War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  He tried to make himself blank, to drive forward like a machine beyond thought or fatigue. Images hurled themselves at him, all of Tania—sleeping, naked, laughing, aiming her rifle, racing beside him in the flashes of explosions. He pushed through them, popping the memories like bubbles until the night was empty of all but the body in his arms and the running.

  He came to a barbed-wire checkpoint, dodging a shattered horse cart on the dark beach. Pulling aside a rickety gate to let him through, the guards said nothing. He regained his pace, and a voice shouted after him, “Go!”

  The medical station was fifty meters ahead in the base of the limestone cliff. It was where Shaikin had lain clutching his neck. Shaikin had died in that cave.

  Zaitsev pushed through the blanket in the doorway to the medical station. He stood panting in a short hall; the walls and ceiling were built from timbers buttressed by metal beams. A bare light bulb

  swung from a hanging wire. Three soldiers lay on stretchers in a line on the floor. A nurse in green fatigues bent over the soldier farthest from Zaitsev.

  Now that he’d reached the field hospital, Tania felt heavy in his arms. His panic spurted at the thought of releasing her. She was going to be given over to this nurse who hadn’t even turned around to see him holding her. He swallowed and spoke.

  “We need help.”

  The nurse lifted her head. Like a winded horse, Zaitsev chuffed hard through his nose. He knew his face must show his terror.

  The nurse moved to him, her hands reaching to support Tania’s head. “Lay her down here,” she said.

  The nurse pulled Tania’s head to guide Zaitsev to an open space on the floor. He wrapped Tania tighter in his arms.

  The nurse saw the madness. “Sergeant.”

  He did not move.

  She spoke sternly. “Sergeant. Lay her down. I must look at her wound.”

  “Where’s the doctor?”

  The nurse checked beneath Tania’s eyelids while she talked.

  “He’s in surgery. I’m the triage nurse. He’ll be with her as soon as he can. Put her down.”

  Triage. This woman decides who goes before the doctor. If I lay Tania down, she’ll die on the floor. She’ll die waiting in line behind these stretchers.

  The nurse stepped back. She seemed to be calculating Tania’s chances from what she could see while Zaitsev held her, looking at the amount of Tania’s blood on him. She pointed at the floor.

  “Lay her down or she’ll die in your arms.”

  The words stung him. He knew death, and he knew this nurse was wrong.

  “No.”

  Behind Zaitsev, a snap sounded. Another snap, like plastic, then a voice.

  “What’s going on here?”

  The nurse kept one hand beneath Tania’s head and motioned with the other.

  “He won’t put her down. I have to look at her. She’s bad.”

  The doctor threw two splotched surgical gloves into a bin. The man was old, the oldest Zaitsev had seen in Stalingrad. He was tall and thick-waisted, with his head shaved bald. His blue eyes were rimmed in exhaustion. The doctor’s white apron was fresh, barely soiled with blood. His stoop disappeared when he held out his arms to Zaitsev.

  “Give her to me. We’ll see what we can do.”

  Zaitsev balked, though he felt a surge of faith in the old man. His arms ached in their lock around Tania.

  The doctor shook his head, solemn as a great oak.

  “She won’t die in my arms either, son. Give her to me.”

  The doctor touched Tania. Zaitsev lowered his arms to let her body roll back from his breast. The nurse stayed at Tania’s head; Tania’s arms flopped when the doctor took her.

  Zaitsev looked at the dripping rip in Tania’s coat. It was big enough to put his fist into.

  “Doctor.” He intended to plead somehow, but the old man and nurse had already assumed all of Tania’s weight and turned from him. They laid her on the floor.

  The doctor’s hands flew at Tania, pecking at her like two white chicks. The nurse returned to the line of stretchers. She knelt at all three; when she was done, she called to the doctor, “Stable.” To the man on the last stretcher, the nurse leaned close and mumbled.

  The doctor unbuttoned Tania’s coat and tunic. With scissors he sliced through her undershirts, pulling aside the burgundy pieces like a velvet curtain. His hands and apron began to streak with red.

  The wound jumped at Zaitsev. A pit the shape and size of an open mouth was torn in the left side of her abdomen, below the rib cage. Poking out of the hole was a pink, veined glob; the pressure inside her body had caused part of her small intestine to boil through the opening. Pulses of blood escaped around the edges, dribbling down her side to pool on the floor.

  The nurse returned to the doctor’s side. Zaitsev moved behind her. Tania’s face was waxen; her eye sockets and cheeks were shadowed as though rubbed with charcoal. Her face stunned Zaitsev; it looked hollow, like a skull.

  The nurse slapped a gauze sheet in the doctor’s outstretched hand. He clapped it over the wound and pushed down. He spoke urgently. “Lift her again.”

  Zaitsev stepped between the doctor and nurse and dug his hands under Tania. He tried to be careful.

  The doctor squawked at him. “Come on, boy!”

  They carried Tania into a large room off the hall. Two tables held the center, both ringed by glaring electric lights hoisted on poles. The low grumble of a gasoline-powered generator came from somewhere in the wails. One table was empty and covered with a fresh white sheet. On the other table a soldier lay unconscious; beside him, a second nurse wrapped gauze around the stump below his right knee. His detached leg was bundled in cloth on the floor, still in its boot.

  Zaitsev laid Tania on the table. The doctor took his hands from the bandage above her wound to put on clean plastic gloves; the nurse pushed down on the gauze in his stead. With her free hand she searched under Tania’s chin for a pulse. Zaitsev backed away from the table and bumped into an elevated tray of surgical instruments. They rattled, but none spilled. The nurse and doctor ignored him, busying themselves with preparatory movements and intense chatter. The doctor asked rapid-fire questions, and the nurse responded in one- or two-word bursts.

  The doctor moved to the middle of the table to swab Tania’s naked torso clean. The nurse removed the bandage from the wound and threw it in a bucket beneath the table. With another swab, she painted an orange coating around the opening where the balloonlike intestine was sticking out.

  “Ether?” the nurse asked.

  The doctor wagged his head no.

  Without an order, the second nurse shut off the lights at her table. She left the amputee soldier and came to stand beside Tania opposite the doctor and the triage nurse. The doctor examined the gleaming tools at his elbow while both nurses donned surgical gloves.

  Zaitsev drifted to a corner behind the old man. He expected to be asked to leave the surgery room; he was ready to refuse. The doctor and nurses leaned over Tania and did not even look at each other while they worked.

  The doctor held out his hand. A nurse selected a scalpel from the tray and put it in his palm. He drew the knife down Tania’s abdomen, crossing the center of the wound. With another stroke, he sliced the corners of the hole to widen it.

  The nurses on either side of the table slipped their fingers beneath the flaps of flesh the doctor had laid open and eased them back. Zaitsev felt himself swelling with the urge to push the three of them away from Tania and take her in his arms again. His dread pulled him a step forward.

  Wet loops of Tania’s small intestine filled the gaping hole. The doctor pushed it about with his fingers and bent his head.

  “A few small lacerations,” he mumbled to his nurses. “We can come back for these.” The women did not move.

  The old man tugged the mass aside and probed under it. He held out his hand again. Another scalpel filled it. The nurse beside the doctor sponged blood from the living crater.

&
nbsp; Zaitsev watched the doctor and the women work with swift certainty inside Tania. Zaitsev himself was no stranger to the insides of living things. He’d skinned a thousand animals in the taiga, buried his hands in their viscera, yanked them out, and thrown them to his dogs. So long as he kept his eyes on the surgery, on the hands of the doctor, on the exposed organs, his anxiety stayed in check. It was when he looked at Tania’s blond hair draped on the table, her hands quiet as wood beside her, that his own gut quivered.

  Months before, the moment he’d begun killing in Stalingrad, Zaitsev had reconciled himself to dying. It was the commerce of battle; he risked his own life in order to take others. But he’d not anticipated dying in pieces. Tania seemed the biggest part of him; if she died on this table, that part died, too. He’d be left alive without her, gutted, then stranded in an icy landscape to survive somehow without her passion and heat.

  And just before this terrible thing happened, such news. An American. What kind of a woman was this, to come so far, to fight so hard and give so much for Russia, from America? What kind of woman? Zaitsev quietly shook his head.

  The doctor dug the scalpel deep into Tania. The triage nurse laid a clamp in his gloved palm, now glistening like a ruby. The doctor wriggled his wrists as if tying a quick knot. One of the nurses lifted a pail from the floor. The doctor pulled up and held Tania’s red spleen in both hands like a gob of mud. He dropped the organ into the bucket.

  Zaitsev shuddered. He balled his hands into and out of fists. His fingers were still tacky with Tania’s blood.

  The nurse opposite the doctor leaned to look down into Tania. She nodded at the doctor. Again he held one hand out for a clamp, then flicked the scalpel. With a twist he took from Tania her left kidney. This, too, he dropped into the bucket.

  A fountain of blood shot from the cavity. The doctor stepped back in surprise, then dove with both hands into the hole. Blood sprayed uncontrolled for several seconds until the doctor quelled it. In the silence after the shock, the doctor and nurses looked at each other through red, dripping masks.

  “Clamp it! Clamp!” the doctor commanded.

  The triage nurse stabbed her hands down beside the doctor’s. In a moment, they were done. The doctor turned from the table to wipe his face with a linen. Zaitsev saw Tania’s blood clinging in the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes.

  The doctor, vibrant and sure moments before, had become old again. Speaking to Zaitsev, he seemed tired and sad.

  “A piece of shrapnel tore up her spleen and kidney. She could live without them. The best thing to do was remove them.”

  He wiped at his eyes with the napkin. Zaitsev said, “Yes.”

  The doctor glanced back at Tania. Zaitsev looked with him, visualizing again the red liquid pillar that had leaped from her middle.

  “The shrapnel was imbedded in her left kidney. The tip of it was protruding from the rear of the kidney. It had perforated the aorta. I didn’t see it. When I took the kidney out, the aorta ruptured.”

  Zaitsev said only, “Yes.”

  “Sergeant, I’ve done what I can.”

  Behind the doctor, the two nurses released their grips on the flaps of Tania’s abdomen. They stepped away from the table in unison, waiting beside the unconscious body in a silent and final tableau.

  Zaitsev would not let it be final.

  “You’re not letting her die.”

  The doctor sighed. “It has nothing to do with me.”

  The old man turned away but stopped and looked back at the sound of the hammer clicking on Zaitsev’s pistol.

  The gun was leveled at the doctor’s heart. Behind him, the nurses took another synchronized step backward.

  “You told me she wouldn’t die, Doctor. You can save her.”

  The doctor pursed his lips to compose his answer. No fear showed in his eyes from the danger aimed at him. He lifted his head to speak as if addressing a student.

  “Sergeant, this patient you brought me has lost a spleen, a kidney, and a lot of blood. I don’t have any stores of blood to replace what she’s lost. All we can do this close to the front line is stabilize the wounded until they can be moved across the river. The tear in her aorta can be repaired. It will take me twenty minutes to do so. But with the blood she’s lost already, the kidney she has left has probably been irreparably damaged. If it hasn’t, it will be before I can return blood flow to it. She will go into renal failure and die.”

  Zaitsev did not lower the weapon. Tania was alive on the table and the doctor must return to her side.

  “She will die, Sergeant. And in the twenty minutes I spend stitching her back together, it’s also possible that one of the wounded men waiting in the hall may also die. Can you live with that?”

  Zaitsev looked at Tania on the table. Her heart continued to beat; it was in a trench, in dire trouble, fighting to live. Those soldiers lying on stretchers in the hall were in their own trenches. He was not here for them.

  “I have no choice,” he said, raising the gun to the doctor’s head. He spoke to Tania, to tell her he was coming. “I love her too much to have a choice.”

  The doctor glanced back at his nurses. They stood motionless, white as painted angels. The old man removed a glove and rubbed his hand over his bald head as if to warm it like an egg, to hatch what he should do next. He looked at Zaitsev’s pistol.

  “If you’re going to wave that gun near my patient, Sergeant, please sterilize it.”

  He peeled off the other glove and threw the pair into a corner. When he returned his eyes to Zaitsev, the gun was holstered.

  The doctor spun on his heels to the table. He was animated again, grabbing fresh gloves and snapping into them. With his hands raised, he announced to his nurses, who’d jerked into action when he did, “He loves her, ladies.”

  The nurses pulled back the carved sheets. Again they exposed Tania’s insides, working without words. Blood-soaked sponges and gauze littered the floor beneath the table. The nurses daubed sweat from the doctor’s face with bandages. Zaitsev’s back ached; he was afraid to move, afraid he might alter some fragile dynamic in the room. Once, Tania groaned. Zaitsev gritted his teeth, longing to crawl into her unconsciousness, to stand beside her and battle their way out together or die shoulder to shoulder.

  At last, the doctor clutched a needle threaded with gut. He dipped into the hole and pulled out and snipped. He sewed like this for a long time, seeming to repair a dozen fissures inside Tania. When he was done, he stood back from the table and took off his plastic gloves. The triage nurse began stitching Tania’s skin, closing her wound.

  The doctor came close. Zaitsev tried to read the man’s blue eyes, hidden beneath tufted white brows. The doctor looked into Zaitsev’s face, then glanced away. His hands rose and fell, as if weighing something.

  Zaitsev looked at the surgeon’s hands, the fingers long and wrinkled, like twigs. Have these old hands saved Tania? He wanted the doctor to report quickly on Tania’s condition, but he could see the man was picking his words carefully. Why? Zaitsev wondered. How bad is the news?

  He prodded. “Doctor?”

  The old man dropped his hands—their work seemed done for now—and dug them into his coat pockets.

  “I put everything back in order,” he said. “She’s in shock. I can’t say how long it will last. One or two days, I suspect.”

  “When she wakes up?”

  Zaitsev watched the man inhale.

  “If the remaining kidney survived the surgery, we’ll know. She’ll have to urinate. If the next forty-eight hours passes and she doesn’t make water, conscious or not, she’s dying and it cannot be stopped.”

  The nurse completed the last black stitches on Tania. Two straight lines intersected on her belly, leaving on her the dark mark of the cross hairs.

  The old man laid his hand on Zaitsev’s collar. He patted once; the touch was light.

  “Remember, Sergeant,” he said, “whatever happens to your friend, she has no choice, either.”


  The doctor walked away; his stoop reappeared across his shoulders. Two white-clad orderlies entered the surgery room and lifted the stretcher of the soldier whose leg had been cut off. The soldier’s head tossed; he was awakening. The orderlies walked past the soldier’s amputated leg and carried him out.

  The nurses clicked off the lights around Tania. One followed the orderlies and the doctor out of the room. The other, the triage nurse, returned to the front hall.

  Zaitsev walked behind the triage nurse into the hall. She kneeled beside the soldier lying on the nearest stretcher. The man’s chest was circled in gauze. The nurse lifted his eyelids. She peered into the eyes for only a moment; she’d become skilled at recognizing death. Without looking at Zaitsev, she stood and moved to the next stretcher. This soldier greeted her with an outstretched hand.