Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel

by Paullina Simons

  The hangings used to take place prominently in the middle of the first semi-circle, perhaps after morning roll call. “Where are your officers housed?” asked Tatiana as they came up to the infirmary.

  “Oh, they…” Karolich trailed off. “They’re in the former Allied barracks.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Just beyond the perimeter, at the back of the camp.”

  “Well, Lieutenant Karolich, are the German officers so well taken care of that they don’t need our help?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s true.”

  “So? Let’s see them.”

  Karolich coughed. “I think there might be some Russians there, too.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, it’s a problem to let you into those barracks.”

  “Why? We will help them, too. Lieutenant, perhaps you misunderstand me. We are here to feed your prisoners. We are here to administer alms. The doctor is here to heal your sick and ailing. So why don’t we start? Why don’t you escort Dr. Flanagan and Nurse Davenport to the infirmary and leave them to do their work, and then you and I will walk through the barracks to help your men. Let’s start at the officers’ camp, shall we?”

  Dumbfounded, Karolich stared at her. “The commandant told me you would like to have—um—some lunch.” He stumbled on his words. “I’m having the kitchen prepare something special. Perhaps have a rest in the afternoon? The commandant has made nice rooms available to you and your staff.”

  “Thank you so much. We will eat and rest when the work is done, Lieutenant. Let’s begin.”

  “What can you do without the doctor?”

  “Why, nearly everything. Unless you need brain surgery performed, but I don’t know if even our doctor can help there.”

  “No, no.”

  Tatiana was too tense to smile. She continued. “Everything pertaining to the sick and wounded, I can do. I can stitch, and wash and bandage, I can administer blood and morphine, treat any kind of infectious disease, prepare medications, make diagnoses, treat lice, reduce fever, shave heads to prevent further problems.” She patted her nurse’s bag. “Most everything I need is in here. When I run out, my jeep is full of additional supplies.”

  Karolich muttered something unintelligible, mumbled that the camps didn’t need blood, or morphine, they were just internment camps.

  “Nobody has died in your camps?”

  “People die, Nurse,” Karolich said haughtily. “Of course they die. But you can’t do much for those, can you?”

  Blinking, Tatiana didn’t reply, flying fleetingly back to all the people in her life she had tried to save and could not.

  “Tania,” Martin whispered, “the commandant had mentioned lunch, no?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, taking her nurse’s bag. “But I told them we just ate.” She leveled Martin with a look. “Dr. Flanagan, we did just eat, didn’t we?”

  He stammered.

  “I thought so. You and Penny head right to the infirmary barracks. I will start with the officers’ barracks and see what I can do there.”

  Since Tatiana was the only bridge between the cultures and the nations and the languages, she was the only one in charge. Martin and Penny went to the infirmary.

  She and Karolich came back to the jeep and opened the back doors. Tatiana stared at the medical kits, at the food parcels, at the apples, trying to get her bearings. She turned away from Karolich for just a few moments because she was afraid. She didn’t want him to see her fear. Without looking at him, she said, to stall for time, to give herself another moment, “Do you have an adjutant? I think we need an extra person. Also maybe a handtruck.” She paused. “To carry the medical kits and the apples.”

  “I’ll carry them,” Karolich said.

  Now she turned to him. She was calmer, more in control. “Then who will carry the machine gun, Lieutenant?” They stood silent in front of each other for a few moments, until Tatiana was sure he had absorbed the meaning of what she was getting across to him.

  Karolich flushed uncomfortably. “The men are all right, Nurse. They won’t bother you.”

  “Lieutenant Karolich, I don’t for a moment doubt that in another life many of them were decent men, but I’ve also had four months of reality and three years of nursing the German POWs on the American front. I have few illusions. And I think it’s bad form for a nurse to brandish her own protection, don’t you?”

  “You are completely right.” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. Asking her to wait, he retrieved his assistant, a sergeant. They precariously loaded a bushel of apples and thirty kits onto a wobbling handtruck and set off for the officers’ barracks.

  The sergeant waited outside with the kits. Tatiana, lugging a burlap bag full of apples in one hand, walked through the first two barracks, holding on to Karolich’s arm with the other. She didn’t want to, but she suddenly realized that if she saw Alexander on one of those nasty, filthy, too-close-together bunks, she might not be able to hide what was inside her.

  She glanced through the bunks, two men per bunk, handed them an apple and moved on. Sometimes, if they were sleeping, she touched them, sometimes she pulled back their blankets. She listened to their calls, their banter, to the sound of their voices. She ran out of apples very quickly. She didn’t open her nurse’s bag once.

  “What do you think?” Karolich said, when they stepped outside.

  “What do I think? Terrible,” she said, deeply breathing in the fresh air. “But at least the men were alive.”

  “You didn’t stop to examine any of them.”

  “Lieutenant,” she said, “I will give you my full report when we have gone through all the barracks. I need to write down the few I have to come back to, the few that require immediate medical attention from Dr. Flanagan. But I have a method for doing this. I can tell by the odor who is sick with what, who needs what, who is alive and who is dying. I can tell by the temperature of their skin and by the color of their face. I can also tell by their voices. If they, like those men were, are calling out, shouting things in German at me, reaching out for me, then I know things aren’t too bad. When they don’t move, or worse when they follow me with their eyes but don’t make a sound, that’s when I start to worry. Those two barracks had live men in it. Have your sergeant give out the small medical kits to each and every one of them. Next.”

  They went through the next two. Not as good here. She covered two of the men lying in their beds and told Karolich they needed to be taken out and buried. Five men had raging fevers. Seventeen had open sores. She had to stop and dress their wounds. Soon she ran out of bandages and had to return to the truck to get more. She stopped by the infirmary on her way back and got Penny and Dr. Flanagan to come with her. “The situation is worse than I thought,” she said to them.

  “Not as bad as in here. The men here are dying of dysentery,” said Martin.

  “Yes, and it’s breeding in the barracks,” said Tatiana. “Come look.”

  “Any signs of typhus?”

  “Not so far, though a number of the men have fever, but I’ve only been through four barracks.”

  “Four! How many are there altogether?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Oh, Nurse Barrington.”

  “Doctor, let’s walk quickly. They pack those barracks with one hundred and thirty-four bunks each. Two hundred and sixty-eight men. What do you expect?”

  “We’re not going to be able to get through this.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Tatiana.

  The men from one of the barracks were in the yard. The men from another were in the showers.

  After going through barrack number eleven, Martin wiped his face and said, “Tell Carol-itch, or whatever his name is, tell him that every healthy man in that one is going to die if the diphtheria cases don’t immediately get sent to the infirmary.”

  In barrack thirteen, Tatiana was bandaging the upper arm of a German man when he suddenly heaved himself off his bunk and fell on t
op of her. At first she thought it was an accident, but he immediately started grinding against her, keeping her pinned to the floor. Karolich tried pulling him off, but the man wouldn’t budge, and none of the other prisoners would help. Karolich had to knock him very hard on the head with the barrel of his Shpagin, and he only stopped after he lost consciousness.

  Karolich helped Tatiana up. “I’m sorry. We’ll take care of him.”

  Dusting herself off and panting, she picked up her nurse’s bag and said, “Don’t worry. Let’s go.” She did not finish bandaging her attacker.

  It was eight o’clock at night when they got through barrack fifteen. Karolich said they had to stop. Martin and Penny said they had to stop. Tatiana wanted to continue. She had heard Russian spoken only in the last two barracks. She went extra carefully through those, pulling back all the covers, handing out the medical kits and apples, talking to some of them. There was no Alexander.

  And then Karolich and Martin and Penny all shook their heads and said they had to stop, they couldn’t do it anymore, they would start fresh the next day. She couldn’t continue without them. She couldn’t walk through those barracks alone. Reluctantly, she returned to the commandant’s house. They washed up, scrubbed down. Penny took another dose of penicillin. They met Brestov and Karolich for dinner.

  “So what does your doctor think, Nurse?” Brestov asked. “How are we doing?”

  “Poorly,” said Tatiana without even bothering to translate. Martin and Penny were scarfing down their food. “You have a real health situation with those men you’ve got there. I’ll tell you your biggest problem. They’re unclean. They’re scabby and furfuraceous. Are your showers working? Is your laundry working?”

  “Of course,” Brestov said indignantly.

  “They’re not working around the clock, though, and they should be. If you kept your men clean and dry, you would prevent half of what’s going on in there. Disinfectant in the toilets wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  “Listen, they’re getting up, they’re walking, they can’t be that sick. They get a little exercise in the yard, they eat three times a day.”

  “What are you feeding them?”

  “This isn’t a resort, Nurse Barrington. They eat prison food.”

  Tatiana looked at the steak on Brestov’s plate.

  “What, gruel in the morning, broth for lunch, potatoes for dinner?” she asked.

  “Also bread,” he said. “And sometimes they get chicken soup.”

  “Not clean enough, not fed enough, bunks too close together, those barracks are incubators for disease, and lest you think it has nothing to do with you, your men have to guard them, and your men are getting sick, too. Remember, diphtheria is contagious, typhoid from eating spoiled food is contagious, typhus is contagious—”

  “Wait, wait, we don’t have typhus!”

  “Not yet,” Tatiana said calmly. “But your prisoners have lice, they have ticks, their hair is unshaven and too long. And when they get typhus, your men will still have to guard them.”

  For a moment, Brestov said nothing as the piece of steak hung suspended from his fork, and then he spoke: “Well, at least they’re not being eaten alive by syphilis.” He threw his head back and laughed. “We’ve taken care of that little problem.”

  Tatiana got up from the table. “You’re mistaken there, Commandant. We found sixty-four men with syphilis, seventeen of them in advanced tertiary stages.”

  “That’s impossible!” he cried.

  “Nonetheless, they’re ill with it. And by the way, your nationals, the Soviet prisoners, seem to be in worse shape than the Germans, if that’s possible. Well, thank you very much for a pleasant evening. I will see you all tomorrow.”

  “We don’t want the men too healthy,” said Brestov after her, taking a large gulp from his vodka glass, “do we now, Nurse Barrington? Good health makes men less…cooperative.”

  Tatiana continued walking.

  The next morning she was up at five. No one else was, though. She had to sit on her hands—literally—until six o’clock.

  They got ready—slowly; they ate—slower, and finally resumed inspection of the remaining five officers’ barracks.

  “Are you all right?” Karolich asked her with a polite smile. His uniform collars were starched, his hair clipped and brushed neatly back. He was incongruous. “Yesterday shake you up?”

  “A little. I’m fine,” she said.

  “He’s been sent to the brig because of what happened.”

  “Who? Oh, him. Don’t worry.”

  “Does it happen often?”

  “Not that often.”

  He nodded. “Your Russian really is very good.”

  “Well, thank you. I think you’re just being kind.”

  They gave out the kits and apples, treated what they could, and got the infectious cases out of the common barracks. Tatiana took a walk through the infirmary beds. He was not there, either.

  “I’m surprised at the condition of the Soviet men,” Martin said when they went outside to take a break. It was raining, and they stood under an awning for just a breath of reprieve.

  “Why?” said Tatiana.

  “I don’t know. I would have thought they’d be treated better than the Germans.”

  “Why would you think that? The Soviet men are not in danger of being scrutinized by international eyes. It’s all about appearances. Those Soviet officers are about to be shipped back to the Soviet Union work camps. What do you think awaits them there?” She shuddered. “At least here, there’s a summer.”

  It was in barrack nineteen, as Tatiana was perched on one bunk, cleaning out an old burn wound with boric acid that she heard a voice behind her and a familiar laugh. She turned her head, looked across the row and found herself eye to eye with Lieutenant Ouspensky from the Morozovo hospital. Instantly she looked elsewhere, then turned back to her patient, but her heart was beating wildly. She waited for him to call out to her, “Why, Nurse Metanova, what brings you here?”

  But he didn’t. Instead, when she was finished and stood up to leave, he said, speaking Russian to her. “Oh, nurse, nurse, looky here.”

  Slowly she looked. He was smiling widely. “I have a number of things very wrong with me that I know only you can fix—being a nurse and all. Can you come hither and help me?”

  The makeup, the hair worked. He didn’t recognize her. Collecting her things and snapping shut her bag, Tatiana stood up and said, “You look perfectly healthy to me.”

  “You haven’t felt my head. You haven’t felt my heart. You haven’t felt my stomach. You haven’t felt my…”

  “I’m an old professional. I can see you are fine from a distance.”

  He laughed joyously, and then, a smile still big on his face, said, “What is it about you that looks so familiar to me? You speak such good Russian. What’s your name again?”

  She had Penny give him a small medical kit and a food parcel while she herself left in a hurry. How long before Ouspensky put her face together with his memory?

  Slower and slower she walked through the last barrack. She dawdled and paused at every bed, even talked to some of the men, slower, slower. If Ouspensky was here, wouldn’t it mean that Alexander was here, too? But barrack twenty proved just as fruitless. Two hundred and sixty-eight men, none of them Alexander. Twenty barracks, five thousand men, none of them Alexander. There was the rest of the camp to get through, but Tatiana had few illusions. Alexander would be where the Soviets were. He wouldn’t be with the German civilians. Besides, Karolich told her as much. All the Soviets were together. The camp didn’t like to mingle the German and Russian prisoners. In the past, violent conflicts erupted over nothing.

  When they stepped outside, she left the others for a minute and walked over to the short barbed-wire fence that separated the housing units from the cemetery. It was June, and wet. It had been lightly drizzling since dawn. She stood, in her soiled white pants, her soiled white tunic, her black hair falling out of her hat, h
er arms around herself, and motionlessly gazed at the small freshly dug elevated hills without markers, without crosses.

  Karolich came up to her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  With a pained sigh she turned to him. “Lieutenant, the men who died in the barracks yesterday, where are they buried?”

  “They’re not buried yet.”

  “Where did you take them?”

  “For now they’re in the corpse cellar, in the autopsy barracks.”

  She didn’t know how she got the next words out. “Could we see the corpse cellar, please?”

  Karolich laughed. “Sure. You don’t think the dead are getting fair treatment?”

  Martin and Penny returned to the infirmary and Tatiana went with Karolich. The autopsy room was a small, white-tiled bunker with high tiled berths for the bodies.

  “Where’s the cellar?”

  “We slide them to the cellar this way.” Karolich pointed.

  At the back of the room Tatiana saw a long metal chute that led down twenty feet into darkness.

  She stood silently over the chute.

  “How do you”—her voice was untrustworthy—“how do you bring the bodies up from there?”

  “We often don’t. It’s connected to the kilns in the crematorium.” Karolich grinned. “Those Germans thought of everything.”

  Tatiana stood and stared down into the darkness. Then she turned and walked outside.

  “I just need a couple of minutes, Lieutenant, all right? I’m going to go over there and sit on the bench.” She attempted a smile. “It will be a little easier for you when some of the Soviets get shipped out, no? You’ll have more room.”

  “Yes.” He waved dismissively. “They bring more in. It never stops. But the bench is wet.”

  She sank down. He waited a bit. “Do you want me to, um, leave you alone?”

  “Would you mind? For just a few minutes.”

  Tatiana’s lower stomach was burning. That’s what it felt like, a slow charring away of her insides. There was such a thing, wasn’t there, as feeling better, eventually and forever? She couldn’t feel this old into eternity, could she?