Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(43)

That is one of the very simple horrors I can’t shake – I can strip the clothes from a pile of dead bodies without retching, but thinking about this ninth grade Girl Scout having to watch her mother being tortured still makes me feel sick. Though I am not sure Ró?a would have grassed on anyone even to save her mother. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Why lucky for her? Not lucky for the people she was protecting, but lucky for Ró?a. She didn’t have to choose.

‘Do they still – these experiments on people’s legs, do they still –?’ I couldn’t finish the question.

Karolina glanced down at my own bloodstained dress. I’d been kneeling for a quarter of an hour and my knees were aching, but I couldn’t sit. I hung on to the edge of the table to hold myself up.

‘Don’t worry, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘I mean, your legs are safe. They stopped the experiments last year.’

‘They might shoot you, of course, but they might do that to anybody,’ Ró?a offered.

‘Hey, hey!’ Karolina said, and Lisette suddenly crawled out next to me and grabbed me round the shoulders.

‘Don’t be scared, darling. Don’t let Ró?a scare you! She makes fun of everything. It’s how she is.’

‘She laughs when she’s in pain,’ Karolina assured me. ‘She doesn’t cry, just laughs like a mechanical fortuneteller in a glass box. Don’t cry!’

‘The war’s nearly over,’ Lisette said soothingly.

‘Look, I’ll let you in on a secret –’ Karolina peeled back the edge of her kerchief. She was hiding a new crop of soft brown curls. ‘I want to look nice when the American soldiers get here. I’ve got to make sure no one sees that I’m growing my hair out though. The guards really hate curly hair.’

It had been drizzling all afternoon and was pouring with rain by the 9 p.m. roll call, and it was the coldest it had been since I’d got to Germany. I was burning with fever by lights out – it nearly killed me to have to climb up to the top bunk.

‘Why do you sleep so high up?’ I gasped. ‘With your legs the way they are?’

‘When people get the shits, it rains down on the lower bunks,’ Ró?a explained. ‘We had to fight the Red Army bitches for the high ones. Mother in Heaven, you’ve never had to fight for anything, have you?’

I was still only capable of lying flat on my face in the crowded bunk, and they all used me for a furnace. Ró?a and Karolina snuggled up on either side of me, Karolina behind me with her arms right around me, and Ró?a in a sodden, shivering ball of misery between me and Lisette.

‘OK,’ Karolina demanded. ‘Fantasia! Start with ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ – that’s an easy one. Sing, Lisette!’

‘Shh,’ Lisette said. ‘Tomorrow.’

Lisette’s word was law, and she’d been watching me closely; she knew I couldn’t perform any more that night. But I had to give them something, payment for the bread, for being adopted into their family, even if I wasn’t going to give a movie commentary.

‘If I grow bitterly,’ I whispered, and managed shreds of Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Scrub’.

‘If I grow bitterly,

Like a gnarled and stunted tree,

Bearing harshly of my youth

Puckered fruit that sears the mouth . . .

. . . It is that a wind too strong



Bent my back when I was young,

It is that I fear the rain

Lest it blister me again.’





‘Perfect,’ Ró?a whispered in astonishment. ‘Beautiful and twisted and exactly like us! Did you think it up today? When did you ever get a chance? You are better than I thought you would be.’

‘It’s just more Millay,’ I confessed. ‘My poems aren’t that good.’

The rain on the thin barrack roof sounded exactly like the rain on the roof of the sleeping porch. I ached with such desperate longing for Pennsylvania that I couldn’t tell where the homesickness ended and the dull throb of the bloody slashes on my back began.

I will never be as good a writer as Edna St Vincent Millay, I thought miserably. My poems will never be that good, because I will die here before I get the chance to write anything worth reading.





April 24, 1945

Paris





Air Raid at Ravensbrück


(by Rose Justice)

‘Runter!’ they screamed. ‘Get down!’ As if we’d all



leap up like mongrel dogs with our teeth bared.

But being obedient curs, down we all went,

not knowing why yet, flat on our faces, prone,

wet cinders in our mouths. The lights in the street

went out. The guards took cover, their well-bred

Alsatians with them. Open siren throats

shrilled an empty threat to swallow us whole.

We lay like forty thousand corpses in rows ten deep

by ourselves, and one thought hit us all hard in the head:

Run NOW. In the dark – get up and run now. Dare



the charged barbed wire NOW. No one sees or cares.

But when our brothers-in-arms in the bombers swarmed



over the blackened street, the howling night