Gone to Soldiers (70 page)

What she treasured about Alvin was that he didn't like fighting. He fought when he had to, for no guy could get through school otherwise, but he didn't seek it out. She decided that if Alvin could be so forward, so could she, so in Latin, she sat with Clotilde in the double seat, where they could whisper and pass notes in French.

Not only did he sit with her in Algebra, but far more blatantly, he waited for her after school to go home on the bus. They did not get off together because he lived three blocks farther, and he had to get home too. So Alvin stood with her on the bus, and then Sandy caught up with her as she got off, and they walked home together. Sandy called Alvin, your boyfriend.

Naomi tried fantasizing about Alvin in those nightly secret stories she made up to try to stave off the images that came to her from her twin. She had the habit now of lying in bed for an hour or more making up exciting stories about Leib and herself. They were spies together, they were partisans, they were underground. She experimented with replacing Leib with Alvin, but Alvin did not arouse in her any of the scary intense guilty out-of-control feelings that Leib did. Alvin was hers because they had helped the colored man Mr. Bates together, and because they both felt neglected and abandoned. He was comfortable as the cat who waited on her bed for her.

Alvin's father was in Sicily, which made for a neat explanation if you didn't know he wouldn't be home anyhow. He had left Alvin's mother and they had been arguing about a divorce when Mr. Sobolov's reserve unit was called up. They had married when they were seventeen and eighteen, respectively, and Mrs. Sobolov had not finished high school. She looked in her twenties and acted even younger, constantly dating soldiers on leave, while Alvin stayed home listening to the radio, doing his homework and the dishes and feeling sorry for himself, or out with the gang.

Four Eyes had named their gang several times, but none of the names stuck. People would respect them more if they had a name, Four Eyes said. Four Eyes tried out The Dukes of Second. Then because of the Purple Gang, criminals who were mostly Jews, he called them the Orange Gang. He picked orange because black and red and yellow and green all seemed taken, pink and white had their problems, and blue lacked zing. But when the Polish gang nearby started calling them the Lemons, he dropped that name fast.

Petty shoplifting was a group activity. They would go in together and Alvin and Four Eyes would attract attention by being their loud selves, while Sandy or Naomi would swipe what was wanted, potato chips or candy bars or flashlight batteries, but often there wasn't much in the stores. Sometimes they swiped a movie magazine or a comic book. Naomi never let herself be frightened. It was as if her hands belonged to somebody else. Once in Woolworth's, Sandy got caught but cried her way out of trouble.

All the older kids in high school had jobs, and many of them fell asleep in class and in study hall. There was a sense in the air that everybody ought to be making money, a kind of itch they felt. The streets of Detroit were crowded day and night with servicemen mingling with men and women out of the factories, lines in front of anyplace a person could get food or a drink or dance or bowl or see a movie or hear music.

Naomi still liked to go visit Trudi on her own, as well as on Sunday with Ruthie. Naomi enjoyed feeling like a lady visiting her friend Trudi with baby David. Leib's grandfather had been David, but Naomi thought of Duvey and his nickels, the coffee she had made for him. When she thought of the times he had stuck his tongue in her mouth, she shrugged. Alvin kissed her like that every time he had a chance. She did not like it any better than she had, but it was his right, as her boyfriend, so she did not object. She felt that Ruthie had made too much fuss about Duvey putting his tongue in her mouth. She had been a baby to get scared. She was an adult, tough, able to take care of herself. She did not see much difference between David and the babies who filled their house, but she imitated Ruthie and crowed over him. She learned she had to do that before Trudi would talk about real things, what Leib had written, what scandalous things Mrs. Sobolov had been seen doing, about Alvin, about houses and how they should be fixed up.

Trudi regularly withdrew books from the library with house plans and sketches to pore over, constantly altering the ideal house she was building in her head. Naomi loved playing that game with Trudi. The house was as important to her as it was to Trudi, but not as a real house in the future. It was an absorbing game that kept bad dreams away. Ruthie was not interested in houses and tended to make practical objections, raising issues of cost and financing, which made her a killjoy. Trudi's mother saw no reason why Leib and Trudi should not continue living in Trudi's old room after the war. Only Naomi wanted to play house plans with Trudi. Often she forgot that Trudi was years older than her and a mother besides.

Sandy talked about clothes the way Trudi talked about houses. Sandy could draw pretty girls comic book style, like the paper dolls they had both played with till recently, putting on and taking off elaborate costumes. Sandy still had a Deanna Durbin paper doll. Now Sandy preferred to draw two cartoon ladies, one labeled Sandy with blond hair and one labeled Naomi with curly brown hair, and dress them in imagined outfits. She drew Naomi to resemble Ritzi in the Sunday papers.

Naomi found clothes less interesting than houses, but she did not allow Sandy to know that. She did not imagine putting on and taking off elaborate garments when she was trying to stave off those bad dreams of the bleak nasty place far away, as she sometimes imagined herself moving through one of Trudi's elegant and comfortable houses. Houses felt more protective than fancy dresses. If she was always having to pretend to be interested in things she was not, and keeping to herself things she wanted to say, it was because she was in someone else's country and someone else's house.

Sandy still shared her daydreams about boys with Naomi, who could tell that Sandy had none of the murky feelings she suffered, the fear, the dark fascination of Leib, the fevered imaginings. It occurred to Naomi that unlike Ruthie she was probably going to be a bad woman. Perhaps she would be a jewel thief or a bank robber. She would die in a swarm of police bullets, like Alan Ladd in
This Gun for Hire
.

One Wednesday when she got home from high school, early because the overcrowded school was in double sessions and she was home by one-thirty, Aunt Rose met her at the door waving a thin blue letter. “It's from your sister, I think, but she wrote it in French.”

Naomi experienced a moment of fury at her aunt for having opened her letter. How could Aunt Rose do that to her, open the only letter she had received since the day after Pearl Harbor from anyone in her family! She looked swiftly at the end, but she could tell from the handwriting that it was from Jacqueline, not from Maman or Rivka.

At first she could not read the letter, could not read the French, and she felt a sharp panic. She was no longer French. Soon she would no longer speak or read French, and she would belong noplace and to nobody, ever. She ran to her room and slammed the door, leaving Rose and Sharon staring after her. She turned and opened the door a second time and slammed it again, so they would know she meant it.

Ma chère petite soeur Naomi, the letter began, which was a surprise in itself, as Jacqueline had always, always insisted on using their French and not their Jewish names. The handwriting was extremely tiny, as if Jacqueline, who had always had a delicate handwriting, now could inscribe letters on the head of a pin. Jacqueline said she thought of her sister often and missed her and wondered how she was doing far away in America where none of them had ever gone before. They were all so scattered, their whole family, sometimes she felt frightened that they would never be together again. She did not think she had been much good before at being a big sister, but she loved Naomi dearly and missed her constantly and wanted to do better if she were ever given the chance. Maman and Rivka had been captured and deported to the east. Papa was a hero, and she, Jacqueline, was not doing a bad job either. She could not write more, but Naomi could know that they loved her. She had not seen Papa, but she had had news of him very recently. She had hoped to see him long before this, but she supposed it was perhaps too dangerous for him.

Dangerous? Naomi flattened the tissue paper letter on the bed and tried to understand these phrases. Papa a hero. Jacqueline not doing a bad job either. Too dangerous. Maman and Rivka deported. She realized she was thinking in French again. Deported meant that her bad dreams were true. She felt a rush of bad smells and loud noises, the constant fear and hunger, the cold that gnawed the bones covered by scabby skin. The place she saw did not come from her subconscious, as Ruthie said about bad dreams, but was a place that existed there in the east, where the black smoke rose as if from a volcano and hung greasy and potent in the air.

The letter continued, I am in the south but not the south you and Rivka used to love so much. I hope that your aunt and uncle and their family are good to you. At least you will continue, whatever happens, and you will carry on our family and remember all of us. I love you and I mean to bring you home as soon as France is free again. Many Jewish children here have to be hidden in Christian homes to save their lives. They too cannot see their families, even though they are still in France.

My dear, if you feel lonely there, you must tell yourself that even if Papa had not been smart enough to send you to safety, we could not be together here. You would have to be sent to Switzerland or Spain or hidden in France, with a Christian family probably, and you would have to act Christian to survive, go to Mass, say their prayers, pretend constantly. Where you are, you are free to be a Jew and you should be proud. Know you are loved and that if we all survive, we will be together. Someday soon the war will be won and our people will come from the shadows. Someone will mail this from a safe place. Je t'embrasse bien fort, ta soeur Jacqueline.

She read the letter and read it again and read it again and again. She understood some of it, and some sounded strange. She had trouble believing her irritable snotty sister had written to her like that, so loving and saying she was free to be a Jew and should be proud. She wondered briefly if Jacqueline had really written it. Perhaps Jacqueline too had bad dreams and saw the place where the dead walked, the skeletons in striped rags with the eyes as big as moons and the bones all knobbly.

Then she lay down on the bed and cried into her pillow until she could no longer breathe through her nose and until her eyes were raw with salt, the lids swollen, clutching Boston Blackie like a pillow. Then she sat up and read the letter again, pausing over every sentence to try to understand. What was the danger? That both Papa and Jacqueline would be caught and sent to the place of cold and pain and unending hunger and fear?

Almost she wished the letter had not come. The letter said she was not sent away because she was unloved, she was not sent into exile, but saved. That she was special. That she alone was protected. Perhaps she did not feel that way because she was bad.

What she understood was that they were all separated, not only her, and that they might never come together again. Maman and Rivka must be sent as far to the east as she was sent to the west. In the middle somewhere were Jacqueline and Papa, but even they were separated, unable to find each other. Her loneliness was not unique but shared among her family. Only Rivka and Maman were together, in the place of death.

She stayed in her room until Aunt Rose came to knock on her door, quite politely, and ask her to come to supper. She started to follow her aunt, then turned and, folding the letter carefully, tucked it into the pocket of her corduroy skirt. As she sat down at the table, it made a little noise, as if it whispered to her.

Everyone was waiting to hear what the letter said. They ate quickly, and then Uncle Morris and Aunt Rose sat there, elbows on the table and hands cradled over their coffee cups, waiting. Reluctantly Naomi brought out the letter and smoothed it on the table. She was passionately glad it was in French, so that no one but she could read it word by word. She would simply tell them some of what it said and keep the rest to herself.

“My sister Jacqueline says that she is in the south of France but not in the part of Provence where we used to go for vacations. She doesn't say where she is. She says that my mother and Rivka have been deported.”

Aunt Rose cried out sharply and Uncle Morris groaned. Then he said, “But we really don't know conditions in all the camps, if they're similar, what's going on. It's all rumors and counterrumors.” He looked grim.

Naomi said nothing. She knew the conditions from her dreams.

Morris raised his head. “Well, does she say how she has managed not to be deported yet? Is she hiding?”

“She doesn't say. She says that Papa is a hero and he is in danger. She says that she is not doing a bad job either. I don't know what she means.”

“Let me see the letter.”

Slowly Naomi unclenched her hand and let Morris take the thin sheet.

“Ach. It's French. I forgot.” He handed it back. “Translate for me, exactly.”

Reluctantly Naomi did, taking the letter back and smoothing it over and over, to erase the touch of anyone else.

Morris rubbed his bald spot. “It has to be the Resistance she's talking about. They must both be underground. That's how she could get the letter out. It was mailed in London, but obviously she's still in France. She's in touch with some network outside of France.”

“Poor girl,” Aunt Rose murmured, “separated from her family and alone, in danger. What will become of her? Her father has a duty to find her.”

Morris shrugged. “In wartime, the primary duty is to fight.”

“Nu, so you'd go and leave us to fend for ourselves, in trouble?”

“I'm an old man. Nobody's handing me a gun and saying, Kill Nazis. But there is something we can do.”