Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Ali Baba and the forty thieves had nothing on the Nazis,” George said. He sounded as numbed as she felt.

  “Was this to bankroll Werewolf?” she asked.

  “The officials of the Reichsbank in Berlin who had all this transported here claim not, but I suppose we’ll never know.” Captain North seemed embarrassed to admit ignorance.

  “Counting is easier than making sense of it,” George said. “Could we have those dimensions again?”

  The captain led them to another elevator and again they plummeted through the rock. Now she definitely felt claustrophobic. Pressing on her head, the mountains were about to shift and squeeze the breath from her.

  On this lower level was one sizable chamber. Captain North stood with his hands locked behind his back. “We have here one hundred eighty-nine containers bearing the name Melmer and a shipping tag labeled Deutsche Reichsbank Hauptcasse 1, Berlin. This material is diverse. For instance, in this container, we have inventoried silver trays, candlesticks, Passover cups, flatwear, two hundred forty-one pounds. These three boxes hold watches, watch chains and cases. This one is powder puff cases, silver thimbles. These are all wedding rings …”

  “All wedding rings?” The container stood as tall as she. “Concentration camp victims?”

  Captain North nodded. “Another suitcase here, dental fillings. Everything seems to have been carefully inventoried, then packed in containers, including suitcases we assume were acquired in the same manner.”

  “How many shipments came here?”

  “We’ve accounted for seventy-six.” Captain North looked happy when he could say something concrete. His body drew inward as he stood among the boxes and suitcases. She began to like him a little. His discomfort was human and appropriate. The numbers were something to grasp.

  He was reciting an inventory: “Watches, 6748.2 pounds; tableware, 29,147.5 pounds; precious and semiprecious stones, 691 pounds; gold rings, 1069.8 pounds; gold, silver dental fillings, 3101.3 pounds.…”

  She stopped writing. She could not take it down.

  “But it wasn’t all precious metals and jewelry. Children’s toys, 515.9 pounds. Drawing instruments, 104.4 pounds. Postage stamps, 89.5 pounds. Spectacle frames in bone, plastic, horn or metal, 691.1 pounds. Small hand tools, 311.7 pounds. Artificial limbs, 404.5 pounds.”

  Louise sat abruptly on one of the suitcases, a big strong one bound with a leather belt and marked with a name which had been crossed out, like the person to whom it had belonged, who had packed it for a journey to resettlement. She had to lower her head between her knees to keep from fainting. George, the two cameramen and Captain North looked embarrassed. She was behaving inappropriately, emotionally. Things, loot, objects. Surplus value: somebody’s labor, somebody’s thrift, somebody’s hopes and fears. On a vast scale, here was displayed a hatred of flesh and a passion for metals, of which some were supposed to be base and others noble.

  The men were discomforted. They joked and wrapped the loot in statistics. As one of those intended to be robbed of her life, she could not look away. She had no choice but to contemplate what passed understanding. That everything was inventoried and labeled and accounted for made the reek of blood more nauseating. She had entered Bergen-Belsen. She had visited Buchenwald and Dora/Nordhausen. She knew how and where this loot had been gathered. She stood again and followed them out.

  Somehow she was not surprised when they returned to the brilliant sunshine and moved out through the four guard points to encounter another captain standing by the outer ring, waiting. “Hello, Oscar,” she said.

  He peered at her and at first she thought he was about to act out surprise, and deep within the mountain of her shock, annoyance stirred, but in fact he was only making sure it was her. “I thought for a moment you hadn’t come, that you’d been replaced by a man …” He was still staring at her intensely, grasping the arm of her overcoat.

  “Did you arrange this?” she asked.

  “More or less. Come. I have to talk to you. I’ll get you back to Berlin.”

  She was too numb to care, the cold of the salt mine in her bones. In her pocket rode the chip of salt, tears turned to stone, a worthy souvenir. All those women whose rings had been taken from their hands, dead. All the children whose toys had been carefully preserved while the children were burned. She thought, he doesn’t know me any longer, he’s looking for someone no longer alive. She allowed him to drag her along by the sleeve of her GI overcoat to the jeep he was using, where a corporal sat smoking and reading the comics in the Stars and Stripes.

  They drove up farther into the mountains. He was lodged with six other OSS personnel in what had probably been someone’s rustic but comfortable country retreat, complete with the heads of stags mounted in moth-eaten melancholy in the high-raftered living room.

  One of the others started to challenge him, but he said, waving them off, “It’s my wife.”

  She felt too weary to speak the words she kept saying mentally as they went up the steps, his arm propelling her from behind as if he did not trust her to follow him. Not anymore, not anymore.

  She sank into a high-backed chair and he knelt and drew off her boots, a gesture that startled her. She kept her overcoat on. “Where’s Abra?”

  He looked blank for just a moment. “Oh, she’s near Frankfurt, with the bombing survey. She had sense enough to clear out. I imagine she’ll be going back to Washington soon. We’re all being mustered out. OSS is rapidly disintegrating, and so am I.”

  “Rapidly disintegrating?” She watched him warily.

  He sat on the bed, kicking off his boots, and closed his eyes for a moment, then sat up as if forcing himself to remain awake, alert. “Gloria’s dead. Have you been in any of the camps?”

  “I went into Buchenwald with the American troops, April eleventh, the day they liberated it. I’ve been to Dora once and Bergen-Belsen often. Gloria’s dead?”

  “She was beheaded in February at Ravensbrueck.”

  “You’re sure.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been in the Russian Zone several times, and they were helpful. I found a survivor who saw her beheading.”

  “Oh.” It was as if a band across her forehead snapped. “In February! So near the end.” She took off her coat. “Did you write Kay?”

  He nodded. “Toward the end they killed more and more.” He was rubbing his eyes. Wiry white hairs glinted among the black in the sunlight that poured in the high window.

  Kay would be almost as upset as his mother. “I assume there’s no way to get the body back.”

  “I sent home a box of ashes. I felt it didn’t matter whose they really were, they were killed just as she was.”

  She stood beside the bed, wanting to comfort him but unable to touch him. “She was in the Resistance?”

  “She was part of an MI9 ratline, caught when the Germans introduced a loop and rolled it up. Arrested March of forty-four. There’s no sign that she gave them names under torture.”

  “Somewhere under that mountain, there’re probably her rings and her jewelry.”

  “I’m sure her rings had ceased to mean anything to her. I just keep asking, why didn’t she leave when she had the chance? Why didn’t she escape down the line? She knew how.”

  “I suppose she thought she was accomplishing more by staying.”

  “So many bodies, how can I mourn one excessively? But in mourning one, you mourn them all too.”

  She began to notice things that she had been too exhausted, too self-involved to take in. He had slashed the right lapel of his Ike field jacket, probably with a razor. When his father had died, he had refused even the slashed ribbon. He thought it was silly, she recalled. On a table near the window was a pamphlet in Hebrew and English, the Aleinu, the mourner’s Kaddish. “So, Oscar, what’s happening to you? You’re in mourning, really? You’re suddenly a Jew?”

  “What else am I?” He shrugged wearily. “How else do I know how to mourn, to really mourn?”

  “I ta
ke that to be rhetorical, but also probably something you’re undergoing, no?”

  “I don’t know what I know anymore. I want to go home.”

  “So do I, but to what?”

  “You got mad when I said you were my wife.”

  “No, I got mad when you said I am your wife. I was your wife.”

  “Was, are, will be. I have no other wife than you.”

  “One wife and seven hundred mistresses. It’s a bit much.”

  “Louise, our daughter’s grown up, she’s having a baby she writes me. Let’s get old and die together. I need you. I fucked up, I know it, I fucked up everything that counted, I know it, listen to me, I know it. But you were proud too and you wouldn’t let me come back. Let me now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because I’m afraid. Aren’t you?”

  “Afraid to be alone? I’ve been alone.”

  “I’ve been alone too. Don’t mock, Louie. I’m unsuited to being with anyone except you. It’s too much work to communicate, day after day and night after night, to someone who doesn’t share the same premises, the same history. I’m afraid of what people are, really. I don’t have the faith I had, in reason, in progress, in science, in Marx, in civilization. There’s a darkness gathered over Europe that I can never forget or cease to deal with the rest of my life. My infidelities too were a matter of pride, Louise, and now it all seems not worth shit.”

  “Gloria’s death shocked you, so now you think you’re somebody else.”

  “Louise, I’m exhausted. I want to go home and you’re home.”

  “I’m not home. I am somebody else.”

  “What we are separately is less than we are together.”

  She sat in the chair. “It’s not that easy, Oscar. You can’t just say, Whoops, I made a mistake in 1940 and let’s just wish it all away.”

  He raised his head from his hands to stare at her. He looked weary, she thought. Something was wrong—not physical. He had the same strong peasant physique she shared; what was wrong with him was what was wrong with her, an angst she had to recognize. She said, “Partly we’re suffering the release of the war. We’ve been geared up to it, living beyond our means, physically, emotionally. Partly we’re suffering the attempted murder of our whole people, and its near success. It’s a wound in us.”

  “It’s a wound in the fabric of existence,” he said.

  “I’m not so cosmological, and I do not advise you to be.” She found herself wryly smiling, a strange smile, one that twisted her face in a way it was not used to moving—not for a long time.

  “But I want to start where I have to start to make things right. How can it be right when we’re both wrong? Off course. French directors, brash young cryptanalysts—”

  “What did you call him?”

  “He’s in the Japanese code reading section. Ah, he didn’t tell you. What a closemouthed young man. I still have my sources. It’s not quite as secret as they’d like it to be.”

  “Are you done retailing my adventures?”

  “I only mention that it’s time for both of us to go home,” he was mumbling, his eyes half closed.

  “Oscar, you don’t understand. I have expanded to fill the entire apartment.”

  “I’ll take Kay’s room. She won’t be needing it.” He was slumping, exhausted.

  “We have plenty of time to argue about all that later on.” She had noticed a typewriter in the next room. She arranged his head on the pillow, pulled the feather bed over him before she went to work on her story. When he woke, she must return to Berlin. She paused to make sure he was sleeping, lying on his back as if he had fallen off a roof, his mouth slightly open and his hands at his sides, palms up. Supplication.

  She smiled again, wryly. She was not sure she was willing to be exactly together, but they did not seem any longer exactly apart. Yet she was as she was, a woman harder and more difficult than he had known her to be. She could not guess what was going to happen, but she was not about to become a wife.

  MURRAY 5

  An Extra Death

  On April Fools’ Day, which Murray noticed sourly was also the Christian Easter, they were loaded onto amphtracs from the huge invasion armada lying off Okinawa. Then they were moved around to the eastern side of the island, but in fact they never landed. They were supposed to create a diversion, drawing Japanese firepower from the landings on the other shore. However, the Japanese did not contest that landing, and so they merely hung around offshore, then were taken back to the transports and climbed the nets to deck again. It seemed like a military April fool’s joke to Murray and Jack, who had expected to land and fight. No one had told them they were only pretend, although he was sure if they had been needed for that diversion, the bullets and the KIAs and WIAs would have been real enough. You died just as dead in a feint as in a charge. In fact their ships were attacked by kamikaze pilots and two were hit, including a big transport, the Hinsdale, that burned for hours.

  “Suppose the officers knew it wasn’t for real?” Jack wondered aloud. “Not that Hickock would tell us anything.”

  Hickock had spoken to Murray privately. Hickock caught him in the passageway and said, his lean face two inches from his own, “Take a good look at this island, Jew-boy. When we land the landing force, you’re going to die here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Murray said, according to regulations, and stared back. He did not doubt Hickock’s word, nor did he doubt his ability. There were a lot of slots you put a man in where you figured the chances of his surviving were nil. It would just be a matter of putting him into those places till he was shot or blown up. His only hope was a Hollywood wound or even a maiming wound, because as long as Hickock was alive, he would not let up.

  Everybody wondered where the Jap resistance was. The 2d Division had been spared Iwo Jima, after Tarawa and Saipan, but they had heard plenty. The casualties were beyond imagining. Whole companies ceased to exist before the fight was over. Some guys thought it was going to be a piece of cake here, because the marines of the 1st and 6th divisions were reporting a walkover. By the first evening, they were in positions they weren’t supposed to take until D + 4. Some of the new guys thought that the Japs had given up, but neither Jack nor Murray agreed.

  “The south end,” Murray said. “That’s mountainous. The other end is too flat and cultivated. Not good cover.” Seen from the water, Okinawa was a green and pleasant land, hilly, well built up, with cities and towns and villages, roads and beaches, rice paddies, quaint-looking stone tombs. There seemed to be no jungle, fetid and fierce, like Guadalcanal, and it was not just a volcanic heap like Iwo, or a wreath of jagged coral flung down around a lagoon, like Tarawa. It was one of those attractive islands like Saipan, and that made him shudder. However, these people did not seem eager to jump off the cliffs to get away from Americans. Perhaps they should have. As the weeks went by, civilian casualties of the heavy shelling and the crossfire were at least as high as military casualties. Out of the loudspeakers on the ships came the news that the President had died. Murray was stunned, dizzied by a huge uneasiness, wondering what kind of country he would return to. If he did.

  They were still being held in reserve, although fighting began to toughen on the island. The Army was still stuck before the first Japanese lines they had come against, while the Marines had fought a brisk engagement on the Motobu Peninsula, but still the 2d Division remained on its transports, waiting. Not that they were out of the line of fire.

  Every couple of days, clouds of several hundred Japanese planes came at the huge armada, which was fifteen hundred ships strong: battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, troop transports, ammunition carriers, supply ships, tankers, hospital ships, ships on radar picket. The heart of the raids were the suicide pilots in simple planes not designed to return, loaded with a five-hundred-pound bomb meant to explode when the little plane plowed into the big superstructure of the American ships or crashed into the flight deck of a carrier. Those kamikazes were surrounded by a swar
m of everything the Japanese had to throw: Zeros, Bettys, Juds, Oscars, to protect them and inflict damage of their own.

  The raids were constant and each time they sank at least a couple of ships and damaged many more. When they hit the ammo ships, the seamen on board never had a chance. You were lucky not to be nearby and get taken out by the exploding shells and rockets. “Fucking sitting ducks,” Slo Mo said. Why couldn’t the brass just unload them so they could be in reserve on land? They were taking more casualties as part of that huge floating shooting gallery than they would in the fighting, all the marines said, until they saw the wounded being brought out. It was beginning to look bad. Mostly the marines blamed the doggies. They never seemed to strike and move forward, but Murray noticed he saw a lot of doggie casualties coming out.

  The kamikaze pilots hit everything: they knocked out carriers, they knocked out cruisers, destroyers, LSMs and LSTs. They hit the transports, the freighters, the tankers, the hospital ships. The ships fired back downing a lot of the bastards, but there were always more swarms coming. Twelve to twenty of them might attack the same ship at once, till at least one got through, and that ship was blown out of the water.

  It was perfect hell being cooped up on the transport with Hickock always watching him, finding rotten details for him, trying to goad him into striking back again. He could not move or speak without looking around cautiously, trying to fade back among the men, trying to efface himself. He stuck as tight as he could to Jack and to Slo Mo and Tiny, the survivors from Saipan. Sometimes he half wished the ship would be hit and the waiting to die be over.