Before Their Time: A Memoir (9 page)

And the French, where were they? Out of bounds. Off-limits. Not to be spoken to, not to be approached or touched, as though they, and not the Germans, were the real enemy. This hurt. What were we doing in France if not to liberate the population from the shame of humiliating
defeat and once again make the French-American alliance strong? But this was a question only I seemed to ask. No one else apparently gave it a thought. I was alone in the third platoon as a Francophile.

We were bivouacked between two small towns that maintained a closely linked existence, and communication was brisk between them. A steady bicycle traffic, moving in both directions, rolled along the road that bordered our orchard. We could catch a glimpse over the tops of our hedgerow from time to time of farmers driving an occasional vehicle, probably burning black-market Yankee gasoline, carrying a load of skimpy produce from one village to the other. I could hear conversations, too, fragments of the real thing, a sharp provincial French that was spoken at such speed that I could barely make a word out here and there.

But we could only look. Somehow the authorities—American? French? I never knew—had decided to keep us apart. Was it the fear that we might be infected by political ideas that would subvert our manly valor? Was it the possibility of catching a venereal disease, which we had been obsessively educated about from the day we entered the Army? Or was it just to save everyone from the sort of unpredictable trouble that often erupts when two people who are without a common language meet as occupier and occupied? Probably a bit of all three, and I resented it.

But the regulations didn’t always work. Accidental meetings took place. Unexpected confrontations happened. We were all witness to them, mostly on our morning hikes where contact was unavoidable. One morning, for example, heading along a dirt road that ran through the
back countryside, loping dreamily along, we passed a small stone house set a couple of feet back from the road. There were no other houses nearby; it was perfectly isolated and perfectly ordinary. (That morning we were just the third platoon, swinging along under Lieutenant Gallagher’s easy direction, enjoying the sharp saline smell that swept in from the coast with the morning fog.) The house, which seemed to speak precisely of Normandy, was shaded by an enormous ancient fruit tree. A sweet glimpse, I thought, of the true pastoral France.

We slowed down as we stepped by; everyone wanted a look, I guess. I saw a small child, a girl maybe three years old, standing in the open doorway of the house, dressed in a blue peasant smock. She was sucking her thumb and gazing at her feet shyly, pretending not to see us.
“Bon-jour!”
I shouted, happy to be actually speaking French. Almost instantly, at my greeting, a hand reached through the doorway, grabbed the child by the shoulder, and pulled her inside. Then an angry wizened face, an old woman’s furious face, glowered at us a moment from the door, and disappeared. What was that, I wondered? We marched on, Gallagher suddenly giving the count in a loud voice. I looked back, hoping to see more, still wondering, but there was nothing, only an empty doorway and a giant fruit tree shading an old stone house.

The experience was repeated a few days later, with a single variation. As we neared the house a second time, the child seemed to be waiting for us in the doorway, still sucking her thumb, still gazing at her feet. Once again, she was wearing her blue smock. This morning I did not shout a greeting. Nevertheless, as we passed, the child was again
pulled inside the house, this time by a young woman wearing overalls and wooden shoes, and with a scarf covering her head.

Before she disappeared, the young woman took a moment to stare at us. I saw her lips move as she said something to the child. Or to us, it was hard to tell. Then we were on our way again, Gallagher picking up the count in a loud voice, as he had the first time, moving along fast, as though he wanted to put the scene behind us.

Of course, I began to think about the two women and the child, vague thoughts that never really came into focus, and I guess others did, too. But, in fact, none of us found the incident important enough to mention. By afternoon, we were back to bayonet practice and silly lectures.

It happened only once again. This time, perhaps a week later, Gallagher decided that the platoon would take a break in the field that adjoined the stone house. There was plenty of room, no trees, level ground. Even so, I found this decision a little strange, as though Gallagher was asking for trouble, as though he wanted to precipitate some action, something he had an instinct for at times. We headed for the field, sprawled out back-to-back as we always did, lazed, and smoked. There was a certain amount of easy chatter, I remember; we were still cheerful at that time. In a moment or two, while we rested there, the old woman, the ancient crone we had seen the first day, appeared from the house. She stood at the edge of the field, shaking her fist in the air and declaiming at us. It was a kind of outraged keen, filled with incomprehensible words, both bitter-sounding and threatening.

The platoon was embarrassed. We stirred uncomfortably and tried to look away. It was clear to everyone that
we were probably trespassing on the old woman’s property, that we had invaded her privacy. While she shouted at us, the child appeared at her side. She was wearing the same blue smock and was still unsmiling. Behind them, in a window of the house, we caught a glimpse of the young woman, the one we had seen a week before, hiding in the shadows. Today she was not wearing a scarf over her head. She was bareheaded, and bald.

“Jesus, did you see that?” Fedderman cried out. For once, he lost his blasé air.

“On your feet, men,” Gallagher ordered, turning his back on the old woman and the house.

“What was it?” Bern asked.

Willis and Johnson and Natale were staring at the house. Barney Barnato looked cynical. Rocky was lining us up, one by one, as though we were still in basic training, urging us to move fast. The other squads were already on the road. Then the child began to cry as the old woman shoved her toward the house. I could see her pinching the child’s shoulders. We saw the young woman again in the same window, a moment’s glimpse of a nearly bare skull, with a faint, thin fuzz sprouting from it.

“What was it?” Bern asked again, looking back.

But we were already on our way and Gallagher was trying to get us to sing. (Another lost cause.) “Fedderman,” Bern pleaded.

“She’s a collaborator!” Ira shouted, over his shoulder. He was excited. “She slept with the Germans. You can tell from her hair. That’s what the French do to collaborators, shave their heads. She’s a collaborator whore.”

We marched on through the suddenly sour air. Nobody spoke. I could tell that Bern was mulling it over. So was I.
Bern had his Catholic judgmental face on, disapproval and disappointment all over it, and I was sure I looked the same. Our moral balance had been upset. Ambiguities suddenly shaded the Normandy landscape.

How could Fedderman be so sure that the woman was a whore? What did he know about collaboration? He was assuming too much, as always. Maybe she was just a (slightly stupid) peasant girl who had fallen in love with
ein deutsch Soldat
(also slightly stupid) who happened to be stationed in the area … at a time when it was easy to fall in love. Suppose, in fact, that she had been raped by a German soldier or that someone with a grudge had informed against her, or any one of many other possibilities, all of which seemed plausible to me.

And what about the child? Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord (at his worst), but surely the child was an innocent. I had never before thought of French collaboration with the Germans in such immediate, human terms. The truth was that I had never thought of French collaboration in any terms. Probably the idea was too painful to consider. I would have to pay closer attention, start to ponder a little, try to keep my expectations from fogging the truth.

It was life close to the bone, I told myself.

ONCE again, our world was changing. The witching hour was approaching. We began to wake up, as though an alarm had been sounded. Had the Ninth Army finally reached full strength? Were all the fresh divisions in place, eager for action, ready to move to Lille, Amiens, or Roubaix? (I had never heard of Roubaix.) No one was talking this time. Gallagher was keeping his mouth shut. The
subject was off-limits. This made it even more real, more foreboding.
Ro-ses are smi-ling in Pi-car-dy …

Daily training became serious again. (It was hard for me not to link this childishly with the dark fate of the bald young woman in the stone house, as though she had hexed us, as though we needed hexing.) Antonovich’s and Gallagher’s lectures ended. Guard duty was rotated by the numbers, in strict fashion. All other duties were handled in the same rigorous way. There was a company forced march every other day (no more sweet little five-mile trots at our own pace)—led by Antonovich, who was seriously out of shape after weeks in the Normandy countryside—with weapons, ammo, and full-field packs, twenty to twenty-five miles at top speed, and barely a break at the end of each hour. Every forced march was like another small death for each of us, but especially for Ira Fedderman.

It damn near broke my heart one morning to see Fedderman struggling in front of me at about the fifth mile of a twenty-mile march. His fat, squat thighs were desperately pumping away as we raced along. Every few seconds, an asthmatic wheeze cut his breath like splinters of glass, while bits and pieces of equipment fell out of his pack as it slid lower and lower onto his powerful haunches. He still couldn’t roll a decent pack, despite my hectoring.

At the end of another mile, barely ten minutes later, Fedderman stumbled once, held on a moment, and cried out in a weak voice. Then he went down on his knees before collapsing flat out into a massive heap. I could hear him struggling for breath as I stepped over him; by then I was also struggling for breath.

“Keep going, men,” Rocky called out, calmly moving out of line to stand alongside Fedderman. “Eyes ahead.”

A few minutes later, as we stumbled along, Fedderman passed us stretched out in the back of a jeep that always followed the company on forced marches for just such emergencies. I could see that he was weeping quietly. I didn’t want to be a witness to that. I had never seen Fedderman cry. I had never seen anyone in the first squad cry. We all looked away, Rocky biting his lips with bitter regret, I’m sure. It was a demoralizing sight. It was terrible.

IT MUST have been intolerable for Fedderman to fail like that, almost as a way of life. In the days that followed, it seemed to me, his emotional temperature dropped; the Fedderman fires, which always burned so intensely, had been tamped down by too many misadventures. I felt it most strongly inside our tent at night, while he slept his vulnerable sleep alongside me, snoring his heavy snores, the raspy snores of an asthmatic, dreaming his (undoubtedly) bad dreams. We never spoke about his collapse. I pretended that it had never happened. Fedderman, however, somehow made it through the next march, and the next—last man in the company column, a hundred yards behind the rest of us. But he made it. We never spoke about that either. I left him strictly alone, as we all did, and after that I stopped nagging him. Let him be a slob, I thought. Let him be whatever he had to be.

AS LIFE began to change, the first squad changed with it. Some of our efficiency unraveled, and with it our sense of our own capabilities—all hard-won at Camp Jackson and later and not an easy loss for an infantry unit to accept.
(This must have been happening throughout the YD, as tension spiraled and rumors about the future spread.) Rocky’s authority lost just a bit of its luster, and there were breaches of conduct and trust among the squad members, sometimes expressed in unexpected aberrant conversations.

Late one night, for example, as we shared guard duty in the damp chill that had come over Normandy in early fall, Barney Barnato sidled up to me in the dark and put his mouth close to my ear. “Kid,” he said. Just like that. As though we were old pals. I pulled away. Like Bern, I preferred not to get too close to Barney. I always kept my distance. I was afraid he might get stuck to me for life if I came too close.

“You’re nervous,” Barney said, in a whisper. “I can feel it. You shouldn’t be nervous with me. It’s only Barney.” It was two o’clock in the morning, the sky was streaked with the potent light of constellations that seemed to be a mere five feet away. Reach out and you could almost touch them. “It’s cold,” Barney said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Barney said. “You’re not a child anymore. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I knew what was coming. (It had been worrying me ever since Barney got back from his emergency furlough after maneuvers; it had been worrying Bern, too, who had made his judgment a long time ago.) I stood still, stupidly waiting. I knew it would be over soon. Another terse remark, deadpanned in that unplaceable accent, an innuendo, a verbal lure, and I would cut him dead, or worse. But I was wrong.

“Ever read Chopenauer?” Barney asked, whispering again.

The question confused me. I looked for a trick. Barney did that to you. You were always prepared for a secret side. “No,” I said. I could see Barney shaking his head in the dark, as though I was hopeless. And damned if I didn’t feel inadequate in the face of his disapproval.

“Too heavy for you?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Barney looked to the right and the left, massaging himself to keep warm.

“Do you know what Chopenauer said about women?” he then asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“You told us. Back in the States.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Women get pregnant. It’s what they were made for.”

“What they were made for,” he said, sounding disgusted. “It’s always so simple for you Americans. You’re just like children. No subtleness. Maybe you should read something else besides Dick Tracy.”

That stung. I wanted to say that I didn’t read Dick Tracy anymore. I finished with that long ago. But I had read Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, and I probably could get interested in Schopenhauer, too. But it was too late to say all that. I could feel Barney withdrawing. The cryptic exchange was over. He wasn’t interested in the likes of me. I had made a wrong assumption. I had been prepared for an unwelcome confrontation—he had prepared me for it—and all there was in the end was verbal dithering.