The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  To her surprise, his expression of condescending amusement did not change, but his grip on her wrist tightened and he said:

  ‘You are being rather silly to talk like that. I have considerable power in this town, you know. Not only can I take Mischa, but I can have Nikolai Suvarov’s house requisitioned, his carts and carriages and the horses, too. And I will do it if you do not…’

  Rage seemed to have given Evelyn a command of words she had never suspected in herself and taken away the last vestige of inhibition.

  ‘You are a coward and bully, Sergei Ivanovitch. And if you are typical of the Whites then I am not surprised that Piotr turned to the Bolsheviki. You are quite despicable, and if you do any of those things you’ve threatened I shall go at once to the Colonel and explain your spite. I do not think that you will then last very long in this powerful position. And now leave me alone. I do not want ever to see you again, or speak to you, or hear your name. Let me go.’

  She did not wait to hear how he would answer or whether he would find something else to intimidate her with, but pulled hard to free herself and walked quickly away. He did not follow, and she had no way of knowing whether he tried to put any of his threats into practice. But when she got back to the house she went at once to Nikolai to tell him what had happened. Some time later he told her that he had spoken to the Colonel and had Mischa released from military service on the grounds of his age and poor health. She wondered what else they had discussed, for Sergei soon departed for another post further south. He took Georgii with him as a parting gesture. Evelyn was sorry about Georgii and felt ashamed every time she watched his father’s bleak face in the days just after they left Shenkursk, but she could only feel relieved that she would not have to face Sergei again.

  His departure seemed to have given her a kind of freedom. For the first time since he had introduced her to the social life of Shenkursk, it dawned on her that she really did not have to carry on going to parties she did not enjoy and pretending to be interested in the inane compliments of the blinkered men who danced with her. Dindin and Natalia Petrovna were amazed by her defection, but eventually accepted her explanation that she could not face dancing while her countrymen and their allies were risking death in battles so close to the town.

  She also took up Lieutenant Oldridge’s suggestion and as soon as she had some time to herself, she went to the hospital. There, her new feelings of freedom and relief were shaken by what she saw and heard. For the first time she discovered what bullets, shrapnel and even frostbite can do to the living human body.

  At first everything was as she had expected: she was introduced to a young officer who had been sent in to have a small flesh wound in his upper arm dressed, and they chatted to each other as courteously and ordinarily as any two wellbred English people. But later she was taken into a ward full of much more seriously ill patients, some of them officers, others enlisted men. There she saw evidence of real pain and it horrified her.

  In every suffering man she saw John and she felt closer to him than she had for months. She knew that she had to do something to help the men, something more than talking soothingly to them of England and America or their courage and sacrifice, and promising to write letters to mothers and wives at their dictation. She went in search of the Medical Officer and begged him to let her come and work in the wards.

  He looked carefully at her, as though weighing up her capabilities and character. Then, after a pause during which she expected to be snubbed, he said:

  ‘There is a great deal that a voluntary nursing aide could do, if you are really prepared to do it. We are severely short of nurses and need help. But it is unpleasant work, and I am not sure if…’

  ‘I have become accustomed to hard work this last year, Major.’

  ‘That isn’t really what I meant. I expect you are too young in any case. You know, surely, that the rule is that no lady under twenty-one shall nurse in the battle zone?’

  ‘But I am already here, in it. Helping you in the hospital won’t make me any more vulnerable than I should be if I remained in my cousin’s house.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, still unconvinced. ‘Perhaps I should have a word with your cousin, if he is in loco parentis, and ask his permission.’

  Evelyn gave a short, slightly bitter, laugh. ‘Very well. But I expect he will say, “She is a grown woman; it is her decision.”’

  Chapter Eleven

  At first Evelyn was allowed to do little more in the wards than refill hotwater bottles, brew tea and take cups to the men, and check that the new arrivals were warm. She felt frustrated. Having taken her resolution to do what had to be done despite the vileness of the wounds and the upsetting groans of pain, it was annoying to find that no resolution was needed and that the only feeling against which she had to struggle was boredom mixed with guilt that she was leaving all her household tasks to her cousins. About a week after she had started work for him, she mentioned her feelings to the Medical Officer and asked if she could not do some ‘real nursing’.

  ‘Miss Markham, I haven’t time to go into the innumerable reasons why you have been assigned these particular duties. I will mention only two: you are entirely untrained and have a very great deal to learn; and cold and frostbite are two of the most dangerous conditions these men have to face. They are brought here on stretchers from the temporary dressing stations through temperatures that you know perfectly well reach minus fifty degrees. It is absolutely vital that the wounded are warmed once they get here. Do you understand, or would you rather give up your work now?’

  His tone and his ultimatum jolted her out of her resentment and a blush stained her pale cheeks as she whispered:

  ‘I am sorry, Major. I had not understood.’

  He did not wait to reassure her, but stalked off, far too busy, with few drugs and fewer trained people to treat the patients in his care as they should be treated. Evelyn looked after him filled with a determination never again to complain or to fall short of his standards.

  Of course she did fall short, more than once, but somewhat to her surprise the MO did not dismiss her even when she fainted the first time she was ordered to help change the dressing on a suppurating wound. Slowly she became accustomed to assisting doctors perform the vilest duties on the wards. She learned how to control the retching nausea and the dizziness that assailed her when she had to deal with the pus that drained from great wounds torn into the flesh of the men, just as she learned that when changing dressings or cleaning wounds, firm, decisive movements were both less painful and more useful than the featherlight touch she had tried to use at the beginning.

  But she could not alter her feelings, and every time she had to touch one of the men she felt revolted. After a week or two she could deal with their wounds, but the smell of their bodies made her feel sick, and their hairiness disgusted her. Taking them bottles and bedpans, let alone dealing with the results, took more resolution than cleaning the beastliest, bloodiest wound, and she dreaded the day when she would first have to give one of them a blanket bath.

  When it came, she knew she could not refuse the order. This was a man wounded in the service of his country, who had risked his life for the defence of all the things in which she believed. She reminded herself as she collected warm water, flannels, soap and towels that he deserved all the help and care she could give, but the idea of putting her hands under his bedclothes, touching him, filled her with horror.

  Gritting her teeth, she set about her task, taking care never to look at the man she was washing. Her embarrassment seemed infectious and he flinched whenever she touched him. Doggedly, with closed eyes and tightened lips, she completed her task. Then, trying to subdue the nausea she felt, she carried the bowl of dirty water to the sluice room, where she was thoroughly sick.

  One of the younger doctors passed by and saw her. He said kindly enough:

  ‘Are you all right, Nurse?’

  Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, Evelyn nodded. A smile of un
derstanding rather than mockery flashed across his preoccupied face for a moment.

  ‘You’ll get used to it. We’re all human, you know. The difference between them and you is not very significant. It’s all skin and muscle, nerves and blood – just like yours.’

  ‘Please go,’ she said, covering her eyes with her other hand.

  Much as she hated nearly everything she had to do in the hospital, Evelyn steeled herself to go on duty every day. But, once home again, she could not bear questions about her work at the hospital and so, tired though she was by the end of every shift, she would change as soon as she arrived home and go straight to the kitchen to help with the dinner.

  One evening Nikolai found her there, leaning for a moment on the edge of the range almost swaying with exhaustion. He put an arm round her shoulders and drew her to the table.

  ‘Evelyn, my child, you ought not to work so hard. I don’t think you should do all this after a full day at the hospital.’

  She leaned gratefully against his strong shoulder, feeling the vast solace of his kindness, and she said without complaint:

  ‘Uncle Nikki, I have to. There are so many things I can’t do now – even the English lessons – that the least I can do to contribute to the housekeeping is help with dinner.’

  ‘Not if it’s going to make you ill, child. Besides, there are enough of us now to manage without you. Dindin can stay away from some of the parties if necessary…’

  ‘Oh poor Dindin. She enjoys them so, you see, Uncle Nikki. I can’t think why, but she does.’

  He noticed that for the first time she had admitted her own dissatisfaction with the social round, but all he said was:

  ‘Nevertheless, she does not need to go to one every night. I’ll explain to her; she is a good-natured girl; she’ll understand. Come, what else is to be done tonight? You sit there and I’ll see what I can do. Just tell me.’

  For a second or two she could think of nothing except the fact that in moving away to help, he had withdrawn from her. But she took herself to task and forced her tired brain into order.

  ‘It’s only the cabbage now, I think. Yes, only the cabbage. It’s in that big black pot. It just needs putting on the range and testing in about twenty minutes. The stew is in the oven and the potatoes are on the left-hand plate. They might be done. Could you test them – with a fork? There’s one here.’ She picked it up and held it out to him.

  He took it from her and as she watched him clumsily but conscientiously doing what he was told, she felt a sense of peace. She felt that she was back inside the warm circle of Nikolai’s approval and no longer had to pretend or fight with herself about what she wanted.

  When they took the food into the hall the only person already there was Bob Adamson. He had spent the day at the barracks, interviewing as many of the men and officers as he could find in order to write an analysis of the recent events for his editor. The interviews had been easy enough, but writing them up was proving unexpectedly difficult.

  It was not the first time he had had to struggle to work since his arrival in Shenkursk, and he could not understand what had gone wrong. The short, factual telegrams he sent off whenever he could persuade the army to despatch them, presented no problem. It was the longer, more considered articles that he seemed unable to make himself write. This piece was to be a full description of the events he had so baldly reported, weighing up the evidence for and against the actions of all the factions involved, but when he sat down to write up his notes he found himself almost paralysed. He knew that he had the elements of an important story, with all the facts that he needed, but for some reason he could not weld them together. His first attempt was wordy, full of statistics and flat. Reading it over, he tried to work out where the problem was and could not.

  Here in Russia, five weeks after the Allies had signed an armistice with Germany, ending the greatest war the world had ever known, an army of British, American and Canadian troops was fighting a series of battles with one of its erstwhile allies. There had been no declaration of war; consuls and ministers of most of the invading countries were still at work in Russia negotiating with the Bolshevik leaders, even though the Allied governments had not formally recognised those leaders.

  The Americans, he had been told that morning, had been sent to Russia with explicit instructions from the President to do no fighting: they were there only to assist in the evacuation of any White Russians who were fleeing persecution by the Bolsheviki. Yet the British command had somehow turned the young, untrained, unpractised American soldiers into fighting units. They bitterly resented the British officers, some of whom they claimed had been deliberately overpromoted to ensure that they were senior to any American in charge.

  The British were resentful too. Time and again when he was talking to British officers and private soldiers, they had apologised to him for discourtesy but explained to him that his fellow Americans were causing the ‘usual trouble’, some of them even refusing to fight; others fighting but making a mess of whatever they attempted. The Canadians now were a different matter, Adamson was told more than once. They seemed to know how to fight from blockhouses buried deep in snow in the middle of dense forests; they always managed to keep their guns firing, despite the murderous temperatures and the probability of getting frostbitten fingers if one took off one’s gloves to clear or clean a gun. And somehow they never burned themselves on the viciously hot metal of their weapons as everyone else had done at the beginning. They were good chaps, those Canadians. They kept morale high despite the depressing perpetual twilight and boredom in which they all had to live.

  All the ingredients for a rousing, indignant story were there, but Bob Adamson could not put it together. At the end of two hours of frustrating rewriting, surrounded by crumpled balls of waste paper, he was forced to think that he had somehow, somewhere, lost his anger, and with it his stock in trade. It was that anger which had driven him out of his own country and as far from his family and their money as he could get; driven him to demand a foreign posting from his editor in the first place and then kept him going during the first lonely months of his assignment in Petrograd.

  Now all he could see were the reasons behind the actions and prejudices of every group of players in the Russian melodrama. That did not mean that he liked any of them, but he could not prefer any one player over the rest. Ever since he had had his first short article published he had never lacked a cause to champion or an enemy to vilify. Now, they were all doing things he hated for reasons he could understand, and he felt lost. It was as though he had no point of reference any more. He felt he no longer knew anyone, least of all himself.

  The words Piotr had used in Moscow just before he left came back to him. Had he really ignored truths and facts and things to admire in people just because he thought they were on the wrong side of some line he had drawn between right and wrong? Could he even have drawn some of those lines in the wrong places? He tried to jerk himself out of this paralysing sense of doubt and failure, telling himself that however much he might have come to admire the tolerance that Nikolai Alexandrovitch had always shown, it was not something a campaigning journalist could afford to catch. He put his head in his hands and asked himself despairingly how, if he could not even make a convincing article out of such components, he would ever be able to write again.

  The sounds of voices and an opening door put paid to his introspection and he lifted his head to see Evelyn and Nikolai at the door of the hall, bearing trays of cutlery, plates and food. Bob quickly got up from the table to go and take Evelyn’s tray. Too tired to be surprised by so uncharacteristic a gesture, Evelyn did notice the downturned mouth and the hopelessness in his hazel eyes that usually looked so challengingly out at the world.

  ‘What’s happened, Mr Adamson? You look so tired.’

  Nikolai watched the pair of them and in his heart rejoiced that at last she had seen the man and not the enemy in Bob. It might come right even now, he thought, as he went as slowly as he
dared to round up the rest of the household for their dinner.

  When he came back at the head of his little family he saw that they were sitting side by side at the table. They were not talking but he could feel from the atmosphere in the dimly lit room that they were at ease, and the way that they were both sitting – relaxed against the chair backs, their hands still and their faces calm – told him that all was well with them for the moment.

  Evelyn looked up at him as he came to the table and her smile found an answering one in his own eyes. He could not say anything to her then with all the others present and in any case he was not sure that she knew what had happened to her, but as he sat down on her other side he touched her warm cheek for a second.

  The next morning Evelyn woke with none of the dragging tiredness that seemed to have been her constant companion for months. She discovered that she had slept on her back in the same position all night, like someone recovering from a serious operation, instead of turning back and forward and winding the sheet round her in an angry tangle as usual.

  She dressed in her grey uniform frock, putting a clean apron and veil in her bag ready to take to the hospital and went down to breakfast, not even wondering at the transformation, so grateful was she for the peace she had been given.

  Dindin and Natalie were laying the table when she got downstairs while Sasha was talking earnestly to his father and Nikolai, and Bob Adamson was scribbling on a big pad of white lined paper by the stove. Karla brought in the eggs and coffee just then and they all sat down at the old round gate-legged table. It was an ordinary morning, yet Evelyn found it even harder than usual to make herself leave them all when it was time to go to the hospital and stood at the front door looking back wistfully until Nikolai said: