Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Daniela was sitting rigidly upright on the car seat beside Jacqueline, who held her. The blue cup lay broken at her feet. The raw smell of spilled liquor cut into the reek of gasoline and oil. Daniela stared ahead. She did not speak or move. Finally Jacqueline led her upstairs.

  Lev slumped at the rolltop desk, scowling. “He was twenty. What kind of shitty world is it where a kid of twenty has to face a choice like that and die, torn into shreds on a rooftop? He should be thinking about going to school and getting laid.”

  “Yet it’s kids who do the killing in wars, always.”

  “I don’t mind the killing when I’m doing it. It’s easy. You just forget they’re human too.”

  “Like anything else,” Jeff said. “The first time is hard and the next time less hard.” He was not about to remark that he had never killed anyone. Lev had shot Gilles point-blank.

  “You were fast,” Lev said reluctantly and got to his feet. He came over and smote Jeff on the shoulder. “You saved my hide—or at least my beauty, nu? Maybe it hurt my pride, that I walked right into his knife, but pride heals faster than flesh. If I’ve been short tonight, I regret it. I didn’t want to tell her.”

  “Lev, let me make you angry again. You’re attracted to Daniela, she’s attracted to you. What’s holding you back?”

  “I’m a married man, Vendôme. Daniela is engaged. Nothing is possible.”

  “How do either of you know the one you’re waiting for is still alive or will want you back? Years have gone by.”

  “If Vera—that’s my wife—can survive, I can wait,” Lev said quietly with a dignity that impressed Jeff in spite of himself.

  “Tomorrow we all may die quite hideously like Daniela’s brother. What a waste, then.”

  “Look, copain, I’m myself till I die and then I’m just a stain on a wall. But while I’m myself, I control how I act. Sometimes I act well and sometimes I don’t make it, but it’s me, trying.” There was a sound from overhead, a sharp cry and something falling. Lev reached for the bottle and filled their blue cups, Prussian blue, actually. “L’chaim.”

  Jeff raised his cup and they clinked them, elbows linked.

  “Someday this will end,” Lev said. “We’ll have the bricks of our lives to pick up and fit together however we can.”

  “I met you as a fighter. I can’t imagine your life before.”

  “Me, I’m a mason. I build. Now I just tear down.… My wife Vera’s a doctor. I think sometimes even those assholes wouldn’t be so stupid as to kill a doctor. It’s the sort of little lie I like to believe day to day. You understand?”

  “I try to.”

  A thin eerie cry came down through the floorboards, sustained, piercing as a note on a violin. Both men looked upwards. Lev poured another drink.

  “You can’t protect me. It’s absurd for you to try. I was in this long before I met you.” She put her hand against his face palm out, a gesture of affection and reproach at once.

  “It’s far more absurd for you to take chances as a courier. The Milice and the Gestapo have your description. Anybody can be a courier, ginger cat. You have no special skill at running errands.”

  “You’re wrong.” She let him pull her down on his lap. “It takes a trained alertness. I have that. It takes caution when caution is needed, boldness when boldness is needed, and the sensitivity to situation to guess which.” She brought her face directly up to his, her eyes wide open staring into his. “Why can’t I see into your brain through your eyes?”

  “You’d see it sweating with anxiety.” He often thought that Jacqueline had cooler nerves than he did. Mostly he acted by not allowing himself to consider the consequences, the dangers. She was conscious and finally braver. Yet he knew such comparisons would never arise for her. She did not consider herself brave, but living on borrowed time, time she had stolen, time she continued to steal, day by day.

  Her hair had grown out, still lighter toward the ends, but with all its metallic colors and glinting hues back, running between his fingers. A pulse ticked in her throat. He thought of dragonflies, of hummingbirds for the glints in her, for her speed, her hovering, her pouncing, her fierce nature. Lily, he called her, for her skin, like the pinkish trumpet lilies his mother had grown with intoxicating perfume. She accepted his names without sentiment, without self-consciousness. She seemed to have few preconceptions about being in love. Her love was cool, crystalline, leaving her mind clear. She could be, she was, judgmental toward him. She held him to standards almost as high as she held herself.

  She had not come to him, she had added him to her family, to the distant sisters, to the mother, even to the father she had not quite forgiven, to Daniela, her adopted sister. In bed she was surprisingly uncoy, direct. She liked her pleasure, she liked making love with him. If he came too soon, she would yell at him, as if he had dropped a plate on her toe. When he got drunk with Lev and could not achieve an erection, she scolded him as for any other small sin. She did not seem to divide off sex mentally from the rest of her life and to feel he needed to be handled in any particular way. He would have liked to have asked Zach if making love to boys was like that, because none of the other women he had ever been with had been so simply demanding and so lacking in manipulative behavior. Sometimes he missed being coddled, being handled, being arranged for, but he only grew crazier for her. Compulsively he sketched her, changeable as a field.

  “You’re not a woman,” he told her as they lay bare flank to flank under the feather bed in his room. “You’re an intelligent cat. You have a human intellect, but not a human soul.”

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Merely an observation.”

  “Tais-toi,” she said gently, putting her hand over his mouth, and mounted him. He liked having her fuck him. He could control his erection better and watch her breasts bounce if she held herself up or feel them bounding against his chest if she lay more closely. He liked the luxurious feeling of making her do most of the work.

  Sometimes he felt as if she were exploring her sexuality more than giving herself to him; sometimes he could even feel used. But he also felt her love, passionate, fiercely loyal. She never made him jealous; she never glanced at any other man with sexual interest. She never flirted, but seemed convinced he embodied sex for her. She pored over his body with minute attention. She caressed his inner elbows until he declared them a major erogenous zone. She discovered exquisitely sensitive spots between his asshole and his balls and on the inside of his ankles and between his big and second toes.

  She scavenged food for him; she fed him and mended his clothes and darned his socks. Those female things she did with a concentration and zest that made him feel cherished. Yet she did the same for Daniela. If anything, she and Daniela had drawn closer. Daniela accepted him without enthusiasm but without rancor. Jacqueline shared her body with him and parts of her mind closed to him with Daniela, such as her problematic relationship with Judaism. Daniela and she had long involuted discussions of how their religion could be rendered more responsive to women. She was so rational a creature, she seemed to him quintessentially French, a female Voltaire, and yet she carried around her religion like a pet porcupine, he thought, caressing its quills and addressing it in passionate tones. It was a paradox he could not resolve.

  She viewed his art as self-indulgence, and yet she was a decent critic. She looked at his sketches and pointed at once to a shoddy line or something superfluous or accidental. He would not lose her to another man, because she paid no attention to them as sexual beings, but he could lose her because he fucked up; he could lose her to the Gestapo. Every time she went off on a dangerous errand without him, he suffered excruciating images of her body bleeding, torn, impaled. He could not swallow. His stomach clenched to a metal fist. Only her safe return released him. In front of the others he managed to seem only normally concerned, but he knew that he was crazy while she was gone, and that any decisions he made then should be reexamined with the return of ease and s
anity, when she reappeared.

  The drop came on Tuesday, near the ruins of a château. It was supplies, the little parachutes opening, cartons and crates floating down in the light of the full moon but scattered over several miles. The pilot in the lead plane had been nervous and began to release before he was over their triangle of fires, so they were up all night collecting every last crate. In the nearby town of Vabre, a textile town with a fish hatchery, they opened the rubbish dump, steaming a little on the icy night air, to hide extra ammunition and plastique in the old trash.

  “We won’t be able to use that site again,” Lev said. “We messed up the snow for two square miles. There’s no way the Boches won’t see it. They’ll know we had a drop. They’ll be looking for our weapons house to house. Your radioman Raymond had better move farther up into the mountains tomorrow.”

  Jacqueline volunteered to get up again after two hours’ sleep and go to warn him in the little village where he was staying with a widow, about ten kilometers out of Vabre, and at the same time to deliver the latest reports for London. There were the railroad reports, the troop movements, the reports on outposts and guard movements in the Pyrénées. OSS was using that route heavily for their people and deliveries of information and money.

  Jeff claimed he had a great need to talk to Raymond too, to send the coordinates of a new drop site for the next shipment. His greatest need was to keep an eye on Jacqueline, but he also considered Raymond felt a little too well protected and had been dragging his heels lately. Sometimes their people up in the mountains grew overconfident, since they weren’t seeing the Germans or the Vichy collaborators every day, and the countryfolk around them gave them support that could fool them to the dangers of their situation. He had been shocked to learn that Raymond was where he had been the week before, staying in the house of a young widow who was reputed to be a first-class cook, able to make a fine ragoût out of a straw hat. It was time to build a small fire under Raymond.

  The air was sharp as flint against their faces as they pedaled through the pale blue morning light along the gorge of the Agout, the road snaking among the grey and red rocks, the snow golden in the patches of sun, cobalt in the shadows. His sinuses ached. His ankle hurt in the cold. He dreamed of spring, of making love with her on a hillside that would smell of heather and broom. They turned onto a narrower road.

  They were bicycling sharply uphill along a stream rattling under its ice, each thrust of the pedal an agony, when Jacqueline abruptly dismounted and motioned him to stop also, to come off the road. Leaving their bicycles hidden in a thicket, they scrambled up a rock over the stream. Icicles hung from its ledges. His feet and hands slipped in the holds he used. Ahead she wriggled up, crawled out on top and lay on her belly in the snow watching the village just below them. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know … Listen.”

  He listened. “I don’t hear anything.” The village looked peaceful. The overlapping slates of the roofs in the mountain village resembled fish scales. Here they hung slate for siding, thin slabs. The effect was not pretty but grim, like stone tar paper. The villages in these mountains were small, stark, poor. Always there were many sheep and a few cows. The churches were small and bowed. Something in the grey rock, the sheep, the many boulders, the fast speckled streams aroused him as a painter. His Argenteuil, his Mont-St-Victoire, his Sacred Mountain was this landscape.

  “Right. There’s only one dog barking, and he’s howling and has been. No other dogs. When have you ever come up on a village and the dogs haven’t barked? And no children. Something’s wrong.” She frowned, shaking her head. Then she crept back to the bikes. “We can’t go in.”

  “Jacqueline, I have to send that information to London.”

  “Something’s wrong there,” she said. “We must go back.”

  She was hardheaded. The village looked normal to him. He had the choice of going on alone, but without what he had come to do, because she was pedaling madly back toward Vabre with the packet of messages. Feeling greatly put upon, he pedaled after her, feeling the cold, his fatigue, the utter futility of having risen at six after going to bed at four, pedaled for two hours and now returning with the same information they had carried up. “Slow down!” he yelled at her. “My ankle is killing me. You’re a stubborn self-righteous little bitch!”

  It wasn’t until they were getting ready to return to Toulouse that they heard that the village had been occupied by the SS, Raymond had been captured, the widow shot in her own yard and her body exposed in the town square. Twenty townspeople were taken as hostages and then machine-gunned as reprisal for the Resistance activities revealed by the presence of the radio. Had they entered the square, they would have seen the bodies, but by then they would have been trapped. The dogs had been shot too, except for the widow’s spaniel. Some German liked spaniels and saved it.

  Jacqueline took her premonition for granted, as did Daniela and Lev. “She can smell them,” Lev said.

  “God gives me that much,” Jacqueline said. “It isn’t what I’d ask for, but it’s useful. It’s necessary to be clear, that’s all there is to it.”

  Was it a chess game they were playing with the Nazis, and if so, did the Germans and the Vichy collaborators ever lose any pieces? Yes, they had lost Gilles. On the Paris street they had lost the captain and his lieutenant whom Daniela’s brother had shot before he blew himself up. And the war. That they were losing. He could smell the invasion coming, while the underground was sending out to the Allies precise and full information on all the German defenses, on their weapons, on their plans. It would come, and soon, he thought. When spring came, could the armies be far behind?

  I belong here, he thought, with these people. It’s right. I never belonged anyplace before, but here I belong. This is my landscape, my countryside, my light, my woman. I will sink roots here and flourish, like one of the mighty beeches. He had begun to cultivate a strong local accent, for he no longer wanted to sound like a Parisian. There had been painters in Toulouse always, but not landscape painters. Corot had painted around here briefly. The mountains in every direction were different: the Pyrénées, mighty, sharp peaks, long vistas bounded by glaciers, steep and lush on the lower slopes. The houses were built higher there, with sharply pitched roofs. The mountains of Lacaune were low and open, scrublands, sheep country full of outcroppings, abandoned stone sheds and farmhouses, small villages growing into the rock. Montagne Noire was covered with rich noble forests, hemlock and beech. He found himself constantly thinking of what land he would buy after the war. There was a country inn outside of Albi he discussed endlessly with Jacqueline. She would run the kitchen and he would run the hotel. That made her laugh, because she pointed out she knew nothing about food, except how to eat it, which she would gladly do on any occasion.

  “We’ll complain of the tourists and the foreigners,” she said. “We’ll talk about the difficulty of getting good help these days and rail at the petty thievery of the staff.”

  On all their errands and escapades and night excursions to sabotage the rail lines, a munitions dump on the Garonne, SS communications, he carried along his country inn, sometimes at Albi, sometimes at Salvetat, furnished it, planned menus, financed and refinanced his dream. Often they worked together, for Jacqueline proved to have the best touch with plastique in the group. On excursions into the countryside he felt as if he were secretly shopping for real estate, for after the war. He would never return to his old life, to the States, to failure. Here he would flourish. And paint. This was virgin landscape. Unlike Taos, where every rock he eyed had been painted ten ways before, who had ever taken an easel into the rock fields of the mountains of Lacaune? Whose eye had stroked the long flanks of these mountains? Who had caught the wild tulips? Who had captured the lichen-grey-green rocks among the rapids? This earth, this sky cried to him. It was his.

  NAOMI 7

  The Tear in Things

  They would run through the cold, black morning, their salvag
ed cans clinking at where their waists used to be. The guards were all around them beating at them with their rifles. If a woman went down, that was it, Maman and she would not let each other fall.

  Then they entered the din of the hollow mountain where they were building a factory, where at least it was warmer from the machinery. Hunger was all of the time, a howling from within the starved body slowly dying, slowly eating itself, the outrage of the body that it should be worked twelve hours a day at hard, fast labor dragging out carts loaded with broken rock, put into harness like horses, and given nothing but moldy bread of sawdust and watery soup of turnips or cabbage.

  Love kept Rivka going, love for Maman like a hot coal in her, Maman who was the only warmth, the only good, the only softness and strength in the universe of acid sleet. Since they were two, one could always watch the other’s few things, the can in which the watery soup was ladled, the scrap of rope, the leg wrappings, the clogs that could not be replaced: any of these stolen could mean death, so when they had to step into a real shower or be deloused, when they had to strip for a Selection, then the other would hold on and wait.

  Sometimes Maman would insist on splitting her piece of daily bread and giving half to Rivka, because she said Rivka’s need was more, for she was still growing, although she was not, she could not. Her bones ached. Her periods had never started; her breasts had never formed. She looked like a tall skeletal child, looming over her mother, when she saw herself reflected in standing water, in metal in the factory. Her hair was cropped so that her skull stood out grey. Her arms and legs were pitted with running sores.