Mother’s friends and their daughters donned the short white veil of the volunteer nurses, a brave red cross sewn upon the apron, but Mother couldn’t bear the sight of wounded men, not with Volodya at the front. Every amputee reminded her of the danger. In lieu of nursing, she organized a sewing circle among her friends, making swabs and rolling gauze for use on the battlefield. My school friends knitted scarves and socks. I tried, but I was no Seryozha. My scarves resembled great tangles of hair.
It was Miss Haddon-Finch who suggested that she and I could help the war effort by assisting the British embassy with its program of distributing parcels—clothing and tools, boots and underwear, evaporated milk and sugar—to wounded Russian soldiers returning home to distant villages. “The British want to show their appreciation for their sacrifice,” she said. I quickly agreed. Anything was better than sitting on a summer’s day rolling gauze. A young adjutant at the embassy gave us a list of questions we should ask the men. They seemed awfully dry, more like a census—name, region, district, and so on. Profession? Married or single? Number of children? Literate? But I supposed they gave married men more than the single ones, and something for the children, books if they could read. Our job was just to take the information. The packages would arrive upon discharge.
My dread grew with each block as we took a cab up to the great military hospital on Vasilievsky Island, grim in the summer heat. Its vast foyer echoed—even there, beds had been set up. I wasn’t a squeamish girl, but I still remember my terror at seeing wounded men lying right in the open, soldiers moaning, hobbling on crutches, their heads encased in bandages. My governess had that English confidence, though, young as she was, and I followed her brisk steps as she approached the desk where a formidable nurse wrote in a ledger.
“Izvenite,” said Miss Haddon-Finch. The woman refused to acknowledge our presence. She tried again, louder. “Excuse me, please? I’m here to visit the soldiers. We were sent by the British embassy. For the discharge packages.”
“What packages?” the woman snapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Miss Haddon-Finch again explained our purpose in halting Russian, but it just irritated the big nurse all the more. “I don’t have time for this,” the woman fired back. “Escorting British ladies around like it’s an exposition. Do you think this is a museum? I’ve got dying men to think about. We don’t even have enough beds. Are the English going to give them to us?”
My governess couldn’t understand such rapid speech, but she certainly could guess that her request wasn’t being properly received. It brought out her military side, this plain young woman in shirtwaist and boater, daughter of a colonel in the Indian army. “I beg your pardon,” she said in English, the way the British did, which was anything but a plea for forgiveness. “I’d like to speak to your superior. I’m here on behalf of His Majesty the King. I resent being treated like a beggar.”
I translated quickly for her, proud of her starch, and the irritable nurse got up and found a soldier into whose hands she could deposit us.
I explained our purpose to him, showing him our forms and questions. He asked a heavier man, perhaps a doctor, who shrugged—What’s it to me?—and the soldier led us up the wide stairs, through some swinging double doors into a great airless ward that smelled of carbolic and human waste. The heat! And the stench. Once you have smelled the stink of decaying bodies, you never forget it. The cheap tobacco the soldiers smoked was a blessing. Both my governess and I stood a few feet inside the doorway, afraid to move another foot closer. There were so many men, a vast stockyard of the wounded—a row against each wall with an aisle down the middle, long as a soccer field. Those who were not in too much pain stared at us, calling out for help, for attention. “Barynya!” Miss! “Water, there’s no water.” “Help me!” The smell, and the shouting…I grew woozy and turned back to the door.
“Stop it,” my governess said, grabbing my arm. “Imagine your brother. My brother. Don’t be afraid of them. They’re in pain.”
She started at the first bed, by the door on the right. She tried to speak to the man, who had some sort of box keeping his yellowed sheet from his feet. “What happened?” she asked in her halting Russian. “Trench foot, barynya.” he said. Clean-shaven, but a peasant, his lined face, his short nose, his bright eyes. Puzzled by the Russian phrase, she turned to me to translate.
I was burning up, and the stink made me queasy. I could smell his decaying feet. It was dead summer. Why didn’t they open the windows? “Are you hot, soldier?”
“Better than being cold, barynya.”
“This lady has some questions for you,” I said. “The English are giving packages on discharge. To thank you for fighting.”
“They’re going to thank us for fighting,” he told the man lying next to him, whose head and left eye were swathed in soiled bandages. “Why don’t the tsar thank us?”
“Thinks he already did,” said the man beyond the one with the bandaged head. “One less arm to wash.” They all laughed their way into coughing fits.
“Sorry, miss. I shouldn’t joke around. Just been in this bed awhile,” said the first.
The man across the way groaned rhythmically. “Help me…help me…”
“What’s wrong with him?” my governess asked.
“Gangrene, miss,” said the first man.
She shuddered, touching the little locket around her neck that held a picture of her brother, fighting in France somewhere, probably Verdun. “Maybe we should just find out which ones are being discharged.” She was a great one for systems. She would have made a good soldier, despite her weakness for romantic novels. She stopped a small nurse carrying a pan covered with a cloth. “Can you tell me which men are to be sent home?”
“How should I know?” the nurse said. “If they get better they go back to the front. If they get worse…” She shrugged. “The amputees go home. Why don’t you start there?”
“But how will we know?” she called after the woman, already bustling away.
“It’s on the chart,” the nurse called back over her shoulder.
Despite the noise and the heat and our confusion, we began to go down the row, studying the charts that hung at the foot of the beds. Trench foot, shrapnel, bayonet. Amputation. Gangrene. Bullet in the head, bullet lodged in the spleen, in the spine, in the groin. Paralysis. Amputation. “We’d better split up,” she said. “It’ll go faster.”
Talk to them myself? To the man groaning on the other side of the row? “But won’t you need me to translate? What if they don’t understand you?”
“I’ll do fine,” she said. “Go.” She gently pushed me toward the other row.
I took my forms and my pencil and, quietly terrified, approached the first bed. “Water,” begged the man with gangrene. He smelled awful, his thin face yellow with fever.
A nurse bustled by. “Excuse me. This man is thirsty,” I said.
She stared back at me with the white eye of a startled horse. “Water’s in the hall. Get it yourself.” I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t a nurse. But I got his cup from the side of his bed, took it out in the hall—at least it was cooler there—filled it from a large urn, and took it back. I tried to hand it to him, but he couldn’t sit up. He just lay there, calling for water. There was nowhere to sit. What should I do? I could feel my helpless tears welling up.
“I’ll give it to him, miss,” said the man in the next bed. He sat up in his dirty nightshirt and I saw that he’d lost a leg. I tried not to stare, but I didn’t know where else to put my eyes. He took the cup from me, reached across the narrow gap between beds, and held up the soldier’s thin head, his neck like a flower stalk, and began dripping water into the fevered man’s mouth.
An amputee! I remembered what I was doing there. “I’m taking information,” I said. “For packages. For men who’re going to be discharged.”
“Theotokos be praised,” he said. “Not a moment too soon.”
Name? Region? Dist
rict? Profession? Married? Children? Mardukov, Foma Fomanovich. Peasant. From Irkutsk Oblast, Cheremkhovsky District, village of Kuda. I laughed. “Really?” Kuda meant “which way.”
“Yes, if you go there, you’ll be asking, too,” he said. His whole demeanor brightened at the small contact. I’d thought he was fifty but he gave his age as thirty-five, married with four children. “She wrote to me, barynya. Look.” He reached into his boot—his one boot, standing by the bed…where was the other, with his leg? Did they bring the leg with him or leave it on the battlefield? I could feel that other boot calling to this one. He handed me a soft piece of paper, grimy from handling.
I opened it. It wasn’t a woman’s handwriting. Lettered, not cursive, full of misspellings. My dear Fomusha…I didn’t know if I really should be reading it. I tried to give it back to him, but he indicated with a rolling of his hand for me to keep it. “Read it to me, miss. I’m a poor simple man, I never learned how.”
I read his own letter aloud to him. “My dear Fomusha, I pray that this letter finds you well. We are fine. The goat had twins, at last.” I glanced at the date—February 1915. Over a year ago. “Little Vanka cut a tooth, he’s been bawling about it for weeks.” And soon Foma would hold him, he’d be walking by now, wouldn’t he? Talking? I didn’t know much about children.
“She’s a wonderful woman, my Rozochka.” His lined face smiling, the creases like the rays of the sun.
“The Krylovs’ izba burned down last month. Is it cold there? The winter’s been terrible here. You should see Grisha—he looks just like you.”
“He’s almost six now,” said the soldier.
“Sonnechka had her baby, a girl. The rye looks good, and the wheat, too, though harvest’s the devil without you.”
He examined his remaining foot, thick-nailed, and sighed. “At least I’ll be home. A thousand thanks, miss.” He took the letter and folded it, put it back into his boot.
I moved to the next bed, the occupant already waiting for me. All of them had something they wanted to tell me, more than region, district, village, profession, married, children. They showed me letters, pictures. They were shy about discussing their wounds, but their bodies spoke for themselves. Trench foot spoke of water-filled ditches where they stood for days and weeks. Their coughing told stories of battlefield gas. Suppurating wounds under dirty bandages gave testimony to the lack of care the nation gave its conscripts. How could we make wounded men sleep in such foul surroundings, such narrow beds? With stale sheets and pillowcases. Everything yellow and gray—walls gray, the floors yellow. And the inescapable heat. My dress was already soaked. I kept thinking that these could be the very men Volodya described in his letters. He spoke of their bravery, their camaraderie. I tried to flag nurses as they bustled about so importantly, yet no one had time to change a man’s bandages, get him a glass of water.
Though filthy and neglected, the men who were not racked with pain or delirious with fever were for the most part surprisingly cheerful, happy to share their information, whether they were likely to be discharged or would be healed only to be sent back. I tried to get them to talk about the war, but they wanted to talk about their villages: Kuda and Polovodovo, Tarkhanskaya Pot’ma, Sosi, Gus’, Veliky-Dobrovo. A soldier from Ryazan Oblast, patched about the head and left eye, asked if I might write a letter to his wife. He was exceedingly polite: “A thousand pardons, miss, but it would mean everything to her.” I had an entire ward to get to—Miss Haddon-Finch was already way ahead of me—but I saw no point in bustling around like these nurses, too busy to get a man a glass of water. We would finish the ward today or we’d come back tomorrow. Meanwhile, I would attend to this man. I tore a sheet from my own notebook and took his dictation. He watched me, head cocked to better view the page, the way children watch a magician performing.
Annoushkha, little bird—
I’m here in the capital, I got caught between the devil and an Austrian. That eye’s never going to be any good, but God be praised I’ll be coming home soon. Don’t worry about a thing. I think of you…
He paused. Awareness of my youth and station prevented him from saying more. “You say the rest.”
“I think of you every day, the sun in your hair,” I said.
“Yes, say that. The sun in her hair…she’s got such pretty hair, too. Blond braids like that.” He showed me with his big hands, his fingers could hardly close around them.
“How should I sign it? What does she call you?”
From the expression on his face, the sly grin, it was probably dirty. “Say Senya.”
“With all my love, Senya.”
I continued to the next bed, and the next. Men from villages whose names sounded like fairy tales told me their specifics. How sheltered I’d been. I could really see how Volodya must have changed since leaving us to fight with these men, for here was Russia, here in these beds. These eyes, clear or red or yellow or bandaged, these men young and not so young. The giant wounded body of Russia. What did I know of these lives? I felt my privilege, my foreignness as a girl from Petersburg, with its quays and canals, its classical buildings, its foreigners and colonnades, its seafront. Compared to the Russia of these men, this was Finland, Paris, a polonaise, a tango, dueling pistols at dawn. It was silver and lilac, Great Peter’s dream.
Big men tossed in fever or lay listless, laughed off the loss of a leg, an arm, yet still believed in the emperor and the healing power of the holy icons worn beneath their dirty shirts. I thought about the poet Walt Whitman, whom Balmont had translated into Russian. It was said he’d served as a field nurse in the American Civil War.
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form…
And buried him where he fell.
Where was our Whitman? I wondered, imagining he was here somewhere, in a trench or a hospital like this one, putting it all into words that would reach across time to break your heart. Maybe this Brusilov Offensive would be the thing to break through and end the war. But the looks of this ward made me wonder. I asked a few of the men about the offensive, how it seemed to be going, but none of them had any idea. They went where they were told; they trusted in God.
I gazed back at the crowded ward, like a terrible mirror house. How many men lay mangled in wards like this in Russia right now, their bodies ruined? Could we really afford to lose so many? Wouldn’t we run out of arms and legs? Though they said we were winning, I couldn’t help wondering what losing would look like. I thought of Volodya…but there were no officers in these wards, only common soldiers. Bad luck to think it. He’ll be fine…
And why did I think Volodya and not Kolya? He could have been shot just as easily. And yet somehow I felt he would be protected—if not by God or the Virgin or spirits then by his own buoyancy. Surely he, if anyone, would know how to evade the bullets and grenades. Yet I knew this was childish thinking. Kolya Shurov was only a man like any of these, blood and muscle, with arms and legs that could be lost, flesh that could be torn, eyes that could burn. Charm couldn’t dissuade bullets or bayonets, land mines or poison gas. But still, I couldn’t quite believe it. Volodya was heroic, an officer of cavalry, the type who could be killed defending somebody else, could trip a land mine. He would be the one to lead any charge. I prayed God to bring him back, safely and soon.
When I told Varvara what I was doing with the wounded men, she shook her head slowly, said the only cure for what was going on in this country was to end the imperial nightmare and agitate for a socialist state. She told me to read Das Kapital. “Better to work for change that affects everyone.” I knew she was right, yet what about the man in this bed, groaning, his body in plaster? Sometimes simply holding someone’s hand was better than all the Hegelian dialectics in the world. Varvara had not seen the glow in a man’s wounded face as I approached his bed, how happy he’d been to be asked the most mundane questions, how glad to simply have been sought out and addressed as a man.
I moved to the bedside of a soldier with a blond beard.
His leg had been amputated at the knee, and the smell was nauseating. Sick as he was, his letter to his sweetheart brimmed with affection and humor:
Dearest Olya,
I’m here in the capital enjoying the fine life. Only the big tankards of kvas, the dancing girls. They send us violins to sing us to sleep. If I hadn’t lost that leg, it’d be a holiday.
The man in the next bed smoked a twisted cigar. “She’s probably sleeping with the foreman, brother,” he interjected. “Women don’t wait, and that’s the truth.”
I flushed, thinking of the boys I’d kissed when I thought Kolya had forgotten me. Wait for me…
“Shut up, Yid,” the blond man said.
“I bet you get back, there’ll be another kid who looks nothing like you.” The cynic was reading a book. The first literate man I’d seen here.
“Keep it buttoned, or I’ll shove your face in,” said my soldier. “She’s a treasure, barynya. She’s my angel.”
“Should I put that in?” I asked. “My treasure, my angel?”
“Yes, write it all down.”
I added these to the other phrases. “What else?”
A tear rolled down his cheek into his beard. “Tell her I’ll be back soon, I’ll warm her up and how…” Then he remembered who he was talking to, a sixteen-year-old studentka. “A thousand pardons, barynya. Forgive me, I’m not used to fine company.”
I wanted to see the title of the volume the other soldier held in his hands. “What are you reading?” I asked him.