Chapter Fourteen
There are many stories I could tell of that war, but this is the only story I trust. I wrote the details down in the journal and when it was all over I put the journal in a Red Cross box.
He began to matter. Like Helen and my brother he is remembered in my flesh and bones and random electrical impulses between synapses undamaged by whiskey.
But when I think of him now, the memory I want to preserve refuses to stand alone.
It is tethered to others. Awful memories that I wish I could paint over, as I once saw Iso painting over a scene she did not care for.
But if I did that I would lose him too. And so, over these many years, I have come to see those memories as the shadows that illuminate the light.
Iso taught me to think like that. Darkness is a necessary contrast, she once said.
The rain had stopped but the temperature had fallen.
Stretchers were laid out on freezing ground and we had to kneel beside them to assess the condition of each occupant, their needs, their place in the queue.
So many of them were French, and the notes that had been attached to their uniforms at dressing stations were indecipherable.
It was slower work than usual and the damp and cold took advantage.
It crept through the thickness of my uniform and two pairs of woollen stockings.
It didn’t take long for my gloveless hands to become numb and useless.
Only when they found a wound, the blood not yet clotted and cold, could I feel them.
I remember a moment when my fingers searched for a pulse but felt nothing.
I was terrified of pronouncing death when there might be life and I considered plunging my fingers deep into the warmth of the boy’s ruptured belly in order to revive them.
What might I have become if I’d done that?
I put them between my thighs instead. Under my skirt and above the woollen stockings.
I knelt there for just a minute as the soft flesh shivered and shared its warmth.
I spoke to him in rehearsed phrases: ‘Je suis là avec toi.’ I am here with you.
‘Tu n’es pas tout seul.’ You are not alone.
When I placed the thawed pads of my fingertips against the boy’s neck, I still felt nothing.
Dr Henning looked up as I came onto the German ward.
He was alarmed and I wondered why, then realised I looked a sight.
I’d had no time to change. My skirt was damp and muddy, my cap was gone and my hair was loose.
My face wore the grime of it all. I hurried to the storeroom and closed the door behind me.
It was not so unusual to come straight to the German ward from another shift, which was why I kept a clean uniform on hand.
There was also a hairbrush, a small mirror, and eau de cologne to mask the smells of the ward.
Scent was encouraged, even if makeup was not.
Regardless, I had a compact with powder, and colour for cheeks and lips.
They were stored in a locker that was rarely locked (what would Germans need with perfume and powder?) though one sister would insist, and on this day it wouldn’t open.
I swore and reached for the tin that held the key.
It was at the back of a shelf full of glass beakers and jars.
My hands were so frozen they felt like they’d been borrowed. Their dimensions were odd and their movements unusual. I knocked a beaker and it smashed on the floor. When I couldn’t open the tin I threw it at the door.
He knocked.
Usually he’d wait for permission before entering, but this time he didn’t. If he was telling this story he might say he heard a scream, a woman crying. I don’t remember it that way. I am not one for hysterics.
‘What?’ I shouted.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Do I look hurt?’
He scanned the wreckage of the woman who stood before him and his forehead creased in a way I’d seen a hundred times. He was concerned and trying to determine the best course of action.
‘Tired,’ I said, ‘and frozen.’ I held my hands in front of me like I didn’t recognise them. ‘Bloody things have stopped working.’
He came forward and put his own hands around mine.
He had large hands with long fingers and they formed a warm cocoon.
The creases on his forehead softened, as they did when he’d worked out how best to help.
After a little while he leaned forward and blew into a small gap he’d made between his thumbs.
His breath was hot and my fingers began to thaw.
That’s the detail I recorded, but I remember looking at his face as he bent to my hands, the straight line of his nose, the pale lashes, the flop of curls low on his forehead.
If he’d looked up, I would have kissed him.
I looked over his shoulder and Alison was standing in the doorway of the storeroom.
I wondered how long she’d been there and what she thought she’d seen.
‘First aid,’ I said, a mask of indifference on my face.
He dropped my hands and stepped away. Too quick.
‘Is that so?’ said Alison. Her eyebrows raised.
My own brows did their best to respond.
‘It is, actually.’
I had denied it but there was ambiguity, and ambiguity is distracting.
When I thought of it in the days that followed, a shiver would blow over me, like wind over the dunes.
I’d feel a rippling in my skin and if I was on the ward I’d look for him.
I wanted to catch him watching me, but I never did, and when I lingered on him, he seemed oblivious.
If a boy is thirsty, I wrote, he helps him drink and if his lips are dry, he applies Vaseline. My hands were cold, so he warmed them. I do not want it to be the same thing.
‘My hands are freezing,’ I said a couple of weeks later, when we were in the storeroom together.
They were merely cold, but I rubbed them together then blew on them as if they were numb. I wanted him to remember.
He showed no sign of being roused, but he did not leave the storeroom. He collected what he needed for a round and placed them on the trolley. He took three ampoules of morphia from a box, so I coupled together syringes and needles and placed them in a kidney dish.
‘Thank you,’ he said, when I handed it to him. He added the morphia to the dish and put it down.
I didn’t move away. I couldn’t. I rested my fingers on the handle of the trolley. ‘You can touch me,’ I said. It should have been a thought but it was a whisper.
His gaze stayed fixed on the kidney dish and I wondered why I’d said it.
I had no answer then, but I’ve had years to think about it. I needed to be touched in order to feel.
‘I will not touch you,’ he eventually said.
‘You don’t want to?’
He didn’t respond.
‘I’m giving you permission.’ My words were just breath, a murmur, like I was telling secrets.
‘Why?’ he asked.
I can explain it now: the fatigue after sleep, the hunger after food, the longing to be touched so soon after being held. He’d warmed my hands and restored feeling. I’d been dulled by that place, but now I was alert and wanting. I said nothing.
‘You want what you cannot have,’ he said.
‘We all want what we can’t have.’
He looked at my hand where it rested on the trolley. He had only to rest his beside it and our little fingers would touch.
Did he think the same in that moment? I have always thought so, but he was more obedient than me.
The trolley moved and my fingers slipped from the handle. When he was gone I felt a tingling: pins and needles in my fingers.
He would not touch me and it became distracting. I need him absent from the ward, I wrote in the journal, but when he was, I would long for him to be delivered. I felt it in my limbs like electricity, and it crackled and hummed. I imagined that if he did touch me, it would hurt.
Within days the crackle and hum had faded. I began to feel a numbness in my little finger. It spread to the side of my hand and then half my palm felt like it was missing. My edges began to fade.