Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She did not mind the American doctor, but when the German doctor came, she turned her face to the wall. The orderlies were German and played mean tricks on the patients. They would take the little mirror the nurse had given her and place it beyond her reach. They laughed at the woman who always wept. They pretended not to understand the German of the woman in the next bed. Then the orderly found a cache of bread she was hiding in her mattress and threw it out. Jacqueline was furious. That was her little food bank, bread she had saved from every day, in case the next day there was none. In the camp if you could save a little bread, you might live. That day the nurse came into the ward and yelled at the top of her lungs to all the patients that the war in Europe was over. Most of them lay and stared at her. Their war would never be over.

  When she closed her eyes she saw women lined up for the winter appel in their grey shifts and ill-fitting clogs standing under the sleet while the SS counted them once, twice, again, again, while the woman beside her dropped and was clubbed to death in the snow. She smelled the burning flesh in her nostrils. She saw the open glazed eyes of those dead in the morning, worked to death, used up. She saw the smear on the wall that was the brains of a child dashed to death by a grinning guard. She saw the blood pouring from the severed breast of a woman with a dog set on her, tearing now at her throat. That was real. This was an unplace, among unpeople. The nurse had told Jacqueline her name many times, but she could not remember, for the nurse was a trick, a smile in the air like the Cheshire cat in Alice.

  She began to stand. She wanted the mirror the orderly had hidden. She wanted to go to the bathroom alone, when she wanted to. She could only walk holding on to the side of the bed and then the next bed. Sometimes she fell. Soon she could go all the way past five beds to the bathroom. Once there she could use a toilet and flush it and then run the water and run it some more, drink as much water as she wanted and wash her face and sponge herself clean. Soon she was allowed to take a bath. She cried in the bath, her tears running into the warm water. She had little breasts again, like a twelve-year-old, the breasts of Rivka. That was why she was crying. Maybe Maman and Rivka were still alive. She had to get well and leave.

  When she awoke the next morning, her stomach hurt. The pain wakened her and she had soiled herself. She had wet the bed. No, blood. For a moment she was frightened and then she realized she was getting the first period she had had since October. She wept again. Now she seemed to cry every few hours. The redheaded nurse carried a glass bottle into the ward with lilacs in it. Their scent made more tears flow. She had turned to salt water: a small spring behind a rock, that was her.

  One day the redheaded nurse brought her a lipstick and powder to use. “Now, fix yourself up. You’re getting a visitor. The night nurse tells me he came too late last night, and he said he’d come back this afternoon.”

  “A man?” For a moment she thought of Jeff, but he had died in Toulouse; then of her father, but he had been killed on the Montagne Noire. Who would be here trying to see her? Henri? That was another life; he had had quite enough of her before she had moved out and disappeared under a name he did not know. All the people she cared about were dead. Only she had incontinently survived.

  Her face with the makeup was a woman’s face, the face of an exotic terribly thin model under chopped hair, a little browner now, strange in its striation, tipped with silver like a fancy fur coat.

  “Vous êtes Jacqueline Lévy-Monot?” the man boomed out, still several beds away. In French he went on: “You were with Daniela Rubin?”

  Oh, she knew him now. How could she not? She had been looking at his picture for years. He had lost that sleepy schoolboy look he had worn in the picture, even though Daniela had told her that when it was taken, he had already fought in Spain. When he reached her bedside, the words jolted out of her, without forethought or volition. “She’s dead! I couldn’t save her, she’s dead! All the way we came from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen to Magdeburg. Then she died on the road, in the death march. She would not get up. She had typhus. We carried her two days, Rysia and I, between us, but then she lay down and died before morning. It was so cold. Her feet were bleeding, infected. The clogs they gave us did that. We were used up, rags. We’d been starved too long.”

  He sat down by the side of the bed. “I’m Ari Katz. I was engaged to Daniela.”

  “I know, that’s why I told you. I know from the photo of you she always had by her, until they took that too from her.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Just before we escaped, Rysia and me. After she was dead, then I decided to escape. They were going to kill us all. They shot me then.”

  “I’ve been trying to find her. I couldn’t stop hoping. Twice I saw someone who looked like her, once on the roadside, once in Bergen-Belsen.”

  “How did you get here? Daniela only knew you had gone over the mountains to Spain.… I used to take children over the Pyrénées. I was called Gingembre.” It was hard to remember that she had had names and she had done things she chose to do, once.

  “You were Gingembre?” He frowned with surprise. “You’re sure?”

  That seemed such a ridiculous thing to say that she laughed. It hurt. She did not know when she had last laughed. “Back when I was alive. Of course I’m sure.”

  He held out his hand to shake. “Everybody back in Toulouse thinks you are dead. They found your diary, your rifle and a body.”

  “I am,” she said. “We all are.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re not dead. We’re not even defeated. It is all only beginning.”

  She turned her face away from him and did not answer. How dare this man who was tanned and well fed and healthy and wearing clean clothes tell her she was not dead. She would not look at him or speak to him. After a while he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Still when he came the next day, she was sitting on the edge of her bed. She refused the nurse’s cosmetics but would have dressed if she had anything to put on. “Bonjour, Jacqueline,” he greeted her. “My name is Ari. Ari Katz.” As if she seemed simpleminded to him and he must start over.

  “What uniform is that?” He was some sort of sergeant.

  “I was in the Second Armored Division, in reconnaissance, under General Leclerc. Oh, you mean—the French army. We get the uniforms from the Americans, and just stick our own caps on. Basically now I’m working with the JDC—trying to help Jews in the camps get into Palestine.”

  “Would you see what you can find out about my mother and sister? They were deported from Drancy in December of 1942. I’ll write down their names for you.… I would like to get out of here, but I have no clothes.”

  He squinted at her. “I’m inept at estimating sizes. Do you know what you take?”

  “Not anymore. I’m half the weight I was.” She had an idea. “Let me see if the nurse has a measuring tape.”

  The redheaded nurse measured her and they wrote the numbers down for Ari. When he was leaving, he said, “I won’t be able to get back for at least a week.”

  She decided she had presumed too much, asking him so many favors. She returned to her sulk, but the problem was that now she felt as if she were being wicked lying on the bed. After a day in fetal position, she got up and began walking to and fro. If only she had clothing. She spoke about her problem to the redheaded nurse, whose name was Betty Jo. Betty Jo said she would see what she could do. That day, Jacqueline forced herself to walk down a flight of steps, although she had to sit twice, and then back up, when she had to rest four times. An hour later, she tried it again.

  Betty Jo collected a pink wool sweater with only two holes in it; a flowered blue scarf; a new slip in white satin that Betty Jo explained was a present sent one of the nurses and too small for her. Betty Jo also brought her a pair of drawers she had purchased, laid in tissue paper in a box. With her new little breasts, she could manage without a brassiere, if only she could get a skirt. Betty Jo brought her a torn blanket and a needle and thread and scissors.
She sat on a chair at the end of the ward sewing herself a skirt. Soon it would be warm for the clothing she was producing, but it seemed to her the height of luxury to be too warm, to be overdressed, rather than shivering in the snow in a thin shift.

  When she had finished, her skirt was scarcely elegant, for Jacqueline had never been handy with sewing, but it was wearable. She dressed herself, put the scarf over her hair and walked slowly but steadily to look at herself in the bathroom mirror. She could only see herself from the waist up, but she looked like a person. She liked the scarf because she had seen photographs of women shaved for sleeping with Germans and did not want anyone to think that was what had happened to her hair.

  She would not let herself return to bed, except to rest between excursions, except to sleep. She slept badly, but she ate whatever she could get. It seemed to her she could go on eating all day, that she was never full, that she never would be full. Now she could walk down the two flights of steps to the ground floor, only resting between flights, and after she sat for five minutes, climb up. She still cringed when she heard German spoken. She pretended she did not understand it. In truth, her throat closed and she could not answer. Sometimes she found herself backed against the wall, trying to flatten herself out of existence. It was hard to overcome the habit of cowering, of never meeting a gaze. She had been a piece too long, a slave, a number.

  She had given Ari up long before he returned. She was dressed and helping Betty Jo talk to patients, translating from Yiddish and French. Yiddish always made her think of Daniela, and somehow thinking of Daniela made Ari appear behind her.

  “You look much better,” he told her. “I have a present for you.” He held out a box.

  She did not equivocate but tore it open. It was a blue and white summer dress. Perhaps it was an ordinary dress, she told herself, but holding it in her hands, clean, crisp, fresh, dainty, she wanted to embrace it. She ran at once to put it on. Now she had enough strength to climb up on the toilet seat, so she could see more of herself in the mirror, headless with the dress hanging on her gauntness, but a woman, a person, a human being. She was wearing the slippers the hospital had given her, and she had still the boots from her aunt Esther. She lacked normal shoes, she lacked stockings, she had only one set of drawers and no brassiere, but she could escape if she had to. She could pass in the street.

  She came back slowly toward the bed, uncertain why she felt suddenly frightened. Betty Jo and Ari fussed about her, but she stood stiffly inside her new dress. Then Ari took her arm. “Let’s go out. The sun’s shining, the day is beautiful. Let’s walk in the hospital garden.”

  She went down the steps with him, carefully, slowly, but as they approached the door to the outside, she found herself pulling away. “No!” Her heart was racing in her chest, shaking her.

  “Jacqueline, you must go out. You can’t stay in the hospital much longer. If that nurse wasn’t protecting you, you’d be thrown out.”

  He had his hand through her arm and he was tugging her relentlessly along. Now the door was opening and now she was passing out into the mild humid air. It was extremely bright and much too big, all around her from every direction attacking. It had no boundaries, no walls, only vast air-over her head and space exploding outward. She drew in, clutched, unable to breathe. She shut her eyes and listened. Birds, traffic passing, someone shouting monotonously upstairs in the mental ward, the multitudinous busy rushing sound of leaves purling in a breeze.

  She opened her eyes and followed him to a bench. The sun laid its hand on her face. She blinked and blinked. “Why did you come back? Why are you so good to me?” The leaves were two thirds opened, soft and vulnerable on the linden trees and the beeches. Along the wall a row of fat peonies were in bloom, white and pink.

  “You were her best friend. You’re all that’s left of her.”

  “Daniela was nothing like me. She was a far better person. She was gentler and braver and she had real faith. She was a good Jew. I’m an indifferent Jew.”

  “I have one piece of bad news for you.”

  She covered her eyes. “They’re dead?”

  “Your mother died at Dora/Nordhausen. Your sister we haven’t been able to trace yet. We know she was in the Tunnel at Dora, working on V-2 rockets. A huge underground factory there employed slave labor.”

  Maman gone, never another chance. For a long while she could not speak, grieving and also furious with him for telling her, for being there, for being so vivid and healthy. No, it was herself who should not be alive, with those she loved murdered. Yet not all were proven dead. Rivka might have survived, like her. She sat up. “I want to leave here. I have to find both my sisters. In the battle at Mon-tagne Noire, Daniela and I were trying to slip through the Boche encirclement when they caught us. I threw away the ID I had, my Luger, my journal, with my other sister’s address in America.… I’ll need money. Is there work around here?”

  “What languages do you speak?”

  “Good English, fair Yiddish, scanty Hebrew, some Spanish and German.”

  “The Americans in Frankfurt will hire you, if your English is good enough.”

  “I’ll go to them and try.” She stood. “As soon as possible. Can you help me?”

  Ari beamed, clasping her hand. “I’ll try to get you an appointment tomorrow.”

  “Please!” It was time to act. Time to crawl outside. Yes.

  DANIEL 9

  Lost and Found

  One activity at work that pleased Daniel was turning up two experts in seashells who knew so much about the beaches of Okinawa that the younger, in his late sixties, was flown out to the Pacific to help with invasion decisions. Everything else during the months of the fighting on Okinawa proved harrowing, for the casualties on both sides mounted until they were enormous, including the highest losses the Navy had ever sustained, and dreadful killing and maiming among the Army and Marine infantry. It left little reason to celebrate in OP-20-G, when the last of the major dug-in knots of Japanese soldiers were annihilated by flamethrowers and napalm or spent themselves in suicide charges, when the deaths finally dropped to a few a day from snipers and pockets of isolated resistance. It was a victory without pleasure, trailing intimations of disaster on an almost incomprehensible scale.

  The mood grew grim among the codebreakers, because while Daniel was aware peace feelers and Japanese declarations of the necessity to end the war were coming in through the broken Purple diplomatic codes, the radio traffic of the Japanese army and navy revealed the same willingness to die by individual act and en masse, the same belief in the beauty and honor of flaming suicide. There would be three million troops defending Japan, besides the volunteers, the civilian brigades, the irregulars. Anticipated Allied casualties of a million were commonly predicted.

  VE-Day had meant little to Daniel. Abra wrote him from Bad Nauheim in Germany every four or five days. He was amused by both of them, conducting their disguised courtship through the mails, writing not love letters but documents designed to demonstrate to the other how lovable each was, how warm, how witty, how knowing, how altogether irresistible. At the same time, he viewed her as entirely capable of keeping him on hold, then returning with a new lover in tow. After all, he was still writing Louise regularly, and if she did suddenly show up in Washington, he did not know what he would do.

  July was sweltering. Several days the temperature rose in the high nineties and they were sent home, but mostly it rained. They decoded a telegram from a former Japanese prime minister to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow. “His Majesty is extremely anxious to terminate the war as soon as possible, being deeply concerned that further hostilities will only aggravate the untold miseries of the millions and millions of innocent men and women in the countries at war. Should, however, the United States and Great Britain insist on unconditional surrender, Japan would be forced to fight to the bitter end.” The invasion preparations continued. “Unconditional surrender” had been repeated so many times that Truman must feel he could n
ot relinquish it for fear of political repercussions.

  July 28, a B-26 named “Old John Feather Merchant” left Bedford Air Force Base near Boston and crashed into the Empire State Building, hitting the seventy-seventh floor and killing twenty office workers and its crew on impact. The building caught fire, elevators plunged to the bottom of their shafts. Watching the newsreel, Daniel thought it a taste of bombing for New Yorkers.

  The next day the radio reported a new kind of bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and had wiped out the entire center of that city. OP-20-G seethed with speculation. The papers had mentioned the equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Nobody had the faintest notion what that entailed, but it was some big bomb and bound to bring home to the Japanese government that it was time to end the war while something was still standing. Daniel envisioned a struggle within that government between the forces of death and the forces for life, between idealized suicide, the cherry blossoms that lasted such a short time and represented to the Japanese the beauty of the samurai, and the sturdy peasant virtue of survival. In the meantime, the Soviet Union declared war on the Japanese, who had been begging the Soviets to make peace for Japan with the Western powers. Another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 14, the Japanese government announced its surrender. The emperor spoke on radio for the first time to his people. The word “surrender” was never used, but the meaning was clear enough.

  Daniel was on duty when the message came in. Everybody jumped up and ran to embrace each other. “It’s over!” Daniel heard himself shouting. A yeoman threw a vast pile of decodes in the air, although they would have to be picked up. Within the hour, sirens were going off, bells tolling, cars leaning on their horns, a joyous raw cacophony. By his immense relief, Daniel could gauge how frightening he had found the prospect of invading a Japan bent on dying honorably in battle to the last possible casualty on both sides. The Japanese would learn to live under their first defeat and their culture would be the richer and earthier for it. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans would not die. He had never experienced peace as an adult: a life he could choose instead of a war that shaped or smashed.