by Marge Piercy
ABRA 8
The Great Crusade
On May 30, Abra received a depressing letter from her brother Ready.
We took a bomb off Marcus Island. I collected a piece of flying metal. Just cut a few muscles rendering me stiff, a minor league injury. They made me a commander, as a consolation prize for missing some of the action. I’m fit now.
He enclosed a photo. This leathery officer in a commander’s braid was her favorite brother. His eyes squinting out of a face prematurely wrinkled were hers. They had conspired together summers, but now it was as if each were translating from a different inner language. She wasn’t the world’s best letter writer and he was close to the worst.
Then the letter got down to what it was aiming for:
Mother is very upset about your staying in England. With the renewed bombing, she’s close to frantic. Mother believes you’re involved with the man you’re working for, some professor whom she describes as a German Jew. What in hell are you doing over there anyhow? It all sounds more than a little unsavory. I think you should hop the next available plane back to the States and show yourself to Mother, so that she stops having fits.
Abra, you know I’m on your side in the long run. You’ve got into some damn fool trouble in your life, but following some Jew professor to wartime London has to take the cake.
Unless you want to end up like Great-Aunt Josephine and keep canaries and coo baby talk to them all day, it’s time to face the music and get back where you belong and shape up. I’m only saying this for your own good.
Your loving brother,
Ready
Abra started to tear the letter into pieces, then stopped. He had been wounded. No matter how angry she was with him, the dangers were too real for her to destroy even so pompous and prejudiced an offering. Her mother’s letters had been in this vein for some time, but Abra did not read them through, so the lamentations made little impression on her. Since college, she had always skipped what she called the noisome parts and simply read the sections with family news. She found that made her feel less hostile toward her mother and better able to write chatty letters home.
She took care to put her own rank on the letter back. She might be only a second lieutenant, but she shoved it at him, to end such family pressure. She did not bother telling him that it was at Oscar’s finagling that she had been commissioned instead of becoming a private, like most of the other women researchers whom OSS had decided to militarize. He wanted to make sure they could eat together, and his boss considered that ample reason. She didn’t think explaining the flippancy with which her contingent took militarization would commend them to Ready in his current righteous mode. At OSS they talked about cellophane commissions: you could see through them, but they kept the draft off. Oscar hated saluting and viewed military regulations as Fascist. Nonetheless as he said, without being incorporated in the Army, they would never cross the Channel. Oscar never stopped scheming to get to France.
She sat over her letter to Ready, writing each sentence slowly and tasting fatigue, for she had been up the night before fire watching—every two weeks she had to stand watch—and tasting too the vinegar of disappointment. She was not sure she could forgive Ready, but men on the eve of battle were strange. She had had some peculiar encounters with airmen, both RAF and American, and considered that perhaps war drove them all crazy. She wrote a brief icy letter saying that he might be in the Navy, but perhaps he might take notice she was in the Army, which did not consult families before posting officers. She said that the captain in question had been born in Pittsburgh. He was of a Jewish family, although not from Germany. She thought that his family had come from Russia, but that he was rather less Russian than they were Scottish, and she could not see what particular bearing that had on anything. She went on to say that she was involved in the war in London exactly as he was in the Pacific, and although she expected a large measure of silliness from their mother, it was depressing to receive it from him. What she would not deign to explain to her suddenly Christian brother was that half a loaf of Oscar fed her far more than a whole loaf of the Wonder Bread she had dined on before.
She shared a belief with Oscar that the invasion of France was imminent. They were not cleared to know when or where, but that week, the city echoed to the sound of big guns and bombers blasting the Pas-de-Calais. It felt as if the guns were going off deep inside the earth and the bombs exploding miles below her feet, vibrating in her small bones. Eisenhower’s headquarters on Grosvenor Square was throbbing with activity, but the bigwigs had gone elsewhere. The London intelligence community felt jittery, on edge. The closer she passed to the centers of power in her errands, the higher pitched everything became. In the streets were rumors about German secret weapons which would make the Wehrmacht invincible in Europe: jet-propelled airplanes, bacteriological warfare, death rays, glider bombs and missiles, rockets, bombs that would turn the air itself to fire. Fortress Europe. Something seemed about to happen, then the weather turned stormy. In the square men were coming and going in a great hurry with grim expressions. People disappeared. Suddenly there were fewer men at the big mess.
General Donovan was in London, everyplace at once. She heard that a great many more of the Sussex teams—Anglo-American intelligence—were off for France; certainly more Jedburgh teams were going. The loud arrogant major who had been her pickup’s roommate whizzed in to study some maps and then was seen no more. He always said hello to Abra, looking slightly glassy, as if he could never place where he had met her. Everywhere preparations for missions in France were heating up. One afternoon when she was sent on an errand, she entered a room where the floor was covered completely with French francs, to the depth of several inches, like fallen leaves. Everyone was walking upon the bills to give them an aged appearance, a secretary-corporal explained.
People kept starting conversations and breaking them off. General Donovan disappeared as rapidly as he appeared from Washington, but it was rumored that this time the head of London OSS, David Bruce, had disappeared with him. The weather continued stormy, winds tearing the foliage from the trees. On the old rubble, rosebay was blooming and frogs croaked from makeshift reservoirs for fighting fires, tanks in which the wan London children sometimes drowned.
Briefly, she mentioned Ready’s letter to Oscar as they ate in a French restaurant in Soho. It was to be a late night. After supper, they would resume work. She made light of the letter but watched him.
“Too bad he’s not around,” Oscar said. “I think meeting me would somewhat deflate the family image of danger and deviousness.”
“You’d be willing to meet him?”
“Why not?” Oscar motioned the waiter to bring more tea substitute. It was hot, anyhow.
Oscar was a family man; he would not be embarrassed. She felt a sense of relief, even though the meeting was only hypothetical for the duration. Oscar truly cared for her. He would not meet her brother unless he loved her; that proved his love. She felt really good for the first time since that letter had come.
“Have you heard from that Navy friend of yours recently?” Oscar wiped the last of the almost real sauce with some dry bread. “The one who lives in your old building?”
“I had a letter a couple of days ago.”
“What did he say about Louise?”
“Nothing whatsoever, even though I asked.” Daniel’s letters were always full of the latest Washington jokes and gossip. Mail had been speeded up between London and Washington, until sometimes she had Daniel’s letters in five days instead of the previous two to three weeks.
“It’s odd he doesn’t answer you,” Oscar said. “Don’t you think so?”
“If she had moved out, I’m sure he’d mention it. After all, it was my damned apartment she confiscated.” Perhaps Daniel was avoiding offending her by mentioning Louise. Unlikely. He enjoyed teasing her. He was protecting Louise. From what? Her knowledge and thus Oscar’s of what was going on back there. Was she being paranoid, or was somethi
ng really happening?
Oscar was looking at her out of narrowed eyes. “You think his silence is significant?”
“Perhaps.” She was not overjoyed at Oscar’s persistence, but everybody wanted to know what was going on with their ex-spouses. The more she thought about Daniel’s avoidance of the subject, the surer she was that Daniel was involved with Louise. Sometimes she thought that she understood Daniel a lot better than Oscar. Would he really have gotten involved with Oscar’s ex-wife, who must be fifteen years older than Daniel himself? Yes, she rather thought that a young man who would get involved with a nisei in wartime probably had the independence of taste to seduce Louise Kahan.
Abra was visited with an extraordinarily vivid image of Louise in the restaurant, wearing that stunning green dress, her auburn hair in loose curls. On her oddly blunt strong hands an emerald ring flashed. Unlike Oscar, who never thought about clothes and who was getting more and more untidy as the war progressed, Louise had an elegant facade. Abra suddenly realized that Louise had selected Oscar’s clothes; she was witnessing the decay of a once fine wardrobe. She did not think he had bought anything for himself in years. Not that it mattered, for their friends were equally shabby. Still, Abra considered that she was proving less able than Louise at the upkeep of Oscar, and that Louise might look over her ex-husband with a judgmental eye for her shortcomings.
Oscar was frowning. She thought he had come to the same conclusion about Louise and Daniel that she had. If so, he would revert to the subject later. In the meantime, they had to go back to work.
The next morning, she stopped in the basement to mimeograph a report for preliminary discussion, collating it and stapling it before she came upstairs. The machine clattered along, requiring constant attention to keep it moving. When she had a neat pile of their report on the German ball bearing industry, she carried it upstairs in a great stack to Oscar, to be glanced over and then forwarded for preliminary screening.
Nobody was in the outer offices and she caught a murmur from office after office as she climbed that reminded her of days in the States when everybody would have the ball game on. Yes, that was it, everyone was listening to the BBC. She glanced at her watch, but it did not seem the right time for news. Gradually she identified a voice as that of British General Montgomery, at a high pitch of rhetoric and some long-windedness. Oh, bother. What was he going on about?
Oscar’s office was tuned to the radio too, everybody standing about or perched on desks listening, even the old radicals who analyzed the German-language papers for them. Montgomery was still going on: “We have a great and a righteous cause.”
“I believe that,” Abra said. “Why do I bridle at hearing him say it?”
“Shhhhh!” said Oscar.
Montgomery rolled on: “Let us pray that the Lord mighty in battle will go forth with our armies and that his special Providence will aid us in the struggle. With stout hearts and with enthusiasm for the contest, let us go forward to victory. And as we enter the battle, let us recall the words of a famous soldier spoken many years ago. ‘He either fears his fate too much or his desserts are small / who dare not put it to the touch to win or lose it all.’ Good luck to each one of you and good hunting on the mainland of Europe.”
“What’s all that?” Abra whispered, annoyed by the solemnity in the room. When generals called on God, she began to itch.
“It’s begun,” Oscar said. “What we need is champagne.”
“A little premature to celebrate victories,” Wilhelm the pipe fitter said. His scar was inflamed, for it reddened when he was excited. “Remember what happened to the British and Canadian lads at Dieppe,” he said with his thick accent that made people glower in the Underground and the shops. He held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, nodding at them. Oscar and Abra regularly passed on their cigarette ration to him.
The radio was speaking again. “We now repeat the historic communiqué Number One from Supreme Allied Headquarters. This was issued at 9:32 this morning, the first bulletin of the greatest invasion in the history of the world: ‘Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France. The Allies have landed on two points of the Normandy Coast between Cherbourg and Le Havre.’”
People were running up and down the stairs shouting. She followed Oscar, Wilhelm and Beverly into the French desk office, where a big map on the wall had already attracted a crowd trying to figure out where the landings had occurred. Everywhere radios were tuned to the BBC. Just yesterday the liberation of Rome had been announced, but that had come as little surprise to them, as OSS Italy had been active in Rome for months.
“I bet that’s where Wild Bill Donovan and Bruce disappeared,” one of the French experts muttered. “Trust the general to get down belly to belly with the enemy,” he quoted sarcastically. R & A had not been universally pleased by Donovan’s graphic description of their allotted role.
Someone quieted the French expert. Abra was pleased that another besides herself remained irreverent, and that somebody else was being shushed. Oscar said, “They just said something about the Resistance.”
Everyone waited. “According to the German Transoceanic News Agency, the 28th and 101st American Parachute Divisions have been dropped in the Normandy Peninsula of France. One question which now is going to cause a great deal of attention is the part which the French underground, the French patriots, may perform to help these paratroopers.
“Marshal Pétain appealed to the French people today not to aggravate misfortunes which will bring upon them tragic reprisals, but the voice to which they listened was General Eisenhower. A naval battle in the estuary of the Seine is now occurring according to German radio.”
Cocking his head and looking at the French expert who had spoken earlier, Wilhelm said, “I heard there was a royal fracas, when de Gaulle learned that Eisenhower and the BBC were not going to let him speak to the French people, except as an appendage.”
“Do you think we can keep him out? The field reports seem to think otherwise.”
Oscar was not paying attention, staring at Paris on the map. “France,” he muttered thoughtfully. “I wonder how soon we’ll be going over?”
M19, the British intelligence service that ran escape routes for downed fliers and escaped military personnel, kept aloof from OSS as from MI6 and SOE, the British elder equivalent of the OSS Special Operations. They were thoroughly military and considered their security impeccable and everybody else’s flimsy. They seemed to view liaison with underground groups as potential interference with their far more important endeavors.
However, among the intelligence community, as it called itself, of London, everybody loved R & A, Abra learned. Everybody patronized them as the sweet innocent buttercup of intelligence, but everybody wanted their reports. They gave more than they got, and so an aura of sanctity hung over their efforts. Although R & A was typified by internal catfights, vendettas of aroused vanity, plots in the toilet stalls and snubs on the stairs, it did not usually need to struggle for its life among the other intelligence organizations, who were constantly trying to prove that the others should be eaten by their group or otherwise cease to exist.
Thus Oscar’s patience had been rewarded. He had established a relationship with a captain in MI9, who was pleased to have reports on the German economy and who knew that Oscar would appreciate news of Gloria. That news came in mid-June, when London was muggy and dank. With the aid of a double agent, the SD (the Nazi counterintelligence) had inserted a loop in her ratline, code-named Ivoire. Downed airmen had been passed on to a safe house, apparently like the others, where they were questioned as if to make sure of their stories, and the details of the ratline thus pieced together.
The Resistance had found out, but just as they sent warnings, the SD moved. That ratline was now out of operation. Most of the ratline operators had been taken by the Gestapo, but some had escaped. That was all M
I9 knew. Oscar did not talk much but he also seemed to give up sleeping. He was looking gaunt.
June 18 Abra went to find out what had happened to Wilhelm, who had not come to work in two days. He had no phone. As an enemy resident alien, classified type C, benign, he was allowed to remain at large but could not own a bicycle or flashlight. She was always willing to run errands, because she enjoyed getting out of the office and seeing London. He lived in a row of attached houses in a mostly Jewish working-class area, renting a room from a leatherworker’s family. She had been there before, as dealing with the exiles who helped OSS involved a certain amount of social work, since they were nearly destitute.
When she came out of the tube at Whitechapel, the broad road was half blocked with lorries flattened like tins and a rapidly running stream from a broken main, although the traffic edged through on one side, with a bobby directing. The sidewalk market was still going on, and she made up her mind after she checked Wilhelm and found out if he was sick or in trouble, she would give a quick cruise for something wearable or edible.
On Wilhelm’s narrow street, the uneven row of squalid leaning row houses staggered along as it always had. Just in the middle of the block where several houses had stood including the leatherworker’s where Wilhelm rented a room, a crater yawned, big as a pond. Windows were broken all along the street, stoops cracked, cornices toppled and objects pulverized, no longer identifiable. As she approached the gap, she waded through crushed and broken glass that jabbed through the thin soles of her worn shoes. As always there was a stench of sewage, of shit. Standing in midblock where perhaps twenty houses had been, she could plainly see a charred foundry still smoldering across the newly created field, two blocks away. In the field some lost chickens were idly pecking. Everybody with a yard around here had at least chickens and rabbits. What kind of bomb could have done all this damage? She had heard rumors of something called a doodlebug.
