The Search for Joyful (27 page)

 
DAYS LATER WE were strung out on the road to Rome. It was a victory march, but probably not recognizable as such. We were a straggling line of exhausted, dirty, exultant beings. Of all the conquerors that over the centuries had taken Rome we were certainly the least likely and the most ragged. Our vehicles were in no better shape than we were. How we could have used Crazy Dancer! Overheated motors, clogged fuel lines, blown tires were the norm. Sooty, blackened, fed a vile mixture of gasolines, they rolled on.

I was driving again, simply because it was assumed I would be. When we got to Rome I planned to apply for a proper army vehicle license. In the meantime I was part of the long line wending its way, with a recalcitrant sun showing itself occasionally.

Then the engine sputtered, the jeep bucked under my hands and came to a stop.

“Get that thing off the road.”

“Yes sir.” I outranked him, but on the road those directing traffic have ultimate authority, even over generals. Besides, we nurses had never had time to learn army protocol, and it wasn't expected of us. I jumped out of the jeep and with the help of a couple of MPs pushed it into a field of cauliflowers. I opened the hood. Thanks to Crazy Dancer I had seen enough engines to recognize that a wire from the distributor had burned through. I borrowed the foil from a pack of cigarettes a soldier had dropped out of line to inhale. I twisted the ends of the wire around each other and splinted them with bits of foil.

Getting back into the jeep, I tried to start it when a sudden explosion racked the column ahead—where I would have been if the jeep hadn't acted up. A land mine sent pieces of trucks and people showering down. Something penetrated my body.

I thought it was the sound. I didn't realize I'd been hit. But the flying metal fractured my right elbow, all three bones, humerus, radius, and ulna. I was taken back to the same casualty station I'd helped set up. I pleaded with Dr. Farnsworth, who was still with us, to operate there and then. I had seen him perform miracles in the field. Otherwise, it would mean being air-lifted to London, and a circuitous route home.

Farnsworth, bless him, agreed without argument, commandeered a surgical nurse, and woke up our anesthetist. My elbow was x-rayed, and he went to work, asking me if I minded baling wire.

“Doctor,” I said, “I'm wearing a crucifix. Would you mind taking it to Rome with you? The Pope needs to bless it. And when he does, it's to be sent to Sister Eglantine, Charity Hospital, Montreal, Canada.”

“Don't fret,” he said. “It's as good as done. I'm sure His Holiness will not refuse a good Anabaptist.”

Before the anesthetist clapped the mask over my face, I saw the bolt intended for my elbow.

 
THE HOSPITAL SHIP was hazy. I'd get used to the roll and then it would start to pitch.

I remember nothing of the crossing. I was in and out of morphine dreams, in which I had tumbled off the world and was trying to climb back on, but the globe rotated and I couldn't manage.

The ship's chief medical officer bent over me, explaining in a kindly voice that I would not in the future have the use of my right arm. “Oh, and practice your signature with your left hand.”

A nurse without the use of her right arm?

 
I FOUND MYSELF a patient in ward B, one of my own wards. They'd put me at the end and curtained it off for privacy.

I didn't like being a patient. Still, I think it should be a requirement for every nurse and doctor. You see things from a different point of view. For instance, the bedpan. The position is antithetical to human beings, but tied into an IV stand it's difficult to get up and take it with you into the bathroom, which was what I did.

Sister Egg popped in every day to scold me. “You're giving us so much trouble, Kathy, that I know you're better.”

I confessed to her my fear over the loss of movement in my arm.

“You've seen enough to know what therapy can do. We'll bring you right along.”

I redoubled my efforts, squeezing a ball in my hand when I was too tired to do anything else.

The strangest thing about being back from the war was that no one wanted to hear about it. I tried innumerable times to convey my impressions of the other nurses, accounts of the roads, the scenery, what it was like to be under bombardment, how we went about setting up a clearing station, triage, evacuating priority-three patients, having dinner with a major general—bedbugs. So many things. They'd piled up in me with no opportunity to assess them. Even Egg was too busy to listen. Civilians, I thought, deliberately shut out the war. And I remembered myself—hadn't I always gone to the ladies' room or to buy popcorn when the Movietone news showed hospital ships unloading wounded? It was too much to absorb, too much grief, too much anguish, and no frame of reference.

But it was too bad. Because along with the horrors and the glimpses of hell, there were some wonderful things about the war. The way wounded men hauled unconscious buddies into the station. Nurses and doctors forgot the civilian pecking order and helped each other with the most menial duties. Frontline combat erased rank, sex, and color. Not once in Italy did anyone question my copper skin.

A joyous note in the midst of this sere landscape, a package arrived and out tumbled Sister Egg's crucifix and a note from surgeon Farnsworth. He had indeed marched into Rome, and an audience with the Pope had been arranged. The Pope was highly interested in the Anabaptist service and blessed the crucifix on the spot.

The pupils of Sister Egg's eyes rolled up out of sight. It scared me until I realized it was sheer ecstasy.

My arm was becoming more flexible, but I had a long way to go before it could be considered usable. Egg made a mark on the wall. I was ambulatory now, and only the incapacity of my arm kept me from working. I walked my fingers painfully up the wall again and again, morning, noon, and night, aiming for Egg's mark. At times I'd flinch from even starting.

Then it happened: one glorious day my fingers crawled up the wall and touched the mark.

I went flying to Sister. She looked at me calmly through round spectacles and went with me to verify my performance with her own eyes. “Excellent,” she said, and made a new mark higher than the first by a good six inches.

Two weeks later my arm was almost well. Follow-up X rays showed that Dr. Farnsworth had been as good as his word. There was the bolt, hammered into the humerus, and the baling wire twisted around the fragments of the two forearm bones. Twenty years down the road arthritis might set in, but the best preventative was to build up the muscles and exercise them daily.

This prescription was exactly what I wanted. I took up my duties as though I had never seen Maj. Dr. Farnsworth mop the blood from the tarpaulin floor, as though I had never performed Miller-Abbott suctions at midnight under flashlights when the generator quit, or transfused with wrong-size needles—the only ones I had—or looked into eyes of anguish and seen eighteen-year-olds meet death calling for their mothers, or had an enemy wish me good luck on the field of battle.

My father had put me back together. I had been able to manage Monte Cassino. Now I must do the same for my life.

Thirteen

SOME DAYS LATER there was a melee at the prison compound, the result of a knife fight. I was told to scrub for an emergency amputation, and received the shock of my life. The draped body on the operating table was that of my friend, the Austrian lieutenant, von Kerll.

Dr. Bennett shook his head and muttered, “I don't know if it's worthwhile trying to patch this Boche up.”

My training took over. The surgical nurse swabbed the wound and debrided it. I prepared the tray of sterile instruments.

“Somebody had it in for him,” the doctor continued. “As I reconstruct it, there must have been more than one. They tried to slit his throat. During the course of which his leg was pinned, and someone went to work on it. The guards heard the commotion and dragged this fellow out. I don't know if it was in time. He's lost four pints of blood.”

Involuntarily I checked the plasma bag. A moment later I asked, “Does he have to lose the leg?” I had to ask, even though I'd seen enough of this kind of carnage to know.

The other wounds were superficial. Someone, as the doctor said, had tried to cut his throat, but the slash missed the carotids. I remembered what Crazy Dancer told me about slashings. Dogs bite, it is the wolf that slashes. I deliberately sent my mind off on this tangent, while they took the leg just below the knee. It was a long operation. But at least Dr. Bennett had a sturdy wood floor under his feet and wasn't trying to keep his balance on a bloody tarp. I helped pack the wound, and began to dress it.

“He's a strong fellow. He should make it.”

I liked Bennett. He hated working on the Boche, as he called them, but always did a meticulous job, and somewhere during the operation he forgot they were the enemy and began rooting for them as patients. By the end he had employed all his skill to see they made it. They usually did.

I walked alongside the gurney. How could I tell him? I'd almost rather lose my own leg. But I couldn't let him hear it from anyone else.

I remembered his initial relief at finding himself in one piece. It was on account of his mother. What kind of mother was she? She should rejoice that he wasn't at the bottom of the ocean. I reined in my thoughts, as I had taught myself to do. There were fewer and fewer places I could send them.

A student nurse and I accomplished the transfer to the cot. Then I went to wash my face and calm down.

I washed my face, but I didn't calm down. I dreaded the moment he would open his eyes.

Of course, when he did, he didn't realize. I was checking the glucose drip when he spoke quite distinctly in English. He said, as though continuing a conversation, “It must have been a
Zaunkönig.
It shrieked past, exploding my eardrum. The floor heaved, the sides of the ship buckled, lights flickered and flared up. Then nothing. It was dark. I remember this vile taste washing into my mouth. I was floating in an oil slick.” He grabbed my hands. “Are they going to strafe us here in the water? Or leave us? Better have it over with.” And he switched to German.

Bending over him I said soothingly, “What about the Rhine maidens? The Valkyries protect the ocean-going warriors.”

“They didn't come. I called them, but they didn't come.”

It was as I thought, he believed he was waking from his first ordeal, that he was just now off the U-boat.

I stopped by ward B again before going off duty and stood a moment by his bed. His sleep was restless, and he murmured, perhaps cursed, in German. I didn't know what he said, but I wanted him to wake up.

No, no, I didn't. I dreaded his waking up.

Erich wasn't lucid until the next day. I came by at noon to check on him. He was lying quietly, resignedly staring at the ceiling. It was a featureless white ceiling. “Kathy,” he said in a very gentle tone, “you're here. So it's all right.”

“What's all right, Erich?”

“I dreamt I wasn't in the hospital at all, but in prison. Gott, I thought. . . . But you're here. So it must be all right.”

I hesitated. “You
were
transferred to the camp. Don't you remember?”

“So it's true?” He closed his eyes, and his jaw set. “It was better to be floating in waves of oil. That was better than . . .” He made himself stop.

We were both silent. It was Erich who finally spoke. “It wasn't yesterday you were sitting beside me? It was months ago?”

“Yes. Eighteen months.”

There was a pause while he absorbed this. “And how have things been for you?” he asked politely.

I tried to match his tone. “I'm still doing business at the same old stand.”

“And how is that young man of yours?”

“Dead.” The word lay between us.

“I'm afraid to ask anything more. I suppose it was the war.”

“A U-boat attack,” I said, slowly and deliberately, without mercy.

A vein in his neck throbbed. That was all.

Why had I done that? Why had I punished him, I asked myself when I was out in the hall. He'd had no part in it. It wasn't his fault. Cassino, the monastery, it wasn't his fault. Yet it was, it was. He'd been awarded the Iron Cross. They don't do that except for direct kills.

I recognized that I was not in control and ducked into the bathroom, took several successive breaths, and steadied myself. If I didn't go back, someone else would tell him.

He didn't look at me when I came in but turned his head away. He was very angry.

“Hello again,” I said, with professional cheeriness. “I thought I'd look in on you once more. Is there anything you want?”

He tried not to ask, but it broke from him. “My leg, if you wouldn't mind. Something for the pain. There's a cramp in my calf.”

I deliberately massaged the wrong leg, hoping to get him to realize, to focus.

“The other one, the left. Just at the knee and below.” It was that terrible phantom pain, where severed nerve ends scream, and nothing can be done about it.

“If I can just shift you a bit in bed, that sometimes relieves it.” I slipped my hands under his shoulders, straightening him. “Any better?”

He smashed his mouth together rather than answer. But he was turning over in his mind what I had said.

“Your young man—when?”

“Soon after you were transferred.”

“God, it's a filthy war.”

“He called it fish-hearted.”

“Fish-hearted? I like that. It's a damn, filthy, fish-hearted war. Will it ever be over?”