‘We have to do whatever we can to stay alive,’ she said when Caro refused to drink a bowl of liquid that was soup in name only. Skye took the bowl and pointed to the tiny lump floating in the liquid. It was the first time she’d seen anything that indicated that what they were eating might actually be food. ‘Look. There’s a piece of turnip. It’s not just water. All we need is to find one thing every day that the guards have missed and that makes this day better than the one before.’
Margaux nodded resolutely, nothing glamorous about her now, nothing glamorous about any of them. But in that nod Skye recognised the Margaux whose poise always turned heads, who was always composed. Caro’s head lifted too and, despite her baldness, she looked like the determined woman Skye had met that first day in Paris, a woman whose beautiful eyes were as yet undiminished. The relief Skye felt then had her brushing away a tear. She knew she wouldn’t survive without Caro and Margaux. But she also knew that now, each day, they would all find a reason to survive.
One day it was a handful of herbs that Caro managed to pick and pocket before anyone noticed as they walked five abreast through the pine-scented woods with shovels over their shoulders to begin their twelve-hour work shift.
‘The herbs have vitamins in them,’ Caro whispered. ‘Vitamins will keep us alive.’
Another day Margaux discovered that Geneviève de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle’s niece, was in Ravensbrück too. ‘The Allies will come for her,’ Margaux said firmly. ‘And they’ll find us too.’
For one incredible month it was the revelation that resistance still lived in all of them. Skye, Caro and Margaux were sent to a sub-camp at Torgau along with a group of Frenchwomen. The three women held hands as they marched there, terror-stricken at having the known horror that was Ravensbrück taken temporarily from them, dreading what unknown horror they might find at the end of their journey.
On arrival they discovered they were to make munitions. Bullets for the Germans to fire upon the French and the British and the American and the other Allied armies.
‘Non,’ Skye whispered to Caro and Margaux. Because what if one of those bullets killed Nicholas, or Liberty?
Their fellow-prisoner Jeannie Rousseau said to the German officer in charge of the factory what everyone assembled there was thinking. ‘I won’t make arms for the Germans. I cannot. Asking us to do so is in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention.’
Caro’s hand tightened around Skye’s and Margaux’s. They stepped in behind Jeannie. Many others did too. They hadn’t enough food, they were, all of them, bleeding or bruised from some German violence or other, their smocks were damp from rain and their bodies shivered with cold, but they would gladly accept all that and more in order not to make the weapons that would murder their fathers and sisters and friends and lovers.
They were lucky. The officer was so shocked at their refusal – a refusal nobody had ever dared to make before – that he placed them in the kitchens to work, where they made food for the women who did not protest, the women who made bullets instead.
How much easier it was to work in a kitchen, where the ovens provided warmth and where crumbs could be easily stolen, than it was to dig sand for twelve hours for no purpose whatsoever except to exhaust them all to an eventual death.
Of course it couldn’t last. The women who’d protested were sent back to Ravensbrück.
‘I don’t know if I can go back in there,’ Margaux said as the gates loomed before them.
It was the first time Skye had ever seen Margaux vulnerable and it frightened her more than re-entering the gates of hell.
‘You can,’ she said. ‘I need you.’ She placed Margaux’s hand on her stomach, and Margaux nodded.
It meant that the next day they had to find something that would make Margaux’s day better than the one before. Skye and Caro spent all day collecting what they needed from wherever it could be found. By evening, they had enough.
Crumbs. That was what they had searched so painstakingly for. Crumbs which, moulded together, made a birthday cake for Margaux. And while marching through the snow-whitened forest on their way to work, Skye had gathered twenty-six twigs for candles. Caro had found a Christmas rose to place atop the cake too.
Margaux cried when she saw it. Skye and Caro held her, crying too. Skye tried to sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, but the bluebirds would not fly. They got stuck in her throat instead, beating their trapped little wings.
The very best day of all was when Margaux was moved to the Effektenkammer, where prisoner possessions were stored, and she stole a piece of cardboard from which they cut out tiny playing cards. How many precious hours were spent thereafter in a game of bridge or rummy, which made time actually pass rather than stall.
On the days when they found nothing, especially those bitter November days when they were made to lay slabs of sod in the snow at Königsberg – sods that iced up one day and had to be hacked free, or that thawed another day and turned into an arctic mud that froze the women despite the straw they had stuffed in their clothes for warmth – they would share stories of the past, of their childhoods. So Skye and Margaux knew all about Caro’s brother Christian and the family villa, Les Rhumbs, at Granville by the sea.
‘Christian and I both love it there, but he’s always hated the dining room,’ Caro told them, smiling a little. ‘The lions and chimeras fighting on the dresser have always frightened him. When he was younger, I’d tell him to come with me into the garden because there were definitely no dragons in a place filled with flowers.’
Skye pictured a small and serious Catherine giving her brother a posy of blooms, just as she’d once given Margaux and Skye those hopeful jasmine flowers.
Then Margaux spoke about her childhood in Lyon, her years in Paris, and school in England. And Skye described her magical Cornwall summers, how she’d learned to fly, and everything about Nicholas. Always Nicholas: the day she’d found him again on an airfield in England, the moment she realised she loved him, what they’d said to each other when he’d placed a seaweed ring on her finger.
They didn’t, ever, share their dreams. Everything they spoke of was from the past – a time that was real and beautiful and couldn’t be taken from them, unlike the hypothetical future and the phantasmagorical present. Occasionally, when her courage was failing, Skye wondered if it meant that none of them had any dreams left.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, Dante had said. Words meant for Ravensbrück, even though they were written centuries before. But then Margaux would deal out the playing cards, or Caro would describe the pink roses at Les Rhumbs, or Skye would tell the story of Nicholas bringing cowrie shells to her when she was lonely, and they would think only of that moment. And because of that, Skye Penrose, Margaux Jourdan and Catherine Dior came to be more than friends. They were the currents of air holding one another up, keeping each other alive.
By December, freezing December, the Appell began at half past three in the morning and women froze to death as they stood waiting for their names to be called. Skye, Caro and Margaux’s most important job became not to search for that one life-giving thing every day, but to find out more about the Kinderzimmer – Block 11 – where the babies were kept. Because, between the three of them, they would soon have a baby to care for: Skye and Nicholas’s child.
Before Skye had arrived at the camp, any pregnant women had been taken away and their babies murdered. But with the influx of prisoners in August and September, the rules had been changed. Births were now permitted, but Skye knew that just because something was allowed, it didn’t mean it was desired. And so it proved to be.
Margaux, who had cleverly managed to be moved from the Effektenkammer to the camp administration block where she could find out the things that might keep them alive, told Caro and Skye that she had news.
‘Six hundred babies have been born since October. Only about forty are still alive,’ she said.
Skye sank to the ground. It was worse than she’d hoped.
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‘The babies are kept five across one side of a mattress and five along the other,’ Margaux continued. ‘When the mothers are allowed into the block to feed their babies, they can’t tell which one is theirs. Each baby is given only one rag, which is to serve as both nappy and blanket. The babies are locked up alone in the block each night, and one of the nurses maintains that a window must be kept open, regardless that it is December, to allow for ventilation. Rats thrive in Block 11,’ she finished.
‘Skye’s baby cannot go there,’ Caro said firmly.
‘No,’ Margaux agreed. ‘Nobody knows you’re pregnant, Skye. It’s impossible to see anything beneath that smock. We’ll keep it that way, and keep the baby with us when it comes. It’s becoming possible now.’
And it was. In the hoar and frost of winter 1944–45, it was well known that the Allies were moving through Europe – although to the women in the camp it felt as if they must be crawling on their hands and knees, so long was it taking them to reach Germany. Many of the guards no longer cared what their prisoners did, and sometimes didn’t even bother to make them work. They were simply marking time until the inevitable occurred. In such circumstances a baby might not be noticed.
But then Margaux came to them with another warning. ‘Camp Commandant Suhren has been told to clean up this mess by making sure two thousand women die each month. It is retrospective: he must catch up to his quota. I’ve heard they’re building a gas chamber and will take the weak and the sick first. You must never go to the Revier. Besides, the doctor told me that they keep women with typhus in the same bed as those with a simple foot infection, hoping the one with the infection will catch the typhus and then she will die too.’
Skye touched a hand to her stomach. Never go to the Revier, the camp’s infirmary. Which meant having a baby and seeking no medical help. For the first time she felt all hope slipping away.
‘It won’t survive, will it?’ she said hoarsely unable, on that bitter day in late December when she’d forgotten that Christmas had ever existed, when all she wished for now was the end of winter, rather than something as uncertain and undependable as the end of the war, to find the sliver of turnip floating in the soup of her hopelessness.
She coughed, the spasm lasting so long her hands scratched at the dirt beside her, clawing onto life, such as it was. She knew she probably had pneumonia, that Margaux had dysentery, and that Caro most likely had both.
But Margaux paid no heed to the crippling stomach pain that accompanied her dysentery. She stood up straight and tall despite her spindly legs and gestured towards the truck that had pulled up by the Revier. It tipped to the ground a pile of newly arrived bodies that were to be sorted into those who were, thankfully, dead, those who were, unfortunately, still alive, and those whose minds had departed their bodies. Then Margaux moved her hand to encompass the bones stacked against the washroom wall; to the ash of the crematorium greying the snow at their feet. ‘If anyone had told you a year ago about this, would you have believed that you could have survived for as long as you have?’ she said.
‘No one will ever believe this, will they?’ Caro said, staring at the truck.
Skye shook her head. She didn’t believe it and yet she could see it.
‘Would you have ever believed you would carry a baby to full term in these conditions?’ Margaux demanded, standing in front of Caro and Skye, blocking their view of the wretched bodies. ‘It’s a miracle, Skye.’
Now, Skye saw only Margaux, unwavering in her belief that they still had, somehow, one last scrap of wonder. Something precious. And Skye couldn’t believe that she’d once looked at this woman on an airfield in England and tried to dislike her. Margaux was the bravest of them all.
When the day came, Skye ignored the pain at first. Pain was normal now; its absence so disconcerting that she had seen women reopen their wounds in order to feel its reassuring presence again. Indeed, Skye’s lungs burned with disease unrelentingly now and she hardly noticed it. But the tightening of the skin on her stomach and the clutch of her insides told her this pain was different. It was a sacred thing in this most unsacred of places.
Caro and Margaux knew the instant they caught her eye, because the three of them were closer now than sisters; they were each the same person. If one was kicked by the guards, the others gasped too. If one’s dreams were cauterising, the others awoke and embraced the dreamer before she even realised she was in the grip of a night terror.
‘Inside,’ Caro hissed, taking Skye’s hand and leading her into their block.
‘I’ll keep the guards at bay,’ Margaux said, and she let Caro stay by Skye’s side while she herself moved between Skye’s bed and the block entrance, keeping a lookout, using her obdurate presence to conceal what was happening in one of the bunks.
Instead of medicines, Caro used stories of her family home, Les Rhumbs, to anaesthetise Skye. ‘Pink roses,’ she said, sniffing the air as if flowers, not evil, bloomed beside them. ‘And peonies all through the garden. Jasmine so thick you feel dizzy when you first walk outside. I would use a bucket to collect all the petals and buds that fell off the bushes and I’d lie on the ground and tip them all over me. Have you ever felt a shower of flowers? It’s something a child would love to feel.’
So Skye imagined her baby lying on green lawn by the sea, a deluge of pink peonies and white jasmine falling down around her.
As much as she could, through fits of coughing alternating with the shuddering contractions of childbirth, Skye held on to that picture. She wished she could smell salty air sweetened by rose, but she hadn’t the strength to push away a stench so powerful as Ravensbrück.
Luckily for all of them, the birth took only a few hours: a baby reared on air and love did not grow like a normal child. She slipped out, a tiny blue thing that Caro rubbed with all her might, while Margaux held Skye’s hand and watched for the afterbirth.
Then Skye held her child, Nicholas’s child, the first of the brood of fearless girls he had promised her, and she wept. Nicholas had no idea he was a father. He had no idea where Skye was. She had no idea where he was or how to tell him about their miracle. And Skye had no idea how fierce love could be until she touched her daughter’s cheek and saw her tiny mouth open, felt the flail of a little fist against her breast. She knew right then and there that she would kill anyone who came between her and her child, that she would give all she had left to protect this baby.
Nor had she any idea how devastating love could be until she tried to feed her daughter. The baby nuzzled her head in frustration, a pitiful cry coming from her mouth as Skye’s breasts refused to produce more than a drop or two of milk.
‘I’m sorry, chérie,’ Skye whispered, understanding now she was so depleted that, even if she could give her all ten times over to her daughter, it still wouldn’t be enough. Her weeping turned into body-wracking sobs, which then turned into a paroxysm of coughing that made the baby pull back in fright and begin to howl.
Skye looked up at Caro and Margaux. Their cheeks were wet too. Skye had tried not to abandon hope but it had abandoned all of them.
Margaux erased her tears with the back of her hand. She tried to draw herself up tall as she spoke but the dysentery had, over the past month, made her concave inwards. Still, her voice was unwavering. ‘Some of the women make teats from the surgical gloves in the Revier,’ she said. ‘I’ll steal some. Then we can at least give her water.’
‘I’ll take some powdered milk from the kitchen,’ Caro added in her quieter but equally determined voice.
Skye wanted to shake her head, to say No, you can’t put yourselves at risk like that, but she knew it was useless. She would do the same if Caro or Margaux were in her position.
That night, with the sliver of baby tucked soundlessly beside her – it hadn’t cried again; it didn’t have the strength – Skye, in the embrace of sleep, fell heedlessly into the past.
Nicholas was there. My watch, he said to her, as he had on their last morning in Cornwall
, it’s not here. I must have dropped it in the gazebo. Kiss me again for luck and I won’t need it.
She kissed him, smiling, and said, Perhaps Liberty saw it and picked it up.
Then the dream tipped and she was screaming and something was crying.
She woke with Margaux’s hand over her mouth. Caro was shushing a bundle that Skye knew was her baby. She tried to lift her arms to take her daughter, to hold her beside her heart so she would hear in that still-beating thud that Skye loved her no matter how her useless body let them both down, but her arms didn’t work. The sheets were wet. There was too much blood for it to mean anything good.
Then there was only blackness, and the thought that Liberty couldn’t have found the watch because she’d had no luck; she was missing too.
In the dream, Nicholas smiled sadly at Skye, turned his back and walked away.
Thirty-Four
The next month was one long and appalling hallucination. Skye didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, just that every morning in the dark she was, somehow, dragged to the Appellplatz for roll call where she leaned against Margaux and Caro, the blood still running down her legs. The guards paid no heed. Blood on prisoners’ legs was nothing to remark upon; the very few women who still had their monthly cycles, despite the starvation, had no rags to use.
Caro, shivering, wrapped Skye in her cape and Margaux, shivering too, gave Skye her blanket to obscure the bundle strapped against Skye’s chest. The bundle that had hardly grown at all, the bundle that would, Skye knew, die before she did.
The guards had given up enforcing labour, but still used the stick freely during Appell, and both Caro and Margaux stepped in front of Skye and took blows meant for her in order to protect the baby – ma petite chérie, as they called her. Skye felt each whack of the stick on her friends’ bodies but it was too cold to cry; instead her tears froze on her cheeks, burning her skin.
The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020) Page 35