6. Helene
6
HELENE
The H?tel-Dieu was quiet and mostly empty as Helene, Elisabeth, and the other first-year nursing students walked from their dormitory in the convent to their wards in the hospital. Their stiff brown shoes clicked on the stone floor of the enormous, arched hallway that connected the two wings of the building. It was Helene’s second night there, and a waning moon cast a pale blue light through the edges of the blackout shades of each window.
A young German officer with his arm in a sling was stationed halfway down, but he only nodded as they passed, his expression vacant.
“Handsome, isn’t he?” one of the second-year students in front whispered with a smirk. A nurse beside her made a hushing noise.
Helene hadn’t interacted much with the other nursing students since her arrival the previous afternoon. Mostly she kept to herself, eating in nervous silence while the girls who had been there longer chatted and gossiped in tight, impenetrable groups.
“What?” the same girl said to her friends as they giggled nervously in response. She stopped and turned back toward Helene. “You think so, don’t you? I can tell. You think the German is handsome.” She smiled at the friends beside her. “You know most of them are sent here from the Russian front, the ones who are sick or wounded. They let them heal, get their strength back, and then send them right back. I’m sure he’d appreciate some female attention before he leaves, don’t you think? Someone who will thank him for his bravery.” She took a step closer. “They’re proper soldiers after all. Willing to stand for what’s right. Defend our country when so many here would rather be cowards, let it fall into ruin.” Her eyes were hard as she searched Helene’s face for a reaction. “The least we can do is let them know how much we appreciate their service.”
The student wasn’t much older than Helene, but she reminded her of the older girls at her school before the war, when she’d attended regularly, the confident, pretty ones who thought it was fun to tease Helene, to whisper loudly that her father was a drunk and her mother had to work all hours of the night to support their family.
“Why don’t we ask the matron?” Elisabeth muttered, coming up behind Helene. “I’m sure she’d like to hear your thoughts, Denise.”
Denise narrowed her eyes at Elisabeth until one of her friends set a hand on her arm. “We’ll be late,” the friend said.
Denise glared at Helene and Elisabeth before continuing on down the hall, her friends flanking her on either side.
“Thank you,” Helene murmured as she walked beside Elisabeth.
“She really thinks that, you know,” Elisabeth said, voice full of disgust. “That we’re better off with them here.”
“I don’t,” Helene replied.
Elisabeth crossed her arms. “You think that’s noble? You think I’m impressed by your heroism to our national cause?”
Helene felt a surge of anger, days and weeks of frustration at her mother’s decision to send her away building up to the point where she wanted to scream at Elisabeth’s rudeness, at her judgment.
“I don’t care what you think,” Helene said, enunciating each word clearly. “They took everything from my family.”
Elisabeth’s brown eyes softened for a moment, but then her expression closed off once more. “Not everything , Helene.”
There was something unspoken behind Elisabeth’s words, but before Helene could ask what she meant, Elisabeth moved on.
When Helene caught up with the other girls at the end of the hallway, they were met by a surprisingly old woman, white hair visible beneath her nursing cap. Her eyes were wrinkled but sharp and clear as she surveyed the group of teenage girls.
“Good evening, Matron Durand,” Denise said in a sickeningly sweet voice.
The matron looked her up and down with barely concealed disdain. Helene stifled a smile.
“Come now, girls,” she said. “You’re tardy.”
They followed the matron down another long, arched hallway with wood paneling. Helene tried to absorb her surroundings. Several empty, unmade stretchers lined the sides, along with large metal carts filled with linens. There were heavy wooden doors spaced out in large intervals, each with a small sign in German and French beside it. At the second door, two of the nursing students broke off from the group and stepped inside.
Every so often, another group of two or three girls entered through a door. Helene craned her head as they opened, catching vague glimpses of beds and curtains.
The matron strode quickly, several paces ahead as the group dwindled. At the very end of the hallway, she didn’t turn to offer any explanation but went through another door that led to a narrow stairwell. The remaining girls trailed her up the white stone stairs until they reached the second-floor landing, where another German officer was stationed.
The matron pushed the door open and motioned for the girls to follow down a hallway identical to the one beneath it. “Arnaud, Clement,” she said as they all came to a halt.
Two girls stepped forward, smoothing down their starched dresses.
“You’ll be with Sister Marie in the surgical ward tonight.” She pointed to the door nearest them. “Aprons on as you enter.”
“Yes, Matron,” the nurses mumbled before walking through.
“Fournier, Adrien,” the matron continued, her voice echoing in the long, empty hallway.
Two other nursing students stepped forward.
“Venereal ward with Matron Renaud,” she said.
Helene noticed that only she, Elisabeth, and another new girl named Anne were left. There was a long silence as the matron looked between them. Her eyes rested on Elisabeth. “Laurent, very few of my girls have to repeat their probationary term. I am disappointed to see you here again.”
“That’s two of us,” Elisabeth muttered, her eyes cast down.
“Pardon?” the matron asked.
“I meant to say, I am disappointed as well, Matron.” Helene saw the effort as Elisabeth tried to rearrange her features into some semblance of piety. “Disappointed in myself.”
The matron crossed her arms. “As you should be. However, God sometimes gives us trials that are unexpected. He has a purpose in challenging you in this way. And I expect you to do your best to overcome this particular test.”
“I will, Matron,” Elisabeth said with a small bow.
“Paré and Corbin then?” she asked.
They nodded.
“I am Matron Durand. I will be your head matron for the next month. You will be considered probationary for your first six months of training. We have sixteen wards at the H?tel-Dieu. The first floor is women and children. Second floor, where you are currently standing, is for men only, dedicated to medicine and postoperative surgical care. The third floor is our isolation wards.” She straightened even further. “We are also, as I’m sure you know, currently functioning as a military hospital. Those wards are in the west wing, along with the operating theaters.
“By the end of this six-month period you will have spent time in each and every part of this hospital. From there you will complete the rest of your training, and eventually specialize in one area of nursing. The nurses who graduate from this program are some of the most well equipped in France. That level of training requires discipline and sacrifice,” she said. “It requires hard work and the strictest obedience. Understood?”
“Yes, Matron,” all three girls said in unison.
“All of our girls start exactly where you are. But you’ll learn quickly. You’ll have to. We begin with our basic preliminary training. Fresh linens for every bed. Cleaning the wards. Organizing and refilling supplies. Washing instruments and bedpans. Invalid cookery. It’s not glamorous, but it’s essential, and no one here is above it.”
Shouts came from down the hall. Helene swiveled in the direction of the sound, but Matron Durand didn’t react at all.
“Are we ready to begin then?”
Helene reached up to loosen the tight collar that rested right beneath her chin, her skin itching underneath it.
“Yes, Matron,” they said.
“Wonderful.” She clasped her hands together. “Then follow me, girls. I walk quickly, so please do keep up.”
Without another word she set off, her starched dress swishing around her wide hips, each step brisk and confident, her white cap a fixed beacon in the darkening hallway.
* * *
By the time the dawn arrived, Helene could barely keep her eyes open. Her back ached with every movement, and several blisters were forming on her feet from the stiff uniform shoes.
The night had passed both excruciatingly slowly and at times all too fast, with rapid bursts of instruction that Helene struggled to retain as her mind swirled in the fog of exhaustion.
Nothing Helene had done felt anything like actual nursing. She hadn’t even gone near a patient. Instead, they had spent hours in the toilets, scrubbing bedpans until their hands were raw. When the toilets were finished, Matron Durand had the girls clear every supply cabinet and scour the bottoms with pumice soap. She felt far more like a maid or orderly.
When the sun was nearly up, Helene sat beside Anne and Elisabeth in a supply room near the operating theaters, cutting and folding gauze into small, different-sized shapes and packing them in cylindrical metal drums. She could think of nothing but her bed at home under the eaves, her family sleeping soundly in the house beneath her.
Elisabeth placed a folded piece of gauze into the drum and dropped her scissors with a clang onto the tile floor. “I can’t do another,” she said as she leaned her head back against the peeling white wall. She looked at Helene.
Helene placed her own scissors on the floor and toyed with the gauze in her hand. “Won’t the matron be upset if she finds us?” she asked in a tone of mock worry as Anne continued to fold and cut with meticulous attention. “We were warned to keep up.”
“No one on earth could keep up with that old crow.”
Helene tried to stifle a laugh as Anne glanced up from her work, horrified.
“She is relentless, isn’t she?” Helene asked as she rolled her neck, feeling the ache in her shoulders.
“That’s one word for it.” Elisabeth’s eyes were tired and red, strands of her dark, curly hair hanging down from her cap. She seemed miserable here, and if she had already failed once, why hadn’t she simply gone home?
“Did you ever think about leaving?” Helene asked. She tried to choose her words carefully. “I mean, after you…after…”
“After my abject failure?”
Helene shook her head and started to apologize but Elisabeth waved it away with a wry smile. “Of course, I think about leaving every single day.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
Elisabeth rubbed her shoulders. “Long story.” Her eyes were distant for a moment, but then she blinked. “Why are you here? It’s pretty obvious you don’t want to be.”
“My mother was the one who wanted this.”
Helene rolled the gauze around in her hand and thought of her mother. Where was she at this exact moment? Likely with a patient, called to a bedside for a death or birth, working in candlelight, blackout curtains drawn, without even the moon to guide her. If Helene were with her, she would be in charge of the red journal, searching for remedies to supplement her mother’s magic touch, herbs that could speed along protracted labor, or tonics to ease the agonal breathing of death. Helene had always suspected her mother had the journal memorized, that she only made this request of Helene to give her something to do. She still encouraged Helene to put her hands on the patients, to ease their pain, always promising it would come back to her, but no matter how many times Helene tried, she never felt the full force of her ability. At the first glimpses of suffering, she recoiled. She couldn’t visualize their pain, hold on to it for long enough to take it away. All she could see in those moments was her father’s face, the relentless agony of his last months, when her mother spent nearly every hour with him, her hands on his belly, keeping his pain at bay as though she were trying to will away a gathering storm.
“Mothers are funny that way, aren’t they?”
“Yours, too?”
Elisabeth nodded slowly.
They watched each other across the small supply closet as some thread of understanding wove its way between them, until the door behind her opened with a loud bang and they all jumped.
“Just checking on our progress,” Matron Durand said crisply as she entered. She noticed their idle hands and the scissors on the floor. “Girls, is there a reason why you have delayed your work?”
Helene quickly picked up the scissors and another roll of gauze, and Elisabeth scrambled to do the same.
Matron Durand dragged over one of the wooden chairs from the center of the room to where they were sitting against the wall. “Perhaps I should sit in for a while and supervise.” She checked her watch as she sat down and picked up an extra pair of scissors along with a basin and roll of gauze. “There’s an hour left until end of shift. Plenty of time to finish our work. Agreed?”
“Yes, Matron,” Helene replied.
“Well then,” Matron Durand said, her uniform spotless and unwrinkled, her hair still neatly pulled back. “Let’s continue.”
* * *
Five weeks later, Helene walked down the hallway to her assigned ward with a stack of clean linens in her arms. Her movements were automatic, tracing the same path she had taken a thousand times since she’d arrived.
She was used to the dark, from working at night with her mother. But she wasn’t accustomed to so many days without sunlight, a life spent mostly indoors except for weekly treks to the church on the other side of the grounds for mass. The nursing students had one shift off a week, but Helene was often too tired to do much on her day off besides sleep. And so, darkness and exhaustion were the only constants in her life. The entire month had passed in a haze of endless instruction, hours upon hours spent stocking supplies or folding laundry or dusting shelves. Her hands were raw and her back ached from shifts spent scrubbing floors and helping prepare patient meals in the kitchens alongside Elisabeth and Anne.
Helene had hoped things would be different after the first month, that once she was assigned to the wards, there would be more to her training than the monotonous slog of cleaning and organizing and listening to lecture after lecture from the elderly French doctors who had been permitted to keep their roles in the hospital. But the tedium of grunt work had only been replaced by the tedium of rudimentary patient care, bed changes and baths and temperature checks. She had written to her mother, soon after she arrived, trying to explain the situation without using the plain words.
Our cousin has changed from when you knew her last. She doesn’t care for our family resemblance. I don’t think she even wants me here. Please, Maman, this is not the place for me. Allow me to come home.
Near the middle of the hallway, she stopped by a large arched window, a hint of light coming through the blackout curtain, and closed her eyes. The words from her mother’s reply flashed before her.
My dear Helene, I am so sorry to hear of your problems with our cousin. But please be patient. You will make a wonderful nurse. You are needed exactly where you are.
Helene opened her eyes. The one and only bright spot the last few weeks had been Elisabeth, who despite her initial attempts to remain aloof, had softened as each long night passed. But as much as her friendship with Elisabeth sustained her, she longed for the wide sky over the harbor in Honfleur. She wanted to see the size of the moon, mark the days by its waxing and waning the way her mother had taught her.
She only needed a few seconds. She reached for the thick rough fabric of the blackout curtain, slid a small portion to the side, and hungrily pressed her face into the glass, gazing out over the rooflines at the wide black sky that shimmered with stars. The moon was round, nearly full, casting a gorgeous glow on the city beneath it.
“Mademoiselle,” came a male voice from Helene’s left, and she jumped, releasing the curtain as though she had been burned.
“I’m sorry, I was only…” she started, but as she turned to face the man who had spoken, her entire body went cold.
Lieutenant Vogel stood watching her from a few feet away. His short, sinewy body was held with calm precision, but his features, even in the dark hallway, betrayed a taut energy. He didn’t frown, or smile, only waited for Helene to continue.
“I wanted to see the stars,” she said, her arms at her sides. He cocked his head slightly, as though she were an interesting specimen, an object to be examined. “But I know I shouldn’t have opened the curtain, sir.”
Vogel took a step toward her, that detached curiosity still apparent on his face. “No, you shouldn’t have,” he said, his French accent all sharp angles, flattening the beauty of her language.
Helene shifted the linens in her arms. She could feel Vogel’s eyes on her, but she refused to meet them. She looked past his shoulder. The doors to the wards were still, the night deep.
“You are the girl from Honfleur?” he asked abruptly. “You have family still there?”
Helene tried to nod. “Yes, sir.”
“Do they conduct themselves well, follow orders, do as they are told?”
Helene had the nauseating feeling that he saw her the same way a cat would see a mouse, as a toy, there to taunt at his will. She had heard whispers from the other girls about him, unsettling encounters in the hallways, questions that felt probing.
Just then, the door at one end of the hall creaked loudly on its hinges. A matron in a white nursing uniform appeared, carrying a tray full of empty glass medicine vials. Her sense of purpose reminded Helene of Agnes, walking down a quiet Honfleur street, her gray skirt skimming the sidewalks, her leather bag slung over her shoulder, off to homes all over town, called, as always, by death or illness or new life.
“Back to your ward, Paré,” she said sternly. “Off you go then.”
“Yes, Matron,” Helene said, and she moved quickly away.
Vogel didn’t try to stop her, but she could feel his eyes on her, his hard, calculating stare following her long after she was out of sight.