Women's Barracks (10 page)

And I—I thought of my dear father, somewhere in a German prison camp, of my mother and grandparents in Canada. Would we ever be together again for Christmas in our little house near Orleans? It was better to lose myself in the thoughts of the other girls…

The priest raised the Host. All the heads were bowed. A few women were weeping in their hands. I saw tears drop between the fingers of one of the little Brittany girls.

It was already being rumored that the invasion would not take place in the coming spring. Our exile was being prolonged. Over there in France, little brothers were growing up, parents were hungry and cold, the Boche contaminated Paris, and here we were so far away—so lost. Would all this never come to an end?
"Noel, Noel, II est ne, le Divin Enfant."
The season of joy was even more difficult to endure than the gray days.

Michel Levy was waiting for Ursula as she came out of the chapel. He had a gift for her—a book of poems. Several times in the last few days, when Michel asked her to go out with him, Ursula had put him off in order to be with Claude. But tonight Claude was celebrating Christmas in her room in town with some English friends and a few of us from the barracks, and Ursula had promised to have supper with Michel. Claude always teased her about her "lover," and Ursula would have liked to stop seeing him, but she didn't know how to manage it without hurting his feelings.

All the women who had asked for leave were scattering down the street with their friends, soldiers, officers, and there were little groups of girls going out together. Ann and Petit went out arm in arm.

Ginette was spending Christmas respectably with a married couple she knew. Jacqueline left for Kensington. Mickey, in a sudden access of remorse, had not wanted to spend Christmas night with Robert. She had asked Claude if she could come to her party.

Hot chocolate had been prepared in the barracks for those who were staying in. Down Street went to bed late, and when the women slipped into their cold cots they sighed,
"C'est la guerre."

Others were dancing all through the night, and drinking.

And all of us, wherever we were, were thinking, Next Christmas, surely, we'll be in France and we'll make up for all this. How glorious it will be to return in uniform, we, the volunteers of Free France! Everyone will honor us. Our parents will be so proud, the bells will ring
Noel, Noel
for us,
Noel
for liberated France, and we'll march under the Arch of Triumph! Oh, France, France, our next Christmas will be in the France that we will have freed!

Yes, our life here was only temporary; another few months to pass, at most a year, and it would certainly be over.

There was a little Italian restaurant that we had discovered on Greek Street. It was modest and cheap, and it was there that Michel took Ursula, for he had very little money. And yet, despite his poverty as an ordinary recruit, he never seemed to be able to think of enough things to do to give Ursula pleasure.

Before the war he had been a student. He wanted to take his degree in philosophy, he told Ursula. In 1937, his parents had got out of Poland, and he had continued his studies in Belgium.

That was nearly all that Ursula knew of him, and she was not enough interested in Michel to wonder about his history. She liked him well enough and she was touched by his gentleness and his discretion. Sometimes when Ursula talked to him about Claude, Michel gazed at her with his childlike eyes, so unreally pure, and the black eyes, with their thick brows always raised in a startled expression, seemed to look at her with so complete a comprehension that Ursula thought that he must know everything, must have divined everything, for he never asked her any questions.

This evening he seemed gay. It was Christmas. Neither he nor Ursula was Catholic. Ursula was nothing at all, and Michel said he was in search of truth. And yet Christmas made them both happy.

After dinner they went out into the black street, where groups of people passed singing. They walked without any special destination, and Michel took hold of Ursula's arm. At first she wanted to withdraw it. She couldn't understand why the slightest physical contact with Michel frightened her. But not wanting to offend him, she did nothing, and they continued to walk like that.

"Merry Christmas!" people in the streets called out to them, and once more Ursula felt her heart heavy and sad. She wasn't thinking of Christmas in France, for she had had neither childhood nor holidays nor a family in her past. There was almost nothing. It was as though she had been born only the day before; her heart and her spirit were still unmarked and they floated in a sort of prenatal obscurity.

But Michel was happy to feel her near him. She was so young. She was the only woman who didn't frighten him; because she seemed so defenseless, because she didn't know how to chatter or to laugh like most women, who always either had an air of being on the defensive or were aggressive. Until now he had told himself, I don't have the right to touch her, or to take her with me, for I have nothing to offer her, neither God, nor a home, nor security, nor even myself—a self that wanted only to die until I met her, a self that still wants to die. He beheld her again in the courtyard, opening the door and halting on the lighted doorstep, a black hazy shadow against a background of light. He saw her sitting on the steps and saw the little movement of fear that she had had upon noticing him—like that of a little wild animal that trembles on seeing a man. He saw again her odd, small face, framed by her glossy hair falling thick and straight like that of a little Indian. And an immense tenderness more powerful even than love invaded him again.

He thought, do I still want to die? And Michel had to answer himself that it was still so, despite his knowing her. He loved her, but he couldn't draw from her the nourishment that he needed. She could not silence the questioning in him and the agony in him. He knew that he had found nothing and that he still wanted to die, as on that day some months ago in Switzerland, in Fribourg, when he had decided to kill himself. Solemnly, his great eyes open with their strange candor, he told her all that was in his mind.

Michel, interned with several other Poles in a camp in Fribourg, had been granted the exceptional privilege of being permitted to take courses at the university. Scarcely seventeen, he felt as though he carried the moral weight of the whole world on his shoulders. He lived in profound despair, telling himself that there was no hope, that human stupidity and the cowardice of the human was so great that one could never change anything, that there would always be wars and barriers of hatred. He wished that somehow he could speak to mankind, explain that only humanity itself could put an end to these horrors. But how, and in the name of what could he speak? He was timid and ugly and he had no power of leadership. Then of what use was it to take part in the human farce and to love when love did not exist, and to bring children into the world in order that they might be killed in the next war in the name of some country that pretended to be more important than another? What for?

The boy Michel had decided to kill himself. He had bought some veronal, and was on his way to his rooming house when he met a fellow student from the university. This student was a monk, and strangely enough, a Jewish monk, a convert—a huge, handsome lad who enjoyed great popularity among the other students. He walked along with Michel, his white robe brushing the boy at every step. The sun warmed the snow on the mountaintops, and the air was so clear and so pure that one might almost have washed in it. Suddenly Michel began to talk. He told the monk that he had found his own truth and that it gave him a will to die. He told of his decision.

There are people who always talk about committing suicide but who never do it. But on Michel's face there was something so serious, his black eyes raised toward the monk were filled with such agony, that the monk realized that Michel had made up his mind.

Instead of moralizing, he proposed a sort of bargain to Michel. "You want to die," he said. "Agreed. But you don't have the right to die in cowardice, or stupidly. There is a war going on. Every day there are men who die, though they want to live. Leave Switzerland. Go to Spain and then to England. Enlist, and let yourself be killed while fighting. Perhaps you will die in place of the father of a family. Perhaps your death will save others. Perhaps your death will hasten the peace. Go get yourself killed, Michel. But only there, through England."

One day in January, in the midst of drill, Jacqueline fainted. Ginette, who was near me,
said,
"There she goes again, our fancy lady!" Others were saying, "Jacqueline must have something wrong with her heart. She ought to be discharged."

As soon as Jacqueline had regained consciousness, Corporal Ann told Mickey and me to take her back to the barracks to rest. The doctor happened to be in the building just then, talking to the Captain. The Captain asked us why we had left drill, and we explained that Jacqueline had fainted. This was a wonderful occasion for the Captain to display her concern for "her dear girls," and she had the doctor examine Jacqueline right away.

We took her up to the infirmary. The doctor was in a hurry. He thought Jacqueline must have had a simple attack of vertigo. But in examining her he touched her back, and she let out a cry. Then he realized that there was something wrong with her, and sent her to be X-rayed.

Two days later Jacqueline was taken to a hospital, where she was put in a plaster cast for several months. She had a spinal fracture.

Jacqueline's cot in the barracks was at once occupied by a new recruit, a student, whose only passion was chemistry. Every evening, amidst the noise of the dormitory, our newcomer, Monique, calmly devoured her chemistry manuals, just as some of us read novels. During the first days the noncoms regarded her with suspicion; then they classified her as crazy but harmless, and left her in peace.

After three days, we talked no more about Jacqueline. No one mentioned her. The hospital to which she had been taken was too far away for us to visit. The girls said, "She's just unlucky," or "How did she manage to do that to herself?" Only a few of us knew the history of that melodramatic night, before she entered the Army, when she had fled from her too ardent hosts. It was true that she now was gossiped about, like the others, for her week-end menage and her numerous suitors, but this other matter seemed to touch upon the more remote and mysterious areas of life, and it was left undiscussed. Indeed, Jacqueline was soon forgotten. Each of us had her own worries, her own preoccupations, her own problems, and then came those of one's closest friend. There was no time to think about anyone who was gone.

Ursula had received a letter from her little soldier, Michel, filled with apologies, in which he begged to see her again. She had not replied. Just now, Ursula was happy, for Claude was in a good mood these days. Whenever Ursula was free and Claude was off duty, Ursula went to Claude's place.

The little room was on the fifth floor, reached by a narrow stairway. Civilian dresses, blue silk sets of underwear and stockings were scattered over the chairs. Claude made toast in front of a gas radiator. On those days Claude wiped off her make-up, and then her face took on a touchingly youthful look. As soon as she was relaxed, there was a kind of childishness that returned to her face, which became fresh and clear. Despite all of her habits, her lovers, her opium, her women, her whisky, one had only to scrape off this veneer of debauch in order to uncover in her a simple little bourgeoise, filled with a foggy remainder of "principles." She had been born to be a good wife and a good mother in some provincial town, and at bottom her lack of equilibrium was due to her having been turned away from this life by a series of circumstances.

She was religious, superstitious, and fairly well cultivated. She considered that a girl ought to be a virgin when she married. Another of her principles was that a decent woman would never permit a man to come to her place to make love. She preferred to come home alone from her lovers in the middle of the night, rather than to allow a man to sleep in her room. All the perversions seemed acceptable to her in love, but this one thing she could not allow. And why that one rather than another? Perhaps only to preserve for herself a sort of token of rectitude.

In the afternoons, when Ursula came to her room, Claude busied herself with little womanly tasks, mending her dresses, repairing stocking runs, washing her clothes, knitting pull-overs for herself. If she had had a kitchen, she would have cooked excellent dinners. Claude was nearing forty and she had been leading a dissolute life for twenty years. Nevertheless, one felt that all that was basic in her came from her peaceful childhood and from her provincial adolescence. She was not a good drinker—even one drink went to her head right away—and yet she drank a great deal. Then she would do anything, scarcely knowing what she was doing.

In the evenings, in the dormitory, Mickey kept us posted on her affair with Robert. She was seeing him fairly frequently. She told us that he had several other mistresses, but she wasn't jealous. Despite her excitement at the beginning of the affair, her senses were slow in awakening. She found it agreeable to make love with him, but the experience aroused no particular feeling in her. It was a sort of game, with a touch of gymnastics in it. And she practiced this sport mostly to be able to say that she had a lover.

When spring came, everybody began to say that the second front would not take place that year either, and a wave of depression swept through Down Street. We would have to spend still another winter in London. Our exile was thickening on us like a crust. Every morning we marched through our drill, commanded by Petit; we marched around automatically, dreaming of our families, or of the landscape at home.

Hyde Park was covered with blossoms. In her strong, deep voice, Petit called out her commands: "To the left, march!" We obeyed, expert automatons now, though sleepy after the all-night bombardments.