Gone to Soldiers (15 page)

At that point the three of us went into the bedroom, shut the door and examined Papa's note carefully to make sure it was really from him, and this was not some Fascist youth in disguise, trying to entrap us. But the handwriting was obviously Papa's. The note was short and said only that he loved us, missed us powerfully and that we should give the young man what he needed, because he would carry it back to Papa on his next rounds, as Papa put it.

The trouble was that we had not had pictures taken of ourselves for several years, and we hardly dare pry the photos off our cards stamped with a big red
JUIVE
much as we hate them. We told the young man we could try to get pictures taken the coming week. We scarcely have any money. He said we should see what we could do, but that he couldn't wait, as he had something to do farther north. He would drop in on us on the way south, he said, to pick up the new photos.

Needless to say I do not intend to say a word to anyone outside the family, and I cautioned Maman, who is always sensible, and Rivka, who is not, to keep their mouths tightly shut on this visit. I have given in to my sister's desire to be called by her Hebrew name, for she has so little to make her happy these days.

Then a present arrived from Naomi in Detroit in the U.S. I was astonished that the little mischief-maker had remembered my birthday, but then I imagined that probably her aunt arranged for the package. It had been mailed two months ago, but everything was intact and we were delighted. She sent us a big kosher sausage, so I guess they make them there too, a kilo of sugar, a jar of strawberry, a jar of apricot and a jar of raspberry jam. Anything sweet makes a big hit with us. She also put in two bars of Camay soap and a jar of liver pâté.

Naomi writes regularly, but her French grammar is dreadful and growing worse. She is becoming a barbarian. I do not know if Papa did the right thing sending her off that way, by herself. We also receive letters from Rose Siegal in Yiddish, a language I cannot read, although Maman translates. Aunt Rose (Maman's oldest sister) assures us that Naomi is well and improving her English (while deproving her own language, I comment) and growing rapidly. So is Rivka, but she is too thin. If only we could get a little more food for her. At school they give the children vitamin cookies. Some of the children trade theirs, but I have ordered Rivka to eat hers every day. Aunt Rose asks about Aunt Batya, their sister, who is still in Drancy. Maman will write her what little we know, for we are not permitted to visit the prisoners.

It was thoughtful of Naomi or Aunt Rose to send us these gifts. Winter is setting in early and we are freezing. We have no heat. Maman is developing chilblains. We go to bed with a hot water bottle, but it stays warm for only an hour. We shuffle about the house wrapped up like packs of old clothes and wearing gloves except when we must take them off to wash a dish.

The soap is a particular treat, because we can institute a regular system of bathing once a week. We have had no soap since October as we have been trading it for food. Rivka must eat and so must Maman. I fare the best because I am petted by my friends who are well connected with the black market and they are always giving me tidbits and even meals. I try to slip a roll or a bite of chicken into my pocket for Rivka and Maman in secrecy whenever I can, because once Céleste caught me stuffing a half a Croque-Monsieur into my pocket and said, Well if you aren't hungry, I'll eat it, and she did.

Yes, I eat ham outside the house. I would eat a toad if someone served it to me. I would have given the ham to Rivka and told her it was corned beef. I felt miserable because I was hungry and I wanted dreadfully to eat it, but I had wanted even more to give a little to Rivka, who is so skinny and almost blue. Maman thinks she might be anemic, but what can we do about it? Henri has not been treating me to lunch this week. He has decided I have a virginity fetish, he says, and must overcome such bourgeois hang-ups.

Fine, I said, I'll go out on the Boule Mich' and stop the first pedicab to offer myself.

A stranger might have a disease, he said. I'm only thinking of you.

I know how you are thinking of me, and dream on, I said. I act very cool as it is the way to behave, but it makes me feel peculiar to sit at the table with him and have him constantly as if casually touching my knee, my elbow, my shoulder. If we did not wear so many layers of clothing, he would be able to see that sometimes I get goose bumps. Luckily for me, we are both wound up in our clothes like mummies in a museum and even when he tries to kiss me, he gets no nearer than six inches because of all our padding. Still I dream of his light brown eyes like wet sand fixed on me, wanting.

12 décembre 1941

So now Germany is at war with the U.S. Henri says the Germans have finally bitten off more than they can chew, but they seem to have digested us easily enough. I have little concrete hope except that by the time I am an old lady, I may live in a saner world. We will enjoy no more packages from Naomi and no more letters either. We are cut off from our sister as if she were on the moon! Maman cries about Naomi a great deal, and then berates herself for selfishness, since at least one of her children is safe. Rivka has never been the same since Naomi left; she is half a child, quiet, subdued and deeply lonely in spite of how much more time I spend with her.

Yesterday something simply unimaginable occurred. The Nazis rounded up one thousand French Jews, including all the lawyers who practice at the Paris bar, yes, every one of them. They took doctors, lawyers, writers and intellectuals and simply arrested them. Nobody seems to know where they have been taken, except that this time it is not Drancy, where the poor Balabans are still imprisoned. We brought them little parcels, but they would not let us in. The place stinks from a block away. It is an unfinished housing project surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. You would imagine the poor Balabans to be violent rapists, murderers, terrorists, instead of a family of factory workers.

Where they have taken the terribly dangerous writers, lawyers and doctors is anyone's guess. We speculate and fear, we pass on rumors and wait for the Boy Scout to return, but he has not. The excuse for this roundup—for some reason the Nazis like to have excuses, no matter how perfunctory—is punishment because somebody fired at a German air force officer. That is all.

Everyone at café Le Jazz Hot makes jokes about how I am the last virgin in Paris. Céleste announced today they are going to have me stuffed and stuck in a case in Le Musée de l'Homme. I said that was fine with me if I could be stuffed with roast chicken and veal chops and steaks. Henri said how about his salami. Sometimes what they say makes me blush inside but I remain very cool. I said, no thank you, your salami isn't kosher.

Then afterward when Henri was walking me to the Métro, he asked me if that was why I wouldn't sleep with him, because he isn't Jewish. He wanted to have a serious discussion on the sidewalk about what I said as a joke to shut them up. I ended having to kiss him in a doorway. Then he tried again to put his hand up under my sweater. I said, Don't you try to do things by degrees, Henri. You won't move me along that way. When I decide, I will do the whole thing, but until then, don't paw at me, I think it's vulgar. He got mad and went off, but I know the problem isn't going to go away.

RUTHIE 2

Of Rapid Pledges

Ruthie stood on a chair. Mama was pinning the hem of the skirt of a smart grey gabardine suit she had found at Goodwill, only slightly worn in the cuffs but Mama had turned them back, and under the arms, where Ruthie herself had repaired the seams. The skirt was longer than the girls were wearing them now, so Mama was turning it up. It was all having to be done in a great hurry because Leib and Trudi were getting married that afternoon in the study of a local rabbi.

Ruthie did not know what she thought of the marriage yet. Leib had been working for a place that made novelty balloons, but they could no longer procure rubber and everybody was laid off. He had got on the line at Chrysler Tank, but when his number was called by the draft, he had not been there long enough to be exempted for doing essential war work. Now he was entering the Army in three days, and he and Trudi were marrying at once. He had been seeing Trudi on and off since he had broken up with Ruthie, but Trudi had complained that she did not think he was in love.

When Trudi told her, Ruthie said, “But, I didn't think things were that good between you.”

“Yeah, but it's all changed. Now he wants to marry me. Go on, Ruthie, you'd have married Leib if he'd ever asked you, and don't tell me different. Talk about tall, dark and handsome. Besides, it's patriotic.” Trudi was the fourth of her girlfriends to marry since December seventh, all to men about to go into the services.

When Trudi had asked Ruthie to stand up for her, Ruthie had longed to make an excuse. She did not like to run into Leib; it still hurt. She did not think she had truly loved him. Always there had been something in him she had mistrusted. She had taken that for granted, as how it was with men—but with Murray it was not that way.

“Mama, I don't like to pressure you, but maybe I'll have to go with the hem pinned. Listen, it doesn't matter it isn't perfectly straight all the way around. It's not my wedding, nobody's going to be looking at me.”

“My daughter, going to a wedding in front of Rabbi Honig with her skirt stuck up with pins? You may not dress up like a movie star, but we don't need to go out before people full of pins.”

Mama had lost some weight and she wore her hair pinned up on her head now instead of pulled back in a ragged knot. She was running a little nursery for babies and toddlers of women in the neighborhood who had gone to work. Thirty-one dollars was all the allotment a husband overseas sent home. Nobody could live on that. What few nurseries existed cost a fortune.

Mama charged sixty cents a day for toddlers, fifty for babies and two meat coupons. She gave them two meals and an afternoon nap. Sharon had her own kids mixed into the pack and was helping. The house was crammed with howling babbling kiddies from seven in the morning till seven at night. Mama and Sharon were clearing about twenty a week. Art had finally been taken on at Fisher Body, working the graveyard shift, meaning they had to keep the little ones downstairs so he could catch his sleep. Arty didn't care for the project, saying they'd get in trouble with the law because they weren't licensed. Ruthie had researched the Wayne County law, and there was just no way anybody in their position could meet those requirements—or the neighborhood women could afford it if such a fancy place were set up.

“Have you heard anything from your fellow?” Mama asked, her mouth full of pins.

“Mama, you get the mail before I see it every day. I only answered his Saturday letter on Tuesday.” She wished Mama wouldn't ask her about Murray's letters, for they meant too much to her. He was down South, which she pictured as an area of swamps, magnolias, live oaks, Spanish moss and night riders in sheets indistinguishable from storm troopers, who burned crosses and Jews and colored people. It was a dangerous place, almost as dangerous as wherever he might next be sent. Murray had finished out his semester; then in February he had enlisted.

“But why did you join the Marines?” she had asked him. “I thought we agreed on the Army and to try to get into the Signal Corps.”

“I can't really tell you. There I am, I've just been through one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, treated like a side of beef, poked, prodded and I'm thinking what an idiot I am for my own survival to have gone into this willingly, and actually to feel relieved, to feel pleased when some bozo at a desk picks up an
ACCEPTED
instead of a
REJECTED
stamp. I'm standing there naked, Ruthie, stark naked, and these guys are sitting comfortable in their uniforms. I think I went for the one that seemed to cover the most. The marine seemed snappier than the others. He seemed to take it more seriously. The Army and the Navy, they were officers and they were making jokes to each other and when they looked at me, I felt they had contempt. I thought to myself, that's what I want, somebody who understands this is a serious matter, fighting a war, and isn't sitting there cracking jokes.”

“I never heard of a Jewish marine,” Ruthie said dubiously.

“So I'll be the first.”

Now he was down in Parris Island, surviving brutality and contempt as best he could. Duvey had taken his able-bodied seamen's papers and gone off to look for a berth on an oceangoing ship, although his pals in the union argued that the work on the Great Lakes was just as essential. Duvey did not think so. “Essential, what is that crap? Nobody's going to torpedo you off Toledo. I'd feel like a coward hanging around here.”

“At least you won't be in the Army or the Navy fighting,” Mama said.

Duvey laughed. “No, you just get shot at. You don't do much shooting.”

They were all relieved nonetheless that Duvey wasn't in the Navy, having to fight in sea battles. He was just doing what he had done for years, but now in the ocean instead of the Great Lakes. Occasionally they got a packet of letters from him, mostly anecdotes of his crew, but then two months would go by and nothing would come. She felt guilty that she did not love her brother better, and she determined to love him more starting right now. Bravery he had never lacked. Maybe she just took that for granted. She had always valued gentle endurance more, but gentle endurance was not a primary virtue in wartime.

“Mama, it's twelve o'clock. I must get ready. Now!”

Mama sighed. “All right, you take off the skirt and you get ready, everything but the skirt, and I'll stitch it up. Tata will just have to wait a little while for his lunch.”

“My one day off, I have to go hungry?” He was protesting pro forma.

“I never saw anybody marry themselves.” Naomi sat on Ruthie's bunk watching.