Andrea Barrett - Archangel

SO, AT ANY rate, went the first version of the story’s first fragment, which seemed to have traveled by way of one of the soldiers billeted with Boyd. At a Red Cross dance two days later, Eudora heard that the woman had been seen frantically brushing at the air with a broom, sweeping Havlicek’s spirit from her house before he could settle in and torment her family. She tried to envision the woman, and then the house as described: peeled logs, sealed double windows, a grandmother sleeping on top of the tile stove, chickens and pigs in the corner, and outside, below the porch railing, a tower of frozen human shit. Had she gotten that right? Every day she was more aware of how little she knew about the world beyond the city, and of how the men at the front felt about the easy life led by the soldiers posted here.

This dance, for instance — a dance! Hundreds of people crammed into a big, warm, handsome room on the second floor of the old Technical Institute, occupations and nationalities as evenly represented as if a giant hand had reached down and gathered samples from across the city. Beyond the windows snow fell, goats wandered the streets, and the frozen river, framed by the pillars on the balcony, gleamed like radium, but in here, portraits of Imperial Army officers in sky blue breeches stared out from gilded frames. Outside people were starving and selling their silverware, their services, themselves, but in here doughboys and Tommies danced with Russian nurses and ward maids, Cossacks in tall gray hats chatted with Serbian soldiers, the six members of the self-appointed Armenian military mission admired each other’s epaulettes and polished scimitars. Supply officers made surreptitious deals involving cigarettes while the young editors of the weekly news sheet discussed whether to print the handwritten resolution — an ultimatum, one said; the beginnings of a mutiny, another suggested — drawn up by a handful of doughboys and circulated at one of the fronts. We the undersigned , it began, firmly resolve that we demand relief not later than March 15th, 1919, and after this date we positively refuse to advance on Bolo lines including patrols .

Eudora, pushed past by a wave of dancers, missed the rest of that discussion. She would have given a great deal to be back in her room, reading quietly; she’d refused the first invitation here, balking until the two Red Cross nurses crushed her resistance. There were nine American women in all of Archangel, they reminded her. Nine, of which she was one; and really only eight because the consul’s wife was too sick to come; and how were the soldiers supposed to enjoy themselves if the women refused to do their part? And so here she was, her mouth shaped in a stiff smile, nodding in time to the cheerful sawings of the regimental orchestra.

Food beckoned from the crowded tables, whisky and vodka slopped from glasses. In a corner a middle-aged woman who spoke six languages and had once run an academy was soliciting new recruits for her conversational Russian class. Two YMCA men, glaring disapprovingly at the British Headquarters staff getting drunk on good Scotch whisky, shared the latest gossip about the sergeant who, after stealing enormous quantities of sugar from the American depot, had been caught bartering it for fur and jewels and, disgraced, had shot himself. Near the spread of cakes and cookies, the major despised by everyone was holding forth about the court-martials he organized with such relish. “Not just the murderers,” he said, slicing the air as Eudora, impelled by the nurses’ words, made her way dutifully forward. “The shirkers have to be punished too, and the ones who wound themselves on purpose.”

On the backless benches men Eudora recognized from the hospital sat tapping their feet and staring at the very few women, including her, as if they were starving and she was steak — which was why the nurses had insisted on her presence. The only thing important about her here was that she was single and shaped like a woman. The orchestra played, the glasses clinked, the hum of voices rose and fell, and she danced with two doughboys in from one of the fronts, then with a clerk from the Norwegian embassy, a British medic, a Canadian gunner, a Polish mechanic, an ambulance driver from Lansing. Below her shoulder blades, the spot where the men pressed their hands began to sweat. She could feel them trying to still their thumbs, which wanted to caress her spine. Her right hand, which each man held in turn, was slowly being crushed. A member of a machine-gun crew, looking at his palm pressed against hers, said, “Your hands are huge, aren’t they? Bigger than mine,” which embarrassed her; at work, where she was most comfortable, her height and strength were assets. The corpse in the sleigh, Havlicek, she remembered as having frozen awkwardly: his arms uncrossed and one large hand bent at the wrist, a foot turned in, a scarf stuck to his skull.

From a supply clerk, who was pleasant enough but whose hands were disconcertingly warm and who was eager to gossip about the incident, she learned more details. Havlicek’s platoon and one other had been sent a hundred and fifty miles east in November, to guard the supply of flour held by a little city and also to train Russian troops to fight against the Bolsheviks. Later they were sent still farther east, to attack a gathering mass of Bolos. Havlicek had been hurt during their first battle, heaved into the air by an artillery shell before crashing down on his back. They’d had neither medics nor ambulance men with them and the cuts on his face had been bandaged by a Russian with a first-aid kit. After their retreat to the little city, the medic stationed there had sent three of the wounded men on to Archangel but kept Havlicek, despite his bitter complaints about pain in his back.

He could walk, his captain pointed out, and he could fire a gun; nothing seemed to be broken and they were short-handed. Through December and January, his captain sent him on patrols but he lagged behind or dropped out, infuriating the rest of his platoon. Put on guard duty, he sat; on kitchen duty, he dawdled so long he delayed their meals. He felt, he was said to have said, as if someone had bored a tunnel down his back and buttock and through his thigh, then filled it with salt and flushed it with acid. Why would no one believe him? By February he was taking his meals alone and claiming he could no longer sleep. By March, he’d been utterly despondent.

So it did look like suicide, Eudora heard from several men chatting over drinks — but this was exactly what Private Boyd denied. Before being drafted, Havlicek had never held a gun and he moved and thought like a civilian. Exhausted, made clumsy by the cold, he had in Private Boyd’s version been cleaning his gun, or putting it away, and somehow something had happened. But everyone knew, said the driver who repeated that theory to Eudora, that Boyd had to say that; Havlicek’s family would get no benefits if he were ruled to have killed himself.

Dancing with an engineer in whose hand she’d once located a sliver of steel, Eudora heard further that Boyd had begged a load of hay from the peasants, and then — there’d been no officers at the outpost to stop him — wrapped Havlicek’s body in blankets and placed it on top of the hay, where it froze solid. On his own he’d decided to bring the body into the city, in to them.

IT SNOWED THREE times that week and the sky, despite the approaching equinox, showed no signs of spring. Gray, every day. Gray at breakfast, gray all day, and the snow gray too, especially in the market square and along the plank sidewalks. The rotten ice on the river was littered with garbage. What should have been good news — the Secretary of War had given orders to withdraw American troops from Russia as soon as spring conditions would permit — made no impression; Eudora knew, as all the soldiers knew, that the White Sea was still solidly frozen and that it would be June at least before they were freed. The Peace Conference in Paris was still stalled, as it had been for months and apparently would always be; millions of soldiers were still stuck in England and France; the Bolsheviks had taken over in Hungary and were spreading through Germany and had been arrested by the carload in Seattle. There’d been strikes in Belfast, strikes in Glasgow and Munich, riots, battles, spreading starvation: but half of what she heard wasn’t true and she couldn’t trust what she read in the odd issues of French and English newspapers that turned up; even they seemed to lie. Astronomers had supposedly just left England, heading for Brazil and the west coast of Africa, to observe an eclipse that was due in May and which would somehow prove Einstein’s theories right or wrong; who could have organized such an expedition? Suffragettes had burned copies of Wilson’s speeches in an urn across from the White House, been beaten and arrested — had that really happened? Was it true that the man who tried to kill Clemenceau was an anarchist and a Bolshevik? In the dark of the X-ray room, listening to her soldiers and considering all she heard and read, the world beyond the White Sea made no more sense than her world here.