Gone to Soldiers (80 page)

Jacqueline volunteered to get up again after two hours' sleep and go to warn him in the little village where he was staying with a widow, about ten kilometers out of Vabre, and at the same time to deliver the latest reports for London. There were the railroad reports, the troop movements, the reports on outposts and guard movements in the Pyrénées. OSS was using that route heavily for their people and deliveries of information and money.

Jeff claimed he had a great need to talk to Raymond too, to send the coordinates of a new drop site for the next shipment. His greatest need was to keep an eye on Jacqueline, but he also considered Raymond felt a little too well protected and had been dragging his heels lately. Sometimes their people up in the mountains grew overconfident, since they weren't seeing the Germans or the Vichy collaborators every day, and the countryfolk around them gave them support that could fool them to the dangers of their situation. He had been shocked to learn that Raymond was where he had been the week before, staying in the house of a young widow who was reputed to be a first-class cook, able to make a fine ragoût out of a straw hat. It was time to build a small fire under Raymond.

The air was sharp as flint against their faces as they pedaled through the pale blue morning light along the gorge of the Agout, the road snaking among the grey and red rocks, the snow golden in the patches of sun, cobalt in the shadows. His sinuses ached. His ankle hurt in the cold. He dreamed of spring, of making love with her on a hillside that would smell of heather and broom. They turned onto a narrower road.

They were bicycling sharply uphill along a stream rattling under its ice, each thrust of the pedal an agony, when Jacqueline abruptly dismounted and motioned him to stop also, to come off the road. Leaving their bicycles hidden in a thicket, they scrambled up a rock over the stream. Icicles hung from its ledges. His feet and hands slipped in the holds he used. Ahead she wriggled up, crawled out on top and lay on her belly in the snow watching the village just below them. “What's wrong?” he whispered.

“I don't know … Listen.”

He listened. “I don't hear anything.” The village looked peaceful. The overlapping slates of the roofs in the mountain village resembled fish scales. Here they hung slate for siding, thin slabs. The effect was not pretty but grim, like stone tar paper. The villages in these mountains were small, stark, poor. Always there were many sheep and a few cows. The churches were small and bowed. Something in the grey rock, the sheep, the many boulders, the fast speckled streams aroused him as a painter. His Argenteuil, his Mont-St-Victoire, his Sacred Mountain was this landscape.

“Right. There's only one dog barking, and he's howling and has been. No other dogs. When have you ever come up on a village and the dogs haven't barked? And no children. Something's wrong.” She frowned, shaking her head. Then she crept back to the bikes. “We can't go in.”

“Jacqueline, I have to send that information to London.”

“Something's wrong there,” she said. “We must go back.”

She was hardheaded. The village looked normal to him. He had the choice of going on alone, but without what he had come to do, because she was pedaling madly back toward Vabre with the packet of messages. Feeling greatly put upon, he pedaled after her, feeling the cold, his fatigue, the utter futility of having risen at six after going to bed at four, pedaled for two hours and now returning with the same information they had carried up. “Slow down!” he yelled at her. “My ankle is killing me. You're a stubborn self-righteous little bitch!”

It wasn't until they were getting ready to return to Toulouse that they heard that the village had been occupied by the SS, Raymond had been captured, the widow shot in her own yard and her body exposed in the town square. Twenty townspeople were taken as hostages and then machine-gunned as reprisal for the Resistance activities revealed by the presence of the radio. Had they entered the square, they would have seen the bodies, but by then they would have been trapped. The dogs had been shot too, except for the widow's spaniel. Some German liked spaniels and saved it.

Jacqueline took her premonition for granted, as did Daniela and Lev. “She can smell them,” Lev said.

“God gives me that much,” Jacqueline said. “It isn't what I'd ask for, but it's useful. It's necessary to be clear, that's all there is to it.”

Was it a chess game they were playing with the Nazis, and if so, did the Germans and the Vichy collaborators ever lose any pieces? Yes, they had lost Gilles. On the Paris street they had lost the captain and his lieutenant whom Daniela's brother had shot before he blew himself up. And the war. That they were losing. He could smell the invasion coming, while the underground was sending out to the Allies precise and full information on all the German defenses, on their weapons, on their plans. It would come, and soon, he thought. When spring came, could the armies be far behind?

I belong here, he thought, with these people. It's right. I never belonged anyplace before, but here I belong. This is my landscape, my countryside, my light, my woman. I will sink roots here and flourish, like one of the mighty beeches. He had begun to cultivate a strong local accent, for he no longer wanted to sound like a Parisian. There had been painters in Toulouse always, but not landscape painters. Corot had painted around here briefly. The mountains in every direction were different: the Pyrénées, mighty, sharp peaks, long vistas bounded by glaciers, steep and lush on the lower slopes. The houses were built higher there, with sharply pitched roofs. The mountains of Lacaune were low and open, scrublands, sheep country full of outcroppings, abandoned stone sheds and farmhouses, small villages growing into the rock. Montagne Noire was covered with rich noble forests, hemlock and beech. He found himself constantly thinking of what land he would buy after the war. There was a country inn outside of Albi he discussed endlessly with Jacqueline. She would run the kitchen and he would run the hotel. That made her laugh, because she pointed out she knew nothing about food, except how to eat it, which she would gladly do on any occasion.

“We'll complain of the tourists and the foreigners,” she said. “We'll talk about the difficulty of getting good help these days and rail at the petty thievery of the staff.”

On all their errands and escapades and night excursions to sabotage the rail lines, a munitions dump on the Garonne, SS communications, he carried along his country inn, sometimes at Albi, sometimes at Salvetat, furnished it, planned menus, financed and refinanced his dream. Often they worked together, for Jacqueline proved to have the best touch with plastique in the group. On excursions into the countryside he felt as if he were secretly shopping for real estate, for after the war. He would never return to his old life, to the States, to failure. Here he would flourish. And paint. This was virgin landscape. Unlike Taos, where every rock he eyed had been painted ten ways before, who had ever taken an easel into the rock fields of the mountains of Lacaune? Whose eye had stroked the long flanks of these mountains? Who had caught the wild tulips? Who had captured the lichen-grey-green rocks among the rapids? This earth, this sky cried to him. It was his.

NAOMI 7

The Tear in Things

They would run through the cold, black morning, their salvaged cans clinking at where their waists used to be. The guards were all around them beating at them with their rifles. If a woman went down, that was it, Maman and she would not let each other fall
.

Then they entered the din of the hollow mountain where they were building a factory, where at least it was warmer from the machinery. Hunger was all of the time, a howling from within the starved body slowly dying, slowly eating itself, the outrage of the body that it should be worked twelve hours a day at hard, fast labor dragging out carts loaded with broken rock, put into harness like horses, and given nothing but moldy bread of sawdust and watery soup of turnips or cabbage
.

Love kept Rivka going, love for Maman like a hot coal in her, Maman who was the only warmth, the only good, the only softness and strength in the universe of acid sleet. Since they were two, one could always watch the other's few things, the can in which the watery soup was ladled, the scrap of rope, the leg wrappings, the clogs that could not be replaced: any of these stolen could mean death, so when they had to step into a real shower or be deloused, when they had to strip for a Selection, then the other would hold on and wait
.

Sometimes Maman would insist on splitting her piece of daily bread and giving half to Rivka, because she said Rivka's need was more, for she was still growing, although she was not, she could not. Her bones ached. Her periods had never started; her breasts had never formed. She looked like a tall skeletal child, looming over her mother, when she saw herself reflected in standing water, in metal in the factory. Her hair was cropped so that her skull stood out grey. Her arms and legs were pitted with running sores
.

In winter every day at roll call, as they stood in the dark and the air that was ice in their lungs and that squeezed even the pain out of their hands and feel and faces, women fell over. Sometimes they died on the spot. If they didn't, they were taken to be killed. Never fall. Keep standing, keep moving, and stay close to Maman
.

When a prisoner threatened Maman, Rivka would bare her teeth like a rat and start swinging. When one of the guards or the kapos hit Maman or knocked her to the ground, of course she had to stand and look down. But she let nobody else touch Maman. Sundays and after the standing at attention in the evenings, sometimes Maman sang her Yiddish songs, “Schlaffen, mine yiddele, schlaffen,” as they picked the lice from each other, the lice that gave them ulcers and brought typhus that killed. “Tumbalalaika” with its magic questions. What can burn, burn and not burn up? A heart. Yes. Then the women ghosts would climb onto the slats and shiver and try to sleep. In the morning someone would be dead and a neighbor would grab clothing, a hidden scrap of bread and their shoes, fast, because shoes could be traded for bread
.

Naomi woke aching, aching. Her stomach seemed to be shriveled to a hard green potato in her chest. Every night she tried to stay awake, but finally she slept and then sometimes she dreamed about school or Alvin or pigeons or people shooting each other, but sometimes, she was there, in the place of death, locked into Rivka's body.

Sometimes she tried to bargain with G-d. Please, let them escape, let them out of the place of evil and I will be good. I won't let Alvin stick his tongue in my mouth. I won't let myself make up stories about Leib in bed at night. I won't think about Leib in that way ever again and I won't imagine that Trudi has an accident and dies suddenly, never once will I do it anymore. I won't help Sandy cheat on tests in English, G-d, and I won't feel superior to her and think how come I get A's when it isn't even my language. I won't steal from the dime store anymore, even if Sandy and Alvin and Four Eyes all beg me to. I won't even sneak any more looks at the gushy letters that Murray writes Ruthie, I promise.

If you just let me sleep and not know and not feel and not see anymore, please, I'll be good. She would help Aunt Rose meekly and zealously for several days, scrubbing and cleaning and shopping fervently, keeping track of the red and blue points with extra care, running around the same as Aunt Rose did to find a little bargain or a shop that actually had a quarter pound of butter or a little piece of lamb. Detroit was always undergoing meat famines, when nothing but offal could be found, and not much of that.

Maybe for several nights she wouldn't have the dreams, and she would try all of the time to be really good. She would even help Trudi with baby David, as if she didn't get too much of babies at home. She strove hard and then she had a dream and she felt like a fool. G-d was mocking her. G-d didn't care what lies she told him and so what if she was good for two whole days, big deal. G-d knew that inside she was no good, and that was all there was to it. To hell with it, which was a phrase she had taken to saying, although not at home. To hell with it. She affected a racy style and swore. Nobody knew what to make of Sandy and her at school. They did well in their classes. They were in college prep, but they were not middle class. Sandy had more clothes than Naomi, but they were both shabby in their washworn rayon blouses and skimpy cut skirts, next to the middle-class girls in powder blue sweaters and little pearl necklaces.

Sometimes Sandy and she wore oversized men's shirts. Naomi had helped herself to two of Duvey's last year, and lately she had persuaded Sharon to give her one of Arty's with frayed cuffs. She didn't care, because she rolled up the sleeves. Sandy and she had that shuffle all the fast girls used, and she could talk to guys out of the side of her mouth and pass comments with the glibbest. They watched the colored kids carefully and practiced jitterbug steps together, so they looked real tough out on the floor at the school dances after every scrap and paper drive. Mostly the girls danced together, but Naomi and Sandy frequently had partners. The Catholic girls passed rumors about them that they did it with all the boys, and the daughter of the Jewish dentist would not walk in the halls with them, for fear their reputation would rub off on her like greasy lipstick. The boys did not try any funny stuff with her, although out of respect for her or out of respect for Alvin, Naomi was not sure.

Clotilde asked her, How come you want to act like those V-girls? V-girls or Victory girls was what the girls who chased soldiers were called. Naomi couldn't answer. Maybe it was a style she could carry off. She didn't have the money to look like the popular girls who ran the clubs in school. Maybe if, like Clotilde, she had her maman, she would not need to act tough.

Sandy's mother, Mrs. Rosenthal, did not like the way Sandy was acting now that she did not have to drag her baby brother around with her. She did not approve of the way they hung out with the boys on the corner or of Sandy's wearing men's shirts. She said the way the girls walked together on the street, shuffling, arms linked, chewing gum and laughing loudly, looked cheap. Mrs. Rosenthal said Naomi was a poor motherless immigrant who didn't know any better and it was too bad that her aunt was too busy caring for other people's children to have time to watch over those under her own roof.