Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(52)

‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,’ Ró?a chanted in my ear, under her breath. ‘We won, we won, we won. Don’t cry.’

‘We won?’ I echoed, stupefied.

‘We won. Not like last time, when they shut us all in the block for three days in August with the windows closed and we nearly suffocated and then they threw us into the Bunker and operated on us there instead of in the Revier. Oh – Lisette – which was worse, standing in the snow till you turned into a block of ice, or being slowly roasted alive? Remember that day we had one cup of water between the five of us till it got dark and you made us share it out by dipping our fingers in it?’

‘Holy Mary, you stupid Rabbit, shut up and go to sleep,’ Irina yawned. ‘They will get us up again in three hours.’

‘We won,’ Ró?a rasped in my ear, and it was the last thing I heard, and then I was unconscious.

‘No coffee this morning.’

Ró?a collapsed in mirth. ‘No coffee! That’s one hell of a punishment. Wow, what did we get yesterday? I don’t remember any coffee. What did we get the day before, was that coffee?’

Our daily dose of ‘coffee’ at 6 a.m. was brown and lukewarm and tasted of nothing. It was the idea of coffee though, brown and lukewarm. We’d stood in the snow for over twenty-four hours, we’d slept for three hours, we’d stood in the drizzling, freezing dark for another two hours, and then we had no coffee. And then they sent us all back to work, even though that morning’s roll call hadn’t come out right either.

The real miracle is that we didn’t all kill one another that morning and save them the trouble of their executions.

The whole week that Karolina and the six other condemned Rabbits were hiding, Irina and I had to go back each day to our weird work crew of tall girls, doing jobs that shorter people couldn’t do as easily as we could – dismantling shelves, boarding up broken windows, carrying stacks of boxes – clearing top bunks of people who’d died in the night, especially in the Revier, where people were too sick to do it themselves.

Anna, the Kolonka with the green badge and green eyes, was contemptuously familiar with the Revier because she’d worked in it before. She took over the back washroom to use as a temporary morgue because the real one was always too full. She’d stand guard at the door by the sinks to make sure we had the place to ourselves, and get a conversation going with me in English so she could pretend not to see if some of us sneaked a dead woman’s wooden comb or a pair of socks down our blouses. I never took anybody’s clothes. I couldn’t bear the thought of wearing some dead girl’s socks fresh off her dead feet. I had other things to think about anyway: Elodie had managed to smuggle me five tiny cigarettes via Micheline, something that looked like tobacco rolled in thin airmail paper, and I was waiting for my moment to try to bargain with Anna for the calcium.

The only thing Anna ever wanted to talk about with me was American food. Popcorn and root beer and hot dogs with mustard and relish and sauerkraut (she’d been to a ball game once). Gosh knows what I will eat when I get home – anything I talked about in the shower room with Anna will taste like sawdust and fill me with nausea.

‘Do you have pork barbecue in Pennsylvania?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘When I was in Chicago there was a diner we used to go to after the lab shut, and they had these fluffy white bread rolls that they baked themselves, and they’d pile the meat in with an ice-cream scoop –’

She broke off with a sob and suddenly we were both crying over pork barbecue. Abruptly we turned our backs on each other at exactly the same moment. I stopped crying first. I spun around and said, ‘Calcium. I’ll write you out a pork barbecue recipe if you can get me calcium tablets.’

‘Calcium!’

‘Isn’t that good for bones? My friend had her bones broken here.’

‘Oh.’

The German Kolonka went tight-lipped. She thought about it for a moment.

‘Not tablets. She’ll need injections – calcium gluconate. You’re friends with the Rabbits, huh?’

Anna had a guilty secret – before she’d been sent to Ravensbrück as a prisoner, she’d worked at Ravensbrück as an employee.

After a lot of wheeling and dealing, I got the dirty story and the calcium out of her in exchange for the cigarettes, the promise of two more bread rations and Mother’s Fasnacht recipe. I tempted her into that one by mentioning how Mother and I had spent two days making deep-fried doughnuts for the church sale for Fasnacht Day, the last day before Lent. Anna let me sit on one of the filthy sinks in the converted washroom-turned-mortuary for a couple of minutes before I started to take the clothes off that day’s corpses so the rest of my crew could cart them off to the incinerator. For a few seconds she watched me writing my recipe against the tiled wall with a stolen pencil stub, and then she just suddenly began talking.

‘You might as well know because if your Rabbits ever find out who I am, they’ll never trust you again,’ she said, leaning against the other sink and smoking furiously. ‘I’m a pharmacist. I got a job here in 1941, requisitioning drugs and bandages – antiseptic, aspirin, glucose, things for the sickbay. Just stocktaking really, because I’m not a nurse. I was here in 1942 when they did the first operations on the Polish girls. I saw what they did. I wasn’t involved at first, I just tiptoed around behind the scenes making sure there was fresh plaster for the casts, and that the knives were sharp. It was my job.’