“Eduard, you should have that tended to, disinfected. It may have to be restitched,” she shot in his direction. It was the first words she’d spoken to him since that initial encounter, and he turned to look at her but said nothing. Only showed a tiny, sad smile. Then a new deluge of stretchers poured into the ward and he disappeared in the swell of activity.
“Please let me help,” Eva implored Tamara the following week. She would go mad here if she didn’t do something, and the truth was, the wound on the side of her head was nearly healed. The headaches and fainting spells still came and went, but that alone didn’t warrant her taking up a bed, or lolling around the ward like an invalid when so many others suffered far greater afflictions. “I’m really just fine, and I’ve been studying for the past couple of years to become a nurse,” she explained as Tamara changed her dressing, swiping iodine at the wound at her hairline, which, despite herself, made her wince. “I don’t have any formal training, but I can wash bandages, I can clean bedpans, I can do anything. Whatever you need.”
She saw in Tamara’s eyes what the answer would be, but Eduard had appeared at her side with an air of agitation, interrupting the exchange.
“Ready?” he addressed Tamara, not glancing in Eva’s direction, as had become his habit. “Let’s do it now. I heard another transport is being brought in right now, and we will need all the blood we can get. Have you asked the rest of the staff if they can contribute?”
“I have,” Tamara replied solemnly. “I did so myself, just this morning.” Then, as an afterthought, flashing an eyebrow toward Eva: “Doctor Kovaks, my friend here says that she wants to help, but perhaps you can explain to her that this is no place for a civilian to do anything but recover.”
“Let her,” Eduard said, surprising both women. “She’s right. She does have some medical knowledge, as far as I recall. Certainly enough to do what she’s offering. And we do need the help. Desperately.”
“Thank you,” Eva muttered as he turned his back to her and walked to a chair. Plopping himself in it, stretching out his legs, he rolled up his sleeve, his arm extending to the fisted, injured hand, his face turned inward, focused. Then Tamara was right there beside him, kneeling at his feet as a worshipping saint, applying a tourniquet before inserting a needle into his vein. The blood flowed, plentiful and bright red, through the thin plastic tube, and Eva had to look away from the intimacy of the scene.
“Enough,” Tamara said after several vials were filled. “That’s plenty.”
“No, not enough. Don’t stop.”
“Doctor, please.”
“I’m fine, Tamara. Keep it going. I’m all right.”
But he was not fine, for he’d turned white as a sheet, and as Tamara glanced up at him and said now, tilting her lovely lips to his ear in a voice so tender that Eva’s blood rose to her cheeks, “Eduard, please,” that she realized what had evaded her all this time. It wasn’t just admiration Tamara felt for Eduard. And it was because of him that Tamara had insisted that she stay in the bunker.
20
IN MID-JANUARY, AT THE END of the sixth week since Eva’s arrival at the Hospital in the Rock, word trickled in that in Pest, the Russians were battling the Germans and Hungarians street to street, house to house. People were succumbing to eating dead horses to keep themselves from complete starvation. In here, the supplies had run out altogether, and the sanitary conditions were growing direr by the day. Saint John’s Hospital had been badly damaged and evacuated, most of the victims brought here, exceeding the capacity tenfold. It had become a common sight to see blood smeared on walls, to see the bedpans unemptied, abuzz with flies. The stench of decay was unbearable; the screams were relentless. Bandages were stripped off the dead and reused, and Eva spent most of her days washing them in a sink.
Eduard had still only spoken to her just a few words, but sometimes she would look up from her grim tasks and see him watching her. Once, she held his gaze and did not drop it away, forcing him to see her, to really see her. She was surprised to see a tiny nod of acknowledgment, as if to say, You are doing a good job. Then Tamara was back at his side, as she seemed to be constantly, bringing him charts to sign, X-rays to look at, insisting that he get something to eat, that he needed to get a few hours of rest.
Eva herself never slept more than three, four hours a night, waiting for a stretcher to become vacant, ate whatever could be scrounged from the kitchen after the patients had received their rations—a hunk of hard bread mostly, and water she prayed was not contaminated. The only time she went aboveground for some fresh air was to help bring in the stretchers. She and the other nurses would huddle by the gate and listen to the ambulance sirens shriek closer and closer, the boom of cannon fire and bursts of machine guns at the riverbank drowning them out momentarily. She became numb to even the most horrific wounds—missing limbs, third-degree burns, faces disfigured by the grazing of bullets.
All in all, it kept her own terror at bay: terror that she may never see Dora or Bianca again, that they might not have survived, that she herself may not live long enough to get back to them. Terror that she would have to live the rest of her life mourning, mourning them, her mother, Aleandro, stumbling through endless, vacant days with only memories to sustain her.
One afternoon, when a new load of patients was carried inside, Eva was called into the operating theater to attend on a surgery. There were several doctors in the hospital whom she’d assisted from time to time, doctors who did not know about her lack of training and more often than not settled on the first nurse or Red Cross volunteer available. She expected the usual set of tasks, comprising mostly holding a hand or a floodlight, or swiping the surgery site with alcohol. But this time, the surgeon in full fatigues waved to her from the sink to come join him, and when she walked over, she was shocked to see that it was Eduard.
“Wash,” he instructed. “All the way to the elbow. For twenty seconds. Then glove up.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, flustered by his directness. “What do you need me to do?”
“You have small hands.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your hands. They are small, I remember. And for what I need, delicate hands and slim fingers are vital. It’s why I called for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I can help.” Eduard motioned to the sink with his chin, hands held up in the air.
“Wash now.”
Minutes later, they stood at the operating table where a soldier lay unconscious, his chest stripped bare to reveal a bullet hole, right above the heart. A medic dosed the patient with iodine, and a scalpel was passed into Eduard’s hand. A measuring look passed from him to her across the table, which she met with a steady gaze. Then it began quickly, without much fanfare, the room falling into full silence.
There was a cut. Long, precise, along the length of the boy’s torso. Yes, the soldier was just a boy. Eduard worked alone as he opened the incision using retractors, stretching the layers of muscles with utter calmness, humming softly under his breath. An array of other instruments passed into his hand, and after a few more maneuvers, his eyes flashed up to her, intent, blazing. Eva’s breath cut a bit short. He’d looked at her that precise way once, the night he’d proposed to her. As if they were embarking on an unknown journey.
“You ready?”
She nodded. She still didn’t know her role in all this, but she was ready for whatever it was that he needed. Her heart was in a full run, a current threading under her skin.
“Good. Now come here, Eva. Right next to me.”
She did. She came close enough to see, to really see the incision site, and there, underneath the skin and muscle, was the boy’s heart. Beating. Miraculously beating.
There was no time for her to fully absorb this as Eduard took her hand. “Your finger,” he instructed further. “Give me your forefinger.” He then brought it down to the boy’s chest and guided it deeply into the incision, into the soft pulp of muscle and flesh. A sound came from her t
hroat. The pulsating rhythm intensified under her touch. Her finger was resting on a man’s heart!
“Now, Eva.” Eduard’s voice grounded her. “There is a shell fragment in here, and I need you to find it for me. Can you do that? Find it. Feel for it. It should be close to the surface, and tiny, like a seed of rice. Concentrate.”
She did. She poured all of her focus and will into it, and found it—a slight, sharp rising underneath the heart wall, and she gave an affirming nod.
“Good. That’s good. Now hold it in place. Do not let it slip away.” Then, without further warning, his scalpel came down again, carving a hairline in the dark pink, pulsing organ right where her finger was.
Blood poured out, an awful lot of it, and she couldn’t help but back onto a wall. Yet it was all right, for she was no longer needed; her job was finished. Eduard extracted the piece of shrapnel, then immediately begin stitching, unaware that she was no longer beside him, the others taking over for her as she stared down at the splatters of blood on her blue uniform, trying to catch her breath.
The whole thing had taken no more than five minutes, but she was flushed, and her own heart drummed wildly. She’d helped save a life! She and Eduard saved a life together; she’d helped him mend a wounded heart. He’d trusted that she could do it. But it wasn’t just pride, or wonderment, or even the rush of adrenaline, that kept her awake half that night.
Seeing Eduard work stirred something inside her deeply dormant.
* * *
Early the next morning, Eva was with Tamara, extracting antibiotic ampules and bandages from one of the cabinets in the storage area. They were silent at first—Eva still caught in the events of the day prior, yet as she closed the cabinet door, Tamara turned to her quite abruptly.
“What was it like? Yesterday, in the surgery, what was it like?”
“It was… it was incredible. To see a beating heart, it was magical. Rather shocking, but magical.”
“No, what I mean is what was it like working with him?”
“Well, you know. You do it all the time. He’s… precise, confident. He doesn’t hesitate. He’s solid.”
Tamara surprised her with a laugh. “Solid? Good God, Eva, do you realize that procedure has only ever been performed a couple of times before? Only a couple of times. By an American army surgeon who no doubt had far better equipment than we do down here. So I guess you could say that makes Doctor Kovaks… solid.” She gave another tiny scoff. “Is that how you think of him?”
Now she felt embarrassed, provincial. How was she supposed to know that? It wasn’t like she’d been briefed beforehand. She’d been called in and she’d done what she’d been asked. But she blushed when she thought of how to answer Tamara. How did she think of him? With utmost respect, of course, but something had shifted in her feelings for him. It wasn’t a definable thing, but more a slight stirring, a feather brushing on her heavy heart. If anything, it reminded her of how she felt when she met him the night of the party and knew right away that he would always treat her as an equal, that he saw in her the possibilities that no one else had. This, however, she couldn’t confide in Tamara. She knew nothing of their past.
“Well, I’m grateful, of course,” Eva tried redirecting. “Grateful for the opportunity that Ed—I mean, Doctor Kovaks gave me yesterday.” At least this part was true.
“Yes. Eduard,” Tamara said, emphasizing the name, “clearly holds you in quite high regard. Because he’s never called in another nurse to assist on a surgery like that. I suppose you should be grateful. If that’s all that you really feel.”
Heat pounded in Eva’s face. “Look, Tamara,” she began again before Tamara could fire any further probing questions. “If I’ve somehow given you the impression that I’m trying to take your place in all this, I want you to know that’s not the case. I’m merely trying to help.”
“Help. Is that the only thing?”
“Yes… help. As I told you before, it keeps me from thinking that when I walk out of this shelter, someday, there will be nothing out there for me. That all that has been good in my life might no longer exist. So yes, helping, keeping busy, it’s really a gift.”
“This war.” Tamara breathed out sharply as she turned and collected some freshly washed towels drying on a pipe over the sink. “We may never go back to the lives we once had, but what I do know is that life will go on. In whatever capacity, we still have it within us to rebuild. Sometimes the bigger tragedy is not seeing what we already have, what is still here, within our reach.” She said this in a very sad sort of way, walked toward the door, then stopped halfway, looking down at her full hands. “Perhaps you might want to open your eyes, Eva. Because what you still have is far more than dust.”
Then she was gone, leaving Eva there to ponder the meaning of her words, until another siren sounded, and the shelter door burst open, bringing in a new wave of wounded, and she was in motion again.
* * *
Several days later, Eva and some of the nurses went outside to wait for the ambulances, only to find the city eerily quiet. No bombs now, no sirens, nothing but a deadly silence stretched into the crisp, sunny sky. A truck of Soviet soldiers rumbled by, waving flags, cheering, passing around a bottle of vodka. One of them shot his rifle into the air, but it was only a shot of cheerful jubilation.
The stark change must have been noticed down in the bunker, too, for within minutes, the entire staff and all the patients who could walk poured out through the gate, stumbling blindly to the end of the street on crutches and sustaining shoulders, afraid to go any farther. It was decided that a couple of medics would walk over to Castle Hill to check out the situation. An hour later, they returned with news: the battle for Budapest that had shaken the earth for nearly two months was over. The German army and their Arrow Cross accomplices had been crushed, and the few who had escaped were trapped in buildings, surrounded by the Russian soldiers with little choice but to surrender. The Soviets held the city.
Through the frenzy that erupted, the cheers, the cries, Eva struggled to find Eduard. There was no sign of him anywhere, and she panicked that they would part again without a single word. At the very least, she wanted to thank him, to wish him happiness, but then realized that likely he’d already gone and that perhaps it was for the better, for it wouldn’t change much between them. That perhaps having her assist in the surgery had been his good-bye, his way of parting with her on his terms.
Still, she tried the bunker one last time. No Eduard, but Tamara was there, feeding soup to a young boy whose left eye had been covered in gauze.
“I was just telling József here,” Tamara said, not taking her tender gaze away from the boy, “that he should not be afraid. He is safe here, and he can stay as long as he needs. And afterward, the Red Cross will help him find his parents. I will see to it myself. In the meantime, we will take good care of him here. Isn’t that right, Eva?”
Tenderness rushed through her. Eva sat down on the bed behind Tamara and set her chin on her shoulder, inhaling her smell of slight perspiration and something woodsy. Tamara was one big contradiction: tough as much as warm, tending to the boy with the same devotion Eva had experienced personally, even though she’d once been the fiancée of the man Tamara loved. For this woman certainly loved Eduard, but Eva wasn’t feeling jealous—more a coursing, dull regret.
“Before I go, I want you to know, Tamara, that I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. For that telegram you sent on my behalf. For taking care of me while I recovered. You are one of a kind. And a wonderful nurse.”
“Go on,” Tamara said in her unsentimental way. “Go on, get out of here. Get back to your daughter, to your friend. Be careful, though—it will not be safe out there for a while, if I had to guess. The reputation of the Red Army precedes itself. God help us for what is still in store now that they’ve got Hungary under their boot. I can’t help feeling that we’ve escaped the clutches of one monster only to land in another’s. Well, at least there will be a reprie
ve. For now.”
“I will be careful. And you, Tamara? What will you do now?”
“No different from what I did before. I will take a long bath. I will sleep. I will reconnect with those from my past who have been fortunate to survive. I will cry for the others. Then, in time, I will return to this, to my nursing job.”
Eva couldn’t help smiling. “Perhaps, Tamara, at some point, we might get in touch? Maybe we can get to know each other better. Under different circumstances.”
“I don’t think that would be wise,” Tamara said, maintaining her unreadable expression. “Under different circumstances, as you say, we would have been good friends. But I’m afraid you would always remind me of a loss of my own.” She shook her head. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not blaming you, Eva. We all cause one another’s losses without meaning to; it’s the way of humankind.”
There was no time to argue with her—or point out otherwise, or to come right out and say that the path to Eduard was open, for hers had closed long ago—because Tamara had resumed feeding soup to the boy. Setting the bowl aside, she began singing him a melody, and the boy reclined against the pillow, his features softening into a deep sleep.
From across the ward, Eva glanced in her direction one last time. “I wish you luck with all your dreams,” she shouted out, then she turned and left, wondering how it was that she and Tamara understood each other so well and yet so very little.
* * *
It took Eva nearly six hours to reach the Pest side of the river and make her way on foot toward her home on Andrássy, praying that she would find it in one piece. All seven bridges spanning the Danube had been blown up by the Germans in a last attempt to hold Buda, and she’d had to wait on the riverbank amid a mass of people to find room on one of the fisherman boats carting civilians across.
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