Resistance Term Analysis

9) Not being able to finish my story.

10) Also of finishing it.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

He has a light nasal tenor—so beautiful. It hurt worse than being slapped, being shown the irony of his life. And of mine, of mine—OF MINE—Isolde alive in the day and the sun while I suffocate in Night and Fog, the unfairness of it, the random unfairness of everything, of me being here and Isolde being in Switzerland, and Engel not getting any cognac and Jamie losing his toes. And Maddie, Oh lovely Maddie,

MADDIE

Julie has vanished.

It’s true she made her first meeting—Tues. 12 Oct., the day after we got here, but then she simply disappeared as if she’d never been in France. Today’s the 21st. She’s been missing over a week.

I understand now why her mother plays Mrs. Darling and leaves the windows open in her children’s bedrooms when they’re away. As long as you can pretend they might come back, there’s hope. I don’t think there can be anything worse in the world than not knowing what’s happened to your child—not ever knowing.

Because that’s what it’s like, schoolmates being guillotined as spies. I didn’t understand before—really didn’t understand. Being a kid and worrying that a bomb might kill you is terrible. But being a kid and worrying that the police might cut your head off is something else entirely. I haven’t words for it. Every fresh broken horror is something I just didn’t understand until I came here.

Julie was next.

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 the green sunlight, then the sky suddenly gray and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.

Her gardens are full of roses—sprawling, old tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. […] The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful someday in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square.

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 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.

There’s more—I know there’s more—Engel’s underlined all the instructions in red—red’s her color, Julie said. The pages are numbered and dated in red too. Julie mentioned Engel had to number the pages. They’ve created it between them, Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Anna Engel, and they’ve given it to me to use—the code’s not in order, doesn’t need to be. No wonder she was so determined to finish it—

“They let us bury everyone at last,” she told me. “Most are up there by the bridge. But I was so angry about those poor girls, those two lovely young girls left lying there in the dirt for four days with the rats and the crows at them! It’s not right. It is not natural. So when we buried the others I had the men bring the girls here—”

Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden, wrapped in her grandmother’s first Communion veil, and covered in a mound of damask roses.