Blue Damask (33 page)

     “Elsa.”

     She looked back at his face.  The eyes were closed.  “Aren’t you asleep yet?” she asked.  She touched his forehead.  “You are supposed to drop and go out.”

     “Did I drop?”  His voice was slow and drowsy.

     “You did.  I stabbed you in the thigh.  You took two steps and went down.  You are safe now.  Go to sleep.”

     “I don’t want to sleep.”

     “I want you to sleep.  I am ordering you to sleep.”  Elsa frowned.  Her patients always succumbed to this sedative.  She would have to stand up to retrieve the hypodermic from where he knocked it against the wall in order to see how much remained in the chamber.  Perhaps she had not been able to depress the plunger as far as necessary.

     “I will not.”

     She gathered her feet under her to retrieve the hypodermic, but he rolled and bent his knees to stand.  She quickly returned to his side and grabbed his hands.  The thought of Sonnenby staggering naked through the streets of Baghdad horrified her. She would have to chase after him.  What a scene.  Residents would cry for the authorities and he would be back in a prison cell.

     “Down!” she ordered him, and he lay back, obedient. “
Gott im Himmel
, Henry, go to sleep.
Verdamnt noch mal!
”

     He was going to need more Luminal.  Obviously what she had injected was not enough. He was a big man.  Ninety-five kilos at least.  He may have swatted the hypo away before he could receive the full dose.  She would need to sterilize the needle and retrieve the bottle.  There should be more inside.  She had packed enough phenobarbital for a horse. Her thoughts were interrupted.

     “I love you, Elsa.”

     She blinked and recovered quickly, “You cannot love me, Henry, you are my patient.”  She had meant to say, “I am your nurse.”  She cleared her throat.  “You are drugged, Henry and don’t know what you are saying.”

     “I love you, Elsa.”  He opened his eyes this time and looked at her.  The pupils were dilated so wide she could hardly see the brown iris.  But he was looking at her.  There was none of the dull flatness that accompanied delirium or lack of consciousness.

     Her mind spun, reaching for a different response.  His eyes demanded one.  She selected the professional one.  She wanted to say, “There, there, Mr. Sinclair.  Everything will be fine.  You will feel much better momentarily.”  Instead she squeezed his hand. He did not flinch.

     “I love you, Elsa.”

     “Stop saying that, Mr. Sinclair.”  Every single day in the hospital wards a patient would say, “I love you, nurse.” The young men would say,  “Marry me, nurse,” and then they would die.  She had held many hands in the middle of the night.  They always seemed to die between midnight and dawn.  Elsa swallowed hard, remembering.  She heard them whisper, “I love you.” or sometimes they would cry, “Mama!”  She tried to keep her face from twisting with tears at the memory.

     “Stop saying that,” she said again and her voice cracked.  But Sonnenby was not dying, he was merely heavily sedated.  She took her hand from his to wipe her eyes.  She needed a handkerchief now.  Very unprofessional.

     He was still looking at her. “I love you, Elsa” he said.

     “No, you don’t.  You can’t.”  She picked up some of the cloth she had been using for bandages and blew her nose.

     The words evoked faces, many faces.  All young, all men.  All suffering.  Some suffered in silence, others wanted to, but found their cries wrenched from their bodies unwillingly as their burns or lost limbs or torn flesh scourged them and the morphine gave them no peace.  Elsa rubbed her eyes to make the images go away, but her fingers could not erase the faces, and instead she could now hear the moans, the cries, and the horrible death rattle that punctuated the nighttime rounds with the croaking syllable that was understood in every language.  Then the smells overwhelmed her.  Dysentery, blood, pus, gangrene, unwashed odors of men too ill to bathe properly.

     Then she started to feel the sensations.  She felt the crawling vermin she picked off their scalps and the wriggling maggots she wiped from open wounds.  The trains would come, filled with men pulled from the mud and trenches of a battlefied. Sometime days after the wounds had been received. She could feel them now. It all became such a roar, like the way a locomotive sounds when one stands too close to the tracks.  She couldn’t breathe, she wanted to scream but there was no more fresh air anywhere in the world.  Only smoke.  Choking smoke, and vile fumes and camphor.  Everpresent camphor.  Goddamned camphor.

     “Elsa.”

     A man was speaking.  He had a low voice, a soft low voice.

     “Elsa, good God.  Here.  Take this.”

     A soft cloth was pressed into her hand and she used it to blow her nose and wipe her eyes.

     “Tell me what you were seeing.  I saw it in your face.  Something horrible.”

     Elsa calmed herself by closing her eyes and breathing deeply.  The air was warm, and close, but there was no stinging camphor and no gangrene.  She opened her eyes.  Sonnenby stared at her.  He had come up on one elbow and had his other arm on her shoulder.  He should be resting.  She used the cloth one last time on her nose and cleared her throat.

     “You should be resting,” she told him.  Her voice sounded strange. Her throat hurt.  She rubbed it.

     “What were you thinking?  I saw your eyes fade and your lips tremble.  You have to tell me.”

     She tried to sit up straight.  She tried to straighten her clothing and tuck away the loose strands of her hair.

     “Elsa.”

     He would not let her be; he tormented her with his words.  He kept saying her name.  She needed him to stop.

     “I am fine, thank you,” she told him firmly.

     “You are not.  You look like you lost everything in the world.”

     “I am sorry I lost control of myself.  I think it is the heat, perhaps, or the—“

     “Damn it, Elsa.” 

     He was sitting up now. He had both her shoulders in his big hands and he gently shook her.  His fingers hurt.  He was strong.  She looked at him and saw how strong he was.  The muscles of his chest and shoulders were thick and bunched as he moved them.  Her brothers were big like that, great hulking lads who could lift heavy sacks of hops and barley and throw them arcing through the air over the side of a wagon.  Sonnenby could probably throw her over the side of a wagon.  She smiled sadly.

     “Thank God, you’re coming around.  Jesus Christ, Elsa, you scared the hell out of me.”

     “I’m fine.  I’m sorry.”  She did feel a little better.  She wished for some medicinal whiskey.  Descartes always had some.  Her eyes moved over the room looking for his satchel.

     “What just happened?  You have to tell me.”

     “I was remembering, that is all.”   Her eyes found Descartes’ satchel near the door.  She got to her feet and retrieved it, fishing around inside as she made her way back to Sonnenby. 

     “What were you remembering?”

     “I was remembering the hospital during the war.  It was horrible and I don’t like remembering it and I don’t want to talk about it.” Descartes had told her she could use anything she wanted inside.  He knew the two bottles were in the bag.  She sat down again and worked on the cork of one of them.

     Sonnenby watched her uncork the bottle and take a swallow.  He said, “There are many things we don’t want to remember.”  He looked at her now with ferocious intensity.

     She passed him the bottle.  “You should never drink on top of barbiturates,” she warned.

     He lifted it to his lips and took a healthy swallow.  He wiped his mouth and said, “I won’t.”

     “I went to nursing school in 1914,” she told him.

     He countered, “In 1914 I was a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Western Frontier Force under Major-General Wallace.”

     Elsa took the bottle from his hand and lifted it to her lips.  Descartes had a fine taste in whiskey.  This was good stuff.  It went down smoothly and the fumes attested to its potency.  She continued,   “In 1916 I was selected to be a surgical nurse, special assistant to Herr Doctor Schmitt.” 

     He left his hand open, inviting her to return the bottle.  “Because you were the smartest?  Best scores on your exams?  Top of your class?  I can see that.”

     “No.”  She upended the bottle for another good hefty dose.  She brought the bottle down and looked him in the eye.  “Because I had the biggest breasts.”

     He took the bottle from her and held it for a moment, then said, “I can see that too.”  He lifted the bottle and drank enough to cause the whiskey to glug.

     Else put her hand out before he could down too much of it.  “Doctor Schmitt was a
verdammtes Arschloch
.”

     Sonnenby choked on his whiskey.

     She admonished him, “Don’t waste that.”  She took the bottle from him.

     He wiped his mouth and leaned back against the wall.

     Elsa corked the bottle.  “I learned post-operative care from that
arschloch
.  Most of my patients died, despite my careful work.”  She sniffed.  “He wasn’t the best surgeon.”

     Sonnenby rubbed his chin then shifted his legs and hips to brace one shoulder against the wall, like he would sit up.

     She watched him.  “You are going to sleep,
verdammt noch mal,
or I am going to knock you out with a board, you bloody, wretched
Scheisskerl
.”

     He just moved his eyes to look at her because it was getting harder for him to move his body.  He slurred, “You know, you swear like a sailor.”

     “You are goddamned right, I can swear.” she said.  She uncorked the bottle and took another long drink and then gasped for air, looked up at the underside of the ceiling.  “I had four older brothers.”

     “Where are they now?” he asked.  He started to slide down the wall and braced himself by bending his knees.

     “Ypres. Arras.  Somme. The Marne.”  Her hand shook, sloshing what little was left in the bottle.  She set it between her knees and jammed the cork in.

     “God,” Sonnenby said. “They are all dead?”  He slid down the wall and lay on his back on the floor.

     Elsa told him, “I am finished with the desert.  With Syria.  With the Bedouin. With guns and daggers and blood and death and,” she took a deep breath, “These pestilent
flies
!” She waved her hand at the ones buzzing around them.

     She had finally made a decision.  She nodded her head once.  Good.  A decision.  Time to get out of the Levant and go home. Everything else be damned.  She looked at him there on the bare floor, stretched out.  Naked. 
That is wrong
.  She wobbled to her feet and stumbled to the stacks of folded white cloth Descartes had brought her for bandages.  She grabbed the top one and shook it out.  She staggered back to Sonnenby and threw the soft cloth over his midsection.  Most of it landed where she meant it to go.

     He looked down at the cloth.  “Well then.  I believe I have been promoted from patient to man.  Excellent.”

     “What?”  She held on to the wall so she could carefully sit without falling.

     “My John-Thomas now offends you.  Before, it was just a body part attached to a patient.”

     She laughed.  It hurt.  She put a hand over her stomach and took a breath.

     “Elsa,” his voice was low and smooth. 

     The barbiturates and alcohol should have silenced him by now.  Why hadn’t they?  She began to wish she had thrown the cloth over his mouth.

     “Elsa.  I love you.”

     “
Nein, nein, nein
,” she was sliding now just like he had done.  The floor greeted her with a bump. He was always speaking and saying her name and telling her loved her.  He needed to shut up and sleep.  She would have to get up again and find that hypo and give him another dose of the damned Luminal.  She would get up in a minute.

     His hand moved and searched for hers.  Found it.  She was too weak to take it back.  Her hand felt cold and limp encased in his warm hard one.  Her hand felt like a dead woman’s hand.

     “I was based in Cairo, Elsa.”

     “Yes. 
Mit
General
Vallace
, You told
mich
.” she had to make an effort to speak.  Her lips were numb.

     “No.  After the war, Elsa.  I was with the Arab Bureau then.  I was sent on small missions to gather intelligence.”

     “
Ja
.  You
sprechen
the language.
Ich Weiss
. You told me.”  She tried to shrug but it was more like a twitch.  His hand was warm. He was always speaking.  He needed to be quiet so she could sleep.  She hated being reminded of her brothers.  She needed to sleep to keep their faces out of her head. Karl and Johann and Wilhelm and Gus.

     “But I went to Akaba and Mecca and Medina.”