Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  Already four months had passed since the war had ended for the rest of the world. Four months during which she’d thought, every day, that she’d be leaving North Russia. A bell boomed from the cathedral and caused the pony, who had a particularly thick mane and lovely eyes, to look toward the blue domes. Still the driver let the reins lie slack. Eudora crossed the courtyard and waved, clicking her tongue softly against her teeth until the pony turned between the pillars and brought the sleigh to a stop at her feet. Beneath the usual mountain of garments—knitted vest over olive drab blouse under leather tunic beneath sheepskin-lined overcoat, topped with a thick balaclava helmet crowned in turn by a fur-lined white hat—she could barely see the man. His eyes were swollen, perhaps from failing to use the goggles pushed carelessly up on his hat. His gigantic mittens hung below his armpits from a white twill harness shaped like an A, which made him look like a massive child labeled for retrieval at a rail depot: A for what he was, an American soldier, or for Archangel province, where he, along with the other five thousand members of his regiment, had been sent. She touched his knee.

  “What?” he said, waking instantly.

  “It’s all right,” she said. The pony moved its lips and teeth, obviously hungry, and Eudora felt in her pockets for the apple she’d saved. Instantly the pony took it from her hand, chewing while the driver turned his head from side to side. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “American Headquarters,” he said. “Somehow I got turned around.” His chunky nose was frostbitten at the tip, above a frozen mustache and raw lips. Undamaged, he would have been handsome. “This”—he gestured sharply toward the bundle beside him—“belongs to them.”

  “Down the block,” she said, pointing toward the big pink building. She stepped closer to the sleigh and the bundle, which was six feet long, sunk deep in the hay, and wrapped in Army blankets blotched at one end. “The hospital’s right here, though,” she added. “Which you seem to need more than Headquarters. What is …?”

  “Havlicek,” he said. He peeled back a blanket corner, allowing her a brief glimpse. “Four days dead, a hundred miles east of here. I’ve been driving ever since.”

  “You couldn’t find an ambulance sleigh? Or a convoy?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said, looking her over. “And you’re too young to be here asking me questions. You’re a nurse?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “Not exactly,” she said. “But I work here, my name’s Eudora MacEachern. And I’m twenty-two, not that it’s your business. I’ll get some men to help you with your friend.”

  He picked up the reins. “Let them figure it out at Headquarters,” he said harshly. “Since they did it.” The pony began to move again, turning the sleigh in a wide arc.

  STORIES ARRIVED AT Archangel in disjointed shards, incomplete, which Eudora like everyone else plucked from the river of gossip. Her sources were Red Cross workers and engineers, ambulance drivers and, most of all, the wounded men who passed through her X-ray room on their way to surgery. Each knew painfully well what had happened right around him, but otherwise—they had no way to grasp the whole disorganized campaign. It was the opposite of France, one officer told her. No real fronts, no lines of battle, thousands of square miles of tundra and swamp and forest dotted by tiny outposts where clumps of men slept in schoolrooms or in the homes of Russian peasants. The wounded soldiers came to her in threes and fours, packed into the boxy ambulance sleighs like eggs in excelsior, or shipped along the rivers and railroad tracks that, on the map in the hospital lounge, showed as red lines splayed like bloody fingers. The fingertips were cut off from each other, able to communicate only with Headquarters, back at the palm. The palm gave orders; sometimes the palm remembered to send supplies. The red lines told her how long the men had traveled back to the palm, hence how much time a bullet or a fragment of shell or bone had had to shift and dig through flesh.

  In the dark of her X-ray room, while she waited for her eyes to adjust, the soldiers told her about fighting along a river resembling the lower Mississippi, tundra oozing edgelessly into freezing water, one step on solid ground followed by another that plunged them over their heads. They talked about the lack of supplies and the lack of guns and the lack of ammunition, all piled uselessly here in the city of Archangel; about the British officer who in his panic, and with a quart of whisky in his hand, ordered the shelling of a bridge occupied by their own troops; about the French troops that refused to fight and the Allied planes that mistakenly bombed them and the medical supplies mistakenly left behind. In the dark one soldier told her, weeping, that he’d amputated another’s leg with a pocketknife.

  Mostly her soldiers were new recruits from Wisconsin and Michigan: boys who’d been drafted last June, trained for a few weeks, and then sent across the ocean. They’d all been expecting to go to France. In England, where they disembarked, they were issued greatcoats, mittens, hats, boots designed by the explorer Shackleton, and rifles designed for the Imperial Russian Army. Then they were shipped toward the Arctic Circle to fight against Russians, with whom they were not at war. Some succumbed to the influenza that swept the transports before reaching Archangel, while more were felled after landing. The soldiers still talked about those horrible weeks before the American hospital opened, when the Russian and British-run hospitals had overflowed and the sick had been crowded into barracks and docked barges.

  That part she knew for herself. She’d changed beds and emptied bedpans and sponged soldiers with cool water, simple tasks mastered during her brief training as a nurse’s aide. Only after the first battles against the Bolsheviks had she begun to use the skills she’d picked up in France, which had nothing to do with her official training but were what had sent her to a place even colder and snowier than her home in the northern Adirondacks. In the dark, as she worked with the X-ray apparatus to locate the objects that had pierced her soldiers, they asked: What are we doing here?Instead of answers, they got pamphlets and proclamations, which she got too, all purporting to explain the goals of the Allied Intervention. Something about forming a barrier inside which the Russians could reorganize themselves. Something about teaching them, by example and instruction, how to rebuild an army and distribute food.

  But she knew perfectly well, as did her soldiers, that the Russian army had split into factions, fighting on opposite sides of a civil war in which the Allies seemed to have chosen a side. The British had claimed that the Bolshevik government was in the hands of the Germans, thus that by fighting the Bolsheviks they were diverting German troops from France. And that this made them guests, not invaders, as the revolutionaries falsely claimed.

  Eudora’s soldiers, serving unhappily under British officers, following British orders and eating British rations, didn’t see it that way. They saw chaos, confusion, peasants who hated them for invading their homes, troops on guard duty in Archangel living high while they starved and froze in the forest. They saw Bolshevik soldiers—Bolos, they called them—who seemed to be fighting with a purpose, and who left, on the snowy forest trails, eloquent pamphlets written in French and English and Russian, pointing out that the Allied soldiers were fighting for the rich, against the working people of Russia. Come over to our lines, which are your lines! they wrote. We are your comrades, friends in the fight against the unprincipled capitalistic class.

  Some first learned about the Armistice from a Bolo armed with a loudspeaker, perched on the riverbank opposite their position and orating in perfect English, under a crescent moon, about the end of this unjust war, which had slaughtered the poor to fatten the rich. And after that, they waited, as did Eudora, for someone from American Headquarters to explain why they were still here. Instead they got another proclamation, which appeared on a wall in the hospital lounge and explained that now they were fighting Bolshevism, which was the same as anarchy, which was destroying Russia. They were here not to conquer Russia but to help her. When order is restored here, we shall clear out. But only when we have attained o
ur object, and that is the restoration of Russia. Which object, in the eyes of soldiers, never would be attained; which meant they would never leave; which for some few meant that they had to shoot themselves.

  That’s what had happened, the rumors claimed, with the frozen soldier wrapped in blankets and bundled in that sleigh. Stories spread from Headquarters down through the barracks at Smolny, across the ice-locked river to the supply depot at Bakaritza, finally circling back to the receiving hospital. Eudora learned from these that the driver was one Private Boyd, a member of the ambulance company which, like the medical detachment, had been broken into small squads and attached to the soldiers scattered across the province.

  Around the first of March, she heard, the platoons stationed at a tiny village near the easternmost front had been ordered back to Archangel, with the understanding that after a few weeks’ rest they’d be sent to a place south of the city where the fighting had recently grown fierce. Boyd and an infantryman, Havlicek, had been held back from the others, ordered to detour ten miles off the route and deliver supplies to a village where a few men were guarding a telephone line. They’d unloaded cigarettes, canned margarine, tea, and tinned beef and then settled in for the night: Havlicek in the back corner of one peasant’s house, Boyd near the stove in another, where two other soldiers were already billeted. In the morning, Boyd had woken to the sound of a shot and then a woman wailing from the doorway across the street. Inside, Havlicek lay in the corner, his revolver in his hand, the top of his head blown off and the walls sprayed with blood.

  SO, AT ANY rate, went the first version of the story’s first fragment, which seemed to have traveled by way of one of the soldiers billeted with Boyd. At a Red Cross dance two days later, Eudora heard that the woman had been seen frantically brushing at the air with a broom, sweeping Havlicek’s spirit from her house before he could settle in and torment her family. She tried to envision the woman, and then the house as described: peeled logs, sealed double windows, a grandmother sleeping on top of the tile stove, chickens and pigs in the corner, and outside, below the porch railing, a tower of frozen human shit. Had she gotten that right? Every day she was more aware of how little she knew about the world beyond the city, and of how the men at the front felt about the easy life led by the soldiers posted here.

  This dance, for instance—a dance! Hundreds of people crammed into a big, warm, handsome room on the second floor of the old Technical Institute, occupations and nationalities as evenly represented as if a giant hand had reached down and gathered samples from across the city. Beyond the windows snow fell, goats wandered the streets, and the frozen river, framed by the pillars on the balcony, gleamed like radium, but in here, portraits of Imperial Army officers in sky blue breeches stared out from gilded frames. Outside people were starving and selling their silverware, their services, themselves, but in here doughboys and Tommies danced with Russian nurses and ward maids, Cossacks in tall gray hats chatted with Serbian soldiers, the six members of the self-appointed Armenian military mission admired each other’s epaulettes and polished scimitars. Supply officers made surreptitious deals involving cigarettes while the young editors of the weekly news sheet discussed whether to print the handwritten resolution—an ultimatum, one said; the beginnings of a mutiny, another suggested—drawn up by a handful of doughboys and circulated at one of the fronts. We the undersigned, it began, firmly resolve that we demand relief not later than March 15th, 1919, and after this date we positively refuse to advance on Bolo lines including patrols.

  Eudora, pushed past by a wave of dancers, missed the rest of that discussion. She would have given a great deal to be back in her room, reading quietly; she’d refused the first invitation here, balking until the two Red Cross nurses crushed her resistance. There were nine American women in all of Archangel, they reminded her. Nine, of which she was one; and really only eight because the consul’s wife was too sick to come; and how were the soldiers supposed to enjoy themselves if the women refused to do their part? And so here she was, her mouth shaped in a stiff smile, nodding in time to the cheerful sawings of the regimental orchestra.

  Food beckoned from the crowded tables, whisky and vodka slopped from glasses. In a corner a middle-aged woman who spoke six languages and had once run an academy was soliciting new recruits for her conversational Russian class. Two YMCA men, glaring disapprovingly at the British Headquarters staff getting drunk on good Scotch whisky, shared the latest gossip about the sergeant who, after stealing enormous quantities of sugar from the American depot, had been caught bartering it for fur and jewels and, disgraced, had shot himself. Near the spread of cakes and cookies, the major despised by everyone was holding forth about the court-martials he organized with such relish. “Not just the murderers,” he said, slicing the air as Eudora, impelled by the nurses’ words, made her way dutifully forward. “The shirkers have to be punished too, and the ones who wound themselves on purpose.”

  On the backless benches men Eudora recognized from the hospital sat tapping their feet and staring at the very few women, including her, as if they were starving and she was steak—which was why the nurses had insisted on her presence. The only thing important about her here was that she was single and shaped like a woman. The orchestra played, the glasses clinked, the hum of voices rose and fell, and she danced with two doughboys in from one of the fronts, then with a clerk from the Norwegian embassy, a British medic, a Canadian gunner, a Polish mechanic, an ambulance driver from Lansing. Below her shoulder blades, the spot where the men pressed their hands began to sweat. She could feel them trying to still their thumbs, which wanted to caress her spine. Her right hand, which each man held in turn, was slowly being crushed. A member of a machine-gun crew, looking at his palm pressed against hers, said, “Your hands are huge, aren’t they? Bigger than mine,” which embarrassed her; at work, where she was most comfortable, her height and strength were assets. The corpse in the sleigh, Havlicek, she remembered as having frozen awkwardly: his arms uncrossed and one large hand bent at the wrist, a foot turned in, a scarf stuck to his skull.

  From a supply clerk, who was pleasant enough but whose hands were disconcertingly warm and who was eager to gossip about the incident, she learned more details. Havlicek’s platoon and one other had been sent a hundred and fifty miles east in November, to guard the supply of flour held by a little city and also to train Russian troops to fight against the Bolsheviks. Later they were sent still farther east, to attack a gathering mass of Bolos. Havlicek had been hurt during their first battle, heaved into the air by an artillery shell before crashing down on his back. They’d had neither medics nor ambulance men with them and the cuts on his face had been bandaged by a Russian with a first-aid kit. After their retreat to the little city, the medic stationed there had sent three of the wounded men on to Archangel but kept Havlicek, despite his bitter complaints about pain in his back.

  He could walk, his captain pointed out, and he could fire a gun; nothing seemed to be broken and they were short-handed. Through December and January, his captain sent him on patrols but he lagged behind or dropped out, infuriating the rest of his platoon. Put on guard duty, he sat; on kitchen duty, he dawdled so long he delayed their meals. He felt, he was said to have said, as if someone had bored a tunnel down his back and buttock and through his thigh, then filled it with salt and flushed it with acid. Why would no one believe him? By February he was taking his meals alone and claiming he could no longer sleep. By March, he’d been utterly despondent.

  So it did look like suicide, Eudora heard from several men chatting over drinks—but this was exactly what Private Boyd denied. Before being drafted, Havlicek had never held a gun and he moved and thought like a civilian. Exhausted, made clumsy by the cold, he had in Private Boyd’s version been cleaning his gun, or putting it away, and somehow something had happened. But everyone knew, said the driver who repeated that theory to Eudora, that Boyd had to say that; Havlicek’s family would get no benefits if he were ruled to have killed himsel
f.

  Dancing with an engineer in whose hand she’d once located a sliver of steel, Eudora heard further that Boyd had begged a load of hay from the peasants, and then—there’d been no officers at the outpost to stop him—wrapped Havlicek’s body in blankets and placed it on top of the hay, where it froze solid. On his own he’d decided to bring the body into the city, in to them.

  IT SNOWED THREE times that week and the sky, despite the approaching equinox, showed no signs of spring. Gray, every day. Gray at breakfast, gray all day, and the snow gray too, especially in the market square and along the plank sidewalks. The rotten ice on the river was littered with garbage. What should have been good news—the Secretary of War had given orders to withdraw American troops from Russia as soon as spring conditions would permit—made no impression; Eudora knew, as all the soldiers knew, that the White Sea was still solidly frozen and that it would be June at least before they were freed. The Peace Conference in Paris was still stalled, as it had been for months and apparently would always be; millions of soldiers were still stuck in England and France; the Bolsheviks had taken over in Hungary and were spreading through Germany and had been arrested by the carload in Seattle. There’d been strikes in Belfast, strikes in Glasgow and Munich, riots, battles, spreading starvation: but half of what she heard wasn’t true and she couldn’t trust what she read in the odd issues of French and English newspapers that turned up; even they seemed to lie. Astronomers had supposedly just left England, heading for Brazil and the west coast of Africa, to observe an eclipse that was due in May and which would somehow prove Einstein’s theories right or wrong; who could have organized such an expedition? Suffragettes had burned copies of Wilson’s speeches in an urn across from the White House, been beaten and arrested—had that really happened? Was it true that the man who tried to kill Clemenceau was an anarchist and a Bolshevik? In the dark of the X-ray room, listening to her soldiers and considering all she heard and read, the world beyond the White Sea made no more sense than her world here.