The Red Ribbon Read online

  Carla took a couple of drags on the cigarette, stubbed it against the wall, then dropped it on the ground and walked off. I waited till she was out of sight, then dodged through the washing to pick up the cigarette butt. Riches!

  The next day Carla came back again. This time she was with a friend — just two guards smoking and chatting like any other normal pair of pals or workers on a cigarette break. Once again Carla dropped the cigarette stubs on the ground. Once again they’d barely been puffed. It couldn’t be an accident that she was leaving valuable litter at the place I now worked. Was this her way of trying to make up for wrecking my hand and my chance of sewing her beautiful clothes? Did she want to repair what she thought of as a friendship?

  I hid the cigarettes in my secret under-dress pocket-bag until they were needed.

  I meant to tell Rose about Carla.

  “Guess what happened earlier,” I began, the first time I spotted Carla smoking.

  “Shh,” she said. “I’m nearly at the end of the chapter . . .”

  We were standing under a line of wet washing, not a book in sight. I waited. Finally Rose gave a little sigh and blinked.

  “It was hard at first,” she said. “Trying to remember it all.”

  “Remember what?”

  “A storybook my mama read to me at bedtime when I was little.”

  “Lucky you,” I said enviously. No one had told me stories at bedtime until Rose.

  Rose tucked her arm in mine. “You don’t realize it at the time — how much you take for granted. When They came to arrest my parents, Mama said she’d find me after the War. She will, won’t she?”

  It threw me to hear Rose less than confident. “Of course she will. You’ve got to hope, remember? The red ribbon — that’s what it stands for.” It didn’t sound half as convincing when I said it.

  “I wish you’d kept it on as a bandage,” she said.

  I was gruff. “I’ve got to get my hand working properly again. Lying around with it in a sling being fed grapes is hardly an option here.”

  “It’s better to let it heal slowly — that way you’ll get full use back. You’ll be able to sew again.”

  I had my doubts about that.

  Rose made a new friend. He was a gardener. If Rose had come and told me she’d made friends with a dragon, I would have been no more surprised. And yet, not far from the drying ground, there was a patch of tilled soil called a garden.

  It was weeded and watered by a Stripey so ancient he had to be at least fifty years old. I thought of him as a tortoise — slow, dull, and wrinkled. His legs were so bent there was almost room to push the laundry basket between them. His back was so rounded I could’ve balanced the basket on top.

  This grizzled old wreck took a shine to Rose when she nipped over to admire the brave vegetables that were defying the odds to grow in Birchwood’s ashy air. Apparently the guards liked fresh fruit and veggies. I suppose They had to have something to balance out all the cakes and wine they scarfed.

  Tortoise’s pride and joy was a stunted rose bush. Rose was honored — he allowed her close enough to sniff the perfume of its tiny blush-red buds. The two of them never spoke beyond her compliments and his wheezing. He touched his striped cap to her when she appeared, as if she really was a countess and he was her staff.

  Rose reminisced. “Our head gardener used to compete with other estates as to who could grow the first green peas of the year. You should have seen the fuel bill, to heat the greenhouses in the walled garden.”

  I ignored her tall tales, eyed the veggies, and wished I could gobble the lot.

  Summer’s death rattle was a few dried-up birch leaves blowing between the blocks. There were no beautiful autumn colors. We went from clear skies to cold, endless gray. Gray skies, gray mood, gray washing. Then came the rain — gray floods of it, day after day after day. The first time we were on duty and it started to rain, we hoofed it to the lines to get the washing in. A passing guard saw us. She waved her arms and shouted, “Stupid bitches, leave it to dry!”

  “B-but the rain?”

  “You think you can change the weather just because you want an easy life doing nothing but sunbathing all day?” she screamed.

  “It’s not logical to leave it to dry in the rain,” I muttered to Rose.

  “If only we had little mice with umbrellas to stand along the washing line,” she said wistfully.

  I didn’t like to argue with Rose’s storybook logic any more than I dared argue with the guard, so we pinned the washing out again and watched it getting soaked. There were wool undershirts, ugly long johns, and woolen shorts — all gone gray in the wash. Oh, for the luxury of underwear of our own, instead of the daily indignity of doing without! I craved real clothes almost as much as I craved a full stomach.

  We tried standing near a wall to get some shelter. Another guard yelled at us to stop loitering. We went back out onto the drying ground and stood in the rain, sucking our fingers to keep them warm.

  “At least we’re getting clean,” said Rose through chattering teeth. She looked as gray as the washing, with little rosy fever spots on her cheeks.

  By the time Hyena came out to call us in, the washing was wetter than ever, and we were both shivering. I tried to warm Rose by wrapping her in my arms and pulling her close to my own body.

  She nestled in. “I can hear your heart beating,” she said.

  Rose kept me dreaming about dresses.

  One morning, once she’d recovered from a sudden fit of coughing, she commanded, “Tell me a dress to go with this place.”

  “What do you mean? A dress to wear when we’re watching the washing?”

  “No — one inspired by the landscape, or an emotion you feel.”

  It seemed like a strange idea. Just the sort of storybook nonsense Rose would cook up. Still, I took the red ribbon out of my secret pocket-bag and let it twizzle around the fingers of my good hand. A dress appeared in my mind. I began to sketch it with words.

  “That would have to be . . . let me see . . . a fine, soft gray wool-silk mix with a loose rolled collar, right up here, to the throat, and skirt all the way down to the feet. Long sleeves, with points from the wrist nearly to the floor. Metal weights in the hem, to keep everything trailing. Over the top, a mist of lace embroidered with silver drops. At the shoulders, a cloud of marabou feathers.”

  Rose was delighted. “Oh, Ella, when you say it, I can see it. You’ll make that dress when we get our shop. Once we launch the autumn/winter collection, the clients will all swoon in their seats as soon as it’s shown. We’ll have so many orders we’ll be turning customers away. ‘So sorry, milady. Apologies, Your Highness. No more frocks for sale today!’”

  She curtsied in her stripes and mismatched shoes. I had to laugh.

  Then I looked out at the rain falling on free ground beyond the barbed wire. “Do you think the War will ever end? Will we really have a shop?”

  Rose put a gentle kiss on my red ribbon. “Have a little hope, Ella. You never know when something good will happen.”

  About half an hour later, that’s all it took.

  I had a laundry basket perched on my bony excuse for a hip. I was lugging it back to the mangle room, walking in the shadow of the Washery wall, when — whump! — a giant sausage fell out of the sky and landed right on the pile of damp shirts.

  I looked around. Nobody in sight. I heard the click of a window closing and looked up. Did somebody drop a sausage out by accident, or was it thrown to me? Either way, I was keeping it. I covered the sausage with clothes and hurried to catch up with Rose.

  She laughed when I told her what had happened.

  “A sausage fell out of the sky into the laundry basket? You couldn’t make it up!”

  “You could,” I said. “And if it actually is from one of your stories, could you please imagine some potatoes and peas to go with it?”

  Our food situation had gotten even worse with the onset of autumn. Instead of colored water with bits, we ju
st got the water, murky with some sort of grit but no real ingredients. The guards were twitchier too.

  We ate half the sausage straightaway and gave the other half to Tortoise. He came hobbling up to us later that day, tugged Rose’s sleeve, and opened his clawed hands to show her three colorless mushrooms.

  Rose leaned forward and took a deep breath of them. “Mushrooms! I’d forgotten they even existed.”

  Tortoise grunted and shoved them at her.

  “For me?” By force of habit Rose looked around for witnesses. No guards or bosses were nearby. “Really?”

  Tortoise tapped the side of his nose, showed a bare-gummed smile, and shuffled off.

  We both stared at those mushrooms for a long minute, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “So can we flippin’ eat them or what?”

  “And how would you like them served, my dear?” Rose teased, cradling the mushrooms to her, like they were a brood of teeny-weeny babies. “With a cream sauce, on buttered toast? In a wild venison stew with herbed dumplings?”

  “Just raw will do. I know what’ll happen if we get back to the barrack to heat them by the stove there — you’ll break them into fractions and share them all out.”

  “There aren’t really enough for everyone, but do you think we should share?”

  “No!”

  We ate them raw, savoring each tiny nibble. We felt like queens at a feast.

  Two days later, pegged between the rows of gray guard socks was a paper packet. Like a magician I disappeared it, to open later, in secret. When I did I had to borrow some of the Washery women’s less toxic swear words.

  Chocolate.

  Gray-brown wartime chocolate, to be fair, but still chocolate! My fingers trembled as I broke off a square and put it on my tongue.

  It’s only when you’ve been without something that you truly appreciate how wonderful it is. That square of chocolate melted in my mouth like food of the gods. Birchwood melted away too, and I was back home . . . on my way home, at least, from school.

  We — me and a bunch of school friends — had stopped at the newsstand. They were all going straight for the sweets. I was counting my money and trying to decide between a fashion magazine and chocolate. I only had enough for one or the other. I remember looking at the chocolate and thinking how easy it would be to slip a bar up my sleeve without paying, without the twitchy hamster-woman at the till noticing a thing.

  Was it stealing to take the chocolate from the washing line? Did I care?

  What would Rose do?

  Ask me who could’ve left it there, then break it into equal squares and share it with everybody and anybody. That’s what Rose would do.

  We used the chocolate paper to line Rose’s shoes because her feet were going blue-gray with the cold. I bartered some of the chocolate for Girder’s permission to let Rose sit near the barrack stove in the evening. Maybe that would stop her shivering. The rest we divided up and ate, morsel by morsel.

  Rose said that in stories, things happened in threes. So a hero would be given three tasks on her quest, or there’d be three brothers going off on an adventure, that sort of thing. Sausage. Chocolate. The third gift wasn’t edible. It was a card.

  I’d seen things like it in the shops back home — beautiful squares of embroidered silk spelling out birthday wishes, or true love. This card was tucked into a pair of gray underpants on the washing line, with the name ELLA on the envelope. It had a picture of two birds holding a heart between them. On the back, a penciled message: Look out for me in the morning.

  All that evening we talked about the card. I had a friend! (An admirer?)

  “A fairy godmother,” said Rose, determined to turn it into a story.

  Morning came, gray and drizzly. Rose woke me up with a tremendous bout of sneezing, followed by an equally energetic coughing session. Roll call was over quickly — only two hours, since nobody messed the counting up by dying halfway through. We hurried to the drying ground.

  There was nobody there.

  Disappointed, I plunged my hands into mounds of wet washing and began to pin. I was wrestling with a particularly obstinate pair of pajamas when I felt something warm behind me. A hand went over my mouth. A voice whispered, “Shhh.”

  I knew him straightaway. It was the faithful dog: Henrik.

  “I’ve finally tracked you down!” Henrik said, flicking socks and long johns at me. He was taller and broader even than I remembered, and just as annoyingly friendly.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “You broke my sewing machine!”

  “Is that all the thanks I get?”

  “I was making a dress. I had to finish by hand, you interfering idiot.”

  Henrik laughed. “I should’ve remembered how passionate you are about all that sewing stuff. Aren’t you glad to see me? Did you like the gifts?”

  “That was you?”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know.” Carla? The gardener? Some invisible fairy godmother?

  “You’re welcome,” he said sarcastically.

  “What? Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “What happened to your hand? Is that why you’re not sewing anymore?”

  I really didn’t know how to be around Henrik. He was nothing like the bookish boys at school, or the more tough-guy gangs I sometimes used to meet while walking home.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Henrik! I told you.”

  “I know your name, but that’s it.”

  “Oh, you want me to come home and meet your father, to ask permission to speak to you? Let me see . . . what would I tell him?”

  “Tell me instead.”

  “OK, brief history. I left school last year. Got a job as a garage mechanic, going nowhere fast. Then there was the War. Obviously, thanks to my religion”— he tapped the yellow star sewn on his striped jacket —“I got on a List for this place. But I’m doing all right. In fact, I’m doing really well. Making a difference, which is great. As a general fixer-upper I get access to all sorts of different buildings in the camps. I can pass messages and news —”

  “And organize sausages for strangers . . .”

  “Plenty more where that came from. And anyway, you’re not a stranger. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  I thought about the heart on the silk card and didn’t know what to say.

  We had reached the end of the washing line and the view out over free fields.

  I felt Henrik behind me, keeping me sheltered from some of the cold wind.

  He murmured, “Even on a bleak day, freedom’s still a fine sight, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, if you could forget the sentry boxes, the land mines, the dogs, and the three rows of fencing and barbed wire.”

  Softly: “True.” Softer still: “What if you could?”

  “Could what?”

  “Forget the fences. The barriers. What if you could get free?”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Escape, my dear dressmaker. Escape!”

  Henrik didn’t say much more, just enough to tantalize. He pointed to a train slowly gathering speed as it left Birchwood to return to the outside world.

  “They come in full, but they don’t go back empty,” he said.

  “People get to leave?”

  “Not people . . . officially. Things stolen from new arrivals. Thousands of crates and bales of goods get loaded on.”

  “Things from the Department Store?” I got a snapshot in my mind — glasses, shoes, and suitcases, piled high like treasure.

  “Exactly. I’ve got friends in what they call the White Cap work squad — the prisoners who fumigate and pack all the bundles for transport. It may just be possible to arrange an escape that way.”

  Escape! Freedom! Home!

  That night in the barrack block I hid under the bunk blanket with Rose. I was bursting with excitement as I told her about Henrik, without mentioning his talk of escape. I don’t know why I veered
away from that. Perhaps it was too precious an idea to share yet. Perhaps it was too dangerous.

  Rose said Henrik was kind to give us food. Then she sneezed for the thousandth time that evening and fished in her sleeve for a scrap of cotton that passed for a hankie.

  “I know a story about a magic handkerchief that turned snot into fishes,” she said, with a throat so sore her voice came out grated, like hard cheese.

  “It’d be better to turn it into gold. Then we could buy a dress shop once the War’s over.”

  “They could be goldfishes, I suppose. Hey, Ella, do you want to hear what happened during a flu epidemic one winter, when all the fishponds were frozen . . . ?”

  And off she went, into story land — her own kind of escape.

  The snuffling, sneezing, and wheezing were bad enough. What was worse was her cough, and the way she shivered all the time, even when she felt boiling hot to touch. We were all so undernourished that even the slightest health problem could be lethal.

  I went to Bear at the Washery and told her to find Rose and me jobs indoors, out of the rain. The way things were going we wouldn’t survive a winter without shelter.

  Bear’s little eyes got even smaller. I guessed that meant she was thinking.

  “Getting a touch wet for you out there?” snickered her sidekick, Hyena. She could see water was literally running down my face from my sodden headscarf.

  “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to drown?” I asked her sweetly.

  Hyena slid behind Bear.

  Bear was sometimes sleepy, sometimes grumpy, and always slow. Eventually she made the connection between the handful of cigarette ends I was offering and the idea of me and Rose coming indoors. She took the cigarettes. Job done.

  Next I went to Tortoise. He was hoeing his patch of garden in slow motion. I asked if he could spare any greens for Rose. I’d probably get shot if anyone found out — as would the gardener. Never mind that. Rose needed vitamins. Tortoise tottered off and cut me a few leaves from a cabbage. Not the whole thing — guards would notice that. I thanked him. He nodded, then cleared his throat. After all those weeks of silence it seemed he was finally going to speak. He had a ghost of a voice.