Gone to Soldiers (120 page)

He squinted at her. “I'm inept at estimating sizes. Do you know what you take?”

“Not anymore. I'm half the weight I was.” She had an idea. “Let me see if the nurse has a measuring tape.”

The redheaded nurse measured her and they wrote the numbers down for Ari. When he was leaving, he said, “I won't be able to get back for at least a week.”

She decided she had presumed too much, asking him so many favors. She returned to her sulk, but the problem was that now she felt as if she were being wicked lying on the bed. After a day in fetal position, she got up and began walking to and fro. If only she had clothing. She spoke about her problem to the redheaded nurse, whose name was Betty Jo. Betty Jo said she would see what she could do. That day, Jacqueline forced herself to walk down a flight of steps, although she had to sit twice, and then back up, when she had to rest four times. An hour later, she tried it again.

Betty Jo collected a pink wool sweater with only two holes in it; a flowered blue scarf; a new slip in white satin that Betty Jo explained was a present sent one of the nurses and too small for her. Betty Jo also brought her a pair of drawers she had purchased, laid in tissue paper in a box. With her new little breasts, she could manage without a brassiere, if only she could get a skirt. Betty Jo brought her a torn blanket and a needle and thread and scissors. She sat on a chair at the end of the ward sewing herself a skirt. Soon it would be warm for the clothing she was producing, but it seemed to her the height of luxury to be too warm, to be overdressed, rather than shivering in the snow in a thin shift.

When she had finished, her skirt was scarcely elegant, for Jacqueline had never been handy with sewing, but it was wearable. She dressed herself, put the scarf over her hair and walked slowly but steadily to look at herself in the bathroom mirror. She could only see herself from the waist up, but she looked like a person. She liked the scarf because she had seen photographs of women shaved for sleeping with Germans and did not want anyone to think that was what had happened to her hair.

She would not let herself return to bed, except to rest between excursions, except to sleep. She slept badly, but she ate whatever she could get. It seemed to her she could go on eating all day, that she was never full, that she never would be full. Now she could walk down the two flights of steps to the ground floor, only resting between flights, and after she sat for five minutes, climb up. She still cringed when she heard German spoken. She pretended she did not understand it. In truth, her throat closed and she could not answer. Sometimes she found herself backed against the wall, trying to flatten herself out of existence. It was hard to overcome the habit of cowering, of never meeting a gaze. She had been a piece too long, a slave, a number.

She had given Ari up long before he returned. She was dressed and helping Betty Jo talk to patients, translating from Yiddish and French. Yiddish always made her think of Daniela, and somehow thinking of Daniela made Ari appear behind her.

“You look much better,” he told her. “I have a present for you.” He held out a box.

She did not equivocate but tore it open. It was a blue and white summer dress. Perhaps it was an ordinary dress, she told herself, but holding it in her hands, clean, crisp, fresh, dainty, she wanted to embrace it. She ran at once to put it on. Now she had enough strength to climb up on the toilet seat, so she could see more of herself in the mirror, headless with the dress hanging on her gauntness, but a woman, a person, a human being. She was wearing the slippers the hospital had given her, and she had still the boots from her aunt Esther. She lacked normal shoes, she lacked stockings, she had only one set of drawers and no brassiere, but she could escape if she had to. She could pass in the street.

She came back slowly toward the bed, uncertain why she felt suddenly frightened. Betty Jo and Ari fussed about her, but she stood stiffly inside her new dress. Then Ari took her arm. “Let's go out. The sun's shining, the day is beautiful. Let's walk in the hospital garden.”

She went down the steps with him, carefully, slowly, but as they approached the door to the outside, she found herself pulling away. “No!” Her heart was racing in her chest, shaking her.

“Jacqueline, you must go out. You can't stay in the hospital much longer. If that nurse wasn't protecting you, you'd be thrown out.”

He had his hand through her arm and he was tugging her relentlessly along. Now the door was opening and now she was passing out into the mild humid air. It was extremely bright and much too big, all around her from every direction attacking. It had no boundaries, no walls, only vast air-over her head and space exploding outward. She drew in, clutched, unable to breathe. She shut her eyes and listened. Birds, traffic passing, someone shouting monotonously upstairs in the mental ward, the multitudinous busy rushing sound of leaves purling in a breeze.

She opened her eyes and followed him to a bench. The sun laid its hand on her face. She blinked and blinked. “Why did you come back? Why are you so good to me?” The leaves were two thirds opened, soft and vulnerable on the linden trees and the beeches. Along the wall a row of fat peonies were in bloom, white and pink.

“You were her best friend. You're all that's left of her.”

“Daniela was nothing like me. She was a far better person. She was gentler and braver and she had real faith. She was a good Jew. I'm an indifferent Jew.”

“I have one piece of bad news for you.”

She covered her eyes. “They're dead?”

“Your mother died at Dora/Nordhausen. Your sister we haven't been able to trace yet. We know she was in the Tunnel at Dora, working on V-2 rockets. A huge underground factory there employed slave labor.”

Maman gone, never another chance. For a long while she could not speak, grieving and also furious with him for telling her, for being there, for being so vivid and healthy. No, it was herself who should not be alive, with those she loved murdered. Yet not all were proven dead. Rivka might have survived, like her. She sat up. “I want to leave here. I have to find both my sisters. In the battle at Mon-tagne Noire, Daniela and I were trying to slip through the Boche encirclement when they caught us. I threw away the ID I had, my Luger, my journal, with my other sister's address in America.… I'll need money. Is there work around here?”

“What languages do you speak?”

“Good English, fair Yiddish, scanty Hebrew, some Spanish and German.”

“The Americans in Frankfurt will hire you, if your English is good enough.”

“I'll go to them and try.” She stood. “As soon as possible. Can you help me?”

Ari beamed, clasping her hand. “I'll try to get you an appointment tomorrow.”

“Please!” It was time to act. Time to crawl outside. Yes.

DANIEL 9

Lost and Found

One activity at work that pleased Daniel was turning up two experts in seashells who knew so much about the beaches of Okinawa that the younger, in his late sixties, was flown out to the Pacific to help with invasion decisions. Everything else during the months of the fighting on Okinawa proved harrowing, for the casualties on both sides mounted until they were enormous, including the highest losses the Navy had ever sustained, and dreadful killing and maiming among the Army and Marine infantry. It left little reason to celebrate in OP-20-G, when the last of the major dug-in knots of Japanese soldiers were annihilated by flamethrowers and napalm or spent themselves in suicide charges, when the deaths finally dropped to a few a day from snipers and pockets of isolated resistance. It was a victory without pleasure, trailing intimations of disaster on an almost incomprehensible scale.

The mood grew grim among the codebreakers, because while Daniel was aware peace feelers and Japanese declarations of the necessity to end the war were coming in through the broken Purple diplomatic codes, the radio traffic of the Japanese army and navy revealed the same willingness to die by individual act and en masse, the same belief in the beauty and honor of flaming suicide. There would be three million troops defending Japan, besides the volunteers, the civilian brigades, the irregulars. Anticipated Allied casualties of a million were commonly predicted.

VE-Day had meant little to Daniel. Abra wrote him from Bad Nauheim in Germany every four or five days. He was amused by both of them, conducting their disguised courtship through the mails, writing not love letters but documents designed to demonstrate to the other how lovable each was, how warm, how witty, how knowing, how altogether irresistible. At the same time, he viewed her as entirely capable of keeping him on hold, then returning with a new lover in tow. After all, he was still writing Louise regularly, and if she did suddenly show up in Washington, he did not know what he would do.

July was sweltering. Several days the temperature rose in the high nineties and they were sent home, but mostly it rained. They decoded a telegram from a former Japanese prime minister to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow. “His Majesty is extremely anxious to terminate the war as soon as possible, being deeply concerned that further hostilities will only aggravate the untold miseries of the millions and millions of innocent men and women in the countries at war. Should, however, the United States and Great Britain insist on unconditional surrender, Japan would be forced to fight to the bitter end.” The invasion preparations continued. “Unconditional surrender” had been repeated so many times that Truman must feel he could not relinquish it for fear of political repercussions.

July 28, a B-26 named “Old John Feather Merchant” left Bedford Air Force Base near Boston and crashed into the Empire State Building, hitting the seventy-seventh floor and killing twenty office workers and its crew on impact. The building caught fire, elevators plunged to the bottom of their shafts. Watching the newsreel, Daniel thought it a taste of bombing for New Yorkers.

The next day the radio reported a new kind of bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and had wiped out the entire center of that city. OP-20-G seethed with speculation. The papers had mentioned the equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Nobody had the faintest notion what that entailed, but it was some big bomb and bound to bring home to the Japanese government that it was time to end the war while something was still standing. Daniel envisioned a struggle within that government between the forces of death and the forces for life, between idealized suicide, the cherry blossoms that lasted such a short time and represented to the Japanese the beauty of the samurai, and the sturdy peasant virtue of survival. In the meantime, the Soviet Union declared war on the Japanese, who had been begging the Soviets to make peace for Japan with the Western powers. Another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 14, the Japanese government announced its surrender. The emperor spoke on radio for the first time to his people. The word “surrender” was never used, but the meaning was clear enough.

Daniel was on duty when the message came in. Everybody jumped up and ran to embrace each other. “It's over!” Daniel heard himself shouting. A yeoman threw a vast pile of decodes in the air, although they would have to be picked up. Within the hour, sirens were going off, bells tolling, cars leaning on their horns, a joyous raw cacophony. By his immense relief, Daniel could gauge how frightening he had found the prospect of invading a Japan bent on dying honorably in battle to the last possible casualty on both sides. The Japanese would learn to live under their first defeat and their culture would be the richer and earthier for it. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans would not die. He had never experienced peace as an adult: a life he could choose instead of a war that shaped or smashed.

OP-20-G could not take the time off to join in the mass orgy that shook Washington, because they had to monitor the communications to and from the Japanese troops. It was not certain that all commanders or all kamikaze pilots would obey the emperor. Indeed some flew to commit ritual suicide with their planes. An attempted military coup in Tokyo failed.

It was a time of too rapid decompression. Daniel wished he could join the excited people who stormed the White House fence and snake-danced on the grounds. Ann went into mourning and would not speak to anyone, for she had just had a telegram. When her father was released from camp and returned to his home, he was beaten to death by a mob. Ann submitted her resignation. Daniel went to the aunt's house, but Ann was gone, her aunt would not say where. He wondered if she had fled to her Japanese relatives, whenever they had gone from camp.

He got an infuriating letter from Louise. It contained not one word of love, not a word of plans for them together, but instead it presented him with a big fat problem.

Dearest Daniel
,

Conditions in the refugee camps are dreadful. Generally the Americans vastly prefer the Germans, who after all are clean, tidy, efficient and wonderful at running things, including camps. In some cases, they have put the same guards back in charge, or others like them. On the other hand, they find the slave laborers and concentration camp inmates dirty, odd-looking, sick, disgusting and apt to whine. When they talk about Jewish DPs infiltrating Germany and Austria, they sound just like the Nazis
.

Now, this is very important. I have located your aunt, Esther Balaban. She is only thirty-one, although she looks years older at the moment. Still, with a little flesh on her bones and the color coming back in her hair, she is looking better every day. She is an amazing woman, with immense powers of endurance
—
obviously, for she survived two years of Auschwitz and a year before that in the Lodz ghetto
.

Esther wants to come to the United States. Her husband, your uncle, was killed in the ghetto, shot down in the street. Her children were gassed at Auschwitz. She alone has survived from your family in Kozienice. This woman does not belong behind barbed wire. I am enclosing a brief letter from her. She is learning English rapidly. Either you yourself or your parents should immediately write to her and begin the process of sponsoring her to enter
.