Gone to Soldiers Read Online Free Page B

not mean Manhattan, but the lower reaches of the Bronx. His attention centered on the demanding and intense classes. He worked hours too long for romance. Although he looked with sharp and frustrated interest after the Radcliffe girls on their bicycles, he found his life civilized and realized he was happy. Finally something besides an infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.

JACQUELINE 1
    In Pursuit of the Adolescent Universal
    14 mai 1939
    Marie Charlotte is definitely my best and dearest friend, and the only person in the world in whom I dare confide my most secret thoughts and wishes. Suzanne has proved her perfidy, and I shall never, never be foolish enough to trust her again. I am ashamed of myself for being such an idiot as to tell her about that little conversation with Philippe in the Musée Carnavalet. Who would have imagined she would have gone straight to him and begun saying in that loud vulgar voice of hers so that everyone could hear it, I hear that Jacqueline is your dear friend, your girlfriend now.
    I am the unluckiest seventeen-year-old in my entire deuxième classe at lycée Victor Hugo. Marie Charlotte has only one younger sister making her life miserable, but I have two: double trouble, twins, and completely wicked. I count my blessings that Maman is not vulgar and would never dress the twins in those disgusting identical dresses. In fact Maman is always careful to give each different clothing, but the little beasts think it is funny to try to confuse people. Today Renée went out in Nadine’s sweater and skirt, and Nadine wore Renée’s, and the little beasts thought it was amusing to pretend to be each other all day long. They communicate by grunts like savages or dogs and sometimes I swear by telepathy.
    Maman simply refuses to understand that it is humiliating to have to haul those brats along to the park or to the cinema. They are forever pulling pranks and dashing around like the worst tomboys and skinning their knees and laughing, very loudly. In addition they call each other Rivka and Naomi, such embarrassing ghetto names I could smack them. Saturday Maman made me take them along when I went to L’Etoile with Suzanne (that slut) and my dear Marie Charlotte. During the scene where Gabrielle falls into the arms of her lover, François, those wretches smacked their lips and giggled. I was humiliated. I will not go out to the cinema if it means taking the twins along, and I am going to make that clear to Maman! Sometimes when Marie Charlotte and I sit on our special bench in the little park Georges Cain near our lycée, the little beasts sneak up on us to listen.
    I believe in the universal, not the accidental particular. Being born in this house on the rue du Roi de Sicile (which name I have to admit I still derive an irrational pleasure from inscribing, for its incongruously romantic sound), in the IVe arrondissement near the Métro stop St. Paul, is simply a matter of coincidence and has no lasting importance. Similarly that I am called one thing—Jacqueline Lévy-Monot—rather than Marie Charlotte Lepellier has no real significance. I want to find what is true, lasting and universal in human life, rather than sitting in my little corner repeating to myself some few phrases of so-called popular wisdom as silly as any other superstition, as Maman does, saying, “Nor a shteyn zol zayn aleyn,” only a stone should stay alone, as if we were not crammed in together. The labels we apply to one another keep us from penetrating to the truth, and we must rip them off our own eyes as well as banishing them from our view of others. The parochial mind is the greatest obstacle to progress, I believe, and I wrote an essay to that effect which won second prize, a Petit Larousse dictionary which I employ every day.
    I strive with that romantic weakness in me, for instance that likes the name of our narrow street, which is after all a dingy