Women's Barracks

by Tereska Torres

  Peter sighed and pressed Mickey close. She looked into his face, feeling him suddenly removed from her, seeking to understand him, wondering at the tightness that had come over his face, and noticing the new creases at the corners of his mouth.

  "You'll stay here now, Peter?" she said. "It's finished?"

  He shook his head. "No, dear. Only one night. I've been sent back to make a report on a German installation we blew up—a big one. Tomorrow I've got to go back again."

  The phonograph record kept going around, the needle caught in the last groove, repeating over and over, "Chante, chante, chante." Peter went to shut it off. Mickey started to prepare dinner. She felt like crying.

  Only one night.

  She thought of the tragedy at Down Street. She could not smother this one night with Peter under that tragedy. She tried to push away from her the trembling thought that next time Peter might not come back. She would keep this one night for him.

  After their meal, Peter made a fire on the hearth. He lighted his pipe, and Mickey sat on the rug, leaning against his legs. In the past, they would have gone out dancing or to a movie. But Mickey felt that all that was over, that she and Peter would never again be the same.

  As though he had followed her thoughts, he said gently, almost as though he were speaking to himself, "After the war I'd like to live in the country. Do you think it would be too boring for you, Mickey? I want to have a house I'll build it myself, in the mountains, at home in Norway. We'll have a whole lot of children. In winter I'll take them to school on a sledge, and in summer—oh, Mickey, it's also beautiful in the mountains in the summer. You'll see. They're covered with flowers, and you can hear the torrents rushing down. I'll raise a lot of things, and we'll ski and hike in the mountains. You're as strong as a man, you're made for that life. Do you want it like that, Mickey? I've had enough of cities, I've had enough—" he hesitated for an instant—"enough of men. I want to forget the war, my darling. I want to live, really to live. The war—it's the worst, the most horrible punishment that man puts on himself. I don't want my children to have to go to war. And there in the mountains we can teach them to love, not to hate, not to kill."

  "Yes," Mickey breathed. Then she looked up with an effort and said, "Peter, I have the most frightful thing to tell you. Michel—Michel has been killed."

  "He, too," Peter said. Suddenly he cried out, "It's more frightful than that, Mickey, because it doesn't do anything to me any more! I've seen too many dead, too many of my friends. We've all got used to it. Every day you hear that someone else is dead—fellows like myself, young men, who wanted to live, to have wives and children. They believed in the future, like Michel… Oh, Mickey, I want to begin all over again, all new after the war. I've come to understand so many things. I know what happiness is, and that every man can build it for himself. It depends only on us. We can refuse to kill, refuse to die—that has to come from us, and from the life we choose to live. I know now, I've chosen what I want for myself. You understand, Mickey? Say that you understand."

  Mickey was weeping. Tears shone in her large blue eyes. "You're talking just like Michel," she said, and she tried to smile. "Yes, dear, of course I understand. And I'd love to live in the country in Norway, and we'll go skiing, and I'd love to have a whole lot of children..." Already she felt lighter, seeing herself surrounded by her sons, a whole flock of them, climbing the rocks.

  Peter took her in his arms. His eyes too had recovered their old gaiety. "Get me a piece of paper, Mickey," he said. "Let's draw the plans for our house."

  Ann was the first of us to return to the barracks. She looked for Ursula's name in the register. Ursula had been marked out after breakfast, and had not been marked in again. Ann therefore concluded that Ursula was still in town, and knew nothing.

  I got home soon afterward. Ann and I decided that Ursula had probably remained in town for dinner. It didn't occur to us to speak to the Captain.

  Ursula must have wandered along the streets until her sleepiness became so powerful that she turned into Hyde Park, and found a quiet corner, between two trees. Although it was still early evening, she was unable to see anything; her eyes could no longer focus. She saw everything double, and the images trembled and danced and multiplied and retreated before her eyes. Her head ached, ached terribly; she had a pain in her stomach, and her heart pounded. Then she slipped to the ground, and curled up as wounded animals do, and she resisted no more.

  When Ursula had not yet returned at eight o'clock, Ann reported the matter to the sergeant of the guard, who hurried to the Captain. We learned then that Ursula had been there at noon. She knew. Now the police were telephoned, and a description of Ursula was given out to all the stations in London and its environs and along the Thames.

  Someone had telephoned Jacqueline, and she rushed over to Down Street to wait with us for the news that we knew must come. None of us in the Virgins' Room went to bed. We all waited in silence. The hours passed.

  At midnight, although I knew I wouldn't sleep, I undressed and put on my pajamas. As I shifted my pillow I heard a soft rustling sound, as though the pillow had rubbed against paper. But I had left no paper there. Who, then? Could Ursula have left a note? My heart thudding, I lifted the pillow.

  There was no note, but something more eloquent than anything Ursula could have written. It was a small snapshot that I had never seen before, a picture of Ursula and Michel, standing close together, smiling. It was her only legacy.

  Wordlessly I handed the picture to Jacqueline, who had come to stand at my elbow. She stared at it uncomprehendingly a moment. Then her eyes widened. She understood. She gave a wordless cry, dropped the picture on my bed, and ran from the room.

  As I gazed after her, I realized that of all of us keeping this hopeless vigil, Jacqueline alone had really expected to see Ursula again. Only Jacqueline had ever made a gesture toward death, and she had failed. There was the night she had lain huddled on the ground beneath the window from which she had jumped, and the day she has slashed her wrists in the department-store washroom.

  Jacqueline had tried, and failed, and tried again. For Jacqueline there would always be a new beginning. When she saw the little picture that Ursula had slipped beneath my pillow, I think she realized for the first time that for some, there is only one beginning and one end.

  Chapter 42

  The next morning the door to the barracks was opened by two policemen, who carried in the body of Ursula.

  She did not remain long in Down Street. For an instant we looked at her white face, her closed eyes, her blue lips; we saw the head fallen on the shoulder, and the dead hands.

  The Captain's door was closed to us all. Only a few officers entered for secret conferences.

  The body was taken away at once, no one knew exactly where, and the next day a lieutenant announced that Ursula Martin had been buried in the French military cemetery outside London. It was all done quickly, without fuss. The incident was quite annoying, very disagreeable. The sooner it was over with, the better.

  One of the corporals remarked that Ursula had always been a high-strung child, and that was her entire obituary.

  But Claude wept. She wept sincerely with all her heart, and she came to me, to Ursula's best friend, to accuse herself for the wrong she thought she had done to Ursula long ago.

  After a few days no one spoke any more about her, for their minds were full with preparations for departure. We scarcely went to our offices any more. We knew now that we were at last going to have active work to do—with the wounded, driving trucks and jeeps on the bombed-out roads, working in the newly liberated towns as telephone girls, as interpreters, in liaison, and as guards. We wanted only to leave as soon as possible.

  Some days later, I learned that before his departure Michel had left a thick portfolio with his Polish friends. The portfolio contained poems he had written, as well as his diary. From what we knew of Michel, of his sense of beauty, of his sensitivity, and from what Ursula had said of his poe
ms, portions of which Michel had read to her, it seemed certain that this unique work of Michel's was truly precious. But there was a formal direction left with the portfolio: "In case of the death of Michel Levy, please burn these papers at once, without reading."

  The young Polish sergeant spoke about the matter to Mickey and Jacqueline and me. We were all absolutely of the opinion that Michel's instructions should be disregarded, that the poems had to be preserved. We felt that their value—of which we were certain—was more important than compliance with his last instruction.

  But the Polish sergeant, a simple, direct lad, knew only one thing. He had promised to obey the instruction, it was the wish of the dead, and therefore he had to burn the papers. We attempted to explain our point of view to him, to plead the cause of beauty and of poetry. It was the only thing that remained of Michel, we said. Ursula and his child no longer existed; at least his thoughts should remain.

  But the sergeant burned the papers.

  That night I wept for a long time. I promised myself that at least if I ever had a son, I would name him Michel. With all my strength, I wanted in some way to fill the emptiness that had come into the world where there had been a voice that had something real to say, and that had been destroyed.

  I thought of all of my friends from this little room, and what had happened to them. First Jacqueline had lost John, and now Ursula and Michel were gone. And it had only begun. I felt them coming as though within myself, all the young, the girls and the men who approached in an endless line, the dead, all the dead who were being sacrificed without anyone knowing why.

  Epilogue

  It was eleven o'clock in the evening. We were tired, and nearly all of us were already in bed. Ginette was brushing her hair, and Ann was still in the bathroom.

  The guards were on the roof, watching for bombs. They telephoned to Claude to ask for hot coffee, and Monique, who happened to be in the hall, said she would go down to the basement to prepare it. Monique had just gone down to the kitchen when a terrific explosion resounded all around us. In the same second the lights went out, and stones and planks and chunks of plaster and pieces of window rained down upon us. I heard Ginette scream, and cries went up from all over the house.

  After a time that seemed endless to us, we came to realize that a V-2 had fallen on Down Street. I remember that I was first of all stricken with astonishment. For four years we had seen buildings crumble all around us, but it seemed impossible that such a thing could happen now to us.

  I moved carefully and stood up. I was unhurt. Ginette was bleeding, but she could walk. We felt our way forward in the darkness, climbing over piles of rubble until we found the door of the room. When I opened it, I saw that the hall was filled with women in pajamas. Someone had found a candle, and its flame cast a flickering light over the scene. The entrance to the building had been torn out, and with it the entire front of the house.

  Already groups were climbing over the debris to reach the street. Presently we were all outdoors, and people came running toward us with flashlights. We were cold, and Ginette was wiping her bleeding forehead with a piece of cloth torn from her nightgown.

  Opposite us was the big hotel, where a dance was going on. It was there that the ARP took us, and we made a sensational entrance in our torn nightclothes, with our faces covered with dust and blood, with our scratched bare feet and our still half-awakened air.

  We were put to bed in the Turkish bath.

  The next morning, in the graying dawn, I looked again on Down Street. The house was a ruin of blackened bricks, disemboweled, open to the sky, with its rafters torn from their moorings, its stones crushed, its windows smashed, its doors hurled from their frames. In a cluttered hole there was a barrel from which a red stream dribbled, forming a puddle, and under this mass of wreckage, of planks and iron and glass and shrapnel, the ARP searched with their shovels for the body of Monique, entombed in the ruins of the kitchen.

  This was my last memory of Down Street. I gazed for a long while at the annihilated switchboard room, at the great assembly hall open to all the winds, at the bleeding, crushed house.

  Standing beside me, I saw the Ambassador of Peru. And he too was gazing, with a very thin smile, scarcely perceptible, on his overred lips.

  Three days later we landed in France.

  The End

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Translator’s Preface

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue