Gone to Soldiers (105 page)

Afterwards Sharon and Trudi laid out Ruthie's best dresses on the bed. They were not impressed. “You've been wearing this red taffeta number since we were in high school,” Trudi said. “We have to take you shopping.”

Ruthie insisted on her pink chiffon. “Just take a couple of pictures, please. I want to send him a picture of me in this dress.”

“A summer dress when it's forty degrees out? He'll think you're crazy.”

“No he won't, I promise. It's his favorite dress,” she babbled. “Please, just take a couple of pictures of me in it and then I'll put on anything you tell me to. Okay?”

Trudi had a Brownie box camera that had been Leib's. With it he had taken a dozen pictures of Ruthie which she wished she could reclaim, if he still had them. She did not dare raise the subject with Trudi, who remained sensitive about Ruthie's having gone out with Leib.

“Where is Leib?” she asked cautiously, as Sharon zipped her into the pink chiffon. It was loose. Ruthie hoped she hadn't lost weight on her bust. She suddenly wanted to make Murray love her, because she was sure he had come as close to forgetting her as she had to forgetting him.

Trudi blew out her breath. “At a football game. Fatty got him two tickets to the Lions, and he took this guy Moose he met in Fatty's bar. He didn't even ask me if I wanted to go.”

“Do you like football?”

“I hate it, and I'd freeze to death in the stands. But I feel like he should ask me if I want to go, instead of going right ahead and asking Moose without saying boo to me.”

“Is Moose Jewish?” Sharon asked.

“Sure. But he's a crook.” Trudi sighed heavily. “The doctor says Leib can't stand all day on the line. I wish he'd go to school like you, Ruthie. The government passed this new bill where they'll pay for it.”

“Really?” Ruthie smoothed creases that came from the chiffon hanging undisturbed in her closet since that time with Murray. “I wonder if Murray knows? I'll write him about it.”

“I'll show you the pamphlet the government sent Leib.”

On the porch railing, Ruthie arranged herself with the coat open trying to smile at the camera as if it were Murray. She remembered the rich warm brown of his eyes with the little flecks of gold in the iris. Had she aged? Had she grown skinny, scrawny? It was as if her body had ceased to exist, and now she was trying to show it off.

She did not know if she was still attractive. The men at the factory had got used to working with women and they knew who was interested and who was not. It had been a long time since any of them had pestered her, more than pro forma. Her classes were ninety percent women. She wondered if Murray would find her withered into an old maid. That was what Leib kept saying about her. Why should she believe Leib? She kept away from him. She spent time at Wayne partially because with the house so crowded, it was hard to study, and partially because she did not like being around Leib, and she never knew when he was going to appear. Yet everybody else seemed to think they were one happy family.

Naomi spent a lot of time upstairs, baby-sitting. However, Ruthie was looking around for a better job for her. Child labor laws had been allowed to lapse for the duration, so kids were quitting school for factory jobs. She wanted to make sure that Naomi stayed in school, but she also thought it would be better if Naomi had a different job.

Now there was a real possibility of her being taken on in the bakery where the Fennimans were shorthanded, after school and Sundays. Naomi would make twice what she made baby-sitting and bring home leftover bread, on the occasions there was any. Ruthie's main aim, aside from thinking that an outside job would be good for Naomi, was to get her away from Leib. Leib had made a pet of the girl, who obviously worshiped him.

She did not really suspect Leib of anything concrete; after all, he had Trudi around and they went at it often enough, as everybody beneath them could testify. She felt he took advantage of Naomi's puppy love and drew her away from friends her own age. Naomi was growing up fast, filling out, shooting up. One day, Ruthie realized that Naomi was taller than everybody in the house except Leib.

Naomi's boyfriend Alvin was crazy about her. Naomi liked him, but that was about it. Ruthie could remember clearly that stage when a girl wanted a boyfriend but could not understand what all the fussing and deep breathing were about. Alvin seemed fine to Ruthie; she did not think he would lean too hard on Naomi, and she judged that Naomi could handle him. Of course she could understand Naomi having a crush on Leib, because romantic feelings for a man you could not have were easier to sustain—and far safer—than developing romantic feelings for Alvin, who after all was just a lumpy overgrown boy a little less smart than Naomi. Ultimately she did not believe in subjecting Leib to temptation. When they finished the picture taking, she would go to the bakery to see if the Fennimans had decided. Mrs. Fenniman particularly liked Naomi, whom she described as a brave girl, although Ruthie could not imagine why.

She tried the taffeta dress, but as Sharon and Trudi both pointed out, it had seen better days. Finally she put on the green velvet, bought on the layaway all through her last winter at Sam's. It needed brushing from hanging so long, but it still looked handsome. Trudi marched her out to the porch again. “That's good. Now smile. Get rid of the sour puss.”

“Wait, I want to put on the earrings he gave me. There.”

“Think about Rose coming home with a big fat goose,” Sharon murmured seductively. “Think of the goose fat rendering, the way the whole house is perfumed. Think about the stuffing with the apples and the dried apricots. Think about how she makes the skin brown and crispy.”

Boston Blackie, who loved the green dress, leaped up to sit in her slanted lap as she perched on the railing, holding on tight.

Rose did come back with a goose. It was a little over the hill, a little tough, but it was a real goose. When Ruthie got home from the swing shift, the goose was hung for the night, and Boston Blackie was in disgrace. He had climbed up the pantry door and bitten a mouthful of feathers. Now he was exiled to the basement. When everybody else had gone to bed, Ruthie called him to her room, where he climbed into bed with Naomi, who was moaning in her sleep. She had too many bad dreams, Ruthie thought, clucking over her, uncertain if she should wake her or let her sleep. Sleep had come to seem so precious to Ruthie during her years of always being short, that she let Naomi alone.

Thanksgiving, they had both the goose and a chicken, the latter for the children, for whom goose was considered too rich, and for Trudi who liked only white meat. Thanksgiving 1944, it seemed the democracies would survive and that the Fascists would finally be beaten. By next Thanksgiving, would Murray be with her? Would she be married?

Naomi had written to her mother in Paris at the old address, but the letter had come back two months later. Morris said he would begin inquiries through the Jewish agencies, now that France was almost liberated. The Germans held only pockets near the Swiss and Belgian borders. Morris went to the Joint and to the Emergency Committee and returned with some Paris addresses. He wrote a letter in Yiddish and Naomi wrote in French. When Naomi got home from school every day, the first thing she did, Rose said, was to check the mail and then look in the mailbox to make sure nothing had been missed. Letters from Europe, she kept saying, were very thin. They could easily get lost.

Secretly Morris said to Ruthie that he thought that it was probable all of the Lévy-Monot family had been killed. With France liberated, a letter would have come if there were anyone to write it. Ruthie agreed.

Ruthie too found her interest in the mail quickened. Murray had received the first of her letters stimulated by the revived hope she felt, and he responded in kind. His letters began to sound as if they came from the person she remembered. They were longer, full of anecdote. He had read
One World
and had an interesting conversation with Slo Mo about world government. What did she think of the idea?

He had also been reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

You wouldn't think I'd be reading a war novel, but I read whatever I can lay my hands on. It feels great to read again. My brain wakes up. That novel made me think about the differences between fighting a war in your own country, and in other people's. I wouldn't be nearly so lonely and we could see each other often. And my family too. But then it's your real estate and your civilians and ultimately your family that gets it
.

Then the photos came. He said he remembered that dress, but that she should not look so sad when she wore it. She should look happy remembering him and thinking of when they would be together again. He said he liked best the one sitting on the porch railing with the cat, because she looked as if she was thinking about Murray and wanted to kiss him, and just looking at it made him want to fly right out through the barrack roof and rocket through the air like Superman, just to be with her for five minutes. I know what you were thinking about in that picture, he wrote. Ruthie smiled.

He said that the new legislation was good, and he'd go to school under it as soon as the war was over. No, he didn't want to live in an apartment. He didn't care if he had to commute. He wanted a house, a real house with a yard and just them, nobody else.

At that, Ruthie frowned, because she planned to take Naomi with her. She did not believe anyone in Naomi's family was left to claim her. She would not argue with Murray through the mails. She would worry about that when he was home.

He hardly knew Naomi, and Naomi hardly knew him. It would sort itself out. When Naomi spoke, most of the time she sounded like any other American teenager—a new word everyone was using and that Ruthie found herself adopting. Naomi had drawn back a little from her gang, although she still hung out with them. They did not seem to Ruthie as tough or menacing as they had. With Naomi's improved performance in school, Ruthie began to talk to her about college. She encountered in Naomi an unwillingness, almost a fear, of discussing the future.

“I don't know!” Naomi would say, turning her face away and tensing her shoulders. “Why talk about that now? What's the point?”

Trying to read through the official line of the newspaper stories, which week after week claimed that Peleliu was almost practically just about conquered, and yet the next day there was more fighting to report, she prayed that maybe the next island in the chain would not be so bloody or so hard. Murray wrote of training, and she wondered what the Marines planned to do with him next. His letters had become more emotional lately, desperate-sounding. One night she dreamed he was crying alone in a forest of tall dark trees. He was calling her, but she could not find him. She could see him very clearly sitting with his head in his hands crying as a woman would cry, but she could not reach him though she ran and ran.

JACQUELINE 11

Arbeitsjuden Verbraucht

They were still together, Daniela and she, and for that and that only Jacqueline could be glad. She was not sure yet, now that she understood the kapo's jokes about up the chimneys, that she should rejoice that Daniela and she had been selected as strong healthy specimens. Two thirds of their transport—two thirds that is of those who staggered from the cars still alive by the end of the fourth day without food or water and who had not been shot or clubbed to death in transit—had been sent by Dr. Mengele to the left. All the children, people above thirty-five, all women with small children, most of those wearing glasses or with a limp, had been sent to the left. For the first three weeks, while they were quarantined in barracks where they lay on filthy straw without room to stretch out a leg or an arm, Daniela and she had imagined that those spared what had been done to them must be better off. “Why didn't the cheminots sabotage the train?” Daniela kept asking. “Why? They know which trains are full of Jews and resistants. Why don't they attack?”

In herds of women lashed and beaten, she was stripped, tattooed, shaved of her head and body hair. She found in herself impassivity like a stone to be sucked in raging thirst and found outside Daniela, whom she set herself to keep always in her sight. What is done to her I can endure too. She found in herself intelligence sharp as a whetted knife. Why do they do this to us? First, they intend to treat us as beasts, so they try to make us beasts. We have no names, no clothing, nothing individual. We are forced to live in terror as if it were the air we take into our lungs. The skinnier, the uglier, the more scabrous, the filthier we are, the greater superiority they can feel. They rub our faces in our dirt so we may stink to them, and to ourselves.

Now they were out of quarantine. Those who had survived were routed out for morning appel, when they stood in thin grey shifts and outsized wooden clogs in the rain or with the sun burning their newly shaven heads for two to three hours, and again in the evening. Sometimes they were marched out for slave auctions, for entrepreneurs and businessmen to select workers. Rumors ran through the barracks, where sleep was always difficult in the stench and overcrowding and noise, of freedom, of punishment, of what was or wasn't going to happen to them or to others. Huge bold rats waddled around chewing on the corpses and attacking the living. Mice infested the straw. Some days they were marched out to carry huge stones they could barely lift from one end of camp to another, work without purpose or end, designed only to exhaust and punish and finally kill. To fall into the mud would be the end, to suffocate in mud.

Death surrounded them, women pulled out of line and beaten to death for some fancied tone of voice or look, women shot for stumbling, for stooping to pick up a potato peeling. Every morning corpses lay in the crowded bunks with the living, women who died during the night of starvation, of overwork, of a severe beating that had left internal injuries. Their bodies were rolled out like logs and stacked. Every dawn and every evening appel, more women dropped and were taken to be burned.