Colum McCann - Dancer

If a soldier was really sick or had no spirit, then I had to wash him down there. Mostly he would close his eyes because he was embarrassed, but once or twice he still got aroused and I had to leave him alone for five minutes.

Olga wouldn’t leave him alone. She carried a spoon in her apron and if a soldier got excited she bashed him there, and that was that. We all just laughed.

For some reason, I don’t know why, their legs were the worst — maybe it was from standing around in those boots all the time. Their feet were covered with sores and scabs. Most of the time they could hardly walk straight. They always talked a lot about their legs, said they used to play soccer and ice hockey and how good they had been at long-distance running. If the soldier was a very young boy, I let him put his head on my chest so he wouldn’t be ashamed of his tears. But if he was big and mean, I washed him much more quickly. He might say rude things to me about my arms, the way they wobbled, and for punishment I wouldn’t give him any soap.

We washed their heads last and sometimes, if they were nice, we gave them a final rub of the shoulders.

The whole bath took no more than five minutes. We had to drain the water each time and disinfect the metal. With the hoses attached to the old car engine we were able to pump the water out quickly. In summer the grass died where the water jetted out, and in winter the blood made the snow look brown.

Finally we wrapped the soldiers in blankets and put new foot cloths on, hospital shirts, pajamas, even hats. There were no mirrors, but sometimes I saw the men wiping the steam from the greenhouse windows, trying to have a look at themselves in the glass.

When we were finished and they were all fully dressed, they were ferried up the road towards the hospital by horse and cart.

The men who were waiting outside the greenhouse watched the clean ones go away. The looks on their faces! You’d think they were at a picture show the way their eyes lit up! Sometimes children came up and hid in the poplar trees and watched, it was like a carnival sometimes.

When I got home at night to Aksakov Street, I was always exhausted. I ate some bread, turned off the oil lamp beside my bed and went straight to sleep. My neighbors in the room next to mine were an old couple from Leningrad. She had been a dancer and he was from a wealthy family — they were exiles now, so I steered clear of them. But one afternoon the woman knocked on my door and said the volunteers were a credit to the country, no wonder we were winning the War. And then she asked if she could help. I thanked her but told her no, we had more than enough volunteers. It wasn’t true, and she was embarrassed, but what was I to do? She was an undesirable, after all. She turned away. The next morning I found four loaves of bread at my door: Please give this to the soldiers. I fed it instead to the birds in Lenin Park. I did not wish to be tarnished with their brush.

By the time it came to celebrate the Revolution in early November, there were only a couple of dozen soldiers to bathe each day, stragglers coming in from the front.

In the afternoons I began to visit the hospital. The rooms were crammed full of men. The beds were stacked five high, nailed to the walls like shelves. The walls themselves were splattered with blood and grime. The only good thing was the children who came in to perform on occasion, and also the music that came through the loudspeaker — one of the nurses had set up a system where they could play the gramophone from the front office. The music could be heard all over the hospital, lots of wonderful victory songs. Even still, the men moaned and shouted for their sweethearts. Some of them were glad to see me, but a lot of them didn’t recognize my face at first. When I reminded them, they smiled, and one or two of the cheeky ones even blew me a kiss.

Of all the soldiers there was one boy I remember best — Nurmahammed, from Chelyabinsk, who had lost his foot to a mine. He was just an ordinary Tatar boy with black hair and high cheekbones and wide eyes. He hobbled in on crutches made from tree branches. We sprayed him down, and I unwrapped the bandages from around the top of his stump. He was bad with the parasites, so I had Nuriya take good care of him. She swabbed the wound well while I got the bath ready. I checked the water temperature with my wrist, and then three of us supported him, walked him across to the bath. He was silent the whole time. I washed him down, and finally he said, Thank you.

When he was clean and dressed in hospital pajamas he gave me a strange look and began to tell me all about his mother’s vegetable patch, how she spread chicken manure to make the carrots grow, how they were the most wonderful carrots a person could want in his life, how he missed those carrots more than anything else.

In my lunch box I had some leftover martsovka. Nurmahammed put his face to the food, smiled up at me, kept smiling while he ate, his head rising up from the plate as though making sure I was still there.

I decided to go up to the hospital with Nurmahammed. We got on the back of a horse wagon, the animals clopping their way forward.

All sorts of things were going on that day because of the celebrations — a special food truck had pulled up to the hospital kitchens, red flags were flying from the windows, two commissars had arrived to pin medals on the soldiers, a man sat on the steps playing a balalaika, and children were walking around in Bashkirian folk-dancing costumes.

“The Song of the Fatherland” came over the loudspeakers, and everyone stood still while we sang it together.

I squeezed Nurmahammed’s hand, and I said: See, everything will be all right.

Yes, he said.

Usually the men were pushed around the hospital in wheelbarrows, but to our pleasant surprise there was a wheelchair for Nurmahammed that day. I helped him with the paperwork and wheeled him along the corridor to his ward. It was noisy in there, all the men shouting under a big cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the soldiers had gotten hold of a huge vat of methylated spirits and they were dipping cups into it, passing them along the bunk beds.

Everyone wore bandages — some of them were wrapped from head to toe — and things had been written on the walls by their beds, names of girlfriends, favorite soccer teams, poems even.

I pushed Nurmahammed on through to D368, halfway down the ward. His was the second of five bunks. He used his one leg to prop himself on the edge of the first bed. I pushed from below, but still he couldn’t heave himself up. Some men came and got their shoulders under Nurmahammed’s weight. He flopped down on the bed without even lifting the sheets, lay there a moment, smiled down at me.

Just then the big troupe of children came into the room. There must have been about twenty of them, all in costumes, green and red, with caps. The youngest was maybe four or five years old. They looked so nice and clean and scrubbed.

A woman in charge made an announcement for silence. For a moment I thought it was my neighbor, but thankfully it wasn’t, this woman was taller, sterner, no gray in her hair. She made a second announcement for quiet, but the soldiers were still roaring and laughing. The woman clapped her hands twice, and the children began dancing. After a few minutes a sort of hush came over the room — a slow wave, like a good thing being whispered through a crowd.

In the spaces between the beds the children performed. They twirled and reeled and went under bridges of arms for a Tatar folk dance. They sank to their knees, and then they rose and shouted and clapped their hands and sank to their knees once more. A tiny girl crossed her arms and kicked. Another child with red hair got embarrassed when his laces came undone. They wore big smiles and their eyes shone; it could have been their birthdays, they were so beautiful.