Andrea Barrett - Archangel

“You knew that,” Axel said. “Didn’t you? I assumed …”

That Duncan had told him, Sam understood. That Duncan had relayed to him whatever Axel, stretched out on his berth, the bandage stuck to his oozing wound, had said. Axel must have told the story of his night on the water to Duncan, who lay on the floor in the place where Sam should have been. Perhaps he’d also relied on Duncan for whatever image he had of Sam’s own night; he’d never asked Sam. “Duncan,” Sam said feebly.

“I know,” Axel said. “Really, I do know — he can be so exasperating sometimes, he probably told you more than he should have, he’s always too dramatic. And he forgets how attached we are. I don’t think it even occurred to him that you might be upset by hearing that something bad happened to me. Any more than he seemed to understand, in Edinburgh, how much he’d hurt me by attacking you.”

Sam stared at him blankly. “But Duncan,” he said, “the way you are with him …”

“I do the best I can,” Axel said. “You must have found yourself in similar situations with students. You know how sometimes you have to treat the one you actually feel least close to as the favorite, just so he won’t lose confidence entirely?”

“I do,” Sam said miserably. Not that he’d ever felt treated as a favorite, but he knew what Axel meant: he’d always acted more kindly toward Sam than he really felt, so that Sam wouldn’t be too crushed to go on.

“I’ve always had to do that with Duncan,” Axel said. His bandage, unpleasantly stained, had shifted farther back on his head. “I still do, I find, in certain situations. And here — what could I do? He wanted so badly to take care of me.”

“You gave him his start,” Sam said, not knowing what he meant.

“It’s a good thing I can count on you to understand,” Axel said. The ship rolled gently, following the long, slow waves. “You’re strong enough to go your own way. That’s part of what makes your work so interesting. And part of what gets you into trouble.”

THE NEXT MORNING, still a day and a half out from Halifax, Axel and five other passengers were transferred to one of the cutters, which had excellent hospital facilities. The wound on his head wasn’t healing properly; the Coast Guard doctor wanted to debride and resuture it without further delay. Sam, left behind with Duncan and Harold and George, could do nothing but wave goodbye and hope that they’d find each other later.

At the docks, a huge crowd greeted them, Red Cross nurses and immigration officials, family members of some of the survivors, local citizens who wanted to help, reporters from various papers: they were big news. Theirs had been the first ship sunk and theirs the first Canadian and American casualties; when the torpedo struck the Athenia , not even half a day had passed since Britain and Germany had gone to war. Nurses moved in to tend to the wounded; volunteers brought coffee and sandwiches; officials herded them into the immigration quarters, where they arranged baths and offered clean clothes. Scores of reporters moved in as well, eager for stories — what had they seen, what had they felt? — and then all the passengers began to talk at once, a hopeless tangle.

How could Sam be surprised when Duncan stepped forward? Of course it was Duncan who, never having set foot on the Athenia , still somehow managed to simplify, generalize, organize the scattered impressions. The reporters turned toward him, relaxing, already making notes: so much easier to follow his linear narrative, spangled with brief portraits of the survivors and vivid details of the crossing! He’d listened closely, Sam saw, to accounts of what he hadn’t experienced himself. Bits of Axel’s story flashed by, along with elements of the art student’s, the plant physiologist’s, Bessie’s, and more. Bessie looked startled, as did some of the others, but what Duncan recounted wasn’t untrue; it just didn’t match much of what Sam felt, or what he knew to be important. If Duncan were to tell the story of Sam’s working life it would, he knew, be similarly skewed — yet who knew him better than Duncan? Who had been with him for as much of the way?

Only Axel, who, leaving the City of Flint for the cutter, had held his hand to his stained bandage, looked crossly at the doctor, and said, “Really, I’m fine . I don’t know why you want to move me like this. I’d rather stay here with my friends.” And then had gestured toward Duncan and Sam, on either side of him.

The first time she saw him, he was driving a sleigh. Not one of the boxy Red Cross ambulance sleighs, but a rough peasant sleigh with a frame of lashed saplings riding low between the runners. His chin rested on his chest; his hands lay loosely in his lap; the reins looped onto his knees, depriving the little pony of any instructions. The snow in the street was firmly packed, neither icy nor badly rutted, and the pony walked patiently, in a straight line, as if planning to continue past the hospital courtyard to the edge of the White Sea. A long bundle, half buried in hay, lay next to the driver — who must, Eudora realized, be sound asleep.

Already four months had passed since the war had ended for the rest of the world. Four months during which she’d thought, every day, that she’d be leaving North Russia. A bell boomed from the cathedral and caused the pony, who had a particularly thick mane and lovely eyes, to look toward the blue domes. Still the driver let the reins lie slack. Eudora crossed the courtyard and waved, clicking her tongue softly against her teeth until the pony turned between the pillars and brought the sleigh to a stop at her feet. Beneath the usual mountain of garments — knitted vest over olive drab blouse under leather tunic beneath sheepskin-lined overcoat, topped with a thick balaclava helmet crowned in turn by a fur-lined white hat — she could barely see the man. His eyes were swollen, perhaps from failing to use the goggles pushed carelessly up on his hat. His gigantic mittens hung below his armpits from a white twill harness shaped like an A , which made him look like a massive child labeled for retrieval at a rail depot: A for what he was, an American soldier, or for Archangel province, where he, along with the other five thousand members of his regiment, had been sent. She touched his knee.

“What?” he said, waking instantly.

“It’s all right,” she said. The pony moved its lips and teeth, obviously hungry, and Eudora felt in her pockets for the apple she’d saved. Instantly the pony took it from her hand, chewing while the driver turned his head from side to side. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“American Headquarters,” he said. “Somehow I got turned around.” His chunky nose was frostbitten at the tip, above a frozen mustache and raw lips. Undamaged, he would have been handsome. “This”—he gestured sharply toward the bundle beside him—“belongs to them.”

“Down the block,” she said, pointing toward the big pink building. She stepped closer to the sleigh and the bundle, which was six feet long, sunk deep in the hay, and wrapped in Army blankets blotched at one end. “The hospital’s right here, though,” she added. “Which you seem to need more than Headquarters. What is …?”

“Havlicek,” he said. He peeled back a blanket corner, allowing her a brief glimpse. “Four days dead, a hundred miles east of here. I’ve been driving ever since.”

“You couldn’t find an ambulance sleigh? Or a convoy?”

“It’s complicated,” he said, looking her over. “And you’re too young to be here asking me questions. You’re a nurse?”