Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  In late May, during the German spring offensive, she was transferred to Auteuil, where she worked surrounded by American doctors and nurses in long white tents spread in rows over the grounds of the racecourse. Orderlies did nurses’ work, recuperating soldiers did orderlies’ work, nurses acted as anesthesiologists. Wearing rubber boots and a white kerchief over her dirty hair, she changed bandages for two days before an exhausted surgeon heard her say something about her training and promptly moved her into the X-ray room to help the medic struggling with the new equipment. The tube stand broke; she fixed it. She calibrated the tube, loaded the holders, mixed developing chemicals, set up the darkroom efficiently. The medic had trouble using the Hirtz compass to localize projectiles; she taught him how to set the legs correctly. The surgeon, reviewing films with her, said her instinct for sensing how bullets and pieces of shrapnel split after they entered a man’s body, and for exposing their peculiar paths, was frightening. Then he invited her to work with him full-time.

  All summer, as the wounded men poured into the white tents, she’d continued to work in the X-ray room. Paris wasn’t far but she never left the racecourse. She wrote home very seldom, ignored the letters she received, and when she wasn’t working either slept or prepared for the next full train. In July she heard that American troops had been assigned to North Russia as part of an Allied intervention; in August, that a small Red Cross unit had left New York on a merchant steamer, carrying food and medicine and other supplies for those troops. Those seemed like pointless facts until September, when she was sent from Paris to London to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where she boarded one of the four ships that at midnight, under a new moon, had floated silently down the river and into the North Sea. As neither the Army nor the Red Cross had roentgenologists to spare, the surgeon at Auteuil had volunteered her.

  So that was her preposterous story, which she’d given up trying to explain. No one at home could understand but here almost everyone had lived through something similar, including Boyd. Nothing in his story had been unfamiliar, if the details differed they were only the details; the contradictions and reversals all rang true. Why, then, had she been so insensitive to him?

  ALL THROUGH THE next day she wrote up a report on a new way to chart the location of projectiles, which she’d developed in France and which Dr. Hirschberg, who’d found it useful, wanted to submit to the Army. He came in several times to check on her but she said nothing to him about Private Boyd’s problems, knowing the time wasn’t right. At the end of the day she let him leave the building alone, so he wouldn’t feel that she was pestering him, and fifteen minutes later she walked by herself to the convalescent hospital. The sky was dark, the moon was hidden by heavy low clouds, and the air was damp and smelled of smoke and garbage. Soon it would start to snow again. People bundled in long dark coats, their faces hidden by hats and scarves, converged in thin columns on the hospital’s front door. She joined the back of one column and moved toward the recreation room, where an elderly British professor was giving the fourth of a series of lectures on Russian literature. For a month now this had been her chief distraction: such a relief, to hear someone talk about anything other than the war.

  On her way in she stopped to say hello to several soldiers; most of those who’d been operated on and stabilized at the receiving hospital ended up here for a while. Dr. Hirschberg, who’d arrived before her, waved and gestured her over and so she sat at his table, facing the river, in a dark green armchair stained with chocolate and smelling of the horrible cigarettes the British supply officer doled out to the men. The movie screen at the front of the hall was blank; the stage, which most recently had hosted a vaudeville entertainment during which one Viola Grottinetskoff had danced in tights, was now bare except for a small wooden podium. Dr. Hirschberg said, “I’m looking forward to this, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” she said. The gray cardigan he wore every day was neatly buttoned but covered with small spots, and there were specks of skin caught in his heavy dark eyebrows. “I do every week.”

  “I’ve been reading Turgenev in French, since the last talk,” the doctor said. “I’ve forgotten—do you read French?”

  “Quite well,” she said. Although he relied on her films to guide his incisions, she was not sure, sometimes, if he remembered her name. But he was a fine surgeon, calm in the face of the worst surprises, and she was happy to work with him.

  “I’m glad you had some quiet time this afternoon,” he said. “If it stays like this, maybe we’ll try to send your report off later this week.”

  “It’s nice to be catching up,” she said. “But I did see one patient I’d like to tell you about.”

  While the room filled up around them, officers and secretaries and headquarters staff trickling in by twos and threes, she related what she’d learned so far about Boyd. His appearance, half-frozen, with Havlicek’s body; his request for an examination; what she’d observed with the fluoroscope. “It’s clearly cadaver bone,” she said. “And the wound’s becoming infected. If you were to operate …”

  “Then he’d end up here,” Dr. Hirschberg said. “Like them.” He nodded at the two soldiers guarding the doorway and then at the pair working the refreshment bar. Convalescent soldiers did all the work at this hospital themselves, except for the nursing and cooking, and were also sent out to guard the Headquarters building or work as clerks or typists inside it, to set type for the little newspaper, and even to work as orderlies and kitchen helpers back at her own hospital. If Boyd’s surgery went well—

  “He wants to have his little operation,” Dr. Hirschberg continued, “and then move over here after a couple of days and have a pleasant week in bed, before waiting out the rest of his tour doing light duty in Archangel. Perhaps he’d like to be in charge of making hot cocoa.”

  Somehow, although that was roughly the same path followed by many soldiers whom she’d examined and he’d treated, his tone was uncharacteristically cool, even mocking. Before she could respond, the professor, dressed as before in his threadbare tweeds, took his place at the podium. While he enthused about Tolstoy and read from his own translations, she puzzled over how she’d offended the doctor.

  The professor finished, the applause died down, the room began to empty out. Half the crowd knew Eudora or the doctor or both and stopped at their table to say hello, preventing her from asking him what he’d meant. Only when they had passed through the double doors themselves and were walking outside through the heavy wet snow, did she ask if she’d done something wrong in examining Private Boyd.

  “I’m sure you meant well,” the doctor said. “And it’s not as if we all haven’t bent the rules before.” The tram clattered past, packed with rowdy soldiers on their way from the barracks to the nightclubs, and he paused, gazing moodily at the men hanging halfway out the windows. “God, I get tired of this,” he said. “Them and their bad behavior, us and our bad behavior, the politicians, the people back home—did I tell you what my wife wrote in her last letter?”

  “No,” she said, uneasily. She located and charted the objects piercing the soldiers’ bodies; he dissected them out and closed the wounds: during the worst rushes, they hardly spoke at all, a glance or a gesture conveying all they needed. She ate with the nurses or by herself and he ate with the officers; when they met outside work it was at places like this lecture and they never spoke of personal things.

  “According to my wife,” he said bitterly, “my continued absence is causing her the greatest inconvenience. My patients have all been taken over by other doctors who’ve been back home for months, her friends feel sorry for her, my pitiful salary doesn’t cover the rises in food and coal, the roof needs work and the garden is a shambles: complain, complain, complain. I can make excuses for her, because she doesn’t have any idea what we’re going through here. But what’s your Private Boyd’s excuse? Everyone’s suffering, everyone wants to go home—and he’s with the ambulance company, he’s supposed to be helping them. Walking out on them now si
mply makes him a shirker.”

  “He’s not ‘my’ private; I hardly know him. But he is hurt.”

  “He’s hurt a little. But I know some things about him that you don’t.”

  After outlining the same events Boyd had described, the plane mistakenly dropping the pair of bombs, the vaporized cook, the men grieving afterward, the doctor continued, “Half of that company was right on the edge of mutiny; they were so furious with the British officers in charge, and with the fliers, that they burned down a shed they’d been using as a hangar. Two British soldiers were beaten up and no one would admit to it. And someone sent an anonymous letter from the front to Headquarters, demanding that their company be relieved. Did you hear the stories about the driver who lost his mind back in November?”

  “Who didn’t?” An ambulance driver, without a rifle of his own, had stolen a rifle from a sleeping comrade and then crept through the outpost until he found a British officer. After blaming the officer for starting the war against the Bolsheviks, he’d blown off the officer’s head, and then his own.

  “Then you can understand why the officers in charge would worry about what was going on after the cook was killed.”

  Dr. Hirschberg dug his hands deeper into his pockets as they rounded the corner and faced the damp wind blowing off the river. By the water, in the light of a fire, three women with cleavers were dismantling a dead goat. “Jesus,” he said. He shook his head, and then continued. At the same time the commanders at Headquarters were considering what to do with those men, there’d been a huge increase in Bolshevik activity far to the east, with rumors of a major attack. More troops were badly needed there. Using that as an excuse, the British commanders had decided to break up the American company, pulling two platoons of infantry and six ambulance and medical men away from the site of the cook’s death. Boyd had been in that group.

  They passed the sawmill, dimly lit but still running, filling the air with a smell so intense that Eudora was briefly transported to the dark pine and spruce forests of her childhood. She said, “I don’t see what that has to do with his injury.”

  “They should have kept him where he was,” Dr. Hirschberg said. “And would have, if he hadn’t been one of the ringleaders. The company’s supervising medical officer had been shot in the stomach and transported back into Archangel, and besides being shorthanded they had hardly any medical supplies. Boyd’s clearly smart, and enterprising; I heard he stitched up someone’s leg in the field with a needle and thread from a sewing kit. But he was enough of a wild card that they wanted him out of the way no matter how skilled he was. Your Private Boyd”—there was that phrase again—“did a ten-day march, carrying a full pack, and then he worked at that outpost for three months before the incident with Havlicek. All with the same wound that he’s complaining about now. If he wants me to operate on him, you can be sure he has another reason.”

  SHE HAD NOT, before that evening, given much thought to how Dr. Hirschberg viewed his patients. Although he’d had no military experience before the war and left behind a lucrative private practice in New Jersey, he worked long hours uncomplainingly, and she’d fallen into the habit of thinking that he was relatively content. And that despite his increasingly scruffy appearance he was somehow sturdier and stronger than she was: less lonely, less baffled, less consumed by longing to go home. The way he judged Boyd so sharply, though, opened up the possibility that he was judging all his patients—and the nurses, and the orderlies, and her.

  Until now she’d believed that he regarded her as simply a component of the operating suite, no less essential, but no more interesting personally, than her X-ray tube. His distant courtesy, which the Russian nurses found insulting, instead made her feel invisible in the most pleasing way. When she’d first learned to use the machines back in the Adirondacks, she’d been alone most of the time and her body had seemed to dissolve in the darkness of the sanatorium basement, leaving her mind directly connected to the wires and the dials. She’d been shocked, in France, to find that the soldiers she tended actually saw her. They questioned her passionately about her own life, poured their stories out unasked, returned to the hospital when they were healed and asked her to walk with them, eat with them, marry them. Her only relief had come during the hours she’d spent studying and working with the manipulatrice.

  Here, Dr. Hirschberg protected her similarly, keeping her busy and hidden. Once he’d said, as she showed him the path a bit of broken rib had traveled, that when he operated it was with her eyes as well as his own, her mind as well as his. They talked about work, and about fluoroscopes and tubes and bones and spleens; about the lectures they both attended when they needed distraction, and about the new books they tried to read. Until his recent outburst about Boyd, that had been all.

  She was still thinking about this a few days later when, on her way back from the supply depot, she passed the base of the massive toboggan slide a group of engineers had built to entertain the troops. In Tamarack Lake, the toboggan runs had been built on the lower slopes of the mountains: snow packed into smooth troughs, sometimes iced with buckets of water, acres of softer snow at the bottom ready to slow the toboggans down. Here the run rose straight up from nothing: flat city, flat square, buildings lined up along the wide flat river and, in the midst of them, a huge tower of cross-braced timbers, buttressed by a long wedge and rising three stories into the air. The underemployed engineers had decorated the steps with small spruce trees draped with colored lights.

  No wonder the children couldn’t stay away from it. At the foot of the wooden stairs, a Russian guard trying to attend to the old woman berating him stood surrounded by a clutch of shrieking little boys and a girl clomping about in what looked like her father’s big felt boots. Eudora, stopping among the spectators to see what was going on, gathered, by piecing together their gestures and exclamations, that one of the boys had sneaked past the guard and climbed halfway up the snow-coated treads before slipping and dropping his sled. The sled had clattered down the steps and then crashed into the old woman, who’d dropped her precious bag of flour. Now she was weeping openly, shouting at the guard and flailing at the boy, who had taken refuge behind a doughboy’s bulky overcoat.

  Private Boyd’s coat, she saw when he turned. Her first impulse, which surprised her, was to pull her hood more closely around her face and hope he hadn’t seen her. He nodded, though, and she was caught. A small wooden sled piloted by a British soldier whisked down the long, steep curve, iced each night to be savagely hard and fast. Boyd slipped something to the old woman—a coin, perhaps—and then moved toward Eudora. The soldier on the sled leaned back, his feet pressed against the steering yoke and the rope in his hands, his vision blocked by the girl sitting astride his lap with her arms wrapped around his neck and her hair whirling over his eyes. A Russian girl, laughing hoarsely; possibly one of the girls who frequented the notorious café with the dark green roof. The sled shrieked twenty yards across the square, then thirty, leaving behind a wake of startled people. There was nothing to stop the sled from shooting over the steep bank and down onto the frozen river—but just then it hit a bump and tipped both passengers into the snow.

  “Interesting technique,” she said to Boyd, as the driver raised his powdered head and waved his arm happily at the crowd.

  “He got lucky,” Boyd said. “And so did I—I’ve been hoping to see you.”

  As he spoke, another little boy, sensing a break in everyone’s attention, sprinted triumphantly past the guard and up the steps.

  “Move back,” Boyd said, tugging at Eudora’s arm as the boy threw himself down on a flimsy sheet of metal. “He’s liable to come flying right over the edge.”

  “He’ll be all right,” she said. “The run’s been up since January, and the only ones to get hurt so far have been soldiers.”

  “Figures,” Boyd said. “The ones with the cushy guard jobs in the city are so bored they have to go looking for trouble. They should come and change places with us.” Then
, as she’d been dreading, he asked her if she’d spoken to Dr. Hirschberg about him.

  “Just briefly,” she said.

  “When will he see me? We’re going to be sent out again soon.”

  “I couldn’t convince him,” she admitted. “He knows of you already, or he thinks he does—he told me about some problems your unit had after your friend was hit by the bomb, and that you’d been sent east as a disciplinary measure.”

  He frowned and stared at the tower, seeming to trace with his eyes the improbably intricate pattern of the timbers. Then he sighed and pulled his collar more closely around his neck. “It’s too cold to stand here,” he said. “Can I walk you wherever you’re headed?”

  “If you’d like. I’m going back to the hospital.”

  He was limping a bit; Eudora matched her stride to his and, as they left the square and began to move along the riverbank, asked how his leg was.

  “It hurts,” he said shortly, turning to watch a flock of mud-colored crows wheeling toward their roost. “What do you think? If I was a horse—a cow, even—the surgeon would be working on me right now, he’d never risk the damage. When I worked with the calves—”

  “You’re a farmer?”

  He laughed. “Hardly. I grew up in Detroit. But one of my uncles had a dairy farm a couple of hours away, where I worked most summers. I learned early to doctor the sick calves and stitch up wounds, and by the time I was thirteen I was helping out a local veterinarian. He let me read his books and taught me some basic surgical techniques. And I once spent a summer with another uncle, farther away in a little village in upstate New York called Hammondsport. He and some of his friends made me curious about all sorts of things …”

  An expression she couldn’t read passed over his face as he paused. “Anyway,” he added, “I got this idea that I might be a vet.”