Gone to Soldiers (27 page)

The scene haunts me in its irrational ragged quality, the violence loosed in both of us—her striking me and throwing down the potatoes, and the violence of our emotions. I wonder why I could not remain calm, which had been my intention, but the more she grew excited, the more excited I grew in return, a vicious loop. Every time I think of that ugly scene, I am aghast at how we acted, how we lost our dignity and how we failed to communicate. I am resolved that we will be at peace again, but on decent terms.

16 juillet 1942

I almost cannot write. I have been weeping so long my eyes are swollen and raw and my sinuses completely blocked.

Maman and Rivka have been taken away in a bus by the police—not by themselves but with thousands and thousands of others. They sealed off five arrondissements yesterday and continuing today, the French police—apparently almost a thousand of them from what we have been able to learn—arrested huge numbers of Jews, including men, women, children, old people, little babies, pregnant women, everybody. The police forced people to leave with just what they could carry and loaded them on the old green buses. One paper says ten thousand Jews were arrested, another paper says eighteen thousand, another paper says twenty-eight thousand. All the papers think it is a wonderful idea and are full of praise of the New Europe cleansed of such lice as ourselves.

I am too sick and exhausted to write anything else.

18 juillet 1942

All of my efforts have been spent trying to find out where Maman and Rivka are being kept, and what is going to happen to them. I do not see how they can touch Rivka as she is born here, a French Jew from birth. Maman was naturalized twenty years ago. It turns out to be very dangerous to try to find out where Maman and Rivka are, because of course my name too is on whatever list they are using to pick people up, and that I escaped was only due to a quarrel. I wish I was with them, lending my level head to the circumstances and figuring out the best strategy to pursue.

It is incredibly hot this week, la canicule. Paris is not designed for fierce summer heat. Henri's room is simply too hot to sleep in. We have been getting up and going out very early, down to the river where it is a little cooler. There is danger in being on the streets when so few are about. Henri has begun working over his black market connections to get me new identification—Aryan, as they say.

But new identity cards will cost a lot. I have no money at all. I am discovering I dislike intensely being dependent on Henri, and Henri too is astonished how fast the situation developed. I do not think he wants me living with him, although he has said nothing. At first he thought it was great, but now the ramifications of the situation are beginning to impress themselves upon him. Here he is stuck with me, a Jew, in hiding, no means of support, kicked out of school, weeping constantly.

19 juillet 1942

I have discovered where Maman and Rivka are imprisoned. They took everybody with children to the Vel d'Hiv, a glass-roofed track with big grandstands where bicycle races are held in the winter. I have learned thousands of people are being confined there. Perhaps they are sorting through everybody's identity cards. Rivka was born here, and Maman was naturalized when she was eighteen, and married moreover to a native French Jew. I am counting on hearing that they are released, but so far no one seems to have been let go. I cannot learn what they are being held for.

20 juillet 1942

I ran into Daniela, so she escaped too. She said she had word via the network just before it happened, so that she and her parents fled their flat at 3
A
.
M
. with nothing. They slipped out just ahead of the police dragnet.

She says that I could pass with good identification, and that she knows where to get it. In the meantime I must have money. Once I have non-Jewish identification, she can get me a job in a hospital, badly paid but sufficient to live on. I must come up with the money for the papers fast.

I went home and asked Henri to tell his father that he had made a young girl pregnant, and to ask him for the money for an abortion. I felt his father would give it to him, along with a lecture neither of them would believe a word of. Henri was frightened but agreed. He is feeling very out of his depth. He did not even want to have sex with me. This is not a stable situation in my estimate.

Daniela has agreed that we must try to find out what is happening to our people in the Vel d'Hiv. We have formally disbanded the school. We both believe that creating visible Jewish organizations is just lining up to be picked off. Daniela says that we must resist, but so far she has not said how. I consider that a lot of hot air, the equivalent of an angry and powerless child saying to someone who has hurt her, I'm going to get you. I'm going to show you.

21 juillet 1942

What little we have been able to learn is terrifying. They say at least one hundred thirty bodies have been carried out of there, including two pregnant women who apparently died in labor. We hear that at least fifteen thousand people, including five thousand children, are being kept without food or water. I cannot believe this, I cannot believe the French police are doing this to my mother and my sister, and yet I cannot disbelieve. I cannot eat or sleep. I am keeping a vigil.

Henri goes today to talk to his father. At this moment I do not care if I live or die. If I had not given in to Henri, I would never have quarreled with Maman and I would be with her now. I feel as guilty as the Nazis, I feel as if somehow I did this to Maman. I wish a large truck would run over me in the street.

Maman is right. I am nothing but a whore, fucking for potatoes and eggs and a few kind words in the midst of a city seething with hatred. Among all the people who were on the streets and saw whole families being carted away by the police, no one tried to help, no one tried to stop them. I have heard that some of the neighbors yelled encouragement at the police including the Laroques whose dog we always fed when they were out of town.

Six days without food or water so far, how can they survive? Maman is strong, but she is thirty-nine and made of flesh and blood. Rivka is wiry but still a child and already malnourished.

If I could give them my blood to drink, I would do it without a word.

ABRA 3

Such a Roomy Closet

“Shall we take a walk?” Oscar Kahan said, as if it were a usual request. “It's such a beautiful day. As it were.” He added the last comment with a grin because the day was hot and soggy, the sort of day when Abra remembered summers in Maine with nostalgia. Staying in New York in the heat felt sometimes as if it were masochism.

She followed him, imagining herself a character in a comic strip, a Daisy Mae with a huge question mark floating over her head in a balloon. Never before had Oscar Kahan asked her to take a walk. She had discovered herself fantasizing about him lately, and had been toying with the idea of abandoning her policy of never becoming sexually involved at work. Her policy, after all, was based on caution rather than morality. What was the use, anyhow, of throwing her own code over, when Oscar Kahan treated her with the same unfailing but nigh universal warmth he spread over all of his students? She was aware she had taken lately to arranging herself in positions designed to emphasize the line of her calf, her profile, her bosom, but if Oscar Kahan noticed, he did not act upon what he observed. Until now.

They left his office and headed westward, toward the river. As they strolled, he questioned her about recent interviews and commented on others, impressing her as always with his grasp of the large pattern and the small detail. Maybe he simply wanted some fresh air, although she did not think there was any to be had nearer than Connecticut. Perhaps the warm weather made him restless. Perhaps having grown up in Pittsburgh, he was accustomed to smog, and actually found the stinking air of Manhattan in summer bracing.

In Riverside Park, he took a bench somewhat isolated from the others, with a view of ships in the river and a couple embracing on the grass. He glanced around, taking in the scene, and then gave her a hard appraising look. “I won't be teaching in the fall.”

There goes my job, she thought. “Where are you going, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Have you considered getting more involved in the war effort?”

He's managed to enlist, I bet. “I thought about the WAVES—the Navy's my family's branch of service—but I can't imagine myself marching around saluting. I'm too much of a spoiled brat for military discipline.”

“Yet you take orders.”

“You know that's not the same thing.”

He stared intently at the tug maneuvering a stolid grey freighter upriver. “I'm planning to recruit you. But not for the WAVES.”

She glanced sharply at him. He smiled. “Don't look so shocked. It doesn't become you. You know perfectly well you've been involved in intelligence work. You figured that out long ago. Now I'm officially joining OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. I'd like to take you with me.”

Finally there it was in the open. “What is OSS?”

“A bit of everything, actually. Propaganda, intelligence, spying. I know mostly Research and Analysis people.”

“Where would we be going?”

“For the moment, noplace but into another office. Later on, who knows? I don't want to discuss details before you make up your mind. I'll be running a little project and I have carte blanche to bring as much of my staff with me as I choose.”

“Of course!” Abra said. “Of course I'll do it.”

“You don't even know what you're getting into.”

“Oh, but I'm sure it will be interesting. I have confidence in you.”

“Did you ever finish up your degree?”

“Not exactly. I completed my class work and passed my orals, but I'm still rewriting my dissertation to Professor Blumenthal's criticisms.”

“You'll have to put it aside for the duration.”

“I'm not thrilled with rewriting it for the fourth time. Does it matter that I don't have my doctorate?”

“I doubt it.” He stood. “This is all silly, because there's so little I can tell you before I take you there, and yet you have to decide first. I hope you aren't being romantic about this.”

Did he suspect her of a crush? Perhaps she'd been a little too obvious with her leg show. “In what way?”

“It isn't a matter of cloak-and-dagger intrigues, beautiful spies and dashing heroes, just academic analysis. We'll be trying to make sense out of vast quantities of information, and the work may often be more statistical than stimulating.”

“I trust your judgment that it's important. I think you have your political priorities straight, and I hope I do.”

“We have a little trip to make to an office in Rockefeller Plaza that need not otherwise concern you. Sign you on, start the process.” He offered her his arm off the bench with rare courtliness. “It's time I became more involved. The slowness of entry was driving me crazy,” he said with a flash of anger suppressed. “Now we'll get moving.”

In July, Ready appeared after months of absence. He had just been commissioned a lieutenant commander and was expecting to be assigned to a carrier. In the morning he was scheduled to head home by train.

Her favorite brother looked older, she thought, his skin leathery and seamed, nets of new wrinkles around his dark blue eyes, his hair even blonder than hers. He was in a good, antic mood. When she suggested various friends, he wanted all of them. After Italian food, which Ready always craved, in a local Village dive Abra favored because even before the war there had never been any pictures of Mussolini displayed, they were joined by Djika, Karen Sue and Karen Sue's new roommate, Eveline, a second cousin on her mother's side from Beaufort, North Carolina, married to an ensign on a convoy escort destroyer. Karen Sue viewed sharing her apartment as her foremost sacrifice to the war effort.

After they had drunk their way through a couple of Village spots, they went uptown to the Onyx Club and then the Famous Door, listening to swing and dancing till two in the morning. “Sweet Georgia Brown,” Abra sang and did the lindy with her brother. Watching Karen Sue and Ready dance cheek to cheek to “That Old Black Magic” in the smoky ill-lit room, the mobbed floor, she suddenly imagined what it would feel like to be in love with someone and send him off to war. Falling in love was something that happened to other women, never to her, and while so far in her life she had viewed herself as able to enjoy men because she was not obsessed with them individually, now she wondered if she were incapable and if she would always avoid what others seemed passionately to seek.

Eveline was dancing with a lieutenant whom Ready had invited to their table. Karen Sue and Ready were doing a sleek flirtatious lindy. “In the Mood” was loud, the brass section standing to blare out their anthem, but Djika's low incisive voice came through clearly from her position at Abra's elbow. “Seeing you with this brother, one begins to understand the basis of your aversion to men of your own appearance and background.”

“But Ready's my favorite brother. We've always been close.”

“Quite so.” Djika nodded, as if she were saying, Mate in two moves. “In fact you even look exceptionally like. You naturally found him attractive when you were growing up, so in fear at the incest lurking, you seek out men who could not possibly be part of your family.”

“Ah, the dubious joys of Freud,” Abra punned. “Prove you were in love with your father at age four, and what do you have? The same set of current problems. I certainly hope I had the good taste to lust after Ready when I was little, instead of my hideously dull brother Roger or father.”

Djika told her for the thirtieth time that ignoring Freud made her naive, but Abra was sure her taste in men was motivated by curiosity, hunger, zest for life, a passion for experience far more than by the incest taboo Djika postulated. At the moment all such considerations were theoretical, as she was too busy for more than an occasional night with an old flame, and her curiosity about Oscar Kahan remained unsated.