Thirteen
SOME DAYS LATER there was a melee at the prison compound, the result of a knife fight. I was told to scrub for an emergency amputation, and received the shock of my life. The draped body on the operating table was that of my friend, the Austrian lieutenant, von Kerll.
Dr. Bennett shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know if it’s worthwhile trying to patch this Boche up.”
My training took over. The surgical nurse swabbed the wound and debrided it. I prepared the tray of sterile instruments.
“Somebody had it in for him,” the doctor continued. “As I reconstruct it, there must have been more than one. They tried to slit his throat. During the course of which his leg was pinned, and someone went to work on it. The guards heard the commotion and dragged this fellow out. I don’t know if it was in time. He’s lost four pints of blood.”
Involuntarily I checked the plasma bag. A moment later I asked, “Does he have to lose the leg?” I had to ask, even though I’d seen enough of this kind of carnage to know.
The other wounds were superficial. Someone, as the doctor said, had tried to cut his throat, but the slash missed the carotids. I remembered what Crazy Dancer told me about slashings. Dogs bite, it is the wolf that slashes. I deliberately sent my mind off on this tangent, while they took the leg just below the knee. It was a long operation. But at least Dr. Bennett had a sturdy wood floor under his feet and wasn’t trying to keep his balance on a bloody tarp. I helped pack the wound, and began to dress it.
“He’s a strong fellow. He should make it.”
I liked Bennett. He hated working on the Boche, as he called them, but always did a meticulous job, and somewhere during the operation he forgot they were the enemy and began rooting for them as patients. By the end he had employed all his skill to see they made it. They usually did.
I walked alongside the gurney. How could I tell him? I’d almost rather lose my own leg. But I couldn’t let him hear it from anyone else.
I remembered his initial relief at finding himself in one piece. It was on account of his mother. What kind of mother was she? She should rejoice that he wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean. I reined in my thoughts, as I had taught myself to do. There were fewer and fewer places I could send them.
A student nurse and I accomplished the transfer to the cot. Then I went to wash my face and calm down.
I washed my face, but I didn’t calm down. I dreaded the moment he would open his eyes.
Of course, when he did, he didn’t realize. I was checking the glucose drip when he spoke quite distinctly in English. He said, as though continuing a conversation, “It must have been a Zaunkönig. It shrieked past, exploding my eardrum. The floor heaved, the sides of the ship buckled, lights flickered and flared up. Then nothing. It was dark. I remember this vile taste washing into my mouth. I was floating in an oil slick.” He grabbed my hands. “Are they going to strafe us here in the water? Or leave us? Better have it over with.” And he switched to German.
Bending over him I said soothingly, “What about the Rhine maidens? The Valkyries protect the ocean-going warriors.”
“They didn’t come. I called them, but they didn’t come.”
It was as I thought, he believed he was waking from his first ordeal, that he was just now off the U-boat.
I stopped by ward B again before going off duty and stood a moment by his bed. His sleep was restless, and he murmured, perhaps cursed, in German. I didn’t know what he said, but I wanted him to wake up.
No, no, I didn’t. I dreaded his waking up.
Erich wasn’t lucid until the next day. I came by at noon to check on him. He was lying quietly, resignedly staring at the ceiling. It was a featureless white ceiling. “Kathy,” he said in a very gentle tone, “you’re here. So it’s all right.”
“What’s all right, Erich?”
“I dreamt I wasn’t in the hospital at all, but in prison. Gott, I thought. . . . But you’re here. So it must be all right.”
I hesitated. “You were transferred to the camp. Don’t you remember?”
“So it’s true?” He closed his eyes, and his jaw set. “It was better to be floating in waves of oil. That was better than . . .” He made himself stop.
We were both silent. It was Erich who finally spoke. “It wasn’t yesterday you were sitting beside me? It was months ago?”
“Yes. Eighteen months.”
There was a pause while he absorbed this. “And how have things been for you?” he asked politely.
I tried to match his tone. “I’m still doing business at the same old stand.”
“And how is that young man of yours?”
“Dead.” The word lay between us.
“I’m afraid to ask anything more. I suppose it was the war.”
“A U-boat attack,” I said, slowly and deliberately, without mercy.
A vein in his neck throbbed. That was all.
Why had I done that? Why had I punished him, I asked myself when I was out in the hall. He’d had no part in it. It wasn’t his fault. Cassino, the monastery, it wasn’t his fault. Yet it was, it was. He’d been awarded the Iron Cross. They don’t do that except for direct kills.
I recognized that I was not in control and ducked into the bathroom, took several successive breaths, and steadied myself. If I didn’t go back, someone else would tell him.
He didn’t look at me when I came in but turned his head away. He was very angry.
“Hello again,” I said, with professional cheeriness. “I thought I’d look in on you once more. Is there anything you want?”
He tried not to ask, but it broke from him. “My leg, if you wouldn’t mind. Something for the pain. There’s a cramp in my calf.”
I deliberately massaged the wrong leg, hoping to get him to realize, to focus.
“The other one, the left. Just at the knee and below.” It was that terrible phantom pain, where severed nerve ends scream, and nothing can be done about it.
“If I can just shift you a bit in bed, that sometimes relieves it.” I slipped my hands under his shoulders, straightening him. “Any better?”
He smashed his mouth together rather than answer. But he was turning over in his mind what I had said.
“Your young man—when?”
“Soon after you were transferred.”
“God, it’s a filthy war.”
“He called it fish-hearted.”
“Fish-hearted? I like that. It’s a damn, filthy, fish-hearted war. Will it ever be over?”
“Yes. We’re going to win.”
“But,” he protested, “the Third Reich was to last a thousand years. Hitler was to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, restore the Teutonic spirit, Saxon myths, Skaldic poems, the Hanseatic code written on stone in runic rhymes. Sieg heil! With his great sword Gram conquers the giants and the dwarves. Ravens dine on the flesh of his enemies, swans pull the chariot of the sun across the sky—Kathy, give me something for the pain, or I will break down and cry like a child.”
I counted my heartbeats. Then I said, clearly, distinctly, and with emphasis, “Which leg is hurting?”
“My left, I—” He stopped.
He knew. Oh, God, he knew.
I listened to the minutes on the wall clock. I’d never been conscious of them before.
“They had to take it off, I suppose?”
I was startled to hear him speak so calmly. “Yes, it was practically severed when they brought you in. It had to be done to save your life.”
“I see. To save my life.” He laughed shortly.
The charge nurse tapped me on the arm. “Cot 14 is asking for you.”
I didn’t want to leave him like this, but he had withdrawn to his own private hell.
I wasn’t able to look in on Erich until the following morning. He seemed deep in thought, but when he saw me smiled deprecatingly, as though too much had passed between us and he was unsure of himself. “It was good of you to come by. Thank you.”
“I wanted
to, Erich.”
“I’m afraid I took the news rather badly. It’s one of those situations that don’t come up often. I didn’t know how to handle it. But I’m getting more used to it now. At least I think I am. I can talk about it, at any rate. And there’s something I want to ask you.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about that British boy, the one who lost his leg. He didn’t want to live afterward, did he?”
“No,” I said truthfully, “he didn’t.”
“And then later, when he grew accustomed to it, he didn’t want to go home. And he got you to write letters for him, saying he was slightly wounded but on the road to recovery?”
“Yes. Yes, he did. Oh, Erich, I’m so sorry. But it won’t make as much difference as you think.”
He held up his hand. “I’m not interested in all that. I’m sure they have marvelous prostheses these days. And I know the crutches will only be temporary, until the wound heals. I don’t care about that. I’m not interested. I want to know about the British boy. I am interested in him. Did they amputate both legs?”
I shook my head.
“Just one? Which was it? Do you remember?”
“The left.”
“Like me.”
There was a pause before the uncomfortable interrogation resumed. “Where was the leg taken off? Below the knee? That’s where they took mine, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes. But what’s the use of—”
“A lot of use. A lot. It’s very helpful.”
He closed his eyes, and I began to hope he’d drifted off to sleep, when he said, still with his eyes closed, “You wrote letters for him, telling the lies he wanted the family back home to believe.”
“I did, but I never sent them.”
His eyes opened with a queer, bright, penetrating glance. “You didn’t send them? Oh, Kathy. You are very much Kathy, aren’t you? Or are you sometimes Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter? What’s it like to have two names?”
“Why don’t you ask me something I can answer?”
“All right. Will you write letters home for me, Kathy? And tell them the same lies?”
“If I don’t have to send them.”
“No. You have to send them.”
“But don’t you want to know the rest? The British boy changed his mind. He went home, Erich. And he sent me a snapshot, taken at his wedding. It had a happy ending.”
“I’m not interested anymore in the British boy.” And he turned on his side, away from me.
WITH THE WAR going strongly in our favor, it seemed an odd time for a prison break. Yet one morning sirens screamed and searchlights crisscrossed a sky which was just lightening. I dressed hastily to hear the news. Sometime in the night five German prisoners cut through the barbed wire and escaped. One was captured almost immediately hiding in the granary, and returned. The hunt was on for the others, with snow-tired vehicles, a ski patrol, and dogs.
Before the day was out the remaining four were recaptured, one of them shot and killed.
The excitement produced a complete dislocation in hospital procedure. But I continued my careful supervision of Erich’s progress. He was at a critical stage. Physically he was coming along, making an adequate recovery, but he totally rejected his body. The lack of interest he had expressed in the English boy extended to everything. I also was banished, everyone was, everything, including life itself. I’d been in that place. I knew it well.
However, the escape triggered something in Erich. I didn’t realize at first when I found him pale and clammy, that it had anything to do with the breakout. His respiration was so quick and uneven that I was alarmed and decided to send for the resident, but Erich put out a hand and stopped me. “Please tell me,” he said. “Who was killed? Was it Norbert? Norbert Freund?”
“Yes, I think that was the name. Did you know him?”
“He’s the reason I’m here, the reason I don’t have a leg.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s a clique, among the prisoners, of hard-line Nazis. They were suspicious of me from the first—I didn’t give their stiff-armed salute at the mention of the Fuehrer’s name, I didn’t join in their songs of the Vaterland. So I was ostracized. That suited me fine.
“I judged from the influx of new inmates that the war was going badly for us. And this was confirmed—the arrivals were boys of fifteen and sixteen, called up, taken out of school. Old men were among them, the Volkssturm, who were the home guard, air raid wardens, they also wound up here. You can imagine the anger, despair, frustration at being out of it, while comrades, brothers, sons, fathers are dying.”
“That explains the timing of the escape attempt,” I said, pleased that he was taking me into his confidence again. “Everyone was asking, Why now, when it all seems to be winding down? But that explains it.” I hesitated, then asked something that bothered me. “Do you feel that way, Erich?”
“Of course. My countrymen are being killed and maimed. At the same time I can’t help wonder—when it’s over, what will Austria’s fate be? Will the Allies stick by their promise that the old Social Democratic Party and the constitution be restored? Or will she suffer reparations as a defeated enemy? I don’t know. It could go so many ways.”
I pressed him to tell me what led to the knife fight.
“A couple of weeks ago, during the exercise period, I slipped into one of the small warehouse sheds to write a letter. I was sitting on the floor, my back against a sack, piles of boxes in front of me. A small group of men detached themselves from the others and stole in, one by one. They didn’t notice me there. I realize now I should have stood up, made my presence known, and left. Even then it might have been too late. As it was, they began to discuss an escape.”
“They planned the whole thing in front of you? You knew it was going to happen? Why didn’t you say something?”
He gave me a long look.
“That was stupid. I’m sorry. Of course you couldn’t.”
He continued, assuming a detached tone. “One of them took out a cigarette butt. Another jostled him for it, and it dropped. In retrieving it, they spotted me. That was it. They tried to kill me.”
“But you wouldn’t have said anything. You didn’t say anything.”
“Because I wasn’t a Nazi, they didn’t credit me with being a patriot. To them it’s the same thing. They don’t understand the code that for four hundred years my family has lived by.”
Perhaps they didn’t understand, but I did. The nuances he saw, the distinctions he made, were those of a thoughtful man who rejected the fanaticism, yet embraced and loved his country. Even now with the war going against him he saw not only defeat but hope. It was a beginning, and I, who had made so many beginnings, saw that my job was to help him come to terms with his disability.
As far as I knew he had never looked at the amputation, and when I tended it, cleaned it, applied lotion, he looked away. If he could have left his leg in my care he would have.
It was time. I handed him the washcloth. He looked at me inquiringly. “I’ve already washed.”
“You haven’t finished.”
His eyes followed mine, traveling the length of his leg, coming to an abrupt stop below the knee. “No,” he said, “I can’t.”
I waited.
“I find it repulsive.”
I waited.
He accepted the washcloth, clenched his hand over it, and, in a single angry gesture, made a pass over the stump. “There. Are you satisfied?”
I took the lotion from the table.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the lotion I rub you with. You have to start doing these things for yourself, Erich.”
“Why?”
“Because the less scarring, the better success you’ll have with the fit of the prosthesis, the more comfortable it will be, and the longer you’ll be able to wear it.”
He grit his teeth and, looking at the ceiling, pressed the lotion into his palm, and made a swipe with it across the w
ound. Most spilled.
“It’s a start,” I said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
The next day when I came, he took the washcloth from me and applied it assiduously to the wound. Then, reaching for the lotion, rubbed that in thoroughly. “Did you know,” he was talking very fast, not letting himself think about what he was doing, “that D minor is Mozart’s key of fate? He was composing the string quartet K421/417B while his wife was having a baby in the same room. You can hear her cries in the music, then the sudden forte as the second octave leaps to the minor tenth. An uproar in the thirty-second bar of the andante quiets to piano. The child is born.”
“That’s beautiful,” I said. “You can pretend the string quartet is playing while you try the parallel bars.” I got him to his feet and handed him crutches. Having so recently gone through therapy myself, I knew the physical pain, the emotional ups and downs, but I was living proof of its benefits, and I was determined that Erich should be restored to a normal human being in spite of himself.
He swung along beside me down the corridor. When we came to the therapy room, he confronted the bars, let the crutches clatter to the floor, and negotiated the space between bars by hopping and swinging his arms. What a superb athlete he was. Never once did he grab the bars for support.
I was ready with the crutches at the other end. The effort had exhausted him. He was wet with perspiration, and I insisted on a wheelchair for the return trip.
He didn’t like me to show concern. If he’d had a bad day, he was sure to cover it up. But I got to know these ploys. He would talk music then, or philosophy or poetry. “Listen,” and he quoted,
“‘You are like a flower, so chaste and pretty and pure. I look at you, and worry strikes me in my heart. It seems to me as if I place my hands on your head, praying that God will keep you so pure and pretty and chaste.’”
He looked at me with a distant smile. “The Nazis burned Heine’s poetry, every scrap.”
“Who would want to destroy such a lovely thing?” I asked.
“You are very schön yourself, Kathy.”
“Schön? Isn’t that thank you?”
The Search for Joyful Page 21
