Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(44)

leaped up in fury wielding searchlight whips

to flay the planes and skin the moon; the beams

broke harsh across our backs and froze us where

we lay revealed – wild does, not fanged or clawed

but weaponless rabbits and deer, blinking and blind.

No one ran or tried to run, lashed down

by the bright perimeter straps of light, bonds lighter

than moonlit air, heavier than iron chains.





My first air raid was during a roll call. It was about a week after I got to Block 32, the day before I was deemed well enough to be booted out of the knitting brigade. As the sirens went off, they made us lie on our faces. We were like a great big living, breathing target with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. They turned out the spotlights, but they had searchlights in the anti-aircraft ditches, sweeping the sky for the planes.

When I heard the planes, I rolled over on my back – no one cared. I lay with my dress bunched up under my backside and my hands beneath my thighs, cushioning my legs a little because they were still sore, with the back of my bare skull and most of my legs cradled by the cold, damp grit of the ground. I counted thirty-one US Air Force Flying Fortresses in the first echelon blacking out the silver moonlit sky, with an escort of fighter planes too far away and tiny to identify in the dark. Barely a mile away from me, 6,000 feet above my head, were American boys not much older than me, carrying Pennsylvania Hershey bars in their emergency rations, one hand on the control column and one hand on the throttle. They were looking down at the same scene I’d looked down at a month ago. Beneath the searchlights they’d see the dim outlines of a factory complex and the black rows of barrack roofs, the long black threads of the railway junctions, and the cool lakes shining silver in the light of the glorious full moon.

They’d be too high and it was too dark for them to see any of the 40,000 women lying face down on the damp gravel, trapped in our wire and concrete cage.

A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.

Five rows away from me, someone stood up suddenly. From where I lay she was silhouetted against the sky in the moonlight, six feet tall and skeletal, with a shock of spiky, short white hair like an old man with a crew cut. She didn’t say anything, just stood with her head thrown back, staring up at the passing planes. The moon lit her bristling hair like frost.

The woman next to her pulled at her skirt, trying to get her to lie down. She completely ignored this, and after a minute she raised one arm to the sky with her fist clenched – not raging, but saluting the airmen above her. Then suddenly she started to shake with sobs. I couldn’t hear her – the noise of the next wave of planes overhead and the sirens on the ground drowned out everything else – but I could see her shoulders heaving, and after a moment she stuffed her clenched fist against her mouth to shut herself up.

The other woman was still pulling at her skirt fearfully, and the tall one snapped at her angrily and reached towards the sky again. This time her hand was open, grasping – as if she were trying to snatch the planes out of the sky like King Kong, or trying to catch hold of them to pull her away with them.

I burst out unthinkingly, ‘Don’t cry!’

She turned to look for me. She didn’t lower her arm.

‘Ne pleure pas!’ I repeated in French, because it was the only other language I had a chance in.

She answered me in French that was worse than mine, heavily accented and without any real grammatical connections.

‘It hurts me that I do not know the planes. These are new since I became a prisoner. The big ones are maybe American? I do not know. They could be my own, I would not know. It always makes me cry.’

‘They’re American,’ I agreed.

She lowered her arm.

‘You know this?’

‘I’m a pilot.’

She burst out in joyful laughter and swore incomprehensibly in her own language. Then she took five long strides over the huddled bodies between us and came to lie down next to me – on her back beside me, squeezed in between me and Lisette, so that the two of us were lying side by side looking up at the sky like stargazers on a beach.

‘American planes,’ she said. ‘What kind of planes?’

‘The big ones –’ I didn’t know the French for ‘bomber’ either, so I just said it in English. ‘The big ones, the bombers, are B-17s, Flying Fortresses.’

‘Four engines,’ she added. You could see them.

‘Wright Cyclone engines,’ I told her. ‘Crew of ten. The little planes, what-do-you-call-them, I don’t know the French for fighters, I think Mustangs.’

She hugged me passionately and I gave a surprised yell of agony as my hands got knocked out from beneath my thighs and my backside hit the rough ground.

‘Oh! What?’

‘Fünfundzwanzig,’ I gasped. ‘Last week.’

‘Sorry!’

She inched away respectfully. She knew it was pointless to try to help (she did know how it felt). She said, ‘I am Irina Korsakova.’

Ró?a, flat on her face beside me, hissed, ‘Don’t talk to her – Russian scum!’

The timing was bad for Ró?a and Irina. Usually the Poles and the Russians in Block 32 got along pretty well – they were united in their disdain of the French, who were shy about undressing and rouged their faces with carefully saved slivers of beetroot. Block 32 was split down the middle with the French all on one side and the Russians and Poles on the other. But when Irina first threw herself into our row, the Warsaw Uprising had just come to a disastrous conclusion and all summer the Soviets had done a lousy job of giving the Poles any useful support. When the Germans finally beat the rebellion down, they practically destroyed the city – Block 32 knew perfectly well what was happening because imprisoned Polish women and children from Warsaw had been pouring into Ravensbrück for the past two weeks. So when I met Ró?a, she was holding a grudge against the whole of the USSR. Also, she was just by nature a jealous little thing.