Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(90)

I turned around to look at her. She was still sitting there with her stockings around her ankles.

‘For my beating? Gosh, I don’t even know who did it!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t want it to happen to anyone else, ever again. But how would I get revenge for that ? They used to bribe other prisoners to do the beatings sometimes, by giving them extra bread! What if they’d held back your rations for two weeks then given you extra bread to beat me? I wouldn’t have blamed you!’

‘Holy Mary, you sound just like Lisette,’ she sneered, and I could tell she didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. Forget about revenge! These trials aren’t about revenge. They’re about justice. Don’t you want justice, Rose Justice?’

For a moment I thought she was going to burst out in her evil cackling laugh at her own stupid pun.

Instead she started to cry.

I’d only ever seen her cry once before, and that had been a full-fledged tantrum. She always made such a big production out of laughing like a witch that I was unprepared for the simplicity of her despair now. She hardly made a sound or moved, but big silent crystal tears like Cape May diamonds slid quietly down her cheeks.

‘Of course I want justice,’ I said through my teeth, aching with guilt and loss and the colossal unfairness of it all. I buried my face in my hands for a moment.

‘Rose, I can’t do it,’ I heard her gasp.

I looked up. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You can’t do what?’

‘I can’t do the trial. I can’t be a witness. I just can’t.’

‘Oh, Ró?yczka!’

I sat down beside her and pulled her into my arms because I knew, I knew exactly how she felt.

She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed. I’d never seen her cry like this – not ever.

‘I don’t want to do it,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want to stand up in front of all those men, all those strangers, barefoot with my skirt pulled up so they can stare at me, and have that dry little man point with his stick and explain it all in words I’ll never make sense of. I don’t want to have to turn around and tell everyone how they did it. It made me cry in the interview, telling about how they stuffed the rags in my mouth in the Bunker so I couldn’t scream, and twisted my arms back and held me down while they injected me – how I fought and fought and just woke up to my hips in plaster again with chunks of bone missing anyway, only in prison this time, they hadn’t even washed the mud off my feet – they did the same thing to Vladyslava, but she’s so much more sensible than me. I told Dr Alexander in his office, but I just can’t tell that hall full of strangers. With that sickening Fischer listening. Men scare me.’

Since she’d been fourteen, all the men in her life had done nothing but hurt her.

‘But you’re Ró?a! You’re so strong!’

‘Yes. That’s the other thing. I’m brave and strong and young – and little and pretty. Dr Alexander wants to show off all that. It’ll make people feel sorry for us, wring their hearts, shock them –’

‘As it should!’

‘But Rose, I’m not smart.’

‘What?’

Ró?a, as far as I knew, was pretty fluent in six languages, not counting Ravensbrück camp patois. She’d memorised every song and poem I’d ever recited after hearing it three times. She knew more about Polish politics than I’d know about anybody’s politics in a lifetime.

‘Holy Virgin Mother, I felt so stupid watching the others get interviewed. Vladyslava is a teacher and the rest of them are all scientists. They always understand what Dr Alexander’s talking about, what was done to them. Their brains are crammed with mysterious expertise in bacteria or chemicals – or medicine, like you.’

‘Well, you’ve got a translation job!’

‘Who told you that? Oh, Lisette.’ Ró?a heaved another desperate sob. ‘I lied to her about that. You have to have a degree to do that kind of work for the Polish Research Institute. I’m just the girl who makes them coffee and puts the stamps on envelopes. They pay me mostly because they feel sorry for me. It doesn’t matter now anyway because they’ve run out of funding and I won’t be able to work there when I get back. But I don’t even have a high school diploma –’

‘So get one!’

‘I can’t, Rose, I can’t.’ She burst into fresh tears. ‘I tried. I tried to take an exam and I can’t do it, and that’s how I know I can’t do the trial tomorrow. I dread it all happening again. I was going to start with mathematics, because I’m good at it and it’s neutral and I could do it in Swedish, and all I did was sit there for an hour cringing while the proctor walked up and down between the candidates making sure they weren’t cheating. Every time she passed me I ducked. I kept expecting her to hit me. And finally, just to prove to myself that I could do anything I wanted and she wouldn’t hit me, I scrunched up the test paper and threw my pencils on the floor and walked out. Then I sat in the toilets and cried until the exam was over.’

It was almost exactly what had happened to me, when I’d tried to read my poems aloud to an audience. I knew exactly how she felt.

Ró?a sniffed, wiping her eyes on her sleeves.