Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(35)

Only, while before it had been a battle of wills between us – stand there until you feel like working – now I was being punished because I’d refused to work.

This made everything a little different. Also, it woke me up.

I’d sat down because I thought I’d been completely at the end of my strength. Obviously I wasn’t. But I was pretty close to it, and now I no longer had a way out. I knew this. Also, now I didn’t know where the whole thing was going, and that was very frightening. So I had to readjust something in my head to help me focus on not losing my mind with fear and exhaustion.

So I made up a poem.

It sort of started in my head as a chant about wire and fuses. It wasn’t anything profound or memorable, just a sort of counting-out rhyme based on something I’d tried to write last summer – rhyming words in a list, like the list of Polish girls’ names that we all memorised and which I reported to the American Embassy as well as the Swedish Red Cross, and which I will report again to anyone else who will listen.

It was as though, ever since I left Camp Los Angeles, I’d been flying a plane so nose-high that I couldn’t see anything below me, because if I looked down I’d be looking into hell and I didn’t want to see. I knew it was there. But as long as I didn’t look, as long as I kept the nose up, I could fool myself into thinking it wasn’t. My Luftwaffe recommendation would protect me. There would be better beds and food and toilets when I was out of quarantine. The Allies would be here in a month. I wouldn’t make trouble. I would be all right.

So now I’d raised the nose too high, and I was going to lose control of the aircraft and plummet into a spin. And when I did, like Celia’s Tempest, I would fall and I would be in hell. Really and truly and for good.

So I stood there until I fell.

I don’t remember this part very well. It really is a blur, not because I’ve forgotten, but because I was already so dazed while it was happening. I ended up soaking wet – I remember being utterly drenched and freezing cold. They must have hosed me down to wake me up so they didn’t have to carry me back to the main camp, and I did walk – incredibly, I am sure I walked. I know it was October and early in the morning, and windy, so it would have been chilly anyway even if I hadn’t been completely dripping wet. The wind felt like knives of ice and they wouldn’t let me hug my arms around me – I had to walk with my hands at my sides. I don’t remember passing the lake or the gates or what the sky looked like or if there were other prisoners around, or even where they were taking me, and when they’d left me locked in a shadowy, bare concrete cupboard of a cell, I didn’t care, because there was a narrow iron bed with a wooden plank for a mattress and no one in it. I curled in a tight, shaking ball against the dank wall and fell instantly asleep without even looking to see if there was a blanket.

Of course there wasn’t.

I was in the cell block, the Bunker, for two weeks. The veterans say you aren’t a real Ravensbrück prisoner till you’ve been in the Bunker. Irina was there for four months in solitary confinement while they interrogated her about the Soviet Air Force in 1943, and it is also where they did the last batch of medical experiments on the Rabbits, when they tied the girls down and gagged them before they operated on them. I feel like two weeks isn’t really long enough to count as time in the Bunker, especially since they fed me once a day and left me alone in between my two doses of twenty-five lashes – my twice ‘Fünfundzwanzig’. There was a week in between each round because if you get fifty at once you’re likely to die. Twice twenty-five was a mild punishment for failing to make parts for flying bombs. Deliberate sabotage is punishable by death, so I was lucky I just stopped working and didn’t try to do anything more underhanded. After they finished my second beating I got put straight back into the main camp.

They make you count aloud as they thrash you. You are supposed to count, in German, the number of strokes you are given. Thanks to Grampa, of course, I could make it up to twenty, but like a jillion other pathetic creatures I didn’t know how to count beyond that, so they had to prompt me. I managed it the first time, but not the second.

I said they left me alone between the beatings and that’s true, but the week between them was pretty awful. Because this time I knew what was coming, and I was already in bad shape. There wasn’t anything to do but lie in the gloom and wait for next Friday – flat on my face on the bare planks, listening to the Screamer siren counting off the days. My mind skips lightly over that week and that second Friday – even what I can remember, I don’t want to. I don’t remember being tied to the sawhorse or if I saw the stinking commander, though I know he liked to watch and he was always there on Fridays. The counting, the second time, was the significant thing. The really significant thing.

I got to 8 and after that I thought I couldn’t speak. They kept going and I was still counting in my head, in English, because I knew that when I got to 25 it would be over, and counting was the only thing I could do to move things along. I lost count at 15. I must have been unconscious by 20. At any rate I don’t remember how it ended or what happened after.

I woke up lying on my stomach on another bare wood slab in an acre of endless, empty, stinking plank bunks – there wasn’t one above me, but the ceiling was so close I couldn’t have sat upright if I’d wanted to, and the closeness made it so dark you couldn’t see where the bunks ended. It was grey twilight and that was because somewhere in the room, below me, there were windows, and it was still light out. I didn’t know where I was or how I’d got there, though it was obviously another part of the same Godawful prison complex.