Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(34)

The foreman eventually came over and gave me a gentle prod in the ribs with the end of a ruler. The civilians didn’t like to touch the Ravensbrück prisoners, and no wonder – even when we were clean, we were still livid with bug bites. My shins were so bitten they looked sunburned. I knew exactly what the ruler-poke meant – he didn’t have to say anything in any language. I wanted to be willing, God knows I wanted to cooperate; I didn’t want to get in trouble. I picked up the wire thread.

And I just couldn’t do it.

Now this, this I remember like it was this morning. I watch my hands writing here on the vanity table in the Paris Ritz and I can see it happening. I picked up the wire thread, wrapped it once round the spool, and I saw Maddie’s hands instead of mine. Just in a blinking flash. Maddie’s pretty, capable hands, with the old French-cut ruby sparkling on her ring finger, taking apart the bomb fuse that Uncle Roger sent me.

I closed my eyes to make it go away. My own hands were still frozen in place over the new relay. And when I closed my eyes, I saw the little boy’s hands from my nightmare – small dirty fingers blown to bloody splinters.

And I just couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t sabotage. It wasn’t my conscience nagging at me. It wasn’t anything noble. God knows I wouldn’t have been brave enough to do anything noble! But now that I knew what I was making – I just couldn’t do it.

I laid the wire gently on the table. Then I laid my hands in my lap. The foreman called over the SS guard who was in charge of the prison workers.

Gosh, they gave no quarter, those SS guards. They didn’t waste any time, ever. This one didn’t even try to talk to me. She took hold of my skull – just grabbed me by the back of my head – and slammed my forehead down on the table. For a moment it felt like my head had exploded, sparkling light everywhere. Then she shifted her grip on my head to force me back upright, and with her free hand she picked up the strand of copper wire and tossed it on the table in front of me.

Beneath her grip I shook my head sadly. NO.

She slammed my face back down on the table, and I have got a scar, just above my left eye, where the copper wire cut me. It’s so thin you probably can’t see it – I am not brave enough to look. But I can feel it and I know it’s there. I count it as a flying bomb scar.

The guard let go of my head.

‘Aufstehen!’

Get up. You got to know what that meant after a while, because you had to do it so much.

They didn’t do anything else – just made me stand up. The copper wire and relay bobbins I was supposed to be working on still lay there on the table in front of me. The prisoners around me were still hunched over their own relays just the way they’d been when I first stopped working, diligently trying not to notice what was going on.

It was like when I took the fuse from the boy on the railway line in Hamble. I was sure I was going to be killed. And it made me sad – not scared, but sad that I had forced myself into this corner where I just couldn’t win.

But they didn’t kill me. They didn’t even hit me again. They just made me stand there.

I stood there for the rest of the day. And all night. And into the next day.

People came and went around me. Production went on during the night, so everybody changed shift around me and I went on standing there.

They kept an eye on me. There were a couple of extra guards brought in especially for me. They wouldn’t let me touch the long table with my hands, or lean against the bench. It got harder and harder not to. I started dreaming about my crowded bunk with its thin mattress and shared blanket. The copper wire on the table in front of me danced and gleamed beneath the harsh factory lights. I heard the screaming sirens go and thought smugly, through the daze of exhaustion, I’ve missed two roll calls.

Not that I’d have been doing anything else in a roll call except just standing there!

In the middle of the night, when I’d been on my feet for probably more than twelve hours – and of course I’d been working for six hours before that, and awake since the 4 a.m. siren the previous day – there was a point when all I wanted to do was lie down under the table and go to sleep. If I couldn’t do that then I might as well be dead. I was pretty sure I didn’t care any more. I’d reached the point when I thought I would do anything to be allowed to sit down – so very carefully, I stepped over the bench and sat down and picked up the copper wire that was waiting for me.

It was bliss, sheer bliss, to sit down, even though I was still sitting upright – bliss just to be allowed to sit. I didn’t think I’d get away with just sitting there, though. I was showing them they’d won, and I was going to have to go back to work. I knew they’d make me finish up the rest of that shift, or make up the time I’d wasted. So I started to wrap the wire around the spool.

And you know what?

I still couldn’t do it.

I put the wire down quietly. I put my hands on the table and pushed myself to my feet somehow. And somehow I managed to climb back over the bench so I was standing behind it again.

The other prisoners glanced up at me briefly and then away. Nobody smiled. The guards and the foreman chatted together for a while and then the foreman took away my copper wire and the spools and gave them to someone else to finish up. They didn’t do anything to me – didn’t hit me, didn’t make me leave the room – just made me go on standing there.