The orderlies who had been carrying the stretcher lowered it to the floor in the center of the room and began to shout for assistance. The body of the injured woman was covered with a dark blanket, but her head jerked violently from side to side.
Ruzsky looked down at the woman in his arms. “Maria?” he whispered. But she did not open her eyes.
Ruzsky moved to the far corner and laid her down gently. “I’ll find a doctor,” he said.
He ran through the enormous wooden and glass doors to the ward beyond, the fetid smell that assaulted him so violently unpleasant that he almost gagged. The room was full of the dead and dying, mostly soldiers covered in putrid, leaking bandages. There were many beds, but the injured were laid out on the floor between them and even in the aisle in the middle of the room.
This part of the hospital had once been a school and the tall windows and high ceilings ensured that it was freezing cold, despite the crush of human bodies. Ruzsky saw that several panes on the window closest to him had been broken. Few of the injured had blankets.
He ran forward past the hollow faces of the wounded-mostly peasants with long black beards, many of whom were unlikely to be leaving here alive and returning to their families in the Russian hinterland.
A patient began to scream at the far end of the room and Ruzsky caught sight of a doctor bending over a struggling soldier, trying to restrain him. After a few moments, the medic turned away.
“Doctor?” Ruzsky asked.
He looked up. He was a young man, a boy even, no more than twenty or twenty-one, but his face was as haggard and lined as that of someone twice his age, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. “Doctor, I need your help.”
The man stared at him.
“I need your help.”
“Everyone does.”
“Please, could you come this way.”
“I have work to do.”
“It will only take a minute.”
“Please wait your turn!”
After his explosion, the doctor looked as if he might cry. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, swaying unsteadily on his feet.
“Just one moment of your time, Doctor.”
“One moment,” he repeated, “my life is measured by moments.”
Ruzsky took his arm and began to lead him carefully down the center of the room. Briefly, it looked as if it might work, but the doctor soon rebelled against the way in which he was being maneuvered.
The doctor released himself from Ruzsky’s grip, turned around, and began to walk away in the opposite direction. Ruzsky ran after him. “Please, Doctor.”
“No!”
Ruzsky swung around in front of him. “Please. For Christ’s sake, don’t make me beg.”
“There are hundreds of patients.”
“But none like her.”
A glimmer of humanity flickered in the doctor’s exhausted eyes. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”
Ruzsky did not respond and the doctor rocked gently on his feet. “Fine. Where is she?”
Ruzsky turned and led the man down into the hallway. Maria lay on the floor, her eyes closed. He knelt down and touched her cheek.
The doctor knelt also.
“Doctor!” an old woman shouted from the other side of the hallway, but he ignored it. Ruzsky noticed that most people around them were waiting with quiet dignity and he felt ashamed, but unrepentant.
“What happened?” the doctor asked, as he took Maria’s pulse.
“The full impact of a horse,” Ruzsky said.
The doctor listened to her chest and then began to check her body with his hands, starting with her head and neck and shoulders and then moving down her chest. She opened her eyes, wincing as he touched her ribs, her face suddenly distorted by pain. She did not make a sound. Relief flooded Ruzsky.
“Any blood?”
He checked her clothes to answer his own question.
“Was she knocked out?”
“Yes,” Ruzsky answered.
“For how long?”
Ruzsky looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes,” he answered. “Perhaps twenty-five.”
The doctor held up three fingers.
“Three,” Maria answered weakly.
“Now?”
“Five.”
There was a piercing, haunting scream from inside the ward ahead of them, the roaring bellow of a wounded lion, but it had no impact whatsoever on the doctor. He covered each of her eyes in turn, checking the response of her pupils to light. He straightened. “Shock,” he said. “Take her home, keep her quiet. If the pain doesn’t lessen, bring her back.”
And before he had even finished his sentence, the doctor had mentally moved on. He stood and stared into the middle distance, oblivious to the cries for help all around him. Ruzsky saw a young boy lying on the floor on the opposite side of the hallway. He was painfully thin, his skin yellow and body wasted. He was with his mother and they both just stared at him.
Ruzsky bent down and scooped Maria into his arms. As he walked toward the exit, she leaned her head against his shoulder, her breath warm against his face.
Ruzsky let her down gently by the door to her apartment and supported her as he fumbled for the keys.
Once inside, he lowered her slowly onto the chaise longue, then took the sheepskin rug from the floor, laid it over her, and set about making and lighting a fire.
As it began to take, he turned to see that she was looking at him.
Ruzsky sat by her feet and they both watched the flames in silence. He moved closer, took her pulse, and then placed his hand against her forehead. He held up three fingers.
She did not respond.
Maria looked up at the changing patterns on the ceiling. The fire crackled loudly. Her skin glowed a soft, honeyed yellow.
“Are you in pain?”
She still did not answer. She closed her eyes.
Ruzsky waited, watching the firelight flickering on her face.
When she had drifted off to sleep, her chest rising and falling rhythmically and without apparent discomfort, he allowed himself to relax a little.
Ruzsky stood and glanced around the room, from the potted plant in the corner, to the theatrical posters and Parisian street scenes that adorned the walls. The richness of the decor had somehow become gloomy.
He made his way slowly to the window, glancing over his shoulder to be certain she was still asleep.
Outside, a cold wind whipped at the snowflakes and wind rattled the windows in their frames. Ruzsky wiped the condensation from the glass. Down below, the street was deserted.
He walked to the dresser, opened the front of it, and took out the bottle of bourbon, pouring himself a large measure, which he drank in one gulp. He tipped his head back in pleasure and relief. The desire to get blind drunk, so familiar from his time in Tobolsk, was overpowering. He poured himself another glass and drank that, too.
Maria lay still, her head tilted to one side.
Ruzsky thought about the boy at the factory, and wondered what had happened to his body.
Ruzsky moved to Maria’s desk and stood before a bundle of letters, an inkwell, two or three fountain pens, and a blotting pad.
Ruzsky glanced across at her once more, then untied the gold ribbon around the letters.
He began to sift through them. Most were notes and instructions from the Mariinskiy, some from Fokine, others from the theater’s administration department, formally offering her roles and discussing her salary. Ruzsky was surprised to see how little she was paid.
He reassembled the pile in the same order and retied the ribbon.
There were three drawers at the back of the desk and he opened each carefully in turn, his eyes upon Maria to be certain she did not wake.
They were all empty. It was as if they had been recently cleared out.