by Marge Piercy
When the remains of the building were taken, she rose and crossed the Seine, feeling terribly exposed, trotting bent over behind the parapet like all the other pedestrians. The Place de la Concorde was studded with antitank stakes driven in. She realized she needed a rest room, badly. She ignored the bullets whizzing across and ran on. On the rue Royale, a restaurateur had broken out a keg of wine and was passing it around. The café was out of food but the toilets were functional and she could clean herself from her long crawl on the pavement. Then she took a seat at a table crowded with strangers who were all in love with each other. She felt dazed and disoriented. It was as if she were attending a huge unruly party where in certain back rooms, people were killing each other. Her left arm throbbed badly where a fragment of the Foreign Office had landed on her. She felt as if the front of her mind, her eyes, her senses were overpowered to bursting with images and sounds, but that her self had dropped away. At once numb and overstimulated, she found it hard to speak, but the noise level was such that no one would have heard her anyhow.
“De Gaulle is in Paris!” the restaurant owner shouted, climbing up on his own table. “He is going to the Gare Montparnasse to receive the German surrender. Paris is free!”
Everybody screamed and embraced and drank or spilled what was left of the wine. The “Marseillaise” was again sung and people began dancing to an accordion. Wearily she began worming her way through the mob toward the street. She was here at this vast dangerous party to do a job, and that included getting to the Gare Montparnasse to hear de Gaulle. Strange men grabbed her and kissed her wetly. She could not escape or wriggle free but must endure until let go. Her arm was hit so many times, she felt like bursting into tears or throwing up. She pressed on, suffering the hands of strangers, along the rue de Rivoli under the arcades.
Out in the street a big bonfire blazed with German signs and Fascist papers, while people capered around singing. A blind man sawed at a violin and a woman was standing on a barricade, singing. Children were squirming through playing soldier. Everywhere people were kissing or twirling around two by two or in large circles, hands clasped. On one street she heard a song of the Spanish Civil War she remembered, “Los Cuatro Generales.” A Sherman tank was smoldering beside a Tiger.
By tomorrow the government would be in place no doubt, hundreds of other correspondents in town and everybody jostling for the same stories. She did not really mind. She had her stories and perhaps with other Americans, she might recover a sense of self again. She felt as if she had come to inhabit an eternal overwhelming present that had pressed out of her all personality. She recorded like a machine. Idly she wondered if Ari had found his Daniela as she pushed along under the arcades. In the Tuileries across the street people danced on the grass.
She passed the Hotel Meurice where the German commander von Choltitz had surrendered that afternoon after a short fierce exchange of fire. The bodies still lay in the street. At the far end of the block, a medical team was working with the wounded, carrying them into the former headquarters. Two young militants with FFI armbands lay where they had fallen, their gelid eyes open. One of them was Claude’s fourteen-year-old son Roland.
ABRA 9
The Grey Lady
Abra was relieved that the regular air raids had ended, but there was something new. Fewer buzz bombs had been getting through lately, since the antiaircraft people had got quite good at shooting them down at the Channel. With this new disaster, no planes were heard. No siren went off. Nothing gave warning until an immense explosion sounded, a shock wave traveled out breaking windows and toppling objects for a mile and a column of smoke and flames rose.
The government announced that another gas main had exploded, until people began making cracks about the flying gas mains. Finally Churchill spoke. They were officially called V-2s. Abra had not bothered to go to the shelters for a long time, and indeed, with the V-2s, there seemed little point. By the time you heard the explosion, you were still alive and they had missed you.
Frequently Americans just over mistook Abra for British. They said she looked like a Londoner. She understood what they meant, whenever she saw herself reflected in a mirror beside one of the newcomers. She had no mirror at home because hers had shattered in nearby concussions. There were no shop windows in which to catch a reflection, had not been in years. Abra was dependent on the still-intact mirror in the women’s room at OSS to see herself in anything larger than a compact. When they said she looked like a Londoner, they meant she had no tan, looked pasty and thin. She wore her uniform almost always, because her other clothes had worn out and could not be replaced.
At work, they had never been busier. Most agents sent out by SO or SI had been overrun in the rapid advances. In Germany, the British confessed to having no agents, and while Allen Dulles out of OSS Bern was reputed to be running some, intelligence was stumped. Someone had hatched a scheme for recruiting through the Labor Branch, the only organ that maintained ties with members of the exile German community not in detention. The boilermakers and transport workers long scorned were now to be studied with an eye to what kind of agents they might make if dropped into Germany.
Since Oscar and Abra were among the resident experts on German labor, they were recruited. Sometimes Abra shepherded the exiles to be outfitted in the great underground rummage sale in Brook Street, where OSS had stockpiled items swapped in the prisoner of war cages, bought in Sweden and laundered into age or collected from exiles: underwear, belts, trousers, shirts, caps, uniforms, dresses, wallets, brassieres, cigarette cases, cuff links. Abra thought she recognized a jacket and a coat they had collected in New York.
Three times Abra was assigned to take German women to be outfitted. One was a nurse, Helga, four years older than Abra, who had been married to a Jew beaten to death in Cologne. She had been imprisoned for a year under the Nuremberg Laws, released because there was a shortage of nurses. Helga was a large soft-looking woman with round features making a series of o’s in her round face, but she was both tough and shrewd. She had recently married the plumber in the project, Reiner, and they were to work as a team.
The second woman was a young Communist laundry-worker, Frieda. The third was Marlitt Becker Speyer, looking fit and eager, as elegant as ever. Abra recognized her at once, with a lurch of her heart; Marlitt remembered her after they had spoken for several minutes.
She shepherded the exiles through the BACH operation to work out cover stories and then to collect forged documents. Much of the time their trainer handled them, but she filled in. Besides an ID card and police registration, a German citizen would be expected to have labor registration, food and clothing ration stamps, travel permits, housing registration, plus draft exemption or military papers for the men. The cover story had to be as close to the truth as could be managed, to avoid snafus, in the new slang.
With tobacco scarce in Germany, the heavy smoker Reiner had to have the nicotine stains sanded off his fingers with pumice. Marlitt had the caps put on her teeth in New York replaced by caps in the German mode. All were unceasingly rehearsed on their stories. Oscar briefed the group on economic conditions in Germany, as far as they had been ascertained, and on what German citizens knew about the war from papers and radio.
The weather was wet and chilly. Every day for two weeks it rained. The bomb craters and the pools that had been dug into the ruins throughout the city to serve as reservoirs for dealing with incendiary bombs were overflowing their banks. Sometimes she came upon damage from the liquid-fuel rockets. A hole in London would gape big as a playing field.
The war in France was galloping forward, while Italy crept along. Her own inner war was one of attrition. Since Louise’s visit, Abra felt she could no longer deceive herself. All evening she had been forced to compare how Oscar acted with her with how he acted with Louise. He was loving with her; he loved Louise. Now she was working on a gradual withdrawal, as from a drug. Tonight, she told herself, tonight you will not see him. You may see him Saturday, but
not Friday, not Thursday. Had he noticed? She thought so, but she could not even be sure of that.
OSS was set up in Paris at the Couvent of Ste-Anne, a clinic and death house for the poor run by the Sisters of Agonie, and teams from R & A hurried off to the Balkan countries as they fell out of the war overrun by the Soviet armies, and then changed sides. Back in Washington, the main impetus seemed to be the war of the top echelon to survive the peace and continue as an organization. R & A was feverishly involved in research in anticipation of the victory over Germany, preparing studies on what must be done, ought to be done, should not be done in the occupation. All this felt premature in London with the V-2 rockets taking out blocks at a time, and eight thousand people living in each of the deep shelters.
Americans exclaiming over the good-natured long-suffering character of the British working class as represented by the homeless who lived in the tube stations or in the shelters, deep or shallow, gave her a bellyache. What did they expect? Total collapse? And what would happen to families then? Americans decided those who suffered were long suffering, an observation of high insight which she attributed to Louise. They did not see if people were bombed out, there was nothing to do but go to work the next day and camp out as best they could.
Almost every day she saw him at OSS. As they worked together, she remembered all the reasons she had fallen in love with him. Her abstinence often felt bizarre and demented. Why refrain from going home with him, why resist going to bed with him? After all, he was there and willing and here she was, wanting him. She did not always carry out her resolution. Frequently the impulse to hope veiled her grim certitude. How easy to follow him. How easy simply to go along. How laceratingly difficult it was to remember why she was resisting: only for her pride. Only to recover herself.
Did she secretly think she was reculant pour mieux sauter? She inspected her mental armament. Please, she begged herself, abandon hope. Hope has played you for a sucker all along. It is as it was the first night, a friendly fuck is all you can get out of him. Some nights nonetheless that seemed more than enough to wish for.
Oscar was no longer conniving to get into France, because Louise had written him from Paris that Gloria was in Germany, in a concentration camp for political prisoners. The work that Oscar and she were doing was far more important to the war than anything Louise could possibly take up. Louise was one of a swarm of reporters humanizing the war. Abra was not sure that war should be humanized. The side of it she had seen the past year and a half had consisted largely of poor people getting burnt in their houses or crushed under falling ceilings, the limp bodies of children being lifted from rubble, a headless woman in the road and the neighbors arguing who it was from what clues remained.
Yet Oscar seemed to have arrived at feeling guilty toward Louise, a tenderly swollen masochism he was nurturing like a rare cactus of the sort Professor Blu-menthal had lining the south-facing windows of his apartment near Columbia, squat spiny things that occasionally belched out an unlikely flower. What did Oscar feel guilty about? Once Abra and he had talked about everything, or so she thought, but now there were volumes of silence between them. Oscar looked no more haggard than the other overworked denizens of the Labor Branch, but she resented that hidden sapping that came from an inner life sealed against her.
That he should feel guilty toward Louise infuriated her. Louise could probably have him back but did not care to. It was a bad farce, and she simply would not remain in her allotted role, the compliant mistress last on the list and taken for granted. She deserved more, she told herself. Her family would be delighted if they knew her resolve. She had no intention of passing on information that would give them that pleasure.
Yet at the base of her brain was a cache of hope, that at some point, realization would smite him and he would turn and see her. She imagined Ready scolding her for wasting her life, but she did not accept that. Becoming involved with Oscar, even at her grimmest she did not regret. Neither was she sorry she had come to London.
At parties, in pubs OSS personnel frequented, she ordered herself to flirt, but she could barely manage it. She seemed to have forgotten the moves. Men started the game with her, but nothing developed. Perhaps in attempting to give up Oscar, she was relinquishing her sexuality. What a joke if Ready and her mother in their fulminations about her becoming an old maid turned out to be correct. She saw herself finishing her degree at Columbia, and teaching political science in some midwestern grassland school. She would march to class in sensible tweeds toting a battered British briefcase, the same one she carried now. She would be well liked but viewed as eccentric, a character. Old Scotty. Lost her fiancé in the war. That would be the legend.
She was done with sex, a burnt-out case. If she could not have Oscar, no other man would do. The nagging annoyance was that she could have Oscar, on the same old basis. While she was indulging in fantasies of her life as a tweedy professor, another woman was probably eying Oscar and preparing a move into the space she had vacated.
One night a blast wakened her as the whole flat shook and large chunks of plaster fell. A rocket had obviously landed within half a mile. She did not think of it again until the next morning, when Oscar did not appear at work. She tried to call, but the phones were not functioning. No one seemed to know where he was, and then she heard someone talking about the rocket that had hit last night just a few blocks away.
She ran to his street, keyed up to terror. His side was standing, although damaged, but the other side of the street no longer existed. The door had been blown off his building and plaster littered the hall.
“Oh, Captain Kahan,” a woman with a bandage around her head was picking through broken dishes, visible in the hall through the hole where the wall had been. “He was taken to hospital this morning. I have no idea, I was off getting my head seen to.”
She was back at her desk frantically calling hospitals when Oscar appeared, moving stiffly. “I broke two ribs. That damned clock fell on me while I was putting out an electrical fire in the hall. Burnt my hand and cracked my ribs.” He had lain under the clock for three hours. “Time hung heavy on me,” he said, setting off a round of puns in the office in which Abra could not join. She had difficulty keeping herself from touching him, assuring herself of his presence. She had been terrified; at the same time, she was aware of being curious as to what her life would be like if Oscar had suddenly been killed. Why, she would continue working. After all, she too knew a great deal about their agents. She would do what she was doing, because that was what she had been trained for; that realization made her more tranquil.
She took him home with her that night and for the rest of the week. The dressing on his hand had to be changed and one on a cut in the small of his back. He was overtly cheerful about the accident. “It was what you might call a thought-provoking experience,” he said. “To be helpless and dependent on somebody turning up to get that object off me. The flaws in my character seemed bigger than I’d ever observed them before. Do you suppose good behavior is dependent on an occasional scare?” He wanted to make love anyhow, but she had to climb on him, gently, slowly rocking.
Abra considered herself as accustomed to the blackout as anyone else. She never knew when she would see a colleague with a black eye or a sprained ankle from falling down a flight of steps. A code clerk had been run over in September while trying to cross the dark streets home. Never had she been as conscious of the moon and its phases. When the full moon gleamed down, the ruins and spires, St. Paul’s dome, the palaces were bewitched silver and eerily beautiful.
Nonetheless she was not prepared for the countryside in blackout. “This is the world before electric lights,” Oscar said. “We’re standing in the past.”
They were on a hill in Dartmoor, where no light shone as far as they could see. The waxing moon had not yet risen. The sky was clear except for low filmy clouds scudding over, beyond whose rapid passage the stars overawed. Oscar had his arm companionably about her shoulders. This was the la
st weekend in England for the first six agents, including the husband-wife team of Reiner and Helga, including Marlitt. Monday they would be flown to Paris, loaded into small planes there and dropped by night into Germany.
“The British think this is ridiculous,” Oscar said, his head thrown back staring up at the stars. “They maintain you can’t drop agents into a hostile country where there’s no resistance to meet them and help them get started. I hope they don’t fall right into a firing squad.”
“Sometimes I wonder why they’re doing it,” she said, shivering as the wind tested her coat.
“They’ve been at war with the Nazis since thirty-two or thirty-three, some of them. And they’re sick of exile. I only hope that the desire to find out what happened to people they knew doesn’t betray them.”
“Oscar, we didn’t think up this scheme, and we didn’t pick who got to go. More people were willing than they chose, by far.”
Oscar was silent for a while. The wind whipped around them, while in the corner of her eye she saw some tiny nocturnal beast flash over a rock and disappear. “I volunteered, you know,” he said at last, knowing perfectly well she had not known.
She felt sick. She said nothing.
“After all, I speak German and I’ve been using it almost daily. I spent a year in Frankfurt in twenty-eight. But they ruled me out right away. Nobody who wasn’t born in Germany, nobody but exiles. They’ve begun combing more agents out of the POW cages.”
