The Story of a Life, page 50
Without getting up, she held out her hand. I bent over to kiss it, but Lëlya grabbed me around the neck, pulled me towards her, and kissed me on the lips.
‘At long last,’ she said. ‘You and I must have been born under a lucky star.’
60
Under a Lucky Star
The field hospital was not supposed to leave until evening. I was afraid of losing touch with my unit and told Lëlya that I had to go that very minute.
‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Just for an hour. That won’t make any difference. Wait, I’ll be right back.’
She left the hut. Zosya asked: ‘Who is that, sir? Your fiancée?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. What else could I have told her? Simple people want simple answers.
‘Be quiet, Zosya!’ snapped Vasil, shocked by her question. ‘How dare you speak to an officer like that. May the Lord protect you!’
About ten minutes later an orderly came in and said the head doctor wanted to see me. The doctor greeted me angrily. ‘Just what are you wangling here, young man?’ he asked, his eyes flashing behind his thick glasses.
‘Wangling? What do you mean?’
‘I’m sorry but I can’t think of a better word. What I mean is you’re a civilian! Your unit belongs to the Union of Cities. That’s a civilian organisation. I trust you know that while at the front you are under the command of the military authorities?’
‘So it seems,’ I said.
‘No, not “it seems” – it in fact is!’ shouted the doctor, turning red in the face and coughing. ‘And so I expect you to act accordingly, or I shall have you arrested. “It seems . . . it seems’’,’ he went on, all puffed up, imitating me.
‘Yes, sir. But I still don’t understand,’ I said.
‘You soon will. I am ordering you to remain here with the hospital until further notice. The proper written orders will be prepared. They will be handed to you in due course. For you to present to your CO. Who is your CO?’
‘Commissioner Gronsky.’
‘Gronsky . . . Gavronsky . . . Pishiperdonsky!’ the doctor mimicked.
I said nothing.
‘Oh, you, offended are you now?’ The doctor shook his head reproachfully. ‘Stay here with us a few days. After that incident with the mother I would be happy to have you to stay on permanently. Don’t be embarrassed. I am well informed about everything. I was young once myself. I’ve suffered too. And I hate old people who’ve forgotten what it was like to be young. For some reason, we don’t give love its due.’
The doctor let out a loud sigh. This conversation had made my head spin. I suspected Lëlya was somehow involved.
‘There aren’t many men in our unit,’ I said. ‘I can’t just desert them, as you can understand.’
‘Yes,’ he sighed again. ‘“Desert”! A rather big word you’ve chosen, but I understand. It’s a tough situation. You’re going to Baranovichi, and so are we. We’ll leave in two hours and not wait until night. We put the last of the wounded on the hospital train yesterday, so no one’s left. You’ll travel with us as far as Baranovichi, all right? We’ll take the mother with us too and keep an eye on her.’
I agreed. The doctor patted me on the shoulder. ‘Allow me to give you some advice as an old man. Cherish love as something precious. Treat love badly just once and the next one will be flawed. Yes, sir, it’ll be flawed, defective. Well, off with you now. I’m glad to have met you.’
I walked out of the hut and saw Lëlya. She was sitting nearby on a bench under what looked like a slanting wooden mushroom. Mushrooms like this had been built in camps for sentries. I went over to her. Lëlya bent down and covered her face with her hands. ‘No, no, no!’ she said in a hurry, shaking her head, her hands still covering her eyes. ‘What a spectacular fool I am! I hate myself ! Go away, please.’
‘I’m staying,’ I said. ‘I’m going with you to Baranovichi.’
Lëlya dropped her hands and stood up. Her fingers had left marks on her cheeks. ‘Come with me!’ she said, taking me by the hand. We headed out onto the main road.
We walked to the first milestone and then turned around. The wind whipped the water in the puddles. Storm clouds were again blowing in from the west, piling up along the dim horizon.
We walked in silence, holding hands. Lëlya only said that after Odessa she had left immediately for Moscow and managed to get transferred to a field hospital on the western front. She didn’t explain why she had done this. But it was obvious, and neither she nor I cared to speak about it. We both knew that however wise or tender our words, they would sound wrong and that we still lacked the words capable of expressing the aching feeling of intimacy – a feeling between two people still almost strangers – that had sprung up in both of us now.
The hospital set out at two o’clock in the afternoon. The medical wagons moved along one after another. Vasil trailed after them on his cart. His shaggy dog, tied to the cart, did his best to keep up. I trotted alongside the field ambulance that was carrying Lëlya and an elderly nurse in gold glasses. Now and then I dropped back to see how Zosya was getting along in Vasil’s cart. She always gave me a cheerful nod and said she was fine. But Vasil looked gloomy – no doubt he was thinking about what lay ahead: would they manage to catch up with the other refugees from their village or would they become lost and alone among strangers in Belorussia?
About twenty versts from Baranovichi, a few armed soldiers stood on the road. Alongside them was an officer on a mud-spattered horse. The officer raised his arm. Our convoy stopped. The officer rode up to the head doctor, saluted and began to report to him about something. The doctor, chewing on his moustache, gave him a sullen look. They were discussing something alarming. We felt it and became anxious. We soon learned that there were a good many sick refugees in a nearby village – it was visible from the road – and the officer, upon the order of the corps commander, was asking the doctor to send some of the medical staff to offer them first aid. The doctor agreed, and three wagons were sent to help.
‘You’re coming with us,’ Lëlya said. ‘It’s your job to help refugees. We’ll catch up with the convoy this evening in Baranovichi.’
‘All right, let’s go.’
We turned off onto a side road. The hospital convoy moved on. Vasil stood on the road for a long time watching us go. He seemed to be wondering whether or not to come with us. But finally, he shook the reins and shouted at his horses, and his cart set off down the road towards Baranovichi. A kilometre from the main road we spied in the bushes some soldiers armed with rifles and a machine-gun.
‘Are the Germans really that close?’ asked the nurse with the gold glasses. ‘Please, go and ask them.’
I rode over to the soldiers.
‘Ride on!’ said a soldier in corporal stripes. He didn’t even bother to look at me. ‘You can pass. I’m disobeying orders by even talking to you, so keep moving. No one is allowed to stop here.’
We rode on. It started to rain. We could already see the beginnings of the village. From our vantage point the wretched place looked like an oozing pile of dung.
‘It looks as though they’re waiting for the Germans,’ I said to Lëlya.
I looked to the west, the direction from which the Germans would probably come, and saw another outpost in a pasture that sloped down towards a gully. The soldiers were sitting and lying in a long chain, rather far from each other. Now it all made sense – it must be to stop the Germans.
‘They’re not here to stop the Germans,’ said the orderly who was driving. ‘This is something else. Look over there!’ He pointed to the east. More soldiers. ‘The whole village is surrounded!’ said the driver. His voice was anxious. ‘They’re everywhere. I’ve got a feeling something’s not right here.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know myself, but we shouldn’t have come. We really shouldn’t have.’
The driver proved to be right. We drove into the deserted village. At the gate stood an empty Red Cross wagon from some unidentified mobile unit. The wagon’s driver shared with us the staggering news: we were trapped.
There was smallpox in the village. The army had encircled it, and thousands of refugees had stopped for the moment at nearby villages. Smallpox could easily spread to the army, and so orders had been given to send a mobile hospital unit to isolate the village and keep anyone from escaping. Anyone who tried to leave was to be shot.
The officer who had stopped us on the road had said nothing about smallpox. Our initial reaction was anger – not because we had been caught in a trap, but because we had been tricked into going to the village. Even had we known the truth, every last one of us would have volunteered to go in and help.
‘The utter stupidity!’ said Lëlya angrily. ‘If they hadn’t lied to us, we could have brought everything we needed to treat the sick. But now we don’t have a thing, not even any vaccines!’
‘It’s not clear whether it was stupidity or something else,’ the driver remarked.
‘What are you talking about?’ snapped the nurse with the gold glasses, Vera Sevastyanovna.
‘Well, who knows?’ he muttered. ‘The bosses always have their own notions. They’re cunning like that, more so than us.’
We couldn’t set up in any of the huts; they were all full of sick villagers. There was one empty shed on the common pasture. The crew from the mobile unit had already found it. We carried our medicine and other things inside. The mobile unit consisted of a doctor, a nurse and two orderlies. We found the nurse in the shed. She was sulky and had no eyebrows. We could hardly get a word out of her.
‘This is one hell of a mobile unit!’ our orderlies commented. ‘More like a society of undertakers!’
We unpacked our medicines. The doctor from the mobile unit appeared. He was a flabby young man with puffy eyes and dark bristles on his cheeks.
‘Well, well . . . greetings!’ he said upon seeing us. It seemed our presence was an unpleasant surprise. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve let yourselves in for?’
‘Smallpox,’ I answered.
‘Precisely! And do you know what smallpox is, young man? Have you seen it with your own eyes?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, then, let me be the first to congratulate you! Do you have any vaccines? No! Wonderful, just wonderful. So just what is it you’re planning to do here then? Crank up the gramophone? Listen to a little Vyaltseva perhaps?’
We just stood there, saying nothing.
‘As for me, I’ve had quite enough! I’m done with fooling around,’ said the doctor.
‘How dare you speak like that!’ a furious Lëlya yelled at him.
‘Mademoiselle!’ The doctor’s eyes blazed with fury. ‘None of your little tantrums, please, even if they do suit you. Yes, you are indeed quite lovely when angry, but other than that your tantrums do nothing. I repeat, nothing! Just some empty pretty sounds. We’re all in this trap. How did Pushkin put it: “Oh, you’re trapped, little bird, stay, for there’s no escape from my net”? Something like that, wasn’t it?’
‘Stop clowning around, doctor,’ said Lëlya disapprovingly. ‘It’s disgusting.’
‘Ridi, Pagliaccio!’ the doctor sang with a laugh. ‘What else can I do? Perhaps you can suggest a way out of this filthy mess?’
‘He’s drunk,’ said Vera Sevastyanovna.
‘Yes, indeed, if you wish, I’m drunk!’ the doctor replied calmly, not insulted in the least. ‘Got any morphine?’
‘Very little. But we do have a lot of camphor.’
‘If you had morphine, I’d put them all to sleep. That would do the trick!’
‘That’s enough of this foolish nonsense!’ I said roughly. ‘Give us everything you have. We’ll do the work ourselves.’
‘Delighted! You are doing me a favour! Please, do help yourselves!’ He bowed theatrically. ‘I’ll give you all our vaccines. Go ahead and inoculate all those sick people. For everyone here is already sick. This is certain to be a remarkable medical experiment.’
I went straight up to him. ‘You know what, you had better hold your tongue or I’ll throw you out, captain or no captain. Military regulations don’t mean a thing here.’
‘Absolutely right,’ he agreed. ‘No rules or regulations. Just like in a plague-stricken city. Take the vaccines! Get to work! As for me, I want to sleep. I haven’t slept for two days. That’s something you young idealists ought to keep in mind as well.’
He walked over to a corner of the shed, collapsed onto the straw and fell asleep as he was pulling his greatcoat over himself.
‘Let him sleep, he needs it,’ said Vera Sevastyanovna. ‘Nurse, give us your vaccines.’
‘You need to sign for them,’ she replied. It appeared she had not been paying any attention to our conversation with the doctor.
I signed and the nurse gave us the medicine.
‘Well, now what?’ Lëlya whispered to me.
‘Good question.’ I answered. ‘Whatever we do, it’s probably useless. You stay here, and I’ll start by making the rounds of the huts with one of the orderlies. Let’s see what I find.’
‘No! I’m not letting you go by yourself. And it’s not because I can’t do without you.’ She blushed ever so slightly. ‘No! It’s just that it won’t be so terrible if we all stick together.’
The four of us – Vera Sevastyanovna, Lëlya, the orderly and I – left together.
A dreary rain blanketed the fields. Potato stalks littered the vegetable plots like piles of broken, black bones. It was already autumn. Our legs slithered through the wet clay mixed with manure and rotting straw. Not a wisp of smoke rose from the hovels, but for some reason the air smelled of scorched feathers. The stench was coming from a pile of old rags still smouldering near a fence on the far side of the village.
‘They’re burning all the sick villagers’ old rags and things,’ said the orderly and then added with a laugh, ‘They call it disinfecting!’
There were no dogs or chickens left in the village, just one undernourished cow mooing in a shed. It made a plaintive sound as it choked on its thick saliva.
‘Yes,’ said Vera Sevastyanovna all of a sudden, ‘it’s just like Dante’s Inferno.’
We went into the first hut we saw. On the front step, Lëlya tied gauze bandages over our mouths. I opened the door. A warm stench hit us in the face. The hut’s windows had been covered. At first, we couldn’t make anything out. There was just a child’s monotone voice that kept repeating over and over the same words: ‘Oy, Grandpa, untie my hands . . . oy, Grandpa, untie my hands.’
‘Don’t touch a thing!’ Vera Sevastyanovna ordered. ‘Let’s have some light.’
I switched on my electric torch. Other than a broken wooden bed covered in a pile of tattered clothes we couldn’t see a thing. A pair of legs that ended in some old leather shoes hung down from the stove, but the actual person to whom they belonged wasn’t visible.
‘Anyone still alive up?’ asked the orderly.
‘Don’t even know myself if I’m alive or dead,’ came a weak voice from above.
I shone the light. An old man in a brown tunic sat on top of the stove. He had a patchy beard, as if clumps of it had been torn out.
‘Thank goodness somebody’s finally come,’ he said. ‘Hey, soldiers, give me a hand, I, um, I can’t pull him down by myself.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s lying right here next to me, my daughter’s husband. He’s been here since last night. Hot as an oven he was, but I just touched him now and he’s as cold as a stone. I don’t like it.’
‘Oh my God,’ Lëlya whispered. ‘What’s that?’
The pile of rags on the bed began to move, and the child’s voice began again: ‘Oy, Grandpa, I can’t stand it anymore. Untie my hands.’
‘Those two up there are beyond help,’ said Vera Sevastyanovna. ‘Shine the light over here.’
I lit up the bed with my torch, and we saw a pair of eyes – huge, black eyes, bright with fever – and crimson cheeks. A girl about the age of ten lay under the rags. I carefully pulled the rags off her. She trembled and squirmed and then held out her hands that had been tied together with a strip of old towel. Her shirt had fallen open at her chest, and for the first time I saw smallpox – flaming purplish spots dotted with black centres that looked like dried tar. The spots appeared as if they had been glued onto the girl’s greenish skin. The girl shook her head from side to side. Her dark hair fell loose, exposing a crumpled red ribbon.
The orderly brought in some cold water from the porch. He was upset to see how her hands had been tied to keep her from scratching her sores. ‘Oh, why this cruelty?’ he muttered. ‘Why torture the poor souls?’
Lëlya gave the girl something to drink. I held her head. Even with my leather gloves on I could feel the dry fever coming off the nape of her thin neck.
‘Give me the camphor!’ said Vera Sevastyanovna.
The smell of ether filled the room. After the camphor, we injected the girl with morphine. Lëlya wiped her face with sweet-smelling vinegar.
‘Well,’ the orderly said to me, ‘let’s carry out the dead man.’
Lëlya took me by the hand, but then quickly let go. Her eyes begged me not to touch the dead man’s body, but she said: ‘Just remember . . . All right, never mind!’
The corpse lay on a heavy linen sheet. We grabbed the corners of the sheet and carried the body out, trying not to touch it. The body fell onto the floor just as we got to the door.
‘Dump him in the shed,’ the old man said. ‘There are two of them in there already.’
The shed door was propped open with some pitchforks. Inside lying face down on the dirt floor was an old woman and next to her a little girl of about five.
‘Oh, this war, this war!’ said the orderly. ‘I’d like to take all the generals and politicians and rub their faces in this stinkin’ mess. The damned butchers!’
We went back to the hut. It had to be aired out, but it was already cold outside, as it is before the first snow of the season.
‘We should light the stove,’ the orderly said, ‘but they’ve burned up every last bit of wood. There isn’t a log left.’
