‘It doesn’t look very big from up here!’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. But –’
I couldn’t let myself cry. I was flying. I clenched my teeth and muttered in the back of my throat.
‘Are you doing the counting out rhyme?’
‘No.’
‘Is it you, or Millay?’
‘Millay.’
‘Say it so we can hear.’
I choked out the last lines of ‘Dirge without Music’.
‘Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.’
I turned. I didn’t want to fly into the searchlights. I told Irina the new heading.
It was a pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.
I knew we didn’t have enough fuel to get to France, even with an extra tank. I knew this because of having to refuel last September, halfway to Neubrandenburg, when Womelsdorff brought me there. And when we were flying back, I didn’t have any accurate way of measuring time. Irina made Róża count, just to keep her occupied, but we were basically faking it. Róża fell asleep eventually anyway, which was a good thing because it meant Irina was able to do some of the flying. We took turns. It wasn’t hard work, once we were in the air, but I couldn’t have done it all myself. I really couldn’t.
I tried to fly parallel, but further north, to my original course. I did a pretty good job because we ended up somewhere in Belgium before we ran out of fuel. You could see every single place they were bombing – all of Germany on fire, the sky stained red in the distance. And we knew when we came to the front, because we could see it. Fire and tracer and searchlights in one long line that just stretched on and on and on like a wall of shifting, glittering light in front of us.
It was beautiful really, fireworks and bonfires, but terrifying. And we’d been flying for what, three or four hours through the burning night before we got there? If my flight into Germany made me wonder if I was in purgatory, the flight out of Germany was pure hell. We’d left one of the prisons in hell, we’d flown all night through hell, and now there on the horizon ahead of us was the boundary – the gates of hell.
Irina said so, looking at it as we approached the front.
‘L’enfer.’
She said it in French, so she wasn’t even cursing, just stating the facts. We’re in hell.
I must have pulled back the control column instinctively, trying to go higher, to get away from the guns. Irina pushed the plane nose forward again from her controls in the rear seat, keeping us level.
‘I will fly,’ she told me. Because even if she counted my flying bomb as a taran, she knew I wasn’t a combat pilot. And she knew we were about to get guns fired at us.
We didn’t get hit and I’m not sure they shot at us on purpose, or even which side was doing the shooting. Irina just kept smoothly on course, steady as – well, steady as a fighter pilot, I guess; as steady as Daddy – straight across one of the darkest stretches of the line of fire, until the noise was behind us, though we never really lost the orange light on the horizon.
We didn’t even wake the sleeping Rabbit.
‘Now you can land in one piece!’ Irina said cheerfully.
Oh well. I did my best. I didn’t break any of us anyway. We landed in a field in the dark. It was not my best landing ever, for many reasons – exhaustion and inexperience being the main reasons, I guess – but the plane came down the right way up, if not entirely in one piece (I smashed the wheel struts and the prop). We all got violently bounced around – none of us were strapped in (only my feet!) – and when everything had become quiet and still in the dark, Róża untangled herself from Irina and hurled herself at me like a rabid squirrel.
‘I hate you, Rose Justice, I hate you, and I am never getting in another airplane as long –’
Irina grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck, hauled her away from me and gave her a wallop across the face that was as brutal as anything she’d ever got from an SS guard.
‘You Russian BITCH!’ Róża screeched.
Irina slapped her again, not quite as hard. Irina said in fury, ‘You are alive. You are over the front. You and your skinny Rabbit legs are safe with the Allies.’
She switched to Russian for the rest of the lecture, and Róża screeched back at her in Russian, and then I began to cry. Irina heaved an impossible sigh, probably remembering her last crash-landing, when she’d been captured. Róża scrambled around trying to open the door of the plane and discovered a thick woollen Luftwaffe overcoat which had been jammed behind the back seat until the heavy landing.
‘You want to get out?’ Irina said neutrally. ‘Or we could just sleep here, where it is warm –’
Róża laughed until she broke off choking. ‘Oh, so now that I’ve got a decent coat I’m supposed to stay in the plane with the crazy taran pilots!’
‘Oh, Różyczka.’ I sighed too. I didn’t know how to explain to her that she could stop fighting now. Or stop fighting us anyway. ‘This plane isn’t going anywhere else tonight.’
So all three of us jammed into the back in a pile, sharing the luxury of the Luftwaffe overcoat. I was asleep in about thirty seconds, and didn’t wake up until the local truants found us there after it got light the next morning. Not their fault they were truants, I guess. Their school gym was full of refugees.
Trust small boys to be the first people to turn up at a crash site!
That was near the end of March. I think it was a little more than two weeks between when we left and when I got to Paris in the middle of April, and it is early May now. I have been here for three weeks – as utterly out of touch with the world as when I was in prison – maybe more out of touch. I know that President Roosevelt just died, because Fernande told me so. But I knew more about the Allied advance when Lisette was tuning in to clandestine radio broadcasts.
You know how sometimes you just keep going and going and then, when you get a chance to rest, you collapse with the flu or something like that? That’s what happened to me after we landed. I woke up in the back of the Stork with the scratchy beginnings of a sore throat, and by mid-morning I had a streaming cold, after waiting absolutely forever for the kids to go away and come back with someone’s big sister who could tell us for sure that we were in Belgium. We’d made it. The whole place was supposedly crawling with Americans because they kept sending weapons and soldiers to the front through the town, and bringing wounded soldiers back the same way.
When did it really sink in? Not that day – not that week. On our first day of freedom we spent a couple of hours sitting on someone’s doorstep drinking fake coffee and eating minuscule slices of bread with nothing on it – the people whose house it was wouldn’t let us further inside and I don’t blame them. Later that day we had to walk a mile or so to the school which the Americans had set up as a refugee centre. But there weren’t any Americans there that day. The middle of the town was nothing but one big dusty crater. The nearest working telephone was said to be twenty miles away. Everyone looked like ghosts and already we were letting ourselves be herded again.
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.
Róża 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 Róża 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 Róża going to Paris?’
‘I’m just sticking with my family,’ Róża 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.
