No wonder the children couldn’t stay away from it. At the foot of the wooden stairs, a Russian guard trying to attend to the old woman berating him stood surrounded by a clutch of shrieking little boys and a girl clomping about in what looked like her father’s big felt boots. Eudora, stopping among the spectators to see what was going on, gathered, by piecing together their gestures and exclamations, that one of the boys had sneaked past the guard and climbed halfway up the snow-coated treads before slipping and dropping his sled. The sled had clattered down the steps and then crashed into the old woman, who’d dropped her precious bag of flour. Now she was weeping openly, shouting at the guard and flailing at the boy, who had taken refuge behind a doughboy’s bulky overcoat.
Private Boyd’s coat, she saw when he turned. Her first impulse, which surprised her, was to pull her hood more closely around her face and hope he hadn’t seen her. He nodded, though, and she was caught. A small wooden sled piloted by a British soldier whisked down the long, steep curve, iced each night to be savagely hard and fast. Boyd slipped something to the old woman — a coin, perhaps — and then moved toward Eudora. The soldier on the sled leaned back, his feet pressed against the steering yoke and the rope in his hands, his vision blocked by the girl sitting astride his lap with her arms wrapped around his neck and her hair whirling over his eyes. A Russian girl, laughing hoarsely; possibly one of the girls who frequented the notorious café with the dark green roof. The sled shrieked twenty yards across the square, then thirty, leaving behind a wake of startled people. There was nothing to stop the sled from shooting over the steep bank and down onto the frozen river — but just then it hit a bump and tipped both passengers into the snow.
“Interesting technique,” she said to Boyd, as the driver raised his powdered head and waved his arm happily at the crowd.
“He got lucky,” Boyd said. “And so did I–I’ve been hoping to see you.”
As he spoke, another little boy, sensing a break in everyone’s attention, sprinted triumphantly past the guard and up the steps.
“Move back,” Boyd said, tugging at Eudora’s arm as the boy threw himself down on a flimsy sheet of metal. “He’s liable to come flying right over the edge.”
“He’ll be all right,” she said. “The run’s been up since January, and the only ones to get hurt so far have been soldiers.”
“Figures,” Boyd said. “The ones with the cushy guard jobs in the city are so bored they have to go looking for trouble. They should come and change places with us.” Then, as she’d been dreading, he asked her if she’d spoken to Dr. Hirschberg about him.
“Just briefly,” she said.
“When will he see me? We’re going to be sent out again soon.”
“I couldn’t convince him,” she admitted. “He knows of you already, or he thinks he does — he told me about some problems your unit had after your friend was hit by the bomb, and that you’d been sent east as a disciplinary measure.”
He frowned and stared at the tower, seeming to trace with his eyes the improbably intricate pattern of the timbers. Then he sighed and pulled his collar more closely around his neck. “It’s too cold to stand here,” he said. “Can I walk you wherever you’re headed?”
“If you’d like. I’m going back to the hospital.”
He was limping a bit; Eudora matched her stride to his and, as they left the square and began to move along the riverbank, asked how his leg was.
“It hurts,” he said shortly, turning to watch a flock of mud-colored crows wheeling toward their roost. “What do you think? If I was a horse — a cow, even — the surgeon would be working on me right now, he’d never risk the damage. When I worked with the calves—”
“You’re a farmer?”
He laughed. “Hardly. I grew up in Detroit. But one of my uncles had a dairy farm a couple of hours away, where I worked most summers. I learned early to doctor the sick calves and stitch up wounds, and by the time I was thirteen I was helping out a local veterinarian. He let me read his books and taught me some basic surgical techniques. And I once spent a summer with another uncle, farther away in a little village in upstate New York called Hammondsport. He and some of his friends made me curious about all sorts of things …”
An expression she couldn’t read passed over his face as he paused. “Anyway,” he added, “I got this idea that I might be a vet.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “Same as what happened to lots of us. I got drafted before I finished my first year of college, and then funneled into the ambulance company because of my little bit of experience. I thought at least I’d learn some medicine, but after basic training all we got was a few weeks of classes. Elementary anatomy, simple first-aid techniques — you know. The dressings go here and you can feel a pulse there. Cover exposed intestines with a damp clean cloth. If blood is jetting out of someone’s femoral artery, apply direct pressure. Lice are bad. Hot soup is good. I knew more than that before I was in long pants. Most of it’s pointless anyway, the best thing we can ever do for the ones who are hit is to get them back here, to the hospital and you. Which most of the time is just what we can’t do quickly enough.”
As he spoke he swung his arms in the air, back and forth, more and more briskly. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, replaced by a cheese-colored moon. The market was closing and lights were blinking on in the café windows. “Everything useful I learned on the job,” he said, describing the weeks he’d worked without proper supplies. He’d splinted broken bones with sticks, improvised dressings from old rags, gleaned from a Russian doctor essential mortician’s skills.
“You don’t understand what it’s like out there,” he said. “None of you here in the city do, not you, not your lazy surgeon, not the officers in charge. You have no idea. We get shot at picking up the wounded, and loading them on the sleighs, and hauling them to the clearing stations and then to the railroads or the sleigh trails. The Bolos cover themselves with white canvas smocks and sneak up on the encampments at night. We can’t see them but we feel them out there, and they pick us off one by one. They come up behind us in the woods. Our own supply officers skim off everything good and we end up with nothing, no smokes, rotten eats. Really,” he repeated angrily, “you have no idea.”
“I have some idea,” she said. “What is it you think I do here?”
By now they had passed the Headquarters building, the place where she’d first sent him. Her feet were cold and she was hungry but he pinned her with his eyes, still talking. Dr. Hirschberg, he was saying, had no right to judge what had happened to him. It was true that after Mike had been killed he’d been angry at everyone, and would happily have shot the Brits who’d ordered the bombing, or the Russian pilots who’d made the mistake, but he and his friends had been glad to be sent from that place and the long hike to the east, which they knew had been meant to punish them, had actually been glorious. Cold, of course, twenty below zero, then forty below, so cold he couldn’t have imagined surviving ten days of it, but away from the fighting, away from the crowded, stifling, stinking billets, he’d been able to see, for the first time, what was beautiful about this country. Between the tiny villages ranks of pine and spruce stretched in all directions, marked only by twisting paths. He’d seen reindeer, and Russian Eskimos, and wolves; windmills, used for grinding grain, and weirs for trapping fish. Women crouched on the frozen river dunking clothes through holes in the ice while men, bulky and hairy as bears in their hooded parki, crossed paths with the actual bears, collared and chained, kept by the Russian soldiers as mascots.