Gone to Soldiers (5 page)

I never understand what people mean by calling me pretty, for when I look into my eyes I see despair, exaltation, joy, pity, an intense probing curiosity, compassion, an aloof questioning spirit; chaos and struggle. Marie Charlotte is pretty. Hers is a calm pure nature in which certain ideas come to rest and she is content with them, as I am content with the furniture in my little room under the eaves. But I think my face is as changeable as my soul. Perhaps only through acting can I reveal those depths and heights, those tempests that rage invisibly, shaking me profoundly. When others call me pretty, they believe they are flattering me, but I feel diminished, invisible behind the mask that they and not I create.

21 février 1940

Papa has been called up, and we are all shaken. He is very cheerful and says not to worry, that it is just like going away to camp. It is true that being at war has been peaceful so far and I think the sensationalistic reporting of the early weeks has faded away before the reality of modern war, which seems mostly a matter of arguing and sitting. The terrible icy weather continues, the harshest winter I can remember, as if nature were mourning our idiocy in this long farcical drôle de guerre.

I have felt estranged from Papa in recent times, but now I wish that we communicated better. Our differences are in reality a matter of Papa choosing to limit himself culturally, while I am trying to expand. I don't think we have ever forgiven each other for the fight about the Farband picnic last summer. I know I was right, but perhaps I stated the matter too baldly. After all I have nothing in common with a bunch of gawky plain lifers simply because they're Jewish. Being Jewish is a matter of accident too. I was born Jewish, but what does that mean? As a religion, I find it absurd. As dietary laws, archaic! I am told those Polish refugees the Balabans from Kozienice are my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, but I cannot even communicate with them about the simplest matters, about tables and chairs, let alone about my ideas, my feelings or my aspirations.

I don't understand Papa's involvement in Poale Zion. The notion of all of us picking up and moving to the Orient to become date farmers is a fantasy I cannot take seriously for five minutes. Papa has always been a Socialist, but he has been involved in the folly of Zionism for the last two years. I suspect he will come home from the army without that baggage. He needs more contact with intelligent Frenchmen who discuss modern ideas. His intelligence is greater than can possibly be used in his factory work, and therefore his thinking tends to become undisciplined.

Papa has great energy, which is sometimes wonderful and sometimes embarrassing. I still do not know if I admire him or not for what happened last fall, when we were waiting in the crowd for the mairie to open its doors and when it did not happen for twenty minutes, everyone was still waiting and grumbling. And Papa just walked up to the head of the line and pushed the doors open. They were unlocked all the time!

Nonetheless for him to talk about meeting boys “of my own kind” struck me as vulgar and tasteless, as well as insensitive to who I really am. I do not understand what some future tractor driver can possibly want to say to me or what Papa imagines I would have in common with him. It's one of those monomaniac obsessions. Sometimes when Papa and his copain Georges are together, all they can talk about is who is Jewish. It reminds me of that slut Suzanne after she slept with her equally vulgar boyfriend, walking down the street and speculating who's a virgin and who isn't.

Maman is very frightened and will need a great deal of soothing and comforting, I can see. The twins bawl and cling. I feel like the only one in the house with a cool head!

16 juin 1940

Really, the Germans are here and it is no massacre or bloodbath, although they have made us put the clocks forward an hour so we are on German time. It has been quiet, orderly, scarcely a shot fired and everyone feels a little stunned. I saw some well-dressed people cheering the German troops as they marched past. They seem clean and well behaved on the whole. I think our fear has been pumped up by the newspapers which have nothing else to do but try to create sensationalism. I am sure Maman is ashamed of having sent the twins south to Orléans with her boss M. Cariot.

I am committed to seeking out the universal, because only in that way can we rise rigorously out of the slough of the accidental particular. I find patriotism not only a refuge of scoundrels but of idiots and those who like to buy their thinking ready made each morning in the vacuous newspapers. Every decade or so governments create wars and whip up a frenzy, so that we will not notice the shortcomings of our own side and will not question the assumptions of our society and demand more rational institutions and laws. I am sure that the Germans aside from speaking another language will turn out to be different from us mostly as we are different from one another, as individuals. We are two countries side by side that seem to have nothing better to do than to invade one another every few years, butchering a great many young men and tearing up the countryside in the process. I suppose what we would discover if we had the courage to examine reality instead of repeating old clichés, is that the Germans are people like ourselves who are good, bad, indifferent in the same measure as we ourselves are.

If only we knew where Papa is, we would probably be quite calm. I was crossing the rue de Rivoli this afternoon and I bumped into a German soldier in the crowd, a lieutenant, I believe. He touched his cap and smiled at me and stepped back out of the way—not at all the brutes dashing out babies' brains we have been led to expect. So much for the enemy being fiends. There has been no raping or looting I have heard of. The gendarmes are back on the street and the stores are opening up again.

29 juillet 1940

Papa is back! First the twins, and then him. He escaped from the POW camp where he was being held. He said that they were beginning to sort out the Jews from the others, although I think that is just their obsession with purity and schemata. They like everybody in neat pigeonholes. He was working on the garbage detail when he escaped from the camp and threw away his uniform. I hope he does not get in trouble from his impetuousness. He wanted to come home, but they say that soon the Germans will release all the prisoners of war anyhow.

It is as if an earthquake had its epicenter right under our little apartment, since he is back. He is rushing around seeing all his copains on the old radical papers and at the Poale Zion. They even sent a delegation to talk to the Jewish Communists, who are reputed not to be going along with the Stalin-Hitler pact like the rest of the party. In the old days, Papa would not even speak to the Communists, but now he is running around Paris conferring with every hothead. He has been handing around some sort of Jewish resistance brochure called
Que Faire
copied out by hand, full of horror stories and slogans like partout présent: be everywhere, and faire face: stand up to them. I am relieved that Papa is safe, although how long he will be safe acting as he does is another question. But I must say, until the twins were returned to us, thinner and bedraggled and full of stories of burning vehicles and abandoned babies and planes strafing the roads, things here were extremely peaceful with just Maman and me. She was worried sick but I comforted her, and I think she respects me more now.

14 septembre 1940

Myself, I believe in attaining an inner tranquility. I admit it is disturbing to walk through the streets and see posters on all the walls denouncing Jews en bloc and to see all those gross new newspapers that do nothing but wish all Jews death,
Au Pilori
, for example. But I practice a discipline as I go around, saying to myself, I know I am not dirty, I am not vile, I am as French as anybody else and as thoroughly imbued with French culture as any of my teachers, so it is not me that this vileness is aimed at and I will simply not accept it. To grow angry is to give power to those who attack. To ignore such an attack is to diminish the attacker, not oneself. We give those screamers their power by taking offense.

Papa and Maman are very upset because the citizenship of the Balabans has been revoked. They have only been in France since 1935, and they have had their French citizenship taken away from them. I am sorry for them, but I cannot think it is too strange. They do not seem to have made any effort to enter French society. They speak only Yiddish or Polish among their friends and are obviously foreigners even on the street. I feel that to be so conspicuous when living in another country is almost arrogant. I feel immensely sorry for the Balabans nonetheless.

2 octobre 1940

Now we are all ordered to go to the local police station and register as if we are prostitutes or criminals, and have a big ugly
JUIF
stamped across our identity cards. I announced at the breakfast table that I am simply not going to do it. I thought Papa and Maman would be shocked, but instead Papa said he would try to figure out what would happen if we did not obey. He thinks it isn't a bad idea to refuse to register, if we can figure out how to avoid it. I know it's meaningless, but I find being separated out and labeled in this way simply humiliating.

Marie Charlotte has been extremely strange with me lately. The last two times we were supposed to meet, she did not show up. She simply left me sitting there waiting. Finally I had it out with her yesterday. She said that she still loved me dearly, but that she had heard that others thought she was a Jew because she was always with me, and she was afraid. She did not want to bear such a label, especially since she was born and raised a good French Catholic and her mother felt it was her own fault because she stuck to me more closely than to her own kind.

9 octobre 1940

We are all duly registered, one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Since the defection of Marie Charlotte, I have been making friends with some young people I would have considered hoodlums last year. They are definitely not the respectable element, but they are not unintelligent and do not seem prejudiced, the way so many people one thought above that sort of thing have revealed themselves to be in the last months. They listen to jazz a great deal, especially American jazz, and affect a bohemian style of dress.

One thing that fascinates me about them is that they do not segregate themselves rigidly by age. Some of this new crowd I have been meeting are in the university, some like me in the final year of lycée, some no longer in school but not yet employed. The peculiarities of their style do not attract me, but their tolerance does. They do not seem anxiety-ridden to obey the German decrees and they do not care what I am, only who I am. For that, I respect them. They think I am too serious but they are going to set me right. I doubt that, but it soothes me to walk into the café Le Jazz Hot where they hang out and sit down with friends and feel welcome. These days to feel welcome is rare, and their languor conceals a courtesy I value.

Every day I feel less certain what is to become of us, all of us, and whether I shall ever get a chance to be anything at all, let alone deciding between becoming instructor or actress, for doors seem to close faster than I can prepare myself to enter them. I feel the way I imagine some creature of the tropics felt when the Ice Age descended and the glaciers loomed over what had been lush and pleasant banana forests. I feel as if I no longer truly belong to my family but have no new niche or role I have created, no place to go where I am truly at home. It is therefore not to be wondered at that I now spend more and more time with my new unrespectable friends at the café Le Jazz Hot.

ABRA 1

The Opening of Abra

For two hundred years, men in Abra's family in Bath, Maine, had gone to sea. Abra went to New York.

At twenty-three, Abra considered her real life to have begun back in September of 1938. Then, at nineteen, she transferred from Smith to Barnard and finally made it to Manhattan, the glittering Oz of her childhood where she had always known she really belonged. Last year she had been accepted in graduate school at Columbia in political science. Abra did not consider herself true scholar material and could not quite imagine teaching, but graduate school was at once sufficient in itself—politics after all was the most exciting topic in the world—and moreover there were ninety percent males in her department among the graduate students and nothing but men on the faculty. Abra, growing up with brothers, found the situation of being the only woman in a room quite natural. Among men she perked up.

She had disposed of her virginity during her nineteenth summer out on Popham Point where her family had always summered, with a sweet local boy who had settled down by now to lobstering. He had wanted to marry her, and she had understood that to put a nice face upon her apparent acquiescence, she must pretend to be considering marriage, oh, on down the pike, of course, after graduation. Abra had transferred to Barnard that very fall and she had no intention of returning to Bath except of course on vacations when John had remained for two more years her delightful summer romance. Romance for Abra included good healthy acrobatic sex.

Now here she was, twenty-three, with a lively group of friends and her own apartment in the Village, a cosy Bank Street walk-up, a good relationship with her thesis advisor Professor Blumenthal and a stimulating new research assistantship with his pal Oscar Kahan in the sociology department. Her family was appalled at her taking an advanced degree; they viewed it as unwomanly and bound to result in her remaining a thwarted and sorrowful old maid. She was compared to one Abigail of dreaded memory who had been a bluestocking and an impassioned abolitionist and who had once actually made a public speech, bringing shame on the family by this wanton act, whereupon her father had locked her up for five years. Abra, who was in the process of fielding her sixth proposal of marriage, doubted she was headed for a lonely old age. The latest was from a young man she had met playing tennis and been seeing for the last two months.