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

The doctor dug the scalpel deep into Tania. The triage nurse laid a clamp in his gloved palm, now glistening like a ruby. The doctor wriggled his wrists as if tying a quick knot. One of the nurses lifted a pail from the floor. The doctor pulled up and held Tania’s red spleen in both hands like a gob of mud. He dropped the organ into the bucket.

Zaitsev shuddered. He balled his hands into and out of fists. His fingers were still tacky with Tania’s blood.

The nurse opposite the doctor leaned to look down into Tania. She nodded at the doctor. Again he held one hand out for a clamp, then flicked the scalpel. With a twist he took from Tania her left kidney. This, too, he dropped into the bucket.

A fountain of blood shot from the cavity. The doctor stepped back in surprise, then dove with both hands into the hole. Blood sprayed uncontrolled for several seconds until the doctor quelled it. In the silence after the shock, the doctor and nurses looked at each other through red, dripping masks.

“Clamp it! Clamp!” the doctor commanded.

The triage nurse stabbed her hands down beside the doctor’s. In a moment, they were done. The doctor turned from the table to wipe his face with a linen. Zaitsev saw Tania’s blood clinging in the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes.

The doctor, vibrant and sure moments before, had become old again. Speaking to Zaitsev, he seemed tired and sad.

“A piece of shrapnel tore up her spleen and kidney. She could live without them. The best thing to do was remove them.”

He wiped at his eyes with the napkin. Zaitsev said, “Yes.”

The doctor glanced back at Tania. Zaitsev looked with him, visualizing again the red liquid pillar that had leaped from her middle.

“The shrapnel was imbedded in her left kidney. The tip of it was protruding from the rear of the kidney. It had perforated the aorta. I didn’t see it. When I took the kidney out, the aorta ruptured.”

Zaitsev said only, “Yes.”

“Sergeant, I’ve done what I can.”

Behind the doctor, the two nurses released their grips on the flaps of Tania’s abdomen. They stepped away from the table in unison, waiting beside the unconscious body in a silent and final tableau.

Zaitsev would not let it be final.

“You’re not letting her die.”

The doctor sighed. “It has nothing to do with me.”

The old man turned away but stopped and looked back at the sound of the hammer clicking on Zaitsev’s pistol.

The gun was leveled at the doctor’s heart. Behind him, the nurses took another synchronized step backward.

“You told me she wouldn’t die, Doctor. You can save her.”

The doctor pursed his lips to compose his answer. No fear showed in his eyes from the danger aimed at him. He lifted his head to speak as if addressing a student.

“Sergeant, this patient you brought me has lost a spleen, a kidney, and a lot of blood. I don’t have any stores of blood to replace what she’s lost. All we can do this close to the front line is stabilize the wounded until they can be moved across the river. The tear in her aorta can be repaired. It will take me twenty minutes to do so. But with the blood she’s lost already, the kidney she has left has probably been irreparably damaged. If it hasn’t, it will be before I can return blood flow to it. She will go into renal failure and die.”

Zaitsev did not lower the weapon. Tania was alive on the table and the doctor must return to her side.

“She will die, Sergeant. And in the twenty minutes I spend stitching her back together, it’s also possible that one of the wounded men waiting in the hall may also die. Can you live with that?”

Zaitsev looked at Tania on the table. Her heart continued to beat; it was in a trench, in dire trouble, fighting to live. Those soldiers lying on stretchers in the hall were in their own trenches. He was not here for them.

“I have no choice,” he said, raising the gun to the doctor’s head. He spoke to Tania, to tell her he was coming. “I love her too much to have a choice.”

The doctor glanced back at his nurses. They stood motionless, white as painted angels. The old man removed a glove and rubbed his hand over his bald head as if to warm it like an egg, to hatch what he should do next. He looked at Zaitsev’s pistol.

“If you’re going to wave that gun near my patient, Sergeant, please sterilize it.”

He peeled off the other glove and threw the pair into a corner. When he returned his eyes to Zaitsev, the gun was holstered.

The doctor spun on his heels to the table. He was animated again, grabbing fresh gloves and snapping into them. With his hands raised, he announced to his nurses, who’d jerked into action when he did, “He loves her, ladies.”

The nurses pulled back the carved sheets. Again they exposed Tania’s insides, working without words. Blood-soaked sponges and gauze littered the floor beneath the table. The nurses daubed sweat from the doctor’s face with bandages. Zaitsev’s back ached; he was afraid to move, afraid he might alter some fragile dynamic in the room. Once, Tania groaned. Zaitsev gritted his teeth, longing to crawl into her unconsciousness, to stand beside her and battle their way out together or die shoulder to shoulder.

At last, the doctor clutched a needle threaded with gut. He dipped into the hole and pulled out and snipped. He sewed like this for a long time, seeming to repair a dozen fissures inside Tania. When he was done, he stood back from the table and took off his plastic gloves. The triage nurse began stitching Tania’s skin, closing her wound.

The doctor came close. Zaitsev tried to read the man’s blue eyes, hidden beneath tufted white brows. The doctor looked into Zaitsev’s face, then glanced away. His hands rose and fell, as if weighing something.

Zaitsev looked at the surgeon’s hands, the fingers long and wrinkled, like twigs. Have these old hands saved Tania? He wanted the doctor to report quickly on Tania’s condition, but he could see the man was picking his words carefully. Why? Zaitsev wondered. How bad is the news?

He prodded. “Doctor?”

The old man dropped his hands—their work seemed done for now—and dug them into his coat pockets.

“I put everything back in order,” he said. “She’s in shock. I can’t say how long it will last. One or two days, I suspect.”

“When she wakes up?”

Zaitsev watched the man inhale.

“If the remaining kidney survived the surgery, we’ll know. She’ll have to urinate. If the next forty-eight hours passes and she doesn’t make water, conscious or not, she’s dying and it cannot be stopped.”

The nurse completed the last black stitches on Tania. Two straight lines intersected on her belly, leaving on her the dark mark of the cross hairs.

The old man laid his hand on Zaitsev’s collar. He patted once; the touch was light.

“Remember, Sergeant,” he said, “whatever happens to your friend, she has no choice, either.”

The doctor walked away; his stoop reappeared across his shoulders. Two white-clad orderlies entered the surgery room and lifted the stretcher of the soldier whose leg had been cut off. The soldier’s head tossed; he was awakening. The orderlies walked past the soldier’s amputated leg and carried him out.

The nurses clicked off the lights around Tania. One followed the orderlies and the doctor out of the room. The other, the triage nurse, returned to the front hall.

Zaitsev walked behind the triage nurse into the hall. She kneeled beside the soldier lying on the nearest stretcher. The man’s chest was circled in gauze. The nurse lifted his eyelids. She peered into the eyes for only a moment; she’d become skilled at recognizing death. Without looking at Zaitsev, she stood and moved to the next stretcher. This soldier greeted her with an outstretched hand.