Sudden cold, and I burrowed into his furs. There descended flashing bolts of color. The sky, prismatic, rained down pulsating sheets of light. We were part of the changing flamboyant purples, greens, and golds as they illuminated us.
“Don’t forget to miss me.” He left with a kiss that for me would always be part of the aurora borealis.
GRADUATION FOR THE senior class and the arrival of new student nurses marked my first year.
One of them arrived early. There were special circumstances attached to Emily Champlain coming a week ahead of the others. Emily was a small, dark, serious-minded French Canadian who had been reared by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their orphanage. She was past eighteen and they didn’t know quite what to do with her. The war had placed a strain on their facilities and space was at a premium. Our nuns were appealed to and here she was.
The only experience she listed in her application was a summer working as an aide in a rundown mental institution for women.
Emily, as it turned out, was my first trainee. Since she had worked around schizophrenics, catatonics, and cyclomaniacs, it was decided to try her in our closed ward. This ward was intended to be a way station in which servicemen broken in mind were evaluated and sent on. In reality it was almost impossible to place these patients, as all suitable institutions were filled past capacity. So the Sisters accepted that the Lord meant this final burden for them, and took it on with what grace they could muster.
Matron Norris, a rather formidable person in her midfifties, was put in charge, and the closed ward became hers. She shared it grudgingly with the psychiatrist, Dr. Bloom, who visited whenever his schedule allowed, which was not too often. Matron Norris used him in lieu of the bogeyman: “We don’t want Dr. Bloom to see this behavior, now, do we?” At times she simplified it to: “What would Dr. Bloom think?” Dr. Bloom was a strict Freudian, and I sometimes wondered if a childhood trauma could possibly be at the root of the disintegration of a soldier found cradling the torso of a buddy who had no head.
At any rate I was nominated to work alongside Emily so she wouldn’t get into trouble. I showed her around. There was a large room and screened-in porch with bars, as well as a corridor dormitory and bathroom. Seeing these young men, listless, vacant, subject to sudden flashbacks, going suddenly manic, was enough to unnerve the most stable among us. I sized up Emily with some concern. She was so young, just a kid.
“I think the two of us will be able to manage a shift,” I said cheerily. “What do you say?”
She looked a bit uncertain, taking in a soldier who roamed about agitatedly, berating an officer for calling in an airstrike using wrong coordinates. I pointed out a burly orderly posted at the door. “As a rule, Matron handles any disturbance. But—”
“Mais oui, it was le meme—the same—where I worked before.”
“As a rule,” I assured her, “everything goes along pretty well. The patients themselves are very helpful at times.”
She nodded her neat dark head. “They have a way of knowing which will burst out, harm themselves, attack the others.”
I was surprised at this insight, and thought she was probably right. “You like nursing, don’t you?”
She brightened at once. “Oh yes. The Sisters at the convent always said, ‘Take pride in your work. You cannot be a good person if you do not take pride in your work.’”
I nodded absently. She reminded me of myself a long time ago, last year in fact.
Matron Norris sat us both down and outlined our responsibilities. We were to patrol the rooms together and keep on the move, settling disputes, dispensing medication, in some cases feeding—the spoons in this ward were sometimes bitten through, their handles twisted or missing altogether.
Emily raised her hand, as though in a classroom, for permission to speak.
“Well?” the matron asked, not at all pleased by this interruption.
“At the Hotel des Femmes,” Emily began in a small voice.
“What are you saying? Speak up, girl.”
Emily cleared her throat and looked to me for support. But not knowing what was on her mind, I had to let her go it alone.
“At the Hotel des Femmes where I worked before, they gave the patients the responsibility.”
“The patients!” Matron had heard quite enough. “My dear girl, the line between staff and patients is never to be blurred. I want you to remember that.” She concluded the interview by saying that any violence on the ward was to be handled by the orderlies. If additional help was needed, there were the MP’s. “On no account are you to involve yourselves. Is that quite clear?”
We sat before her and nodded dutifully.
“Oh, and Kathy, as the senior member of the team, I hold you accountable.” She dismissed us with “Have a nice day.”
But I felt out of sorts. It didn’t seem fair to put me in charge and, at the same time, hem me in. Perhaps that’s why I listened to Emily.
She hesitated, trying to gauge my reaction in advance, then plunged in, once more relating her experiences at the Hotel des Femmes. “The patients were given responsibility, n’est-ce pas? They themselves broke up fights, and did other useful tasks like . . .” She pondered it. “Like mend the radiator. Your radiators do not function properly,” she ended triumphantly, as though that proved her case.
“No,” I admitted ruefully, “they certainly don’t.”
“C’est très froid,” and she shivered in her old patched sweater, but the next moment she was all business. “The matron Norris did not talk of suicide. Can we talk of suicide?”
“We try to keep watch on those patients that are acutely depressed,” I said uncomfortably, “if that’s what you mean.”
“But someone, now and then, kills himself anyway. No?”
I admitted that happened. “We can’t be everywhere.”
“That is where the other system would help. We appoint a patient to watch. Each watches the other. C’est meilleur, two watchers instead of one of us. And those who watch, it gives them esteem of self.”
“Importance,” I said, liking the solution. But there were several big ifs. Matron for one. And the patients themselves for another—could we trust them? “We are terribly short-handed,” I conceded.
Emily watched me struggle with the problem. “We’d be taking a chance,” I said. “Matron Norris is old school, strictly by the book. If she found out, she’d put us on report. . . . It isn’t that she isn’t an excellent nurse,” I finished. “She is.”
“Je comprends.”
I knew she did, because her face assumed unhappy lines, and it helped me make up my mind. “Of course, the way I look at it there’s no use bothering Matron with such a scatterbrained idea. But we can talk the plan over with the patients and see what they think of it.”
“Oh, could we?” The mobile young face exuded sudden joy. The joy touched me.
I only hoped she didn’t burn out. I had seen enthusiasm such as hers fade after a few weeks. However, Emily’s underground system was worth trying. It didn’t hurt anyone and it freed us for tasks we rarely got around to in the locked ward.
The men endorsed the plan whole-heartedly, partly, I think, because it was not officially sanctioned. But in spite of its adoption and even with Matron’s disciplined calm, there were certain frenetic times on the ward, such as meals, baths, and bedtime. The bathroom in particular was a place of chaos. Light-bulbs were often smashed and the mirrors soaped, graffitti appeared above the urinals, and there were water fights. Matron always sent us in together to tackle the bathroom.
This evening cot 26 stuffed something into his mouth and was choking on it, so I bent him over and whacked his back. I hated leaving Emily alone and listened for any disturbance. But things sounded normal. My patient finally brought up a three-day-old dinner roll he must have hoarded under his pillow.
I got him into bed and hurried down the corridor to the bathroom.
Shock stopped me at the door. Emily Champlain had our resident c
atatonic arranged as a towel rack. His rigidly outstretched arms, which were impossible for any of us to move manually, were draped with towels for the men coming out of the shower, and his turned-up palms were soap dishes.
As luck would have it, Matron Norris had chosen this moment to conduct Dr. Bloom on one of his periodic inspections.
At the door she turned catatonic herself, and the good doctor, cyclomanic. He found his voice first and thundered, “How can you treat a human being this way?”
Emily looked stricken. I was about to come to her defense. It wasn’t necessary. An eerie voice, rusty from disuse, came out of the towel rack. “On this ward, Doctor, everyone does his job.”
At Matron Norris’s request I was transferred from duty in the locked ward. I missed working with the innovative Emily and wondered how the patients would fare without the “system.” I learned later that Emily herself lay low, but a patient committee met with Matron Norris and argued quite rationally that wartime conditions required wartime solutions. She acceded to patients’ demands and reinstated a modified form of “responsibility therapy.” I think she got as much pleasure hoodwinking Dr. Bloom as we did hoodwinking her.
THE NEXT MORNING I returned to my old beat and was checking the linen closet with Sister Magdalena, when through the open door to the ward I heard raised voices.
The patient next to the German lieutenant was on his good elbow talking to, or rather at von Kerll. Until last week we had kept the prisoners separate from the other patients. But casualties were coming in so fast that we were overwhelmed, and put newly admitted wounded wherever we could find a bed.
A French Canadian sailor, invalided from the Mediterranean theater, was being treated with sulfanilamide administered every four hours. He had responded so well that now here he was belligerently continuing the war.
“Certainement, U-boats are floating coffins, c’est tout. They’re slow torpedo boats on the surface, slower underwater. Slower than a tug in harbor. Once you’re submerged, you’re pinned down, the easiest target in the world.”
The German lieutenant started to defend his submarines, but the sailor cut him off, to heap scorn on the whole German war plan.
Sister Magdalena asked me to pay attention to the linen count, and insisted on adding those in my arms to the ones in the closet. “It doesn’t seem to tally,” she moaned, and went through it all again.
Meanwhile I tried to glean something of what the sailor was taunting von Kerll with. “. . . And your great Fuehrer with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, what does he know about strategy? He was a corporal in the last war. Okay, so you made a cemetery out of Russia. Winter’s here. You know what a Russian winter did to Napoleon. Seen a paper lately? Well, the Russkies have what they call a ‘scorched earth’ policy. Vraiment, they’re retreating, but they don’t leave so much as a blade of grass for you Krauts. No electricity, no water, no food, no transport, not even a mule. They wreck their own rolling stock, and your trains don’t fit their tracks. I’m telling you it was a celebration for us when the little corporal opened the Eastern Front.”
Von Kerll retorted that the Axis didn’t need Moscow. Capturing the Ukraine meant capturing Russia’s breadbasket and controlling the oil reserves of Eastern Europe.
I had enjoyed our sailor giving the German what for. But now that von Kerll was matching him argument for argument, the Quebecois lost his temper. He cursed, first in French, then English, finally he tried German. But von Kerll laughed at his accent.
He became so infuriated that I thought I should intervene. Enough was enough. I left Sister Magdalena in the midst of matching sheets with pillowcases and marched in. “Able Seaman Duprez, I want to know what this means, fraternizing with the enemy.”
“Fraternizing?” he sputtered and became so indignant that I was afraid he’d burst open his stitches. “I was just telling that Jerry officer how it really is, non? And which way things are going.”
“You did a fine job. But now it’s time for your shot and a little rest.” I pulled the bleached muslin curtain along its track between the beds.
He wanted to continue his voluble defense, but I gave him a glass of water along with a lecture. “You get so worked up you’re apt to do yourself damage. Lie back, that’s it, and take it easy.” I administered a hypo and read to him until he fell asleep. Then I went around to the other side of the curtain to see how my prisoner patient was doing.
I saw he had started a letter and put it aside.
“Can I give you a hand with that?” I asked.
“Yes,” he laughed, “a right hand.” His own had deep lacerations produced by metal splinters that penetrated the burn. “I’m afraid I’m awfully clumsy with my left.”
I picked up the discarded page. “How stupid of me, it’s in German.”
“I’ll start again in English.”
“Who’s the letter to? Your wife, your girl?” The question was routine. I asked it of everyone.
“I’m not married. At least I showed some sense there. Actually the letter is to my mother. To tell her I’m well and no part of me is missing. That’s important. Mother sets a great deal of store on appearance. If I’d been maimed, or if my burns had reached my face, I don’t think I’d go home.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong about that. There was an English boy, an amputee, who felt the same way. It was quite a struggle for him. But when he was discharged, he went home.”
“He was brave, braver than I. But then he didn’t have to confront the daughter of an Austrian vice admiral. You see, my mother’s family is old. By comparison my father is an upstart. When I was a child we used to vacation at my grandparents’ estate on the Bodensee. Austria is a land of lakes and that is the largest. Great bathing and boating.”
I don’t know when it stopped being routine—as he talked I could see a blond boy in a sailor suit wandering the shore, pitching stones, seeing how many times they skipped. More pictures formed. Novels from Old Irish Bill’s library, romances by Wassermann, Thomas Mann, and Romain Rolland furnished the background. Gracious hotels looking out on ski runs, summer homes on the lake, picnics aboard the family yacht. And the daughter of this house, I imagined her too. Bobbed hair, of course, after the latest fashion; she’d be quite a beauty. Her little boy longed to climb into her lap, but no one took liberties with Elizabeth Madeleine Hintermeister von Kerll.
“Heinrich, the old gamekeeper, used to take me fishing. Have you ever had rainbow trout? Pike and grayling too. The finest fishing in Austria.”
“You’re Austrian? Not German?”
“We were annexed in ’38, in preparation, I see now, for the war.” He stopped, and went on again in an altered voice. “March eleventh at ten in the evening. On the thirteenth Hitler announced we were a province of the German Reich. You can see why. We are the third-largest producer of crude oil in Europe. And we have a modern airport at Wien-Schwechat near Vienna. You don’t have to look further than that. The Nazis tore up our constitution. We became a German satellite overnight.”
“But Hitler is Austrian himself, isn’t he?”
“The house painter?” He snorted. “Yes, he is Austrian. So are the cattle in our barn, if being born on Austrian soil makes one Austrian. But the heritage is something different. Our Academy of Science goes back to the Middle Ages. Architecture, poetry, music, the Vienna waltzes and operettas of my grandparents’ time. The Burgtheater is the best German-speaking theater on the continent, and then there’s the Viennese Staatsoper, the state opera. Music was born in Vienna. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, even the moderns, Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. And our museums have a wealth of Old Masters down to the cubist painter Oskar Kokoschka, who naturally has fled. But that’s Austria, the heart and soul of her.”
My mind had caught further back. All thought of a little blond boy throwing stones into the water disappeared. “It was a plebiscite,” I said.
“What?”
“A month after the Germans took over Austria there was a plebiscite. Austria voted
to go along, voted for the—what is it called?”
“The Anschluss.” His voice had dropped so low I could scarcely hear him. The next minute he rallied. “You have to understand. It was called a plebiscite, it was supposed to be the will of the people. The will of the people was to live, and that was the only way we could manage it.”
“Still, you left that part out.”
“You’re right. I apologize. I wasn’t deliberately misrepresenting. I wanted you to see Austria as she had been, as I know her.”
He spoke so sincerely that I relented a bit. It had not occurred to me that not all Germans or Austrians supported the war, that some, like Erich, were caught in its net.
In the days that followed, his Austria became very real to me. Years of reading . . . Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Mann’s magic mountain down which lovers skiied, made it easy to close my eyes and see a line of sloping meadows and craggy peaks rising behind them, smell forests of beech and larch, and the many streams sparkling their length like unwinding ribbons. To see the mighty Danube moving lazily, a water bridge from Germany to the Black Sea, where the snow of the valleys and the snow of the streams met.
He spoke of Grunderjahre, the good times, his life a procession of nursemaids and governesses, whom he ruled with the quick easy charm of his class. When he was nine a tutor was found for him, a tutor who was strict and knowledgeable in science and mathematics.
It had been decided, probably when he was in his first little sailor suit, that, like his father and grandfather, he would be commissioned in the navy. It was easy to picture him sailing his toy boats from the shore of the Bodensee.
The next time I dropped by to check on the malfunctioning Quebec heater in ward B, I found my two patients arguing violently about the war—this time it was the American Revolutionary War. Von Kerll was vigorously defending Benedict Arnold, who he claimed had been unforgivably snubbed, passed over, and insulted by jealous fellow officers.
The Search for Joyful Page 10