Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(32)
Afterwards the porch smells of pine soap and the windows are so clean they are just reflective slabs of blue sky.
How can I ever tell Mother about the filth? It wasn’t plain old dirt. Dirt’s easy to get rid of – you can rinse it away. It doesn’t hurt you. The linoleum of our kitchen floor gets scrubbed with Clorox every two weeks. Mother would pick up a ball of pie dough off the kitchen linoleum if she dropped it, and shrug and slap it down on the pastry cloth on the dough tray, and laugh. ‘We’re all going to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’
I’m not talking about dirt. I’m not talking about a crumb of dust or a dog hair in the pie crust. I’m talking about more than 50,000 women locked inside a cinder and concrete prison half a mile wide and a quarter of a mile across with no toilets. When I got there, there were three toilets that still worked in Block 8, although they were pretty horrible. There were 400 of us using them and only one was still working by the time they sent me to the Siemens factory three weeks later or whenever it was. Most of us used the ditch outside.
By the middle of January even the ditches were full. For the last couple of months we went against the wall outside the building we lived in. There wasn’t anyplace else to go, and most of us had dysentery or typhoid. You’d have to let it run down your legs if you needed to go during a roll call. How can I ever tell Mother? How can I ever tell her about the filth I have lived in all of last fall and winter and half this spring?
I can’t tell her. I’ll never tell her.
After one night in quarantine, we had so many flea bites it is a miracle we didn’t all end up with bubonic plague. During that first 4.30 a.m. roll call all I wanted to do was scratch until I’d peeled my entire skin off. Why do they go for your ankles, which are the hardest part of your body to reach when you’re pretending to stand at attention? Are fleas in league with the SS?
Quarantine was just about bearable. You knew it wouldn’t last. Three weeks of Block 8, of overflowing toilets and fleas and eye-crossing boredom during the day, sitting there waiting for the quarantine to finish and not being allowed to talk to anybody, and then we would all get to move on.
If I’d known I’d never see Elodie again when it was done, I might not have been in such a rush to get it over with. I feel like I squandered my three weeks of being friends with her by wasting the whole time eagerly looking ahead to some mythic improvement that never actually happened. But you can’t blame us for hoping, can you? Doesn’t hope keep you going? We’d stand in line swapping camp songs in French and English under our breath, and when we discovered we knew some of the same tunes, ‘Tallis Canon’ and ‘By the Light of the Moon’, our delight wasn’t desperate – it was real. We should have had a chance to be friends.
Elodie was a natural Organiser. I don’t mean that in the normal English language sense of people who can arrange things. I mean it in the camp sense of magically being able to get hold of miraculous, hard-to-find forbidden items like woollen scarves and soap and paper and cigarettes. She pulled stuff out of nowhere like a magician. She bartered with the schmootzichs. She bartered with the guards, and she had to get someone to translate for her when she did that. I watched her sometimes, trying to figure out how she did it, like it was a knack you could pick up. And it is of course, but it came naturally to Elodie.
She got us toothbrushes and soap, needle and thread, a collection of pencil stubs, a razor to sharpen them with. Underpants for me and socks to line her own mismatched shoes and a button to close the gap at the side of the dress she’d swapped with me. She organised sanitary pads for me. Most of the other people in our block didn’t need them – they’d been in prison so long that malnourishment and fatigue and, I guess, just living with such an intensity of fear and distress had temporarily shut them down. I shut down eventually too, thank God. But when I first started my period halfway through quarantine, Elodie was the one who scavenged bits of cotton blanket and jute ripped from the edge of the straw mattresses. With half a steel sewing machine needle and thread unravelled from the ragged edge where the collar was missing on my own dress, we whipped together a small collection of primitive pads, uncomfortable but effective.
Elodie wasn’t a leader. She’d been a courier in the French Resistance, delivering messages, doing as she was told. She was just really sneaky. She’s the one who figured out that prisoners from other countries had a letter in their triangular ID patch showing what country they were from – Polish prisoners had a black ‘P’ in their patch, Czechs a ‘T’ for ‘Czech’ in German. The French patches were blank – special humiliation for the French. So Elodie embroidered an ‘F’ in her own red triangle. And ‘USA’ in mine.
More dry words on a page. I wish I could capture Elodie, make her come alive again – small, scarred, sneaky, singing.
When I think of her – when I picture her – I picture her with her gold bangs sticking to her forehead in the September sun on that first afternoon, though I don’t know if her hair ever grew back before they gassed her. Of course, I didn’t see her go – Irina told me. Elodie shouting with Micheline and Karolina from the back of the crammed truck – ‘TELL THE WORLD’ – and I picture Elodie the way she looked the day I met her. They yelled in French and in Polish, English and German. ‘TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD!’