Rose Under Fire (30 page)

And we walked down that road in broad daylight, Ró
ż
a lurching between us tucked beneath our arms. There was no one else walking there and we were careful to cower in the weed-filled ditch at the road’s edge, gritting our teeth among last year’s dead stinging nettles, whenever traffic passed. We kept chattering to one another, insulting one another, discussing the weather –
anything
, like walking through a den of lazy lions and praying they won’t get up. If they raise their heads and keep an eye on you as you pass, that’s a little disconcerting. But as long as they don’t come after you, you’re safe. You know you better not run. Well, we couldn’t run. We had to stop and rest about every quarter of a mile. It was probably a four-mile walk to the airfield.

‘How is Lisette?’ Irina asked.

‘Brave,’ I said.

Ró
ż
a asked conversationally, ‘What is the officer’s name?’

‘Which officer?’

‘The one we all work for. In case someone asks.’

‘Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff,’ I answered.

‘Wow, that was fast! Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff! I thought you didn’t speak any German, French Political Prisoner
Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig
. You must have a devious streak after all.’

Still at the Ritz

Except that I feel like I have never lived anywhere else but this big room and its gorgeous bathroom, this could have happened yesterday. I think it is partly the reason I haven’t even ventured out to find a dining room. The
terror
of that first day in the open, with the treacherous future yawning in front of us like the Grand Canyon – on foot with no food and no money and no papers in the middle of Germany, eternally at war, probably with people hunting for us – although I’m pretty sure now that if they had been, they’d have already found us for sure. But you don’t think every thing through logically when you have no real future except to plummet over the edge of the Grand Canyon.

We didn’t make it past the airfield. I guess it is a miracle we made it that far. The ground crew who caught us were very kind. They were all airmen and mechanics, not SS guards. Maybe this isn’t fair of me, but I actually think they were
smarter
than the SS guards – I mean, they were doing skilled jobs, not siccing dogs on starving women. Seems like that must automatically make you a nicer kind of person. Not necessarily, I guess, but it’s a good start.

These guys knew perfectly well what we were and where we’d come from. Irina was still in prison uniform beneath the threadbare coat; Ró
ż
a couldn’t walk; I had no hair beneath my bandanna. And only Ró
ż
a spoke any German.

We got stopped along the barbed-wire fence by the airfield perimeter. There wasn’t any place to hide. It was an unarmed man on a bicycle who caught us – he pulled up alongside Irina and laid a hand on her arm. I saw her assess him, recognise that she couldn’t take him on, and her shoulders sagged. She didn’t try to shake him off. I didn’t run. Ró
ż
a couldn’t, and Irina was caught. There was nowhere to go anyway.

Ró
ż
a tried to feed him a line. I don’t know what she said, but I swear I have never seen her be so charming. When was the last time she sweet-talked anyone – maybe the Gestapo officer who made her watch while they beat her mother to a pulp? Anyway, she was like Snow White convincing the huntsman not to kill her – heart-melting. As well as being the only one of us who could speak German, Ró
ż
a was the only one of us who was actually dressed inconspicuously, since I’d given my coat to Irina. Lisette had combed and braided Ró
ż
a’s hair and twisted it up before we left. If you could look past Ró
ż
a being filthy and skeletal and crawling with bugs, she was lovely, really, in a waif-like, Orphan Annie kind of way.

I remember worrying about how close we were standing to the wire fence, thinking it was probably electrified.

The mechanic on the bicycle didn’t threaten us. He got off his bike so he could walk alongside us, and escorted us back to the main gate and on to the airfield. Over Ró
ż
a’s head, Irina shot me an agonised glance. I spread my hand into a plane and rocked the wings at her. Irina’s mouth cracked into a small, sad, ironic grin and she briefly rocked her own hand back at me.

All right, they are really going to shoot me this time, I thought. And I have completely
failed
to get Ró
ż
a out safely.
Idiot!
What was she THINKING? But at least if they kill me with Irina, as a prisoner on a Luftwaffe airfield, I will have died as a combat pilot. My father was a combat pilot and so is Irina and so am I. We are soldiers and
I
am not going to make a fool of myself.

At the big vehicle gate, the guard in the sentry box made a telephone call, and after a minute a couple of other people came out to meet us. One of them took my arm the way the mechanic had Irina’s. They still let us support Ró
ż
a between us.

They frogmarched us to a bleak, cold maintenance room in the hangar. One side of the room was crowded with a million paint cans and tubs of dope for lacquering fabric aircraft wings, and the rest of the room was stacked with empty buckets and brooms and mops. They took the brooms and mops away in case we might try to use them as weapons, then locked us in and went away. The mechanic whom Ró
ż
a had been charming earlier left her a small canvas bag, like a gas mask bag, that turned out to contain two margarine sandwiches and a thermos of watery beef broth.

We fell on this unexpected feast like turkey buzzards. My gosh, food – or lack of it – makes you stupid. We couldn’t do a thing until we finished eating, and it never occurred to us to save any of it.

Afterwards Ró
ż
a stood staring out the window across the acres of Luftwaffe concrete and wire that surrounded us again. After a moment, she said matter-of-factly, ‘We’re fucked.’

Irina and I glanced at each other. Irina nodded once in grim agreement.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ró
ż
a said.

We went and stood next to her at the window. Ró
ż
a licked a smear of leftover margarine from the back of her hand and repeated sadly, ‘We’ve had it. I really thought we might win. I’m sorry.’

I thought so too. I think we all did.

We stood quietly staring across the airfield with her.

Standing on the apron, only about thirty yards away and gathering a crown of snow like icing sugar, stood a familiar, ungainly Luftwaffe plane with a black iron cross painted on its side and a black swastika painted on its tail.

‘That is a Storch,’ Irina murmured.

‘A stork!’ Ró
ż
a translated, and let out one of her mirthless giggles. ‘A sign of spring, right? Of new life! Good luck in the coming year! We had one nesting on our chimney the year I was arrested.’

‘It’s a German liaison aircraft,’ I said. ‘Um, for communications. And they use it for ambulance work.’

‘Pffff.’ Ró
ż
a gave a dismissive snort and turned away.

‘Controls for two pilots? Room for three?’ Irina asked quietly.

We were both forming the same desperate, insane idea.

We knew Ró
ż
a was right. We knew we’d had it. We were locked in a building inside an electrified perimeter fence with dogs patrolling it – a more comfortable prison than the one we’d just come from, but nearly as secure, and in maybe less than an hour they’d send someone to collect us. And if they didn’t shoot us on the spot, they’d haul us back where we’d come from like they did with the Gypsy girl who tried to escape, and after they were done with the dogs and the beating, we’d probably be too dead to execute.

So Irina and I had a quiet little discussion about the plane, without speaking our crazy idea out loud, because we didn’t want to get Ró
ż
a excited. She’d already decided we didn’t stand a chance and was dealing with it in her own way. She wasn’t listening to us any more; she was making her own last desperate statement. She’d begun ransacking the shelves and paint tins and was leaving behind her a good-sized trail of destruction.

‘Flight controls front and back,’ I told Irina. ‘But you can only control the flaps and throttle from the front seat.’

She gave me a funny look. ‘Have you
flown
a Stork?’

‘I’ve flown
that Stork
,’ I whispered.

Her white eyebrows soared into her hairline. She grinned. ‘Rosie, you are full of surprises.’

‘That’s the plane I came in on. But of course I haven’t flown for six months.’

‘Who gives a damn?’

I shrugged. I didn’t think I could do it – I didn’t think I was
strong
enough to do it, but I didn’t like to say so. We’d no other chance. Irina hadn’t flown for two years.

‘I haven’t flown in the dark. Or in snow, much.’

‘Controls for two, I can help you. You have flown this plane, and I have flown at night in snow. We can do it together. If we go down burning, we will take another Fascist aircraft with us, yes, Rose Justice?
Taran!
’

‘
Taran!
’

We didn’t need to say another word. We both began to assess the window. There was iron mesh pressed between the glass, not prison bars but like chicken wire, and even if we smashed the glass, we’d still have to cut the wire somehow – Irina’s wire-cutters had not gone with her to the Punishment Block. The main window was just a sheet of plate glass like a shop window, but there was a narrow transom at the top which slotted open with a lever to let in air.

‘Little Ró
ż
yczka will fit,’ Irina said.

‘And then?’

Irina shrugged. ‘She can take the hinges off the door.’

‘Break it down,’ I improved.

It was just as likely. Ró
ż
a’s starved hands would never be strong enough to unscrew the steel door that shut us in, even if she had the right tools.

‘Give her a hammer and she will break the lock –’

‘– She’ll find a blowtorch!’

We laughed together mirthlessly and turned away from the window to look at our pet Rabbit.

This is what Ró
ż
a was doing: she’d found an open bucket of black paint, and she was covering the walls with graffiti, just like me and my doomed French work team had done last November. Ró
ż
a hadn’t wasted any time. In letters six inches high she was writing out the list of Rabbits’ names, as far up as she could reach, all seventy-four of them, dead and alive. She was covering the walls with names in black paint beneath a thick black heading in German which said something complicated and accusing like, ‘Polish women used illegally as medical specimens in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp at Fürstenberg’ – a great big shout of defiant witness which they’d have to scrape off the walls with a razor blade if they wanted to hide it – or paint over it, of course.

We wasted a few minutes helping her complete the list.

‘Ró
ż
yczka, we want you to climb out the transom window.’

‘Oh yes, I’ll run to Berlin and get a job as a showgirl,’ she said. We’d finished the list, but she’d started again, slapping paint on the shelves and counters, which would be a darn sight harder for anyone to scrape clean than the walls.

‘Be sensible. We want you to find a way to get us out. Find some wire-cutters, a screwdriver, a crowbar – hand us in some tools and maybe we can break out of here.’

‘I’ll get eaten by dogs!’

‘If we see them coming, we’ll throw paint pots at them. Come on, Rabbit, earn your keep! Get up there and get out of here.’

We hoisted her up to the transom. She stood on Irina’s shoulders and clung to the window frame, and then somehow the three of us managed to push her feet first through the narrow opening. She giggled maniacally, leaning over the transom back into the room, looking down at us from above.

‘Oh
hell
, it’s cold out here, this is SO UNFAIR –’ Ró
ż
a wriggled her way out and lowered herself down. We watched her collapse in a heap of bones and threadbare wool on the concrete wasteland just outside the window. At least the snow wasn’t sticking, except on the plane.

Ró
ż
a pulled herself to her feet and banged on the glass.

‘Keep painting!’

Then she scuttled off in her lopsided, lurching bunny-hop, supporting herself against the side of the building.

There wasn’t anything else useful for us to do while we waited, so we obeyed Ró
ż
a’s last order. We covered the windows with names. And the steel door. And the floor. We’d begun on the ceiling when the bolts in the lock on the door started to click.

I froze. Irina leaped down from the counter and positioned herself beside the door, armed with a paintbrush.

But it was only Ró
ż
a coming back. Irina let out a soft whistle.

‘They left the key in the door!’ Ró
ż
a said. ‘To make it easy for whoever they send for us. We’re dead anyway. We’ll never get through the fence – it’s all patrolled and they’ve shut the gate. The only thing we can do is hide, and that’ll just make them madder when they find us. Actually, it’ll make them use the dogs to find us.’ Suddenly she sounded defeated. ‘I’m not going to hide.’

‘Neither are we,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

‘
Dogs!
’ Ró
ż
a protested.

‘Just
come on
.’

We locked the door behind us, to confuse things and maybe buy us a minute or two of extra time. The Stork wasn’t guarded. There wasn’t any reason for it to be guarded. It never occurred to anyone we might try to
steal a plane.
It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone on that airfield, in a million years, that two of us were pilots. Probably, when I got out of that Stork six months ago, it didn’t occur to anyone on that airfield that I was a pilot.

In the back of my mind I began thinking about Karl Womelsdorff – I wondered if he were still alive, or shot down by enemy aircraft –
our
aircraft. Or if, like me, he’d been taken prisoner.