Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(55)

A couple of mornings later the camp authorities distributed coats, and that made everyone’s hopes soar too, because we were sure they wouldn’t waste winter coats on people they were about to execute. The coats got dumped in big piles outside the chain-link fence around our block, arranged by nationality, with numbers and prisoner patches already sewn on. You were out of luck if your coat didn’t fit. Lisette, who was used to dropping her status as honourary Pole whenever they made us line up in national groups, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the French pile of coats along with the spies and Resistance couriers in their beetroot rouge.

Not surprisingly, these garments had all seen better days; their linings had all been ripped out, and every coat had had one sleeve ripped off and another sleeve of a wildly contrasting colour sewn back in its place, to make them obviously prison coats. We tossed them back and forth, trying to find our own numbers, and suddenly Lisette burst out laughing. She shoved a lightweight pale green wool at me – it had a velvet collar so moth-eaten that no one had bothered to salvage it.

‘Come on!’ Lisette pulled at my arm again. ‘Back in line!’

I started to pull on the coat she’d given me and suddenly recognised the navy contrasting sleeve.

It was from my ATA tunic. My ‘USA’ flash was still in place on the shoulder. That was what had made Lisette laugh.

Wonderful Elodie!

Later, when I had a chance to check out the coat more closely, I discovered that Elodie had tucked my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy into a pocket hidden on the inside. With the blue thread from the collar of my dress she’d embroidered another rose on the hanky in the corner opposite Aunt Rainy’s, and on either side of it she’d put our initials, with a little French flag under the ‘EF’ and a little American flag under the ‘RJ’.

And she’d also hidden cigarettes in the hem of the coat, and a couple of threaded needles, and three sugar cubes wrapped in paper (worth more than their weight in gold in terms of bribing the insatiable Anna). Hope, hope, soaring like a kite! We were clinging to anything we could. A coat without a lining, full of hidden pencil stubs! What treasure! It was already so cold in November.

We had a regular supply of calcium for Ró?a by then too. She screamed and carried on the first time we tried to inject her, until Irina threatened to tie her down and gag her like the SS did when they operated on her in the Bunker. Who do you think Ró?a finally let give her the jabs? NO ONE. She did it herself. She’d rather do it herself than let anyone else poke a needle into her.

Thorny little Ró?yczka.





Thanksgiving


(by Rose Justice)

From the steaming kitchen it’s a quarter-mile



across the crowded wasteland to the patchwork barrack,

and we two get to haul the drum of soup

heavier than we are. The challenge is

not to let go. It’s a race against time (it will be cold,

already it’s cooled down), a race against

the several thousand grasping hands and gulping mouths

we have to pass before we eat.

(Thank you for the gold November sky,



the warm steel kissing my cold hands, no mud today.)

But first we have to get it down the steps.



We stop to rest outside the kitchen door –

the barrel still is gently hot between us,

steaming like a bath. One second’s pause

to take a breath, gather the strength to lift

and then to drag ourselves and the drum of soup

the endless quarter-mile over the cinders.

One second too long on the steps.



Behind us blows and screams (we are too slow),

and in the square a hundred hungry scarecrows

race towards us ready to lighten our load.

Trapped between buzzards and gaping beaks

we fight like the mutts we are – I won’t let go –

I’ll fight with teeth and feet, I’ll bite the girl

who tries to scoop a bowlful under my clinging fist –

but when we kick it’s our mistake.

The careful balance goes. The whole thing tips.

(Thank you for the hands that caught the heavy drum



and those who saved what spilled in bowls of soup

and cups of dirt and their cupped palms,

and those who sponged it up with bread

and those who licked the thirsty earth –

Thank you for the chagrin that let us go

with no one begging more, thank you

that now our load was lighter for the long walk back.)



April 28, 1945



Paris



Guess what – I am dressed.

I have been sitting here writing or pacing around this room stark naked for over a week, and now Fernande has taken me quietly in hand. It started with the extra quilt and now she has moved on to clothing. She brought me a pile of panties and camisoles and a couple of skirts and blouses. She’s built a lot like me, tall and bony. Not as bony as I am now, of course, but she’s built like I ought to be. I don’t think the clothes are hers though – I think they are her daughter’s. She wouldn’t say they were, but she did tell me her daughter had been put in prison and she doesn’t know what happened to her. I am probably wearing another dead woman’s clothes. But it is easier to wear these than the clothes Elodie organised for us, because these have been lovingly looked after in the hope that their owner might come back for them some day.