Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(36)

It was quiet and I couldn’t move, even though I was awake. I just lay blinking and breathing – not really thinking. Not even feeling sorry for myself.

I’d more or less forgotten who I was.

So then a voice near my head commanded in English: ‘Say your poem.’

The command made no sense and I didn’t even try to answer.

‘Say your poem,’ the voice insisted. ‘Say the counting-out rhyme.’

Counting – that made more sense. The last thing I could remember was being told to count, and the last thing I could remember doing was trying to count aloud, so I kind of assumed we were picking up where we’d left off. I felt certain that whether or not I obeyed I’d eventually wind up unconscious again, if not dead. But maybe if I cooperated we’d get it over with quickly. And so a poem called ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’ began to spill abruptly out of me.

‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow

Bark of yellow birch and yellow

Twig of willow.’





I said it very slowly.

While I was speaking, a strange thing happened. I began picturing the springtime woods of Pennsylvania, each branch and twig, as I said its name. I had to stop after the first verse – just three lines – because it was exhausting.

‘Go on,’ said the nearby voice.

After a moment of despair, I pulled myself together and went on.

‘Stripe of green in moosewood maple,

Colour seen in leaf of apple,

Bark of popple.’





And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these words, to remember that these things existed – the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the leaves.

Incredible to think these same spring leaves are uncurling there now.

‘Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,

Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,

Wood of hornbeam.’





It was MAGICAL to say their names. It was a blessing. It was holy.

‘Silver bark of beech, and hollow

Stem of elder, tall and yellow

Twig of willow.’





I was finished. That is the whole poem. There was a pause.

‘Is that your poem?’

‘No. It’s by Edna St Vincent Millay.’

‘Do you know more?’

‘Dozens,’ I croaked. ‘She’s my favourite poet.’

Oh, what a lot she’s got to answer for, Edna St Vincent Millay, whipping the youth of America into action in Europe. I’m sure she didn’t mean for me to end up in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany when she signed my copy of Make Bright the Arrows in that lecture hall at Jericho Valley College last spring, and shook my hand and wished me good luck ferrying planes in England.

‘Is that the poem you said when they were beating you?’

‘What?’

‘They told you to count and you said it was a counting-out rhyme. They stopped halfway through so they could call in Gitte, our Blockova, to watch and to translate, because you knew so much about munitions they decided they would have to put you in high security – here, Block 32. With the Soviet Red Army women soldiers and the Polish experimental Rabbits and the French Night and Fog spies. And when they brought you here, our Blockova Gitte told me to ask you to tell me your poem, because I am trying to learn poetry in English for my exams.’

My interrogator was Polish. Her heavily accented English was just like Felicyta’s, though the voice was different – higher, soprano instead of alto. And younger. I could tell.

‘Blockova?’

‘Block leader. You might as well learn Blockova, because no one ever calls them anything else. It’s a Polish word, not German. The Blockovas are prisoners too. Most of the group leaders are prisoners. The German criminals are the worst. Look out for them; they’ve got green triangles to show they’re criminals and red armbands to show they’re forewomen. They’ll report you for smiling if they don’t like your face. Gitte’s all right; she’s a political prisoner, a German communist. Handed out one too many anti-Nazi leaflets!’

I can’t really write her accent or her idioms without making her sound stupid, and she never did sound stupid. Anyway, I can’t remember them. I always understood her. So I am just going to write it the way I understood it, not the way she said it.

‘You’re learning poetry for your exams?’ I repeated, completely bewildered.

‘Yes, they pulled a lot of us out of school when they arrested us, along with half the professional scholars in Poland – all the ones they didn’t just murder right away. So we students are trying to earn our diplomas with the professors. Oh well, it’s a good thing to pretend anyway – that the war will end before we’re all shot or starved to death, and that I will need a diploma. Like you reciting poetry while they beat you.’

‘I don’t remember –’

I began to say it, and then suddenly I did remember.

‘Oh!’

This is what I’d done: I’d continued my instinctive effort to save my sanity that began when they first took away my relays for the bomb fuses. When I stopped counting during the second beating, I started muttering aloud the poem I’d been making up for the past two weeks – the words I’d had in my head as I stood swaying with exhaustion in the Siemens factory, the words I’d whispered to myself in the dark in the cold, cramped cell in the Bunker.