Code Name Verity(29)

I thought about Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, pretending she is a prisoner in the Bastille to make her work as a scullery maid more bearable. And you know . . . I just couldn’t do it. What is the point in pretending I am in the Bastille? I have spent the past two days in chains, underground, slaving for a monster. Ariadne in the maze of the Minotaur? (I wish I’d thought of that earlier.) But I was too busy slaving to pretend much of anything anyway.

So – I got to take the recipe cards away with me in exchange for being groped, and managed to limit the assault by suggesting I was von Linden’s personal Bit of Tartan Fluff and that the Hauptsturmführer would not like it if the cook defiled me.

O Lord! How is one to choose between the Gestapo inquisitor and the prison cook?

Of course I was not allowed to take the paper into my room with me (in case I should tear it into strips and weave it into a rope with which to hang myself, I suppose), so had to wait for a while in the big outer chamber while von Linden was busy with someone else. See me, cowering in the corner in my wrist and leg irons, clutching my armful of blank recipe cards and trying not to notice what they were doing to Jacques’s fingers and toes with bits of hot metal and tongs.

After an exhausting hour or so of this melodrama, v.L. took a break and sauntered over to have a chat with me. I told him in my best Landed Gentry voice of frosty disdain how puny an empire the Third Reich must be if it can’t afford to supply paper to double-crossing informants like myself, and mentioned that the foul beast in the kitchen and his skivvies are all very demoralised about the way the war is going (Italy has collapsed, German cities and factories bombed to bits, everyone expects an Allied invasion within the year – which is after all why Mssrs Jacques and I are here, caught trying to hurry said invasion along).

Von Linden wanted to know if I’d read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

I wish I had not gratified him again by gaping. Oh! I suppose I did let slip that I like Orwell. What was I thinking?

So then we had a genial argument about Orwellian socialism. He (v.L.) disapproves (obviously, as Orwell spent 5 months battling the idiot Fascists in Spain in 1937), and I (who don’t always agree with Orwell either, but for different reasons) said that I didn’t think my experience as a scullion exactly matched Orwell’s, if that was what v.L. was getting at, albeit we may have found ourselves working in similar French hotel basements for similar rates of pay (Orwell’s somewhat higher than mine, as I seem to recall he was given an allowance of a couple of bottles of wine in addition to raw potato peelings). Eventually von Linden took possession of my recipe cards, my chains were removed and I was thrown back into my cell.

It was a very surreal evening.

I dreamed I was back to the beginning and they were starting on me all over again, a side-effect of having to watch them work on someone else. The anticipation of what they will do to you is every bit as sickening in a dream as when it is really going to happen.

That week of interrogation – after they’d starved me in the dark for most of a month, when they finally settled down to the more intricate task of picking information out of me – von Linden did not look at me once. He paced, I remember, but it was as though he were doing a very complicated sum in his head. There were a number of gloved assistants on hand to deal with the mess. He never seemed to tell them what to do; I suppose he must have nodded or pointed. It was like being turned into a technical project. The horror and humiliation of it weren’t in that you were stripped to your underthings and being slowly taken to pieces, but in that nobody seemed to give a damn. They were not doing it for fun; they were not in it for lust or pleasure or revenge; they were not bullying me, the way Engel does; they were not angry with me. Von Linden’s young soldiers were doing their job, as indifferently and accurately as if they were taking apart a wireless set, with von Linden doing his job as their chief engineer, dispassionately directing and testing and cutting off the power supply.

Only your wireless set does not shiver and weep and curse and beg for water and be sick and wipe its nose in its hair as its wires are short-circuited and cut and fried and knotted back together. It just sits there stoically being a wireless set. It doesn’t mind if you leave it tied to a chair for three days sitting in its own effluvium with an iron rail strapped upright against its spine so it can’t lean back.

Von Linden was not any more human grilling me about Orwell last night than when he was grilling me about those blasted codes two weeks ago. I am still nothing more than a wireless set to him. But now I am a rather special wireless set, one he enjoys tinkering with in his spare time – one he can secretly tune in to the BBC.