Chapter Six
Six
A boy had woken from surgery to find one leg gone and he became panicked.
I tried to calm him in my fledgling German, leaning in and speaking quietly, rhythmically.
I’d done it before, in that ward and others.
It worked half the time, but not this time.
The boy flung his arm out to push me away as if he thought I’d come for the other leg.
I stumbled backwards and the cup I was holding slipped from my hands and smashed on the floor.
This stopped him. The shock of it like a slap on the cheek.
He stared at the wreckage of porcelain awash in hot cocoa.
I’d used my own teacup. I did this for the amputees waking for the first time to their new bodies: a porcelain cup instead of tin.
‘Scherben bringen Glück,’ the boy said, all panic gone.
I turned to Dr Henning, who’d been summoned by the smash. ‘Shards bring luck,’ he translated.
After that the boy asked various questions, trying to ascertain whether his fortune was good or bad.
Dr Henning shook his head a few times and the boy’s demeanour deteriorated.
Then, finally, an answer that satisfied him.
When I asked, Dr Henning explained, ‘He is in bed four, a lucky number in Germany. Now he thinks he is lucky to have lost one leg and not two, to be alive and not dead, to be a prisoner in a warm bed and not a soldier in the mud. He will go home, eventually. He is happy.’ More words than I had ever heard the doctor speak.
I don’t remember Iso being there, though she must have been because she’s drawn it.
She gave me the drawing the next day. Just the teacup, that is all.
Broken bits of porcelain with a pattern of flowers.
She used black ink for the outlines and coloured it with white and pink pastels.
The largest of the pieces, the piece with the handle, is resting against the metal leg of the bed.
The other pieces are arrayed around it and it’s easy to see how they might fit together, though one piece is missing, fallen beyond her view. It is a strange still life.
I paid attention to bed four after that and my journal is full of its occupants. A restricted view, Iso said when she noticed I barely spoke of the boys in other beds. It is often necessary when there is too much going on.
The boy I’m remembering now was also in bed four, or perhaps I’ve placed him there for convenience; I do that sometimes.
Bed four was easy to see from the nurses’ desk and it had a window above.
In good weather and at certain times of the day, light would stream in and the boy in bed four would be illuminated – like an actor on a stage.
This boy had blond hair, though I can’t tell you the colour of his eyes.
They never opened while he was with us. His dressings were blood soaked, I wrote, and Dr Henning opened him up where a surgeon had recently sewn him closed.
He would have recorded all the details in his patient notes but that’s not what concerns me now.
It’s the doctor I want to recall, the way he took my hand and placed it where he needed it to be.
The boy in bed four was bleeding out, but it was Dr Henning’s touch that shocked me.
Dr Henning. The German. Filthy Hun. Prisoner number 29.
His hair was the colour of oatmeal and in September 1915 it flopped over one eye and I wanted to push it back.
He had a gold chain around his neck with a gold cross, carefully hidden.
He had a gold watch that he kept in his doctor’s coat.
Sometimes he wore clogs. He spoke little and tried never to touch me.
Then one day he did. In twenty years, these details have not faded.
We stood on either side of the bed.
‘May I?’ he said, as he reached over and took up my right hand.
My focus had been on the boy, on the bleeding, on passing the doctor whatever he needed. I felt his hand enfold mine and I looked up. Dr Henning met my eye.
‘May I?’ he said again.
We were wearing rubber gloves but he held my hand like a gentleman. I half expected him to bring it to his lips.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He moved my hand to where the blood was flowing. ‘Use your fingers like a clamp.’
I did as he asked and the flow was stemmed. He worked hard to save that boy and whatever he needed from me I gave. We were bent over the bed so our heads almost touched and I could smell the sourness of his scalp and hair, too long without washing. I would normally have been repelled.
The boy was as pale as paper when Dr Henning sewed him back up.
We both knew he had too little blood to keep him living and transfusions were not so easy back then, especially on the German ward.
But Dr Henning made him tidy and I cleaned the skin around his wound.
When I was done, the doctor took my hand again to examine the glove.
There was a moment, he thought, when the suture needle had caught it.
Did I feel it? I couldn’t say, or didn’t.
I wanted him to check and what I remember now is the way he held my hand.
The way he stroked the back, the palm, then the length of each finger.
It is easy to embellish, and I have, in different ways, but he was simply wiping away the blood so he could see the rubber.
He found a small nick.
‘Stay with him,’ he said.
He went to the storeroom and returned with a basin of water, a flannel and soap. He put them on the bed between us. He held out his hand for mine.
Shall we dance? I thought.
He removed my glove and revealed my bloodied skin. I felt a pang of pain. It happened sometimes, when I saw their blood on my skin, and I welcomed it. But the pain would fade, as phantoms do.
‘It could be my blood,’ I said. Hoping.
‘Yes,’ he said.
He soaked the flannel and rubbed it with carbolic soap. Then he wiped each of my fingers, the back of my hand, the hollow of my palm. It was so unnecessary. I could have washed as I usually did, at the storeroom trough, but I didn’t pull my hand from his.
When the blood was gone and my hand was dry, he continued to hold it.
He rubbed at a scar I had between finger and thumb, as if the boy’s blood lingered there and he wanted it gone.
I barely felt it, but he continued to rub and I watched his thumb move back and forth – slowly, gently, an unaltered rhythm.
My brain invented a sensation to match and I shivered.
The rubbing stopped.
‘It is a scar?’
It was a discolouring, really. A patch of white shaped like clover, three-leafed not four. A reminder of who I used be.
‘Self-inflicted,’ I said.
He looked at me directly then, and I was startled, as if some stranger I’d been following had suddenly turned.
He waited. Patient. Taking me in with subtle shifts of his gaze.
It was an invitation to continue but I didn’t.
He was holding my hand and his gaze felt generous; I was suddenly hungry for it.
I remember wanting a better description of his eyes – clearer detail for the journal.
Brown, I’d written earlier, then, light brown with a halo of burnished gold.
He blinked and the ring of gold flared. His eyes, I realised, were not brown at all, they just gave that impression. If Iso were to paint them she would use a kaleidoscope of colours, too many to name.
‘Self-inflicted?’ he said.
‘I started a fire.’
‘It was an accident?’
‘No.’
‘Not an accident?’
He blinked again, a few times in succession, and the gold flared each time.
I thought of the boathouse in Oxford filled with skiffs and sculls for the sons of wealthy men.
A bastion of male privilege, a symbol of everything we were fighting against. It was a fight I felt so sure of, one worth breaking the rules for.
I’d stood in awe of what we had done while the others fled.
The blaze lit up the night and when the first beams split and came crashing down, I felt heroic.
I felt so much in those days and was exhilarated by it.
‘I broke the rules,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I thought it would change things.’
‘Did it?’
‘No.’
He looked back to my hand and I thought he might trace the outline of the scar, make some comment about three leaves not four – better luck next time, he might have said. But he did none of this. He just let my hand go.
‘It is a regret?’ he said.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I’d do it again.’
Something in the boy’s breathing changed and Dr Henning turned towards him.
The boy breathed in then out and we waited. He breathed in then out and we waited. The interval grew.
Dr Henning bowed his head and rested one hand on the boy’s shoulder, the other clutched the cross he wore beneath his coat.
He whispered a prayer in German; they sound the same in any language.
I couldn’t join him, but neither could I leave.
I had become the congregation, the witness and mourner. We stayed like that, in quiet vigil.
It is absence that draws the eye, Iso once said, and so it was then. The boy stopped breathing and Dr Henning stopped praying. He let go of the boy’s shoulder and held his fingertips to the boy’s neck.
Stay with him, he’d said, when he went for the basin, the flannel, the soap.
He’d not wanted the boy to be left alone.
He’d wiped the blood from my hands, but it was the boy he’d been thinking of, not me.
The boy’s breath was all that had mattered and he’d stroked my fingers like a Greek worries his beads. I had felt it too keenly.
He took his fingers from the boy’s neck but he did not turn from the boy’s face.
‘I have a son,’ he said, so quietly it might have been part of his prayer.
‘A son?’
‘He is thirteen.’
I was relieved. ‘Too young for all this.’
He shook his head. ‘This boy is no more than fifteen. They think it is an adventure.’
It was true. I said nothing.
‘This could be Clemens,’ he said.
He has a son and his name is Clemens. I had forgotten, but I wrote it down and now I remember.
‘But it isn’t your son,’ I said.
‘In two years, it might be.’
‘The war won’t last that long.’
He looked up and was frowning. ‘How can you know?’
I couldn’t answer and he looked away.