Gone to Soldiers (128 page)

They lay in the bed side by side, untouching and silent. They stared at the ceiling that moonlight whitened to bone.

“No, besides the enormity of it, it is different,” she said. “What you'd see with what I suppose we'll have to call old-fashioned bombs is that it's so arbitrary, fate with a nasty sense of humor. A baby is thrown through the air and lands on a mattress. A young man is decapitated by flying glass. A grandmother hides under the stairway, and that's the last thing standing. In a row of houses, one is missing like an extracted molar. It's a capricious evil, do you see?”

“Death on the human scale. Death you can grasp.” Daniel's voice was a croak.

“There nothing's left. Not an ant. Not a weed. Not a butterfly. Not a mouse. Nobody was lucky. It's flat as a pane of glass. It didn't matter who took shelter and who didn't.”

“I can't get my head around it,” he said. “The void. A force that turns people from breathing flesh into an image on stone, like a photograph.”

“It is different, isn't it? Whole families, whole communities, wiped out. Not some, not half, all. It's something new under the sun, Daniel.”

“They kept saying it was like the sun. The sun came down. We can't live inside the sun.…” His voice died away. They lay in silence.

She fell into a jumpy reverie, images of the day flashing before her, frozen, stark. Had he fallen asleep? His breathing was too shallow. Finally she could not endure the silence, in which their love, their life, all lives felt acutely fragile. “People in that hospital are still dying. Not just burns. I was talking to the nurses. Some kind of death rays go on killing people.”

“Radiation,” he croaked.

“Madame Curie!” she said, sitting up.

“That's right. She discovered radiation.”

“Handling the radium. It killed her, slowly.”

“Will they all die, everybody from Hiroshima? Everybody?” He sat up too.

“Does anybody know? I don't think anybody knows anything.” The moonlight floated on the air like ash. “I remember when the bomb was dropped, I was glad, because I figured that would end the war, hooray.”

“This isn't what I thought it would be like after the war. After Fascism.” He lay down again. After a long silence, he said, “No wonder they kept putting us off. I can't sleep.”

“I feel as if I'll never sleep again. Imagine the fireball, the moment of blast. Do you think they really knew what they were doing when they dropped that thing? Another at Nagasaki still to be seen.”

“You said
they
, not
we
.”

“Nobody asked me for permission.”

“O brave new world, that has such creatures in it. Moloch in person. The angel of death appeared in the sky too bright to gaze upon.” Daniel flung himself from side to side. “I took a sleeping pill. Should I take another?”

“It won't work.”

“I have such a strange feeling, Abra, as if God's finger is on me, and I'm an agnostic through and through.”

She leaned on her elbow over him. She laid her head softly on his chest, feeling his heart beat. “God's finger? We
are
getting Biblical.”

“We have to do something about it. I feel as if I looked out through a vast eye and saw the future of the world in a plain of ashes, of sand turned to glass, flesh vaporized, time itself burned up.”

“What can we do?”

“First, put our opinions in the report if we can.”

“It might be a matter of politics,” she said. “I used to be good at that. When we're back in the States. If we do go back.”

“If we do.” He sighed.

“People back home don't know anything about the bomb. It's just a matter of making them see. Nobody knew.”

In spite of the sleeping pills, they lay awake all night. They watched dawn spread over Tokyo, already beginning to rebuild amid the rubble. Abra wondered about his uncle in Shanghai. Surely when their work here was finished, they could manage a visit. They had been invited to a Japanese home for the first time the coming weekend, and that should prove interesting too. They were both stunned by what they had seen, and she did not think they would forget. Nonetheless, between them they drew on enormous energy, and the world was noisy with invitations like birdsongs that filled the remaining trees of Tokyo. At Hiroshima, there had been no birds.

NAOMI 10

Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain

The telegram was there when Naomi arrived home from school. Her overcrowded high school was still on half sessions, so she was always home by one-thirty. Normally she got to the bakery by two and worked till they shut at six-thirty. Then she ran home, where they were waiting dinner for her. But today that part of her day, the least fraught, the simplest, was cleft through. She sat in a kitchen chair to read the telegram while Aunt Rose and Sharon in their aprons pulled up chairs to face her expectantly.

The telegram was in garbled French from Jacqueline from Toulouse in southern France and said that she was coming to Detroit via New York, leaving Marseille on the first of December, the earliest she could book passage.

“My sister's alive,” she said.

“Your twin?” Aunt Rose asked, beaming. She let out a long gusty sigh.

“No.” She did not explain that she never called Rivka her sister. Rivka was, had been, part of herself. The better part. The good half, or the half she was only good with. “My older sister Jacqueline.”

“I thought the Germans had shot her?”

In answer Naomi lifted the telegram. “She's coming here. I can't make it all out.”

“Where will we put her?” Sharon asked, frowning. Arty was still in Europe in the occupation forces, and after Ruthie got married, Sharon had moved Marilyn into Naomi's room. She was six, attending kindergarten in Naomi's old school. Marilyn was thin for her age, prone to sinusitis and sore throats, a sharply observant but reticent child whom Boston Blackie had adopted as his own.

Rose rubbed her hands together, considering. “There's always room. We'll put Marilyn in your room, and Jacqueline can share her sister's room.”

“Maybe she doesn't want to stay here,” Naomi said weakly.

“Why wouldn't she want to stay with mishpocheh? Is she rich?”

“I don't even know where she's getting the money to come,” Naomi said.

“Ketsale,” Aunt Rose said. “This is big news for you but we can talk at dinner. You'll be late to work, you don't hurry.”

For the first time Naomi burned an ovenload of bread. Then stuttering, she explained to the Fennimans. They rejoiced with her, thinking her tears excitement, joy. Naomi felt guilty, for she knew better. She was terrified. Her period had not come last month. There was no one she could talk to, no one she could tell. Ruthie was the only one she thought of confiding in, but Ruthie had disappeared into Murray. She came to the house several times a week, every Friday with Murray whom her eyes would scarcely leave; when she was there without him, it was only a little better, because he was all she talked about. Trudi and she chatted endlessly about how men were changed by war and the trouble they had adjusting to civilian life, while Sharon worried whether Arty would be the same way.

She did not tell Leib, because she had got in the habit of trying to stay out of his way. She no longer felt that mesmerizing love like a mountain over her. What did she feel? She felt bound to him, powerless. She felt used. She felt anger, sometimes a cold sour fury, something spoiled inside her. She knew she must tell him eventually, but that telegram had given eventually a deadline. She had no idea how long it would take Jacqueline to reach Detroit from Marseille, but December first was only two weeks away.

Still she let the two weeks pass, always hoping, always praying, running to the bathroom twice as often, staring at her cotton panties and demanding that a spot of blood appear. She begged G-d to give her her period as a birthday present. Instead she was given a new coat, a warm winter coat in red wool of which the family was enormously proud. She began to have morning sickness. Everyone complained about how long she was taking in the bathroom, how vain she was becoming. Twice she could not make it to the bathroom. Once she ran into the alley. Another time she vomited in her room and cleaned it up with Marilyn watching with big eyes. Then she had to pretend to spill part of her bottle of Evening in Paris from Woolworth's to cover the sour smell.

Sandy talked of nothing lately but, After we graduate. What colleges are you going to apply to? Naomi always said she didn't know. She wasn't going to go to college, because she wasn't going to finish high school, but she did not tell Sandy that. She was going to bear a bastard and die in childbirth, in her bed or in the alley where she had thrown up. They would all say what a bad girl she had been, but they would feel sorry for her. If only she could get the dying over before Jacqueline arrived and learned what kind of sister she was crossing oceans to find.

Everyone was speculating on what would happen when Jacqueline arrived. The general assumption was that she would be staying in Detroit, looking for work. Naomi did not think so. She thought that Jacqueline meant to take her back to Paris, but she also must want her journal. What Jacqueline meant to do mattered little, Naomi thought, because what Jacqueline expected to find was a sweet little invented sister who was still twelve years old, still French, still good, still virginal. She knew from the journals that Jacqueline had slept with Henri, and that gave her some hope; but that had been for food and Henri had not been a married man with two babies already borne by his wife, David and the new baby Linda.

Sometimes she told herself that she had loved Leib, but if so, it had dissolved in her misery like chalk in water. All she could remember of what she had called love was the feeling of being held in place, transfixed. She did not know if she had lost something precious or awakened from a fantasy, but what she had wakened to was worse. Sometimes she imagined drawing her savings out of the bank and running away with her baby hidden inside.

She sounded out Sandy. “Do you ever think of doing it with a boy?”

“Sure, I think about it, but my mother would break my neck. Every time I go on a date, she waits up with the porch light on and she has to know every single minute.”

“Do you tell her everything?”

“Most of it. Who wants to tell their mother about necking?”

“But what happens to girls who do it? Do they all have babies?”

“If all the girls who do it had babies, half our class wouldn't graduate,” Sandy said smugly. “Or one third, anyhow. That's what condoms are for. I explained them to you years ago.”

“But if they get pregnant anyhow, do they always have babies?”

“Some have operations and some have babies. Mostly they go away to homes and the babies get adopted. But sometimes, like Magda Revitch and that colored girl with the braids, they keep their babies and raise them. Then they've really had it.” Sandy mimicked slitting her own throat.

That was the sum of the information Sandy knew: nothing about abortions other than that some fast girls who got caught had them. It seemed hopeless. If a girl had a baby, then obviously she hadn't gone, so it was no use asking her; if the girl had an abortion instead of a baby, nobody would know, so you couldn't ask her either. Finally as December first passed, she had to speak to Leib. After weeks of avoiding him, she found it impossible to catch him alone. Leib had passed his real estate license and gone into business with Fats and Moose and some silent partners whom Trudi said were crooks, with money from numbers and prostitution. Trudi was angry with Leib because he was always out. She had quit the hospital again to stay home with the baby. Now she said it was worse than when he was in the Army, when he had written her twice a week. At least if he wrote letters, she'd be more in touch than feeling him climb into bed two hours after she'd gotten in, observing him eat his eggs in the mornings and watching him rush out the door when Fats tooted the horn on his De Soto. Trudi was not as friendly to Naomi as she had been. Lately she always asked Sandy to babysit.

Finally Naomi got a chance. Leib came downstairs one evening saying he'd run out of cigarettes and was off to the drugstore that stayed open till ten. The guy there usually had some under the counter at a high price. “Anybody want something from the drugstore?”

“I'll go with you,” she said. “There's some shampoo I want.”

“So you can stay even longer in the bathroom?” Sharon asked. “What's wrong with the Halo I use?”

“My hair's too curly for it,” she said. Any nonsense to get out. She had already put on her coat and stood by the door.

“Let her come along,” Leib said. “I like company.”

“Okay, get me some corn plasters.” Rose counted out the change.

When they were walking down the street, Leib said, “So after playing hard to get for a month, you decide to throw yourself at me when it's freezing down to hell. What do you think, we can do it in the park tonight?” He put his hand heavily on her arm. He still limped but he could move more rapidly than he had in the summer.

“I have to talk to you. Leib, I'm pregnant.”

“Impossible.”

“It's true.”

“By that lumpy kid?”

“You know I never did it with him.”

“Maybe you better start.”

“That's not possible,” she said angrily. “No.”

“How do you know you're pregnant? Have you seen a doctor?”

“What doctor could I trust? I've missed two periods, I have morning sickness and my breasts are sore. I looked up all the symptoms in Aunt Rose's doctor book.” That was an encyclopedia of information about illnesses and parts of the body. Coming on Naomi looking at it, Ruthie had confessed to her that she had tried to find out about sex from it when she was thirteen, but while the doctor book was strong on inner organs, it stopped there. Naomi wished she had to look through books to learn about sex.