David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

“We need help.”

The nurse lifted her head. Like a winded horse, Zaitsev chuffed hard through his nose. He knew his face must show his terror.

The nurse moved to him, her hands reaching to support Tania’s head. “Lay her down here,” she said.

The nurse pulled Tania’s head to guide Zaitsev to an open space on the floor. He wrapped Tania tighter in his arms.

The nurse saw the madness. “Sergeant.”

He did not move.

She spoke sternly. “Sergeant. Lay her down. I must look at her wound.”

“Where’s the doctor?”

The nurse checked beneath Tania’s eyelids while she talked.

“He’s in surgery. I’m the triage nurse. He’ll be with her as soon as he can. Put her down.”

Triage. This woman decides who goes before the doctor. If I lay Tania down, she’ll die on the floor. She’ll die waiting in line behind these stretchers.

The nurse stepped back. She seemed to be calculating Tania’s chances from what she could see while Zaitsev held her, looking at the amount of Tania’s blood on him. She pointed at the floor.

“Lay her down or she’ll die in your arms.”

The words stung him. He knew death, and he knew this nurse was wrong.

“No.”

Behind Zaitsev, a snap sounded. Another snap, like plastic, then a voice.

“What’s going on here?”

The nurse kept one hand beneath Tania’s head and motioned with the other.

“He won’t put her down. I have to look at her. She’s bad.”

The doctor threw two splotched surgical gloves into a bin. The man was old, the oldest Zaitsev had seen in Stalingrad. He was tall and thick-waisted, with his head shaved bald. His blue eyes were rimmed in exhaustion. The doctor’s white apron was fresh, barely soiled with blood. His stoop disappeared when he held out his arms to Zaitsev.

“Give her to me. We’ll see what we can do.”

Zaitsev balked, though he felt a surge of faith in the old man. His arms ached in their lock around Tania.

The doctor shook his head, solemn as a great oak.

“She won’t die in my arms either, son. Give her to me.”

The doctor touched Tania. Zaitsev lowered his arms to let her body roll back from his breast. The nurse stayed at Tania’s head; Tania’s arms flopped when the doctor took her.

Zaitsev looked at the dripping rip in Tania’s coat. It was big enough to put his fist into.

“Doctor.” He intended to plead somehow, but the old man and nurse had already assumed all of Tania’s weight and turned from him. They laid her on the floor.

The doctor’s hands flew at Tania, pecking at her like two white chicks. The nurse returned to the line of stretchers. She knelt at all three; when she was done, she called to the doctor, “Stable.” To the man on the last stretcher, the nurse leaned close and mumbled.

The doctor unbuttoned Tania’s coat and tunic. With scissors he sliced through her undershirts, pulling aside the burgundy pieces like a velvet curtain. His hands and apron began to streak with red.

The wound jumped at Zaitsev. A pit the shape and size of an open mouth was torn in the left side of her abdomen, below the rib cage. Poking out of the hole was a pink, veined glob; the pressure inside her body had caused part of her small intestine to boil through the opening. Pulses of blood escaped around the edges, dribbling down her side to pool on the floor.

The nurse returned to the doctor’s side. Zaitsev moved behind her. Tania’s face was waxen; her eye sockets and cheeks were shadowed as though rubbed with charcoal. Her face stunned Zaitsev; it looked hollow, like a skull.

The nurse slapped a gauze sheet in the doctor’s outstretched hand. He clapped it over the wound and pushed down. He spoke urgently. “Lift her again.”

Zaitsev stepped between the doctor and nurse and dug his hands under Tania. He tried to be careful.

The doctor squawked at him. “Come on, boy!”

They carried Tania into a large room off the hall. Two tables held the center, both ringed by glaring electric lights hoisted on poles. The low grumble of a gasoline-powered generator came from somewhere in the wails. One table was empty and covered with a fresh white sheet. On the other table a soldier lay unconscious; beside him, a second nurse wrapped gauze around the stump below his right knee. His detached leg was bundled in cloth on the floor, still in its boot.

Zaitsev laid Tania on the table. The doctor took his hands from the bandage above her wound to put on clean plastic gloves; the nurse pushed down on the gauze in his stead. With her free hand she searched under Tania’s chin for a pulse. Zaitsev backed away from the table and bumped into an elevated tray of surgical instruments. They rattled, but none spilled. The nurse and doctor ignored him, busying themselves with preparatory movements and intense chatter. The doctor asked rapid-fire questions, and the nurse responded in one- or two-word bursts.

The doctor moved to the middle of the table to swab Tania’s naked torso clean. The nurse removed the bandage from the wound and threw it in a bucket beneath the table. With another swab, she painted an orange coating around the opening where the balloonlike intestine was sticking out.

“Ether?” the nurse asked.

The doctor wagged his head no.

Without an order, the second nurse shut off the lights at her table. She left the amputee soldier and came to stand beside Tania opposite the doctor and the triage nurse. The doctor examined the gleaming tools at his elbow while both nurses donned surgical gloves.

Zaitsev drifted to a corner behind the old man. He expected to be asked to leave the surgery room; he was ready to refuse. The doctor and nurses leaned over Tania and did not even look at each other while they worked.

The doctor held out his hand. A nurse selected a scalpel from the tray and put it in his palm. He drew the knife down Tania’s abdomen, crossing the center of the wound. With another stroke, he sliced the corners of the hole to widen it.

The nurses on either side of the table slipped their fingers beneath the flaps of flesh the doctor had laid open and eased them back. Zaitsev felt himself swelling with the urge to push the three of them away from Tania and take her in his arms again. His dread pulled him a step forward.

Wet loops of Tania’s small intestine filled the gaping hole. The doctor pushed it about with his fingers and bent his head.

“A few small lacerations,” he mumbled to his nurses. “We can come back for these.” The women did not move.

The old man tugged the mass aside and probed under it. He held out his hand again. Another scalpel filled it. The nurse beside the doctor sponged blood from the living crater.

Zaitsev watched the doctor and the women work with swift certainty inside Tania. Zaitsev himself was no stranger to the insides of living things. He’d skinned a thousand animals in the taiga, buried his hands in their viscera, yanked them out, and thrown them to his dogs. So long as he kept his eyes on the surgery, on the hands of the doctor, on the exposed organs, his anxiety stayed in check. It was when he looked at Tania’s blond hair draped on the table, her hands quiet as wood beside her, that his own gut quivered.

Months before, the moment he’d begun killing in Stalingrad, Zaitsev had reconciled himself to dying. It was the commerce of battle; he risked his own life in order to take others. But he’d not anticipated dying in pieces. Tania seemed the biggest part of him; if she died on this table, that part died, too. He’d be left alive without her, gutted, then stranded in an icy landscape to survive somehow without her passion and heat.

And just before this terrible thing happened, such news. An American. What kind of a woman was this, to come so far, to fight so hard and give so much for Russia, from America? What kind of woman? Zaitsev quietly shook his head.