‘Why calcium?’ I asked.
‘For the Rabbits who have had bone operations. For Ró?a, so she doesn’t break her leg walking on the damaged bone. It can happen. Calcium helps make bones stronger.’
I thought about it for a minute. Anna was like a guard dog – trained to be vicious, but maybe if you handled her the right way . . . I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie, she’d said.
Irina caught my eye and raised two fingers to her lips, miming smoking.
She was right – I was ready to bet Anna could be bribed with cigarettes. Except for Irina, the other girls on my work team were all from my original transport. If they were still sharing bunks with Elodie, if they were still in the same block with her and she was still alive, maybe one of them could carry a message to her – I felt sure Elodie was capable of organising cigarettes for me to give to Anna.
‘We’ll work on it,’ I said.
The next morning Irina and I joined the tall French girls again and marched through the mud past the tent, with Anna marching next to our column where she could keep an eye on us. Irina stood between me and Anna to hide the fact that I had a whole day’s bread ration hidden in the blouse of my dress, about a quarter of a loaf. That was the standard unit of camp currency, a day’s bread ration, and we’d scraped it together in anticipation of our great calcium caper.
Hope – you think of hope as a bright thing, a strong thing, sustaining. But it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s simply this: lumps of stale bread stuck down your shirt. Stale grey bread eked out with ground fish bones, which you won’t eat because you’re going to give it away, and maybe you’ll get a message through to your friend. That’s all you need.
God, I was hungry.
I don’t mean I was more hungry that day than I’d been the day before. I mean I was constantly, hopelessly, stupefyingly hungry. I said earlier, I can’t remember when I first felt that way – though I know I wasn’t able to eat much right after I got out of the Bunker, I don’t remember ever not being hungry. The thing is, when you’re that hungry, it’s almost impossible to think about anything else. You know you ought to, and you want to, and sometimes you’re forced to. Calcium and cigarettes. Air raids. Feeling sorry for the people who are dying of thirst and the half-human schmootzich beggars licking spilled soup off the kitchen steps. But it takes an effort.
We got marched past the tent, past the Bunker and the sickbay and kitchens and out through the main gate, but without our handcarts this time. Then we went around the walls towards the crematorium, the path we’d taken with the corpses yesterday, and I had a bad moment thinking they’d make us work at the incinerator ovens today. But we passed the crematorium and ended up in the building next to it, a long shed with a sort of huge garage door entrance. It was being used as a storage area for building and maintenance equipment. Our team of Tall Strong Amazons was supposed to clear it out.
The shed was full of tools, shovels, long lengths of rail, stuff like that. I don’t think I could ever in a million years describe what it was like for me and three other underfed girls to pick up a steel rail – two of us on each end – and carry it on our shoulders to a pile by the train tracks. If any one of us had dropped her end, or stumbled, our feet would have all been crushed.
Irina and I worked together, but on our third rail we somehow got swapped around with a couple of the French girls, and I ended up next to Prisoner 51444.
‘I have some of your things,’ she muttered suddenly. ‘Your friend Elodie sent them.’
We were at the unloading point and let our end of the rail come thundering down into the muddy ground. We had to shift the rail over to line it up, and the girl hissed in my ear as we worked, ‘Wait till we’re back in the shed. I’ll hand them over.’
Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you’re being lifted you don’t worry about plummeting.
‘I have bread for you to give Elodie,’ I whispered back. ‘Can she get me some cigarettes?’
51444 gave a panicked, explosive laugh. ‘What if I eat the bread myself?’
I hissed in her ear, ‘You won’t. You just said you’re Elodie’s messenger.’ I hazarded wildly, ‘You can have half.’
‘I’m Micheline,’ she said.
Later on she stumbled against me and grabbed at my arm for support, and suddenly I was holding something soft and silky balled up in the palm of my hand.
I stuffed the silky wad into the neck of my dress, and gave her the bread.
I didn’t know what she’d pressed into my hand until I got back to Block 32 that night and had a chance to look. It turned out to be my hose. Elodie had sent me my stockings! They were actually little socks that she’d made out of my hose. She’d been put to work in one of the workshops where they re-purposed everybody’s clothes, and she’d got hold of my torn nylons and cut them into pieces and made me three little pairs of socks – they just slipped over your feet so they’d be hidden by your shoes. I hope she kept a few pairs back for herself.
And – this is so Elodie – she’d embroidered a tiny rosebud on the instep of each one. The thread was from my own dress, the one I was still wearing, from the same ball of thread we’d unravelled from the torn collar when we were together in quarantine. A little blue rose on each foot.
Oh, wonderful Elodie!
Three pairs of nylon socks. If I’d worn all three on top of each other my feet would have still been cold – but of course I gave a pair to Ró?a. And another to Lisette. I passed them round under the table when we’d finished eating. Lisette tried to give hers to Karolina – Karolina wouldn’t take them. They had a fight over them. Or rather, Karolina refused heatedly. Lisette just kept calmly insisting, ‘I won’t wear this newfangled nylon, my dear, so you may as well have them.’
‘Idiots!’ Ró?a blazed. ‘Give them all to me if you’re going to be stupid!’
‘Take turns,’ Irina suggested as though she couldn’t care less.
I am almost ashamed to write this down, but it never occurred to me I could have given away all three pairs. Not till this minute. I gave a pair to Ró?a because she couldn’t walk. I gave a pair to Lisette because she was the mother of our Camp Family, and I’d been told to treat her like my mother. And I kept one for myself because they were mine and my feet were cold. Irina, I figured, was perfectly capable of organising socks for herself, and Karolina – well, Karolina kept insisting she wasn’t a cripple and I didn’t want to offend her.
And anyway, she was just so delighted by my fire-engine-red toenails when I put on the little nylon slipper socks for the first time that she didn’t care about her own feet.
‘Nail varnish!’ Karolina hissed in delight. ‘You are a painted woman! No wonder they slapped you with a French prisoner’s triangle!’
It is true. The nail polish for my date with Nick still hadn’t come off. My toenails had grown out a bit, so there was a bare gap between the nail bed and the enamel, but if you didn’t look too closely and you didn’t look at the skin of my blistered feet, my toenails were still pretty.
Ró?a rolled her eyes. ‘Karolina is the vainest creature in the world. Last time she tried to grow her hair out they made her wear a sign that said, “I have violated camp rules by curling my hair.”’
‘Shut up, Ró?yczka. What’s the colour called? The colour of the varnish?’
‘Cherry Soda,’ I said. ‘It was a little bottle I brought with me from America.’
Karolina and Ró?a both sighed in ecstasy.
‘Cherry Soda! No wonder your toes look like balls of candy.’
‘My mother never let me wear make-up – ever,’ Ró?a vowed with vivid envy.