Rose Under Fire

Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you're being lifted you don't worry about plummeting.

But people need lift, too. People don't get moving, they don't soar, they don't achieve great heights, without someone buoying them up.

Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?

It is so hard trying to say what you mean.

It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

Fight with realistic hope, not to destroy all the world's wrong, but to renew its good.

God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.

Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing - and the insane mind behind it just urges us all on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.

You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.

These trials aren't about revenge. They're about justice. Don't you want justice, Rose Justice?

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.

Tell me “The Subtle Briar” again,’ she asked. She knew I would still know it by heart. I whispered to her in the dark. ‘When you cut down the hybrid rose, its blackened stump below the graft spreads furtive fingers in the dirt. It claws at life, weaving a raft of suckering roots to pierce the earth. The first thin shoot is fierce and green, a pliant whip of furious briar splitting the soil, gulping the light. You hack it down. It skulks between the flagstones of the garden path to nurse a hungry spur in shade against the porch. With iron spade you dig and drag it from the gravel and toss it living on the fire. ‘It claws up towards the light again hidden from view, avoiding battle beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then, unloved, unfed, it clings and grows in the wild hedge. The subtle briar armors itself with desperate thorns and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher, unquenchable, it now adorns itself with blossom, till the stalk is crowned with beauty, papery white fine petals thin as chips of chalk or shaven bone, drinking the light. ‘Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia, Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena, Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda, Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara, Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna, Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna, Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria, Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia. ‘When you cut down the hybrid rose to cull and plough its tender bed, trust there is life beneath your blade: the suckering briar below the graft, the wildflower stock of strength and thorn whose subtle roots are never dead.

Hope has no feathers Hope takes flight tethered with twine like a tattered kite, slave to the wind's capricious drift eager to soar but needing lift Hope waits stubbornly watching the sky for turmoil, feeding on things that fly: crows, ashes, newspapers, dry leaves in flight all suggest wind that could lift a kite Hope sails and plunges firmly caught at the end of her string - fallen slack, pulling taught, ragged and featherless. Hope never flies but doggedly watches for windy skies.

She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over he shoulder, letting out the line as I held the kite above my head. "Run with me, Rose," she cried.

A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could. This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.

When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up or down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backward through the air: thrust and drag. Thrust is the power that pulls the kite forward—you run with it to get it up in the air. You have to have thrust to create lift. Drag is there because your kite’s surfaces push against the air and slow the kite down. Drag doesn’t pull you out of the sky; it makes you fly more slowly.

Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight. You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive—like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach—there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift, as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite. Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks.

And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these word,s to remember that these things existed--the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the trees.

Róża laughed until she broke off choking. 'Oh, so now that I've got a decent coat I'm supposed to stay in the plane with the crazy _taran_ pilots!' 'Oh, Różyczka.' I sighed, too. I didn't know how to explain to her that she could _stop fighting_ now. Or stop fighting _us_, anyway.

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries?

Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.

There are four forces which work together if you want to put something into the sky and have it stay there. One of these is lift. Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upwards. That’s how birds fly. That’s how kites fly – a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That’s how airplanes fly. But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

This is what’s so heartbreaking: the fact that I am here, alive, has no doubt given Fernande some grain of hope for her daughter. But the fact that I was there makes me sure there isn’t any.

I am scared of the way they are clinging to the French and Belgian ports, even though they’ve been pushed out of most of the rest of France. There is something about it that spooks me. They’ve lost.