by Lou Cadle
That night, she was woken in the dark and taken down a level to a windowless room, concrete floors, stone walls. The same questions. She answered the same answers. Then two soldiers brought in a wheeled metal tub. Her first thought was “acid,” and the thought sent a chill of fear through her. She imagined being dumped in, burned away over hours or days to nothing. When would the pain stop? With death, of course, but would it come quickly?
She was picked up by the arms by two men, and they took her to the tub. She fought, but she was weak from lack of food, lack of sleep, and from being beaten. A third man picked up her lower half at the hips and upended her. She was shoved in, headfirst. But she was not burned with acid. It was water and large blocks of ice. For a few seconds, it felt good as her injuries grew numb. Hands held her shoulders down.
Had she been ready, she would have taken a deeper breath before the dunking. But as it was, she began to feel the need for air in mere seconds. She didn’t mean to struggle, but her body had other ideas than her mind. She fought to raise her head, but they did not let her. She fought harder, kicking, her feet meeting nothing. They only pushed her down farther in the ice water.
Red dots danced at the edges of her field of vision. She opened her eyes and immediately wished she had not, for the ice water burned. A hand held her head down, but it slipped on her bald head. Stupid of them, to shave me, she thought, and then the world began to fade.
She came awake on the floor, face down, feeling pressure on her back. At first, she thought it was more rape, but then she felt the urge to vomit, and up came cold water, tasting of metal. She gasped for air between the retches, and whoever was on her back pressed down sharply, and more water came out of her nose and throat.
The pressure on her back eased, and she lay there, gasping for air. Strong arms hoisted her up again, into the chair. A man was before her, someone she did not recognize, and he asked, “Who are your contacts here?”
“I don’t know,” she managed to grate out. “I was given a code phrase, and that is all.”
“Again,” he said to the others.
The soldiers picked her up by the arms. She fought and kicked, but again she was no match for them, healthy, well-fed, and weighing fifty pounds more than she did at the worst of times. At least she managed to suck in a deep breath as her face approached the water’s surface. Then she was dumped into the ice water again.
This time it burned her immediately. It may as well have been acid, for how badly it seared her nerve endings. She fought, and then she thought to pretend to have passed out again and went limp. Though every muscle in her body screamed at her to fight before her breath ran out, she forced herself to be as limp as a dead thing. It was as hard a battle as she’d ever fought. The hands still pressed her down, and held her, and held her. They were not fooled.
The urge to move grew and grew. The dots of red lights came again, and her back arched and she fought like a wild thing, trying to escape their grasp. But there was no way she could, as there was no way she could force her body not to open her mouth and inhale, desperate for air, desperate.
She came to again, coughing on the floor, a fist pounding at her back. She began to shake. The frigid water. The cold concrete floor. Her body had no defense against it, and her tremors grew more and more violent. She couldn’t catch her breath. She was still going to drown, right here on the floor, even though out of the water. Someone picked her up, and rough cloth hurt her frozen, bloodied skin as arms wrapped around her. They tightened, sharply, and more water came out of her mouth and nose. It was as if it was happening to someone else, she had so little control of it, the vomiting and coughing up water, the shaking and gasping. The hands let go and she dropped to hands and knees, coughing again, getting more water out of her lungs and throat, which felt raw already.
She was not going to last long in the face of this. Too weak, too beaten down already.
Do it for Claude. Do it for Madame Charlevoix. For Will. For the hens. For France. For Reg. For Mama and Papa.
She lasted three more times, she thought, though it may have only been two. When she came to herself the last time, and recovered, and they picked her up yet again, she said, “I’ll talk.”
“What did she say?” a man’s voice said.
Another voice answered gibberish. No, not gibberish. German.
“I speak,” she said in German. Then coughing overcame her again, and she could only fight the fight for enough air to live one more minute. She hung there suspended in the arms of the Nazi soldiers.
When she was done coughing, the interrogator came around and raised her face by her chin. “Are you ready to confess?”
“I am, I am,” she said. But they had missed their moment. A minute ago, she might have told them everything. Now, she was breathing again and had gained a bit of herself back. She would tell them about Monk circuit, about the already-captured agents. She would make up operations and dates.
“You will tell us everything,” he said.
She was about to answer when she realized he had said it in English. “In French, please,” she said, and she made herself weep. “I can only understand French.” And she let herself cry, and this time it was real. She cried for the pain. She cried for the terror. She cried for everyone she’d lost, and everyone who had been lost, even those she never knew, for those in Monk who had lived through this and worse, for ones she’d never heard of. “In French, in French,” she managed to get out.
He said something in German to the guards, and they dragged her out of the windowless room. A uniformed woman gave her a towel, and when Antonia couldn’t control her hands, the woman said something as if disgusted and wiped her roughly, and then tossed the towel on her head. She was given another thin shift. She was still barefoot, but her feet had never been immersed in the ice water. Otherwise, she doubted she’d be able to walk.
She was marched up the stairs and into an office she’d never seen, not Meyer’s. There was someone with a dictation machine, and her new interrogator of that night from the room with the ice water. All of their questions, she answered. But she did not tell them any truth they didn’t know already. She held to her persona as a local Marseilles girl, a part-time courier. She gave code names she’d only heard, and she thought to get one of them slightly wrong, to lend verisimilitude to her confession. Someone as minor as she would not have known the important English spies well. She would have a local contact. She made one up on the spot, a carpenter named Jacques she had gone out to the cinema with once or twice four years ago, who had moved away from Marseilles for most of that time. He must have come back because of the Résistance, and it was he who had recruited her.
She wept from time to time, as if shamed by what she was doing. She hoped she did not get some poor innocent carpenter named Jacques in Marseilles arrested, but she had to say something. She did not want to go back into the room with the ice water.
Then she was left alone in the office for nearly an hour. Someone came back with her confession, typed up neatly in German. She had to sign it on every page. So efficient, the Germans. With her broken hand, it hurt to hold a pen, and she could barely make a mark with her left.
Then the woman who had given her the clothes came again and led her back to her filthy cell.
She curled up and hid her face, as if terribly ashamed. Inside, she was cheering. She’d made it through the worst of what they’d done to her so far. She had not broken. The people she cared about in France were safe. Will was safe in England.
Chapter 37
They left her alone for a full day and night, though they did not feed her. There was water pushed in once, and she drank it all. How strange to feel water was a friend when so recently it had been her enemy.
The second morning, a guard led a man in civilian clothes to the door of her cell. Antonia recognized him, the doctor again.
With as few words as possible, he cleaned up and dressed her wounds. He straightened her fingers and wrapped the three together
with a thin piece of wood for support. “These will heal in a few weeks, though they may hurt you when the weather changes for the rest of your life.”
“So not for long, in other words,” she said, so softly that the guards would not hear.
To that he said nothing. He dabbed iodine on all her wounds on her backside and thighs.
“Did they rape you?” He did not meet her eyes.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did they use anything like a board inside you? A truncheon? Tear you?”
She hadn’t had to suffer that. A small wash of gratitude for that fact disgusted her with herself. That was nothing to be grateful for here. Nothing. “No. Not that.”
“I hope you do not get pregnant.”
“I won’t,” she said. She did not know it for certain, but she was not at her fertile time yet, so she was hopeful she’d be spared that indignity.
“Your jaw is still a problem.”
The pain had been so constant, she had nearly grown used to it. It had changed the way she spoke, no doubt.
“I can fix it again, but it will hurt.”
She laughed then, without humor.
He grimaced and went to work. First he had her sit with the back of her head against the wall—so she could not escape his efforts. Then he grabbed her face in both hands and—she didn’t know what he did, but it was a sharp jerk, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. Maybe they should just do that for torture, snap the jaw in and out like that until a person confessed all.
“Try not to use it. Don’t chew solid food. Don’t talk unless you must. And try not to use that hand until the bones have knit.”
As if what she ate and when she spoke would be her choice.
He had been efficient and unemotional the whole time. Since she was not to talk, after he had packed his bag, she offered him her bandaged hand to shake.
He looked at it, disgust writ large on his face.
For some reason, that hurt her heart more than anything the Nazis had done to her. She turned away while he called for the matron and left, hiding her face from him and the Nazi woman so they could not see her distress.
She obeyed his instructions and refused to eat any food but soup and water. She was starving, and she wondered if all the healing her body was trying to do at once was making her hungrier. She began to cough that night, and she kept coughing. Pneumonia? Perhaps. There was no fever that she could discern.
The second night after the doctor’s visit, she had a visit from Meyer. “Is there anything left to tell me?”
She shook her head, keeping her eyes downcast as if still ashamed by letting them break her.
“I sense there is.”
She didn’t even bother to shake her head this time.
“I have other work to do, however, so I cannot spend all my time on you. You have been sentenced to a prison for war criminals and spies. There, your sentence will be carried out as determined by law. Au revoir.”
Until I see you again—but that would never happen.
His footsteps faded away.
An hour later, she was given shoes and a thin coat and taken to a car. From there, she was driven many miles to a train. It was not anywhere she knew, but she could not help but glance around to see if Claude or someone else from the circuit might not be there.
But no. She would not be freed the way Will had been. She was locked into a train car with four bench seats and with two other women. One was clearly mad, pacing and raving to herself at times. The other would not speak to her. That was fine. Her jaw still hurt and she should stay quiet and let it heal. Whenever she lay down, she coughed, so she propped herself upright on the bench and dozed when she could.
All the next day, the train car sat unmoving. At least there was a WC in there. On her way out one time, with her left hand, she tried all the windows and doors, but none budged. She considered throwing a bench through a window, but on both sides, there was a pacing uniformed guard, changed every few hours. And she was exhausted, and hungry, and weak. And only one hand worked. Maybe if the guards left, she would try anyway.
That night, the car was put onto another train engine, and she was moved again. The next day, the train kept going, stopping only now and again for less than an hour at a time. At one of those stops, they were given a loaf of moldy bread. She tore her share into tiny pieces and swallowed without chewing.
She looked out the window, but all she could tell was that she was headed north. There were no signs to read in any language, no flags waving to tell her the nation she was in, but surely she was out of France by now.
Finally the train stopped at what seemed to be a rural station, empty of people. There was a dusting of snow on the ground outside, and the interior of the train car had grown cold. They certainly had been moving north.
The crazy woman had withdrawn into silence several hours before. The other woman spoke to Antonia. “Take off those splints on your fingers. You don’t want them to think you’re not useful.”
Antonia had no idea how she might know this, but she obeyed the instruction, peeling off her bandages and the wood splint, and shoving them into a corner under a bench seat with her shoe. Soon thereafter, a truck pulled up, and the three of them were loaded into the back, guarded by two soldiers, which seemed excessive to Antonia, considering that none of the women were dressed to survive in the cold weather, and if they were deep into German territory, which seemed likely, they would have nowhere to go in any case.
The truck drove along a well-kept road, from the feel of it. The surface of the road was even, and they swayed from side to side only at curves. The crazy woman began to talk again, in French.
In German, one guard said to the other, “What it she saying?”
“I don’t know,” the second guard said, and then he said something else Antonia did not catch.
She had some small hope of surviving. Surely, if they had only meant to execute her, they would not have bothered to take her hundreds of miles to do it.
They took a turn, stopped, and she heard the driver and another German exchange a few words, and then the truck came to a halt. The soldiers jumped out. While they’d been polite before, now they began yelling: “Out! Out!” as if the truck were on fire and it was imperative the women vacate it now.
She was nearest the back. She pushed out of the canvas flap that had hid most of the world from her for the drive, jumped down with a grunt of pain, and saw she was in a field of dirt inside a high fence. The fence was topped with rolled barbed wire. She was facing a guard gate, through which they must have just driven, and there and at two other points some distance away, there were raised wooden towers where a guard stood watch. One of the soldiers who had ridden with her almost wordlessly swept his rifle at her and yelled something in German.
With no idea of what he wanted her to do, she walked a few steps to the side, in the direction his rifle had ended up pointing. That made him angry, and he yelled at her again. “I speak little German,” she said, in that language. “I am sorry.”
“English?” the other guard said.
“Nein,” she said. She would maintain her cover story until the bitter end, and they would have to speak French to her or use mime until she picked up more German. The other women had jumped from the truck, and the crazy woman immediately turned and walked away.
At first, she wandered without direction, but then she saw the gate and headed for that, as if drawn by a magnet, walking faster and faster. A guard jumped in front of her and said, “Halt!”
Antonia had become aware of other people around, prisoners in gray uniforms, walking purposefully between buildings or standing singly or in quiet pairs. She could feel them all watching the main gate, though when she turned to glance at a pair, their heads were not turned that way. Still, she thought they were watching.
A rifle shot made her whip back around. The crazy woman knelt on the ground. As Antonia watched, she fell over. Two guards ran over to check her. One took off in a trot for a
building, the best-built one she could see, two stories, dark wood, stained or painted brown not too long ago.
The crazy woman wasn’t moving. Dead? If not, badly injured. The sympathy she felt for the woman was a small thing, like a flower blooming in her chest, but she clamped down on it. The third woman who had ridden in the truck had the right way of it, she believed. Stay quiet. Try and be useful enough to keep alive. Give little advice. Care as little as possible about your fellow prisoners and never show the Germans you care about anything. Why give them another weapon to use against you?
The guards from the truck hurried Antonia and the surviving woman over to another part of the compound. They were pushed into a room, and one of the prisoners—it had to be one, for she wore the uniform Antonia had seen all around her—spoke to them in German.
“I only speak French,” Antonia said in German.
In thickly accented French, the woman said, “Learn German quickly.” And then she went on in German, with Antonia struggling to keep up. She finally gave up on understanding, and did what her fellow prisoner did, taking off her clothes and shoes. She was issued a prison uniform and thin slippers.
The other woman dressed in them, so Antonia did as well, making sure she used her broken fingers as normally as she could bear to.
“Are either of you sick?” In German.
She caught the meaning of those words and shook her head. The next question she did not understand.
“Fleas, lice?” the other prisoner translated for her, in a Gascogne accent. Far from home. Though so was Antonia.