by Marge Piercy
15 avril 1944
We have a new radioman, parachuted in. He is from Louisiana and he speaks a peculiar slurry French. He is called Achille, a devout Catholic who keeps aloof from the Jews he finds himself among. There is no difficulty getting him to move promptly when he completes a transmission. He is neat and keeps his gear together and ready to clear out the door within five minutes of finishing a broadcast. He will probably survive a lot longer than the more gregarious and comfort-loving Raymond. Jeff finds him efficient but complains he cannot establish the rapport he had with Raymond. I don’t like the way he looks at me since he learned I am Jeff’s lover. He views me as a whore, I believe. Achille is uncomfortable with us and therefore despises us. It was a great relief to place him in Cambon, in the mountains near Lacaune, and return to Toulouse without him.
18 avril 1944
I have just been reflecting how you are not supposed to say men are beautiful, and yet that contradicts my deepest experience, because Jeff is beautiful in his body and his face and his movements and his little gestures. He uses his hands more than most Americans I’ve observed, perhaps unconsciously adopting that custom from us. But he has a great stillness that I adore, when he sits and sits and stares and stares while his eyes devour the world.
When he wears that intent, amazed expression, I ask him what he is thinking about. Half the time he’ll insist he wasn’t thinking about anything, but if I persist, I find he was studying the light on the cypress needles or on the bricks, or the color of the shadow of a cloud or the particular green of the grass along the canal. Therefore I do not fall into the error I have often heard lovers make of saying, We are just the same, we are one. Jeff is not like me inside. Light and color move him the way words or ideas move me. Sometimes when he stares at a hill patchworked with vines and wheat, his hands move in his lap or in the air as if they are stroking something. He picks up an apple and turns it in his hands as if it were a small world; then he doesn’t hear what the others are saying.
Usually I go home to Daniela every night, but if we are caught by curfew or out on an action together, then I sleep in Jeff’s room overlooking the crowded cemetery. One way in which we are different always comes out then, because Jeff has a passion for making plans for after the war. He wants me to play let’s pretend with him, but for me that is all it is, a game to pacify him. I think of Larousse’s thin torn body, white as whey, and while I have never longed more fiercely to live and go on living, I cannot believe in plans.
Jeff needs to dwell on a future in which we will be together, here, a future in which he paints and we make a living in some pleasant way. Me, when I think about afterward, I imagine sitting in an easy chair in my own room safely reading a book while Bach plays. I remember certain dishes: veal in mustard sauce, challah, financier cake with almonds, butter on croissants, butter on beans, butter on potatoes. Real coffee thick with creamy milk. That is all I let myself imagine.
I do not love him any less than he loves me, but I cannot want the way he does—I don’t believe in the world that much. No, I take what we have and cherish it and live it. If we should die together at once, suddenly, that would not be so bad as many likelier fates. A moment of painful surprise and then silence. Following all this joy.
20 avril 1944
We have never been busier, with more and more sabotage to be carried out. We do collect important information for Jeff to code and transmit through Achille to London, through the National Nitrogen Board, through the Resistance-Fer, through Thibaut in the mairie, through Margot in the Milice office. Sometimes the BBC broadcast specifically assigns us targets—shipments, troop movements, factories, bridges.
Tonight there were three different actions to be carried out. Lev was taking two men out of Toulouse to join the maquis at Cambon. Daniela was to coordinate the distribution of the new issue of Quand Même, the Jewish paper. Jeff and I, along with Roger, were going to sabotage a plaque tournante, an electrical turntable in a roundhouse. Locomotives are serviced in the roundhouse. Tonight there were twenty-four inside. The engine is driven onto a turntable until it balances on the pivot, then it turns around to the exit rails. Two charges placed just right on the pivots—taped there—will do damage quite neatly, injure no one and require replacement of the pivot—a job that can tie up all the engines in a roundhouse for a good long time.
I have proved quite tidy with explosives. Small deft hands are an advantage. I have learned how to place the charges so exactly that I require only a narrow beam flash. I handle the plastique almost casually now—never without caution, but no longer do my hands sweat themselves slippery. I must remark that I have noticed as soon as I began work with plastique, it lost its charisma. It became a tool, merely. The Sten guns remain the province of men and therefore potent, but plastique has been reduced by the touch of a woman to something like explosive dough. The men no longer compete to handle it.
When I kneel to wedge the half hour time pencils—they have to go off simultaneously—the night seems preternaturally quiet. Every movement of my fingers sounds abruptly magnified. My knees crack like castanets. Time feels elastic, stretched and stretched and about to snap back suddenly. Yet when I finish, I must force myself to leave. I want to hang around and watch, drawn back to the heavy machinery with its reek of oil and power.
In another existence, I would deal with these huge machines that are like dumb and amazingly strong dinosaurs, and lead them through their paces. I would be one of those women from Soviet posters who drive earthmoving equipment and build dams. Like Daniela’s friend on the kibbutz, I would fight the men for the right to drive the tractor. Machines make us powerful, too. With a machine I can pick up a house. With a machine I can carry tons of coal. With a machine I can dig a hole through a mountain.
Tonight I sleep at Jeff’s, and he is waiting impatiently for me now, so I will end. After an action, it is hard to go right to sleep.
21 avril 1944
This morning I was asleep when Lev burst in. “They caught Daniela last night. They’ve got her at the Milice barracks and this morning they’re taking her to the prison. We’re going to attack the truck.”
I could not speak. I thrust on my clothes and checked my stolen Luger, slid it under my old blanket of a coat and stood waiting.
“Not you,” Lev said.
“Yes, me,” I said. “Daniela is my sister. You can’t stop me from going. I have little enough family left.”
Jeff was dressed now, that pointed foxy look he has before action. “Do you have a plan? Let’s hear it.”
Lev leaned over the rickety table by the window. “This is the prison truck.” He moved a pencil along. “This is the gazogène truck. It pulls from a side street across. Blam. They collide. Here’s the Renault coming up behind. We open fire and then we grab her. It’s our only chance.”
I tell the truth when I say I didn’t care if it was a good plan or a bad one. I had to take Daniela back or die. That was all. I needed to be acting, doing. I wanted to strike Jeff and shake Lev hard, to get them moving. Jeff argued, “The truck hits the armored truck, okay, but you don’t want them to come out firing. Jacqueline is in the truck, but she’s pregnant. She’s in labor. She’s on her way to the hospital. She starts screaming and moaning and groaning. Roger is with her, he’s the husband. You and I are behind in the Renault. Roger and Jacqueline create a diversion begging the police for help.”
“As long as I have my weapon.”
“No,” Jeff said. “You have to look pregnant.”
“I’ll be pregnant. Look.” I grabbed the cushion from the chair, but to myself I thought, Okay, but I’ll give birth to a revolver.
At the moment in the street, actually bruised and shaken from the accident and with blood trickling from a cut in my forehead, I found myself proved right about the need for my weapon. The guards had smashed Roger against the steaming hood of the truck and were kicking him and searching him. Me they left lying on the street moaning, with the pillow giving me a vast
whale belly. One of the policemen casually kicked me, but they had left me there like a pile of laundry while they beat Roger and then when he tried to argue with them, they smashed him over the head with the butt of a pistol. When I heard the first shots from the back of the prison truck, I fired on the guards as they turned, weapons in hand.
I think tonight of all the times Daniela and I have talked about violence and when it is justified and whether even then we could or we couldn’t kill, and I am amazed, both proud and aghast at what has happened to me in this war, that I shot without thinking and accurately. It was decided by all sides long before, the police that they would capture and kill Jews and resistants, the resistants that we would fight back.
Roger was out cold from the blow to his head. The gazogène truck was wrecked. Pillow flopping out, I dragged Roger by the leg around to the Renault. They had Daniela, half carried between them. Lev slid in to drive. Another dead policeman lay half out of the prison truck, broken open like a can. Lev bent a fender backing out of the narrow street. Then he was off at full speed, while I held Daniela, shaking against me. We were jammed in, six in a car built for four adults.
“Hold me gently,” Daniela said in a cracked voice, “I’m banged up. Do you have anything to drink?”
Lev passed back a flask. “Here.”
Daniela shook her head. “Water, I mean.”
“Drink this now,” I ordered her, wondering what she would say when she found out it was me who shot the two Milice. I decided not to mention it. “How did they get you?”
“They busted the whole Quand Même staff. Everybody.” Daniela sipped the brandy and gagged. “We can’t go back to the garage. They have my address. Did they pick up the Fauriers?”
“No,” Lev assured her, driving fast. “When you didn’t come home, they packed up the kids and came to me. They should already be at Lacaune. We all better clear out of Toulouse. I’ve got the boys moving the weapons. We’ll have to take to the brush just like Lapin. At least spring is here. Daniela … what did they do to you?”
“They roughed me up. They knew they had to hand me over to the Gestapo, so they were just amusing themselves.”
“Did they rape you?”
“Is that all men can think of to ask? No. But I have a couple of broken ribs. With every breath, my side feels pierced. When the two trucks hit each other, I thought we’d gone over a mine. Could we get these chains off?”
“Soon,” I promised, wanting to hold Daniela close but fearful of hurting her more.
“At least they didn’t rape you,” Lev repeated.
“Thank you for taking such an interest,” Daniela said. “What’s wrong with Roger?”
“He’s coming to,” Jeff said. “We’ll have to get him looked at.”
“Who’s to look at him besides me?” Daniela said. “I’ll give you instructions for taping my ribs as soon as we’re where we’re going. Soon. Please soon. I’m terrified the rib may pierce my lung.”
I have to say that in spite of Daniela’s condition. I felt as if my blood were fermenting with happiness, for Daniela had been taken from me and now we had taken her back. She lay against me, her eyes shutting, half unconscious in a trance of pain. At one point she opened her eyes, touched my face and murmured, “There’s blood all over you.”
I had forgotten that my forehead was cut where the Milice struck me when he knocked me down. I must say, I do not give a damn. If it leaves a scar, I can wear bangs. Daniela is taken back. I feel drugged with the poisons of fatigue and the ashy residue of excitement, but still happiness sings in me. She has been seized from death.
I don’t even care that we had to go off and leave Toulouse with no notice and no preparation. By now I have no possessions except my journal, worn around my neck in a bag, and my Luger. Here the season is a month behind Toulouse. Sometimes they get thirty centimeters of snow in the winter. These mountains are not grand and snowcapped like the Pyrénées or as lush as the Montagne Noire. Jeff says it looks like Dartmoor in England.
This is real maquis country, scrub growth, with huge bushes of broom and gorse and many grey rocks scattered about. Good country for shepherds and the sheep I can smell roasting downstairs in this abandoned farmhouse where we have taken up residence, made of stone picked up on the hillsides. Daniela has fallen into exhausted sleep, properly taped up—she instructed me as I worked on her, so that I felt like a doctor operating on a patient according to verbal instructions given as the operation proceeded! From the southernmost of these mountains you can look across the valley at the Montagne Noire, but we are high up in the moors. It is extremely quiet. We can hear for a long way and see, from the mountaintops, for a long way too. Here we are nestled near a fast-moving mountain brook that tumbles down from rock to rock, grey and splotched yellow green with lichens, that look in the stream like huge frogs. From our room upstairs we can hear the sound of the water plummeting down. Although we are safe noplace, here we can talk in normal voices and stay together as a family, among the sheep, the river and the rocks.
RUTHIE 7
Woman Is Born into Trouble as the Water Flows Downward
March was bitter and drab. The snows melted only to reveal the trash, the dog feces, the discarded orange rinds of winter, the sodden leaves of fall drained of color. Freezing rain fell, a phlegm of the air. Everyone was irritable and half the world had a hacking cough or the flu.
The war had gone on and gone on. Everybody was tired of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” and bond drives every month. People bitched about wage and price controls and shortages. Everybody knew someone who had made a killing in the black market. Half the time when Rose and Sharon did have enough red points or blue points to buy meat or canned goods or sugar, what they wanted didn’t exist. In March, already the union and the Democrats and Republicans were gearing up for the November election. The Russians were making a brave show, pushing the Germans back across the map, but in Italy, the front seemed stuck and casualties mounted.
Morris was attending a frenzy of meetings about the Jews of Hungary, who had survived the war until this spring but were now in grave danger, since the Germans, no longer trusting their allies the Hungarians, had taken over. Yet the State Department remained as hostile as ever toward intervening on behalf of Jews, and no government expressed interest in the negotiations to save that population. The British would not budge on refusing passage to Palestine. No country wanted more Jews, so they would go up the chimneys for lack of caring. Morris drafted letters, signed petitions, raised money, buttonholed his congressman. “The truth is,” he complained, “the Democratic party is giving us the finger, because they know we’re for Roosevelt and they don’t have to bargain for our votes.”
On the line at Briggs, Mary Lou was badly burned when a tank of oxygen exploded., Vivian and Ruthie decided to forgive her the anti-Semitic preacher and visit her in the hospital, but she was too doped up to know them. She kept saying, “It’s so lucky my face didn’t get burned,” lying swaddled to the neck in white wrappings.
Ruthie liked welding, liked working in the mask and gloves so that no one could guess her sex, liked the sense of being wrapped up in the tools and accouterments of her new trade. She was good and fast, and so was Vivian. When they learned new tricks, they taught each other.
Vivian wanted to continue after the war; she liked welding and she was making good money. Her one ambition was to get on the day shift, so that she could work the same hours as her husband when he came back from the Army. She didn’t worry as much about him as Ruthie did about Murray, because he was working in transportation. “They asked him what he did in civilian life. He said he built auto bodies. So they put him in the repair shop for jeeps and trucks. If he hadn’t used to work on this old Nash,” Vivian rapped the steering wheel, “I don’t think he would have known the first thing. I figure he’s okay if anybody is. He’s in Palermo.”
Murray sounded safe for the moment. He was back on Guadalcanal training. He said it was a differ
ent place, with movies and ice cream and real barracks. He talked a lot about his buddy Jack. He drew a picture of a land crab, which he said were like enormous cockroaches, got into everything and when they were crushed, stank of rotten fish. He did not mention his friend Harvey any longer, although she had asked about him.
Naomi had been having such bad nightmares that Ruthie had invited her to sleep in the upper bunk again. Naomi continued using Duvey’s old room for doing her homework but seemed a little afraid of sleeping there, mumbling about a dead man’s bed. Ruthie understood. At one point in her childhood, she would weep if she had to take the garbage out to the alley, because she developed a morbid fear of the rats scurrying there.
Naomi was asleep when she came in from work, so Ruthie undressed in the bathroom and slipped into her bunk. If she had studying to do or an exam the next morning, she could turn on a pinup lamp attached to the bedpost, prop her pillow against the wall and work without disturbing Naomi. Naomi moaned in her sleep and sometimes woke crying. Ruthie would stand beside the bunk brushing Naomi’s curly hair to soothe her, rubbing her shoulders.
Leib had been sent back to the States, to the government hospital in Ann Arbor, where they were getting ready to fit him with an artificial right foot. Trudi, who went up to see him every weekend, said he was a real hero about his foot. He was supposed to be discharged within a month. She had not been permitted to bring baby David, but she gave Leib twenty photos: baby David eating, baby David with a rattle, baby David in the arms of every relative down to second cousin.
“What’s a foot?” she said to Ruthie. “Wouldn’t you trade a foot any day to have Murray safe at home?”
It was a barbaric idea, trading parts of the man you loved for safety. “Will he be able to walk?”
“So he’ll walk with a limp. He can’t run bases or play basketball, but he’s a grown man, who needs that? He’ll get disability, but it’s not like he’s a cripple. When I think what could have happened to him! His mother goes up there and cries. I think that’s disgusting. I try to kid him around, so he knows he’s still my husband and I’m crazy to get him home.”
