A Timeless Romance Anthology: European Collection

by Annette Lyon

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Me?” He paused in the snow, seeming hesitant to speak English. “I am— Antti.”

  “Nice to meet you, Antti.”

  He smiled at that then continued on, leading her to what looked like a hilly mass of branches and snow. Not until he stopped before it and knocked did she realize that this was a shelter of some sort— a camouflaged dugout. It blended in perfectly with the surrounding the forest.

  Antti set the suitcase before the door. “Here is the women’s place. I don’t go in,” he said, gesturing toward the dugout. He lifted a hand and gave a slight nod, as if he were tipping a hat— as he probably had to ladies on the street before the war broke out— and walked away with the lantern. Alone in the darkness, Anna felt even colder than before.

  She lifted a hand to knock again, but the door opened before her knuckles made contact, revealing a pretty woman with a round face and blonde hair pulled into a tight bun. “Oi anteesk—”

  Anna shook her head, hands raised. “I’m sorry; I don’t speak Finnish.”

  The woman looked up. “Oh, hello.” She spoke the two English words with confidence. “American?”

  “Yes. I’m a reporter. Antti says I’m to stay here?”

  “Ah. You came to see the war and write for a newspaper, yes?”

  “For a magazine, yes,” Anna said. She pointed inside the dugout. “Do I stay in here?”

  “Yes, yes,” the woman said. “Come.” She led the way inside. Anna struggled to drag her suitcase inside. She closed the door, and immediately felt better; the bitter cold was gone. She was enveloped by a highly unexpected feeling. Not warmth, exactly, but also not the freezing cold she’d stepped from. This was quite tolerable. She looked around. The walls were covered with hides with short hair. A glow spilled from a lantern in the corner, making the room lighter than Anna would have expected. She reached up and stroked one of the furs on the wall. “What animal is this from?”

  “Reindeer,” the woman said.

  “Brilliant,” Anna murmured. Drawing her hand down the wall, along the concrete, which gave her a feeling of security, although she had no idea whether it was a false sense of safety. Could a bomb or tank still bash it to pieces? Probably. But this area of the war was supposed to be quiet.

  She heard a boom in the distance. Mortar fire or a bomb, surely. But how close? She swallowed back the nerves climbing up her throat, reminding herself that she’d asked for this assignment.

  I will prove myself as equal to any other reporter on staff. Another boom, this one closer. It took Anna’s breath away.

  When the boom subsided, the woman crossed to a cot on the far side of the room, seemingly unfazed by the noise. “My name is Kaisa. I’m a nurse. And I believe this is your cot.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said, following from behind and setting her suitcase beside the cot. The dugout had ten cots, with nine obviously in use; personal effects and clothing were stacked beneath them and on top of them. Each cot had a small shelf unit or other storage. Remarkably nice for an icy war zone.

  Kaisa turned toward the door, apparently ready to leave, but Anna called her back, unwilling to be left alone with nothing to do. She pulled out her notebook and pencil and hurried toward Kaisa.

  “Could you show me where my photographer is?” Anna asked. “Kuusinen said he arrived yesterday.”

  The nurse stopped at the door and turned around. “Tall man, blond hair, very handsome. Could pass for a Finn?”

  Anna shrugged but smiled at the description. “I don’t know; I haven’t met him.” She mentally went through the photographers she knew at the magazine, but that didn’t do much; several were tall and blond, including Pete.

  Ugh. Stop thinking about him!

  “He’s very handsome.” Kaisa’s eyes lit up. “He went on a ski patrol a few hours ago. They should be back soon. Would you like to wait in the mess hall for him?” She pushed the door open, letting a stream of frigid air into the dugout. “That’s straight ahead about one hundred meters. You can use the flashlight on your cot to find your way.”

  Anna found the flashlight, which she hadn’t noticed before, and flipped it on. The yellow beam was a strange comfort in this land of what felt like eternal night.

  “I must go to my shift in hospital now,” Kaisa said, making a move to leave.

  Anna jumped at the opportunity. “May I come with you?”

  Kaisa stopped in her step a second time and looked questioningly at Anna. “You want to see hospital?” Her voice sounded incredulous.

  “I want to see the war from all sides.”

  Kaisa seemed to consider the suggestion for a moment before nodding. “Very well.”

  Anna quickly opened her purse, from which she snatched two extra pencils in case one broke, and followed Kaisa into the bitter cold. Even though she’d been outside only moments before, the sheer force of the winter was again a shock to her system, as if she’d walked into a wall of ice. She tried not to show her reaction to Kaisa, who tromped along, seemingly without noticing or caring about the temperature or the snow squeaking beneath their boots.

  Along the way, Anna couldn’t see tents, dugouts, or other structures until they were nearly upon them. Only their two small flashlights kept Anna from stumbling and running into things.

  “I’m glad you’re leading the way,” she said to Kaisa, hoping to keep the heaviness of the darkness from pressing in on her like a heavy weight. “I’d be liable to wander into the trees and get lost in the snow without your help.”

  Slowing her step, Kaisa turned around, her face suddenly somber. “That is exactly what happens to the Russians. They aren’t ready for our winters and don’t want to fight anyway. Their leaders lie about why they’ve invaded our country.”

  “What kind of lies?” Anna mentally opened her reporter’s notebook so she could remember this conversation. She couldn’t take notes in the dark, but she wanted to hear what was on Kaisa’s mind. Anna’s journalistic instincts promptly overcame her desire to get out of the cold, and she felt no need to hurry, even though her toes burned with the cold.

  “Stalin tells his soldiers that they are coming to liberate us poor, downtrodden Finns. Some prisoners we’ve captured say they can hardly believe their eyes when they see how we Finns live more comfortably than they do in Russia. We have everything we need. They have nothing to offer us.” She shook her head wistfully. “Poor Russian boys…” Even though she spoke of her enemy camped somewhere in the dark in the distance, her face showed compassion. “Most of the Russians soldiers are hardly trained at all. So many young men are just sent to the border on trains and then they march. Many have died from the cold as they come across the border before they ever see battle. Those who survive are told that if they are captured, the Finns will torture them, pluck out their eyeballs, and then kill them. Of course we do no such thing.”

  Anna’s stomach twisted. “How horrible. Why don’t the soldiers refuse to fight?” Even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. Soldiers didn’t disobey orders.

  The faint glow of Kaisa’s flashlight showed her pained smile. Clearly, the idea of suffering was hard for this nurse to bear, even if it meant the enemy. “The commanders give them no choice. Russian soldiers march toward us with guns at their backs. They are shot either by our snipers or by their own commanders.” Kaisa nodded toward the forest behind Anna. “Or, if they try to escape into the trees… they get lost, as you said. It doesn’t take long for them to freeze and die.” She cleared her throat, shook her head as if to clear such sad thoughts, and turned toward the path in the snow again. “Come. I must report to my shift.”

  They entered one of two tents, both of which Kaisa indicated belonged to the field hospital. The other was for surgeries, this one for the recovering wounded. The tents were large and painted white as camouflage in the snow. Kaisa held open a heavy canvas flap, which, like the dugout, was lined with fur. Anna stepped inside. The temperature within the t
ent didn’t feel quite as warm as in the dugout, but the sting of cold wasn’t here. Cots lined both sides, more than half filled with wounded.

  Kaisa consulted her superior as she began her shift, and Anna took in every detail, trying to commit it all to memory as she looked for a spot to sit where she could take notes. She spotted a chair the opposite side of the room from Kaisa, where she sat to jot down all she’d learned so far.

  Low-toned Finnish was spoken in whispers, mostly by nurses caring for soldiers, but also by a surgeon and a few others. The language sounded nothing like French or German, or even Russian. It had a distinctive, beautiful quality to it, one she’d have to find a way to put into words when she wrote about the war. Through the hum and buzz of conversation, with rolled R’s and vowels Anna had never heard, a different voice pierced the sound, one that didn’t match the others.

  She lifted her head and found the source: a man three cots down on other side of the room. He groaned, seemingly half conscious, as his bandaged head moved back and forth and he clutched his arm, which was in a sling. The words coming from his mouth sounded strangely familiar— or rather, not the words, but the accent. He wasn’t speaking Finnish; she was quite sure of that.

  She took a step toward Kaisa, who was now consulting a clipboard at the base of the first cot on the left. She replaced the clipboard then removed her stethoscope from around her neck, blew on the metal end a few times— surely to warm it up— as she approached the head of the bed then listened to the man’s heart. A blood-soaked bandage wrapped his leg, and he wore a glazed expression.

  As Kaisa listened to the man’s heart, she kept her eyes on her watch. Then she wrote a note onto the clipboard and replaced the stethoscope around her neck. She asked a question to the soldier, who shook his head and said something Anna interpreted as a thank you.

  Kaisa moved to the next cot. Anna crossed the narrow room and touched the nurse’s arm. Kaisa turned toward her, a question in her eyes. Anna nodded at the moaning soldier, who still mumbled in a different accent. “Is he Finnish?”

  “No,” Kaisa said simply.

  “Swedish?” Anna asked next. Many Finns spoke Swedish natively, or so she’d learned in her research. Plus, some Swedes had volunteered to help their neighbor country.

  Kaisa removed the next clipboard and consulted the information on it. She glanced briefly to her right, at the man Anna meant. “Him? Russian, of course.”

  The words froze Anna in place almost as much as the cold had before. Shouldn’t a POW be kept elsewhere, or at least restrained? Had he not been moaning in Russian— saying what Anna now realized was probably Stalin— she would have assumed he was one more in a line of Finnish wounded.

  Seemingly without noticing Anna’s reaction, Kaisa continued her duties. She shook a thermometer then placed it under the second soldier’s tongue then went on to change a bandage on his forehead.

  Likely sensing Anna behind her, Kaisa said, “We see many injuries in the face.” Her movements were gentle and precise, like a true professional. She didn’t flinch at the angry red stitched-up wound, but Anna did. “We have many good snipers who grew up hunting. They can shoot, hiding in the trees at a great distance. But when they have to fight, it’s often very close, with knives instead of guns.”

  Anna tried not to shiver. She opened her notebook and wrote furiously, grateful that she’d brought pencils instead of a fountain pen, which would be little more than a block of black ice here. “Did he…” She gestured toward the Russian. “Defect?”

  Kaisa looked up from changing the dressing. “De… fect? I do not know that word.”

  How to explain? “Did he leave his army to join the Finnish army?”

  “Oh, I understand.” Kaisa set the bloodied bandage into a metal bowl then went to work cleaning what looked like an angry, swollen stab wound below the young man’s eye. “No. We treat the few Russian soldiers we capture as our own. They are no longer the enemy then, simply another person who needs help.”

  Even though the soldier needed help because of wounds caused at the hand of a Finn? Being humane toward prisoners was one thing, but Anna had never heard of this kind of care toward a prisoner of war. “Surely your own men get medical care first.”

  Kaisa looked up, her brow furrowed in what looked like genuine confusion. “We treat wounds in order of how serious they are. I believe you call it triage?” She set aside a cotton ball she’d dabbed on the soldier’s wounds and looked at Anna straight on to explain. “We are nurses and doctors. Our job is to help anyone who needs us. These poor Russians had the misfortune to be born where Stalin would one day rule and send them off to be slaughtered. We may have to fight them to stay free— and we will fight while Stalin ships endless numbers of boys to be killed, as if they were worth nothing more than bales of hay.” She finished bandaging the wound then stood and returned to Anna’s side. “What’s hard for us is that we don’t have as many men as the Russian do. The same men fight all the time, without rest, but the Russians keep coming in waves, always fresh, never ending.” Her eyes looked weary.

  Kaisa picked up the bowl and moved to dispose of the old bandage, leaving Anna standing there. Her mind whirled. The Finnish field hospital’s triage put Russians ahead of one of their own if the wounds were worse? The world needed to know about these good people, living in a country roughly the size of California but with a far smaller population, fighting the single largest nation on the planet, which was run by a ruthless butcher.

  She recalled political commentators saying this war could go for months. How was that possible, between one of the largest, strongest nations in existence, against a tiny neighbor? But if the Finns could hold out until spring or later, how would that affect the battle? Already the world was looking down on Russia, condemning the decision to invade its small western neighbor, and with good reason.

  Anna looked around and found a chair, which she sat on to write easier. Her hand moved quickly on the page to capture her thoughts. Dill would be pleased with the first piece she’d send back. She’d have to interview a few more people to corroborate the information Kaisa had provided, but Anna was well on her way to having a solid story, assuming she’d ever meet her photographer and get a few good images to go with it.

  Americans always did love rooting for underdogs, she thought as she wrote. Perhaps FDR would bend and send aid.

  Chapter Three

  Lieutenant Haikkola glided to a stop beside Pete. “You did well,” he said, stepping out of his cross-country skis. “What did you think of how we take care of the Reds? They don’t know where we come from or how we slip away so quickly; it terrifies them.” He grinned with obvious pride.

  In the two days Pete had been at the Tolvajärvi front, he’d learned that the Finns had far fewer resources than the Russians but used what little they did have to their extreme advantage.

  Will I be here as long as they say— for months? Pete almost hoped he would; being away had been the best thing he could have done to distract himself from thoughts of Anna. But better to stay in this eternal dark of winter. He didn’t want to be here long enough to see spring, with blossoms and grass and chirping birds, things that spoke of life and happiness… of the love he’d given up.

  I couldn’t stay with her! He mentally yelled the words at the universe. He and Anna were both journalists, which was enough reason to not try to maintain any kind of relationship; they would both be forever going in different directions, rarely seeing each other as they traveled to cover whatever assignments they had next. What if she wanted a family? Would she stay home with a baby while he went gallivanting across the globe, putting himself in danger? That wasn’t fair to her or a child.

  As long as he’d stayed in California, his thoughts had kept returning to her, to the pained shock in her eyes when he’d said it was over between them. He hadn’t been able to stop second guessing himself, wishing he could go back to her, undo what he’d said, and start over, even though she deserved more than him.
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  He couldn’t give Anna the calm, quiet life she deserved. He could be headed for a different state or country after one phone call. He’d learned to pack a duffle bag with the essentials in about ten minutes, and he could live out of that bag for weeks. He’d done so many times.

  Pete handed his skis and poles over to an enlisted soldier as he’d just seen Haikkola do then followed the lieutenant toward a dugout for officers. “Your men are in great shape,” Pete said, still huffing from tagging along on the ski patrol.

  “My men could ski almost as soon as they could walk.”

  The cold was so oppressive, it limited conversation until they were inside the warmth of the dugout, where Pete sighed with relief. That’s where the two of them took off their white snow suits, which were used to blend in with the snow. Pete had seen firsthand on the patrol how the Russians hadn’t tried any kind of camouflage whatsoever. No wonder the Reds were terrified; they faced a smaller force, but one that was nearly invisible to them.

  With their suits off and set aside, Haikkola patted Pete on the shoulder. “I hear we have a Russian POW, found in the forest wounded and nearly frozen. We think he got lost after a recent fight; he needed surgery on his leg and stitches on his face. You may find his views interesting.”

  Pete’s eyebrows went up. “I’d love to talk with him. Is there someone here who could interpret for me?”

  “I believe we could find someone,” the lieutenant said with a nod. “Or perhaps you’ll get lucky, and he’ll speak English. But first, let’s get some coffee, and then you can visit our POW before you go to bed.”

  “Thank you,” Pete said. He tilted his wristwatch and shined his flashlight on it. Nearly eleven. Despite the hour, the mess hall would have food. He’d want to go there for a late dinner, definitely, especially after such a rigorous time skiing on the patrol. Then he’d go to bed and sleep dreamlessly, if he was lucky. “On second thought, coffee might be a bad idea at this hour. I’d like to talk with the prisoner then have a small meal and go to bed.”