Andrea Barrett - Archangel

“Then he’d end up here,” Dr. Hirschberg said. “Like them.” He nodded at the two soldiers guarding the doorway and then at the pair working the refreshment bar. Convalescent soldiers did all the work at this hospital themselves, except for the nursing and cooking, and were also sent out to guard the Headquarters building or work as clerks or typists inside it, to set type for the little newspaper, and even to work as orderlies and kitchen helpers back at her own hospital. If Boyd’s surgery went well—

“He wants to have his little operation,” Dr. Hirschberg continued, “and then move over here after a couple of days and have a pleasant week in bed, before waiting out the rest of his tour doing light duty in Archangel. Perhaps he’d like to be in charge of making hot cocoa.”

Somehow, although that was roughly the same path followed by many soldiers whom she’d examined and he’d treated, his tone was uncharacteristically cool, even mocking. Before she could respond, the professor, dressed as before in his threadbare tweeds, took his place at the podium. While he enthused about Tolstoy and read from his own translations, she puzzled over how she’d offended the doctor.

The professor finished, the applause died down, the room began to empty out. Half the crowd knew Eudora or the doctor or both and stopped at their table to say hello, preventing her from asking him what he’d meant. Only when they had passed through the double doors themselves and were walking outside through the heavy wet snow, did she ask if she’d done something wrong in examining Private Boyd.

“I’m sure you meant well,” the doctor said. “And it’s not as if we all haven’t bent the rules before.” The tram clattered past, packed with rowdy soldiers on their way from the barracks to the nightclubs, and he paused, gazing moodily at the men hanging halfway out the windows. “God, I get tired of this,” he said. “Them and their bad behavior, us and our bad behavior, the politicians, the people back home — did I tell you what my wife wrote in her last letter?”

“No,” she said, uneasily. She located and charted the objects piercing the soldiers’ bodies; he dissected them out and closed the wounds: during the worst rushes, they hardly spoke at all, a glance or a gesture conveying all they needed. She ate with the nurses or by herself and he ate with the officers; when they met outside work it was at places like this lecture and they never spoke of personal things.

“According to my wife,” he said bitterly, “my continued absence is causing her the greatest inconvenience. My patients have all been taken over by other doctors who’ve been back home for months, her friends feel sorry for her, my pitiful salary doesn’t cover the rises in food and coal, the roof needs work and the garden is a shambles: complain, complain, complain. I can make excuses for her, because she doesn’t have any idea what we’re going through here. But what’s your Private Boyd’s excuse? Everyone’s suffering, everyone wants to go home — and he’s with the ambulance company, he’s supposed to be helping them . Walking out on them now simply makes him a shirker.”

“He’s not ‘my’ private; I hardly know him. But he is hurt.”

“He’s hurt a little . But I know some things about him that you don’t.”

After outlining the same events Boyd had described, the plane mistakenly dropping the pair of bombs, the vaporized cook, the men grieving afterward, the doctor continued, “Half of that company was right on the edge of mutiny; they were so furious with the British officers in charge, and with the fliers, that they burned down a shed they’d been using as a hangar. Two British soldiers were beaten up and no one would admit to it. And someone sent an anonymous letter from the front to Headquarters, demanding that their company be relieved. Did you hear the stories about the driver who lost his mind back in November?”

“Who didn’t?” An ambulance driver, without a rifle of his own, had stolen a rifle from a sleeping comrade and then crept through the outpost until he found a British officer. After blaming the officer for starting the war against the Bolsheviks, he’d blown off the officer’s head, and then his own.

“Then you can understand why the officers in charge would worry about what was going on after the cook was killed.”

Dr. Hirschberg dug his hands deeper into his pockets as they rounded the corner and faced the damp wind blowing off the river. By the water, in the light of a fire, three women with cleavers were dismantling a dead goat. “Jesus,” he said. He shook his head, and then continued. At the same time the commanders at Headquarters were considering what to do with those men, there’d been a huge increase in Bolshevik activity far to the east, with rumors of a major attack. More troops were badly needed there. Using that as an excuse, the British commanders had decided to break up the American company, pulling two platoons of infantry and six ambulance and medical men away from the site of the cook’s death. Boyd had been in that group.

They passed the sawmill, dimly lit but still running, filling the air with a smell so intense that Eudora was briefly transported to the dark pine and spruce forests of her childhood. She said, “I don’t see what that has to do with his injury.”

“They should have kept him where he was,” Dr. Hirschberg said. “And would have, if he hadn’t been one of the ringleaders. The company’s supervising medical officer had been shot in the stomach and transported back into Archangel, and besides being shorthanded they had hardly any medical supplies. Boyd’s clearly smart, and enterprising; I heard he stitched up someone’s leg in the field with a needle and thread from a sewing kit. But he was enough of a wild card that they wanted him out of the way no matter how skilled he was. Your Private Boyd”—there was that phrase again—“did a ten-day march, carrying a full pack, and then he worked at that outpost for three months before the incident with Havlicek. All with the same wound that he’s complaining about now. If he wants me to operate on him, you can be sure he has another reason.”

SHE HAD NOT, before that evening, given much thought to how Dr. Hirschberg viewed his patients. Although he’d had no military experience before the war and left behind a lucrative private practice in New Jersey, he worked long hours uncomplainingly, and she’d fallen into the habit of thinking that he was relatively content. And that despite his increasingly scruffy appearance he was somehow sturdier and stronger than she was: less lonely, less baffled, less consumed by longing to go home. The way he judged Boyd so sharply, though, opened up the possibility that he was judging all his patients — and the nurses, and the orderlies, and her.

Until now she’d believed that he regarded her as simply a component of the operating suite, no less essential, but no more interesting personally, than her X-ray tube. His distant courtesy, which the Russian nurses found insulting, instead made her feel invisible in the most pleasing way. When she’d first learned to use the machines back in the Adirondacks, she’d been alone most of the time and her body had seemed to dissolve in the darkness of the sanatorium basement, leaving her mind directly connected to the wires and the dials. She’d been shocked, in France, to find that the soldiers she tended actually saw her. They questioned her passionately about her own life, poured their stories out unasked, returned to the hospital when they were healed and asked her to walk with them, eat with them, marry them. Her only relief had come during the hours she’d spent studying and working with the manipulatrice .