I was answered in the next mail delivery. Georges, in a hasty scrawl, wanted to know a lot more about “this Jeff character.”
Like pups from the same litter, we three were headed in different directions.
Mama’s world had brought me far, given me an education and a profession. But it didn’t accept me. And, what was worse, didn’t admit it didn’t. As a student nurse I had gained respect and the confidence of the Sisters and my fellows. During working hours I was on an equal footing, there were shared jokes, friendly remarks; I was included. Mama always said—Kathy is to be included. Here, at the hospital, my uniform was a badge of admittance. Out of it, my status disappeared, and I wasn’t included except once or twice as an afterthought. That’s when I remembered how much kindness can hurt.
Looked at fairly, Mama’s white world had prepared me, as few Indian girls were, to take a place in it. But had I left room for joy? Happiness I long ago rejected as not good enough—it must be joy that lifted you up to the skies. Joy at seeing, feeling, hearing, joy at being in the world. Joy became my prayer. The only prayer, Sister Egg tells me, God wants to hear.
So each day I remind myself I am Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter, and look for a piece of joy to take to bed at night. I seize on a cloud lighted by a sinking sun, or the pattern in a leaf, or the reds and golds autumn brought, and wrap myself in it before sleeping.
But in the morning I have to face the pain, the useless bravery and hopeless courage in the wards. I couldn’t get the ulcer case out of my mind. The ulcer broke through to the stomach, and a nasogastric tube was used to suction it. That afternoon the patient died.
Not “the patient.” Ralph. Ralph died. I was hiding from his name. You can’t allow names, they make it too real.
No one expected him to die. It was a shock. I kept reviewing the plasma drip I’d been responsible for. But that had gone routinely. I could think of nothing I could have done to keep him alive. So I played a game of dominoes with cot 14, remembering to call him Bob. The dominoes were bone, not wood, and the clicking sound gave him a great deal of pleasure.
“Is there any strategy to this game?” I asked. “It just seems to be matching ends.”
Bob’s answer was a grin. “You got to beat me before you complain about it being too easy.” Midway in the game he said, “No holding out. If you can play, you got to.”
I gained a new respect for the game. It was like life: you have to play if you can play. And those pieces that were sidelined? You had to forget them and go on.
THE WAR ITSELF was a morass of contradictions, fought from the fogs off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland where wolf packs hid, to the sands of el-Alamein with Rommel falling back to Tunisia chased by Anderson’s First Army. Massive German reinforcements arrived, and the battle seesawed.
I don’t think in Washington, Ottawa, or London they really knew how the war was going. A victory here offset a defeat there.
Outside Stalingrad German troops were mired by winter. In the Pacific Admiral Halsey mounted an offensive against an island I’d never heard of—Guadalcanal. U.S. and Aussie troops attacked the Japanese in Burma and drove them out of Gona.
Recently there were German prisoners among our patients. I found it difficult to even approach them. There they lay, looking like everybody else. They didn’t wear the blue-gray uniform of prisoners, with the large red circle in the middle of the back, a target in case they tried to escape. No, they were in the usual white hospital gowns.
They might look like anybody else, but they were responsible for the shrapnel cases, the amputees, the boy with infected shell fragments in his back. One of them might have killed the Clark boy. And what about cot 19? It was not impossible they had had a part in John’s face being shattered, or the abscessed jaw in the corner, with yellow streaks seeping into the fibers of the dressing. They were Nazis, the horde that overran Europe, occupied Paris, bombed London.
The senior nurses were slow in answering their calls and more and more it was left to me. I tried not to think that even now their comrades were trying to kill Georges. Lying helpless on army cots they were just more broken bodies with the same fear-filled questioning eyes. Yet when they cried out, it was in guttural words I didn’t understand.
They didn’t ask anything of us, there were no requests. It was clear they found their position a peculiar one. While they themselves had been captured, they knew—we—knew that in the broader theater of the war Germany was the victor. Everywhere land was taken, ships sunk, populations driven into camps. They must wonder why we inferior peoples didn’t recognize that we were conquered. Why didn’t we give up and admit defeat?
It must rankle to be so dependent on us.
However, I was a nurse. I administered morphine and pain medication to these examples of the “master race,” handled syringes, turned them to avoid bedsores, changed linen, gave baths, and shuddered at their wounds. I couldn’t help it. They suffered.
Cot 5 had developed pneumonia. His breath came in weak rales, and it was obvious he was dying. He was very young, eighteen or nineteen. At the end he reached out groping for something, someone to hold on to. I gave him my hand. The name on his chart was Kurt. I was afraid to say it for fear the sound of my English voice would frighten him.
He murmured something in German. “Gott.”
That we agreed on. “Yes,” I whispered under my breath, “God will look after you.”
A second later I closed his eyes and a tear of mine fell onto his face. That’s when I found out it was as hard to lose a German as a Canadian or English boy.
One of the men on the ward, with chest injuries and third-degree burns on his hands, thighs, and abdomen, had been picked up from a U-boat. “I would have let him drown,” Ruth said bitterly. She had lost an uncle in a U-boat attack.
More than I hated wolf packs and Hitler I’d begun to hate the war.
Whether this burn case would survive to undergo a lengthy series of skin grafts was questionable. We had extracted numerous shards of metal, and were giving palliative treatment. He’d lain motionless in a coma for a week exuding the faint smell of decay accompanying extensive burns and made no better by overlying disinfectants.
I was changing the dressings when his eyes suddenly opened and he looked at me. Gray, thoughtful eyes.
“I hear English voices. Am I in England?” He spoke a cultivated English, better than my own.
“You’re in Canada,” I told him. “Montreal.”
“I always wanted to see Canada.”
“Don’t try to talk. You’re going to come along fine now, but you’ve been quite ill.”
He nodded and slipped, not into coma, but into sleep.
He must be an officer, I decided, to be so well educated, to have such a command of English. I’d forgotten his name, so I flipped the cover page of his chart—Lt. Erich Helmut von Kerll.
I was busy for a while in the other wards, but before I left the floor I looked in on him. He had come around but didn’t remember our conversation. He once more wanted to know where he was.
He looked at me and saw me for the first time. “Very kind of you,” he said, “an enemy and all.”
“You’re a patient,” I said firmly.
“Very kind,” he said again.
I checked the chart of the next bed to make sure he’d been given his evening medication. When I turned back the lieutenant was asleep.
I looked in on him the next morning. He was asleep and his vital signs were stable. His fever, however, remained high and he was continued on intravenous feeding. While I was adjusting the tubing he woke and asked for water.
“It isn’t allowed.” Nevertheless I brought cracked ice, put a little in his mouth, and passed a chunk across his parched lips. He tried a joke. “Florence Nightingale was some other war, wasn’t she?”
I smiled at his attempt.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Kathy.”
He seemed disappointed. “I thought you’d have an
Indian name.”
“I do. Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter.”
“Remarkable,” he said and fell asleep.
EARLY THE NEXT morning before going on duty I stopped by Lt. von Kerll’s bed. The night nurse had not carried out her instructions. The edges of his abdominal burns were adhering to the dressings, and it was necessary to moisten them and peel them away. No matter how gently this was done, it was an agonizing procedure.
He grit his teeth. While he said nothing, he sweated his gown through. Gingerly I got him into a fresh one.
“Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter, I think you don’t intend to let me die. I think you intend to get me well.”
“I’m going to get you well,” I said with resolution.
“I feel much better and I’m hungry.”
“That’s good news,” I said, wondering what I could feed him at this unorthodox hour. Breakfast preparations were not yet under way. Then I thought of the nurses’ station—they always kept something on hand. “I’ll try to bring you a cup of broth.”
I did bring it, but by the time I got back with it he was sleeping. I looked down at him with a pleased warm feeling. The stench of decay no longer hung about his wounds. He was resting comfortably.
RUTH HAD A date and asked me to take her shift in the wards that evening.
When I came on duty Erich von Kerll was awake and slightly propped up in bed. Beside him was soup and a glass of juice, neither of which he had touched.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“I wasn’t. I am now.”
“Good. What will you have first, the drink?” I held it to his lips. “Now for the main course,” and I ladled a spoon of potato soup into his mouth. He took three or four sips then put his hand up.
“Enough?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You’ll be able to sleep now. Shall I put the light out?”
“I knew you before, when I was just lying here. I knew when it was you adjusting the machine, changing plasma bags, giving injections, taking my pulse.”
“Did you?” I said, trying not to show how touched I was. “I’ve often wondered if comatose patients don’t comprehend more of what goes on around them than we think.”
“Yes. Well, I did. When I was in the water I thought, this is when Brünhilde, or one of the lovely Rhine Maidens is supposed to take my hand and lead me to that Vallhalla reserved for warriors. Instead of a maiden of light, waves of oil rushed into my mouth and washed my eyes. And there was fire on the water.”
I had forgotten, I allowed myself to forget he was off a U-BOAT. I recoiled, I couldn’t help it.
He read my expression, stiffened, and a look of whimsical grief passed over his features. “I was second mate on the U-186. Our kill was nine merchant ships, two of them Canadian, and a corvette.”
I compressed my lips.
Why had he said that? Why remind me we were enemies? I walked from the room.
Six
THE CHRISTMAS SEASON was a busy time here. The saints’ days were observed by extra services. I mailed packages to Mama Kathy, Connie, and Georges. Books this year. A Christmas Carol for Connie, a beautiful Audubon for Mama, and a life of Houdini for Georges. Mandy and I exchanged presents; she gave me earrings, long and dangling. I loved them, although I couldn’t imagine where I would wear them, or with what. I found a pretty little pin for her. The Sisters clubbed together and gave every girl a white prayer book.
The Sisters had been persuaded to allow a dance to be held. There were a few regulations: absolutely no liquor on the premises, the affair to be chaperoned, and the hours posted.
We girls, delighted at the prospect of a party, made a trip to the closest woods and brought back fir branches and sprigs of holly. We strung popcorn and macaroni and colored them with leftover cake dye, then turned our attention to the hall.
The tree was symmetric, tall and gaily trimmed with ornaments, some of which dated back a hundred years, and at its base the Sisters laid a crèche. The holy family was represented, the shepherd, the wise men, all the animals, and of course in the manger lay the Christ child, while over him an angel kept guard. I was reminded of the angel wrapped in newspaper a year ago and wondered when the family would be gathered under it again.
I decided to bring a strand of popcorn to the German burn case. He’d undergone a second skin graft and I had not behaved in a professional manner, stalking out as I had. After all, I told myself, it’s Christmas. So I went to the foot of his cot.
A tent was arranged to keep the covers from his body. He lay quietly. I thought at first he was sleeping, but his eyes were fixed on the ceiling.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, holding out the purple chain.
He turned his head. “Merry Christmas, Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter.”
“You remembered my name.”
“Yes, but I haven’t had much occasion to use it. I drove you away. My outburst the other day—it came from anger that I can’t always control. Anger that I’m caught up in events, tossed this way and that, and find myself a prisoner. The anger spilled out at you simply because you were good enough to talk to me. I am sorry. Can you forgive my boorishness?”
“I don’t even recall what was said. My impression was that you were in pain.”
“Pain.” He shrugged impatiently. “Pain is no excuse.”
“No,” I said, “just an explanation. . . . You looked so thoughtful when I came in. Were you thinking of home?”
“We generally go skiing. Afterward there’s eggnog and Brandy Alexanders with your feet in fur-lined carpet slippers, lolling in front of a fire, roasting chestnuts. Yes, I was thinking of home.”
“We used to roast chestnuts too. That was part of our Christmas.”
“I begin to think,” he said slowly, “that the world is more alike than different.”
“And war is old-fashioned and outmoded, and no one wants it anymore.”
“No,” my German enemy agreed, “no one wants it.”
I tied the purple popcorn to the lamp and wandered into the basement to see if anything still needed doing. The staff was assembled and the hall was beginning to fill with groups of sailors and soldiers.
The music started, Sister Ursula at the piano and Dr. Good-win playing a bass fiddle. In contrast to a few unhappy experiences at school, here I wasn’t permitted to sit down. These boys wanted a girl to hold, to talk to. They told me about Maryanne, Aggie, Marie, Patty. The name of the girl kept changing, but they were the same girl.
Dr. Bennett was deep in an analysis of the war. He was explaining to Sister Mary Margaret the psychology behind the latest battlefront moves. “Hitler’s egomania is beginning to work for us. He has fine generals, Rommel, for instance, a real professional. But the little madman doesn’t listen to him. He doesn’t listen to any of them. He knows better. Mark my words, that’s the flaw in his character, the fatal flaw that’s going to win us the war.”
Once Dr. Bennett noticed me, there was no escape—he had found a new victim for his thesis and whirled me away. Dr. Bennett was one of those doctors whom the war had brought out of retirement, energized and given renewed purpose. We had only taken a turn or two when he was tapped on the shoulder and relinquished me to . . .
Crazy Dancer.
I made an effort to keep my feelings in check and said lightly, “This isn’t happening. It isn’t real.”
“It is possible,” he conceded, “to dream someone else’s dream. But not this time.”
“Are you here for an hour, a day, forever?”
“I’m here for the Christmas party.” And he swept me into new patterns.
“I didn’t know you knew how to ballroom dance. I thought you only danced with a corn-husk mask braided into horns, and stripes of paint on your cheeks.”
“I can dance anywhere, anytime, anyplace.”
The music called our feet and insinuated into our bodies. Crazy Dancer and I touched a star together.
The Christmas star on the tree was cut twice fro
m silver paper and placed at right angles to itself so that the intersection made it appear to have another dimension. We stopped in front of it, breathless.
“I have a Christmas present for you.” He rummaged in his pockets and came up with the gray and white feather off the motorcycle.
“You can’t give me this, Crazy Dancer. It’s your protection.”
“You hold it now for both of us.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. That’s why I came. I’m only here on a Christmas pass. I came because of what you wrote.”
Desperately I tried to recall, to mentally scan my letters. Sometimes you write things you wouldn’t necessarily say. Had I signed any of them, “Love, Kathy”? I didn’t think so.
He jogged my memory, “The part where you said you missed me. . . .”
“Oh.” I was relieved. “I did miss you.”
“Missing,” he said, “is a powerful wish. You wish someone is with you. Right?”
“Yes. . . .”
“So I came,” he finished triumphantly.
I had to laugh at his absurdities. He was a clown who made very good sense.
Mandy, curious about him, dragged Robert over to meet Crazy Dancer.
“I know you already,” Crazy Dancer told her. “Sometimes it was you who signed for supplies.”
“Of course,” Mandy said, placing him. “I thought you looked familiar. Are you posted back here now?”
“No. I came for the dance.”
“You came to Montreal for a dance?”
Crazy Dancer shrugged. “—I’m a crazy dancer.”
“Come on.” I guided him toward the soft drinks and away from Mandy.
The dance broke up promptly at midnight with the traditional “Good Night, Ladies” waltz, and I went with him to the coatroom, where he got into a wool cap, muffler, boots, and a fur jacket. “The cold doesn’t have room in the city to spread out. It’s pushed together by all the buildings . . . and look what it makes!” He led me to the door and opened it.