Gone to Soldiers (97 page)

The downstairs apartment was haunted by Louise. Was he angry with her? Yes. He could not forgive her for abandoning him. He was not used to women leaving him, yet the sense of being deserted was familiar. It made him remember how he had felt when his father had left them in the Bronx and gone off to China, left them to suppers of beans or oatmeal, to studying by candlelight because the electricity had been turned off for failure to pay the bill, of his feet always hurting because his socks were darned lumpy. The other kids had teased him because his father had run away, they said, run away to China.

That summer his mother had found a kitchen job in the Catskills and his older brother Haskel had gone along to work as a busboy, but he and Judy had been left with a neighbor. He had never spoken to Judy about that summer, but he had felt abandoned. Crying alone, he had decided nobody cared for him in his family, nobody, that they viewed him as an accident that had happened to them.

He was still stunned that Louise had left him. He had known, of course, how much she disliked her job at OWI and how frustrated she felt. Yet she was writing interesting articles, always, and she could have gone on doing that. Sometimes he blamed Kay. Louise always felt that whatever damn fool thing Kay did was Louise's own fault, issuing directly from a failure of upbringing. Daniel thought that after an early point, kids pretty much did what they felt like. The world the new generation lived in was different from their parents' world in its pressures, fantasies and standards, even its jokes and bywords. Kay experienced her war and Louise lived hers.

Why had she left him? Sometimes he was convinced it was to get back with her exhusband, who always loomed off there on the edge of Louise's mental landscape. Oscar was still her inner measure of male. She hadn't given him enough time to replace Oscar, and why not? That was the sore he returned to, licking and licking until it was infected.

Since he was fifteen, he had always been in love. Even during his chaste months at Harvard, he had been in love with his exacting mistress, the Japanese language, which he imagined as a courtesan with enameled face out of Hokusei, mocking him from behind a fan, body rippling under a silken kimono. Now he had bad dreams. Often he dreamed of Louise, leaving him again and again.

He had had two letters from her, letters from London, but he had not opened the first until the second had come. He had taken great pleasure in picking it up each day as he came home from work and then tossing it down again, forcing it to remain silent, dumb, rejected. Now that there were two, side by side, his curiosity overcame him.

She wrote him that the only thing she missed from Washington was him. The phrasing irritated him. She was supposed to be a writer, sensitive to language, yet she called him a thing. That was how she thought of him: a body, a convenience, a small pleasure to be put away after its season. I am Madame Butterfly, Daniel said to himself. He despised himself for his grief, but the world seemed to him full of shrill and gentle cries of pain.

The commander he had replaced had come out of the hospital and resumed his old post, so Daniel was back decoding and translating messages. Part of the American strategy in the Pacific was to bypass many strongly held Japanese islands, leaving them in isolation so that while they were unconquered, they were useless and in exile from the war. These ports and islands sent and received messages which OP-20-G had to monitor. The pathos of these little garrisons moved Daniel. They could not be resupplied or evacuated, but held out hundreds of miles behind enemy lines with their dwindling supplies and evaporating morale, radioing passionate devotion for the emperor and samurai sentiments to their superiors, who were writing them off as dead losses. They were bombed now and then, more for practice than for any military end, while leaflets urging surrender rained on them whenever any appropriate officer got around to ordering it done.

Although he wrote only brief formal notes, he went on receiving occasional letters from Louise. Then he began to see her articles. That is, he took to buying
Collier's
every week, because something from her was usually there. It was masochistic, yet he did it.

When the pieces on children growing up in subway stations gave way to stories about the daily life of artillery units and tank crews, he realized that she could be killed. Correspondents were shot, they were torpedoed, they were blown up by land mines or artillery shells or bombs that fell on them as on the troops. He was safe in Washington reading other people's mail while she was off sticking her nose into foxholes in France. Why? He could not quite put together Louise in the kitchen making gefilte fish or kasha varniskes with Louise kneeling behind a stone fence, as she was shown in an accompanying photo, her familiar face daubed with mud, the rest of her indistinguishable in its bulky khaki from the GI next to her. He stared at the photo on and off for the rest of the evening. Why? he asked himself, and he could not answer.

Abra had gone to London with her man, in vain pursuit of Oscar's undying love. If a woman was in love with a man and that man went to war, then if a woman could, she would go also, providing she had no children to hold her back. But Louise had gone off to war with the same motivations as any other war correspondent, for glory, for curiosity, for vague patriotism, for clear anti-Nazi motives but also as a shrewd career move. Finally that bothered him. He could not quite put that ambition together with the yielding body, the soft warm breasts and belly and the eagerly thrusting, welcoming hips. Why should those warm lips and those encircling arms and that body that smelled of a French perfume carefully dosed out each day, just one drop behind each ear and one drop behind each knee, why should that body so familiar to him under and over and twined with his own offer itself willingly to danger and discomfort? He accused Louise of concealing something hard and unwomanly in herself, an ambition complicated and functional as one of those rifles he had never learned to handle.

In June, Abra had written teasingly that she had figured out from his reticence that he was having an affair with Louise, and she praised him as the last gentleman, the noblest Victorian of them all, but by the time that letter arrived, Louise had vanished. By the time Abra had his answer, she also had Louise in London and Oscar panting after her. Her next letter was perhaps the most naked she had ever written him.

I don't know what I might have done in this war more useful than what I am doing, but I doubt there would, honestly, be much. That has to suffice, but it's cold comfort at the moment. One of the mistakes I've made has been to let Oscar become my life. I see that clearly, how it happened, why it happened, but it has meant that whereas in New York and even in Washington, I swam in a school of friends, and other people's ideas and perceptions inevitably jostled and changed my own, I have been alone in an artificial semimarriage with Oscar since we left the States. I have made no friends here. I have got into the habit of confiding in no one, except you; and you had not till your last letter been particularly open with me
.

I have a strong sense how costly this mistake has been, but perhaps I have shrunk from making friends for fear their observation would throw light on my relationship with Oscar I have been at pains to avoid. In some sense, I am still to Oscar what I was: his valued and hardworking research assistant. I feel as if I am waking from a long paralysis, but to what except despair I cannot imagine
.

You tried to tell me what I was unwilling to hear. Sometimes when people have been wiser than us, we become angry with them, but I don't feel that. Instead I feel a tender gratitude for how hard you tried to be honest with me about my folly, back in Washington when we lived as neighbors in that funny little house
.

She signed the letter
love
. That was new. She had always signed flippantly before—yours in potpourris of passion, leaping lizards of love, your humble and obedient donna sirviente, and so on. Now, love. Perhaps she had merely run out of flippancy. Yet he could not imagine Abra signing a letter without premeditation.

If she were in Washington, he thought, musing on the letter in her sloping hand, the loops below the line looking like paddles thrust out in a rush, he thought he could go to her and finally resolve their long flirtation. I could have her, he thought, but laughed at himself because the contention had to remain unproved. The flirtation was heating up because they both needed something to lighten their depression, that was the size of it, but he put considerable effort into his reply.

At work they had been monitoring the traffic from Saipan until the last cry of despair from the commander, the transmissions from Guam where fighting was fierce, ever nearer to Japan. Why didn't the Japanese give up, defeat after costly defeat? In what the American pilots called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, the Japanese had lost an enormous number of pilots and many ships. What did they expect could save them? Yet Japan had never yet been defeated. They kept using a phrase lately,
kamikaze
, which was the divine typhoon, the great punishing wind sent by the great goddess Amaterasu the Sun who had given birth to an ancestor of the emperor and thus must constantly protect him. When Kublai Khan had conquered all the rest of Asia and sent his fleet against Japan, Amaterasu had raised the divine wind, the kamikaze, and wiped out the invasion force. Such a miracle must come again, they believed. The war would continue.

He wondered sometimes if he would ever see the places that were so familiar to him in Japanese codes: Hollandia, about which they were translating dispatches daily until MacArthur's forces took it in April; Aitape; Biak, where the invasion had gone badly awry. MacArthur often disregarded the information, it was rumored, that the Magic decodes offered him. He trusted only his old intelligence buddies from the Philippines, the Bataan Gang. Magic was the field name for intelligence from their decrypts.

Nonetheless, the information went out and was often used. On 25 June, they had decoded a signal from the Japanese Eighteenth Army Commander General Adachi stating that he was planning a major attack in the vicinity of Aitape around 10 July. He sent on details of his three divisions involved, his battle plans and even where his command post would be located. This information was all bundled off to the intelligence officers who fed it to the commanders defending American positions on Aitape. What pleasure he found in his life at present issued from his sense of the precision and importance of the work they were doing.

Since he was spending his always limited social time with his co-workers, he began to put together a picture of how he seemed to them. Most seemed to have a high opinion of his work and his temperament. He was viewed as sweet-tempered, an image at odds with his own idea of himself as hotheaded, impetuous, adventuresome, a persona based more on his running wild in the streets of Shanghai than anything since. He considered himself anew. What he wanted most was a mixture of adventure and stability. He thought briefly of taking up again with Ann, but when he saw her, she gave out a high whine of anxiety like the cry of a hungry mosquito.

Then too his romanticism about her could not survive a lunch together. He began to remember the banality too, the pruned quality of her, stunted into passivity. If Louise had proved too ambitious for him to keep, Ann was too lacking in will to keep him. He was glad to touch fingers with her and feel she meant him well, although she could hardly maintain a focus on him even until the check arrived.

He had told Louise it was inevitable they should become involved, he remembered, and perhaps it was—too convenient for her to resist long; yet she had failed to consider him her equal or the equal of her ex-husband. That was her error, he muttered, wandering through the apartment that had seemed far more opulent when she had inhabited it, although she had left him almost all her things.

He began to wonder what would become of him after the war, although nobody in OP-20-G believed that Japan would collapse or the end come soon. Before the Navy had carried him off to this exotic occupation, he had served subpoenas on petty offenders. What was he equipped to do in a postwar world? What did he know? Cryptanalysis and Japanese. It did not sound promising. Maybe he should go back to school after the war and become a professor of Japanese, but would there be any call for them? He doubted there had been more than a handful in American universities before the war.

Surely the cryptanalytical branch would be closed down, because whose mail, whose signal intelligence, would America need to read? Perhaps he could get a job inventing puzzles for children's magazines or hobbyists?

Maybe he would go back to China and rejoin his uncle Nat, whom he never doubted would survive. His Chinese had lapsed, but he could renew it. Or maybe, he thought, with a sense of secretive and shameful ambition, maybe he would go to Japan. At least there a knowledge of Japanese would be useful.

JACQUELINE 10

Up on Black Mountain

15 juillet 1944

Yesterday the Americans dropped us, in the daylight, do you believe it, an enormous quantity of ammunition, guns and food, all decorated with little tricolors. They were B-17s escorted by Mustang P-47s, the long-range fighter the Americans and sometimes the British use to protect their bombers. We have been seeing many of them going over, but this time they came for us. They dropped us 12 containers holding 4 machine guns with 17,000 rounds, 44 rifles with over 60,000 rounds; 50 submachine guns with 16,000 rounds, 140 hand grenades, 100 kilos of plastic explosives with fuses and timing devices, 200 first aid kits, 40 kilos of packaged food and 40 kilos of clothing, blankets and shoes. None of the latter are for women and they are all much too big for me.

We are pleased to receive this bounty, finally, but lately they have been making even too many drops. This time four more of their own personnel parachuted down, too. Such a big drop in daylight so soon after the last is bound to attract German attention, so that while we are pleased with the outfitting, we are a little nervous, as befits Jews whose good fortune often calls down the envy and wrath of others, who select it to notice and remember. It is also the case that there were no mortars, which we desperately need, and nothing heavy enough to use against German armor.