The German Woman Read online

  “Horst!” she said, feigning shock.

  “And he’s a lucky boy. The article he came with was about Wilson. What if it had been a review of some dreary play?” He put the papers aside and stood.

  Now was the time, while his mood was still light. She didn’t share Horst’s stubborn German fidelity to the abstract concept of duty, especially since she wasn’t sure to whom they were still to be dutiful; Germany as they’d known it had ceased to exist, the army as well. She breathed deeply and asked—again, though for the first time in a week—if they shouldn’t leave.

  “We can use the ambulances,” she said. “Load the few remaining wounded onto them in the morning and drive west. One of us to each ambulance. You, Father Thomas, and I. We’re already packed and ready to move and we have almost nothing here to detain us.”

  She’d revealed her plan in a rush, faster than she’d intended, trying to counter all possible objections before he even voiced them, as if she might overwhelm his doubts with a tidal wave of words; Horst shuffled the papers together before he spoke, letting the silence—his true answer—build. Then he said, “Kate,” and pulled off his glasses.

  “We mustn’t. At least not yet.” He sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. “We were nearly out of supplies and now we have them. We have to treat them as the gifts they are, not squander them on a trip whose end we can’t foresee. And none of our patients would benefit from being moved. Think of the influenza cases. The jolting, the cold air—it would kill them.”

  His refusal didn’t surprise her. Their arrival in Wilno had been horrible, part of an ignominious retreat through the Ukraine before advancing Red armies, crossing the swollen Neman by ferry right after a regiment of cavalry, the deck filthy, wounded laid on the dung; he would not want to leave ignominiously as well. The hospital should be in good working order when he left it, and he would want someone to turn over command to. Service before self. Still, she pushed on.

  “Please, Horst,” she said, her voice rising so that even to her it sounded shrill. “Can’t we? Those ambulances spook me.”

  He laughed and squeezed her hand. “Kate! Your mother never told me about gypsy blood. The best English stock, she said. Next you’ll be asking to read my palm.”

  When she didn’t laugh, he squeezed again. “Trust me. We’ll be fine.”

  “The refugees,” she said, knowing that it was a mistake, but she was desperate.

  “Kate.” He sat back. “Twice before, we’ve lived through waves of refugees, and both times it meant nothing. Yes?”

  They had, it was true. In late November the refugees fled east, away from an advancing Polish army that proved imaginary, and two weeks later another terrified group swarmed west, ahead of the fast-moving Czech legion. Though that army had proved both real and rapacious, it had also been remote, seven hundred miles away in central Russia at the time and moving east, away from them.

  Seeing he hadn’t convinced her, he softened his voice. “Three days, that’s all. I promise. We owe it to our soldiers who marched north to stay that long.”

  They had left two weeks before. “They were supposed to be back yesterday.”

  “Yes.” He shrugged. “It’s wartime. Better to wait for the soldiers to be sure the way is safe, that no other patients need us. Let’s give them three more days. If they haven’t returned by then, we’ll go. I promise.”

  He clapped his hands before she could reply and squared the papers on his desk. “Come,” he said. “Time for tea and a smoke! Feed that bit of English left in you, yes?”

  Water was boiling over a Sterno lamp in a German helmet, and two glass ventouse cups on the table were filled with tea leaves. “Let’s enjoy our newfound luxury before bed. The paperwork only multiplies if I attend to it.”

  The offer of tea, the boiling water, were meant to make her happy, but she was certain it was one more thing they shouldn’t have, a poisoned gift. The war had overturned everything: emperors and czars were gone, kingdoms and countries, millions of men; why shouldn’t what once was good now be bad? It puzzled her that such things weren’t plain to Horst, but she smiled and nodded, having argued and lost.

  Still dressed, Horst asked Kate if she was ready for the dark, the game they’d played since their wedding night. Even at their most exhausted, when they moved like somnambulists after hours of surgery following especially bloody battles, one or the other had always teased with this delicious moment of waiting. Tonight, wanting him beside her, Kate wished Horst would forgo it and hurry to bed, but she knew she had to play along; domestic routines were their last remaining anchor.

  He cracked the window and turned out the gas lamp and jumped beneath the piled blankets. She drew him close, trying to shake her chill as the windows rattled from distant cannon fire. Explosions flickered across the cloudy southern sky like heat lightning and she felt the pressure from them on the soles of her feet.

  “Don’t they worry you?” she asked.

  “Why should they?” He pulled her tightly to his chest, the scent of tea lingering on his breath. “We’ve been listening to it for months. It moves, it comes closer, it goes away. We’ll be fine.”

  Rapid pulse, shallow breathing; he didn’t seem to believe his assurances either, though she said nothing. What would be the point? They were going to stay. Three days, perhaps their luck would last. She wanted more than luck. Closing her eyes, she prayed for a southern wind, as the warmer air would carry the sound of the guns more clearly, allowing her to identify them, and if she knew whose guns they were, she might know better what was about to befall them.

  SHE AWOKE FROM a dream of Father Thomas beating reveille on a tin tray, a dream from a happier past. The dream unsettled her and she lay watching her smoking breath, certain something was wrong, her heart skidding, her limbs paralyzed by a crushing dread, her legs tangled in sweat-dampened sheets. Horst rolled over and began to snore, breaking the spell, making her realize that what had terrified her was the awful, unprecedented silence. Even the roosters were hushed.

  She dressed hurriedly. The cannons had stopped. Outside the window a blue mist blurred the land. The thatched roofs of peasant cottages showed blackish green with moss, and the dark church steeple stood out clearly against the first bars of plum-colored light, but the surrounding fields and the roads between them and the stucco roadside shrines might never have existed: roof and steeple and she herself seemed to be floating on a tenuous, shifting blue-white cloud. In the west the moon was still up, though smaller and white now, as if its passage through the dark had drained and diminished it.

  Downstairs, she stepped out into the appalling cold. Ghostly figures appeared to hurry toward her from the north, a Jew with his twin side curls, a woman wearing a tall blond wig, but the mist thickened before she could make out their faces; though she waited, the two didn’t reappear, and she wondered if she’d imagined them. No one seemed left in the town, and no other refugees had arrived since noon the day before. Who could they be?

  Shivering and afraid, she stepped forward uncertainly, hands out like a blind woman’s, wanting to touch something to prove she wasn’t dreaming, and before she’d gone five paces the clop of horse hooves calmed her. The horses were real; the drumming of their hooves over the frozen road reverberated through her boots, followed by the clink of metal—guns and sabers. The soldiers had come back, and Horst had been right, perhaps they’d have more wounded to care for.

  A dozen yards to her left something dark moved, a sentry. “Feldruf?” he said in a hoarse voice. The password? She had no idea what it was.

  The mist cleared between them; his rifle was pointed at her, and her forehead tingled above her left eye, the spot where she imagined the bullet was aimed. “Berg,” she said. “It’s me.”

  He was the son of a Hanoverian cheese merchant for whom he’d kept the books since he was a boy, his father too often taken up with amateur taxidermy to attend to them. “That’s why I wear glasses,” he’d told her. “I ruined my eyes.” Sh
e’d learned all that when treating him for trench foot a month before, and now he was about to shoot her.

  “Please,” she started to say, but before she finished the snorting horses drew closer and he swiveled and repeated his demand more loudly. “Feldruf?” he said.

  “Berg,” she said. “It’s all right. They’re soldiers. They won’t know the password either.”

  “I know they’re soldiers,” he said, looking at her briefly before pressing the gunstock to his shoulder. “But whose?”

  A small thunderstorm erupted in reply, loud gunshots and muzzle flashes yellowing the mist, followed by the thud of bullets hitting flesh. Berg’s dark form crumpled, his gun going off as he fell.

  Kate was back in the hospital before a second volley, Horst running toward her, face creased from sleep, holding his medical bag under one arm, working the other into a coat sleeve. The mobile patients had propped themselves up on their elbows; the immobile ones’ terrified glances darted from her to the door.

  “Here,” she said, grabbing the fluoroscope and heaving it toward Horst, “take this to the morgue!”

  “What?” He stopped. “What for?”

  “Hurry!” she said, wanting him to run, to save himself, but it was too late. Behind her the door burst open and two soldiers strode in carrying a wounded man, their tall hats almost knocking against the door frame, red stars shining on the black fur. They shoved Horst aside and lowered the wounded soldier to a bed.

  “Good God!” Horst said, grabbing at one. “What are you doing?”

  Kate reached down to tuck Josef’s crucifix beneath his gown, wondering if Father Thomas had suspected Red Russians were about, had given away his cross to save himself. The soldiers ignored her and pounded up the stairs to the isolation ward, and Horst was bending over the wounded Russian when an officer came in behind them.

  “And who are you?” Horst demanded.

  The officer seemed not to hear him. He stood by the nearest bed and raised his boots one at a time, wiping mud from them onto the linens, rubbing them back to an approximation of a shine, finishing just as the soldiers came running down the stairs dragging Father Thomas, his left eye already swollen closed and his breath whistling like a boiling kettle. His pipe had been ripped from his throat and the wound was bleeding and Kate felt unworthy for having doubted him. Her heart beat very fast.

  “Wait!” Horst said, speaking first to the officer and then to the privates and then to the officer again when the privates ignored him and dragged Father Thomas out the door. “He’s not a soldier, he’s a priest!”

  He switched from German to Polish and from Polish to French. At the last the officer swiveled toward him. “A priest?” he said, in exquisite French. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  He called the soldiers back and rested one large, square hand on Father Thomas’s shoulder. Tilting his head toward Father Thomas’s, he said, “Prêtre?”

  Father Thomas nodded and the officer unholstered his pistol and pressed it to Father Thomas’s temple and fired. Blood sprayed over Kate; her knees buckled and she grabbed Josef’s iron bedstead to keep from falling. Other soldiers pushed into the ward and the officer ordered Horst to attend to the wounded Russian before turning to Kate, who felt warm urine streaming down her leg.

  “The boy,” he said, switching to German and waving his pistol at Josef. “From which army?”

  Father Thomas’s body lay on the floor, legs twitching, and Kate shifted her glance to her own fingers, white where they gripped the bed. “None,” she said.

  “What? Louder!” She guessed from his face that he was yelling, but his voice sounded dim.

  “None,” she said and looked at him, knowing that otherwise he wouldn’t trust her. “He’s just a boy who got hurt.”

  “Lying won’t save him.”

  “I’m not lying.” Her voice cracked, and she had the odd notion that she herself was very far away, watching the events unfold from a great distance, which allowed her to repeat her protestations in a smoother voice.

  He dug his finger under the Austrian brassard. “Then why this?”

  She paled, knowing they’d put Josef in danger, as a unit of Austrians was still fighting the Soviets, trying to restore the Russian monarchy. “We pulled them out from one of those ambulances. They didn’t come with the boy.”

  “Yes, those ambulances.” He stepped closer to Kate, smelling of sweat and cordite. Behind him, soldiers blocked Horst from moving. “How did you happen to come by them?”

  “Yesterday,” she said, and shook her head. She told him that the three men driving them had disappeared without saying so much as a word, but even as she recounted the story she realized it sounded thin.

  “And these three mysterious wise men. Where have they gone? Were they following another Christmas star?” He smiled, which only deepened her fear.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They took our truck and left.”

  “Of course. How convenient. But we’ve been watching this place for some time. Altogether too many comings and goings.”

  “We’re a field hospital, for God’s sake,” Kate said. “We send people on when we can.”

  The officer seemed to consider this before holstering his pistol. He unpocketed a map and opened it over Josef’s legs. “And this? Can you explain it?”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you see these lines?”

  Blue chalk chevrons nearly encircled the town. Kate nodded. The map vibrated; Josef was trembling, and she gripped his ankle through the blanket to try and calm him.

  “They’re the dispositions of nearby Soviet troops. I took it from the first ambulance. What was it doing there? And the third ambulance. Here is a partial list of what it contained.” He unfolded and read from another piece of paper: machine guns, mortars, rifle grenades, sheepskin waistcoats, mackintosh capes, ground sheets, cases of rum, tobacco, cocoa, coffee, revolvers, Very light pistols, gloves. He refolded the list and asked, “What would a medical outpost be doing with such things?”

  “We’re not spies,” she said.

  A muscle twitched in his cheek. “Why do you protest a charge no one has made? Have you something to hide?”

  Kate had no answer, but in any case he seemed not to expect one. How had he known what the ambulance contained? Turning to Horst he said, “Will my soldier be all right?”

  Horst spread his bloodied hands above the wounded Russian. “I think so. I didn’t have time to clean the wound properly. I’d need to operate for that. A bit of hypochlorous acid would do wonders for him, prevent infection.”

  “Do you have any?”

  “No. But perhaps . . .”

  “But perhaps we have some?”

  Horst shrugged.

  The Russian shook his head. “He’ll have to take his chances.”

  He snapped out orders in Russian and soldiers pulled Kate and Horst out of the hospital and ran them across the frozen ground toward the nearest ambulance. Kate slipped but wasn’t allowed to fall, the men dragging her forward; first her boot came off and then each of her three socks, and though she felt the skin peeling off the top of her foot she couldn’t get her balance to lift it. Behind her the sound of clinking instruments from Horst’s bag meant that at least he was going with her.

  The ambulances had been rifled, their contents strewn about. Mixed in with the armaments were the remains of the piano, and lying beside them was the milkman’s nag, a gaping wound on its exposed belly, its entrails a smoking blue pile. From the hospital a boy’s scream was followed by a gunshot. Kate struggled to get loose but a soldier slammed his rifle into her stomach and shoved her into the ambulance and shut the door.

  She tried to breathe. The engine started, the ambulance was put in gear, and they moved off, bumping over the frozen mud and rutted ice, Horst reaching out for her as they picked up speed and swerved away.

  FEET AND LEGS NUMB, Kate paced the dirt basement, three steps away from the door, three back, trying to drive off the terrible
cold. By the coal pile Horst had found a boot. It was wet when she put it on and she hadn’t dared ask from what. “No socks,” he’d said, and given her two of his own. A hunk of coal stuffed into the curled toe made the boot almost fit.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Horst had said. “They let me keep my instruments. Why would they do that if they planned to shoot us?”

  “It could have been an accident,” she’d said, though now she regretted her earlier doubts and clutched his surgical bag as she walked, wanting to believe him since he was gone. A watch would have made her less frightened. He’d been gone—how long? An hour? Two? Surely not more than three. That might be good—perhaps at that very moment he was convincing some Bolshevik that they were medical personnel, not soldiers or spies—but she feared that the opposite was true, that every minute away made the chance of his return less likely.

  Three steps away from the door and the dirty snow that had drifted under it, three back; she couldn’t bring herself to go farther, as one corner held a pair of bloody hands.

  “Jews,” their guard had said before slamming the door. “We wouldn’t waste bullets on them.”

  She and Horst weren’t Jews, they wouldn’t be cut up, but of course they might still be shot. It was almost to be hoped for; she was far too familiar with the body’s fragility, had seen what men and metal could do, to imagine anything but the worst: severed fingers, blinded eyes, submersion in a pit of coals. Her mind focused on this last one and she couldn’t shake the image of Horst screaming in pain as his skin charred.

  She tried counting as she paced, imagining Horst’s return, making herself go farther. Why should cut-off hands bother her? She was a nurse; for years she’d drunk her morning coffee in the cool morgue, ignoring amputated limbs awaiting burial, but those, cotton-wrapped, had been attempts to save lives, not to take them.

  She yelled, twice, but no one responded—no other prisoners to encourage her, no guards to order her silence. Was anyone in town even left alive? They’d driven past a line of men in the Jewish cemetery, digging an enormous trench in the snow, and just before their jailers had come for Horst they’d heard a volley of rifle shots.