Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(180)

Karolich flushed uncomfortably. "The men are all right, Nurse. They won't bother you."

"Lieutenant Karolich, I don't for a moment doubt that in another life many of them were decent men, but I've also had four months of reality and three years of nursing the German POWs on the American front. I have few illusions. And I think it's bad form for a nurse to brandish her own protection, don't you?"

"You are completely right." He wasn't looking at her anymore. Asking her to wait, he retrieved his assistant, a sergeant. They precariously loaded a bushel of apples and thirty kits onto a wobbling handtruck and set off for the officers' barracks.

The sergeant waited outside with the kits. Tatiana, lugging a burlap bag full of apples in one hand, walked through the first two barracks, holding on to Karolich's arm with the other. She didn't want to, but she suddenly realized that if she saw Alexander on one of those nasty, filthy, too-close-together bunks, she might not be able to hide what was inside her.

She glanced through the bunks, two men per bunk, handed them an apple and moved on. Sometimes, if they were sleeping, she touched them, sometimes she pulled back their blankets. She listened to their calls, their banter, to the sound of their voices. She ran out of apples very quickly. She didn't open her nurse's bag once.

"What do you think?" Karolich said, when they stepped outside.

"What do I think? Terrible," she said, deeply breathing in the fresh air. "But at least the men were alive."

"You didn't stop to examine any of them."

"Lieutenant," she said, "I will give you my full report when we have gone through all the barracks. I need to write down the few I have to come back to, the few that require immediate medical attention from Dr. Flanagan. But I have a method for doing this. I can tell by the odor who is sick with what, who needs what, who is alive and who is dying. I can tell by the temperature of their skin and by the color of their face. I can also tell by their voices. If they, like those men were, are calling out, shouting things in German at me, reaching out for me, then I know things aren't too bad. When they don't move, or worse when they follow me with their eyes but don't make a sound, that's when I start to worry. Those two barracks had live men in it. Have your sergeant give out the small medical kits to each and every one of them. Next."

They went through the next two. Not as good here. She covered two of the men lying in their beds and told Karolich they needed to be taken out and buried. Five men had raging fevers. Seventeen had open sores. She had to stop and dress their wounds. Soon she ran out of bandages and had to return to the truck to get more. She stopped by the infirmary on her way back and got Penny and Dr. Flanagan to come with her. "The situation is worse than I thought," she said to them.

"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?" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"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?"