Tatiana and Alexander (54 page)

“Not as bad as in here. The men here are dying of dysentery,” said Martin.

“Yes, and it’s breeding in the barracks,” said Tatiana. “Come look.”

“Any signs of typhus?”

“Not so far, though a number of the men have fever, but I’ve only been through four barracks.”

“Four! How many are there altogether?”

“Sixty.”

“Oh, Nurse Barrington.”

“Doctor, let’s walk quickly. They pack those barracks with one hundred and thirty-four bunks each. Two hundred and sixty-eight men. What do you expect?”

“We’re not going to be able to get through this.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Tatiana.

The men from one of the barracks were in the yard. The men from another were in the showers.

After going through barrack number eleven, Martin wiped his face and said, “Tell Carol-itch, or whatever his name is, tell him that every
healthy man in that one is going to die if the diphtheria cases don’t immediately get sent to the infirmary.”

In barrack thirteen, Tatiana was bandaging the upper arm of a German man when he suddenly heaved himself off his bunk and fell on top of her. At first she thought it was an accident, but he immediately started grinding against her, keeping her pinned to the floor. Karolich tried pulling him off, but the man wouldn’t budge, and none of the other prisoners would help. Karolich had to knock him very hard on the head with the barrel of his Shpagin, and he only stopped after he lost consciousness.

Karolich helped Tatiana up. “I’m sorry. We’ll take care of him.”

Dusting herself off and panting, she picked up her nurse’s bag and said, “Don’t worry. Let’s go.” She did not finish bandaging her attacker.

It was eight o’clock at night when they got through barrack fifteen. Karolich said they had to stop. Martin and Penny said they had to stop. Tatiana wanted to continue. She had heard Russian spoken only in the last two barracks. She went extra carefully through those, pulling back all the covers, handing out the medical kits and apples, talking to some of them. There was no Alexander.

And then Karolich and Martin and Penny all shook their heads and said they had to stop, they couldn’t do it anymore, they would start fresh the next day. She couldn’t continue without them. She couldn’t walk through those barracks alone. Reluctantly, she returned to the commandant’s house. They washed up, scrubbed down. Penny took another dose of penicillin. They met Brestov and Karolich for dinner.

“So what does your doctor think, Nurse?” Brestov asked. “How are we doing?”

“Poorly,” said Tatiana without even bothering to translate. Martin and Penny were scarfing down their food. “You have a real health situation with those men you’ve got there. I’ll tell you your biggest problem. They’re unclean. They’re scabby and furfuraceous. Are your showers working? Is your laundry working?”

“Of course,” Brestov said indignantly.

“They’re not working around the clock, though, and they should be. If you kept your men clean and dry, you would prevent half of what’s going on in there. Disinfectant in the toilets wouldn’t hurt, either.”

“Listen, they’re getting up, they’re walking, they can’t be that sick. They get a little exercise in the yard, they eat three times a day.”

“What are you feeding them?”

“This isn’t a resort, Nurse Barrington. They eat prison food.”

Tatiana looked at the steak on Brestov’s plate.

“What, gruel in the morning, broth for lunch, potatoes for dinner?” she asked.

“Also bread,” he said. “And sometimes they get chicken soup.”

“Not clean enough, not fed enough, bunks too close together, those barracks are incubators for disease, and lest you think it has nothing to do with you,
your
men have to guard them, and your men are getting sick, too. Remember, diphtheria is contagious, typhoid from eating spoiled food is contagious, typhus is contagious—”

“Wait, wait, we don’t have typhus!”

“Not yet,” Tatiana said calmly. “But your prisoners have lice, they have ticks, their hair is unshaven and too long. And when they get typhus, your men will still have to guard them.”

For a moment, Brestov said nothing as the piece of steak hung suspended from his fork, and then he spoke: “Well, at least they’re not being eaten alive by syphilis.” He threw his head back and laughed. “We’ve taken care of
that
little problem.”

Tatiana got up from the table. “You’re mistaken there, Commandant. We found sixty-four men with syphilis, seventeen of them in advanced tertiary stages.”

“That’s impossible!” he cried.

“Nonetheless, they’re ill with it. And by the way, your nationals, the Soviet prisoners, seem to be in worse shape than the Germans, if
that’s
possible. Well, thank you very much for a pleasant evening. I will see you all tomorrow.”

“We don’t want the men
too
healthy,” said Brestov after her, taking a large gulp from his vodka glass, “do we now, Nurse Barrington? Good health makes men less…cooperative.”

Tatiana continued walking.

The next morning she was up at five. No one else was, though. She had to sit on her hands—literally—until six o’clock.

They got ready—slowly; they ate—slower, and finally resumed inspection of the remaining five officers’ barracks.

“Are you all right?” Karolich asked her with a polite smile. His uniform collars were starched, his hair clipped and brushed neatly back. He was incongruous. “Yesterday shake you up?”

“A little. I’m fine,” she said.

“He’s been sent to the brig because of what happened.”

“Who? Oh, him. Don’t worry.”

“Does it happen often?”

“Not that often.”

He nodded. “Your Russian really is very good.”

“Well, thank you. I think you’re just being kind.”

They gave out the kits and apples, treated what they could, and got the infectious cases out of the common barracks. Tatiana took a walk through the infirmary beds. He was not there, either.

“I’m surprised at the condition of the Soviet men,” Martin said when they went outside to take a break. It was raining, and they stood under an awning for just a breath of reprieve.

“Why?” said Tatiana.

“I don’t know. I would have thought they’d be treated better than the Germans.”

“Why would you think that? The Soviet men are not in danger of being scrutinized by international eyes. It’s all about appearances. Those Soviet officers are about to be shipped back to the Soviet Union work camps. What do you think awaits them there?” She shuddered. “At least here, there’s a summer.”

It was in barrack nineteen, as Tatiana was perched on one bunk, cleaning out an old burn wound with boric acid that she heard a voice behind her and a familiar laugh. She turned her head, looked across the row and found herself eye to eye with Lieutenant Ouspensky from the Morozovo hospital. Instantly she looked elsewhere, then turned back to her patient, but her heart was beating wildly. She waited for him to call out to her, “Why, Nurse
Metanova
, what brings
you
here?”

But he didn’t. Instead, when she was finished and stood up to leave, he said, speaking Russian to her. “Oh, nurse, nurse, looky here.”

Slowly she looked. He was smiling widely. “I have a number of things very wrong with me that I know only you can fix—being a nurse and all. Can you come hither and help me?”

The makeup, the hair worked. He didn’t recognize her. Collecting her things and snapping shut her bag, Tatiana stood up and said, “You look perfectly healthy to me.”

“You haven’t felt my head. You haven’t felt my heart. You haven’t felt my stomach. You haven’t felt my…”

“I’m an old professional. I can see you are fine from a distance.”

He laughed joyously, and then, a smile still big on his face, said, “What is it about you that looks so familiar to me? You speak such good Russian. What’s your name again?”

She had Penny give him a small medical kit and a food parcel while she herself left in a hurry. How long before Ouspensky put her face together with his memory?

Slower and slower she walked through the last barrack. She dawdled and paused at every bed, even talked to some of the men, slower, slower. If Ouspensky was here, wouldn’t it mean that Alexander was here, too? But barrack twenty proved just as fruitless. Two hundred and sixty-eight men, none of them Alexander. Twenty barracks, five thousand men, none of them Alexander. There was the rest of the camp to get through, but Tatiana had few illusions. Alexander would be where the Soviets were. He wouldn’t be with the German civilians. Besides, Karolich told her as much. All the Soviets were together. The camp didn’t like to mingle the German and Russian prisoners. In the past, violent conflicts erupted over nothing.

When they stepped outside, she left the others for a minute and walked over to the short barbed-wire fence that separated the housing units from the cemetery. It was June, and wet. It had been lightly drizzling since dawn. She stood, in her soiled white pants, her soiled white tunic, her black hair falling out of her hat, her arms around herself, and motionlessly gazed at the small freshly dug elevated hills without markers, without crosses.

Karolich came up to her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

With a pained sigh she turned to him. “Lieutenant, the men who died in the barracks yesterday, where are they buried?”

“They’re not buried yet.”

“Where did you take them?”

“For now they’re in the corpse cellar, in the autopsy barracks.”

She didn’t know how she got the next words out. “Could we see the corpse cellar, please?”

Karolich laughed. “Sure. You don’t think the dead are getting fair treatment?”

Martin and Penny returned to the infirmary and Tatiana went with Karolich. The autopsy room was a small, white-tiled bunker with high tiled berths for the bodies.

“Where’s the cellar?”

“We slide them to the cellar this way.” Karolich pointed.

At the back of the room Tatiana saw a long metal chute that led down twenty feet into darkness.

She stood silently over the chute.

“How do you”—her voice was untrustworthy—“how do you bring the bodies up from there?”

“We often don’t. It’s connected to the kilns in the crematorium.” Karolich grinned. “Those Germans thought of
everything
.”

Tatiana stood and stared down into the darkness. Then she turned and walked outside.

“I just need a couple of minutes, Lieutenant, all right? I’m going to go over there and sit on the bench.” She attempted a smile. “It will be a little easier for you when some of the Soviets get shipped out, no? You’ll have more room.”

“Yes.” He waved dismissively. “They bring more in. It never stops. But the bench is wet.”

She sank down. He waited a bit. “Do you want me to, um, leave you alone?”

“Would you mind? For just a few minutes.”

Tatiana’s lower stomach was burning. That’s what it felt like, a slow charring away of her insides. There was such a thing, wasn’t there, as feeling better, eventually and forever? She couldn’t feel this old into eternity, could she?

In eternity, wouldn’t she be young, wearing her white dress with red roses, her golden hair streaming down past her shoulders?

She would be walking in the Summer Garden late at night, strolling down the path with the ghostly sculptures standing to attention before her, and she would break into a run, as her hair flowed, and a smile was on her face.

In eternity she would be running all the time.

Tatiana thought of Leningrad, of her white-night, glorious flowing river Neva, and over it Leningrad’s bridges and in front of it the statue of the Bronze Horseman, and St. Isaac’s Cathedral rising up, beckoning her with its arcade, with its balustrades, with its wrought-iron railing above the dome, where they had stood once before, a lifetime ago, and looked out onto the blackest night, waiting for war to swallow them.

And it did.

She sat in disbelief.

Something was finishing inside her, she felt it.

Had it been raining all this time and she didn’t even notice?

Tatiana lay down on the bench in the rain.

“Nurse Barrington?”

She opened her eyes. Karolich helped her up. “If you’re not feeling well, I’ll be glad to take you back to the house. You can have a rest. We can do the camp prison and the rest of the barracks another time. There is no hurry.”

Tatiana stood up. “No,” she said. “Let’s do the camp prison now. Are there many in there?”

“It’s in three wings, two of them we closed, but the operational one is half full.” He spat. “They break the rules all the time. Disobey, don’t come to roll call, or even worse, constantly try to escape. You’d think they’d learn.”

There was only one way into the prison wing and one way out, and it was guarded by a man in a chair with his machine gun propped up against the wall. He was playing cards with himself.

“How has it been today, Corporal Perdov?”

“Quiet today,” the corporal said, standing up briefly in salute. He smiled at Tatiana. She did not smile back.

The prison was a long corridor, floor covered with sawdust and cells on each side. They went through the first five cells.

“How many prisoners are you keeping this way?” Tatiana asked.

“About thirty,” Karolich replied.

In the sixth cell, the man had fainted and Tatiana put smelling salts under his nose to revive him. Karolich had left to open cell number seven. Cell number six revived. Tatiana gave him a drink of water and walked out into the corridor.

From inside cell number seven, she heard Karolich say in a mocking voice, “How is my favorite prisoner doing this morning?”

“Fuck you,” came the reply.

Her knees buckled.

Tatiana stepped from the corridor into the doorway. The cell was long and narrow with a step down divider, and on the straw beneath the tiny window that shed no light on the floor, twenty feet in front of her, lay Alexander.

The moments of silence fell through the cell. They fell onto her face and her shoulders. Her breath taken away, her burning stopped, her heart stopped too, she stood and looked at the bearded, thin man in manacles, in dark slacks and a blood-drenched white shirt. She dropped her nurse’s bag, and her hand went over her mouth stifling a racking sob.