Gone to Soldiers (74 page)

Anyhow, we reached Limoges by nightfall and I left him talking to the local Resistance and hurried off to organize my children for tomorrow morning.

16 décembre 1943

This crossing has been extremely difficult. The rivers are frozen solid, so I am crossing them lower in the mountains than usual. Also I fear trying to take one of the high routes, with the snow already deep and storms coming daily.

Vendôme has made himself useful. He is one of those people who talks to children very much as he talks to adults, and as he generally speaks gently to adults, this seems to work fine. Children sense right away when adults are putting on an act.

We have two adolescent boys, twelve and fourteen, a girl fourteen, a girl ten, a boy nine, a boy of seven and a girl of eight. This afternoon as we lay up in a thicket waiting to cross on the ice after dark, I had them play with a dreidel I have along, because Chanukah is coming and I never know how long storms may delay us. But when the eight-year-old, Raizel, was playing and she got Shin, where you lose and pay, she began to cry. Pearl, the fourteen-year-old who mothers her, immediately began soothing her, but I worry about Raizel. She is weightless as a dried leaf, colorless, of a stupefied sadness. Pearl says Raizel saw her family killed before her eyes, then was left for dead in a pile of bodies. She has a bad scar on her shoulder and another on her ribs, which are easy to count, believe me. She never plays, so I was happy when she was drawn to the dreidel. Bad luck.

We sleep in piles with the children to keep them warm, and thus far Vendôme has not given me any trouble. He is a pleasant traveling companion because he does not complain of the weather or the short rations or the cold wind, and he always notices the landscape carefully, which is important. “He is so handsome,” Pearl said to me. “You must love him.”

“Why must I? Why should a face be that important in anyone's life?”

“Because you're pretty, you can be fussy.” Pearl touched my hair. “I want to be loved, I don't care why. I just want someone to love me and tell me to stay.”

I think at fourteen she has already had an unhappy affair. War is an absolute disrupter. At fourteen she is a century older than the two boys or than I was at her age. Nobody can give her her childhood back. But she has immense will to live; if I bring them through safely, she will make it. She tags after Vendôme, who accepts her adoration tactfully. I worried when I saw her press herself against him, but he just put his arm around her and turned her to look up at a hawk circling high overhead. Up in the mountains frequently I have to go ahead to scout the way, and I must leave him alone with them. He dislikes that intensely, but I point out to him again and again, the children are the priority. We are here to save them.

He obeys me, which Lev would never do, and for that too I am grateful. I also know that whatever mandate he was given, it surely did not include shepherding Jewish children illegally into Spain. His government has been opposed to this project all along, and their State Department puts every obstacle in our way. He is doing this on his own, I know, and as it turns out, he has been useful. I never like leaving the children alone as I go forward. Still, I am often exhausted because I walk parts of the route three times, while everybody else has enough trouble tramping it once. Sometimes I lack the extra energy for carrying a large exhausted child, which is another place he steps in.

17 décembre 1943

Raizel is dead. We had to scratch out a shallow grave and lay her in it and leave her to the wild animals. When I awoke at dusk, she was not with us. She had gotten up and wandered away and lain down by herself, and she was dead. Dead of the cold? I have never lost a child before.

I find grief in myself, perhaps even something as tainted as spoiled pride that I should lose one of my children and also something just as rotten: anger. Why did she wander away? I accuse her in my heart of giving up on life and of choosing to die. Choosing to join her mother, her father, her grandfather and grandmother, her brothers and sisters and the baby, her whole village. Turning and slipping into death. Shin. I will have Gimel, everything! At least Hey, half, but I am aiming for Gimel. And Gimel I want for these children, whose world has burned.

It is getting harder and harder to pass the children through. The Germans and their accomplices are crazy, simply. If they want to win a war, you would think that would be their priority, but they care more to tie up huge numbers of men trying to keep a few children from escaping. Those children have no military importance, alive or dead. Now the ratlines which move downed fliers out, I can understand their passion to unravel those, because it takes money and time to train a pilot. None of these children represent a second's danger to the Third Reich.

The tracks we leave in winter are dangerous. We will have to return a different way and we must keep moving. They can rest only while I scout ahead and I must sleep no more until we have crossed into Spain. We can take five minutes rest on each hour and that will have to do all of us.

18 décembre 1943

The six children are safe. Jeff and I are rapidly descending the Pyrénées, making much better time. We scout carefully as we go. Now we are on the way to a rendezvous with Papa. He is in the Montagne Noire, mountains less than half the size of these but noble enough, to the east of Toulouse. It is extremely cold and this will be a very short entry as I can scarcely write. We sit by a tiny fire. When we stop, we lie in each other's arms to keep warm. There is no choice. We would freeze, apart. I thanked him for not taking advantage of the situation, and that made him laugh. “How could I?” he asked me. “I'd probably get frostbite on the part that matters.”

I liked his being able to laugh about it. He asked me to call him Jeff, which is his real name, and I promised to do so when we are alone.

The first night of Chanukah 1943

We are in Arfons, in the Montagne Noire, where we are to meet Papa whenever he in fact appears. Tonight is the longest night of the year. I cannot imagine why I am extremely nervous about seeing my own father. Perhaps it is simply the length of time. Nevertheless I am nervous, perhaps because in some way I expect him to judge me. Now that the day approaches, I am glad that Jeff is with me, because it dilutes the intensity of the meeting. This is a small grey village built around a square, the same fish-scale slate roofs I see when I am crossing the Pyrénées. The local people say the Germans seldom come here, unless raiding for food.

We are put up in rooms over a restaurant. The food is plentiful anyhow, as they also traffic in the black market here. Some patriots sneer at the black marketeers, but in truth, many Resistance people are involved, because it is a sector of the economy which the Germans cannot control. Whatever food is on the black market is not available to them, who ship out of the country three quarters of what is grown here for themselves and leave us hungry, and the money made there is invisible money and can go directly to support the Resistance.

I have the back room which opens onto the fields of snowy stubble, while Jeff has one immediately next to me. Two of the waitresses have doubled up in the next room. Normally one of them lives in my room, and Jeff's room is the spare room, for guests and often now for Resistance people passing through. Both the waitresses have been making a big play for Jeff, not even bothering to ask if we are together or not. What opportunists!

They eat well here. Even though my stomach is shrunken, I find it is easy to stretch it again. We eat and eat. We help in the kitchen and make ourselves useful. The kitchen is run by a stout woman with a peppery temper and a strong right arm, and we both attempt to stay on the lee side of her.

Perhaps there are no Jews in Arfons, yet even if I were back in my old apartment on the rue du Roi de Sicile, I know there would be no proud candles proclaiming our identity tonight. The first candle unlit tonight. All across this deep dark night, I think of all the candles of lives blown out.

22 décembre 1943

I hardly know how to describe what I did last night, but I will go on being honest. I think as long as I live, I will always wonder if Maman read my diary about Henri, if that precipitated that dreadful quarrel. I only wish there were a chance of her reading this, but I am writing in code now anyhow. I would give anything to see her!

I have become lovers with the American, Jeff. It was I who made it happen; shamelessly I got up half an hour after we had gone to bed in our respective rooms and I went tiptoeing along the hall to his room. It was noisy downstairs, someone singing and the cook shouting in the kitchen and banging of pots and cutlery. Fortunately his door was unlocked and although his candle was out, when I said his name softly and ready to bolt, he sat up. I was astonished at myself as I went to him and kept thinking that I could not really be doing this, and knowing perfectly well that I have been coming to this decision for days.

He got out of bed at once. “Is something wrong?” He lit his candle and took his automatic from the bedside table.

“No. You don't need that with me,” I said, beginning to laugh.

I thought that I would have to explain, after putting him off for so long, but he came right to me and began to kiss me, so I did not have to make clumsy overtures. I thought I had better say something, so I remarked, once we were undressed and in bed, “I am not a virgin, by the way.”

“By the way, good.”

I was startled. “I didn't think that was supposed to be good.”

“Did you find your first time ecstatic?”

“Of course not. It was painful, to say the least.”

“This won't be,” he promised, and it wasn't. In fact I found myself forgetting how awkward I always found placement of the bodies and instead of permitting, I was wanting. That was new and more interesting. My body seemed to take on a life of its own. I begin to understand what the poetry and the moaning and fussing arise from. It was as if my body were growing from within and taking over and demanding. I actually wanted to put him inside me. He had a condom, which was convenient. After we had finished, I decided I did not care whether the whole house knew we are lovers or not, so I stayed and slept there. It was cosy and warmer. He sleeps like a kitten, curled up. Sometimes he seems very young, the way Americans are, and other times like a wizened old man who has given up on what he had wanted. But not now.

I thought it might be strained in the morning. I woke first and I got up to pee and that woke him. When I came back to bed, he sat up and held out his arms to me. Then it was as if a fist clenched and unclenched in my belly, my womb perhaps, as in the Bible it says her womb moved? Anyhow, I wanted to also and we made love again. Then I went down and brewed us café au lait and found some bread in the kitchen and butter and strawberry jam made without sugar, because nobody has any, but it is still good.

I brought it all up on a tray and crawled into bed with him and we talked and talked. We are telling each other our lives. His hands are like a woman's hands, not like a man's. I mean they feel what they touch. They don't grab but caress. He says he has eyes in his fingers. He lost his mother at twelve. There is sadness in him at the core, sweetness and then sadness. I cannot believe I have done this, but I have chosen him.

On the other hand, maybe I just want to dilute things more. Maybe I want another man who has a claim on me standing there when I see Papa. I always view myself with a somewhat jaundiced eye, ever since the quarrel that sent me from Maman's house. I also think that losing Larousse makes me more needy. Whatever my motives, I chose wisely. It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover, if he knows how—at least that is my conclusion.

The oddest thing is that from that first moment I experienced orgasm with Jeff, I thought to myself, oh, this, yes, and it felt terribly familiar. It felt at once strong and completely familiar, although with Henri I never had anything of the sort, as if the body knew all along.

I told him I do not love him, but I like him strongly and I chose him. He says he also chose me. He says women have been telling him since he was fifteen that they love him, and he has never been quite sure what they meant except that they usually wanted him to set up housekeeping with them. He says that he wants us to be together and I should not tell him anything I don't mean. I liked that. I told him the same.

24 décembre 1943

They all went out to midnight Mass, but we stayed in the kitchen by the fire. The door opened and first a boy with a Sten gun came in. He was about sixteen and big as a polar bear standing on its hind legs and just as shaggy. Jeff said, “I recognize that gun. That's one of the load I brought in, isn't it? Don't wave it about, you'll scare the mice.”

“Lapin is here,” the enormous boy announced, after he had searched the house. That's what they call Papa, because he has escaped the Germans so many times. Then the boy/bear whistled and Papa came in.

He has a beard, dark curly blond. He looked the same and different. He had a German rifle on his back which he leaned against his chair and came to peer at me and then hug me. He felt very cold and bumpy, his jacket on, with an ammunition belt and a canteen and all kinds of hardware clanking and sticking into me.

“You've grown like a weed, you're almost as tall as I am! You've grown up, Jacqueline.”

“Rivka is tall too,” I said. “I saw her when they were marching into the cattle cars to be deported to the camps.”

He sat down abruptly. “Your mother?”

“Her also.”

“At least they didn't get you.”

“Not yet.”

“When were they deported?”

“Last year at this time.”

He rubbed his chin and said nothing for a while. Jeff was standing by the fireplace looking ill at ease so I decided to make matters worse and introduce them. “Papa, this is Vendôme—”

“The American commandant.” Papa leaped out of the chair to shake hands with Jeff. “We are overjoyed to have you with us, but we need more arms. We need them desperately. They must drop mortars. We have nothing heavier than a machine gun, and only seven of those. We have nothing to use against armor.”