Gone by Nightfall

by Dee Garretson

  I ran to the front to find the nurses crowded around the windows, clutching one another. Blok was at a window by himself. I moved so I could see people running in all directions. I took hold of Galina’s hand. “What’s happening?” I whispered. She didn’t answer.

  The sound of gunfire continued and then the screaming started. As more people left the square, a grim sight emerged. Several bodies lay in the snow: men, women, and even children.

  No one said a word. The horror of it turned to a numb feeling inside me. I knew it was real, but my mind wanted it not to be. I closed my eyes but couldn’t get rid of the scene. I didn’t realize I was crushing Galina’s hand until she made a whimpering sound.

  “Look!” One of the nurses pointed at a building across the square. “There’s the gun.”

  I opened my eyes to see two policemen crouched on the roof of the building and aiming a machine gun down at the square. It looked like they were trying to put more ammunition in, but as they worked on it, a group of men burst out of a door onto the roof and ran toward the gunners. The men all had red armbands on and were dressed as ordinary workmen. The gunner tried to swing the weapon around to aim at them, but the other men were too fast for him.

  Some of them ripped the gun off its stand and then surrounded the two. I thought they were going to drag them off, but then the men picked up both policemen and carried them over to the edge of the building. The policemen struggled.

  “No!” someone gasped.

  The men threw the policemen over. They screamed all the way down.

  I turned away, bile rising in my throat.

  “Get out of my way.” I heard Blok’s voice. It had gone high and shaky. He was trying to get around the nurses to go back toward the kitchen.

  “Coward!” I yelled. “Why are you sneaking out the back? The front door is right there. Let’s see you go out it. Be a brave man and walk around the bodies of children. Let the revolutionaries see you.”

  He rushed over toward me and raised his hand as if he was going to slap me.

  Galina stepped in front of him. “Go,” she ordered, grabbing hold of his wrist.

  He shoved her out of the way and ran toward the kitchen.

  “He won’t be back,” one of the other nurses said. “Now that a revolution has started, the police will pay for what they’ve done.”

  “Look!” someone cried.

  We went back to the windows. Black smoke billowed from the building across the square as the group of men who had been on the roof emerged from the door. The people who had run away when the shooting began flooded back into the square, cheering the men on.

  “They want to make sure the police don’t regroup there,” Galina said. “But that’s not going to be enough.” She pointed to one of the streets that led to the square. Policemen were pulling another machine gun mounted on a wagon toward it. Other policemen were running into the square from all directions, their weapons drawn.

  I spotted Carter and the photographer on the opposite side of the square. Carter stood in plain view, writing in his notebook as if there weren’t bullets flying around. He made a perfect target with his height and his hat. The photographer had had the sense to plant himself behind a parked automobile, though he was still visible as he leaned on the hood. I couldn’t understand why they wanted to be in the middle of such violence. I prayed both men would survive the day.

  More shots sounded, and then we heard sharp thuds against the building. Bits of stone shot in all directions away from us.

  “Get away from the windows!” Galina yelled, grabbing a nurse’s arm and pulling her back.

  “Why are they shooting at us?” someone cried.

  “They’re just shooting in all directions to get people out of the square,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true. Everything was happening too fast.

  When the crowd scattered again, we saw the people who had been hit. The injured tried to crawl away. The dead lay still, but the gunfire continued.

  “There’s someone trying to get inside.” A nurse pointed out the window to the right. I looked out to see a woman dragging herself across the snow toward the hospital, blood staining the snow behind her.

  Galina and I both headed toward the door.

  I hadn’t realized Tanya had come in from the pantry until I heard her voice. “Galina, no! You can’t go out there,” she cried. “You’ll be cut down too. They don’t care who you are.”

  “It’s only a few feet,” Galina said. “Lottie and I are quick. We can get out and get her back inside fast as can be.” She went over to the armoire where we kept some of the coats and grabbed two, tossing one to me. “Put this on and stay low.”

  The woman was unconscious by the time we reached her. We tried dragging her by her arms but she was too heavy. “Help!” Galina yelled as two men ran by us. They ignored her. The gunfire continued. I tried to shut out the noise.

  “Get her feet!” I shouted. “Maybe it will be easier to move her that way.”

  “I can help,” a voice said. It sounded like Dmitri, but I didn’t understand why he’d be here. I looked up and saw it was really him.

  Between the three of us we managed to get her inside, and once we had the door shut behind us, the other nurses took over.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Dmitri. The expression on his face was so grim, I felt sick. Something had to be very wrong. “Is my stepfather ill?”

  He motioned for me to move away from the others. “It’s not the general. It’s Stepan. He’s missing. He was very upset because he overheard Archer talking about how we were all going to be slaughtered by the end of the day. I tried to convince him it wasn’t true, but he wanted to go out and see what was really happening.”

  “How could you let him leave?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to get my own coat.

  Dmitri followed me. “Wait, Charlotte. I didn’t know he was going to leave. He said he wanted to go to his room. It was only later when Hap went looking for him that we realized he was gone.”

  “What did Osip say? Surely he wouldn’t let him leave.”

  “Osip didn’t see him, but Hap said his coat is gone too. No one saw him leave.”

  I felt like my breath was being squeezed out of me. Stepan was too young to be out on the streets in all the chaos.

  “I came here because I thought you might know where he would go,” Dmitri said.

  I heard gunfire again, and then one of the windows shattered, bits of glass flying everywhere. Dmitri reached for me but I was already on the floor. More bullets hit the outside of the building.

  He flattened himself beside me.

  “We have to move the patients. They could be hit,” I said as I got to my knees and crawled toward the ward. I should have been terrified, but a calm had settled over me. I knew I had to stay focused to help the patients and find Stepan.

  Dmitri followed me. The other nurses were already there. We moved the two patients and their babies to a different room, one at the back of the house on the second floor.

  When everyone was settled, I spent a few minutes talking to Galina and explained what had happened. “It’s all right,” she said. “You go. We can manage. Be careful.”

  I went back to Dmitri. “Stepan doesn’t go off by himself. Did you ask Hap and Miles if they had any ideas?”

  “Yes, they didn’t have a clue. In fact, they were both astounded he’d go out by himself.”

  I remembered about the train and the plans for the boys to leave town. With everything that had happened, I’d completely forgotten the whole reason I’d come to the hospital. “Are Miles and Hap still home?”

  “Yes, the trains have been shut down today.”

  At least they were safe for the moment. “We can go out the back,” I said.

  While I was watching Dmitri put on his gloves, I realized he didn’t have his cane with him. He hadn’t had it at all, and he’d been moving around much better, though he was still limping. The nurse in me worried he shou
ld still have it in case he needed it.

  “We need a plan before we leave the building,” he said. “What about your friends who own the theater? Would he go to the Tamms?”

  “I don’t think so. He hasn’t been there as much as the older boys.” He’d always been jealous that Hap and Miles wanted to go there without him.

  “Well, what about his friends? Would he go to one of their houses?”

  I tried to think of where he might be and what friends he would visit until an awful realization hit me: Stepan didn’t have any friends. Even though he would have been old enough to start school the year before, we’d kept him home because he’d been so shaken by my mother’s death. He was so quiet, so overshadowed by the other boys, I hadn’t even considered that none of us had made an effort to arrange for him to meet other boys his age.

  “I can’t think of anyone’s house he’d go to,” I said. “He may just be out in the crowds.”

  “All right. We’ll find him.” I heard the determination in Dmitri’s words, but I knew it was going to be a nearly impossible task. It would be dark soon. The winter days were short, and we’d have a much harder time when night fell.

  I heard Tanya scream, and then came the sound of a man shouting at her. I recognized the voice.

  Blok.

  He’d come back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DMITRI AND I ran to the kitchen. Dmitri was first, and when he reached it, he stopped so suddenly I ran into him. It wasn’t just Blok. The room was filled with policemen. Tanya huddled in one corner, weeping.

  “Get out of here!” I screamed. Pure rage welled up in me. I tried to shove one toward the door but he pushed me away without even looking at me. The rest ignored me, and I realized they were all drenched with sweat and breathing heavily.

  “Up to the roof!” one of them shouted to the others. Two of them carried a machine gun.

  I ran to block the entrance to the back stairs. “This is a hospital! We have patients here.”

  Another one shoved me out of the way. Dmitri took hold of me.

  “Stop!” Dmitri said to the men. “You don’t have authorization to take over this building.”

  “We don’t have time for authorization. There’s a mob out there.” He motioned to Dmitri’s uniform. “You should be out with your regiment helping us, but if you’d rather hide here with your girlfriend, just stay out of our way.”

  He spat on the floor, and then some of the men moved up the stairs. Two ran toward the front of the building and another took up a position at the back door with his gun raised. I wanted to throw pots and pans at them or do something, anything, but Dmitri wouldn’t let go of me.

  “No! No!” I couldn’t stop yelling.

  “Charlotte, it won’t do any good. There are too many of them,” Tanya said.

  I heard more glass shattering at the front of the house.

  Galina ran in. “There are people in front of the house throwing rocks and trying to open the door,” she yelled. She saw the policeman at the back door and her eyes went wide.

  “They know the police are in here,” Dmitri said. “They’re trying to get at them.”

  The policeman at the back door swore. “They’re not getting me!” he cried.

  “Charlotte, one of them has a torch,” Galina whispered.

  Horror rose in me, and my throat tightened so much I had a hard time getting the words out. “They’re going to try to burn the building down to get to the police. We have to get the patients out of here.” I tried to block out the image of the hospital in flames.

  Galina hesitated for only a few seconds. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” Her voice was back to its normal tone, one that sounded like a nurse. “We’ll split the nurses up so that someone is with each mother and baby while we take them to their homes. The woman caught in the gunfire can go with one of us until it’s safe to get her to her own home.”

  I’d already forgotten about the woman we’d brought in. “How is she?”

  “She’s all right. She can walk, at least. One bullet went right through her arm. Another grazed her face, which was why there was so much blood, but it’s just a minor injury.”

  I looked over at Dmitri. I could see the strain on his face. He nodded.

  As soon as we told the other nurses, they began to help the patients get dressed. Galina directed everything, reassuring the women everything would be all right.

  I didn’t tell the policeman’s wife that her husband was in the building or about the attacks on the police.

  “Take me to my sister’s, please,” one of the other women said. “It’s closer and she’ll be there with my children.” A sob escaped her. She was a frail woman named Lena and I feared she’d break down, but she clamped her mouth shut and pulled on a coat a nurse gave her.

  I could only imagine how much fear the patients felt, still weak and with fragile newborns to protect.

  I heard more sounds of glass shattering, but we acted as if we hadn’t heard. All the nurses were calm, and I knew that the others had blocked out the chaos swirling around us because we had a job to do. It was one of the first things I had learned in nursing training: to focus on the task at hand, ignoring everything else.

  I didn’t notice that Dmitri had left the room until I glanced over to see him coming back in when we were almost ready to go. He made a motion with his head like he wanted Galina and me to go out in the hall.

  “The back door is still clear,” he said. “The policeman scared off people trying to come in that way. I think they are concentrating on getting in the front because there are more windows. Once we’re outside, no one will hurt a group of women with nurses as long as they realize who you are. I’ve told the policeman what we are doing so he won’t stand in our way.”

  “All right. We’re almost ready,” Galina said. “Charlotte, you and your friend take Lena Arkhipova and her baby to her sister’s house. It will be safe for you to leave her there so you can look for your little brother. We’ll take the others to their homes and stay with them as long as necessary.”

  The worst part was going down the stairs. When one of the policemen fired his gun through the broken window and someone outside screamed, Lena Arkhipova nearly collapsed. Dmitri carried her the rest of the way down. I had her baby, a little girl who was sleeping through it all. The other babies were all crying.

  “Hurry,” Galina said to the other women. “This way. Don’t look. We’re going out the back.”

  The back courtyard was empty. Galina went first. Lena Arkhipova was in such a state that Dmitri continued to carry her. We split up at the street, Dmitri and me going one way with Lena Arkhipova and her baby, the others going in the opposite direction.

  “Godspeed,” Galina said to me. I nodded my head, not able to find any words.

  “Ready?” Dmitri asked me.

  “Ready,” I said. The sooner we got the woman and baby to safety, the sooner I could look for Stepan.

  We skirted the edge of the building until we were close to the front and then turned to go around the square. It was full of people shouting, but no one paid attention to us. Dmitri was still carrying the patient, and he was struggling, limping a little.

  “Wait,” I said. I touched the woman’s face. “Lena, do you think you can walk? We can get to your sister’s more quickly if you can.”

  She nodded, and Dmitri set her on her feet, keeping an arm around her for support. As we walked away, I looked back to see that the front door of the hospital had shattered. A crowd surged into the building through the door and the broken windows. There were shots but they didn’t stop. The man with the torch went inside.

  All my mother’s work, everyone’s work—Dr. Rushailo’s, Galina’s, the other nurses’, Tanya’s—it would be all gone.

  “There won’t be anything left, will there?” I murmured.

  “I don’t know,” Dmitri said. “Don’t think about that now.”

  The baby began to cry. I hugged her to me. Focus on the task
at hand.

  It was only a few blocks to the sister’s house. We got them settled in and tried reassuring everyone they’d be safe if they stayed inside. I finally had to tell them I needed to look for my little brother so they would let us leave.

  When we got back outside, we were surrounded by soldiers. There were hundreds more than there had been even a few hours earlier.

  “I didn’t know there were that many troops in the city.” I didn’t understand why the policemen were the ones firing on the crowds while the soldiers didn’t seem to know what to do.

  “Better follow behind me,” Dmitri said. “Fourteen thousand Cossack troops were brought in overnight to bolster the army reserves already here. The authorities knew there was going to be trouble and the guard units stationed here wouldn’t be able to handle it. Most of the troops already in the city don’t even want to be soldiers. They’re just reservists. I don’t know if any of them will fire on our own people. I hope not.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “My friends in the regiment have told me.” He shouldered his way through a clump of soldiers. I stuck close behind.

  As we walked, I peered into the face of every small boy we passed. There were too many who had on coats similar to what Stepan wore, and since they were all bundled up with hats and scarves, it was nearly impossible to tell them apart unless I got close enough.

  An image of Stepan popped into my head. I remembered his serious little face the first day we’d barreled into the house and his life. He’d just turned three. His mother, Papa’s second wife, had died when he was a baby, so he’d been brought up by a very old nanny. I remembered how in those first days he’d go hide in the attic at times, overwhelmed by the boys shouting and running up and down the halls when they weren’t sliding down the banisters.

  Shouts came from a nearby street, and then the sound of a machine gun. We flattened ourselves against the nearest building. An automobile sped by, packed full of men. One was even lying on the running board beneath the doors, shooting off the machine gun he held.