by Colum McCann
Milyausha was a splendid welder. She had learned just before the war. She wore special glasses and the blue flame lit up her lenses. After two days it was there: a giant metal bath.
But we hadn’t thought about how to heat the water properly.
We tried boiling the water on the woodstoves that we had set up, but, even though the greenhouse itself was warm from catching the sun, the water never held its temperature. The bath was just too big. We stood around, quiet and angry, until Nuriya had another idea. She asked her cousin Milyausha to see if she could get permission for maybe a dozen more metal sheets. The very next morning she came up from the refinery dragging five more sheets. Nuriya told us the plan. It was simple. Milyausha set to work straight away and welded the metal into the giant bath, crisscrossing the strips until eventually the whole thing looked like a metal chessboard. She drilled drains in the bottom of each bath, and Nuriya borrowed an old car engine from her husband’s brother. She attached a pump to the engine to take the water out. It worked perfectly. There were sixteen individual tubs and, because they were small, we knew the water would stay warm. We laid down planks for gangways so we could walk from bath to bath, and then we hung a portrait of Our Great Leader inside the door.
We lit the stoves, heated the water, filled the baths. Everyone smiled when the water stayed warm, and then we took off our clothes and sat in the baths, drinking tea. All around us the glass was steaming and we were warm as soup.
Sweetness, said Nuriya.
That evening we went up to the hospital and told the nurses we would be ready the next day. They looked exhausted, black bags under their eyes. We could hear the soldiers moaning from inside the hospital. There must have been hundreds of them.
Nuriya pulled me aside and said: We will start right now.
We did only eight the first evening, but on the second day we did sixty and by the end of the first week they were coming up directly from the railway station in their bloody rags and bandages. We had so many that they had to wait in lines outside the greenhouse on long canvas tarps. Sometimes the canvas got sticky with blood and it had to be hosed off, but they were patient, those men.
While they were outside Katya wrapped them in blankets. Some of them were happy, but others cried, of course, and many just sat and stared straight ahead. The parasites were on them and the rot was setting in. You could see the worst of it in their eyes.
Inside, Nuriya was the one to shave their heads. She was quick with the scissors, and most of the hair was gone in a few seconds. Without it they looked so different, some like boys, some like criminals. She shaved the rest of the hair with a straight-blade razor. She swept the hair up quickly because there were lice still crawling through the clumps. The hair was shoveled into buckets and placed at the door of the greenhouse, and the farm boy took them away.
The soldiers were so shy they didn’t want to take off their uniforms in front of us. We didn’t have any young girls working with us—most of us were thirty or more. I was forty-seven. And Nuriya told them not to worry, we all had husbands—which was true, except for me, I never had a husband, no reason really.
Still they wouldn’t take their clothes off until Nuriya roared: Come on, you don’t have anything we haven’t seen before!
Eventually they shed their uniforms, except for the men on the stretchers. We used Nuriya’s scissors for them. They didn’t like it when we had to take off their shirts and undershirts, maybe they thought we were accidentally going to cut their throats.
The soldiers stood in front of us, hands over their private parts. They were all so skinny, poor things, they made even Katya feel fat.
We used the rotten uniforms for fuel but we made sure we took the medals off first, put them in little bundles until the baths were finished. All the men had letters and photos in their pockets, of course, but there were some strange things too—the spout of a teapot, locks of hair, bits of gold teeth. One of them even had a little finger, curled up and shriveled. Sometimes there were explicit pictures we weren’t meant to see but, as Nuriya said, they’d been through a lot for our great nation, it wasn’t our place to scold.
As the soldiers waited their turn, Olga sprayed them with a chemical that came in boxes all the way from Kiev. We used fertilizer tanks and mixed the chemical with water—it smelled like bad eggs. We had to cover the soldiers’ mouths and eyes. But we didn’t always have enough dressing to put over their wounds, so when we sprayed them it sometimes hit their open sores. I felt so sorry for them the way they howled. Afterwards they leaned against us and cried and cried and cried. We sponged down the wounds as well as we could. They dug their fingers into our shoulders and clenched their fists. Their hands were so bony and black.
When their wounds were swabbed, it was time for the bath. If one of them had lost his legs, it took four of us to lower him in the water and we had to be careful of the level so he wouldn’t drown. If he had no arms, we propped him up at the edge of the metal sheet and kept ahold of him.
We didn’t want to shock them so we kept the water lukewarm at first, and when they were immersed we poured kettles full of boiling water around them, wary not to splash. They said ooh and aah, and the laughter was contagious; no matter how many times we laughed in a day another man would make us laugh all over again.
The thing about the greenhouse was that it made the sound much bigger. It wasn’t exactly an echo, it was just that the laughter seemed to bounce from pane to pane and back down to us, bent over the baths.
Olga and I were the ones to sponge. I didn’t use soap to start with. That was a treat for the very end. I gave their faces a good scrub—they had such eyes!—and I cleaned very carefully, the chin, the brows, the forehead and behind their ears. Then I went vigorously at their backs, which were always filthy. You could see their ribs and the curve of their spines. I went down towards their bottoms and cleaned a little around there, but not so much that they got uncomfortable. Sometimes they would call me Mama or Sister, and I’d lean forward and say: There there there.
But most of the time they just stared straight ahead without a word. I went to their necks again, but this time I went much more gently and I felt them relaxing.
It was harder to do the front of their bodies. Their chests were often bad, because a lot of the time they had been hit with shrapnel. Sometimes, when my hands were at their stomachs, they hunched over very quickly because they thought I was going to touch them down below, but most of the time I got them to do that themselves. I was no fool.
If a soldier was really sick or had no spirit, then I had to wash him down there. Mostly he would close his eyes because he was embarrassed, but once or twice he still got aroused and I had to leave him alone for five minutes.
Olga wouldn’t leave him alone. She carried a spoon in her apron and if a soldier got excited she bashed him there, and that was that. We all just laughed.
For some reason, I don’t know why, their legs were the worst—maybe it was from standing around in those boots all the time. Their feet were covered with sores and scabs. Most of the time they could hardly walk straight. They always talked a lot about their legs, said they used to play soccer and ice hockey and how good they had been at long-distance running. If the soldier was a very young boy, I let him put his head on my chest so he wouldn’t be ashamed of his tears. But if he was big and mean, I washed him much more quickly. He might say rude things to me about my arms, the way they wobbled, and for punishment I wouldn’t give him any soap.
We washed their heads last and sometimes, if they were nice, we gave them a final rub of the shoulders.
The whole bath took no more than five minutes. We had to drain the water each time and disinfect the metal. With the hoses attached to the old car engine we were able to pump the water out quickly. In summer the grass died where the water jetted out, and in winter the blood made the snow look brown.
Finally we wrapped the soldiers in blankets and put new foot cloths on, hospital shirts, pajamas, even hats. T
here were no mirrors, but sometimes I saw the men wiping the steam from the greenhouse windows, trying to have a look at themselves in the glass.
When we were finished and they were all fully dressed, they were ferried up the road towards the hospital by horse and cart.
The men who were waiting outside the greenhouse watched the clean ones go away. The looks on their faces! You’d think they were at a picture show the way their eyes lit up! Sometimes children came up and hid in the poplar trees and watched, it was like a carnival sometimes.
When I got home at night to Aksakov Street, I was always exhausted. I ate some bread, turned off the oil lamp beside my bed and went straight to sleep. My neighbors in the room next to mine were an old couple from Leningrad. She had been a dancer and he was from a wealthy family—they were exiles now, so I steered clear of them. But one afternoon the woman knocked on my door and said the volunteers were a credit to the country, no wonder we were winning the War. And then she asked if she could help. I thanked her but told her no, we had more than enough volunteers. It wasn’t true, and she was embarrassed, but what was I to do? She was an undesirable, after all. She turned away. The next morning I found four loaves of bread at my door: Please give this to the soldiers. I fed it instead to the birds in Lenin Park. I did not wish to be tarnished with their brush.
By the time it came to celebrate the Revolution in early November, there were only a couple of dozen soldiers to bathe each day, stragglers coming in from the front.
In the afternoons I began to visit the hospital. The rooms were crammed full of men. The beds were stacked five high, nailed to the walls like shelves. The walls themselves were splattered with blood and grime. The only good thing was the children who came in to perform on occasion, and also the music that came through the loudspeaker—one of the nurses had set up a system where they could play the gramophone from the front office. The music could be heard all over the hospital, lots of wonderful victory songs. Even still, the men moaned and shouted for their sweethearts. Some of them were glad to see me, but a lot of them didn’t recognize my face at first. When I reminded them, they smiled, and one or two of the cheeky ones even blew me a kiss.
Of all the soldiers there was one boy I remember best—Nurmahammed, from Chelyabinsk, who had lost his foot to a mine. He was just an ordinary Tatar boy with black hair and high cheekbones and wide eyes. He hobbled in on crutches made from tree branches. We sprayed him down, and I unwrapped the bandages from around the top of his stump. He was bad with the parasites, so I had Nuriya take good care of him. She swabbed the wound well while I got the bath ready. I checked the water temperature with my wrist, and then three of us supported him, walked him across to the bath. He was silent the whole time. I washed him down, and finally he said, Thank you.
When he was clean and dressed in hospital pajamas he gave me a strange look and began to tell me all about his mother’s vegetable patch, how she spread chicken manure to make the carrots grow, how they were the most wonderful carrots a person could want in his life, how he missed those carrots more than anything else.
In my lunch box I had some leftover martsovka. Nurmahammed put his face to the food, smiled up at me, kept smiling while he ate, his head rising up from the plate as though making sure I was still there.
I decided to go up to the hospital with Nurmahammed. We got on the back of a horse wagon, the animals clopping their way forward.
All sorts of things were going on that day because of the celebrations—a special food truck had pulled up to the hospital kitchens, red flags were flying from the windows, two commissars had arrived to pin medals on the soldiers, a man sat on the steps playing a balalaika, and children were walking around in Bashkirian folk-dancing costumes.
“The Song of the Fatherland” came over the loudspeakers, and everyone stood still while we sang it together.
I squeezed Nurmahammed’s hand, and I said: See, everything will be all right.
Yes, he said.
Usually the men were pushed around the hospital in wheelbarrows, but to our pleasant surprise there was a wheelchair for Nurmahammed that day. I helped him with the paperwork and wheeled him along the corridor to his ward. It was noisy in there, all the men shouting under a big cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the soldiers had gotten hold of a huge vat of methylated spirits and they were dipping cups into it, passing them along the bunk beds.
Everyone wore bandages—some of them were wrapped from head to toe—and things had been written on the walls by their beds, names of girlfriends, favorite soccer teams, poems even.
I pushed Nurmahammed on through to D368, halfway down the ward. His was the second of five bunks. He used his one leg to prop himself on the edge of the first bed. I pushed from below, but still he couldn’t heave himself up. Some men came and got their shoulders under Nurmahammed’s weight. He flopped down on the bed without even lifting the sheets, lay there a moment, smiled down at me.
Just then the big troupe of children came into the room. There must have been about twenty of them, all in costumes, green and red, with caps. The youngest was maybe four or five years old. They looked so nice and clean and scrubbed.
A woman in charge made an announcement for silence. For a moment I thought it was my neighbor, but thankfully it wasn’t, this woman was taller, sterner, no gray in her hair. She made a second announcement for quiet, but the soldiers were still roaring and laughing. The woman clapped her hands twice, and the children began dancing. After a few minutes a sort of hush came over the room—a slow wave, like a good thing being whispered through a crowd.
In the spaces between the beds the children performed. They twirled and reeled and went under bridges of arms for a Tatar folk dance. They sank to their knees, and then they rose and shouted and clapped their hands and sank to their knees once more. A tiny girl crossed her arms and kicked. Another child with red hair got embarrassed when his laces came undone. They wore big smiles and their eyes shone; it could have been their birthdays, they were so beautiful.
Just when we all thought they were finished, a small blond boy stepped out of the line. He was about five or six years old. He extended his leg, placed his hands firmly on his hips and hitched his thumbs at his back. He bent his neck slightly forward, stretched his elbows out and began. The soldiers in their beds propped themselves up. Those by the windows shaded their eyes to watch. The boy went to the floor for a squatting dance. We all stood silently watching. The boy grinned. Some soldiers began clapping in rhythm but, just as the dance was about to end, the boy almost fell. His hand slapped the floor and broke the impact. For a moment he looked as if he was about to cry, but he didn’t, he was up once more, his blond hair flopping over his eyes.
When he finished the ward was full of applause. Someone offered the boy a cube of sugar. He blushed and slipped it into the top of his sock, and then he stood around with his hands in his pockets, rolling his shoulders from side to side. The stern woman snapped her fingers, and the troupe of children moved to the next ward. The soldiers began whistling and shouting and, when the troupe was nearly gone, the men lit up their cigarettes and dipped their cups once more into the vat of spirits. The blond boy peered over his shoulder to take another look at the ward.
Just then I heard the sound of a bed creak. I had forgotten about Nurmahammed. He was staring down at his one leg. He moved his lips as if he were eating something, then took a couple of deep breaths and reached down to his stump, ran his hands up and down along where the shinbone used to be. He caught my eye and tried a smile. I smiled back. There was nothing to say. What could I say? I turned away. A couple of soldiers nodded at me as I left.
From the end of the ward I could hear poor Nurmahammed sobbing.
I went back down to the baths. The sun was going down and it had gotten cold, but there were a couple of early stars. A wind whipped at the trees. Some balalaika music sounded from the hospital.
I closed the doors of the greenhouse and kept the lanterns turned off. There was a pile o
f uniforms and some kindling on the ground. I stuffed it all into the stove and fired it up, then filled a pail of water and waited. It took a long time for the water to boil and right there, in the greenhouse, I thought to myself that of all the good things in the world, the best is a hot bath all alone in the darkness.
* * *
He wakes beside his mother in the morning, head tucked by her arm. Already his sister has risen to get water from the well to prepare breakfast.
His mother recently traded two picture frames for a single bar of soap. The soap smelled strange to him at first but now, every morning, when he rises from the bed, Rudik takes the bar from the pocket of his mother’s bathrobe, hauls the scent of it down. There is, he has noticed, no soap in the hospital where he dances. The soldiers smell gruff and worn, and he wonders if his father will have a similar scent when he returns from the war.
His mother combs his hair and takes his clothes from the stove top, where they have been warming. She dresses him. Some of his clothes have been handed down from his sister. His mother has altered a shirt from a blouse—the cuffs lengthened, the collar stiffened with old cardboard—but still it seems ill-fitting to the boy and he squirms when she fastens the buttons.
For breakfast he is allowed the chair while his sister cleans the table around him. He hunches over his cup of milk and a potato left over from the night before. He can feel his stomach tighten as the milk hits the back of his throat, and he eats half the potato in three bites, tucks the rest away in his pocket. In school many of the other children have lunch boxes. With the war over, almost all the fathers have returned, but not his, and he has heard that most of his father’s salary goes to the war effort. Sacrifices must be made, says his mother. But there are times when Rudik wishes he could sit at his school desk, open a lunch box to reveal black bread, meat, vegetables. His mother has told him that hunger will make him strong, but to him, hunger is the high feeling of emptiness when the trains emerge from the forest and the sound bounces across the ice of the Belaya.
