Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(78)

We waited in the school for not quite two weeks, and then an American convoy came through and Bob Ernst picked us up – he was with the convoy that took us to the Swedish Red Cross unit, the night before Bob brought me to Paris. I don’t remember much about the first two weeks in the school. It was like after being let out of the Bunker – a lot like that. For about five days I had a fever so high it would have got me admitted to the Revier, and I coughed so hard that, two weeks later, when the Red Cross nurse checked me, she bandaged up my ribs because she thought I’d given myself stress fractures. She guessed I’d had bronchitis. My ribs still hurt now when I cough, but I got rid of the bandages when I took that first long bath.

Ró?a caught my cold too, but she had something else wrong with her and I still don’t know what it was.

I mean, I do, sort of – she’d picked up an infection in her leg. Her right leg, the fragile one.

I think I can remember her announcing cheerfully, ‘Well, it’s broken now! I’m not getting up again.’ She said this as she sat down next to me in the school gym holding two chipped, grubby mugs of cabbage soup, but I thought she was talking about the dishes. I think that she didn’t get up after that – not without help. Irina quietly fed us and took turns dragging each of us to the ditch in the schoolyard a couple of times a day.

When I write it – and I know this is partly due to the gaps in my memory – it doesn’t sound a lot different from what we’d escaped. It was the same kind of food, doled out sparingly, the same desperate toilet arrangements, the same incomprehensible babble of people shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. But there were two blankets between the three of us now, thick, scratchy US Army blankets – and the soup was salted sometimes – it wasn’t full of dirt because whoever made it actually cleaned the earth off the potatoes or turnips – and no one cared if we didn’t get up all day. That was the real difference.

I should never have stuck to Bob Ernst like that. It was because I knew he was a reporter, and I wanted so badly to give him our story, even though I was never brave enough to begin. We got going talking about my poems. He sang with me. I’m pretty sure, thinking back (and I don’t remember it as clearly as I should) that what he meant about interviewing Ró?a was that it was the Red Cross who wanted to talk to her, not Bob himself. And of course they didn’t want to tell her story in an international newspaper; they wanted to know how they could help her.

And somehow I ended up going with him in the front of the convoy, and twelve hours later when we stopped –

I can’t believe I lost them.

Before the Red Cross camp, during that wonderful spring day when we were all together driving through the forest riding in the back of Bob’s jeep and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, I asked Irina, ‘Why are you going to Paris?’

She shrugged. ‘It takes me away from the Red Army. I have no place to go. Why is Ró?a going to Paris?’

‘I’m just sticking with my family,’ Ró?a said.

Because we were all she had.

This notebook – I can’t believe I am the same person who wrote in this same notebook less than a year ago. I can hardly stand to think of my earnest last-summer-self sermonising about heroism and how much fun it is to be part of a crowd. ‘Home for the living, burial for the dead.’ Irina will never go home. Elodie and Karolina will never be buried.

I thought I’d finished writing, and Edie is coming for me tomorrow, so I finally dared to skip back to the beginning of this notebook so I could read what I wrote about my Big Date with Nick – the one when I painted my delectable toenails with Cherry Soda nail polish. And when I opened this book to the front, I found the letters from Maddie. They were tucked in a little cardboard pocket inside the cover, which is why I hadn’t found them before. I’ve been so obsessed with what I’m writing and so scared to look back that I just didn’t notice they were there.

Nick is married. He is married. Married to some other girl – he didn’t even wait till the war was over.

All that time I was alive, all that time I was – all I’ve seen, all I’ve had to do – cartloads of skeletal dead women, gas chamber paint in my ears, Karolina and Irina fighting over my coat, the list of mutilated girls stuck in my head, crumbs of stale bread for Christmas dinner, that day of Strafstehen in the snow, twice Fünfundzwanzig – telling fairy stories about him rescuing us! We’d never even split up – he proposed to me on our last date! And he went and married someone else.

And if I did come back,

what in return could I offer to you,

who used to make so free

with my softness and kisses and verse

as if it were your due?

Imagine me

on your doorstep – would you laugh in the old way

and greet me lovingly:

Hello, it’s been a long time,

how are you today?





There won’t be anything to say.

I did stop dreaming he was touching my hair and all I dreamed about was bread. But he could have waited. He could have waited till the war was over.

My gosh, how Ró?yczka would laugh.

Fernande took away my camp clothes about a week ago. This morning she returned what she found in my pockets, all the pointless things I’d stuffed there in a panic before I left Ravensbrück: a couple of poems I’d managed to write down, a paper airplane decorated with a silly drawing of Lisette nitpicking my scalp in the pilot’s seat, a pencil stub. Irina’s airplane, Karolina’s drawing of Lisette. Nothing of Ró?a. And the half of Aunt Rainy’s hanky that Elodie embroidered for me with the blue rose and our flags and our initials.