The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  ‘Good luck today, my child. We shall have dinner ready when you get back tonight.’

  She laughed and said:

  ‘Uncle Nikki, I think you are spoiling me by being so nice to me. Goodbye.’

  Then she left, but the warmth stayed with her all morning, even through the operation to remove two gangrenous fingers from a gunner, who had not noticed they were frostbitten until it was too late. As she stood beside the Surgeon Major, holding the chipped enamel kidney bowl to receive the stinking, ruined fingers, she was filled with sympathy for the gunner, but there was none of the sick revulsion she normally felt during such operations. For the first time, she could see the blood and the mutilation for the healing measures that they were, and feel admiration for the quick deftness of the doctor instead of disgust at what he was doing to the unconscious body on the table.

  When it was over she stripped off her theatre gown and gloves, deeply thankful that it was her turn to sit with the patient until he regained consciousness instead of forcing herself through the disgusting routines of cleaning the operating table, emptying the blood and swabs and sterilising the instruments. He groaned and cried as he came up out of the anaesthetic, and swore at her for the pain in his hand as she restrained his automatic movement to pull off the bandages.

  ‘Leave me alone, you bitch,’ he said. ‘It fucking hurts.’

  ‘I know it hurts, Corporal Jones. You have had an operation,’ she said, trying to keep calm and telling herself that most post-operative patients said such things before they knew fully where they were. But she was unable to help thinking: are all men such beasts underneath the surface? She kept one cool hand on his undamaged arm, speaking to him as gently as she could until the fog in his mind dissipated. When it was safe to leave him, she got up from the hard chair at his bedside and went about the rest of her duties, returning every twenty minutes or so to make sure that he was still sleeping normally and that there was no blood seeping through the bandages.

  Towards the middle of the afternoon he woke clear-headed and as she stared down at him she saw him blush. Then he said, in as rough an accent as she had ever heard:

  ‘Was it you I was swearing at, Miss?’

  ‘Yes, Corporal Jones, it was. But you mustn’t mind; a lot of patients do talk like that before they are properly conscious. They can’t help it.’

  ‘Well, I’m f—— very sorry, Miss.’

  ‘That’s all right, Corporal. Now, would you like something to drink? You’re probably rather thirsty after the ether.’

  Jones ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth and found it was as dry as the bottom of a parrot’s cage. But his mind had returned to him, and she was a lady, and so he just said:

  ‘That’d be nice, Miss. I could do with a cuppa.’

  She smiled and went away, her ugly grey skirts swirling and her flat shoes squeaking on the polished floor. He wondered how she came to be there, an English lady like that, so kind and pretty, in the middle of this benighted arctic country in which he had found himself fighting. Jones had missed the main war, being classified C3 because of his miserable physique and poor lungs – he had seen so many of the chaps from his town march off in their pals’ brigade to fight and die gloriously for their country. He had always felt bad about that; it wasn’t right somehow. And so when he’d heard they were recruiting for another bit of the war when your physical state didn’t matter, he’d gone straight off and joined up. It hadn’t been much fun, of course, but then it wasn’t the proper war and being stuck in a blockhouse in the middle of a forest all winter would be boring. He’d fired a few shots, and he’d heard the Bolo guns, but he’d never seen one of them and none of his comrades had been wounded. This frostbite was just stupid, and it’d be tough getting a job with only one usable hand. But he’d done his bit for England like the other boys, and he was proud of that.

  When the nurse came back with his tea, she had to help him drink it, but he felt better after it. She took the cup away when it was empty and then she sat down again on the old wooden chair by his bed and he could see how tired she was.

  ‘Can I do anything else for you, Corporal Jones?’ she asked in her quiet voice.

  He was still ashamed to have sworn at her like he had, and he didn’t want to make her do anything else for him. Anyway, it wasn’t right for a lady like her to be waiting on someone like him. But he thought it would do her good to sit for a bit, and so he said:

  ‘Would you … I mean would you mind reading to me a bit?’

  She looked quickly round the ward, as though checking that there was no one who needed anything more urgent, and then, full of relief that he wanted nothing that would make her touch him, she said:

  ‘Of course I will, Corporal; though if the doctor calls for me, I’ll have to stop. What would you like?’

  ‘I’ve a book of poetry in my kit, Miss. There’s a letter marking the one I like best. Would you read that one?’

  She found the book from his pack and opened it, putting the letter carefully away in the outside pocket, and she started to read. He shut his eyes as the stirring words flowed over him, but as her voice faltered a bit he opened them again to look at her. Then he saw that she wasn’t reading at all; she was speaking from memory and there were tears in her brown eyes.

  ‘The sand of the desert is sodden red –

  Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

  The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,

  And the regiment blind with dust and smoke,

  The river of death has brimmed his banks,

  And England’s far, and Honour a name,

  But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks:

  “Play up! play up! and play the game!”’

  Jones put out his good hand to take the stained, tattered edition of Henry Newbolt’s poems from her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

  Evelyn shook her head and brushed the tears out of her eyes with the back of a hand that trembled.

  ‘That’s all right, Corporal,’ she said, betraying none of the emotion that was boiling beneath her calm demeanour. ‘But I’ll have to go now. There’s the night nurse arriving. She’ll look after you. She doesn’t speak much English, but I’ll explain to her about your hand and you’ll probably be able to show her anything you need. If not, call one of the doctors if you have to.’

  ‘All right, Miss. G’night. And thanks ever so.’

  She left him, flinging her bloody, soiled apron into the laundry room as she walked past it. Then she made her report to the doctor in charge, briefed the night nurse in her slow Russian and walked briskly home, the anger beginning to show in her face now that she did not have to keep it hidden from the patients.

  Bob Adamson seemed to be waiting for her when she shut the big front door, and he made her sit down by the stove before she went to change.

  ‘Nick says you’re not to dream of going to the kitchen tonight. He wants you to rest, then change and eat your dinner in peace.’

  She acknowledged the instruction with a rueful relaxation of her angry eyes and sat gratefully down on the cushioned chair in the warmth. Bob pulled up another chair and sat opposite, looking at her bleak face in concern.

  ‘What’s up? This is more than just exhaustion. Did something happen at the hospital?’

  She nodded and then, taking a deep breath, astonished him by saying:

  ‘Mr Adamson, do you remember that day in Petrograd when you asked me about Johnnie, about what he was like, I mean?’

  Remembering with humiliating vividness the sarcasm with which he had said, ‘So, tell me, Miss Markham, what was he like, this hero of yours?’ and bitterly ashamed of the cruelty that had made him sneer when she had answered, ‘He was prepared to die for his country. What more could you possibly need to know?’, he said:

  ‘I’m sorry to say that I do.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t be sorry, truly. It’s I who … I’ve only just realised
what I was doing then.’ She lifted her face and looked at him with an earnestness that he had never seen in her before.

  ‘You see, I believed it all then. The idea that he was wounded, gassed perhaps, with his memory gone or even his mind, was terrible. Of course it was. It still is. But then I didn’t know. You see I thought it was all true.’ She stopped, unable to pick words from the seething cauldron that seemed to have replaced her brain.

  ‘What was true?’ asked Bob, wanting to take her hands, but not daring to make any move that might make her retreat into the freezing superiority she had used so often for protection. And then in an instant he saw it and as gently as possible said: “‘Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”?’

  ‘Yes. Just that. I don’t know how I could have been so, so stupid.’ Her head had drooped again and her eyes gazed at the floor. Once again, but with what different emotions pounding through him, Bob Adamson put his hand under her chin and forced her to look at him.

  ‘What happened to you today, Evelyn? I wish you didn’t have to deal with those wounds and operations …’

  She instinctively moved away from the touch of his hands and said urgently:

  ‘No, no it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything medical. It was a corporal, a pathetic, deluded man who has lost two fingers from gangrenous frostbite. He wanted to be a hero, and he thinks it’s a good thing to be. He asked me to read Vitaï Lampada to him.’ Her voice dropped and he had to listen hard to hear her words. ‘I’d learned it with my brothers in the schoolroom at home, and I used to thrill to it, too. I didn’t know till now what wicked, wicked words they are to teach the ignorant.’

  He was at a loss; he didn’t know what she was talking about. He repeated, ‘Vitaï Lampada?’

  ‘Don’t you know it? You should, for it shows that the things you used to say to me are right. I don’t know why I didn’t understand before.’

  ‘Tell me.’ And so she recited the whole rhythmic, dangerous poem to him.

  At some of it he was hard put not to laugh, for the risible childishness of it was astonishingly funny. But the things she had seen were not remotely amusing, and the agony she was feeling was real. He watched her as she fought her way through all its verses. Then to his dismay she said:

  ‘And Johnnie and all the others were brought up to believe it and so they went into that murderous hell to die for a false ideal. Oh, dear God, Johnnie.’

  His hand went out towards her, but when he saw her lean away from it and press herself into the chair back, he knew she would not be able to accept the comfort he suddenly ached to give her. He went as quietly and quickly as he could to find Nikolai for her.

  Chapter Twelve

  The trickle of wounded that had been bad enough began to swell by the rime they were halfway through January. For a while the significance of the daily increasing number of patients escaped Evelyn, but by 21 January she understood. After a harrowing day during which she had had to sit by a young American boy dying from a head wound, she walked home watching the flashes of the guns to the west and listening to the roar and crash of explosions that seemed very near in the still, cold air.

  ‘You always know what’s happening: where is the battle?’ she asked Bob as soon as she saw him.

  Looking at her thin, anxious face, which seemed somehow stripped these days, he was tempted for the first time in his life to lie and protect her from the truth. But his impulse died in the face of her searching eyes.

  ‘Ust-Padenga, yesterday. But they’ve evacuated the village, and fallen back on Matveevskaya today.’

  ‘Ten, no, eleven miles away? Three or four hours march from here?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said shortly, wondering what she would say next and how he could deal with her if she fainted or wept. She surprised him by laughing, but there was no joy in the sound.

  ‘Three years ago – it seems a lifetime – I fought my parents to make them allow me to go to Flanders because I wanted to be in on the war. I wanted to find Johnnie and share what he and Tony were having to put up with. It wasn’t safe or suitable, they said, and they sent me to Russia. I suppose I deserve whatever comes tomorrow.’

  ‘Listen, Evelyn: whatever I’ve said about your countrymen, and I know I’ve said a lot that hurt you, I know that they won’t just leave this place to be wiped out.’

  ‘What can they do? You’ve said yourself that there are absurdly few of them here, and there are thousands and thousands of Bolos. Some of the men in the hospital were saying that Trotsky himself is somewhere around here, egging them on.’

  Again he was surprised to find that he wanted to lie to her, but before he could open his mouth she said, in a very different voice:

  ‘Mr Adamson…’

  ‘Evelyn, must you? At such a time, couldn’t you call me Bob – or even Robert?’

  She looked surprised, but obediently rephrased the question she wanted to ask him:

  ‘Robert, if they go, what will happen to people like Uncle Nikki?’

  His face contracted as though he was in pain, and he forgot that he wanted to protect her.

  ‘I know,’ he said meaninglessly. ‘I asked him when the attack on Ust-Padenga forced the retreat whether he would join an evacuation from here.’

  ‘And he said that he was a Russian,’ came the deep, slow, beautiful voice that Evelyn loved. She turned and although she stood still, he felt almost as though she had run towards him.

  ‘Uncle Nikki, you will come,’ she burst out. ‘You must.’

  He shook his big, shaggy head and said again:

  ‘Evelyn my child, I am a Russian. This is my country. To leave with an invading army on the retreat? How could I?’

  In that moment she understood why Natalia Petrovna had taken refuge in the fantasy of illness when Piotr had torn himself out of her family. She wished that she could do the same, or even succumb to the dizzying faintness that hovered somewhere at the edges of her mind, but with Nikolai’s steady dark eyes on her own she had to face the truth. She was going to lose him. Whatever happened in the next few days, he was going to stay to face the wrath of the Bolsheviki when they eventually threw her people out of their country. They would not know that Nikolai had done nothing to help the invaders; but they would find out that he had sheltered English and Americans and fugitives from Petrograd in his house. His agony in Siberia might not save him. The injustice of it, the cruelty of fate, held her speechless.

  Nikolai came towards her and said slowly, calmly:

  ‘Child, it may not happen like that. But even if it does, it will be better for me than perpetual exile. I have spent long enough barred from my home.’

  ‘But will they understand that you have been on their side? It’s not your fault that the English came to your home. Can you trust them?’

  His smile cut through her as she saw in it all the knowledge and pity that had made him.

  ‘No one can be trusted who is pushed to the limits of endurance.’

  Evelyn turned away. She had too much respect for him to beg and plead and try to persuade him with threats of what might come. Whatever he decided would be the product of his past and his reason. She could never change that; and for one, short, comforting moment she knew that she would not want to.

  But the knowledge of what she would be losing when she lost Nikolai made it almost impossible for her to leave his side the following morning to go to the hospital. She felt as though in tearing herself from him, she would leave part of the tissue of her own self indissolubly glued to him. It seemed that he understood that, as he had understood everything about her, and said as she got up from the breakfast table:

  ‘Evelyn, I have to talk to the colonel this morning; I’ll walk with you to the hospital. Bob, will you look after things till I get back?’

  ‘Of course, Nick. But can’t I go to the barracks for you? The colonel will be besieged with people of all kinds; you may have to wait God knows how long before he’ll be able to see you. Let me go.’

 
Evelyn was beyond understanding anything except that she might lose some precious time with Nikolai, and she looked angrily at the American. He did not notice, but Nikolai shook his head.

  ‘Thank you, Bob, but I have to go myself. I must sort some things out with him.’

  There was so much Evelyn wanted to say to him as they walked down the embankment, past the great convent towards the hospital and the barracks, that she did not know how to start, and they had almost reached the nurses’entrance before she managed to say:

  ‘Nikolai Alexandrovitch, you have given me so much since we got to Shenkursk that if I were to live in your house for the rest of my life I should not be able to repay you. And now we have only a few days left.’

  ‘Dear Evelyn, I have done nothing except to try to show you a little of yourself. All I want from you is your promise…’ He paused, his very articulateness getting in the way of the simplicity he needed.

  ‘Yes, Uncle Nikki? I would promise you anything.’

  He stopped and stood before her, his familiar figure silhouetted against the ornamented whiteness of the convent.

  ‘Child, I am afraid for you. You are a long way down the road, but there is further yet to go before you reach safety. And as you go you will find that you will meet many people who have not set off on their own journeys, who will recognise what you have done and try to batten on to you. When that happens it will be hard for you to keep on.’ He looked at her as she stood with her back to the faint lightening in the east and said with a smile that robbed his words of some of their vague menace: ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’

  Evelyn shook her head, but she said with the confidence of utter certainty:

  ‘But I won’t forget the words; and when whatever it is happens, I will try to stand firm for you, Nikolai Alexandrovitch.’

  He bent to kiss her cheek, oblivious of the interested passers-by, and sent her off to her day’s work.