Gone to Soldiers (114 page)

She was on American rations and thus ate well, but she froze in her rooms like everybody else and washed standing in the little kitchen. This was not as hard a winter, but it was a mean dispiriting season, ice, sleet, fog the color of old newspapers seeping through her cardboard and packing crate windows which had lost their glass from blast the spring before.

Nonetheless London was no longer a black pit after dark. They were on dim-out rather than blackout. People stopped having freak accidents plunging into areaways and breaking their necks. Of rubble they had plenty. She lived in a partially demolished city, to which each day added new ruins. Still many of the rocket launching sites had been overrun, and fewer V-2s were falling lately.

With the lights partially on, London looked shabby but had survived—as had she. All through the winter she had cast her web far and wide, politicking, making friends, cultivating acquaintances, putting in time at pubs and parties. She had never formally broken off with Oscar; sometimes she still slept with him. Rather she had made herself available. She picked up an RAF pilot; she allowed an Australian tankman to seduce her. She spent a Saturday night and a Sunday with a quartermaster from Harlem with whom she had reminisced about the prewar jazz scene.

What had she found? That in truth she had lost something of her taste for random adventure, but that enough of it remained to sweeten those hours. Each of them was a log dragged across the road back. Each of them brought her further from Oscar and her long fidelity. Having had something more, she no longer confused chatter and the odd confession with good communication, but she wasn't writing off the pleasures of occasional sex without complications. She liked going after what she wanted without truly caring what each of them thought of her.

She dressed and put coins in the meter to heat water for the real coffee the Americans got, although never enough to last. She was expecting her girlfriend Beverly, an OSS imitation corporal as she was an OSS imitation second lieutenant. Inside the organization, no one paid attention to those arbitrary ranks. Her doorbell had given up in a bombing raid that had brought down much of the ceiling. When Beverly arrived, she had to stand outside and yell, something she rather enjoyed doing in her flattened western tones. Beverly came from Moscow, Idaho.

This morning, Beverly, for once protective of British feelings, confined herself to tossing bits of rubble at the boarded-up window. Abra ran down to let her in. Beverly was perched on the steps smoking. “My daddy used to tell me, only fast women smoke in public and only whores smoke on the streets. But this war has gummed that up. All girls do it, like wearing pants and going off to hotels with men. What will they do with us back in Idaho?”

“Don't you think the same thing has been going on at home? Coffee's ready. I looked for you last night, but I didn't see you.”

“We were at it till midnight.” Beverly yawned, loudly. “Lots of goodies coming in from those tame Jerries you sent over. But we think they may have got one of the women.”

“Helga?” Abra's hand closed tight around the cup.

“No. The other one. Marlitt.”

The handle sheared off in her hand. “Damn. I broke the stupid cup.” Cups with handles had not been manufactured in England for years. Her stomach began to hurt. She did not feel like asking more, but she was compelled. “What makes you think she's been caught?”

“She was giving us good stuff and now nothing, all week.” Beverly shrugged condolence. She was tall, big-boned and fair, with a broad plain face, flaxen hair worn shoulder length, a broad gape-toothed smile and the manner of a good old girl, who likes men and expects them to like her. She was a widow, she had told Abra the first time they had talked intimately, without ever having been a wife. She had been engaged to a pilot lost in '43 on the ball bearing runs, when a third of the planes had gone down. Since then she had refused to form strong attachments to men. “Peace comes, I'll settle down,” she predicted. “No point trying till then. Just get your ass kicked hard.”

Abra thought that she herself had formed no close friendships with women during her first years in London because she had not wanted to expose her long pursuit of Oscar to anyone else's cool stare. She had not wanted to sound like Djika, indomitably pursuing a course up a dead end. Now that she was free, or almost, she wanted that other gaze, a woman who would double-check her decisions and keep her from fooling herself.

It was pleasant for both of them to go off to pubs together, comfortable in each other's company, but always giving the other the room to move off if she wanted to pursue something. Abra felt as if she was coming back into shape. Beverly and she went to movies and plays, plunged into the parties Oscar found boring. He was not a partygoer. He preferred one-on-one, or dinner parties where conversation was possible. Beverly could jitterbug and had learned the rowdier English dances; they practiced together and off they went every chance they had. Abra felt as if she had dropped five years. She wrote her mother begging her to send a dress she could go dancing in, but she doubted that her mother would come up with anything useful. She wrote the same letter to Karen Sue with more hope.

Beverly set down her cup meaningfully, although carefully, considering Abra's recent mishap. “All right, girl, what are you going to do? You have to make a move soon if you're ever going to.”

Several people who had worked on the German agent project had been asked if they wanted to sign on to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Preliminary work had been going on in New York for months, but as the end of the war in Europe clearly approached, they were setting up offices in London and recruiting OSS people. Oscar had been approached also, before she was. He ruminated and said no. He was scheduled to go to Paris and then as occasion let him, to Germany. He had been processing materials from the German agents.

To Abra he said, “I have a pretty good idea what's real with the bombing. When our agents got into the Ruhr and Berlin, they found everybody eating fine and services scarcely disrupted. They complained we had given them clothes too shabby for the norm. Okay, now the cities are being leveled, but I doubt if this survey will be allowed to talk about how ineffective strategic bombing has been. I don't want to get involved in a whitewash.”

Now Abra sighed, thinking of Marlitt. “I'm going to tell them I'm interested.… Do you think they'll take me without Oscar?”

“They're taking me. I bet we'll get to Europe finally.” Beverly stuck out her lower lip. “Now tell me, are you going to get on board or dillydally around until all the berths are filled?”

“I'm seeing them today. I really am.”

She did not believe it even after she had done it. They could not be interested in her without Oscar. What was she, except Oscar's assistant? Then she heard informally that they were taking her. They liked her background. She felt a stiffening of pride. She could make it on her own in this world, amazingly.

When the new orders finally came down, Oscar handed them to her without a comment.

“I won't be going with you to Paris,” she said lamely. Even at this late moment, some part of her wanted him to beg her.

He nodded. “For me it'll be a loss, but for you, I suspect, a gain.”

“Your appraisal's inadequate. This will be my great loss too.” Are we really parting so formally? She could not believe it. She felt like someone in a stage play. Surely the curtain would drop and they would walk off together, as they had for so long.

She sat with Beverly over a doled-out glass of the weak war beer trying to explain why the exchange had let her down. Beverly said, “But what do you want? Him on his knees? Lover come back to me. You walk out the door, his balls fall off, and he says, clutching himself, wow I never knew.”

The major who was now a lieutenant colonel passed them on his way out, a young British soldier at his heels. He paused, nodding at Abra and grunting hello with the same slightly puzzled air he always wore when he recognized her but failed to place her.

“How do you know Our Lord God Zachary Barrington Taylor?” Beverly asked, leaning forward, elbows on the tabletop.

“I spent a night with his roommate once. Who is the bastard, besides full of himself?”

“He's a gen-you-ine hero. Popped in and out of four resistance movements. A one-man army. They worship him at SO and tell tales that would do for a Superman comic. He's also queer as a five-leafed clover.”

She was glad that the bombing survey was set up in another building, Eisenhower's old headquarters on the square, even though she was still within two blocks of Labor Branch. She began work there in late March, with the bulk of those recruited in the States arriving in April. She was assigned to a section studying the effect of the bombing on German morale. Back in the States a war was being waged over the future of OSS, and the hallways of her old unit were fraught and buzzing with the newest victories and defeats. A lot of the battle seemed to be fought in the newspapers, as well as in Congress. Abra observed that some of her colleagues viewed the approaching end of the war as a personal disaster. They longed to continue in intelligence and looked back on their collegiate or corporate careers with a shudder.

“Do you ever think about staying in intelligence?” she asked Beverly.

“No, by the time I'm safely home, I'll have enough pub crawling and working nine
A
.
M
. to midnight. I want to see the peaks and those rolling hills. I want to ride out in the early morning with the fog sitting down in the clefts. I want my horses and my own spread.”

“I don't know what I want. I admit sometimes going back to Columbia and finishing a Ph.D. sounds exasperatingly dull. But I notice we are talking less about our Fascist enemies and more about the dangerous Communists lately, and this war isn't even over. It gives me pause.”

“You know, it's guys like your Lieutenant Colonel Taylor who'll go bonkers. I hear he was in insurance before the war. He's been charging all over the landscape feeling like one hell of a dude. Now he's supposed to sit at a desk and worry about actuarial tables?”

“Maybe he should have got killed instead of his friend. His friend wasn't gung ho. He was some kind of artist.”

“Taylor doesn't strike me as the type that gets killed. Other people around him may die like flies, but he'll walk through the bullets. War is hell for most people, but it's heaven on wheels for some of the weird ones, have you noticed?”

Abra drained her weak beer. “But what I'm trying to figure out is if I'm one of those weird types myself. If I haven't got used to this life, to being mobilized.”

“We all have, girl. We'll have to get unused.”

Oscar had long since left London for the Continent. Roosevelt died and the future yawned suddenly more uncertain. Abra had never voted for anybody else for president; she couldn't imagine how the government could continue with the center missing. Astonishingly, she received a promotion to first lieutenant and worked the usual six-day week on the bombing survey. There was talk they would be moved to Germany. No more rockets fell. More lights went on. Every two weeks, Oscar wrote her, chattily, affectionately. She responded in kind, for her sense of style demanded she be civil. A courier brought her a bottle of Chanel Number Five along with intelligence reports.

On May Day the news came that Hitler had killed himself. There was an impromptu party at the office. The next evening while they were returning from supper at the big mess in the Grosvenor House, they heard that the BBC had just announced the surrender of the German army in Italy. Rumors about that had been endemic in OSS for several days. It was understood that Allen Dulles of OSS Switzerland had a hand in arranging the surrender.

The radio was kept on that night. It was an addiction, to hear the good news repeated and hope for more. At ten-thirty, as they were closing up for the night, Stuart Hibberd came on and announced the fall of Berlin.

“It's over!” Abra heard herself screaming. “It's over!”

“That depends,” Beverly said.

“On what?”

“First, whether the Bavarian Redoubt exists, and how well defended it is. If it's anything like we've heard, it might take months or a year to take it. Second, we know Himmler launched Werewolf, an underground of sabotage and clandestine warfare.” Beverly did not want to be tricked into celebrating until she knew with absolute security no bad news was going to trickle in. Abra felt she herself was more like the general population, avid for something to feel good about. The tension of waiting just built over the weekend. It was all anyone was talking about. Is the war over? Is the war finally over?

Monday everybody seemed to be milling in the streets, hanging around outside Buckingham Palace. When she got into the office, she heard that Admiral Doenitz, the putative head of a state that seemed to be nonexistent, had finally accepted the surrender terms, but still no announcement came. She had a sick feeling that something was wrong. Perhaps the SS was holed up in the Bavarian Redoubt with rockets and new secret weapons. Nobody tried to work. People drifted from office to office and building to building exchanging news and rumors stirred together.

Why didn't the radio speak, why? At six came an announcement there would be no announcement by Churchill that night. What was wrong? She had no stomach for supper. She ate a sandwich at her desk, and tried again to read the materials spread about her. At seven-forty in the evening came another announcement: tomorrow would be celebrated as Victory in Europe Day and would be a national holiday, as would be the ninth. So was it peace? What a ridiculous wimpy way to end a war.

In the morning she woke in her dank bedroom groping for her coat and her flashlight, as the familiar sounds of yet another air raid broke over her. She was enraged with disappointment. Why doesn't the fucking war end already? Enough, too much, way past too much. I want my life! She was up, into her uniform and half into her shoes before she realized that it was not bombing but thunder. She made herself coffee with dried milk and saccharin, carrying it back to bed.