Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Only afterward did Daniel notice that toward the end of the engagement, small Zeke planes with bombs strapped under their wings had dived straight into the Santee and the St. Lo. Gradually he began to understand that this was the secret weapon that the Japanese had been referring to in their signals. OP-20-G speculations had run to new types of bombs, a Japanese version of the German inventions of the late war, jet fighters, rockets, snorkel submarines.

  Now he knew: the secret weapon was the willingness of young pilots to kill themselves if they could take a ship with them. They need not be well trained: all they had to do was fly once and crash once. The planes could be minimal: they were designed for one mission without return. It was most economical and unfortunately effective. They were flying in under the radar and then climbing briefly to dive on the ship of their choice. The American ships with their wooden decks proved especially vulnerable. They had a name, these suicide pilots. Of course, Daniel thought, kamikaze: the divine wind that had saved Japan from Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet. Through the winter they heard more about the glorious suicides.

  The New Year came and went in a wave of slush, while Bing Crosby crooned about a white Christmas and the papers were full of the Ardennes German offensive they were calling the Battle of the Bulge. Abra and he were writing regularly. They served as safe confidants for each other, for they were not only in different countries but knew the protagonists of each other’s dramas. She was claiming to be finished with Oscar, but she had written that before, then returned to the affair.

  Compulsively he read Louise’s articles. Often he learned more from them than from her letters. She wrote as often as Abra did, but less honestly, he thought. They were short, rushed, often breathless letters.

  I had a bath this morning, a whole real even somewhat warm bath. I cannot recall the last bath I had. Oh, yes I can. It was in Rheims where I also shared a bottle of wonderful champagne with my fellow scribblers. The champagne was cold, the bath was hot, the food was real and I slept in a bed. That has, needless to say, hardly been the case since. Usually the food is cold, the bed is wet ground, and the alarm clock is a shell.

  The page just got crumpled because Sad Sack, the company dog, sat on it in order to get my attention. So many of the GIs pick up pets, you’d be surprised. Animals get the worst of war. Far more of them get slaughtered than people …

  From Collier’s, he learned she had been trapped in a German encirclement for five days during the Battle of the Bulge. If the Germans captured her, what would they have done with her? Raped her? Shot her? As a Jew, would she be sent to a camp? Why did she need to place herself in danger? He was convinced her frustration in OWI had led to this vindication through fire, but suppose she got herself killed?

  When he thought of her, it was in bed, her silky skin against him, heat and softness. Lately other images intruded from the photographs accompanying the stories: Louise, her body lost in vast male gear, smiling warmly but diffidently from under the nozzle of a huge piece of artillery or straddling a ruined wall or peering out of the turret of a tank. He looked at those bizarre images and thought, she will never come back. He felt as if she were being processed by the war into something else, if not a corpse then a being he did not know, perhaps did not want to know.

  Abra was frank about her terror at the rockets. Perhaps the growth he noticed in her letters was one reason Oscar had asked her to marry him. Daniel wondered why after waiting so long, she had not instantly accepted. She wrote back:

  What is offered so grudgingly after so long is not the same thing that might have been offered originally, fresh and exciting and warm. Let’s just say the offer is a little stale by now and I have other ideas. I’m working on establishing my freedom, and then enjoying it.

  Once her letters had been all shallow joking and flirting, but he thought they had both come to appreciate having each other to confide in.

  Daniel noticed a marked difference between the personnel who dealt primarily with the Enigma transcripts from the German forces and those who dealt with the Japanese codes, which he thought reflected the different attitudes of the bulk of the Navy, engaged westward, and the bulk of the Army, engaged eastward. The high spirits of those oriented toward the conflict in Europe had been depressed by the German offensive in December, but were again on the rise. They looked beyond the war, speculating, planning, politicking. They retooled old ambitions and designed new ones.

  Those engaged with the Pacific war watched a rising curve of resistance and losses, longer and longer battles and fiercer and more lacerating refusals to yield an inch of terrain. There were no mass surrenders. As the war moved closer to Japan, every aspect grew bloodier and the costs mounted. No one looking toward the Pacific thought they would soon be demobilized. Daniel did not rush to make new plans or revise old ones. He saw the war stretching on and on, a year, a year and a half, two years. By then, Japan might be only barren mountains and burned towns, and the United States might be poorer by a million young men. He could not share the cheerful anticipation of those oriented toward Europe. To him the prospects looked grim indeed.

  NAOMI 9

  Belonging

  During that winter the dreams began to weaken. Only once in a while did she enter the place under the mountain where the flying bombs were made, where hunger never stopped, where cold penetrated to the bones wrapped in loose papery skin. Seldom now did she look out through Rivka’s eyes at the evil glistening walls of the cave pressing in on her.

  She was working in Fenniman’s bakery. She dropped her books at home, grabbed a bite of lunch and hurried off to the bakery, where she put on a white smock over her school clothes. It smelled sweet and hot and yeasty all through the winter when home was always cold and drafty, not enough coal to heat the house. There were always ends and broken pieces of dough to eat or bring back.

  She felt important. She had a job, just like an adult. Every Thursday she received a paycheck. She took it straight to the bank and put it in her own private account. Then she drew out her own allowance for the week and the four dollars she paid Aunt Rose. She had an account in the same bank as Ruthie and Uncle Morris and Aunt Rose.

  Mostly she sold behind the counter, but Sundays when she could come in early, she helped bake. That was her favorite day. When she baked, she felt as if she were a good person. Ruthie had got her this job, and at first she had not known what to think about it. Then she decided it was good that she was not in the flat upstairs all the time with Leib and the toddler David. The Fennimans had always liked her, since that hot June when Mrs. Fenniman, Alvin and she had helped Mr. Bates.

  Trudi was pregnant again. Leib said it didn’t matter and had nothing to do with what he felt for Naomi. In the Bible, he said, all the important men had more than one wife. A man like himself needed more than one woman, and he needed Trudi and Naomi both. Since the weather had turned cold, the things he did with her, he did upstairs, which made Naomi nervous.

  She loved Leib, she could not help loving him because he felt to her as wide as the sky. Love for him was something she lay under as Rivka toiled under her mountain. Maybe that was why she had gradually stopped dreaming of Rivka, because she belonged now to Leib and not to Rivka. As much as she had hated the dreams, she missed them. She felt disconnected. Maybe Rivka was still trying to talk to her. Maybe Rivka was dead. She would have known a year ago, known instantly, but not any longer. She had put Leib in between Rivka and herself.

  His body came around her like a fist and held her hot and tight. He had kept his word and he had not yet entered her, but that was all he had not done. Each time she imagined she would say no, but when he reached for her, she could not say anything. She was bad: that was all there was to it.

  Sometimes she imagined him carrying her off to be together finally someplace else, anyplace else. Yet she liked Trudi. Trudi was friendly to her, while she was deceiving Trudi. She was Trudi’s secret enemy. Ruthie had made her escape easier by arranging for the bakery job. Now she had no rea
son to be upstairs, and stayed away from Leib as much as she could. Yet from time to time, they would be alone in the house and he would call her and she would go to him.

  Alvin had a job too, loading trucks at the Detroit News. Neither of them had much time to hang around with the gang. Even Four Eyes had a job, off the books for a numbers runner. Only Sandy did not work; her mother thought it unladylike. She was so bored, she hung around their house whenever she could escape her mother’s surveillance. Sometimes Naomi worried that Leib would go after Sandy while she was working, but he claimed not to find her attractive. Leib was busy too, studying for his real estate license. Leib and his buddy Fats said there was going to be a real estate boom when the troops came home.

  Alvin and she went to the movies every Saturday night and sometimes Sunday night too, because Alvin had money in his pocket.

  “Sometimes I think I should quit school,” Alvin said. “Why hang around getting a diploma nobody cares about? My uncle Barney, he went to college and he ended up in a shoe store and thought he was lucky. Now he’s a clerk in the Quartermaster Corps. I could make more money than he ever earned, right now, tomorrow, if I quit school.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “What does she ever say? Go to college. Get learning. Don’t be a goyisher kopf. She doesn’t see there’s opportunities.”

  “You wouldn’t have time to spend with me.”

  “Suppose I quit and got a good job where I’m pulling down sixty bucks a week, regular. We could get married at sixteen with parental approval. So my mother will wail and raise her hands, but I can get her to agree. And you got no parents.”

  “I got parents. They’re just not here.”

  “I suppose your aunt and uncle have to sign for you, but why wouldn’t they? You’re not their daughter, and they’d probably be glad to have somebody else picking up the tab.”

  “How come you want to get married, all of a sudden? You had a fight with your mother, or what?”

  “We could have our own little place. Wouldn’t it be sweet? I’d go off to work and you’d be waiting for me.”

  “I’m not quitting the bakery, Alvin. I like the Fennimans. They like both of us too, and you know why.”

  Alvin looked embarrassed. “Ah, they don’t remember that time. It was almost two years ago.”

  “Sure they do. That’s why they gave me the job, with me underaged.”

  “Everybody’s hiring kids, that’s what’s so great for us now.”

  “Besides, what makes you think we could find a place of our own? We’d just have to live with my aunt and uncle or your mother.”

  “The war’ll be over soon. They’re already laying people off at Willow Run and all those hillbillies will go back where they came from and leave plenty of room around here.”

  “If they’re laying off people at Willow Run, and if the troops are all going to come back looking for their old jobs, where are you going to be working in six months, Alvin?”

  Grimacing, he raked his hands hard through his new crew cut. She had got to him. She was disappointed. She had hoped he would have an answer. Leib would. He would say he was going to get rich off those guys coming back. Sometimes with Alvin she felt as if he was matched against a giant, but he didn’t even know he was fighting anyone. She wished he had not had his hair mowed to the roots in the new fashion, because he looked dreadful, victimized. Leib had grown his hair out again, combing it back. She hated crew cuts, for they made the men look strange, raw Frankenstein monsters. Walking down the street sometimes Sandy and she stared at men and giggled, because the ears stripped naked and sticking out from the new super-short hair looked like jug handles. She begged Alvin to let his hair grow, but he wanted to be in style. He wouldn’t believe she didn’t like it.

  Always she was careful of his feelings, because she saw Alvin as like herself, vulnerable, half grown, not quite belonging. His very virtues worked against his being able to protect her, to keep her from Leib. He was big and tough in appearance. In the street, guys looked at him and looked away. Nobody bothered her with Alvin. Under his cropped hair and his hulking bones, he was sensitive, humane, considerate. He never pushed her too hard sexually. He was afraid of hurting her, afraid of causing bad consequences. Probably that was why he wanted to marry her, to go to bed with her without feeling guilty.

  Once or twice she had considered doing it with Alvin to try to stave off Leib; she would say to him, I belong to Alvin. The thought of belonging to Alvin was faintly silly. They were friends who necked. He would caress her breast lightly, lightly, as if it were a bird he feared to crush. They kissed for twenty minutes at a time, but never did she melt into the hot liquid chocolate she became with Leib. No, Alvin and she were too alike for him to excite or overawe her.

  Alvin was feeling flush. His mother’s birthday came in March and he bought her a sweater. At the same time, he got a present for Naomi. That Sunday night, Alvin gave her a silver bracelet with a piece of blue stone called a turquoise set in it, like a piece of Mediterranean sky stuck in the silver. She put it on and brought it in the house to show everybody, Alvin behind her. The whole family plus Leib and Trudi were downstairs listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The radio upstairs no longer worked, and nobody had the parts to fix it, so Trudi and Leib came downstairs to hear their favorite programs.

  Everybody admired the bracelet. Trudi said it was a perfect color for Naomi and her complexion, and that Alvin was really unusual to be able to pick out presents. Her father had always handed her mother a twenty-dollar bill on her birthday and told her to buy herself something.

  Leib seized Naomi’s arm in a tight grip. “Let’s see. What did you pay for it, Alvin?”

  Trudi shook her head. “What a thing to ask, darling. You can’t ask him that in front of his girlfriend.”

  “I hope you didn’t pay much,” Leib said, “because see, it’s flawed. Too bad.”

  She yanked her arm from him, furious. How dare he pick on Alvin? What had he ever given her? Alvin was looking down at the rug and she knew he would have liked to cry.

  “I’m no jeweler,” she said. “So what do I care? It’s pretty and Alvin gave it to me, and that’s just perfect,” she said loudly, waving her wrist around.

  The next time Leib caught her alone, which wasn’t till Thursday night, he said, “What are you doing with that kid these days, that he’s giving you bracelets from the jewelry store?”

  “He’s nice to me, that’s all. He wants to marry me.”

  Leib laughed. “You’ll be sixteen soon, and I guess that’s old enough. But you’d be a fool to marry that kid. I’m going to take care of you in style so you can have turquoises big as bowling balls.”

  “Leib, I don’t want to tonight. Trudi’s pregnant, I don’t feel good about it anymore. Please, Leib. It’s not right.”

  “It feels just fine to me.” He pulled her into the bedroom. “But you’re right about one thing. I’m not going to fool around with you anymore.”

  “Then let me go. Please, Leib. Let me go downstairs.”

  “If you want to be downstairs, why did you come upstairs?” Laughing, he shoved her onto the bed.

  “You called me.”

  “Damn right. And you better come when I call. If you hadn’t, I’d have come downstairs after you. What do I care, upstairs or downstairs?”

  He took all his clothes off. He had never done that. She tried to think if anyone might come in. Trudi and Ruthie were at work. Uncle Morris, Aunt Rose and Sharon were out at a rally about the camps and refugees, trying to make the government let survivors into the States. Uncle Morris hesitated to take her, because he thought she shouldn’t look at the photographs. She was supposed to be studying. She had not known if Leib was going out; lately he was out so often Trudi complained. Naomi had been afraid of the meeting, afraid of seeing what she had seen in her dreams.

  Now Leib was kneeling over her, pulling the clothes off her, turning her round and round on the bed to shuc
k off her clothes and dumping them on the floor. The air felt cold. She began to cry, softly.

  “Cry before, cry afterward. It’s time, babydoll. I’d be a fool to delay longer, for some kid to pick the cherry I’m waiting for. You know this is right, no matter what anybody else says. You’re mine. I picked you out and I’m taking you with me wherever I go.” He lifted her behind and put a towel under her. “Spread your legs. I said, spread your legs, Naomi.”

  Although he had been putting his fingers into her since the summer, when he pushed his thing in, it burned and tore her. She cried out and then bit on the pillow to be quiet. Every thrust felt as if it was tearing her again. She was glad when he finished, and begged him not to when he then started touching her. She was too sore to come.

  He brought cigarettes back to the bed, passing his over to her in the way he had that she always found flattering. She was still crying but he was feeling expansive. He sat up against the headboard smoking and talking while he caressed her shoulders and hair. “All I need is a nut. A bit of capital to start with. Fats can get something out of his old man, but not enough. The time to buy land is now, right now, while nobody wants it. In six months, they’ll be putting up little houses for vets so fast, the whole landscape will change. I see it coming, but if I can’t get my hands on money, it won’t do me one stinking piece of good.”

  Naomi lay uneasily beside him, chilled and lightly bleeding. Her vagina stung. She felt sticky, dirty. Tears continued to roll out of her eyes. Now she belonged to Leib, totally. But his wife was pregnant and she did not want to hurt Trudi and what did it all mean? There was no one to ask. No one to speak to. For her, only silence and fear. “Please, I’m cold. Can I put my clothes back on?”

  A letter arrived for her, from a French Adjutant Lev Abel. In French it told her that her father had been a very brave man and a leader in the maquis. He had fought the Germans and killed many of them, the letter said, before they had killed him finally on 20 juillet 1944 in the Montagne Noire. Her father had stayed behind with a handful of fighters to hold off the Germans so that the rest of their forces could escape and regroup. He himself was alive because of her father.