The Red Ribbon Read online

  Henrik turned his back to me and began to button a gray cardigan over his shirt. I pulled my striped dress off and felt in the darkness for the normal clothes. They were poor quality. A thin wool skirt, cotton blouse, and threadbare sweater. The shoes were too small, with a squat, square heel. Even Grandma would’ve called them frumpy. But they were fine. Better than fine.

  “I feel like a real person again,” I whispered.

  Henrik smiled down at me in the shadows. “You’ve always been real, right from that first time you told me, ‘I’m Ella, I sew!’ Now you look great. Just the sort of girl I need at my side . . .”

  He leaned closer as footsteps passed the hut. I felt his breath on my face. Way off in the distance I heard a train whistle. My ride to freedom.

  And so we smuggled ourselves out of Birchwood, avoiding the guards, the dogs, the machine guns, the barbed wire, the land mines. We hid among boxes and bundles of clothes loaded from the Department Store, then we jumped out at a station, bought tickets with some money Henrik had, and sat in a proper passenger train, on seats, as real people. Every mile of track took us toward freedom and closer to the end of the War. We joined the army of liberators. We sang songs of victory, wore patriotic medals, and we were heroes. We came back. We found Rose. We were happy.

  That’s what would have happened if I was telling a story.

  I’d like to think Henrik got away all right. He wasn’t dragged out to the gallows at roll call, to be executed like other Stripeys who’d been caught trying to escape. No gray cardigan clotted with blood and bullet holes was brought back to the camp to be pulped in the Rag Shed. I know. I went there to ask.

  I stayed for Rose.

  All day long in the Washery my hands were shaking. I heard a train whistle and hoped it meant the escape had worked. I heard dogs barking and people shouting. Mostly I just heard my own heart singing. I was filled with a kind of wild joy. I’d stayed! Yes, I was back to being a Stripey. Yes, I was still bound by barbed-wire fences. Somehow that didn’t matter.

  No one knew I’d been planning to go, so they just thought I was giddy for no reason. Hardly. In my mind I was seeing Rose’s face light up when I arrived after evening roll call. Just twelve more hours to wait and work.

  Long johns swished in the tub . . . and I carpeted our dress shop. Undershirts swirled in the suds . . . and I hung the curtains, polished glass lamps, and threaded the needle of my imaginary sewing machine. The sun sank into a gray mist and I was ordering cream buns from the cake shop next door. Picking sprigs of blossoms from the apple tree in the park opposite. Shooing the last of the customers out of the shop.

  Then roll call. Longer than ever. Shouting. Barking. Counting. Recounting.

  The whistle blew. I ran, with hundreds of Stripeys running all around me under cold slices of light.

  I ran, and then I stopped running.

  This was the Hospital all right, so why was the door open? The windows too?

  I crept inside. The beds were empty. There was filth and rubbish everywhere. Water sloshed as two skeletal Stripeys mopped the floor, just wetting the dirt and spreading it to different corners.

  I almost couldn’t speak.

  “What happened here?”

  The nearest Stripey looked up from her bucket, then looked down again. Then she answered in a dull voice, “What does it look like? Everyone in here was on a List.”

  “A List? Nobody said anything about that! How many did they take?”

  Splosh went the mop in the gray water. “Didn’t you hear me? Everyone was on the List. Patients, nurses, the lot. This place is empty. They’re all gone.”

  I walked through the water and the muck to Rose’s bunk. Her threadbare blanket had been dragged off the straw and onto the floor. Her crumpled headscarf was the only thing left on the bed.

  “Gone?” My voice was a squeak. “Gone where?”

  Slap went the mop on the floor. The Stripey’s eyes flicked to one of the windows where flames gave the sky an unnatural sunset.

  When I looked down I saw that Rose herself had given up. There it was, sodden with water and grime: the limp, red ribbon.

  Wind, clouds, and ground remained. No birds sang. All leaves fell. The birch trees of Birchwood were naked and cold, like me under my striped dress.

  The next morning I struggled out of a dream that Rose was dead.

  A voice was calling from far, far away. “Wake up, wake up! Roll call!”

  That didn’t sound right. How could there be roll call when the world had stopped turning?

  “Go away,” I growled when someone shook me.

  “Girder will kill you if you don’t get up!”

  “Let her.”

  “Oh, leave her,” said someone else. “She was in a right foul mood last night.”

  Yes, leave me, I thought.

  They left me. I stayed curled up in a ball, like a hedgehog. I must have dozed off again because this time I dreamed Rose was alive. Her hand was in mine. Get up, lazybones, she murmured in my ear.

  “Let me sleep. . . .” I mumbled.

  Sleep later. Get up now. Come on, I’ll help you. Legs over the side of the bunk . . . that’s right. Jump down. Don’t forget your shoes.

  “It’s still dark, Rose. Can’t we have a lie-in?”

  Later, silly. Run now. That’s it, take my hand. . . .Quickly now, the whistles are blowing.

  “Rosalind, I missed you. I thought you’d gone.”

  I’m right here. I always will be.

  “I didn’t leave you. I couldn’t leave without you.”

  I know, dearest, I know. Keep running.

  She pulled me through the icy morning air, into the herd of mindless zebras. Together we made it to roll call.

  “The chimneys are smoking,” I whispered.

  Don’t look at them, Rose whispered back. Just think of yourself. You’re alive. You breathe. You think. You feel.

  After the first three hours I didn’t feel the cold. I just felt Rose’s hand in mine. I turned to tell her about the dream I’d had, where she was dead and I was alone. She wasn’t there. Inside my frozen fingers, I had the red ribbon.

  Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, I cried inside.

  Rose was already gone. Somewhere in the icy air was her last breath. If I breathed in, would I taste it?

  A whistle blew and left me standing, alone under a grim sunrise. Flakes of gray ash snowed down, oh so soft. Of all the horrors of Birchwood, of all the deaths and indignations, I discovered that loneliness is the worst.

  I had to tell others eventually. I had to explain why she wouldn’t need a bunk space anymore. Why she wasn’t showing up for work.

  “Lucky for her she’ll have died quickly,” Girder said. “Unlike the rest of us, still slogging away. Don’t you go giving up,” she added quickly. “Maybe one more winter, that’s all we’ll have to last.”

  Easy for her to say. She’d outlast another ice age, she was so tough.

  In the Washery the only response I got to my news was a nervous laugh from Hyena.

  My fingers curled into a punch.

  Don’t hit her, said Rose.

  Not even a little bit?

  You know violence isn’t the answer.

  I sighed. Hyena kept her nose unbroken.

  For a while I just worked. What else was there to do? Bear sent me back to the drying ground. I didn’t care. Every frosty morning I took the laundry out. The washing lines would be hung with iced dew. They looked like a crisscross of giant spider webs. Every evening I brought the laundry in. I beat the stiffness out of it and passed it to the ironing room.

  Rose tried tickling me sometimes, but I didn’t feel a thing. Was I even still alive? Once I could have sworn her lips brushed my cheek, but it was just a sock dangling from a peg.

  Several times I saw Carla passing the lines of frosted washing. Pippa whined, and Carla jerked the leash. She saw me. I know she saw me, but she said nothing. Did nothing.

  At night I lay on my bunk,
eyes open. No tears. No sadness. No anger. I was numb.

  Then one morning it snowed. There was ice on the inside of all the windows and white everywhere outside. The only bit of color to be seen was in my little length of red ribbon. I stroked the silk and knew what needed to be done. My shoulders were squared as I left the Washery with a wheeled laundry basket.

  “Watch her,” said Hyena with a giggle. “She’s got that look.”

  “You think she’s going to run for the fence?” squeaked Shrew.

  “She’s going to do something; that’s for sure.”

  The fence was electrified. Deadly. Despairing Stripeys often chose to embrace the fence as a warm, shocking way to finish their lives.

  I did not mess up the virgin snow near the fence with my shoe prints.

  “I need fabric,” I announced to the barrack that evening. “At least two meters of it. I’m going to make a dress.”

  “You’ve already got a dress,” said Girder.

  “Not a prison dress. I’m making a Liberation Dress.”

  It was impossible. Where could I get a handkerchief-size scrap of fabric, let alone enough for a dress? Add to that rare and precious items such as needle, thread, pins, fastenings, scissors. It would take a fairy-tale hero years of questing to gather such treasures.

  I had until Birchwood was emptied.

  Now that there were echoes of guns on the horizon, Birchwood was to be disbanded. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. The signs were everywhere. Harassed guards. Chimneys smoking day and night. More bales and bundles than ever before leaving the Department Store by train.

  There were cargoes of prisoners being transported out of Birchwood too. Rumor had it They were going to other camps, farther away from liberating armies. After so many years of boasting They could kill whoever they wanted, now there was a panic. It seemed They were desperate to hide evidence that places such as Birchwood had ever existed. It made me think of a school friend, back in the real world, who’d lost a board game and swept all the pieces to the floor, saying, “There, nobody knows who lost now!”

  When I left Birchwood — however that happened — I’d go dressed like a real human being, in proper clothes. Not a bought dress, not a stolen dress, a dress I’d sewn myself, every single stitch mine.

  Fabric.

  I still had the crummy clothes Henrik had organized for our escape attempt. It had been risky keeping them hidden under my striped dress. Guards were brutal to anyone who showed initiative — like layering up to survive the cold. So I traded the thin jumper for half a pack of cigarettes. A whole half packet of cigarettes. The skirt and blouse weren’t worth as much: more cigarettes and some bread. With these riches I could approach the Department Store.

  Girder knew a girl who knew a girl who knew someone working in the Department Store. Taking her cut from my precious store of cigarettes, Girder made arrangements for the material I needed to be smuggled out to me. It was hugely risky, both for the girl who took the fabric and those who passed it along. I felt badly for getting other people involved. They didn’t — payment was payment after all.

  It took several tense days of waiting before a packet came my way. Girder let me open it in her private cubicle in one corner of the barrack block.

  It was the ugliest fabric ever woven.

  Girder burst out laughing. “Someone’s puked all over it!” she cried. “Look, those orange squares could be bits of carrot!”

  I felt like being sick myself. Perhaps on a mature woman, in a dim light, the crazy multicolored pattern would work. Not on a skinny young beanpole like me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said valiantly. “It’s good-quality fabric, there’s enough of it, and it’ll hang well.”

  “Can’t wait to see it on!” Girder chuckled.

  Scissors. There were two pairs that I knew of in use in the Laundry Mending Room. They never left the room. They were never unsupervised. Help came unexpectedly. Bear was ill. Hyena took temporary charge as boss of the Washery. I told her I was going to swap shifts with a seamstress from the Mending Room. Predictably, Hyena laughed.

  “Ha, ha, nice try. Not a hope! Not a chance! Not going to happen!”

  I didn’t back down. “I need to borrow the mending-room scissors. To do that, I have to work in the Mending Room. You have to authorize it. If you don’t, I’ll find a way to steal those scissors, and I’ll stab you in the heart with them while you’re asleep.”

  Hyena opened her mouth to laugh . . . then thought better of it.

  The Mending Room was not the Upper Tailoring Studio. By day there were about thirty women darning and repairing, watched over by a guard. By night there were thirty different women and no guard. I wrangled a visit during the late shift, when discipline was more relaxed. I’d heard the mending crew wasn’t so bad. They swiped a lot of yarn and thread for themselves, or to barter, then smugly mended the guards’ gray woolens in the wrong colors. Simple acts of defiance.

  I found a spot to spread my fabric out.

  “What are you doing?” said a heavyset slug of a woman, half-hidden behind a pile of holey socks. She must have been monumentally fat before Birchwood. Now she was swamped by folds of loose skin. Somehow this seemed even sadder than the skeleton-thin Stripeys I saw every day.

  “I just need a bit of floor space,” I told her briskly. “If you could move your feet, please.”

  Slowly the Slug retracted her wooden shoes. I spread my fabric across the floorboards and picked up the mending-room scissors.

  “What are you making?” asked the Slug.

  “A dress.”

  “Huh.”

  “Aren’t you going to use a pattern?” squeaked a mouse-like woman, who was curled over a table, mending a torn shirt.

  “Haven’t got paper,” I said, eyeing the fabric and wondering how best to get a dress out of it. I opened the scissors.

  “What sort of dress?” squeaked the Mouse.

  “A Liberation Dress. For me to wear when I get out of here, all right?”

  “You’re going to wear it? For real?”

  Both Mouse and Slug stared at me.

  I set the scissors down. “I suppose you’re going to report me?”

  Mouse looked at Slug. Slug looked at Mouse.

  “Here, you’ll need a tape measure,” said Mouse timidly. She passed one over.

  “Be quick,” said Slug, who looked as if she’d never done anything speedy in her life. “I can see to your quota of sock darning while you’re at it.”

  I blinked. “OK. That’s good. Thank you.” There were nice surprises left in the world after all. I picked the scissors up again.

  Pins were no trouble — there were several on the mending-room floor, as I found out when I jabbed my hands and knees on them. Marta would’ve had a fit. In my head I heard her calling, Pins! Thread was easy too. I just teased out lengths from the cut edge of the material. Now all I needed was a needle. Slug nudged Mouse with one wooden shoe. Mouse twitched.

  “Give her a needle,” Slug said.

  Mouse passed me one, all the while gaping at me as if I was starting a major revolution and she wanted to do her bit.

  “Are you really going to sew your own dress?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Guards’ll shoot you if they get wind of it,” Slug announced.

  I nodded again. “I know.”

  The pins, thread, and needle went into my secret pocket-bag. As for the cut dress pieces, I put them flat under my bunk mattress, hoping my scrawny weight would more or less iron them out. I meant to sew a little bit of the dress each day before lights-out.

  Grandma had a cutting from a magazine pinned above her sewing table back home. It was advice on how to look nice while sewing. When she first read it she nearly killed herself laughing. I thought of the advice as I began work on my Liberation Dress:

  When you sew, make yourself as attractive as possible. Put on a clean dress.

  Clean dress? Fat chance. I sponged my striped sack of a
dress down as often as I could at the Washery. As for being attractive, that was a complete nonstarter in Birchwood.

  Being shaven also ruled out the next advice: Have your hair in order, powder and lipstick applied. If by powder they meant flaky skin from vitamin deficiency, I could manage that. Lipstick . . . lipstick cost a couple of packs of cigarettes in Birchwood. I’d heard of one tube of lipstick that did the rounds of a block, with every single woman dabbing some on her lips. They must’ve looked hideous, like painted skeletons. In their minds, having lipstick meant they were being normal women again.

  Which was why I needed a Dress.

  The final comment from the magazine explained the pre-sewing primping: apparently we’d all get twitchy worrying about someone dropping in, or your husband might come home, when we weren’t looking our best. It wasn’t husbands that worried me, of course, but more sinister visitors.

  “Will you ask someone to keep lookout for guards?” I begged Girder the first evening I started sewing.

  Girder sniffed. “Shouldn’t you be worried about me, since I’m the law round here?”

  I froze, suddenly more timid mouse than cunning fox.

  “Just kidding, ha, ha!” Girder slapped me on the back, making my bones rattle. “The look on your face then . . . hilarious. But listen, little sewing girl, it’s not just those feckwit guards you’ve got to watch for. Sneaky types in here could spread the word about what you’re up to, for spite or ciggies. Just so you know, if you get caught I won’t do anything to protect you.” She mimed a gallow’s noose.

  It was pretty nerve-racking, taking up a needle for the first time since Carla had smashed my hand, and not just because of the fear of discovery. What if I couldn’t do it? I stretched and wiggled my fingers lots first. I even got close to abandoning the whole project. A long-forgotten Grandma saying came to my rescue: One stitch started is one nearer finished. Her advice was much better than all that magazine twaddle.

  I was shaking as I threaded the needle. My fingers ached. I took up one side seam. Pushed the needle in. Pulled it through. One stitch was followed by a second, a third, then countless more. The rhythm returned. It was almost like being happy.