvin, your boyfriend.

  Naomi tried fantasizing about Alvin in those nightly secret stories she made up to try to stave off the images that came to her from her twin. She had the habit now of lying in bed for an hour or more making up exciting stories about Leib and herself. They were spies together, they were partisans, they were underground. She experimented with replacing Leib with Alvin, but Alvin did not arouse in her any of the scary intense guilty out-of-control feelings that Leib did. Alvin was hers because they had helped the colored man Mr. Bates together, and because they both felt neglected and abandoned. He was comfortable as the cat who waited on her bed for her.

  Alvin’s father was in Sicily, which made for a neat explanation if you didn’t know he wouldn’t be home anyhow. He had left Alvin’s mother and they had been arguing about a divorce when Mr. Sobolov’s reserve unit was called up. They had married when they were seventeen and eighteen, respectively, and Mrs. Sobolov had not finished high school. She looked in her twenties and acted even younger, constantly dating soldiers on leave, while Alvin stayed home listening to the radio, doing his homework and the dishes and feeling sorry for himself, or out with the gang.

  Four Eyes had named their gang several times, but none of the names stuck. People would respect them more if they had a name, Four Eyes said. Four Eyes tried out The Dukes of Second. Then because of the Purple Gang, criminals who were mostly Jews, he called them the Orange Gang. He picked or
ange because black and red and yellow and green all seemed taken, pink and white had their problems, and blue lacked zing. But when the Polish gang nearby started calling them the Lemons, he dropped that name fast.

  Petty shoplifting was a group activity. They would go in together and Alvin and Four Eyes would attract attention by being their loud selves, while Sandy or Naomi would swipe what was wanted, potato chips or candy bars or flashlight batteries, but often there wasn’t much in the stores. Sometimes they swiped a movie magazine or a comic book. Naomi never let herself be frightened. It was as if her hands belonged to somebody else. Once in Woolworth’s, Sandy got caught but cried her way out of trouble.

  All the older kids in high school had jobs, and many of them fell asleep in class and in study hall. There was a sense in the air that everybody ought to be making money, a kind of itch they felt. The streets of Detroit were crowded day and night with servicemen mingling with men and women out of the factories, lines in front of anyplace a person could get food or a drink or dance or bowl or see a movie or hear music.

  Naomi still liked to go visit Trudi on her own, as well as on Sunday with Ruthie. Naomi enjoyed feeling like a lady visiting her friend Trudi with baby David. Leib’s grandfather had been David, but Naomi thought of Duvey and his nickels, the coffee she had made for him. When she thought of the times he had stuck his tongue in her mouth, she shrugged. Alvin kissed her like that every time he had a chance. She did not like it any better than she had, but it was his right, as her boyfriend, so she did not object. She felt that Ruthie had made too much fuss about Duvey putting his tongue in her mouth. She had been a baby to get scared. She was an adult, tough, able to take care of herself. She did not see much difference between David and the babies who filled their house, but she imitated Ruthie and crowed over him. She learned she had to do that before Trudi would talk about real things, what Leib had written, what scandalous things Mrs. Sobolov had been seen doing, about Alvin, about houses and how they should be fixed up.