Gone to Soldiers (41 page)

Every night we get under the pile of covers and listen to the BBC news of Stalingrad. The war in Africa does not seem to be going well, although it is exciting to hear that French troops are fighting again on the Allied side, and to realize there is French territory where we would be safe if we could reach it. The Mediterranean is wide, but not so wide as the Atlantic. We live off these little fantasies. Daniela and I have worked out a system whereby we trade off certain fantasies, equal time for each. She plans our life together with her fiancé Ari in Palestine on a kibbutz that will raise apricots. Then I get my turn to plan our life together in Paris attending the Sorbonne.

She asked me tonight if I ever miss Henri, and I said, honestly, no. I feel he dealt honorably with me in borrowing the money from his father for a fictitious abortion, which paid for my identity cards, and in sheltering me for a month and a week. By the time I moved out, he only wanted to be free again; he was terrified he would end up in prison because of me. He did not talk of love again after the first week of my having to move in; that was actually a relief, since I could not lie. I harbor no anger, no malice toward him, some gratitude but not a lot, frankly.

Daniela asked me if I ever missed sex, and I said, again honestly for that is our policy with each other, not really. I had begun to enjoy aspects of the act, but I believe I never had an orgasm, and Daniela too says that if I had one I would know it. She misses Ari. She is glad that they began to make love together before he left Paris six months ago to try to go over the border into Spain, where he fought during the Civil War. He intended to make it to Palestine to join the Jewish Brigade, but we wonder now if he may have gone to North Africa instead, to join up there. At least he is free—probably. People disappear every day and it is unusual luck if you happen to find out what happened to them. She intends to remain faithful to him the rest of her life. I consider that a little quixotic considering she doesn't even know what country or indeed what continent Ari is on, but it is all theoretical anyhow. I think it makes Daniela feel secure to think one aspect of her life is firmly fixed. She carries his picture with her, a full-faced boyish but stubborn-looking young man posed with a rifle under a too hot sun that makes him squint. She insists that when we finally meet, we will like each other and be friends also. I look at the photo skeptically but who can tell? Will she ever see him again? Will I ever see anybody from my family? Nowadays you can count only on seeing those whom your eyes rest on at that moment. It is interesting that both Daniela and I have had one lover, but she seems to have thought more of the experience. I wonder what makes the difference?

18 décembre 1942

We heard via the network that a deportation was scheduled today, and that Maman might be in it. I got off work yesterday faking a toothache and went racing all over, but to no avail. The Ausweis is in the works, but always in the works and never real.

I took the train to Drancy this morning, to stand with a group of others on the bridge over the railroad yards, where we can watch. They will not let us nearer. It is flat and drab there, a scraggly railroad suburb around the marshalling yards. Somewhat after dawn the first pale raggedy tottering ghosts were marched double time beneath us. I almost did not recognize Rivka, because Rivka has grown as tall as Maman and is so lean and stooped she looked like an old lady at first. I saw Maman at once. She looked bone thin but she walked with a very determined step, looking around and grasping tight to Rivka. Many of the others just hung their heads, but she saw me at once and we stared at each other as hard as we could, hungry for the fragile contact. She blew a kiss to me and had Rivka do the same. The moment was over much too quickly and then they were gone in the crowd being driven along like starving sheep to the cars. I had to rush off to work, as being absent again would not be at all wise.

I did not cry all day but now I cannot stop. The tears keep leaking slowly down my face. I wonder if what the Pole told us is true, and I fear it is. I hope Maman and Rivka do not know where they are going. I hope I am wrong. Hope is the feeblest emotion.

If we were not engaged in our little counterfeiting action, I would go mad. What saves me is the hard work we do daily in the hospital, and our lifesaving work afterward. Only lately it all feels too little. Daniela and I used to talk about the violent Resistance as something almost criminal, becoming like the Nazis, but I no longer think so. I begin to respect that work. Now that Maman and Rivka are transported, should I stay in Paris or try to find Papa? I do not want to be separated from Daniela, but her parents are also in the south. Our best information is that the Gestapo were waiting for the drop to be made in that bistro near Gare du Lyon, so we don't know where the weak link was and how much danger we are in.

I try to sleep but I keep seeing Maman marching forward so firmly and so much herself in spite of her pallor, gripping Rivka by the hand, who has shot up taller than Maman but thin as a seedling hatched in the dark. To see them and not to be able to speak, to touch them, to hold Maman just for one moment to say I want to be forgiven and I love her! At least she saw me. At least they saw me. At least I saw her. That is a little more than nothing.

JEFF 4

A Few Early Deaths

Jeff and Zach spent a few weeks in Casablanca before they were ordered on to Algiers, where OSS headquarters for North Africa was located, in the sumptuous Villa Magnol with a view of the harbor. The head of Algiers OSS, Colonel Eddy, trusted only the OSS Secret Intelligence people who had suffered through the long spring and summer of discontent when the Joint Chiefs could not decide whether they would listen to his agents in North Africa, whether they would support the French Resistance there, whether they would send any weapons or supplies whatsoever to conduct the sabotage they ordered but did not back up. Eddy had watched his French operatives gradually arrested as he made promises he could not keep because Allied Headquarters would not let him.

The French the Allies had put in power or left in power after the successful Operation Torch invasion of Northwest Africa, Jeff considered an unsavory crew, many of them Fascists who had either supported the Vichy government in southern France or cooperated, as did that government, most enthusiastically with the Nazis. Some were simply slimy opportunists. They were a different breed than the Free French he had met in London, who were touchy, vainglorious but thoroughly anti-Fascist. The local OSS brass were anti-Gaullist. The pro-Gaullist element in OSS had been purged or rendered powerless.

The Allies had made a fast alliance with Admiral Darlan, who had been a high Vichy official and so far to the right he considered the Bourbon pretender to the throne, who was also hanging around Algiers plotting, insufficiently reactionary to back. It was some liberation, Jeff thought. The local Jews were still being persecuted under Vichy decrees, still had to wear their yellow stars, Resistance fighters were still in concentration camps, the Fascist supporters of Vichy retained their positions and flourished. Allied Headquarters had run to embrace Admiral Darlan, who had extolled cooperation with the Nazis under Marshal Pétain.

When the French laid down their arms a couple of days after the Allied landing, the Germans rushed fresh troops to Africa. Now fighting was fierce in Tunisia. Although OSS had been in Africa before the Torch invasion, they were shut out of Eisenhower's headquarters, for he preferred British intelligence. OSS was orphaned, hanging around the outside trying to wriggle in.

“Eisenhower's got a British girlfriend, and he leans toward them. He thinks they know everything he doesn't. All the American brass cling together and bitch about it,” Zach reported. He had a cousin in headquarters who was bitter indeed.

Zach and Jeff were kept in Algiers, partly because of Jeff's idiomatic and excellent French, and partly because Zach was one of the few people in SO who had actually had any experience with irregular warfare, acquired as he said from assisting in British disasters in 1941. An OSS faction still supporting the old Resistance commandeered them. The controlling powers in OSS were supporting the Darlan regime, but there was a younger element in rebellion who wanted to protect the local liberals and the Resistance people.

Since the Americans had not told their French agents when the invasions were to take place until immediately before, the sabotage and uprising had been abortive and costly, leaving a number of Resistance people behind barbed wire. With Eisenhower's decision to work with the old Vichy officials, getting their people out was proving difficult. Jeff, as a Special Operations person of no experience (in which he resembled just about every other SO person in North Africa), was handed part of the problem to solve, clandestinely. The first job was to prevent more of their people from being arrested, as was happening weekly.

“It goes without saying we'll spring them somehow,” Zach said. “In the meantime, can't we find a more comely Fatima?” That was what the Yanks called the Moslem women they hired to clean their rooms, do their laundry, all the dirty little jobs which they no longer had to do for themselves.

They certainly ate better than in London. There seemed no shortage of food here, and the local cooking—both the French and the Algerian—was excellent. Wine was coarse, strong and bountiful. “After the war, I could imagine retiring here,” Zach said. “I mean for a month or two. It compares quite favorably with Palm Springs or Palm Beach. Cheaper. Better food. Hash. Tea. Vin du pays. Arab boys and French girls. Who could ask for more?”

“It would help if Eddy didn't view us as so obviously expendable.” Jeff found Algiers less enticing than Zach did. He missed the London art scene. He did not like the French colonials. His Parisian friends had been artists, bohemians, leftists. Here he enjoyed none of the intellectual fervor or play he associated with speaking French. He was also unaccustomed to the colonial position, to being one of a small minority comfortably squatting on a large impoverished population. He was not used to being in a city, large areas of which were hostile and closed to him. The weather was iffy. The rain laid the sticky heat and the dust by making mud. The frequent bombing made every cock in Algiers crow all night, in competition. He remembered Renoir's paintings of the local landscape, but he was not moved to try his hand. When he felt most open to the land, he thought rather of Cezanne. But he was not painting, only sketching desultorily.

Zach plunged into the Casbah with zest, the narrow streets jammed with robed men, veiled women, begging children, the streets of prostitutes each in a cubicle open to the passerby behind a curtain that would fall after a customer entered. “Ah, the stench of the stews!” Zach flung back his head. It stank certainly, with open sewers running down both sides of the tiny winding, always climbing streets, tobacco, incense, hash, the baking smell of strong sun on stucco and stone, the aroma of little cups of sweet Arabic coffee that came on brass trays as they sat cross-legged in sidewalk dens. Jeff reflected that it stank no worse than the flophouses and shantytowns he had slept in, and he had seen child prostitutes in Chicago and El Paso. Here, however, there were more and larger flies. It was a subject for a Mediterranean Hogarth. Zach and he were spending almost all their time together. Jeff felt overwhelmed at times, crowded emotionally.

He desperately missed his Welsh art student, Mary Llewellyn. He missed the yellow London fog and the bomb ruins in the rain. He missed their neat apartment in Chelsea near the embankment. He missed seeing paintings two or three times a week, staring at them, going back to look again, talking over what he had seen and what he was trying to do and what others were attempting. In London he had felt himself fully a painter. It was a royal gift, the milieu he should have had in his early twenties that the Depression had robbed him of. He had hated to leave it. He missed it daily.

Nonetheless he was aware that it was war that had brought him to London, and he was here to pay for that beautiful time that had been granted him, the taste of the life he, with more money or born in less interesting times, might have led, and might conceivably live after the war. That remained his fantasy: that he would survive, return to London, perhaps even marry Mary Llewellyn, share a studio and paint forever. She was the first painter he had ever been involved with, and the relationship had felt much fuller, much richer, than he was used to. They never ran out of something to talk about.

When word came that a French liberal was in trouble, one of their jobs was to hide him or her, temporarily, if that would do the trick; if not, they had to spirit their protégé over a border to safety, or install him or her in the back country somewhere, just so they could keep them away from the Darlan government and keep them out of prison. It was a war against Allied Headquarters, who found this worrying about Communists and Jews, as they put it, ridiculous. Finally it was war against the old Vichy establishment.

Zach managed to visit one of the prison camps, which had made him keener on what they were doing. He described it as a hell hole run by sadists who wanted to be Nazis. Jeff felt satisfied with their work, but he minded strongly that it was necessary. Some war. The wrong allies, the wrong enemies here. At least in Tunisia everybody was fighting the Germans.

However with their new assignment, he began to like the French better. Instead of gouty right-wing generals, dealers in vegetable oil and financial manipulators trying to convert worthless francs into dollars, all of whom talked about the native problem, sneered at Roosevelt and held anti-Semitism as a passionate faith, they were dealing with younger officers, petty merchants, the little punks who had stuck their necks out, mechanics, refugees who had fled here to get away from the Nazis. They were dealing with people who had trusted the Americans and still wanted to like them.

“The British, they don't like us and we don't like them,” a dealer in secondhand furniture told them. “Fire and water. We don't mix.”