Gone to Soldiers (22 page)

“Doucement, doucement,” Clotilde warned. “We are not supposed to speak in anything but English, as you know. We must be quiet. But I was born in Martinique, where I have a great deal of family and it is very beautiful with no winter and the white people are not as mean as here. I know how people here make fun of you when you do not speak English at home.”

“It feels so good to speak French, to hear it, I feel like crying!”

Unfortunately the shortstop threw the next batter out, ending their conversation. Naomi was squatting among the dandelions looking for one that had made a seed head so she could blow it off, watching to see when she would have to go to bat, when she realized she felt wet between her legs.

Could she have peed on herself? She waited till she came in from the field at the end of gym class and changed out of the shorts the school had made her buy, long gym shorts in ugly navy. Big stain of red, of blood, the size of a half dollar. She remembered a story on the radio about a little girl dying of anemia and the blood rushing in her ears. Then she remembered the time Jacqueline left a napkin in the bathroom. Maman had slapped Jacqueline and called her a dirty girl, but then Maman explained to Rivka and herself how little girls became women.

Then they asked Jacqueline privately. She lay on their parents' bed reading
Wuthering Heights
, an English novel. Both Maman and Papa were at work. Jacqueline assumed an air of great importance. It was nothing, she said, although some girls made a great fuss about it and lay around all day with hot water bottles and took many aspirin. She herself thought it was merely boring. But it meant you had become a woman. It was like a private bar mitzvah and more real, because it happened when G-d chose. Then you would notice how you waxed and waned with the moon and that your time would come at a certain point in the cycle of the moon.

Naomi knew that the girls were always talking about periods and falling off the roof and that time of month, but she wasn't going to say one word. They might make fun of her or that mean Joyce might tell the boys and then she would simply die. She stuffed toilet paper into her panties and walked very carefully to her next class.

At home Aunt Rose was yelling at Sharon about changing the babies right away. Naomi stood about on one foot and then on the other waiting to talk to Aunt Rose, but when Rose noticed her, it was only to send her to the bakery for pumpernickel and to the dairy for a gallon of three percent milk.

Finally Ruthie came home for a quick supper, changing the white blouse and dark skirt she was required to wear at work. Ruthie had three such blouses and two such skirts that she was forever washing and ironing. She kept them all the way over on the right of the closet they shared, for they were never worn on any other occasion. Naomi viewed them with respect and was careful not to muss them when she looked for something in the closet. Ruthie had about an hour before she had to rush to class.

Naomi caught Ruthie in their bedroom as soon as she could. “Ruthie. Something happened to me today.”

“Something good or something bad?”

“I don't know.” Naomi shrugged uncomfortably. The question itself disturbed her. Was the blood a punishment or a passport to adult freedom?

“If you don't, who does?” Ruthie was digging in the back of the closet. “It's time to start wearing cottons. What a day to be stuck inside.”

“There's blood inside my panties.” Naomi sat miserably on the very edge of Ruthie's bunk. “It's what do you call it in English? My periods.”

“Period. Is it really? Did Mama give you a napkin?”

“I didn't tell her yet.”

“You need a sanitary belt and a napkin.” Ruthie rummaged in her dresser. “You put my belt on for now. Tomorrow I'll buy one for you downtown.” Ruthie stroked her hair, asking anxiously, “Do you understand what it means?”

“Now I can have babies.”

Ruthie laughed. “Not on your own. Only by getting in bed with a boy, which you shouldn't yet think about for a hundred years.” Leaving her to put on the pad, Ruthie skipped off to the kitchen, humming.

Naomi could not see why her getting blood in her panties made Ruthie feel bouncy. Maybe it was because Ruthie wanted to have babies, not for years, but she wanted babies. Naomi did not think she did. She wished she could tell Rivka that, for she had used to think they were so adorable that whenever she saw a mother pushing a pram, she would stop and make a fuss. Rivka said that was disgusting and gooey. Now since Naomi was around babies every afternoon from the time she got off school until their mothers got them, she had grown disillusioned. Mess and caca, crying and falling out of chairs, throwing their food on the floor, that was the rule.

Naomi loved the sound of the word, disillusion. She imagined a veil being ripped away. “I am disillusioned,” she said out loud. After all, now she was a woman. She would never again pick her nose and put the boogers under the seat. She would master eating with the fork in the right hand the way Americans did. She would stop sneaking Murray's letters from Ruthie's underwear drawer and reading them. Now that she was a woman, she could no longer act like a child. Everything she did counted now, and she must start to behave properly and bravely and be bien rangée.

She sat on the edge of Ruthie's bunk and practiced sitting like a mature woman. The pad was uncomfortable between her legs. She wondered how she could run with it chafing her thighs. She peered at her face in the small mirror over the dresser they shared. She tried giving herself a languorous look, such as women threw at men in the movies. The words were hard for her to follow still. Then she squinched up her right eye, made her left eye big and round and bared the teeth on one side of her mouth only. That was her best witch face. Sometimes Rivka used to say maybe they would grow up and be witches. That sounded like fun.

Had Rivka started? She closed her eyes and tried to feel her twin, but she couldn't. Six o'clock. It was midnight in Paris so Rivka must be asleep. It would have been so fine if she and Rivka had each other to talk to: then she would know whether she was happy or displeased. When you have a twin, you are never lonely, unless you are separated, and then nobody ever understands what is missing but you.

She had a moment of bleak anger at her parents for separating them. It had not been supposed to be for long. Papa had got an Ausweis that enabled him to travel to the Vichy zone along with papers and a carte d'identité belonging to a man named Antoine Saligny, who had business in the south. The Ausweis included a daughter, but only one. Antoine Saligny had suffered a heart attack before his Ausweis had come through, and Papa had bought the papers. He had intended to take Jacqueline, who refused to leave with the exams for her baccalauréat just coming up. Papa had chosen Naomi as the next eldest—she had been born fifteen minutes earlier than Rivka.

Papa's idea was to get a job in the Vichy zone and then to bring down the rest of the family. That turned out to be more difficult than they had imagined. There was no telephone service between the two Frances. The only mail they could send were postcards you bought and checked off a given message. In order to go back and forth, you had to get a permit. The Vichy French were rushing to pass anti-Jewish laws to equal the Nazis. When Papa saw a chance to ship her to the United States, he had decided to move her to safety.

So Papa had stayed in the south of France while she found herself flying alone to New York where she was met by a woman from the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and put alone on a train for Detroit. She had never in her life been as miserable as those five days in which she had been on the plane going from airport to airport, to Casablanca and then to Martinique and then to New York, on the plane whose roaring filled her head for two days afterward. Her English had not proved to be as good as she had always supposed it, and half the time she could not tell what people were telling her to do or asking of her.

Sometimes she felt cast out by her family. Why should she be the one to be separated? Since the new war began, she had no more letters from Rivka and Maman and Jacqueline. She had only those moments she could not demand but could only accept when she felt her twin sharply from inside her.

Aunt Rose came in and kissed her. “All right, so I won't slap you, Ruth wants me to be modern and American. But you be a good girl now.” Rose pinched her cheeks between her calloused and water-worn hands, smelling of onions. “Be a good girl for us and for your own mother, my dear sister Chava, who I know is always thinking of you.”

Naomi nodded awkwardly. What was all this fervent wishing that she be good? Did G-d start counting when you had your first period? Maybe G-d didn't get mad at anything you did until then, but then it counted, every thought and every deed and every mitzvah performed or failed. She felt dismayed at the prospect of having to be really good. She changed the subject intentionally. “Did my mother, Chava, start at the same age as me?”

“You're twelve, right? The same age. Chava was already pretty then, already smart. I was the sensible one, I had to take care for the little ones. Your aunt Batya was the silliest, the most boy-crazy. Esther, she was only a little baby when I left. She's the one who married well. Both Esther and Batya married Balabans, from Kozienice also, but Batya married the handsome boy with no sense, while Esther married the one with the mill, and she keeps his books.”

Naomi loved to persuade Aunt Rose to talk about the sisters. It made the connections real, that she was still in the same family however scattered they were across Europe and America.

At supper when she sat down to the table, a soup of onions and potatoes served with the dark bread Aunt Rose had sent her to buy at the bakery, Uncle Morris looked at her with such a face of sadness and worry and amusement, she knew immediately Aunt Rose had told him. She wanted to throw down her spoon and rush out of the room. What restrained her was remembering how many such stupid scenes Jacqueline had put on, accusing Maman usually but sometimes Papa of being insensitive, of not respecting her, of making fun of her ideas. Bang. Down would go the spoon and back would go the chair and Jacqueline would storm off to shut herself in the salle de bains. What she did in there was a mystery. They would hear the water running wildly. When she came out she would look as if she had received some secret message; she would act smug, withdrawn, slightly exalted. She would look at them all sideways, as if to say, You who do not understand me will understand someday after I have done great things!

Naomi resolved she would not become silly like Jacqueline. Ignoring everybody, she ate her soup. The blood was not particularly impressive. She had bled far more with a nosebleed, as had Rivka when they had been carving their names in a chestnut tree and the knife slipped. She said instead, since everybody kept glancing at her surreptitiously, “There's something I'd like to know.”

“What's that?” Ruthie asked, at the same time that Uncle Morris said, “Are you sure you don't want to wait till after supper and ask your aunt?”

“Why does everybody think it's funny or wrong if you want to be friends with a colored girl? Why does anyone care?”

Everyone in her new family looked upset, as if she had asked about something even more embarrassing than periods. “Your uncle Morris will explain,” Aunt Rose said, while Arty and Sharon made faces as if the soup didn't taste good. Naomi decided she was never going to understand how to be an adult, even if she did bleed now. Uncle Morris said he would talk to her after supper, as if she had asked about something dirty. She gave up and ate her soup. It occurred to her that whenever she felt Rivka lately, Rivka was always hungry.

DANIEL 2

The Great Purple Crossword Puzzle

Daniel Balaban had always been a devotee of
The New York Times
crossword puzzle. During his years at City College, he had relished a competition with his cousin Seymour to see which of them could work it faster. The one done first would call the other to crow. However, he had never imagined that he would one day be working a giant crossword puzzle day and night under intense pressure with a sense of probable doom hanging over him.

Of course cryptanalysis—deciphering codes, in this case, in Japanese—was not the same as working a crossword puzzle, yet at times it felt so, for everything in the structure they were creating was interrelated; when they discovered one tiny piece, it could change other pieces guessed at and now rendered certain or incorrect.

In the spring when men from his program of crash Japanese instruction had begun to be called to Washington, Daniel had wondered increasingly what would be done with him. He had imagined interrogating prisoners on a tropical isle. Would he be sent overseas at once? He was in the second batch called up. In college he had been a C student, rarely roused to pursue excellence. Here he had outdone classmates who had studied Japanese for several years. He had never thought of himself as stupid, but neither had he considered himself brilliant. His cousin Seymour was the intellectual and his brother Haskel, the all-A student. Now he viewed himself with a new respect for his mind.

Then came the induction all at once and over his head into the OP-20-G office, where he was put to work on cryptanalysis with dispatch and a furious pressure from above. He was reminded of Haskel teaching him to swim by tossing him off the side of a pool at the Y. He was dropped into deep and choppy waters, in the midst of a fierce storm of incomprehensible office politics. Yet somehow he learned. He could not understand the purpose of this grim activity for some weeks, but he attempted to make his way.

Daniel felt out of place when first posted to Washington, to OP-20-G. Half of the staff were Navy career men, Annapolis graduates who had spent time in Japan as part of their training. Half were civilians, men and women whose vocation and identity were bound up with Japanese language and culture. Several of them were nisei or partly Japanese, a few were married to Japanese, but he did not share the suspicion of everything Japanese-American that characterized most Americans and was, indeed, the official government position. After the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans, the Navy had to move their own nisei from the West Coast to Colorado, to protect them. Without them, the program would have been crippled.