Colum McCann - Dancer

We cleaned out the giant greenhouse first. Nuriya gave the tomato plants to the farm boy who hung around the hospital. Katya, Marfuga, Olga and I shoveled most of the soil onto the ground outside. I was the oldest and my shoveling duties were light. Soon the greenhouse was clear, as big as two houses. We dragged in eight woodstoves, stood them next to the glass and lit the fires. After a while the greenhouse didn’t smell so much of tomatoes anymore.

The next thing was the big metal sheets. Nuriya’s cousin, Milyausha, was a welder at the oil refinery. She had gotten permission to take away fifteen sheets. She borrowed a tractor, hitched the sheets to the back of it, dragged them through the hospital entrance, down the narrow road to the greenhouse. The sheets were too big to fit through the doors so we had to remove the back windows to slide the metal in. The farm boy helped us lift the heavy sheets. He kept his head down — maybe he was embarrassed by all us women working so hard, but it didn’t matter to us, it was our duty.

Milyausha was a splendid welder. She had learned just before the war. She wore special glasses and the blue flame lit up her lenses. After two days it was there: a giant metal bath.

But we hadn’t thought about how to heat the water properly.

We tried boiling the water on the woodstoves that we had set up, but, even though the greenhouse itself was warm from catching the sun, the water never held its temperature. The bath was just too big. We stood around, quiet and angry, until Nuriya had another idea. She asked her cousin Milyausha to see if she could get permission for maybe a dozen more metal sheets. The very next morning she came up from the refinery dragging five more sheets. Nuriya told us the plan. It was simple. Milyausha set to work straight away and welded the metal into the giant bath, crisscrossing the strips until eventually the whole thing looked like a metal chessboard. She drilled drains in the bottom of each bath, and Nuriya borrowed an old car engine from her husband’s brother. She attached a pump to the engine to take the water out. It worked perfectly. There were sixteen individual tubs and, because they were small, we knew the water would stay warm. We laid down planks for gangways so we could walk from bath to bath, and then we hung a portrait of Our Great Leader inside the door.

We lit the stoves, heated the water, filled the baths. Everyone smiled when the water stayed warm, and then we took off our clothes and sat in the baths, drinking tea. All around us the glass was steaming and we were warm as soup.

Sweetness, said Nuriya.

That evening we went up to the hospital and told the nurses we would be ready the next day. They looked exhausted, black bags under their eyes. We could hear the soldiers moaning from inside the hospital. There must have been hundreds of them.

Nuriya pulled me aside and said: We will start right now.

We did only eight the first evening, but on the second day we did sixty and by the end of the first week they were coming up directly from the railway station in their bloody rags and bandages. We had so many that they had to wait in lines outside the greenhouse on long canvas tarps. Sometimes the canvas got sticky with blood and it had to be hosed off, but they were patient, those men.

While they were outside Katya wrapped them in blankets. Some of them were happy, but others cried, of course, and many just sat and stared straight ahead. The parasites were on them and the rot was setting in. You could see the worst of it in their eyes.

Inside, Nuriya was the one to shave their heads. She was quick with the scissors, and most of the hair was gone in a few seconds. Without it they looked so different, some like boys, some like criminals. She shaved the rest of the hair with a straight-blade razor. She swept the hair up quickly because there were lice still crawling through the clumps. The hair was shoveled into buckets and placed at the door of the greenhouse, and the farm boy took them away.

The soldiers were so shy they didn’t want to take off their uniforms in front of us. We didn’t have any young girls working with us — most of us were thirty or more. I was forty-seven. And Nuriya told them not to worry, we all had husbands — which was true, except for me, I never had a husband, no reason really.

Still they wouldn’t take their clothes off until Nuriya roared: Come on, you don’t have anything we haven’t seen before!

Eventually they shed their uniforms, except for the men on the stretchers. We used Nuriya’s scissors for them. They didn’t like it when we had to take off their shirts and undershirts, maybe they thought we were accidentally going to cut their throats.

The soldiers stood in front of us, hands over their private parts. They were all so skinny, poor things, they made even Katya feel fat.

We used the rotten uniforms for fuel but we made sure we took the medals off first, put them in little bundles until the baths were finished. All the men had letters and photos in their pockets, of course, but there were some strange things too — the spout of a teapot, locks of hair, bits of gold teeth. One of them even had a little finger, curled up and shriveled. Sometimes there were explicit pictures we weren’t meant to see but, as Nuriya said, they’d been through a lot for our great nation, it wasn’t our place to scold.

As the soldiers waited their turn, Olga sprayed them with a chemical that came in boxes all the way from Kiev. We used fertilizer tanks and mixed the chemical with water — it smelled like bad eggs. We had to cover the soldiers’ mouths and eyes. But we didn’t always have enough dressing to put over their wounds, so when we sprayed them it sometimes hit their open sores. I felt so sorry for them the way they howled. Afterwards they leaned against us and cried and cried and cried. We sponged down the wounds as well as we could. They dug their fingers into our shoulders and clenched their fists. Their hands were so bony and black.

When their wounds were swabbed, it was time for the bath. If one of them had lost his legs, it took four of us to lower him in the water and we had to be careful of the level so he wouldn’t drown. If he had no arms, we propped him up at the edge of the metal sheet and kept ahold of him.

We didn’t want to shock them so we kept the water lukewarm at first, and when they were immersed we poured kettles full of boiling water around them, wary not to splash. They said ooh and aah, and the laughter was contagious; no matter how many times we laughed in a day another man would make us laugh all over again.

The thing about the greenhouse was that it made the sound much bigger. It wasn’t exactly an echo, it was just that the laughter seemed to bounce from pane to pane and back down to us, bent over the baths.

Olga and I were the ones to sponge. I didn’t use soap to start with. That was a treat for the very end. I gave their faces a good scrub — they had such eyes! — and I cleaned very carefully, the chin, the brows, the forehead and behind their ears. Then I went vigorously at their backs, which were always filthy. You could see their ribs and the curve of their spines. I went down towards their bottoms and cleaned a little around there, but not so much that they got uncomfortable. Sometimes they would call me Mama or Sister, and I’d lean forward and say: There there there.

But most of the time they just stared straight ahead without a word. I went to their necks again, but this time I went much more gently and I felt them relaxing.

It was harder to do the front of their bodies. Their chests were often bad, because a lot of the time they had been hit with shrapnel. Sometimes, when my hands were at their stomachs, they hunched over very quickly because they thought I was going to touch them down below, but most of the time I got them to do that themselves. I was no fool.