Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She imagined Wilhelm sitting over the table covered with German-language newspapers and commenting, half in English and half in German on the articles relevant to them, dictating to Beverly and claiming he could do anything, anything at all, except write, gesturing with his cigarette between the thumb and index finger.

  She called to a woman futilely digging in the rubble in the next street. “I’m trying to find a friend. He was in Number Eighty-four in this street.”

  “They was all kilt,” the woman said without looking up. “Twenty-three what lived on this street and two still missing. M’muvver among ’em. Made bloody mincemeat of ’em.”

  A phrase came to her out of the manual she had seen on agent recruitment, official OSS policy: “No agent should be recruited without serious thought being given to the means of disposing of him after his usefulness is ended.” Now OSS wouldn’t have to worry about the pipe fitter Wilhelm, Jew, member of a splinter left Communist group, creator of bad bilingual puns, admirer of the long-dead Rosa Luxemburg. He had been pulverized. She shuffled back and forth in the wreckage that covered the street and sidewalk to the depth of half a foot, staring at the crater. Gone. She supposed that Oscar or she would have to identify the body, if there was one. What could have made such a hole? Were these the vaunted secret weapons?

  In the following days, rumor answered that question long before the government finally announced that rockets were falling on England. What they learned shortly was that the doodlebugs were pulse jet powered cruise missiles carrying a ton of high explosives at a maximum speed of four hundred miles an hour. The blast power was something new. Fashionable London began to empty again, evacuating to country homes; but working-class London felt more crowded than ever and cheap housing was being destroyed so fast, many families were again sleeping in the underground, as well as the barely tolerable shelters.

  People seemed to feel it was a duty to try to remain cheerful, but their courage was wearing out like everything else. The scuttlebutt on the rockets was that they sounded like a locomotive when they came through the air above you, but that when they cut out, with a weird greenish flash, and the silence came, you were about to get it.

  All the front windows in her flat were broken by bomb blast. She had them boarded up. It was like living in a cave. Her bed suddenly collapsed one night, the pegs having worked their way loose. None of her doors hung properly and none of the drawers would go all the way in. Bombing had warped the furniture. She no longer bothered to go to the shelters. A doodlebug that landed on a shelter would kill everyone inside anyhow. Better to stay home in bed. There was no warning they were coming, and they came as often in the daytime as at night.

  The news from Normandy was all right, for the Allies were holding even if they had failed to advance much. Then Oscar got a letter from Louise saying his daughter had eloped with a bombardier. He exploded and pulled all the strings he could to try to call the States. A week passed and he was still trying vainly to reach Louise in Washington.

  Monday while they were working on the final version of the ball bearing report, Oscar’s phone rang. “Louise!” he barked into the phone. “I’ve been calling you every day. What are you doing about Kay?” He listened and then rose to his feet motioning her wildly out of the room.

  Furious, she shut the door and sulked in the outer office until he appeared sometime later. “Louise is in town,” he said mildly. “We’re having supper with her. She specifically asked for you.”

  “Here? What’s she doing here?” Abra was dismayed.

  “She’s a war correspondent, waiting to go to France.”

  “Her, a war correspondent? What qualifies her? Are they trying to turn the second front into a romance?”

  Oscar gave her a look intended to wither. “Louise has been writing serious articles for ten years. Of course they won’t send her into combat, but there’s a lot of the war in London and behind the lines she can sink her teeth into.”

  She was never allowed to criticize Louise, who was supposed to be on some other plane than herself. It galled her. What happened to freedom of speech? Didn’t Louise’s carrying on with Daniel bring her stock down any?

  They ate in the Grosvenor Hotel mess. Louise was an officer too. Oscar did not outrank her. Louise had, as she said with amusement, a theoretical rank of captain, in case she was captured. Abra was glad she was at least a second lieutenant. Louise looked radiant, Abra thought, and asked maliciously, “How’s Daniel? Didn’t he mind your coming over here?”

  “Nobody enjoys all these wartime partings, do they?” Louise asked blandly. Oscar kept staring at her and asking far more questions about Louise than he did about Kay, who was the pretext for this get-together. Abra did not find the dinner a great success.

  JEFF 8

  The Die Is Cast

  “I used to let myself be distracted,” Jeff was explaining to Jacqueline as they lay curled into each other like nested S’s in the old bed, upstairs in a farmhouse in the Lacaune Mountains. “I was always getting into affairs I didn’t really want, because I wanted something. Do you understand?” The farmhouse had been deserted since an old woman had died the year before, her sons off in North Africa. They had fixed the roof and cleaned out animal debris. In their room, they could always hear the Agout, a white water stream plunging over the rocks outside.

  “Half and half.” Her cheek lay against his palm so that he could feel as well as hear her voice. A scent of roses seeped through the open window. Swallows nesting in the barn swooped by, madly twittering. Now that June was upon them, almost everybody took a siesta after lunch, but they were considered blatant, shocking, because he insisted they not bar the heavy plank shutters to the world. In the south in the daytime, houses looked blinded to him, sinister, mourning in darkness within, although he knew that habit enabled them to hold daytime meetings in Toulouse with perfect impunity behind closed shutters. She lifted her head to say, “I recognize the phenomenon. My friend Céleste used to get involved with men that way.…” She fell silent and he felt her muscles contract.

  “Did you forget to do something?”

  “I have so many friends who may be deported, who may be dead and I don’t know.” She shook herself, nestling closer into him. “Anyhow, the phenomenon is familiar to me, but not personally. I have more resisted than sought out connections. I feared losing myself.”

  “Your self is the one thing you can never lose, even when you want to.”

  “Observe the married women you meet!” She imitated an affected voice. “Oh, mon mari, my husband would never permit me to work. My husband would never let me go off by myself on a trip. Oh, we used to be friends, but that was before I married.… My own mother was never like that.”

  “Women give up less than you think. I always found them working hard to make me into the husband they wanted.”

  “You always speak as if you had had thousands of women.” She poked him in the belly. “Like Don Juan in the opera, with his servant’s lists, which of course he keeps to flatter the Don.”

  “Not thousands, but I imagine a good hundred.”

  “Ugh. And you loved all of them?” Her voice was round with scorn.

  “I loved none of them.” He held her tighter. “I loved some a little, but none enough. It was an enormous waste of time, all that energy finding a woman, making her love me and then getting rid of her.”

  “Ah, do you want to be rid of me? I could disappear in fifteen seconds.” She made as if to sit up, naked as she was. They had not even a sheet over them, as the afternoon was warm. They had been up most of the night. Soon he had to drag himself from the cosy bed and go over the information he had collected from his agents that week, collate it, encapsulate and code it for transmission, a tedious job that took the better part of a day. Tomorrow he must go into Toulouse and pick up new reports. London was pushing him hard for fresh information.

  “I want to hold on and on. I’m just explaining to you exactly why I am going to be a much better pa
inter after this war ends than I ever was before. I wasted too much energy being bored. I moved every few months. Now I want to sink roots and never budge, oh, except maybe once in a while to see the shows in Paris and attend one of my own with a fancy opening.”

  “Bah, you’re going to have to put up with Paris for a while. I have to get a degree. Unless I simply go on blowing things up. I prove to have talent for that.”

  “I think the prospects for advancement are limited.” He sighed, sitting up on the bed’s edge to lean out the window. “There’s Lev, teaching the older Faurier girl how to shoot. Isn’t she a little young?”

  “They deport them younger than that and kill them younger.”

  The sunlight fell on her hair, grown out to its own color, bushy on her shoulders like a cloud of fine metallic yarn spun around her face. Her shoulders were delicate but strongly shaped, with little hollows just to the side of her full breasts with their purplish nipples. Ah, she was thin, small boned but wiry, amazingly strong for her size. Every day she walked or pedaled many kilometers, hauled heavy loads on her back. After the war, she would lose that cat’s wariness, that sense of being about to bound off or change direction in midair at a strange sound. He found that nerviness attractive, but he could dispense with it.

  They had an extensive garden up here. Several of the men hunted, including Lev who showed an aptitude for tracking. Trout lurked by the rocks in the river, where Daniela fished almost every day, saying the water soothed her. They had acquired two small but productive cows, three goats and a flock of darkly burnished chickens. They were healthier. They lived in less fear. They slept better and they were all in fine fettle and excellent humor: a good little group of maquis, seventeen strong scattered through the area, including six boys in a forest camp where many of their supplies were buried. For sabotage, they were a high-quality weapon. He did not count the older Faurier girl, Sophie, although Lev was training her. Of the seventeen, thirteen were men and four, women, all except for Mme Faurier at least as useful as the men.

  Mme Faurier had her uses too: she cooked and foraged. Since she had revealed herself unable to refrain from wincing when she fired and thus misdirecting every shot, the possibility of turning her into a sniper had finally been abandoned even by Lev. She kept the books for them, and she was learning to process agent intelligence. Again Jeff was doing something unorthodox and contrary to procedure, but he did not see why he should remain the only operative in the group able to code and decode transmissions. If he were knocked out of action, how would they transmit to London or Algiers? Notions of security in London did not always prove out in the field. He felt he had to back up his expertise.

  She wore her hair in braids wrapped around her head, perched on a short neck above a body that could be rendered by a stack of circles. She was gap-toothed and easy to provoke into laughter, but always wary, always with an ear or an eye alerted for her girls. Even while Lev was instructing Sophie, having her shoot at bottles set up on a stump, Mme Faurier was within view shelling peas.

  Once he had disliked her, for no better reason than that she seemed to protect Jacqueline from him; now he liked her very much indeed, along with her husband who was their precious mechanic, fixer of all machines that could be fixed and cannibalizer of those hopelessly smashed.

  He became aware Jacqueline was speaking. She was sitting in the middle of the bed with her legs crossed and her hands knotted together staring dreamily out into the blinding sunshine and talking about placing charges. “I like to use the smallest amount for doing the job and set it exactly at the point where it will do the most damage. Sometimes it’s only a matter of timing so that we hit cars seven and eight, but let the earlier cars go through safely, since they have civilians on them. But with a turntable, with a bridge, placement is everything.… Sometimes I think of being an architect or a civil engineer.”

  He was not enthusiastic about her returning to school. However, it was pointless arguing now. He said only, “If you decide on either of those, Montpellier or Toulouse would do fine. No reason to return to Paris.” He was perched on the window ledge. Right outside, the previous owner had planted a pink horse chestnut, the upright torches of its flowers swarming with bees. They bloomed later here than in London.

  “Oh, I have to go back to Paris at least for a while.” Her pupils were tiny, staring into the white light outside. Her eyes were pale green buds, the brown submerged for the moment.

  “To trace your family?”

  “To try.”

  Sometimes he felt behind her words an enormous force of the unspoken, as if they did not in spite of sharing bodies and danger quite share the same world. After all, falling in love with somebody from another country meant that only slowly would he come to understand what had formed her. His image of second grade or a holiday would be at odds with hers. Time together would give them a family history and culture mingling the nature of both tributaries. Their children would be bilingual.

  He reached for his pants. Time to work on his agents’ discoveries. Nowadays London was sending him long shopping lists of what they wanted, and his agents risked their lives trying to supply what was demanded of them. Every few weeks, one of them disappeared, and he had to recruit somebody else, revise drops.

  That night, June 5, they listened to the BBC as always. The broadcast was long, nothing special for them, and Jeff found himself daydreaming as the maddeningly uninflected voice repeated each message: “The bears have a thick coat. The bears have a thick coat. I kiss you darling, three times. I kiss you darling, three times. Holiday greetings to Papa Noël. Holiday greetings to Papa Noël.”

  Then he came sharply awake, feeling as if cold water had rolled down his back. Surely he had heard wrong. “Shhhh!” he barked, although no one in the room had spoken. Mme Faurier was staring too: she had learned her codes well. “Il fait chaud dans le Suez,” the bland voice repeated.

  “Merde,” he muttered, so used to operating in French he did not realize he swore in it now.

  More messages. Perhaps it was not real. Then the radio said, plainly, “The die is cast.” A bit of his schoolboy Latin came back to him. Alea iacta est. Caesar’s phrase. He himself was only a barnyard general. That was the second code: the call for a general uprising. It was the signal to dig out the arms and give everything they had. He considered what they had, and it was pitiful. Fine for guerrilla ambushes but absurd for open war. For months he had been asking for mortars, heavier guns, antitank weapons, but only light arms had been dropped.

  He was still mulling that over when another phrase came: “The arrow will not pierce.” Then shortly after that, “Reeds must grow, leaves rustle,” repeated in that maddeningly slow voice.

  After the messages had finished, Jeff rose slowly to his feet. “We’ve been ordered to rise! They’re activating Plan Vert: the sabotaging of railroad lines. We know our objectives. Plan Bleu also put in action: that’s the hydroelectric power lines. Plan Violet: cutting the underground long-distance wires. We’ve got those targeted into Castres. Finally, Plan Bibendum. We’re to try to slow down and if possible prevent German troop movement toward the field of battle.”

  “What field of battle?” Lev asked. “Are the Allies landing?”

  “They wouldn’t be pulling out all the stops if they weren’t. It has to be now. It’s come, finally, the signal for a general uprising.”

  Lev, who had been getting information from the cheminots, said, “They’ve been bombing the shit out of Pas-de-Calais. Think that’s it?”

  Everybody looked to Jeff who shrugged. “Sure, the Joint Chiefs call me nightly to chat about their plans. All I know is, they’re coming and they want us to raise hell.”

  “About time,” Lev said. “Let’s maul the Boches!”

  Special Forces Headquarters had allotted them certain targets two months ago, so that he had expected the invasion in May. The main objective was to prevent the Germans moving the southern divisions north in time to box up the beachhead and wipe ou
t the Allied troops as the British and Canadians at Dieppe had been penned in and massacred. Especially important were the German Panzer units, but the Resistance had not been given good antitank weapons.

  “The railroad men must be hearing the same messages,” Lev said with satisfaction. “They’re primed. They plan to carry out thirty-five cuts in the lines. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I suggest we go to bed now, try to sleep and meet at one. Don’t we also have some bridges?”

  “One rail bridge over the Agout, and one road bridge near Castres. That’s ours.”

  “Do we have enough explosives for all our targets?” Lev turned to Jacqueline.

  “We have enough if we’re elegant, not if we’re sloppy.”

  “Better do the Castres bridge first tonight,” Lev said to Jacqueline.

  Jacqueline preened herself, a ginger cat basking in the acknowledgment of her skill. He had an image of himself in the dining room at home, what remained after years of childhood dishwashing of Viola’s good china in the breakfront, The Professor ensconced in his armchair at table’s head under the electric chandelier. Jeff was presenting Jacqueline. “This is my fiancée. She can make a perfect omelette and she handles plastique and dynamite with a truly professional touch.” He smiled.

  Lev noticed. “Yes, Vendôme, it is good, nu, to be unleashed at last to do what we can to the bastards? Now that it’s come, we can know there’ll be an end. We are only responsible now for how well we strike and how well we fight, hein?”

  “Can we use the Renault?” Jacqueline asked. “We can get more done if we can cover the ground fast tonight.”

  “We’ll risk it,” Lev decided. “We have a list of targets so long we’ll be lucky to hit half of them.”