Gone to Soldiers (111 page)

His body came around her like a fist and held her hot and tight. He had kept his word and he had not yet entered her, but that was all he had not done. Each time she imagined she would say no, but when he reached for her, she could not say anything. She was bad: that was all there was to it.

Sometimes she imagined him carrying her off to be together finally someplace else, anyplace else. Yet she liked Trudi. Trudi was friendly to her, while she was deceiving Trudi. She was Trudi's secret enemy. Ruthie had made her escape easier by arranging for the bakery job. Now she had no reason to be upstairs, and stayed away from Leib as much as she could. Yet from time to time, they would be alone in the house and he would call her and she would go to him.

Alvin had a job too, loading trucks at the
Detroit News
. Neither of them had much time to hang around with the gang. Even Four Eyes had a job, off the books for a numbers runner. Only Sandy did not work; her mother thought it unladylike. She was so bored, she hung around their house whenever she could escape her mother's surveillance. Sometimes Naomi worried that Leib would go after Sandy while she was working, but he claimed not to find her attractive. Leib was busy too, studying for his real estate license. Leib and his buddy Fats said there was going to be a real estate boom when the troops came home.

Alvin and she went to the movies every Saturday night and sometimes Sunday night too, because Alvin had money in his pocket.

“Sometimes I think I should quit school,” Alvin said. “Why hang around getting a diploma nobody cares about? My uncle Barney, he went to college and he ended up in a shoe store and thought he was lucky. Now he's a clerk in the Quartermaster Corps. I could make more money than he ever earned, right now, tomorrow, if I quit school.”

“What does your mother say?”

“What does she ever say? Go to college. Get learning. Don't be a goyisher kopf. She doesn't see there's opportunities.”

“You wouldn't have time to spend with me.”

“Suppose I quit and got a good job where I'm pulling down sixty bucks a week, regular. We could get married at sixteen with parental approval. So my mother will wail and raise her hands, but I can get her to agree. And you got no parents.”

“I got parents. They're just not here.”

“I suppose your aunt and uncle have to sign for you, but why wouldn't they? You're not their daughter, and they'd probably be glad to have somebody else picking up the tab.”

“How come you want to get married, all of a sudden? You had a fight with your mother, or what?”

“We could have our own little place. Wouldn't it be sweet? I'd go off to work and you'd be waiting for me.”

“I'm not quitting the bakery, Alvin. I like the Fennimans. They like both of us too, and you know why.”

Alvin looked embarrassed. “Ah, they don't remember that time. It was almost two years ago.”

“Sure they do. That's why they gave me the job, with me underaged.”

“Everybody's hiring kids, that's what's so great for us now.”

“Besides, what makes you think we could find a place of our own? We'd just have to live with my aunt and uncle or your mother.”

“The war'll be over soon. They're already laying people off at Willow Run and all those hillbillies will go back where they came from and leave plenty of room around here.”

“If they're laying off people at Willow Run, and if the troops are all going to come back looking for their old jobs, where are you going to be working in six months, Alvin?”

Grimacing, he raked his hands hard through his new crew cut. She had got to him. She was disappointed. She had hoped he would have an answer. Leib would. He would say he was going to get rich off those guys coming back. Sometimes with Alvin she felt as if he was matched against a giant, but he didn't even know he was fighting anyone. She wished he had not had his hair mowed to the roots in the new fashion, because he looked dreadful, victimized. Leib had grown his hair out again, combing it back. She hated crew cuts, for they made the men look strange, raw Frankenstein monsters. Walking down the street sometimes Sandy and she stared at men and giggled, because the ears stripped naked and sticking out from the new super-short hair looked like jug handles. She begged Alvin to let his hair grow, but he wanted to be in style. He wouldn't believe she didn't like it.

Always she was careful of his feelings, because she saw Alvin as like herself, vulnerable, half grown, not quite belonging. His very virtues worked against his being able to protect her, to keep her from Leib. He was big and tough in appearance. In the street, guys looked at him and looked away. Nobody bothered her with Alvin. Under his cropped hair and his hulking bones, he was sensitive, humane, considerate. He never pushed her too hard sexually. He was afraid of hurting her, afraid of causing bad consequences. Probably that was why he wanted to marry her, to go to bed with her without feeling guilty.

Once or twice she had considered doing it with Alvin to try to stave off Leib; she would say to him, I belong to Alvin. The thought of belonging to Alvin was faintly silly. They were friends who necked. He would caress her breast lightly, lightly, as if it were a bird he feared to crush. They kissed for twenty minutes at a time, but never did she melt into the hot liquid chocolate she became with Leib. No, Alvin and she were too alike for him to excite or overawe her.

Alvin was feeling flush. His mother's birthday came in March and he bought her a sweater. At the same time, he got a present for Naomi. That Sunday night, Alvin gave her a silver bracelet with a piece of blue stone called a turquoise set in it, like a piece of Mediterranean sky stuck in the silver. She put it on and brought it in the house to show everybody, Alvin behind her. The whole family plus Leib and Trudi were downstairs listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The radio upstairs no longer worked, and nobody had the parts to fix it, so Trudi and Leib came downstairs to hear their favorite programs.

Everybody admired the bracelet. Trudi said it was a perfect color for Naomi and her complexion, and that Alvin was really unusual to be able to pick out presents. Her father had always handed her mother a twenty-dollar bill on her birthday and told her to buy herself something.

Leib seized Naomi's arm in a tight grip. “Let's see. What did you pay for it, Alvin?”

Trudi shook her head. “What a thing to ask, darling. You can't ask him that in front of his girlfriend.”

“I hope you didn't pay much,” Leib said, “because see, it's flawed. Too bad.”

She yanked her arm from him, furious. How dare he pick on Alvin? What had he ever given her? Alvin was looking down at the rug and she knew he would have liked to cry.

“I'm no jeweler,” she said. “So what do I care? It's pretty and Alvin gave it to me, and that's just perfect,” she said loudly, waving her wrist around.

The next time Leib caught her alone, which wasn't till Thursday night, he said, “What are you doing with that kid these days, that he's giving you bracelets from the jewelry store?”

“He's nice to me, that's all. He wants to marry me.”

Leib laughed. “You'll be sixteen soon, and I guess that's old enough. But you'd be a fool to marry that kid. I'm going to take care of you in style so you can have turquoises big as bowling balls.”

“Leib, I don't want to tonight. Trudi's pregnant, I don't feel good about it anymore. Please, Leib. It's not right.”

“It feels just fine to me.” He pulled her into the bedroom. “But you're right about one thing. I'm not going to fool around with you anymore.”

“Then let me go. Please, Leib. Let me go downstairs.”

“If you want to be downstairs, why did you come upstairs?” Laughing, he shoved her onto the bed.

“You called me.”

“Damn right. And you better come when I call. If you hadn't, I'd have come downstairs after you. What do I care, upstairs or downstairs?”

He took all his clothes off. He had never done that. She tried to think if anyone might come in. Trudi and Ruthie were at work. Uncle Morris, Aunt Rose and Sharon were out at a rally about the camps and refugees, trying to make the government let survivors into the States. Uncle Morris hesitated to take her, because he thought she shouldn't look at the photographs. She was supposed to be studying. She had not known if Leib was going out; lately he was out so often Trudi complained. Naomi had been afraid of the meeting, afraid of seeing what she had seen in her dreams.

Now Leib was kneeling over her, pulling the clothes off her, turning her round and round on the bed to shuck off her clothes and dumping them on the floor. The air felt cold. She began to cry, softly.

“Cry before, cry afterward. It's time, babydoll. I'd be a fool to delay longer, for some kid to pick the cherry I'm waiting for. You know this is right, no matter what anybody else says. You're mine. I picked you out and I'm taking you with me wherever I go.” He lifted her behind and put a towel under her. “Spread your legs. I said, spread your legs, Naomi.”

Although he had been putting his fingers into her since the summer, when he pushed his thing in, it burned and tore her. She cried out and then bit on the pillow to be quiet. Every thrust felt as if it was tearing her again. She was glad when he finished, and begged him not to when he then started touching her. She was too sore to come.

He brought cigarettes back to the bed, passing his over to her in the way he had that she always found flattering. She was still crying but he was feeling expansive. He sat up against the headboard smoking and talking while he caressed her shoulders and hair. “All I need is a nut. A bit of capital to start with. Fats can get something out of his old man, but not enough. The time to buy land is now, right now, while nobody wants it. In six months, they'll be putting up little houses for vets so fast, the whole landscape will change. I see it coming, but if I can't get my hands on money, it won't do me one stinking piece of good.”

Naomi lay uneasily beside him, chilled and lightly bleeding. Her vagina stung. She felt sticky, dirty. Tears continued to roll out of her eyes. Now she belonged to Leib, totally. But his wife was pregnant and she did not want to hurt Trudi and what did it all mean? There was no one to ask. No one to speak to. For her, only silence and fear. “Please, I'm cold. Can I put my clothes back on?”

A letter arrived for her, from a French Adjutant Lev Abel. In French it told her that her father had been a very brave man and a leader in the maquis. He had fought the Germans and killed many of them, the letter said, before they had killed him finally on 20 juillet 1944 in the Montagne Noire. Her father had stayed behind with a handful of fighters to hold off the Germans so that the rest of their forces could escape and regroup. He himself was alive because of her father.

He said that he was very sorry to tell her about the death of her father and to tell her so long afterward, but he had just found her address. A journal that had been written by her sister Jacqueline had been found after the battle in such a situation that they believed that her sister had been shot by the Germans, but an exact identification had not been possible because of the condition of the body. He wished he had better news for her, but he was sending her the journal. Under the circumstances of not knowing if Jacqueline were alive or dead, he had taken the liberty of reading the journal as far as he could. He explained that in 1943, she had begun writing in code, and that he had not been able to read it after that point. However, long before Jacqueline had begun using code, she had entered in her diary the address of her sister in the United States.

He hoped she would have good news of the rest of her family. He regretted again to give her the news of her father's death, but her father had been a great fighter in the Jewish Resistance, and it had taken a tank to bring him down. She should be proud of her father and honor his memory. He had had the pleasure of serving under his command. Further, he had worked with Jacqueline, and her bravery and intelligence in tight situations were sorely missed. She had saved the lives of at least eighty Jewish children.

He ended by saying that he hoped he would meet her someday after the war and that he had a photograph of her father taken when they were all in the maquis, which he had put in the package with the journal. He hoped she would like to have this photograph of her father in remembrance.

When she had finished reading the letter, she stood and then she fainted.

When she came to, she was lying on the living room floor with her head bleeding where she had banged it on the hot air register. Aunt Rose was kneeling over her with a washcloth soaked in cold water and vinegar. Naomi lay on the floor and began to weep and did not want to get up.

Always she had hoped that in the end, even if Maman was dead, even if Rivka had died, all alone with Naomi no longer listening, Papa would still come on his motorbike and take her back into a place where she belonged. Now there was no such place. There was only Jacqueline, far far away, maybe dead too, shot down as Papa had been. Even if she wasn't shot, she was only an older sister and could not help. Jacqueline was as weak as she was.

Naomi belonged to nobody now except Leib. Not even Ruthie was here to stop her tears, for Ruthie was at work. Now she was really an orphan, and she belonged no place good.

JACQUELINE 12

Whither Thou Goest

On January the eighteenth, Jacqueline and Daniela along with fifty thousand other haeftlings were still alive to stand appel. This day was different from all the others. They could hear the Soviet artillery as they had for two weeks, each day louder, a sound that rose from the earth up into their bones. They hoped, they longed for Soviet shells as they had used to long for the Allied bombers to come. The crematoria had been blown up and black greasy ashes no longer fell. However, the machinery of death had ceased without death itself ceasing. The dying were heaped in piles or shoved into barracks and locked inside. All week the SS had been burning papers and shooting inmates who knew too much.