The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  They discovered they had no friends or acquaintances in common, although they’d both resided in Boston. Anna left it unspoken that her husband was a prominent physician in the city and her family had lived there for generations.

  Kazanjian was smuggled out of Turkey as a teenager after protesting the massacres of Armenians put him in danger. He worked in a factory near Boston and learned English from coworkers and later tutors. He was thirty years old when he passed an admission examination and enrolled at Harvard, the oldest student in the dental college. Now he was one of the oldest members of the Harvard Surgical Unit, a group of volunteer medical personnel.

  The Unit had come resolutely prepared for war, but even with the enormous crates of supplies they brought to the base hospital, the medical supplies were wholly inadequate for the anticipated number of wounded. Kazanjian despaired when it was reported that there were only fifteen dentists to serve the entire army. “We must rely on our wits,” he said.

  Early in the morning before the day became too hot, the artist and the dentist walked through camp together, scavenging. “I will make splints from stray telephone wire, flattened coins, paper clips, bits of leather and rope,” he explained. Pieces of discarded equipment, packing material, even empty condensed-milk and meat tins would be cut into pieces for jaw splints. When he expressed a wish that kindling could be transformed into metal, she declared he was a hoarder of metals, a modern Midas.

  “A sniper’s bullet typically tears a three-by-five-inch hole in flesh,” Kazanjian told her. “The jawbone is hard as ivory and it fractures. A man can live without arms and legs, with a severe face wound, but not without his mouth.” A man’s life could be saved by saving his jaw. An intact body was already an anomaly for Kazanjian.

  Anna and Kazanjian were constantly together. During one scavenging expedition, she picked great armfuls of wildflowers and presented him with a single flower, which he kept in a bully beef tin next to his cot.

  Anna ignored the critical eyes that watched her, a married woman without her husband. Having found an accepted place in the midst of war, she put aside her own work.

  For one week, Anna observed Kazanjian as he performed dental surgery on the staff. She was dexterous and quickly learned the vocabulary of his shorthand gestures—sometimes just a glance—indicating certain requests or instruments. Since his heavy spectacles concealed his eyes, she preferred to read his expression up close, as his forehead and his lips were more revealing. His words were always carefully considered, and he was wholly present to everyone who spoke to him, his concentration a gift from translating a second language and his natural reserve.

  After she officially became his assistant, she committed all his supplies to memory: saline solution. Higginson’s enema syringe to cleanse wounds. Provocaine and novocaine. Modeling compound, Vulcanite and gutta-percha to hold damaged jaws in place. A Brophy gasoline-powered blowpipe for soldering. Orthodontic wire, forceps, pliers, tongue and extracting forceps, cleft palate instruments, mouth gags. She completed the first difficult extraction of a soldier’s blackened teeth before becoming ill.

  “It’s good you learn the work now,” Kazanjian told her. “Everything will change when battle shifts in our direction. Once the wounded arrive, time is our intractable enemy.”

  The long scar dug in the earth that the soldiers occupied was only fifteen miles away. There were wild rumors of battle, of enemy sightings and atrocities. Pervasive as sunlight or heat, fear of the impending battle seized words in conversation, interrupted appetites and dreams. The situation slowly became claustrophobic. Everything was stasis.

  WEEKS PASSED AND Anna had received only a single letter from her husband. He sounded remote, harried, and there were few words of affection or regret. She was surprised only by her anger. She glued the letter to the back page of her sketchbook, flap side down, so it was safe but couldn’t be opened.

  One afternoon Anna and Iris, a V.A.D. girl from Mayfair, ducked into a marquee tent to watch a cinematograph show. There was no piano accompaniment, and Anna was unable to focus on the silent, jerkily moving figures; the characters and the story held no interest for her. A melodrama filmed before the war.

  Afterward, Kazanjian accompanied the two women into the woods nearby, where Anna had noticed a patch of wildflowers. Deep under the sheltering trees, the muted sound of the supply vehicles had the gentle regularity of surf, so their surroundings seemed enchanted, artificial, remote as an island. They found the lilies, pale gold flowers, their sharp star shapes puncturing a luxuriant bank of foliage.

  Kazanjian wandered off and the women gathered flowers, their hands sticky from the broken stems, brilliant orange pollen streaking their white-and-gray uniforms.

  Without a sound, three dark, bearded men in uniform suddenly emerged from the underbrush. Anna stood stiffly in place, but Iris waved at them.

  “Bonjour, bonjour. Ça va?” She turned to Anna. “They’re foreign soldiers. Turcos. From Algeria.”

  Iris had been looking after the man with the bandaged arm. He grinned in recognition, bowed, and presented her with a roughly bundled handkerchief. She thanked him profusely.

  Kazanjian returned and offered the men cigarettes, which they solemnly tucked into the breast pockets of their uniforms. He managed a few words in Arabic, which delighted the Turcos, respectfully shook their hands, and wished them luck.

  After the men had left, Iris untied the handkerchief and found a handful of wilted rosebuds. “I can’t very well keep this, can I? Not from their dirty hands.” The handkerchief unfolded as she tossed it in the air, scattering the pink buds over the ferns. She was willing to nurse the Turcos but scorned them outside the hospital setting. After all, she was of her class.

  Kazanjian said nothing, but by now Anna knew him well enough to catch the contemptuous look he gave Iris before he turned and a dense green reflection masked his spectacles.

  SINCE ONLY A HANDFUL of soldiers were currently being treated at the base hospital, the staff focused on one another as distraction from the medical supplies laid in rows on towels, the sharpened surgical tools, the rolls of white cotton wool bandages. Everything was uncannily quiet.

  A wag on the hospital staff announced it was Midsummer’s Eve, and it became an excuse for a celebration. Freshly laundered sheets were draped over the long tables in the mess tent. A selection of wines and champagne, dishes of pickled quail eggs, foie gras, ham, and cheeses appeared, all of it mailed from home or donated by new recruits or staff returning from leave. A doctor had smuggled back a haunch of wild boar, and the slices—the red black of garnets—were arranged on huge platters. The buzz of flies sounded the depth of the tent as the women went around pouring champagne into mugs.

  A majestic rumble of gunfire echoed across the distant fields, penetrating the tent as easily as an odor. An instant later, an echo repeated the noise. The battle had begun. One of the nurses wailed, then stretched her hand over her mouth.

  A drunken lieutenant threw himself on the ground and motioned for quiet before pressing his ear against the thin grass. Those who had served time at the front continued to eat and drink, accustomed to battle and this type of behavior. The others, half drowsy from the wine, nervously waited.

  “I can hear the movement of great vehicles,” he whispered. “It won’t be long. Won’t be long.”

  AS THE FIGHTING raged five miles away, the ground trembled, the vibration and the sound indistinguishable from each other. Anna felt it through her feet and legs, her bones a conductor of this telepathy, impossible to disconnect, linking her to battle. It possessed her as if she were under water. Anxiety constricted her shoulders, dried her throat, and she wished for Kazanjian’s comforting presence. In that instant, she recognized the first betrayal of her husband.

  Messages pulsed along the miles of telegraphic wires from the front to the hospital, and everyone worked frantically, preparing for the imminent arrival of wounded soldiers. The wave of noise in the distance grew louder, and late in
the afternoon a convoy of ambulances, camions, and horse-drawn wagons bearing the injured swept onto the grounds. After all the cots had been filled, the wounded were laid on straw in the chapel and under nearby trees by the light of hurricane lanterns. There was scarcely room to walk around the prone bodies. Some soldiers had to be cut free from their clothing and their stretchers, since blood had dried during the time it had taken to evacuate them from the battlefield. Some men had waited several days. Gas gangrene was common, and the stench from the wounded bodies was so terrible that the tent with the most gravely wounded men could be distinguished by smell alone. Anna’s skin and clothing reeked of pus, and the odor persisted even after cleaning.

  Anna was astonished that there were so many ways a body could be damaged. She stared as a nurse used an indelible pencil on a man’s naked torso, drawing circle after circle on his skin. “It’s the quickest way for the surgeons to find the shrapnel,” the nurse muttered, already studying the next quiet man on a stretcher.

  In the operating tent, the five surgical tables were staffed by an anesthetist, a surgeon, a nurse, and an orderly. No one rested, and an entire day would pass without a meal or an opportunity to sit down. Constant motion was hypnotic, an incantation, a way to keep the mind occupied. Anna knew this from her own work. Her eyes sought blankness, staring at the army blankets, a strangely brilliant crimson, thrown over each cot.

  A few trees shaded the compound, and as the heat grew stifling, the tent flaps were roped back to allow a breeze to pass through. This had little effect, since the canvas was still warm to the touch at eleven o’clock at night. The women were miserable in their long, thick skirts and their caps.

  Anna shared a single tent with the other women, and when there were a few hours to sleep, they collapsed—without a greeting or a good-night—fully clothed onto their cots, unable to soothe themselves or one another. Occasionally, a groggy nurse would hold up a torch from her nest of sheets so another woman could undress illuminated by its weak light. When there were fewer casualties, their shifts were shortened to twelve hours.

  At first, stress and the constant noise made sleep impossible. Then one type of sleeplessness was replaced by another, a state of dazed wakefulness, dreaming disbelief. Anna wasn’t certain if she was awake or asleep or drifting in a third, unknown condition.

  Sitting by a patient’s bedside, Anna read a feverish, recently blinded man a letter from his wife. Careful of his privacy, she didn’t look at him as his wife’s news of their garden, the weather, their youngest son, was shaped by her voice.

  “Show me where she made the marks,” he murmured, holding out his hand. “Show me the exact place my Susan signed her letter.”

  She slipped the paper into his hand, guided it to his lips so he could kiss his wife’s bold, private XXX of love, too intimate for another woman to read aloud.

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning, Anna struggled alone to help a choking man. Kazanjian’s hard shoulder suddenly pushed her aside, and he pulled the man into a seated position. He swiftly inserted his fingers into the soldier’s throat.

  “Secure his tongue,” Kazanjian gasped as a nurse ran over, his eyes never leaving the man’s face. Or what was left of it.

  Anna stumbled outside and bent over her knees on a crate. Oblivious to her distress, figures hurried along the paths of pocked sand, stopping to jerk aside a tent flap and expose a harsh triangle of light from the interior.

  Anna’s shoes were wet, and when she slipped them off, she realized they were filled with dark blood from the wounded men.

  THE DOCTORS AT the base hospital were never quite comfortable with Kazanjian. He was a foreigner, a dentist. But he proved to have an uncanny gift for improvisation—which was necessary given the shortage of supplies—that they lacked.

  Soldiers with jaw injuries were routinely sent across the channel with closed-bite splints. Many died of lockjaw. Kazanjian solved this by creating a device fashioned from two tapered wooden sticks, a small block of wood, and a piece of elastic that kept the patient’s mouth open until arrival at a permanent hospital.

  Nothing Kazanjian did could be imitated or anticipated. The doctors took note of his expertise and addressed him with new respect. They began to seek Kazanjian out at mealtimes and invited him to the officers’ mess for card games, their acknowledgment of his superior skill. Once they shared a bottle of fine wine found in an abandoned rucksack, as Kazanjian had a reputation as a man with sophisticated taste. However, he maintained a space of solitude around himself.

  Kazanjian stopped Anna outside the mess tent. They were both late for the meal.

  “I’ve volunteered to serve at another hospital. I will be leaving the country.”

  The wind lifted Anna’s thin apron, and she smoothed it down against her skirt.

  He held up a strip of rubber. “This was cut from a hot-water bottle. I’ll use it to splint a jaw.” He shrugged in exasperation. “I’m a scrap man. I don’t mind. I’m here to serve. But my abilities will be better used in a proper hospital.”

  “When will you leave?” Her question was automatic, her voice flat.

  “After the next military push. Every pair of hands will be needed.”

  The sun was hot on her bare neck. She squinted against the light reflected from the canvas tent, trying to read Kazanjian’s eyes through his thick spectacles.

  “Mrs. Coleman, are you comfortable with the wounded men?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you depict a grotesque face with a neutral eye, without judgment?”

  “I can draw anything set before me.” Sensing this was an audition, she tried to calculate the response he wanted. “The skill of the drawings is for another to judge, of course.” She rarely apologized for her work and was irritated at her own criticism. Irritation to cover her dismay at his leaving.

  “No debate about your skill. But these portraits would require physical detail, not the psychology of character. They are a record of medical treatment.”

  “I believe I have that ability.”

  “Good. A drawing can be crueler than any photograph.” He indicated she should precede him into the tent. The interview was finished. Kazanjian had enlisted her.

  Without an official title, Anna could slip into another role, another establishment or country. She wrote to her husband explaining that she would be leaving the base hospital. There was no reply, and a second letter was forwarded to the hospital where he was working, a few miles from the front. Communications were erratic. The Times arrived across the channel the day after it was published, but letters sent fifty miles were delivered weeks late. It was a paradox. Decisions made during wartime were sometimes equally paradoxical.

  She fit chalks, pencils, paints, brushes, and India rubber erasers back into their original wooden boxes, and brushes into leather cases. The three legs of the stout sketching stool were refolded under the pigskin seat. The enormous rolls of Arche, Whatman, and watercolor papers from Messrs. Dixon of Liverpool had never been unpacked. Before the last trunk of her personal effects was locked, she removed her wedding ring, knotted it into a rag, and hid it in a paint box.

  The Wolseley staff motorcar delivered Kazanjian and Anna to the coast, where they boarded a hospital ship, the Guildford Castle. They disembarked at three o’clock in the morning, and it seemed the hour had been reversed, as military and hospital personnel bustled around the platform as if it were afternoon. An enormous heated shed was filled with rows of War Department ambulance trains. The coaches were thirty-one feet long with the Royal Arms and a Geneva cross painted on the sides, crimson against khaki gray. The interiors had white enamel walls, mahogany fittings, maroon leather seats, spotless enamel basins, and could accommodate up to five hundred men slung in hammocks from floor to ceiling, swaying with the rhythm of the train. There were separate coaches for the pharmacy, kitchen, and mess room, and a sitting room for the staff.

  During the journey to the new hospital, Anna studied the face under Kazanjian’s tutel
age, learning different details of physiognomy than the drawing masters in Rome had presented. She enjoyed her role as pupil, appearing more obedient than she believed herself to be.

  “A single nerve commands the face. Here.” He touched her cheek directly in front of her ear. “This is the root of sensation. The nerve branches again and again into upper and lower branches like a tree, spreading sensation over the face.” She had once fitted her thumbs into a dry skull’s empty sockets and marveled at the minute span of the eyes’ connection to the brain. Close as two lips.

  Twenty-two muscles on each side of the face, most of them longitudinal, created an infinite constellation of expressions, pulled into place by the emotions just as planets obey the sun. The Latin names for the muscles were as exotic as locations on a map: mylopharyngeus, levator palpebrae, and the buccinator. To express happiness, the mouth curved upward with the zygomaticus major, the cheeks lifted, and the muscle around the eyes, pars orbitalis, contracted into a gentle squint. Fear was complicated, involving the inner and outer brow and the mouth. The eyes widened, the lips were stretched back by the risorius and the masseter, and the jaw might drop. He solemnly demonstrated this.

  Kazanjian also explained that shrapnel caused more severe facial injuries than bullets, as the jagged pieces tore the skin. These types of wounds usually went septic because debris was forced into the body along with the fragments. Gas was worse. It burned away skin and eyes.

  When Kazanjian put away his diagrams and turned to gaze out the train window, Anna secretly studied him, the light pouring over his face, the green landscape that filled his eyes, returned by its image across his spectacles. She regretted the lack of paper and chalk to create a memento of him at this moment.

  “When will we arrive?” she asked, purely to give herself distance from him.

  “Half an afternoon.”

  The view through the window was a moving channel, a distraction that allowed him to speak more freely than usual. “I hope I’ve acted correctly, persuading you to work at a new hospital in another country.”