Gone to Soldiers (93 page)

I took off my belt, with its brass buckle. I scrambled back up onto the narrow ledge and worked on the opening, taking care that no dust from my rubbing fell out the window. Whenever I saw or heard the guard approaching, I stopped. I knew that he could not see into the darkness where I was crouching, but nonetheless, when he was near I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe. I tried to forbid myself to think about what was going to happen to us and simply to focus all my energy, all my strength, on escaping. The sentry seemed so close as he passed, the top of his head only ten feet below me, I felt as if he could smell my fear. I thought that fear tasted just as my dry mouth tasted, of old blood and something tinny. I doubted first whether I could get through the narrow gap between stone and bar, and second, whether I could do it in under ten minutes. Otherwise he could hardly miss me hanging in midair over his head.

I made no impression on the rock, of course, but the mortar was weaker. I suppose altogether I scraped off about .7 centimeters. I felt every minute space gained made it more likely I would be able to wriggle through. My fingers were bleeding by now and I still had no idea if that narrow space would pass even my head.

It was finally dark when they came back with Jeff. I heard him cry out something in the hall, but I could not make out the words. They took Margot away again. I was sure my turn would come next, before I ever had a chance to try my plan. It did not seem like much of a plan, but it was all I could think of, and I had to try something. I had to. I crawled up on the ledge again. I realized that my clothes were only going to get in the way.

I hopped down and stripped, feeling more naked than I ever have in my life. I tied my dress and slip, my sabots into a bundle, which I placed carefully on the ledge so I would not drop it. I began trying to work my head through as soon as the sentry had passed. Then he called out something to another. When I heard shooting, I froze, but nothing more happened.

Then came my wonderful piece of luck. Planes arrived over Toulouse to bomb the railyards and the foundries. The ground was shaking and dust rising. The sentry disappeared. I forced my head through. It felt as if I had skinned myself and broken my jaw but there I was hanging over the street with my head through the bars and my clothing in a bundle on the ledge. I pulled it through so that it was on the outside with my head. I continued forcing myself through, wishing I were skinnier than I am. I wriggled and wriggled. Whenever I let myself panic, I got stuck. My own sweat helped lubricate me. I was sweating heavily, partly from exertion, for never have I worked so hard as I did to force my body through. My breasts hurt. They were bruised already from the guards. I thought my arms would rip from their sockets, but the hardest part was my hips. Finally I lunged and then fell, clutching the bundle. That was how I broke my arm. I lay stunned in the street while the sky bloomed with vast zinnias of flame, red and gold and incandescent white, the clusters of rockets from the antiaircraft batteries, the searchlights crisscrossing and wheeling in arcs, the rosy fall of a bomber and then the tower of flames where it went down in the city. I was dazed. My hip hurt so, I thought I had broken it too.

Lying there in the dirt and my blood, naked and filthy and torn, I felt like some small fierce creature of the night, a weasel, a stoat, something tiny and lithe and close to the ground with sharp teeth and an immense will to live. I had to get up in spite of the pain. I did not know how many bones I had broken but I could not care, I could not care. I pulled on the dress somehow, stepped into my sabots and crept along the building toward the street in front. I was afraid to head toward the back, as that was the direction the guard had run in when the raid started. I hobbled along the street, but no one was about except a fire truck going by.

I went straight to the house of a cheminot nearby. I could think of nowhere else to go, and I knew that once the raid was over, my chances of escaping in my bloody dress were slight. I felt ashamed, as if anyone looking at me could tell I had been raped. I could smell my stench, of their semen, of blood, of sweat, of urine. I banged on their door, but did not make too much noise as I did not want neighbors to hear. Then I realized because of the bombing, no one could hear me, no matter what I did. They live near the yards and all their windows were long ago smashed and the walls of the house itself cracked. I finally pushed on the old packing crate that serves as window curtains and fell into their kitchen with a great clatter, which brought the wife at once.

Now I am at the base in the Montagne Noire, with my people again. We are waiting word. Neither Jeff nor Margot seems to have been able to escape and I want to know where they are being held—the Milice barracks or Gestapo headquarters on rue Alexandre Fourtanier. Daniela set my arm and splinted my fingers. I am not much good. I couldn't shoot a gun to save my life, although it may come to that too. I am covered with hideous bruises and abrasions. My nose is swollen purple as a turnip. But I am proud that I escaped. Here in the high clean beech forest, I slowly recover.

I wish we would get news of Jeff. I fear for him. I am afraid they will beat and torture him. I have nightmares in which I am laying out his body, as I did Larousse, and each time I wake weeping. When I am wide awake, images of tortured flesh haunt me. I worry about Margot too, but I cannot pretend I feel her danger as keenly. I tell myself that Jeff was well trained and that if a civilian, a woman, can escape, surely he can too: not in the same way, of course, since he could never have wriggled through, but perhaps when they move him. One thing I dread is telling him about being raped, how he will take that.

10 juin 1944

The Milice shot Margot. That was the fusillade I heard from my cell. They did not want the Gestapo to know about their leak, to interrogate her about Milice headquarters, so after they had questioned and beat her for several hours, they shot her in the courtyard of the prison. We think the Gestapo has Jeff. We must find out.

They did not know who I was when they were raping me, but now they know I am the same organizer of the trips across the Pyrénées they were hunting earlier. My wanted poster has gone up everywhere, but I am told that they get torn down as fast as they go up. Like Papa, I have a price on my head. Papa is trying to find out where Jeff is being kept. I am impatient to know, so that we can make plans to break him out. Oh, Eduardo brought a new recruit to me, a construction worker who told me that the way I escaped is called the bar of freedom and was done wherever they could get away with it when the prisons were being revamped after the Nazis arrived. The workers would move one bar after it was inspected but before the cement hardened.

11 juin 1944

Papa came to our tent to tell me, while Daniela was changing the dressing on my hip. He is dead. The Milice killed him. There is nothing more to say, nothing. I cannot believe he is dead, but it is so, Papa insists. We cannot even recover the body.

21 juin 1944

Both Papa and Daniela gave me a talking to, that I must get myself together and set an example, that I cannot continue to give way to my feelings. Grief, Daniela says, is a luxury. Did I not urge her to think about the living when her brother killed himself with his own grenade? It seems to me I was insufficiently sympathetic then, but Daniela denies that. Papa orates somewhat more. He says we are at war and cannot pause to mourn or remember our dead until we have won. He asks me if I should have wished Jeff to collapse if I had been shot alongside Margot.

Papa said one thing is sure: Jeff did not talk before they killed him. No more arrests have followed. Mme Faurier has taken over running his agents from outside Lacaune, and the two operations are separate now as that know-it-all, the British radioman, keeps saying they should have been all along. Mme Faurier will continue to transmit through Achille. We will leave him hidden in the Lacaune Mountains. Here the maquis have that British radioman who communicates with London for them.

Many separate maquis groups have gathered here to fight the Germans, not only the Jewish Army and scouts but many local groups. There is some tension, but mostly we all get on. The Jewish squadron is actually admired for our discipline and our training: Lev is responsible for that. Every day one of our people says to me how much they miss Jeff's style and his energy. People have also been giving me drawings he left various places. I have been looking at them too much and I have decided I must hide them away. I know I am failing in my work. If I only escaped to weep and lie in my tent and walk on the mountains alone trying to imagine how he would have seen these landscapes, I should have died at the hands of the Milice too, as he did, as Margot did. The only time I feel some respite from his death is when I climb one of the old logging roads that rise steeply among the beech and holly. Purple columbine grows in the paths. Giant glistening diamond-backed black slugs slide everywhere, devouring the wildflowers. The world is peaceful noplace, but here it is whole. Cuckoos keep calling. I climb till I am exhausted.

I will try to see only the labor before me. That labor is hard, because I am frankly of little use, with one arm in a sling and the other hand partially splinted. Our groups have been attacking German convoys on the way toward Normandy with food or munitions, attacking too the concentrations of troops moving in that direction. We have gone a long way from practicing with sticks.

I forgot to say, in my personal craziness, that London called off the order for the general uprising. Too bad, folks, we changed our mind. Sorry about that. In the meantime maquis all over France went on the attack, expecting that mythical Force C to land by plane to reinforce us, and the Boches responded with tanks, planes, the full works, and wiped them out. They have also killed entire towns full of people as punishment. A woman arrived who may be the sole survivor of a little village in the Dordogne. She and I spent several days together, as we were both in the same state of torn-open crazy grieving.

I work with Daniela in our improvised field hospital, where every day's fighting brings casualties. We still have no doctor, but we have another nurse besides Daniela, and me, with my limited hospital experience. We had a drop of medical supplies and lots and lots more arms, food, gear. After all those years of shortages, suddenly they are dropping tons on our heads every week. Now everybody has at least one weapon. We feel rich.

26 juin 1944

I work in the hospital. My hand is out of its splint and I am doing exercises Daniela gave me to recover the full use. My arm in the cast itches terribly. I sleep badly and I can never tell when I will begin to cry, suddenly. Tears just start running from my eyes as if a faucet were turned on. It is completely out of my control, and mostly I ignore it, and try to get everyone else to do the same. I was pleased when my period started. The last thing I could endure is to be pregnant by one of those thugs. It was a week late, but at last it came.

Papa is a good leader, adored by his comrades. He and Lev get on well after a rocky start, but Papa is especially fond of Daniela. We have a lot more OSS and SOE people coming through here as if we were camped on a great highway of intelligence and guerrilla warfare: the former are American; the latter, British. I tend to be friendlier to the OSS. I ask them if they knew Jeff. One had met him in training, but none of them has turned out to be his friend. On the whole the Americans are warmer than the British, but they have dreadful or silly politics. I speak English very well now, but the British tell me I have an American accent.

We had horrible news of Vercors, which was the biggest maquis base in France. After they rose to attack the Germans on command, the Germans poured a whole army in there and wiped them out. Some of the maquis got away over the mountains, but whole villages were massacred down to the babies and even the pets, their bodies hung on hooks in the butcher shops. It is terrifying and leaves us unable to enjoy the news we hear from Normandy of the Allied advance. It seems they are really established now. The Resistance has been doing a good job of tying up German troops and preventing columns from reaching Normandy to join in the fighting. That is one reason the Germans are trying harder than usual to wipe us all out.

5 juillet 1944

Mme Faurier sent for me to come and talk to her. It broke my heart to see the farmhouse there, with the room upstairs under the steep pitch of slate roof where he and I used to sleep, with the sound always of water cascading over the frogsback rocks. Sometimes remembering happiness sticks in the chest like a knife. Everything I looked at—rocking chair, pitcher, plate, ticking clock—went off like little time bombs exploding memories, his face, his voice, his hands, the skin of his back, the way he would brood on a landscape as if it said and meant something entirely different to him than to anyone else.

Mme Faurier took my hands in hers, calloused and with the feeling they have always of being warm but worn. “We have learned several things. There has been a big shake-up at the Milice. The guards who assaulted you and the one you think helped you have all been sent to forced labor in Germany, and that captain has been demoted and sent to Pau. You see, the Gestapo got no one and the Milice had to be punished. In the general upheaval, we once again have someone inside now.”

“What are you not yet telling me?” I asked none too politely, because I could feel her holding something back.

“The Milice did not kill Vendôme. He took his own life after torture.”

I must have screamed, because she jumped up and put her arms around me, hugging me against her softness. She is shorter than me but plumper, softer-bodied. Normally I like to lean against her the way her daughters do, but I could not bear it then and yanked away.

“Jacqueline, he is a hero, like Daniela's brother. He knew too much. That's why OSS gives them poison capsules, so that if they feel they cannot take the torture, they have a way out. His is an honorable death.”