They’d moved just in time. Two months after Roza’s initiation, Pavel had lingered at the door. Unusually preoccupied, he’d given Roza his wedding ring. ‘Father Nicodem’s idea,’ he’d said. It had been a first slip of the tongue: he’d used a name. Three hours later the front door had splintered under a sledge hammer and Otto had stepped over the debris followed by four men in coats the colour of mud.
The drawer opened, snapping her reverie.
‘Tell me what you know, Roza.’ It was the first time that Brack had used her name. ‘We’re not going to let you out until you tell us.’ He was staring at her swollen stomach and the hidden life. A hint of the attic came across his face. ‘You don’t understand, Roza. You don’t know what harm the Shoemaker has done.’
‘Harm?’
‘Harm.’ The bark had gone; he still seemed trapped. He was still in a tunnel of filth trying to find his way out. Roza pitied him. Major Strenk had trusted him to break the girl while he dealt with the men.
‘There’s nothing you can do to me,’ she declared, obliquely.
Brack twitched and slid the drawer shut.
Thirty-two days later the cell door opened.
Two guards helped Roza to her feet and brought her slowly down the stairs to the cellar. Ahead, to the left, was the entrance to the room with the cage. The grey iron door was open. But Roza was pushed on to a chair standing incongruously by the corridor wall. Moments later came the sounds of scuffling and dragged feet. A man whom Roza had never seen before was pulled down the stairs. He was disfigured and cut, his chest gurgling like a blocked pipe. His feet were bare, bouncing along the concrete as if he were a marionette without strings. The guards hoisted him into the room with the cage. Moments later a heavy shot crashed into the corridor. The echo was still ringing in Roza’s ears when she heard more noise from the staircase, more groaning and dragging.
Another man was hauled along the passageway This time the guards stopped at the grey door. The prisoner lifted his battered face towards Roza. She hadn’t recognised him because of the quantity of blood… but it was Pavel. His body was limp in the arms of the green thugs, his shoulders horribly high, as if he were meat hanging on two hooks. He gaped at Roza, and sobbed, seeing for the first time the great swelling of life in her stomach. He tried to raise a crushed hand but all his energy went into a shake at the neck. As they dragged him into the room he coughed a sort of ‘No’.
Brack stepped out, a revolver in his hand. He stood, hangdog and determined, grimacing at Roza, waiting for her to make another choice. She pressed her thumb against the two rings on her finger and made a confused shake of the head. Her ears were ringing. A black hole was quietly expanding, rising from her depths. Brack’s mouth sagged open and he stepped slowly into the room.
The silence seeped into Roza’s mind.
She waited for the sound, her knees shaking uncontrollably Then, a compressed bang seemed to tear open her side.
They took Roza back to her cell as if nothing had happened. As the lock turned, she sank to her knees and the mental thread between her mind and her mouth snapped. She started gibbering. Her words became jumbled, losing shape and sense. Sounds poured out from her stomach like vomit. An arm came around her shoulder. The woman with cropped blonde hair was stroking her brow, saying ‘Shush’. Lights flickered and popped behind her eyes. The agony of childbirth was under way and she could feel nothing. Standing over her was the grey, distressed woman, wagging her finger, screeching nonsense.
Chapter Fifteen
Roza was transferred to the prison infirmary, a ward of evenly spaced iron beds, just like the dormitory at Saint Justyn’s. There, in a state of delirium, she moaned, looking up at some figment of Major Strenk. Cradled in his arms was a big fish, gasping for air, its tail flapping as if it were a kind of wild applause. A door slammed in a draught.
The following weeks were lost to Roza. She couldn’t scratch them on a wall to mark their passing. Exhaustion gradually shut down the hallucinations. A dark cloud settled on her consciousness, its density drawn from the pain it absorbed. She recovered the basic functions of living without quite being alive. When she could hear and respond to simple questions, they took her to a nursery on the same corridor.
‘It’s yours,’ said a nurse with a square jaw.
‘Mine?’ Roza cried, wanting wonder, feeling only a terrifying weight.
‘Have you thought of a name?’
Roza sank to a chair, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t look down. She’d already glimpsed the vast ocean-blue eyes, the gangling limbs. She could hear a soft sucking sound. She’d seen the lips, the little tongue working, the nails on small fingers hooked on to the blanket.
‘Name. Have you got one?’ The jaw was pushed forward as if she were holding a pin between her teeth. She tapped a pencil on a pad. ‘There are forms to be filled in.’
In abject misery, Roza turned her head aside, away from the bulky nurse with the muscular fingers, away from her pad, the notes, and the endless requests for names and dates of birth. Opening her eyes, Roza saw a window The frame was large, with bars fixed on the inside. Beyond lay the sky, puffs of cloud and, most agonising of all, a tree. Roza could see the pink cherry blossoms. A light breeze came in short gusts, plucking them free. They floated away by the handful, like scared butterflies.
‘I have a form.’ The pencil tapped impatience.
Roza looked at the large pad of blue paper with its columns and boxes, the gaps and dotted lines. ‘There will be no name.
‘Just a surname?’
‘Nothing.’ Roza couldn’t do it. She couldn’t reduce this mystery of life to just another fact in prison. ‘No name at all.’
‘I’ll leave it blank, then.’
Roza had a consuming dread that her milk would dry up from grief and the devastating guilt that came from bringing life into a prison. But as she fed the murmuring infant she looked out of the window and received something that made her strong and able to cope with the shock of hearing that first murder and the sound of Pavel’s execution, all set against the grotesque monotony of prison existence. She’d seen pink blossoms. She’d seen the wind that strips the trees.
‘One day we will win,’ said Roza, crouched on the footstool, when next summoned for an interrogation.
She’d never said ‘we’ before; she’d never spoken of a struggle for victory But now she was more than herself. She spoke for someone who didn’t yet have a voice; and she joined herself to all those beyond the prison walls who couldn’t speak, either from ignorance, complacency or fear, and she spoke for them. She pledged herself to a victory that they would all claim as their own, one day, with or without merit, a victory that she knew was utterly certain, a day of freedom that could only be delayed and never denied.
‘I can wait,’ she said. ‘Today, tomorrow, either in here or out there, it makes no real difference. It’s all about patience and waiting, and I can do both. Do you know why?’
Like the prisoners, Brack was barely distinguishable from the greenish walls. Even his brown hair seemed to have changed. The green in his eyes had grown stronger. He said nothing. Roza felt herself grow beyond her surroundings: even as she crouched, she filled the room.
‘Do you know why?’ she repeated, looking up, arms folded on her knees. ‘Because you can’t stop the Shoemaker. You can’t lock up his words. You can’t kill his ideas. They’re beyond reach. They have a life of their own. They’re for ever on the wind. And whether you like it or not, they are the future, yours and mine, because, fundamentally your ideas and your words aren’t as compelling as ours. They aren’t as good. They require force… bloodshed… suffering; whereas ours… ours demand nothing. First they persuade… only then do they ask for commitment and sacrifice.’