“What happened?”
He shrugged. “Same as what happened to lots of us. I got drafted before I finished my first year of college, and then funneled into the ambulance company because of my little bit of experience. I thought at least I’d learn some medicine, but after basic training all we got was a few weeks of classes. Elementary anatomy, simple first-aid techniques—you know. The dressings go here and you can feel a pulse there. Cover exposed intestines with a damp clean cloth. If blood is jetting out of someone’s femoral artery, apply direct pressure. Lice are bad. Hot soup is good. I knew more than that before I was in long pants. Most of it’s pointless anyway, the best thing we can ever do for the ones who are hit is to get them back here, to the hospital and you. Which most of the time is just what we can’t do quickly enough.”
As he spoke he swung his arms in the air, back and forth, more and more briskly. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, replaced by a cheese-colored moon. The market was closing and lights were blinking on in the café windows. “Everything useful I learned on the job,” he said, describing the weeks he’d worked without proper supplies. He’d splinted broken bones with sticks, improvised dressings from old rags, gleaned from a Russian doctor essential mortician’s skills.
“You don’t understand what it’s like out there,” he said. “None of you here in the city do, not you, not your lazy surgeon, not the officers in charge. You have no idea. We get shot at picking up the wounded, and loading them on the sleighs, and hauling them to the clearing stations and then to the railroads or the sleigh trails. The Bolos cover themselves with white canvas smocks and sneak up on the encampments at night. We can’t see them but we feel them out there, and they pick us off one by one. They come up behind us in the woods. Our own supply officers skim off everything good and we end up with nothing, no smokes, rotten eats. Really,” he repeated angrily, “you have no idea.”
“I have some idea,” she said. “What is it you think I do here?”
By now they had passed the Headquarters building, the place where she’d first sent him. Her feet were cold and she was hungry but he pinned her with his eyes, still talking. Dr. Hirschberg, he was saying, had no right to judge what had happened to him. It was true that after Mike had been killed he’d been angry at everyone, and would happily have shot the Brits who’d ordered the bombing, or the Russian pilots who’d made the mistake, but he and his friends had been glad to be sent from that place and the long hike to the east, which they knew had been meant to punish them, had actually been glorious. Cold, of course, twenty below zero, then forty below, so cold he couldn’t have imagined surviving ten days of it, but away from the fighting, away from the crowded, stifling, stinking billets, he’d been able to see, for the first time, what was beautiful about this country. Between the tiny villages ranks of pine and spruce stretched in all directions, marked only by twisting paths. He’d seen reindeer, and Russian Eskimos, and wolves; windmills, used for grinding grain, and weirs for trapping fish. Women crouched on the frozen river dunking clothes through holes in the ice while men, bulky and hairy as bears in their hooded parki, crossed paths with the actual bears, collared and chained, kept by the Russian soldiers as mascots.
She hadn’t left the city once. The surrounding country, flat and deadly, lacking the ridges and valleys of the land back home, was almost a blank to her. She imagined rivers in which the soldiers drowned, swamps that sucked at their legs, forests concealing their enemies. Railroads crossing the blankness and bringing them back to her. Her feet, she realized, were numb.
“We trapped rabbits,” Boyd said dreamily, as if he’d enchanted himself. Why hadn’t she pushed Dr. Hirschberg harder to consider his case? “We fished with grenades and shot deer and ducks and the little wild birds the peasants call rabchiks; they make a good stew. One night we stayed in a monastery. Another in a village hidden so deep inside a ravine that we didn’t see it until we were in it. At noon the sun was just above the horizon, the rest of the day it was more like twilight, and we had to watch each other constantly for frozen ears and noses. But we were alone, just our two platoons. No British officers, no Russian troops to supervise. No one was shooting at us. We walked all day and ate good meals at night. We watched the sky. The northern lights here make a joke out of those back home, you must have seen them for yourself. Do you go out to watch them?”
“Sometimes,” Eudora said. “Not often, though—if I’m not working at night, I’m usually at a lecture, or in my room. I can’t …”
Odd, that he didn’t understand how impossible it was for her to move beyond the busiest and most public places at night. So many soldiers, from so many countries, and just the tiniest handful of non-Russian women in the city. He looked at her curiously but then started talking again, this time about his leg.
The long hike, he said, was the only time he’d been at peace since landing here, but it had also hurt his leg, inflamed it in some way he hadn’t understood until she’d examined him. First a little pain, which he thought had been caused by the weight of his pack, then something more constant and grinding. There’d been nothing to do but endure it. The medic at the tiny field hospital they’d established in a school gymnasium knew no more than he did and couldn’t do anything to ease his pain. He’d managed—“Vodka helps,” he said—but when he’d met Havlicek, whose pain was so much worse than his own, and who had lost all his friends, he’d felt an immediate bond.
“Couldn’t you have asked to be sent back to Archangel? Both of you, maybe?”
He snorted. “You don’t get to ask for things, in the Army. I didn’t choose to be here at all, although I guess you did.”
“I didn’t either, really,” she protested. “I was working in France, I was useful there. Then all of a sudden I got sent here.”
The sky had turned an unpleasant metallic shade and a fire flared in the distance, sending up a column of oily smoke. A cart passed, mounded with garbage. Two thin dogs trailed the cart, followed by more little boys—were they the ones who’d been at the toboggan run, or others? She had never seen so many children in the streets. Boyd called something to them in Russian that made them laugh, but when he turned back to her, his face was stern.
“I did try, you know,” he said. “To get Havlicek sent back. But the medic who first treated Havlicek took against me right away, maybe because I asked him to look at my own leg. And then I think he heard things about me from a couple of the officers. By the time I asked him to re-examine Havlicek and to put him on the sick list, the whole platoon I’d come east with was under suspicion. People had heard that we complained too much after Mike was blown up, and that we’d been sent to them only because the place was so far away, and because they needed some bodies to stick in front of the Bolos, and they figured we couldn’t contaminate anyone else out there. Anything any of us wanted, we got the opposite.” He laughed harshly. “I should have asked for Havlicek to be sent wherever the fighting was worst.”
They passed a shopwindow in which one small box of sugar sat like a crown on a purple cloth. She said, “But I thought Havlicek’s death was an accident.”
“Officially an accident, yes. But I didn’t think we were talking officially.”
Abashed, she shook her head.
“Then, well—I don’t guess it was an accident. But if it wasn’t, then someone could maybe have saved him. I might have saved him.”
She said, as she said to Dr. Hirschberg when he came out of the operating room bloody and pale, a sheet pulled over the face of whomever he’d worked on, “You did what you could. You tried.”
“So what?” By now they’d reached the pillars at the entrance to the hospital, and he looked broodingly across the courtyard. “I tried to get people to pay attention to what had happened to Mike, and to pull us out of that stupid place, and that didn’t work. I tried to help Havlicek and I failed at that too. That trip into the city—I stopped at a little farm, at the end of my first day, when it was too dark for the farmer to see the bun
dle on the sleigh. He gave me a place in the house near the stove and let the pony stay in the barn, but when I went out the next morning the whole family was already there, staring at Havlicek’s feet, which had come unwrapped somehow. They shooed me away and then the next night, when I stopped at a village, the people seemed to guess right away what was lying under the blankets. They made me leave the sled outside. The third night, I came into a village that was already in the midst of a wake. The men were drunk and when they saw the bundle they unloaded Havlicek without even asking me and carried him into the death house. They stretched him out on a bench next to a body that was already there and they told me I could sleep on the floor. By then I was so tired that I did. The next day I didn’t dare stop and so I kept passing all the villages and moving until it was too dark to see and then I got caught out overnight. I couldn’t stay warm. Finally I had to unwind one of the blankets from Havlicek’s body and wrap myself in it and burrow down into the hay next to him. That’s when I froze my fingers and my nose.”
She thought back to her first sight of him, hunched and silent, half dead with fatigue. “Why didn’t you let me help you?” she said. “Bring you into the hospital then—everything would have been different if you had. Dr. Hirschberg would have seen you frostbitten and hurt from your journey, and he would have taken care of you, he didn’t know anything about you then—”
“Because I wanted those lazy assholes at Headquarters to see Havlicek. To see him like that, frozen and with a piece of his head blown off. Leave their fancy dinners and their Scotch whisky and make them see what happens to us out there.”
“Did they?”
“What do you think? Plus they asked a lot of questions about how he died. If two of the men stationed at the outpost hadn’t supported my statement about the shooting being an accident, they would have ruled it suicide for sure. I would have done better to have him buried there. They’re all against me, now. Your surgeon, too, I think. Unless you do something to change that.”
He turned and she did too, facing him as he faced her, already thinking about ways she might try to convince Dr. Hirschberg to change his mind. The distant pressure she felt next turned out to be Boyd’s hands resting on what, through the layers of her thick coat, approximated her waist. The pressure increased; he was tugging her. “We could go someplace,” he said. “Do you have a room here?”
She stepped back, beyond his reach. The clouds surged and wavered in ominous patterns and on the river the ice shifted and groaned.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his arms still sticking out in the air. “You don’t want—well, of course you don’t want me. Who would want me?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “Only …” Why didn’t he understand how impossible her situation was? It didn’t matter, here, what she felt; she was so overwhelmed, surrounded by so many hurt and miserable men, that she couldn’t let any one of them get too close.
“Right,” he said, pulling sharply away from her. “Only only only only. I thought you—never mind. Why don’t you get the doctor to fix me? What would it cost you?”
“It’s not about me, about costing me …” He knew nothing about the work she and Dr. Hirschberg did together. As indeed the doctor knew nothing about her beyond her work. He might do what she asked, or he might not. “But I’ll try again, if that’s all you want from me.”
“I’d take more,” he said.
“So I see,” she said, suddenly furious. “Whatever you can get, apparently. I need to go in.”
“Now you’re angry. I just wanted—”
“Just just just,” she said. He might accuse her of not seeing him but he was the one who didn’t see; he had no sense at all of who she was or what she did, what she felt like or what she endured; for him she was simply an instrument.
AFTER A COUPLE of days she calmed down, convincing herself that Boyd’s behavior in the courtyard, at first so upsetting, was a version of what other soldiers experienced in her darkened X-ray room. Something came over them that they couldn’t help; she pretended they didn’t mean it and so did they. He was no different than the rest of them and what happened to him was no more or less her problem. Of the two paths lying before him, she could influence neither. Either his leg healed and he resigned himself to being sent back to the front—indeed he might already be gone—or the wound became frankly infected and he reported to his medical officer, who’d send him in to the hospital, where she could examine him legitimately. She’d treat him like any other soldier, then, neither better nor worse. Dwell too long on one, she’d learned in France, and many suffer. The lines etched between her nose and her mouth, the weight she’d lost, the nights she spent reading Tolstoy instead of sleeping came from having that lesson forced on her again and again, and from seeing certain soldiers realize that they weren’t the only ones she tried to care for. In pain, in the darkened X-ray room, they called for their mothers and girlfriends, then confused her with them, then felt betrayed when she turned to the next in line.
A small rush of patients came later that week, brought in by a train; then four soldiers were hurt in a bar brawl. Busy, usefully busy, she pushed Boyd and his problems aside and didn’t immediately think of him when, at the end of March, she first heard about what had happened at the barracks. Another threatened mutiny, one in a string that by this point hardly claimed her attention. In October French troops had put down their arms and refused to fight upon hearing about the pending Armistice; in December a contingent of Russians trained by the British had deserted in the midst of a major battle, bringing maps and plans to the Bolsheviks; in February a battalion of British soldiers had refused to march to the front lines, changing their minds only when the two sergeants leading their revolt were arrested. Most recently, a company of French soldiers who’d refused to board a train heading toward one of the fronts had been confined to their barracks and then shipped back to France. This one involved Americans, though, and the rumors contradicted each other.
It was one platoon, or several platoons; they’d quietly declined to load their sleds until someone explained to them where they were being sent and why, or they’d shouted and stormed away or even, in one version, laid hands on their guns. All the versions agreed that a unit of some size had balked when ordered to leave the city. And everyone heard that the officer in charge had been sufficiently upset to telegraph a report to Washington, and that the news had apparently leaked to some newspapers. On the Friday after whatever had happened happened, Eudora read a stilted, somewhat cryptic account in the English-language weekly paper printed at the convalescent hospital:
On Monday morning, a company was told that they were being sent to a front south of the city and were ordered out of barracks for the purpose of packing sleds for the trip to the railroad station. The men remained in barracks, and eventually the NCO in charge reported the situation to the officers.
Some of those officers entered the barracks and repeated the orders but the men continued to delay for several more hours. The colonel of the regiment then arrived, assembled the men, and read them the Article of War that pronounces death as the penalty for mutiny, following which he asked if they had any questions.
Although there were no questions regarding this specific Article, one soldier did ask the colonel respectfully: “Sir—what are we here for, and what are the intentions of the U.S. Government in North Russia?” The colonel reportedly answered that he could not answer this question definitively—but that whatever the purposes of the Expedition, it was in danger of being driven to extinction by the Bolsheviks, and that all must now join in successful resistance. Silence followed.
The colonel then asked any man who did not agree with his statement, and who would refuse to fight, to step forward three paces from the ranks and explain his position. No one accepted his invitation and the meeting was dismissed with an order to load their packs on the sleds and proceed to the railroad station.
A small group of men, left behind to organize the release from the S
upply Company of special rations and medical supplies that unaccountably failed to reach this front earlier, will join the rest of the company next week.
Only then did she begin to wonder about Boyd. Had his company left Archangel right after she’d last seen him, or was it the one that had balked? The following day her question was partly answered when he left a note with the guard at the hospital. I’m supposed to leave for the front tomorrow, he wrote. I’d like to see you before then. Please meet me at 8 tonight, at the toboggan run.
Of course, she thought. Every place he went he caused trouble; he must have been involved in the incident. A confused man, a difficult man. A man there was no point in seeing, except for the fact that she had failed utterly to help him. After supper, she went to the toboggan run and found him there, pale but apparently cheerful. He thanked her for coming.
“I didn’t think you were still in the city,” she said. “I was surprised to get your note.”
Calmly, quickly, smiling as if it meant nothing, he explained that his had been the company she’d read about. “Everyone boarded the train, in the end,” he said. “All but three other ambulance drivers and me. We’re supposed to bring more medical supplies down south tomorrow.”
Then, instead of confronting her about her failure to persuade Dr. Hirschberg to remove the splinter in his leg, instead of begging her to do something else to keep him from returning to the front, he asked if she wanted to take a run. “This fellow here,” he said, pointing to a soldier pulling a toboggan by a rope, “says he’ll let us take a ride on his.”
What, she wondered, had actually gone on at the barracks? Had he been one of the leaders, or one of those hanging back at the edges, following the tide? “I’d like that,” she said.
Up the stairs to the little platform, which was lit by lanterns and was higher than she thought. She could see domes, chimneys, scaffolding, train tracks, the far side of the river. She sat in front, snugged between Boyd’s outstretched legs, the steering rope tight in his hands. The moon was up, lighting the scene and accompanied by two bright stars, which perhaps were planets. The wind had dropped and the air was still and cold. At the base of the run soldiers and children and passersby gathered in small knots, chatting and looking up at the toboggan, which eased over the lip, dropped, and then began to gather speed. Music drifted from across the square—an accordion, a violin—and also the smell of potatoes roasting. His legs kept her skirt from blowing as they went faster. What did she know about him, really? That inside his leg was a long sliver of someone else’s body. That he’d seen that body shattered before his eyes; that he’d lifted other bodies from the snow and bandaged those who were still alive, loaded them into sleighs and driven them one place and another. That he’d seen a man named Havlicek with his head blown off and had slept, for three nights, in the company of the frozen corpse. But about his life before Archangel she knew almost nothing, other than those summers spent with one uncle or another, on one farm or another. Where had he lived and what were his parents like, did he have brothers and sisters and a favorite friend, had he left behind one girlfriend or a whole string, a ukulele or a camera or a cherished set of chisels? At night, when he’d leaned over a desk to study his schoolbooks, had he done that restlessly or with pleasure? She didn’t know whether he liked to fish or swim, watch movies or read, join a gang at the baseball field or lie in a field by himself, dreamily watching a hawk. Even his journey with Havlicek’s body remained a mystery; much of what she knew, what she thought she knew, came not from his account but from various rumors.
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