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? District? 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.