She stays with Rose that night, not just because she wants to read her story, but also because she cannot bring herself to leave. It isn't until midnight and three-quarters of the way through that she realizes just how familiar this is.
She is pouring over the words of a girl who has been through Hell and then suddenly she is back in the barn loft in Ormaie – Maddie can almost smell the hay and hear Mitraillette calling for La Cadet to come in and feed the chickens. It hits her like a freight train, the sudden loss and almost longing for a time before then, when she was lonely and scared and alone but there was still that faint slant of hope, something to hold onto, something to remember –
Oh, God.
Fly the plane, Maddie.
The war is over. Maddie knows this. Never again will she have to cower on the floor of a London bus while the city falls to pieces outside, never again will she have to wake in the middle of the night to sirens and run through the wood in her pajamas with only an umbrella for safety. She will never have to worry about Jamie flying in the night and being shot down over France, never have to worry about what the Gestapo will do to him or the secret passengers he ferries – ferried, she has to remind herself. The war is over.
She pushes back those memories, back into the ground where they belong, even though they continue to creep back up like the roots in Rose's poem. She tries not to think of the bitter irony of it all, Rose and Julie and their tiny scraps of hope. Had fate allowed it, had the timing been right, they might have ended up in the same place. They would have liked each other, and for a moment she imagines a world with the three of them, alive and well and flying over the coast of the North Sea in that old Puss Moth, the skies clear and the sunset bright.
She doesn't need to worry about Rose now that she's here, safe and sound in her bed, and every so often Maddie will glance up from the pages (her handwriting is so tiny, as though she'd been afraid the paper might be snatched away at any moment) and she keeps a hand on the younger girl's shoulder as though making sure she's really there.
The war is over. She keeps this as a mantra in her head, a secret prayer to a God she doesn't even believe in but she says it anyway. It is 1945. She is 23 years old. The war is over.
(Julie will always be 21, and in Maddie's heart the war will never be over.
She wonders just when she had started to feel so old.)
And Rose is so young, so young to have been through this all. She is only 19 and her prose is utterly heartbreaking, while her poetry is something else entirely. It bleeds hope and it gasps despair, it is a single voice trapped and smothered under the weight of memories that no one should have had to bear.
Which is worse, Maddie wonders, the bearing of the pain or the remembering of it?
"I get so muddled in the smoke."
Maddie pointed. "Straight line across the grass. Easy peasy if you're brave enough - like finding Neverland. 'Second to the right and then straight on till morning.'"
"What about you? Brave enough?"
"I'll be all right. Now I've got something to do -"
They both ducked instinctively as something exploded at the other end of the runway. Queenie squeezed Maddie around the waist and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. "'Kiss me, Hardy!' Weren't those Nelson's last world at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don't cry. We're still alive and we make a sensational team."
The champagne has yet to run out. Pilots and soldiers drink for free, and once again she indulges in the magic of her ATA uniform. Maddie watches the couples stumble around her, starry-eyed and bright, drunk on each other instead of the alcohol, and hides her smile in her wineglass.
She meets Jamie in Paris the third night after VE Day.
Sometimes he reminds her so much of Julie that it hurts. The way he walks with utter confidence, unafraid, that same easy smile, that slightest hint of madness she knows is right behind those pretty features. She almost expects him to cock his head in the same way she once did and grin,"High time they put the RAF in kilts, wouldn't you say?"
But Jamie does not say that, because he has his own way of greeting her instead, and as he makes his way across the crowded bar he holds his arms out for her to fall into. And she does, and he is sturdy and so warm and familiar and he whispers, "Ma cheri" in her ear in that half-teasing manner that makes her want to laugh and cry at the same time because it is so familiar and she doesn't want to think about anything else other than him being here and now.
"Took you long enough," she mumbles into the crook of his shoulder just for the sake of having something to say.
And she thinks she loves him, she really does, the way he'll call her his bonny Maddie-lass, how he kicked a football over the church at their wedding just to make Jock and Ross laugh, how he flew out of France in his socks just so her feet could be warm and then let her fly herself out of there too, his hand on her shoulder the entire way home just to be sure she was okay. They are Peter Pan and Wendy, flying through the skies, fighting pirates and Nazis alike.
And she tells him everything, because she has always told him everything and Maddie has never really been good at keeping secrets anyway.
(She's a pilot, not a spy, she will never be a spy, not in a million years.)
He sucks in a deep breath, perched on the seat next to her. "So, Rose, she's safe back at home?"
"Not yet. She's still here in England. In this hotel, actually. I honestly don't know what she's going to do next."
Jamie knows. He squeezes her hand and matches her gaze, keeping his voice low but his tone steady and even. "You're wishing it had been Julie, aren't you?"
Does it make her a horrible person to say yes? If she had a say in who was able to come home and who to leave behind, would it make her a horrible person to choose her best friend over a half-stranger?
But she knows Rose now, and she thinks of that thick stack of paper upstairs, six months worth of thoughts and dreams and poems and she feels that she cannot even summon the energy to wish to choose. There is only the facts, that there was Rose and there was Julie and now there is Rose upstairs and Julie lying under damask roses in France and the irony and cruelty of it all and Maddie knows that all the wishing in the world would not change that fact.
She tilts her wineglass to get the last few drops of champagne, her wedding ring sparkling in the light.
"No one really comes home, do they?"
Suddenly she laughed wildly and gave a shaking yell, her voice high and desperate.
"KISS ME HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!"
Turned her face away from me to make it easier.
And I shot her.
I saw her body flinch - the blows knocked her head aside as though she'd been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.
Gone. One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly gray and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.
It's a strange thing to do, really, but one night Maddie wakes in the middle of the night after a nightmare and thinks about Anna Engel.
Granted, she thinks about a lot of people in the middle of the night, people whose faces she has never seen, whose names and stories are the only things she knows about them. But she met Anna Engel, three times, once on a chilly November night, then again right under the nose of the Ormaie Gestapo, and then finally on a winter afternoon. They shared a cigarette. She had talked about returning to Berlin.
She had recognized her immediately in Rose's narrative. A sick feeling of dread had begun to pool in her stomach the moment she read about the Kolonka with her American English and pharmaceutical background. Anger fierce and sharp like glass in a storm. Kindness so hidden you had to dig for it, search for it and pick it out with your fingers before realizing it had been there all along.
Oh, Anna. The Angel of Sleep of Ravensbrück. The slave-girl secretary/driver/translator of Ormaie. Maddie cannot even imagine what Berlin was like, and even though they were still technically enemies, fighting for two different nations on different sides, Maddie feels so incredibly sorry for her, cannot help but think that Anna was a victim of Germany's madness even as she worked for it.
She wonders what Julie really thought of her beyond those pointed barbs and jabs made at her in her fabricated report. It could not have been all bad. The German girl did give her cigarettes, after all.
She wonders if Anna ever made it out. She wonders often if a lot of people made it out, but she hopes that Anna Engel made it out most of all.
"You need to learn our names."
"I know your names."
"All our names. You need to learn the list, the list of Rabbits' names. Then, if you get out, you can tell everyone about us..."
... They yelled in French and in Polish, English, and German. "TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD!"
The day after she returns to Craig Castle, she goes looking for Julie's report. Esmé is at least able to tell which of the two libraries it should be in, but other than that she has no idea where it could be. The Glaswegian refugees had spent many a day pouring over the collection of books, rearranging and stacking them to their hearts content.
Still, Maddie wants to find it, and find it she will, and when she does she sits in the middle of the floor for a moment, staring at the handwriting, neat and precise, the complete opposite of what you might expect from someone who had been tortured for a week and then forced to write out a confession with the threat of death still looming over her head.
Even now, years afterward, Maddie marvels at her friend's bravery. Her resilience.
(Adolf Hitler, you bastard, of all the lives you took you had to take one of the brightest, the cleverest, she flew so high you had to burn her wings and watch her fall)
And isn't it funny, isn't it, how words written years ago can still make you cry, and she flips through the sheets of paper and recipe cards and pharmaceutical forms as quickly as she can, even as phrases jump out at her, even this constant reminder that once upon a time Julie traced ink into words into sentences into meanings that once told the story of Maddie and Queenie and "we make a sensational team" -
"Dammit, Maddie-lass, get it together," she finally hisses to herself, swiping at her eyes for what she swears is the last time. Fly the plane, dammit. This isn't what she's here for.
She lays out another sheet of blank paper and a pen and starts to work.
The Official Secrets Act says that this report never existed. No one is supposed to know what Julie did in France. No one is supposed to know about the people she met, the lives she impacted, what happened to them.
What happened to them?
Mitraillette (Gabrielle-Thérèse)
La Cadette (Amélie)
Maman Thibaut
Papa Thibaut
Etienne Thibaut
Rose had her list for those she could not forget. For those it would be a crime to forget. She had them committed to memory, names, strings of letters put together to form a person with likes and dislikes and dreams and fears.
So Maddie creates her own list too. For those she cannot forget. For the ones who made up her story, hers and Julie's and Jamie's.
Anna Engel
von Linden
Isolde
Jacques
Marie
Paul
Georgia Penn
The list grows. She writes until there is no more room on the paper and she does not want to get up to find another. Instead, she continues writing, scrawling names, any name now, across her arms, her hands. She writes the names of everyone she knows, alive and dead, just for the sake of seeing them in ink, just to see them tangible once again in the world.
She adds Rose's name, English and Polish for good measure, the Rabbits, the Glaswegian boys who have all gone home by now, Dympa Wythenshawe. That Bloody Machiavellian Intelligence Officer, the gunner Julie tried to save at Maidsend, the Jamaican rear guard they rescued in Ormaie, the fugitives they did save, Julie's great-aunt. She writes and writes and writes because God forbid, if she forgets, if she forgets -
If she cannot tell the world, if she cannot remember, if no one remembers, then who's to say they existed at all?
And that's how Jamie finds her, sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at the ink smeared across her skin, these human beings who breathed and lived and now all that's left of them are their names and her memories of them and Jamie what will happen if I forget what will happen if I forget her, mad and beautiful and playing the part of a German radio operator and running across the airfield under fire, who's going to remember her fears and her words and her favorite book and that beautiful flash of green in the sky Jamie I'm scared I don't want her to die
I don't want her to be dead.
He doesn't say anything. Instead, he crouches down on the ground next to her and gently tugs the pen out of her grasp. He doesn't chide her, nor does he give her any words of comfort. He just sits there beside her, and when Maddie hugs her knees to her chest, taking shaky breaths trying so hard not to cry, he notices something that she had not even realized.
"You didn't write her name."
My name is a bit of a defiance against the Führer all on its own, a much more heroic name than I deserve, and I still enjoy writing it out...
"...I couldn't."
...I am not Scottie. I am not Eva. I am not Queenie. I have answered to all three, but I never introduce myself by those names.
"I didn't need to. I couldn't forget her name if I tried."
I am Julie.
That's what my brothers call me, what Maddie called me always, and that is what I called myself.
I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told
The war is over. Maddie buries her face in Jamie's neck and cries.
What's strange about the whole thing is that although it's riddled with nonsense, altogether it's true - Julie's told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.
And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb - alive, alive, ALIVE.
fin
Author's note:
Let me blunt. Rose Under Fire fucked me up so bad.
It had me sobbing, to put it simply. Elizabeth Wein has this talent for making spectacularly real female characters, strong and defiant and fragile and emotional all at the same time. The fact that she wrote the characters so realistic and human made the horrors that the women had to undergo in Ravensbrück a million times worse - it was a constant reminder that this happened to real people once upon a time.
When it comes to tragedies like World War II or the Holocaust, it is my personal belief that the only crime worse than the actual killing and torture of innocent human beings is the forgetting of it. When people forget about the suffering that their other fellow human beings have been through, it allows it to happen again. I was particularly struck by the constant theme of remembering that ran throughout the book, the way Rose needed to remember the names of her fellow prisoners in order to tell the world what really happened.
Of course, there is also the pain of remembering that survivors have to bear that Wein also addressed very well at the end of the book with Róża, describing how she didn't want to testify against the Nazi doctors. That scene also made me cry very hard because in a way it was very, very true. How do you translate human pain and emotion and all the horrible things that have happened to human beings into a series of bullet points and present it before a court to be judged?
Róża was actually one of the best characters in that book, in my opinion. Almost on par with Julie from Wein's previous novel - I might do a one-shot on her later on, perhaps Anna Engel as well.
Anyway, what also hurt a lot about Rose Under Fire was that casual mention of Maddie and her life after Code Name: Verity. In all honesty, every time she or Jamie or anyone else from the previous book was mentioned, I instantly locked in on it, because like many readers I wanted to know what happened. I had fallen in love with Maddie and Julie and wanted to make sure that Maddie would at least get a happy ending.
What I found most fascinating about Maddie, however, was that by the end of Rose Under Fire she had lost two friends to the Germans, and only got one back. But in the end, she got to read both of their stories, and I thought that she must have been thinking about Julie while she was reading Rose's story. She must have been remembering.
(Also, may I just say, Julie is perhaps one of the best female protagonists I have come across in a long time. Wein managed to capture a real spirit in her that I have rarely seen anywhere else. Even now, when I have read the book at least ten times, I am still in utter amazement of how fierce and beautiful and real she seems. Which may have been why I found it a little strange when Maddie told Rose that Julie would not have survived in the camps, but in hindsight perhaps it might have been because Julie would have been too much of an Icarus - it's very apparent that she cannot hold back her temper or any smartass remark while being interrogated by the Gestapo, so it isn't too much of an assumption that she would have done the same at the camp, I suppose. Still, I love her for it.)
So anyway, I thought about Maddie, and what she must have thought about Rose trying to hard to remember the names of the people she met so she could tell the world. And I thought about everyone Maddie had met during the war, the story that both she and Julie told, and how Wein had managed to make us care about so many people in such a short time. And it occurred to me how many people have died and how many names have been forgotten over time and how many stories there really are in the world that may have been told but then got lost and how completely sad that is
I wondered if Maddie wondered if one day Julie's story would get lost as well. And I wondered, what would Maddie do?
(Also, some added Jamie/Maddie because it's technically canon. I will admit that I did ship it even before Rose Under Fire, but also thought that Julie and Maddie's relationship could be up to interpretation as well. Most of all, though, I love how Wein wrote their friendship -whether it was platonic or romantic, there was never any doubt that those two girls loved each other fiercely.)
So here you are. It's a shame that Code Name: Verity doesn't have it's own section here, but perhaps soon. I'm personally hoping for a movie adaption.
Mischief managed!
-Leila