Women's Barracks (11 page)

And the bombardments grew in intensity. One night, as I stood fire watch on the roof with Ginette, Ann, and two other girls, we decided to relieve the monotony by telephoning down to Claude, who was on duty at the switchboard, and asking her to sing something for us. Pressed together around the receiver, we heard the distant melodious voice of Claude as she sang:

"C'est toujours I'onde Qui m'a charme, Vagues profonds Aux fiots legers.
Aussi toujours, La nuit, le jour, Je veux chanter, L'onde, mon seul amour.”
And all of us on the roof joined in the refrain:
"Bon soir, Madame la Lune, bon soir, C'est votre ami Gerbault qui vient vous voir. Bon soir, Madame la Lune, bon soir."

One day, years later, I opened a newspaper and read that the poet Alain Gerbault had just died. In the same moment, I saw all of us again on the dark roof, and I heard myself singing, together with the distant voice that rose to us from below:

"Bon soir, Madame la Lune, bon soir, C'est votre ami Gerbault qui vient vous voir."

On that small roof, weren't we also afloat in a little boat, like the poet? And this night-gray stormy sky that surrounded us—wasn't it the immense sea with which Gerbault was in love?

The noise of the planes became deafening, and the DCA sounded on all sides. When we spotted a flare falling in our vicinity, Ginette immediately telephoned down to Claude, giving the direction in which it had fallen, and Claude transmitted the information to the local ARP. We were by now so accustomed to these alerts that the bombardment at first did not seem to us heavier than usual. But presently one of the Brittany girls remarked that this time all the bombs seemed to be incendiaries, and that they were all falling some distance away into a single area. It seemed to be the part of London known as the "City." Fires began to show there.

On the roof, we had sacks of sand ready. Ann peered out into the night, whistling the refrain from Alain Gerbault's song. From below, Claude informed us that the ARP had just come around to tell her that the entire City was on fire, that bombs were falling there like rain. The duty officer, Claude said, had ordered all the girls to get up and assemble in the kitchen. Our kitchen was in the basement and served as a shelter during the heavy raids.

Ann said she thanked heaven she was on watch that night. She had an absolute horror of any sort of shelter. Such places filled her with a mysterious terror and a sense of suffocation. She preferred a thousand times to be out in the open where she could see what was happening; if there was any danger, she wanted to see it.

The sky became dark red as though it were a lighted fireplace, with a flame that increased in intensity every moment. The spectacle had so extraordinary and horrible a quality of beauty that it filled all of us with awe. We all left our sandbags and forgot every principle of defense as we leaned against the railing of the roof, watching the scene.

London was on fire.

The sea of Gerbault was now all around us, a sea of fire. Not for a moment was any one of us free of the agonized consciousness of all those whose homes were collapsing and of those who were dying at this instant. And yet we could not take our eyes from this immense pyre whose flames seemed to be great enough to consume the world. Ann remarked that we were like Nero watching Rome burn, and because it was so conventional, her statement seemed somehow appropriate, with a historic grandeur that matched the grandeur of the scene.

The holocaust continued all night long. And somewhere deep in that night of flame, Ann began to talk to me. Though Ann was one of those people who seem entirely explained by their very appearance, I realized that I had known little of her until that night. It was as though the purgatory all around us were the purgatory of her life.

I recalled that other night when Mickey had come up onto the open roof, after her experience with Robert. But what Ann had to tell belonged to this night when all was unreal. In her husky voice, held down to a quiet monotone, Ann talked of her life as though she had to communicate it to destiny itself, in the face of this holocaust. Like most of the girls in the barracks, I had taken Ann and all Lesbians somehow as freaks, even to be considered amusing. Listening to her in that tragic purgatory, I wanted to weep.

Ann had spent her childhood in France, raised by her mother in poverty. She was an illegitimate child. She had shown unusual sexual tendencies when she was still scarcely grown. She had left her mother, and little by little cut herself away from all her early connections as she entered the spheres of her particular passion. She had come to England with a woman. When she had broken with her, Ann had found herself alone and penniless in London. It was just at the time of the defeat of France, and Ann had volunteered for De Gaulle's forces. As soon as she had seen Petit, she had felt herself to be at home.

Ann could not live without a liaison. It wasn't so much a need of love as a need of an affair with all its accompaniment of intrigue, mystery, and the consequent pleasure. By herself, she was not outside the normal; she was only so when she had a partner. And yet this departure from normalcy was necessary to her, as she had found out when scarcely more than a child. She could not live otherwise. Without a partner she felt as though something were amputated from her.

A woman like Claude offered no interest either to Petit or to Ann. They rather disdained her, with the disdain of the true artist for the dilettante. They never considered her a Lesbian. They said of her, "She's a pervert, a curiosity seeker." And as to Claude's Lesbianism, this was true.

We had known so little of these matters when we came to the barracks, and now we were able to distinguish between the various grades. Through Ann, I realized that Claude made love with women not because of an absolute physical necessity, but through snobbism, and in order to excite her masculine lovers. She also felt that she was revenging herself on them, through feeling that she was just as strong as they in winning women. Several times in her life she had found men unfaithful to her. As soon as she discovered herself in such a situation, Claude sought out her rival and appropriated the girl. It was then she who became the lover, the taker. This was her strength, in the face of men.

Moreover, she was fond of her role as a dangerous woman. Love-making with women, opium-smoking, group love-making—all this was part of her role. She had learned to be a Lesbian, just as she had learned to smoke opium. For her it was the same sort of excitement. Claude had never suffered from this condition as Ann and Petit had suffered. She was married, she had numerous lovers, and she could have lived a normal life as wife and mother if she chose. As for the rest, it was nothing but a game that satisfied her vanity and provided her with amusement. She played being the man. The women of her circle, before the war, all played at that game. And the men of their acquaintance took them seriously, being unable to perceive that it was only a game. The men believed that they were making love with real Lesbians, and felt flattered and proud. What a man I am! they would think. I can even arouse a Lesbian! In the great comedy of love, in which everybody lied, this was only one more lie.

But to Ann, the love of women was no game. Ann had memories of her solitary childhood, when she had continually been reprimanded for not conducting herself like a good little girl who plays with her dolls. She remembered when all of her girlhood friends started going out with boys, and her own shame at being always alone with nothing but a secret love for her teachers, or for her mother's women friends.

One summer she had visited Sweden, and there she had met a woman for whom she had felt an instant adoration. Soon enough the woman had called Ann into her room and explained certain things that Ann had not yet known about herself. She had listened in fear, and yet with a terrible joy. For at last she knew that she was not alone, and that there was a way in which she too could love. The woman had become her mistress and her lover. It was an exhausting love, compounded of jealousies, of quarrels, of petty intrigue, but nevertheless it brought her the possibility of loving someone.

Ann was then seventeen. She had her hair cut, and looked absolutely like a boy. She had never experienced any desire for a man. For her, men were good comrades; she felt herself their equal. She was never in need of their help or of their presence.

Since that time, Ann had come to know well the contempt, the closing doors, and the hardening faces of respectable people. But most intensely she had known that exhausting love which dies of its own sterility between brief flashes of passion. It was a love that circled on itself, like a cat chasing its own tail. But that was how she was made. And Petit also. And the childhood of Petit had been the same. And the youth of all these women had been the same, and no one could ever change things for them.

At Down Street there was never any question of a true Lesbian pursuing a normal woman. Normal women were rarely interested in the real Lesbians. Claude could play at such games, for the subject of her attachment was of little interest to her. It was not the woman that she desired, but her own self-excitement; or, as in the case of Ursula, it was the child that she desired.

Ann and Petit enjoyed passing an occasional evening with Claude, for at least with her everything was clear. They could be their own selves, without having to hide anything. Claude served as a bridge between the Lesbians and the other women. Only by this bridge could the Lesbians approach other women, and in this way come to feel themselves less isolated in the world.

There were several other Lesbians in Down Street. In their group, every slightest incident became exaggerated into immense proportions, and there were the most violent discussions of the smallest bits of gossip, the mildest adventure. The taste for intrigue was the one feminine trait that seemed to remain with them, and it was developed to the maximum.

There were also Lesbians from outside, Englishwomen, ambulance drivers, women from the ARP and ATS, who came to visit the bar that had been set up in the main assembly room of our barracks.

The rest of the girls, the "real" girls, dancing to the eternal "Violetta" in the arms of sailors or soldiers from the Free French Forces, laughed among themselves as they watched the Lesbians.

It was at the bar that Ann met Lee. We all saw this happen. A tall Englishwoman, thin, long-limbed, with a very pale unreal white face and yellow catlike eyes, she had the air of a young Oxford student. Lee belonged to an aristocratic Scottish family. She was working as an ambulance driver. She had come to Down Street that evening wearing navy-blue trousers; her short hair glistened; her long hands trembled a little as she raised one glass of whisky after another. Ann, too, was standing at the bar, and it was plain to us all that she was intensely attracted to the Englishwoman.

My long talk with Ann on the night of the fire of London had given me a deeper insight into the behavior of my comrades—of Claude and Mickey as well as of Ann herself.

There were many ways in which Mickey resembled Claude. She, too, liked to play the dangerous woman. But while Claude knew exactly when she was doing good or evil, and while she called her actions by their right names, Mickey didn't have the least moral sense. It had little to do with her youthfulness; she simply knew no wrong. Occasionally she liked to offer some of the girls what seemed to her to be serious advice and moral counsel. She would rattle off any number of catch phrases, platitudes, and it could be seen that they had no significance whatever to her, and that she never related these precepts to her own behavior. In her own life, Mickey was always carefree and gay. She was not a very demanding girl and life was easy for her. She liked novelty, adventure, and a little danger. If she burned herself, she cried for a few minutes and then began again. Moreover, she was quite practical and realistic and didn't get mixed up in things for the sake of ideas.

She was immensely taken with Claude, for in her eyes Claude represented the ideal woman. She wished she could be like Claude.

Before long Mickey was chattering to us about her unfaithfulness to Robert, and for a time she made love haphazardly with one man or another. Each time she wanted to feel more and more ravished, and so she would come back and tell us that her new lover was "handsome as a god!" She was learning the technique of love, like a dutiful student. Presently she began to report to us that men were telling her she was an excellent mistress, and in the end Mickey even believed that she was happy.

Claude and Mickey made an excellent pair, and went out a good deal together. Claude began to see less of Ursula. She sensed that Ursula was not really made for Lesbianism, and even felt a little guilty about having started the girl toward perversion. Lately, when Ursula had come to her, this feeling of guilt toward the girl had made Claude ill-tempered and petulant. Often she had sent the child away. Ursula would suffer, without understanding these changes of mood in the woman she adored. But with Mickey, things were easier for Claude; with Mickey she had no feelings of guilt. Mickey was made of the same stuff as she was, and so Claude got into the habit of taking Mickey along on her dates. The blonde and blue-eyed youthfulness of Mickey contrasted attractively with Claude's air of the mature
femme fatale.
Mickey was amusing, very gay, and universally pleasing.

One day, when Claude was drunk, she made a little game of kissing Mickey on the mouth in front of her current lover, and from Claude's mouth Mickey passed to the mouth of the lover.

That evening Mickey described her afternoon to me. Ursula was sitting on her cot, in her pajamas, and Mickey somehow included her, though not speaking directly to her.

Mickey had gone with Claude to visit a colonel whom Claude had met at the house of some friends, and who had invited her to come to his place for a drink. Mickey, as a second-class private, had felt flattered and impressed at going along to the house of a real ranking officer.

After a few whiskies, Claude began to undress. Her eyes grew quite small, as always when she was drunk. The colonel was what is known as a fine specimen of a man, according to Mickey's description: about forty, graying elegantly, fairly large and tall. He was a good officer and probably a good family man. But his family was in France, and there was no end to his exile. Besides, here was a woman undressing in front of him without even having to be asked. He studied her, nude. Claude was very beautiful. She was rather large, with fully rounded muscular shoulders and magnificent breasts, round and firm. Her skin was soft as though polished by years of caresses. She had a hard belly and a long back. Only her legs were a little short, but altogether, for a woman of forty, she was extraordinary. Seeing Claude nude, Mickey said she considered that she ought to keep her company, and began to undress in her turn. The colonel kept on only a funny little undershirt that reached to his thighs. One could sense that actually he was a little shocked by Mickey's youthfulness, for, as he told them, he had a daughter of Mickey's age. But Claude gave him no time for recollections.