Page 52 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

51

Sixteen Months in Prison

Schw?bisch Hall Prison, Germany, January 3, 1945

Never did Léon think it would take this long for the Allies to come. Never did he imagine it was possible for a human being to stay alive for so long when shackled and starved and frozen and beaten and damp and sleepless and broken.

He can feel insanity beckoning every morning when the sun trickles in through the cracks in the masonry. He’s been able to ward it off with his slow progress over Marie-Madeleine’s body, but the ends of each strand of her hair mark a point past the time he’d believed he would still be here.

He could picture his son, he supposes, the child he’s never seen. How old would he be now?

Léon doesn’t know, because he doesn’t know what month it is, what day, what year. Just that he’s been in prison for hundreds of days. And that picturing the child he’s terrified he’ll never meet hurts worse than the howl of hunger in his gut.

All he can see is a small boy who’ll one day ask his mother, Did my father ever hold me?

Will she lie and say, Yes. Yes he did ?

Léon’s forehead drops to his knees. His will has always been the strongest part of him, stronger even than his body. But he can feel it dying now.

Please come, Minerva. Please come…

—

He’s jolted awake by his jailer, pushed out of his cell. Maybe they’re carrying out his death sentence. He wants to care more about this, but they’ve long since murdered his soul; all that’s left is the casing.

He’s shoved into a room that holds dozens of creatures who are just armatures of bone draped with skin. Everyone’s hair is as white as their teeth would be, if they had any left. Léon raises a hand to his own stubbled scalp. Is he white, too? That won’t do; Minerva always loved his dark hair.

That’s when he realizes—he still thinks he’ll see her again. And he still has vanity. So perhaps there are embers still alight somewhere.

But for how long will they continue to glow?

“Commandant!”

There’s a skeleton in front of him calling him commandant. The skeleton’s voice is familiar, and Léon feels his face shift, incredibly, into a smile. The skeleton is Magpie!

For a second, he sees in Magpie’s eyes the shock at how terrible he looks, which must be bad if it’s worse than the other cadavers here. But then the shock is gone and there’s only the joy of clasping the hands of a friend, of pressing their cheeks together, their chains making an embrace impossible. But he still feels the relief of knowing he isn’t alone and that, with a friend by his side, perhaps he can live for a hundred days more.

Before they can speak, they’re herded onto a train and Léon loses Magpie in the shuffle. Then he wonders—was Magpie even real?

The train crawls away and Léon tries to make himself move to search for Magpie, but his legs are unused to activity and refuse to cooperate. Then Magpie, who is truly, wonderfully real, finds Léon and they sit side by side on the floor, and Léon discovers it’s been sixteen months since he was captured.

More than four hundred and fifty days.

The Allies landed in June. Magpie says that it’s January 1945, six months later. His son, Léon realizes with a sharp shock, is more than one and a half years old.

Bon sang.

Soon they arrive at their new hell, Sonnenberg Fortress, north of Berlin, deep into Germany. Astonishingly, he and Magpie are placed in cells side by side. They’re allowed to talk whenever they want. It’s almost possible to feel happy, to hope—even to believe that, nourished by companionship and conversation, they’ll both be able to stay alive until the Allies finally come.