Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  During that gray, discouraging week, she saw Boyd for the second time. He came to the hospital just as she was about to leave for supper—because, he said, he’d heard from someone at the barracks that there was a woman who ran the X-ray facility at the American hospital, and that she was a volunteer, not officially part of the Army.

  “Would that be you?” he asked.

  “It would,” she admitted. The square tip of his nose, sharply defined when she’d first seen it, was now covered with small dark blisters. “But I don’t need an X-ray to see what you’ve done there.”

  “Forget my nose,” he said, plucking at the cloth over his right thigh. “That’s not the problem. Can I just show you?”

  When she nodded he unwrapped his leggings, peeled three pairs of socks from his feet, discarded his leather tunic and his knitted vest. Then he hesitated. “There’s a bathrobe back there,” she said, gesturing at the folding screen. He stepped behind it and emerged a minute later, wrapped in the old brown wool robe donated by the major.

  She was longing to ask why he’d brought Havlicek’s body into the city by himself. Instead she said, “Which doctor referred you here?”

  “I sent myself,” he replied. His calves were white and strongly muscled, and she saw that the black fur lining his hat had misled her about his coloring; his hair, sticking up in dirty cowlicks, was the color of ashes. Despite that he seemed to be hardly older than she was. He said, “I’ve done enough first-aid work in the field that by now I can tell when there’s something really wrong. But I can’t get our doc to pay attention.”

  “Why not?”

  He made a face, which she didn’t understand. Then he said, “Some evidence would help. If you could find something …”

  She put down her clipboard. “You know how this works. Unless we have such a rush of wounded pouring in that there’s no time, I have to have a medical officer’s order to examine you.”

  He turned in a half-circle, the brown wool flaring around his knees as he mutely pointed out the obvious: the room was empty, the corridors were silent. Dr. Hirschberg had finished his work and gone up to one of the little cubicles on the second floor where he and the nurses, the cook and Eudora and a few other Red Cross staff were lucky enough to be quartered. The rest of the building, once a meteorological institute, was calm. Downstairs, Eudora knew, two of the Russian washerwomen were boiling linen and one of the nurses was using the same hot stove to sterilize operating room equipment. In a room down the hall another woman—they never had trouble finding help, Russians were glad to work here for food—was using an American sewing machine to make surgical masks and gowns. Behind her the orderlies had finished serving supper in the old classrooms that now served as wards. For the last week they’d had fewer than twenty patients; no one new had come in for three days and all the staff had been storing up sleep and strength. They might have been in any half-empty hospital anywhere, on one of those quiet days when the staff, suppressing sighs of boredom, finally turned to neglected paperwork.

  “Who’s waiting?” Boyd asked. “What am I taking from anyone else? If you took a quick look, just, you know—it’s driving me crazy. Look.”

  Turning away from her, gathering the bathrobe’s hem on the right side and pulling it up and toward the front so that the taut cloth concealed his buttocks and his genitals—a modest man, she noted, marveling at his delicacy—he exposed the outer aspect of his upper right thigh. In the meaty part of his quadriceps was an angry red dot the size of a ladybug.

  “Maybe a little infection,” she said. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “There’s something in there,” he said. “Way down in. If you could just look …”

  “I can’t make a plate,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right to use the film and the developing supplies. But I can check you over quickly with the fluoroscope.”

  Fifteen minutes later she had him arranged on the X-ray table in the darkened room. In the glow of the ruby light she’d adjusted the diaphragm and the angle of the screen and positioned him on his back, arms crossed on his chest, with his right thigh sandwiched between the tube box, which was below the stretcher, and the screen suspended from the holder above. She rubbed a little more paraffin along the ridge that fit into the groove of the stretcher and then slid the whole thing half an inch, moving the red dot on Boyd’s thigh into better alignment. The movement startled Boyd and she apologized.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Just do what you need to do.”

  She positioned one hand on the screen stand and said, “Okay, then. I’m going to turn off the red light and let my eyes adjust. The room will go black, and you won’t be able to see me, or any part of yourself. In about ten minutes, I’ll be able to examine you; we can talk while the time passes, but you need to lie completely still until I’m finished with the examination. Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” he said—sounding, as all the soldiers did, mildly offended that she would ask; unaware, as they all were until it happened, that these minutes lying utterly still in the black, stuffy, silent room might cause the most unpredictable reactions. In the dark, she’d seen men weep silently, cry hysterically, sit up so suddenly they’d knocked her screen stand askew. Some told stories about the awful things they’d seen and done; some would start cursing and be unable to stop; a few, gentle enough in the ruby light, would after a few minutes in the dark start whispering obscenities and grab at her thighs and her crotch. One had seized her hand and pulled it between his legs, then bitten her when she tried to pull away. She was careful, now, not to let her attention drift.

  So far he hadn’t moved. Quietly she breathed in and out, waiting for her pulse to slow and her eyes to adapt. His voice floated up. “You never asked my name,” he said. “I’m Constantine. At home, people call me Stan.”

  “Constantine,” she repeated. Not once had that surfaced in the rumors—always, she heard “Boyd.” “Or would you prefer me to call you Stan?”

  “Constantine’s fine,” he said. “We don’t know each other yet. May I call you Eudora?”

  “Please.”

  “How did you get here?” he asked.

  His tone was perfectly calm; he was fine; this was going to be easy. “The same way you did, I imagine,” she said. “Transport, from Newcastle-on-Tyne.”

  “In September?”

  She nodded, before remembering he couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said.

  Comparing notes, they determined that they’d been on two different ships. More men, nearly forty, he said, had died of the influenza on his ship than on hers. Because he’d been sent down the Dvina to one of the fronts the day after landing, he’d missed the first terrible weeks in the city, which she remembered so sharply: the tiny Russian Red Cross hospital overflowing, men sick on the ships and sick in the barracks, with no place to put them and, until the engineers hastily constructed a cemetery, not even a place to bury them. She’d spent much of her first weeks helping to turn this building into a hospital, installing the X-ray apparatus shipped over from Boston and helping set up the operating suite. Not that any of it helped the soldiers sick with the flu. On the river, he said, ten more men from the infantry company he was assigned to had gotten sick, and two of them had died.

  “Did you get sick yourself?” she asked.

  “I didn’t, somehow,” he said. “You?”

  “I didn’t either.”

  The darkness had grown soft, almost velvety, which meant her eyes were ready. She lowered the fluoroscopic screen, tapped the floor switch, and adjusted the diaphragm. The coating on the screen began to glow and there he was, his interior suddenly visible, a sight that still astonished her. There were the familiar landmarks and also, suspended among them, an unfamiliar intrusion. What was that jagged, slivery shape? His femur was intact, the hip joint as well, and there were no signs of skeletal injury—yet the projectile she saw, well down from the little red dot on his skin and at an unexpected angle, was neither shrapnel nor a fragment fr
om a shell. Long, slim, pointed at both ends—

  “That’s bone,” she announced. “But I don’t see where in you it can have come from.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Sorry. I guess it makes sense, though.”

  She looked intently for another minute and then, before switching off the power to the tube, inked a small square and a number on his skin directly over the intruder. “You can sit up when you want,” she said, moving the screen holder out of the way and turning on the light. Quickly, before she forgot any details, she marked on one of her printed forms the size and position of the sliver. “Why does that make sense?”

  “Because it probably is bone,” he said, “but not mine. Mike’s.”

  In December, he explained, he’d been with a company south of the city, holding part of a riverbank along with British, French, and Russian troops. If someone actually was in charge, the men on the ground couldn’t tell. One day they’d get orders from the American colonel at headquarters in Archangel and the next those would be contradicted by the British commander who visited the front. One day they lost four men while fighting to hold a little bridge and the next were told to retreat and burn the bridge behind them; a week later, ordered back again, they’d had to cross on homemade rafts. They slept in the peasants’ small homes and ate their food and grew friendly with some; then moved on to a camp in the woods and were told that the peasants were Bolshevik sympathizers. In icy weather, they returned and, so the Bolsheviks would be without shelter, cleared out the families and burned the houses to the ground, watching women who’d fed them a few weeks earlier wail over little mounds of household goods.

  Their biggest battle had taken place on what people elsewhere called Armistice Day. For air support they’d had a few Allied planes, Sopwiths fitted with big skis and piloted by former members of the czar’s air corps, trained by RAF flyers. One of those Russian pilots, mistaking a group of American and French troops for Bolsheviks, had dropped two 112-pound bombs directly on their position, wounding several doughboys and killing their cook outright.

  “I was standing right near Mike,” Boyd said. Eudora, who’d listened to all of this without comment, put down her pen.

  “The blast tossed me ten feet away but I landed in the snow and at first I thought I’d gotten away with just the cuts on my face and hands. There wasn’t anything left of Mike but some little pieces, which we gathered up in a blanket and buried in the crater. That night my leg started killing me and the next day, when I went to the latrine, I found a little hole in my thigh, which wasn’t bleeding much but which seemed deep. I cleaned it out, bandaged it, and didn’t think more about it. We were so mad about Mike that for a couple of days we wouldn’t talk to any of the Brits. Their commanders had trained those pilots, and given them the crummy information—but then the real fighting started up again, skirmishes every day. A patrol went out and lost two men, three more were wounded trying to move supplies across the river. I didn’t have time to worry about my leg and anyway the surface scabbed over and the opening began to close. A few weeks later—”

  He stopped abruptly and she waited. When he showed no sign of continuing, she said, “Why don’t you get dressed?”

  He nodded, slid off the table, and disappeared behind the screen. When he returned he looked like a soldier again, whatever else he’d wanted to tell her folded up in the brown wool robe. He tapped his right thigh and said, “So this is from Mike, is all I meant to say—you don’t need to know the rest of it. I was standing right next to him and part of him must have blown into me.”

  “From a long bone, would be my guess,” she said without thinking. “Femur, humerus, tibia maybe …”

  He looked her over and shook his head. “A cold one, aren’t you?”

  She blushed, something she hadn’t done in months.

  “That’s Mike,” he said, gripping her arm above the elbow and thrusting his face so close she could see his pale lashes. “My friend. I want that fucking thing out of me, I want him out of me. I want the surgeon to fix this and then put me on the sick list and send me to the convalescent hospital and let me work there until I can be shipped home. No fucking way am I going back out there.”

  Eudora tugged her arm free. “You know it’s the surgeon who has to decide that.”

  “But you can tell him what you saw. That it’s infected or whatever it is, and how I’ll be crippled if it’s not removed.”

  His eyes were a clear light gray, hard to see because so deeply set. She promised him she’d see what she could do.

  SHE SPENT THAT evening loading film in cassettes, replenishing solutions in the darkroom, and filing two weeks’ worth of forms, but despite those dry satisfactions she still felt unsettled when she went up to bed and, although her room was warm and her nightgown was clean, she remained too angry with herself to sleep. When had she stopped seeing below the surface of events, or stopped hearing, beneath what was said, what was really meant? If her hands and eyes, so experienced now, conjured images from the X-ray apparatus, and if the surgeons had come to rely on the accuracy of her readings, that didn’t make what she’d lost less crucial. The part of her that had once intuited feelings and responded appropriately had grown as coarse-grained as film meant for use at night, everything delicate sacrificed to speed. Nothing surprised her anymore, only the details differed. This battle, that battle, these wounds, those; shells, shrapnel, airplane crashes, railroad collisions, bombs. Here, they were somehow fighting the Bolsheviks, not the Germans, with the British, not the French, in charge: so of course it was a British-trained soldier, in an RAF plane, who dropped the fatal bomb, and the friendly cook—why was it never the pig-eyed sergeant who cheated at poker?—who was killed. And of course the sliver of bone lodged in Stan’s, Constantine’s—Boyd’s thigh (after all, she couldn’t use his first name) wasn’t his own. As that was one of the things that could happen, so it did happen, as did everything sooner or later: but she might have remembered what her speculation would sound like to him. Oh, it must be from a femur …

  She folded her limp pillow beneath one ear and pulled her blanket over the other, which muffled but didn’t block the sound of the nurses snoring in the cubicles around her. Once she would have thought it odd for one man to be carrying inside of him bone from another, who was dead. But everything here was backwards, including her own presence, which had come about by a chain of events so implausible that she omitted most of them when she wrote to her family back home. Even when she wrote to Irene Piasecka, who had first taught her, she touched only on the surface of her last year. She left out locations, events, the ridiculous journeys between events; Irene, who had made her way from Poland to New York to Colorado, from Colorado to the sanatorium in the Adirondack Mountains where they’d both worked, knew all about sudden, improbable change. Writing to her, Eudora had skimmed over her stay at the mobilization station in New York, her voyage to London, and her shipment to France a few weeks later with a group of Red Cross nurses who, looking on her as a lowly aide, had been consistently unkind. She wrote still less about the British hospital in Paris, where she’d ferried blankets and bedpans through the corridors, brought trolleys of food from the kitchen, held basins while nurses unwound long strips of iodine-soaked gauze—tasks that, she couldn’t help thinking, any breathing creature might have done equally well, although she was glad to be able to do them.

  And after that—what was the point of describing what she’d seen and heard and done? Searching for something her family could bear to hear, she mentioned that the excellent French she’d learned in high school had finally been put to use when, after the start of the Picardy offensive, she was sent to a French hospital near Beauvais and found, scattered among the French soldiers, wounded doughboys who couldn’t communicate with the French doctors and nurses treating them. Couldn’t explain that the weights and pulleys holding a shattered leg in traction needed adjustment; longed to write their wives and couldn’t ask for paper; hated liver but found it on their trays. They’d
been glad to have her interpret for them and to fix what she could.

  She had not even tried, though, to describe the insane rapidity with which her duties had been transformed. One day she was writing a letter for a soldier with no hands and the next a French nurse she often saw near the operating room had pulled her over and asked her to hold some sandbags around a poilu’s shoulder while he was being X-rayed. The nurse mentioned that she had taken Marie Curie’s training course for manipulatrices nine months earlier and been practicing ever since, and Eudora in a few words described the machines she’d worked on in the basement of Tamarack State Sanatorium. Briefly, as if appraising a wound, the nurse had looked away from her task and at Eudora’s face. Two days later, she began teaching Eudora the difficult, interesting techniques of localization.

  A bullet might enter in one place, she learned, but end up in another, after being deflected by a bone. Shrapnel might tunnel this way or that and might, on an X-ray image, seem to be lying over an organ it actually lay under. Fragments of a shattered bone might move like arrows, puncturing viscera or piercing organs which might leak or bleed, undiscovered, were they not able to calculate accurate trajectories. One day she learned something and the next was left to do it alone, which was exactly what she couldn’t explain to anyone back home. Out here she saw it happen all the time, to nurses and soldiers and doctors and drivers and engineers alike; no one did what they’d been trained to do, they did what needed doing. She learned more in six weeks than she had in six months of concerted practice at home.