Then he said one word. It sounds the same in English and French and German. Kerosene.
And he left me here with the door closed.
I would like to write something heroic and inspired before I go up in fireworks, but I am too stupid and sick with dread to think of anything. I can’t even think of anyone else’s memorable defiance to repeat. I wonder what William Wallace said when they were tying him to the horses that would rip him into quarters. All I can think of is Nelson saying ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’
Ormaie 17.XI.43 JB-S
They have WASHED MY HAIR. That was what the kerosene was for this time. FLAMING HEAD LICE. Now I stink of explosive, but I have not got nits.
Just after the Hauptsturmführer left me last night, there was an air raid and everybody scrambled to the shelters as usual. I sat weeping and waiting for two hours, just as I did sometimes during that week of interrogation, begging God and the RAF for a direct hit that they NEVER DELIVER. After it was over, no one came back for another hour. THREE HOURS without anyone telling me what was going on. I expect v.L. was hoping that in my panic I would write something more productive as a last resort, only I struggled so much trying to get my legs free that the chair I was tied to fell over. Needless to say I could not write in such a state (and did not even consider calling for help). Eventually a number of people came in and found me doing a frantic imitation of an upside-down tortoise.
I had managed to drag myself and my chair over to the door and prepared an ambush that sent two guards sailing head over heels as they tripped on me when they came in. Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realise that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.
When they had got me resurrected and pulled up to the table again, von Linden came in and laid a single white pill in front of me. Like Alice I was suspicious. I still thought I was about to be executed, you see.
‘Cyanide?’ I asked tearfully. It would be such a humane way to go.
But it was not a suicide tablet, it turns out. It was an aspirin.
Like Engel, he does pay attention.
He has given me another week. But he has doubled my workload. We made a deal. Another one. Truly I thought I couldn’t possibly have anything left of my soul to sell to him, but we have managed to strike another bargain. He has got a tame American radio announcer who does Nazi propaganda in English aimed at the Yanks – she works from Paris for Berlin’s broadcasting service, and she has been badgering the Ormaie Gestapo for an interview. She wants to give her American battleship audiences a sugarcoated, inside perspective on Occupied France, how well prisoners are treated, how stupid and dangerous it is that the Allies force innocent girls like me to do dirty work like mine, blah blah blah. Despite her shining, legitimate, Third Reich radio credentials the Ormaie Gestapo are reluctant to respond, but von Linden believes he can use me to make a good impression. ‘I would not be here if my own government were not so ruthlessly inhumane,’ I will tell her for him. ‘By contrast see how humanely the Germans deal with captured agents, see how I am doing translation work, neutrally occupying myself while I await trial.’ (A joke – they will not give me a trial.)
(After my second escape attempt, while they were waiting for von Linden to turn up and pronounce punishment, a couple of his stupid subordinates casually blabbed a great many administrative secrets in front of me, not realising I understand German. So I know a lot more about their plans for me than I’m supposed to know. I fall under a sickening policy called Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog, which allows them to do whatever the hell they feel like to people suspected to be ‘endangering security’, and then make them disappear – really disappear. They don’t execute them here, they ship them off without leaving a trace, into the ‘night and fog’. Oh God – I am a Night and Fog prisoner. It is so secret they don’t even write it down – just use the initials NN. If this manuscript survives me they will probably black out everything I’ve just written. It is not really Nacht und Nebel policy to grant interviews for radio broadcasts, but these Gestapo are opportunists if nothing else. They can always chop me into bits afterwards and bury the scraps in the cellar.)
If I cooperate with the propagandist I can have more time. If I tell the bleak truth – then no. And they’ll probably make the American broadcaster disappear too, and I’ll have that on my conscience.
The aspirin and kerosene are part of Operation Cinderella, a programme designed to transform me from a feverish, nit-infested, mentally unstable prison rat back into a detained Flight Officer of cool nerve and confidence, suitable for presentation to a radio interviewer. To add credibility to our story I have been given a sort of translation job copying Hauptsturmführer von Linden’s own notes from the past year here, with names (when he knows them) and dates and, ugh, some methods used, in addition to information extracted. Oh, mein Hauptsturmführer, you are an evil Jerry bastard. A copy is to be made in German for his C.O. (he has a Commanding Officer!) and another made in French for some other official purpose. I am doing the French one. Fräulein Engel is doing the German (she is back today). We are working together and using up all my ill-gotten recipe cards. We are both cross about that.
The job is both horrific and unbelievably tedious. And so deviously instructional it makes me want to put the man’s eyes out with my pencil. I am made to see into a small methodical corner of von Linden’s mind, not anything personal, but how he works. And also that he is good at it – unless of course it is all fabricated to intimidate me. I don’t actually think he is imaginative enough to do that – at least, not in the way I use my imagination, not to pretend anything, not to concoct a fake collection of half a dozen notebooks bound in calfskin and filled with tragic miniature portraits of a hundred and fifty doomed spies and Resistance fighters.
But he is creative in his own scientific way – a technician, an engineer, an analyst. (I’d love to know what his civilian credentials are.) His persuasive techniques are tailored to the individual as he gains understanding into the character of each. Those three weeks I spent starving in the dark, waiting for something to happen – he must have been watching me like a hawk, tallying my silences, my tantrums, my numerous half-successful attempts to clamber out of the transom window, the heating duct, the air vent, to pick the lock, garrotte and/or emasculate various guards, etc. Observing how I cower and weep and plead whenever the screaming starts in the next room. Observing how I frantically try to put my hair up whenever someone opens the door and sees me (not everyone is questioned in their dreadful undergarments – it is a special torment reserved for the modest and the vain. I am one of the latter).