Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(38)

I gasped aloud in horror. It shook me physically – I actually flinched backwards, away from Ró?a’s awful legs, and then I gasped again in pain because it hurt so much to move.

Ró?a’s injuries weren’t new – her legs had healed that way. They were as good as they were going to get. When Gitte put Ró?a down and she turned round to face me, I could see a trio of sunken, dented scars in the front of her right leg, half an inch deep, where bone should have been.

It looked like her legs had been split with a butcher’s knife and then she’d been shot at close range.

She picked up a makeshift crutch – a Y-shaped stick padded with more of the striped prison cloth – and tucked it beneath her right arm.

‘Can you knit?’ she demanded.

‘Sort of.’

She pulled a face and mimicked, ‘Sort of.’

‘You’re an “Available”,’ Gitte told me. ‘Verfügbar. That means you’re not assigned to any special work.’

‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you,’ Ró?a elaborated. ‘Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’

I blinked down at her, still lying flat, too much of a wreck to lift my head. A skilled job. Well, I’d had my chance.

‘Hey, don’t cry. We’ll keep you inside the block for a few days – till you can sit down anyway. Gitte’s going to say she needs another knitter to keep the quota up this week, since Zosia and Genca were shot.’

Then Ró?a disappeared into the twilit aisle between the bunks, escorted by the ageless block leader. I was too high up to see them go. But I could hear Ró?a’s progress as her wooden clogs clomped against the dank concrete floor, punctuated by the thump of her crutch.

After about thirty seconds, the clomping and thumping stopped suddenly. She yelled back at me, in English, ‘One piece of bread per poem!’

Until November we had two evening roll calls – that was the way they’d always done it, one at 6.30 and one at 9 p.m. Eventually they stopped the 6.30 one because there were so many of us it was taking up to three hours three times a day to count us all. But the week I came to Block 32 they were still doing both evening roll calls, and I went to both. I have no memory of either one, or of climbing up and down out of the top bunk. The population of Block 32 was really, really good at propping people up.

In between the roll calls I am pretty sure I did nothing but lie on my face. I was all burny with a light fever and I didn’t want to eat anything, and Ró?a, for whatever reason, didn’t follow through with her promise to bring me supper – to be fair, there wasn’t a notice up saying ‘Feed the New Girl in the Top Bunk’ and I was still nothing more to any of them than just the unknown person who’d be making up the murdered Zosia and Genca’s knitting quota.

Gosh, I was dazed.

What I do remember is that suddenly on this plank where I’d been sprawled flat on my face all afternoon, there were three other people trying to make themselves comfortable. We struck a kind of bargain where I got to stay sprawled and the rest of them got the blanket, only they had to sleep sitting up. Or as near upright as you can get when the ceiling is three feet above your head and you are asleep.

We slept that way for five hours, maybe, and then the 4 a.m. Screamer went, and it was a scramble to the horrible toilet ditches before the 4.30 roll call. And that was me back on my feet.

I said my counting-out rhyme saved my life and it’s true, because that’s what made Gitte notice me and give me to Lisette to take care of. You were dead if you didn’t have someone looking out for you. But I never had to worry about finding a teammate. I was so lucky. Lisette’s bunkmates in Block 32 weren’t just a team – we were a proper Camp Family, with Lisette in the role of Lagermutter, Camp Mother.

It took me some time to notice Lisette was there, because Ró?a acted like she ruled the roost and Lisette was so quiet. Lisette was older than Daddy, but she didn’t really look it, partly because she’d been such a beauty. I like to think she will be again. It was a game I played during roll calls, trying to picture everybody in real life. Lisette Romilly, possibly France’s most popular detective novelist, Jazz Age flapper who drank cocktails with F Scott Fitzgerald in Paris, then surprised everybody by marrying the principal cellist of the Lublin Philharmonic and uprooting herself to move to Poland. She had three boys all as handsome and talented as their parents, she became an archivist at the Catholic University in Lublin, she learned to play the bass violin at the age of thirty-two and within two years she became so good they let her join the orchestra.

Her husband was Jewish. He and her three boys – the oldest was two years younger than me – were all swept up in 1939 and marched out of the city and shot on the road. They didn’t even take them to a camp. Lisette got thrown out of their apartment and there she was, widowed, her children dead, owning nothing, in a foreign country at war. She had no work because the Germans had closed down all the Polish universities. She tried to go back to France and got arrested at the train station. When it first happened, she thought it was for carrying a cello without a licence or something like that. But actually, they arrested practically anyone who was connected with the Polish universities. I think they shot most of them.

I loved Lisette. We all loved Lisette.