Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(57)

‘Shut up, 7705!’ Karolina hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear about her criminal activities. I want to hear about her pink cake and Shirley Temple cocktails.’

I know why I forgot my birthday. It was sometime while I was in the Bunker. I had entirely forgotten who I was by the end of that two weeks. I lost count long before nineteen.

The camp authorities shot our Blockova Gitte next. We didn’t see that coming, but we should have, shouldn’t we? Since they didn’t shoot the Rabbits? We should have known we weren’t going to get away with our desperate war of passive defiance. But we thought they’d take it out on us, not on Gitte. Although, of course, murdering Gitte and replacing her with the demon Blockova Nadine Lutz was taking it out on us.

After Nadine arrived, there was no talking while we ate, no talking while the knitters worked, no talking in the bunks – we were allowed to talk outside on Sunday afternoons only. Most of our communication happened while we were going to the toilet, because Nadine wouldn’t come near the waste ditches when everyone else was going. But she’d dole out soup herself for the sheer pleasure of smacking you on the head with the empty ladle afterwards. She brought reinforcement guards with their dogs inside the barrack, even at night. It didn’t stop us trying to whisper, but it made every word we said to each other weighted with terror. One night she set a couple of dogs loose in the bunks. Gosh, we hated those dogs. The most common injury people turned up with in the sickbay, according to Anna, was dog bites.

I can’t describe how desperate we were to fly below the Demon Nadine’s radar – to fool her, to go behind her back. We did crazy things. We’d be standing in a never-ending roll call and I’d inch one foot out of the mismatched shoe that was a little too big, so slowly you couldn’t see me moving, and then I’d nudge Ró?a in the ribcage and she’d turn her head and glance down at my toes and stifle a giggle. You could still see the nail polish, disappearing into a thin ruby crescent as my toenails grew out, like the waning moon. Ró?a would poke Karolina in her ribs and hiss, ‘Candy store’s open.’ And Karolina would poke Irina, and we’d all stand there poking each other and snorting with stifled mirth until Lisette exclaimed, ‘Shhh!’ as Nadine looked in our direction, and I’d ram my foot back into the muddy shoe and stare vacantly at the back of the woman in front of me.





Playing Statues


(by Rose Justice)

If I sigh my shoulders rise and fall.



It counts as movement. I won’t sigh. I’ll blink.

I’ll count how many blinks it takes before

the shadow of the smokestack hits the wall.

But if I blink I’ll fall asleep. I’ve closed my eyes before

standing in line; it’s dangerous to blink.

I’ll watch the sky.

I’ll count how many crows

touch the long cloud behind the trees.

Oh God, but then I’ll cry.



Wings in the pine boughs always make me think

of freedom. I won’t count or blink or sigh.

I’ll think of food. I’ll think of bread and meat,



pretend that when we’re told to go

there will be pepper pot

thick with tripe chunks, spicy and faintly sweet,

like Mrs Kessler sells on Union Street.

God no, and no, and no! Of all things, not



Union Street: Don’t think of Union Street!

Don’t think of home.

Anything else but that. I’ll throw

myself on the electric wire. I’ll wiggle my toes.

I’ll sprint to the end of the row

and sock that pretty dog handler in the nose.

That makes me smile and clench my fist.



I’m out. She sees me move. Now I



can blink and sigh and sob.

She’ll make me count the blows.





*



My work team of Tall Girls got sent back to the maintenance shed we’d cleared out earlier.

Since we’d been there some prisoners from the men’s camp had boarded up the windows and the big garage doors of the shed, and replaced them with just a normal-sized set of wooden doors. Now we had to paint the interior walls black as high as we could reach. Once the guards made us understand what they wanted, they locked us in – Anna was allowed to make herself a little camp outside the new door of the building, with a crate for a chair and a coffee can or something for a stove with a fire in it like a hobo. Where she got the coal and how she got away with burning it right out there in the open, I will never know. But she was a red armband. She could get away with a lot.

And because we had Anna for a guard, we could get away with little acts of rebellion while she wasn’t looking. Inside the shed, Irina scavenged in the corners – nails, scraps of thin copper wire like they used in Siemens, wood splinters. French Political Prisoner 51444, otherwise known as Micheline, got busy painting Allied defiance all over the walls in letters three feet tall: VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVENT LES ALLIéS! MORT AUX NAZIS! and a token GOD BLESS AMERICA! Her friend 51350 followed behind frantically covering everything up so they wouldn’t get caught.

‘You’ll get us into so much trouble!’

‘You should have seen what I got up to when I worked in the post office,’ Micheline said. ‘We’d put big black censor stamps all over instructions being sent to German officers, or we’d steam open envelopes and swap letters around so they went to the wrong people, or steam off stamps so there was postage due – and anything that came from Paris with a German name on it we’d return to sender. Every now and then we’d send off a mailbag with a burning cigarette butt tied up inside it. My God, I miss the thrill of being a civil servant!’