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.’
Brack’s top teeth scraped his bottom lip. He’d darkened at the assault on his beliefs, but then mastered himself, strangely unsettled — it seemed — by Roza’s assurance and indifference to his authority.
‘Today is your day’ admitted Roza. ‘This is your winter. But we’ll have the spring. Tomorrow is coming and when it dawns — ’ she nodded severity at him, and confidence — ‘there’ll be new laws, fairly framed; there’ll be honest, dedicated lawyers. There’ll be judges who don’t pass sentence in a damp cellar with a pistol. You’ll be spared what was done to me, but rest assured, you will be prosecuted for what you have done. I will give evidence against you. I will tell them about the cage and the merciless killing of two innocent men… whose only crime was to think differently from you and the barren system you serve.
Once more Roza expected Brack to ignite at her attack but again he said nothing. There was no outburst about choosing sides and warnings in the sewers. He looked at Roza over his desk and the heap of Major Strenk’s papers, his teeth gouging at the lip. And then Roza understood why he’d been silent throughout her credo. Like all lackeys he was scared of what might happen if the teacher went away: where he would be if, when tomorrow came, Roza was right and he was wrong. The recognition made Roza fire a shot at the present.
‘You can’t keep me here for ever,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I’m already outside. I’ve seen the wind in a cherry tree.’