Andrea Barrett - Archangel

During that gray, discouraging week, she saw Boyd for the second time. He came to the hospital just as she was about to leave for supper — because, he said, he’d heard from someone at the barracks that there was a woman who ran the X-ray facility at the American hospital, and that she was a volunteer, not officially part of the Army.

“Would that be you?” he asked.

“It would,” she admitted. The square tip of his nose, sharply defined when she’d first seen it, was now covered with small dark blisters. “But I don’t need an X-ray to see what you’ve done there.”

“Forget my nose,” he said, plucking at the cloth over his right thigh. “That’s not the problem. Can I just show you?”

When she nodded he unwrapped his leggings, peeled three pairs of socks from his feet, discarded his leather tunic and his knitted vest. Then he hesitated. “There’s a bathrobe back there,” she said, gesturing at the folding screen. He stepped behind it and emerged a minute later, wrapped in the old brown wool robe donated by the major.

She was longing to ask why he’d brought Havlicek’s body into the city by himself. Instead she said, “Which doctor referred you here?”

“I sent myself,” he replied. His calves were white and strongly muscled, and she saw that the black fur lining his hat had misled her about his coloring; his hair, sticking up in dirty cowlicks, was the color of ashes. Despite that he seemed to be hardly older than she was. He said, “I’ve done enough first-aid work in the field that by now I can tell when there’s something really wrong. But I can’t get our doc to pay attention.”

“Why not?”

He made a face, which she didn’t understand. Then he said, “Some evidence would help. If you could find something …”

She put down her clipboard. “You know how this works. Unless we have such a rush of wounded pouring in that there’s no time, I have to have a medical officer’s order to examine you.”

He turned in a half-circle, the brown wool flaring around his knees as he mutely pointed out the obvious: the room was empty, the corridors were silent. Dr. Hirschberg had finished his work and gone up to one of the little cubicles on the second floor where he and the nurses, the cook and Eudora and a few other Red Cross staff were lucky enough to be quartered. The rest of the building, once a meteorological institute, was calm. Downstairs, Eudora knew, two of the Russian washerwomen were boiling linen and one of the nurses was using the same hot stove to sterilize operating room equipment. In a room down the hall another woman — they never had trouble finding help, Russians were glad to work here for food — was using an American sewing machine to make surgical masks and gowns. Behind her the orderlies had finished serving supper in the old classrooms that now served as wards. For the last week they’d had fewer than twenty patients; no one new had come in for three days and all the staff had been storing up sleep and strength. They might have been in any half-empty hospital anywhere, on one of those quiet days when the staff, suppressing sighs of boredom, finally turned to neglected paperwork.

“Who’s waiting?” Boyd asked. “What am I taking from anyone else? If you took a quick look, just, you know — it’s driving me crazy. Look.”

Turning away from her, gathering the bathrobe’s hem on the right side and pulling it up and toward the front so that the taut cloth concealed his buttocks and his genitals — a modest man, she noted, marveling at his delicacy — he exposed the outer aspect of his upper right thigh. In the meaty part of his quadriceps was an angry red dot the size of a ladybug.

“Maybe a little infection,” she said. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

“There’s something in there,” he said. “Way down in. If you could just look …”

“I can’t make a plate,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right to use the film and the developing supplies. But I can check you over quickly with the fluoroscope.”

Fifteen minutes later she had him arranged on the X-ray table in the darkened room. In the glow of the ruby light she’d adjusted the diaphragm and the angle of the screen and positioned him on his back, arms crossed on his chest, with his right thigh sandwiched between the tube box, which was below the stretcher, and the screen suspended from the holder above. She rubbed a little more paraffin along the ridge that fit into the groove of the stretcher and then slid the whole thing half an inch, moving the red dot on Boyd’s thigh into better alignment. The movement startled Boyd and she apologized.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Just do what you need to do.”

She positioned one hand on the screen stand and said, “Okay, then. I’m going to turn off the red light and let my eyes adjust. The room will go black, and you won’t be able to see me, or any part of yourself. In about ten minutes, I’ll be able to examine you; we can talk while the time passes, but you need to lie completely still until I’m finished with the examination. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” he said — sounding, as all the soldiers did, mildly offended that she would ask; unaware, as they all were until it happened, that these minutes lying utterly still in the black, stuffy, silent room might cause the most unpredictable reactions. In the dark, she’d seen men weep silently, cry hysterically, sit up so suddenly they’d knocked her screen stand askew. Some told stories about the awful things they’d seen and done; some would start cursing and be unable to stop; a few, gentle enough in the ruby light, would after a few minutes in the dark start whispering obscenities and grab at her thighs and her crotch. One had seized her hand and pulled it between his legs, then bitten her when she tried to pull away. She was careful, now, not to let her attention drift.

So far he hadn’t moved. Quietly she breathed in and out, waiting for her pulse to slow and her eyes to adapt. His voice floated up. “You never asked my name,” he said. “I’m Constantine. At home, people call me Stan.”

“Constantine,” she repeated. Not once had that surfaced in the rumors — always, she heard “Boyd.” “Or would you prefer me to call you Stan?”

“Constantine’s fine,” he said. “We don’t know each other yet. May I call you Eudora?”

“Please.”

“How did you get here?” he asked.

His tone was perfectly calm; he was fine; this was going to be easy. “The same way you did, I imagine,” she said. “Transport, from Newcastle-on-Tyne.”

“In September?”

She nodded, before remembering he couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said.

Comparing notes, they determined that they’d been on two different ships. More men, nearly forty, he said, had died of the influenza on his ship than on hers. Because he’d been sent down the Dvina to one of the fronts the day after landing, he’d missed the first terrible weeks in the city, which she remembered so sharply: the tiny Russian Red Cross hospital overflowing, men sick on the ships and sick in the barracks, with no place to put them and, until the engineers hastily constructed a cemetery, not even a place to bury them. She’d spent much of her first weeks helping to turn this building into a hospital, installing the X-ray apparatus shipped over from Boston and helping set up the operating suite. Not that any of it helped the soldiers sick with the flu. On the river, he said, ten more men from the infantry company he was assigned to had gotten sick, and two of them had died.

“Did you get sick yourself?” she asked.

“I didn’t, somehow,” he said. “You?”

“I didn’t either.”

The darkness had grown soft, almost velvety, which meant her eyes were ready. She lowered the fluoroscopic screen, tapped the floor switch, and adjusted the diaphragm. The coating on the screen began to glow and there he was, his interior suddenly visible, a sight that still astonished her. There were the familiar landmarks and also, suspended among them, an unfamiliar intrusion. What was that jagged, slivery shape? His femur was intact, the hip joint as well, and there were no signs of skeletal injury — yet the projectile she saw, well down from the little red dot on his skin and at an unexpected angle, was neither shrapnel nor a fragment from a shell. Long, slim, pointed at both ends—