The Restless Sea, page 31
Finally, the mosquitoes come, biting and pinching at his flesh. Another woman wraps a sheet around Jack’s shoulders, patting him gently on the back. The kindness makes his knees weak, and he almost collapses.
They follow each other in dull shock to a train carriage that transports them like cattle to a hospital, rattling and bouncing against one another. The smell of raw sewage is ever present. When the train stops a short distance away, they are walked to a large building, and then ushered into a tiny room filled with six beds – there is barely space to squeeze between them.
There is something strange about the room. Then Jack realises: it is lit by the soft, warm, yellow glow of electric light. The windows are boarded up. It is the first time Jack has been out of the glare of daylight for weeks.
A slim girl appears. A Russian nurse. She talks to them kindly, but of course no one can understand. Another nurse appears. She points at the beds, indicates that they must get in. Jack peels back the blanket. The sheets are clean at least. The nurse nods, pointing again, encouraging. He sits first, then lies, still clasping the sheet around his shoulders, tucking his legs into his body like an unborn baby, the knife still clutched in his hand. The Russian nurse carefully pulls the blanket back over him and he feels a wave of sleep wash over him, and he closes his eyes, and at last there is true darkness.
When he wakes, someone is massaging his feet. It is the slim Russian nurse. She smiles and nods, says something he doesn’t understand. The Chief, in the bed next to him, says, ‘Best frostbite treatment I’ve ever had.’
Grifter, beyond him, gives Jack the thumbs-up.
The sound of propaganda from loudspeakers drifts through the boarded-up windows. The other nurse is busy scrubbing down the room, which, although cramped, is spotless.
Jack is embarrassed. His feet are still grimy and the toes are now pale blue, fatly swollen and covered in red blisters. They remind him of the sausages he used to steal with Stoog. The blisters sting and burn. But the nurse waves him back down as he tries to sit up.
Dr Tasker appears. There is a dark-haired Russian girl at his elbow, who translates between him and the nurse. When he has finished talking to the nurse, he turns to the men. ‘You’re the lucky ones,’ he says. ‘You won’t be losing any limbs. Goddamned frostbite.’
‘Thanks to the Chief, here,’ says Grifter.
Dr Tasker nods. ‘I’ve seen the damage done when men try to heat them up too quickly. Sometimes their feet melt without them realising. But yours are treatable. Not too much tissue damage. Good job.’
Jack cannot believe that those swollen waxy things on the ends of his legs will ever look right again.
The doctor touches Jack’s head. ‘I’m sorry about all that at the dock,’ he says. ‘It’s so bloody filthy here, we have to take extreme measures. This is one of the cleanest places left. It used to be a school. It was requisitioned especially for the British sailors coming off the convoys. We had to fight for it, though. The Russkies barely have any space to treat their own. Poor buggers. And they’ve given us plenty of nurses, but I’m the only doctor. We’re struggling to treat everyone.’ He brightens suddenly. ‘But not my problem for much longer, thank the Lord. I’m moving on,’ he says. ‘We’re opening a new hospital around the corner at Vaenga. Near the airfield. Much better conditions. All run by our own men. No offence, Anya,’ he adds, nodding at the translator. ‘It’s just so damn overcrowded here.’
Anya smiles. ‘We can only do what we can,’ she says.
‘Where will they have taken my friend?’ Jack asks.
‘The one with the legs?’
Jack nods.
‘To Bolnitsa. It’s the only proper hospital. He’ll be fine … as long as he survived the first night.’ Dr Tasker rubs his hands together. ‘Best be off, anyway. Got masses of you lot to get through.’ He signals at Anya to follow, and they move on to the next room.
When the nurse brings Jack his food, he tries to ask her how to get to Bolnitsa Hospital. She shakes her head at him, proffers the bowl instead. Jack takes it. Inside is a grey soup with something black floating in it. The nurse nods again, mimes eating, pushes the bowl. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Good.’
Jack takes a sip. It is revolting. Tasteless. Like water with dirt in it. He prods the black thing. ‘It’s potato,’ says the Chief. ‘And the white stuff is meat.’
‘Not like any meat I’ve ever tasted,’ says Grifter.
‘Can’t be as bad as seabirds,’ says Jack.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
The nurse returns for their bowls and sees their wrinkled noses and the liquid and gristle still swimming around in the bottom. She is furious. ‘This is good,’ she says. ‘You very lucky. You eat better than any of us.’
Guiltily, they finish every scrap. It is not quite as bad as it looks.
When the other nurse returns to scrub the floor again, Jack says, ‘Bolnitsa Hospital?’
‘Ah,’ she nods and smiles, showing blackened teeth. ‘Bolnitsa. Yes.’
‘Where?’
She shakes her head, goes back to scrubbing. The sound of the brush sets his teeth on edge. He tries to get out of bed. ‘No! No!’ the nurse says, pushing him back and shaking her head. She looks worried.
‘Yes,’ he says, and he pushes her out of the way and heads for the brightness of the corridor. He is just in time to see Dr Tasker leaving with his translator. ‘Wait!’ he says. But the doctor is already outside, stepping into a truck. ‘Please!’ Jack shouts. The translator turns, resting her hand on the doorframe. ‘Bolnitsa Hospital?’
‘You can’t miss it,’ she says in heavily accented English. ‘It is a big building not far down this road. Lots of soldiers wait outside it. Name looks like this.’ She writes in a notebook in letters that look like symbols. She tears the paper from the book and hands it to him. ‘I warn you, is very … basic,’ she adds.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘Very welcome,’ she says and smiles at him, her mouth opening to reveal a natural gap between her front teeth, and another where a tooth is missing. She has a pretty smile, but her eyes are etched with sadness.
‘I’m Jack.’
‘Anya.’
‘Thank you, Anya.’
‘Good luck, Jack.’
She turns and trots neatly after Dr Tasker, who raises his hand in a goodbye gesture without turning around.
Back in their room, Jack starts to dress. The men have been given new clothes and boots from British naval supplies. Jack pulls on the thick serge trousers. The material is scratchy and thick, yet somehow soft.
‘You look like a proper Navy boy now,’ says the Chief. ‘What would Mart think?’
Jack pushes his head through the thick woollen jumper and then sits to pull on the leather boots over his sore feet. ‘I wish he was here to tell me.’ He stands and stamps his sore feet into the boots properly.
‘You’re crazy,’ says Grifter.
‘That’s good coming from you.’
‘You’ll never find him.’
‘I will.’
‘We’ll all be transferred on to the next ships to go home.’
But Jack knows Carl is not well enough for that. ‘I hope you are,’ says Jack. ‘But I can’t leave Carl.’
The Chief scrabbles about under his bed. ‘Take these,’ he says, handing Jack a pair of thick mittens and another pair of socks.
Grifter sighs and shakes his head. ‘And mine,’ he says, holding them out to Jack. All along the row of beds, Jack is offered cigarettes, spare clothes, soap. He clasps each of their hands briefly. Doesn’t dare say anything in case he chokes up. He looks once more around the room. He knows all of their faces as well as his own – even clean-shaven. They have shared something no man should have to.
‘See you on the other side,’ he says.
The town is filthy beneath its imposing buildings, the odour of decay and the relentless deprivation somehow making it more miserable to Jack than his memories of London in the Blitz. No one takes any notice of Jack wrapped up in his coat. Most of the people keep their eyes averted, avoiding the guards who are always escorting prisoners somewhere. The prisoners wear pitifully thin clothes and old sack cloths on their feet instead of shoes. The locals – old men and women – have dull stares. Only the children seem to be interested, tugging at his coat until policewomen in pointed caps chase them away. The shops are empty. There are piles of fresh sewage on the side of the road, sewers running down to the river. No wonder it smells so bad. Jack brushes a fly from his mouth. Another one lands immediately, its legs tickling along his lips.
The translator is right: the hospital is easy to spot. It rises out of the squalor like something from the distant past, ornate columns leading up to patterned cornicing above wide stone steps. But nearer the ground, the reality is evident: bandaged and exhausted Russian soldiers surround the building: some standing, some leaning, some lying. Their green uniforms are patched and grimy beneath their greatcoats. Their faces are torn and bloodied and dirty. Some will never get up; Jack recognises the waxy stare of death. For a second he thinks back to the lifeboat. But no death is better or worse than any other.
Jack wades through the bodies on the steps. Inside it is worse. The corridors are lined with the half-dead. They loll on the grimy floors, suffering in grim silence. Men missing limbs, their faces half eaten away, backs of heads missing, or just jibbering wrecks. The smell makes Jack gag; he breathes through his mouth, but that’s worse as the stench hits his throat, invades his lungs. He needs fresh air, but he presses on. He must find Carl. Jack glimpses wards packed with beds – there is barely any floor space, but where there is, the men are lying there too. There are two or three men in many of the beds. Those that have sheets are stained with blood, vomit, infection. The stench of urine and gangrene and blood makes his eyes water. Raw sewage seeps under a door. The flies buzz around everything in clouds.
Jack pushes on until he finds a room reserved for foreigners. He spots Carl immediately. His friend is lying on his side, nearest the window – or what’s left of the window, since they are all boarded up too, but someone has smashed the bottom board of this one to let in some of the air from outside. Not that you could call it fresh.
Jack touches his friend’s shoulder, but Carl doesn’t respond. ‘Carl?’ he says, moving around the bed to squat in front of him. ‘Carl, it’s me. Jack.’ Carl’s eyes are shut, his face twitching and grimacing, small beads of sweat on his forehead.
‘Hasn’t said a word since he got here,’ says the man in the bed behind. His voice is ugly, scratching like sandpaper.
‘He wasn’t this bad when I left him,’ says Jack.
‘No time to do anything here. Too busy with their own poor bastards coming back from the front.’
Jack looks under the blanket. Carl’s legs are white and black. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the burns or the frostbite or the dirt. The worst thing is the stench: it is the stench of death.
A mumbling and muttering starts up as a nurse and two orderlies thread their way through the ward. The sound builds to a crescendo until the patients are hollering and screeching at each other, and then the noise suddenly stops and a deathly silence descends. The orderlies have stopped in front of Carl’s bed. They are old men, creased but burly beneath their stained coats. The nurse is tired eyes haloed by a pristine white headscarf. She says something to Jack before trying to shoo him away.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks.
‘Moving patient. If not, he die.’
‘Moving him where?’
‘Operation.’
The man in the next-door bed starts to cackle. ‘The guillotine! He’s for it now …’ He is laughing hysterically, and so are some of the other men, like creatures from a nightmare, their faces and bodies patched together in macabre ways. The sound of so many men laughing and shrieking is so out of place that Jack feels the anger swell. He would punch the man if all his effort wasn’t taken up with trying to hold on to Carl as the orderlies pull him from the bed.
But the orderlies are thickset men, and Jack is still weak. He cannot stop them lifting his friend, and soon he is jogging next to Carl on the stretcher, along the stinking corridor to a room with four operating tables arranged beneath one dim light bulb.
He glimpses a severed limb and a stump in a bucket, and he recognises the metallic smell of fresh blood. On one of the operating tables, a man lies on his back, his stomach gaping, the intestines slithering out on to the table like fish guts. The nurse pushes Jack away. ‘No,’ she shakes her head and holds him back. ‘You stay.’
The orderlies close the door and stand in front of it, their arms crossed, their faces grim, their necks bulging.
So Jack stands there in the corridor while patriotic songs are pumped into the air around his head, and he knows there’s no anaesthetic and he hears the grotesque howl of a creature that has been mortally wounded and he feels the bile rise into his mouth, bitter and sweet, and he turns and vomits in the corridor. The orderlies watch motionless, their arms folded, their eyes fixed.
Carl is brought out half an hour later. Jack cannot bring himself to look at the bloody stump below his friend’s knee. The orderlies carry him back to the bed by the window, but there is someone else lying in it. They turn to the neighbouring bed, which is now empty, but Jack is in front of them, grabbing the man with the raspy voice by the vest and yelling at him. ‘Out!’ he says. ‘Get out.’ He knows it is the only place that Carl might get any semblance of fresh air.
The man falls to the floor with a thud. Jack’s stomach lurches as he realises the man has no legs at all. He shuffles along the floor on his stumps, back to his bed, somehow clambering up into it, moaning and tutting at Jack. But Jack has seen enough suffering not to care. He helps to lift Carl on to the bed and tuck him in. His friend is delirious, talking about bananas and oranges and the bells of St Clements. The orderlies leave. No one has time to tend the bandages except for Jack. He tears some of the sheet from the end of the bed and uses it to wipe Carl’s forehead. He finds drinking water, and begins to nurse his friend again, just as he did at sea, except here there is no fresh air or salt spray stinging his eyes and his mouth, only the smell of death and the feathery wings of the flies that buzz around them, their fat bodies glinting like blue metal in the dim light.
As the long day turns to night, Jack curls up on the floor under Carl’s bed, beneath the spiders’ webs. He is covered in bites from the bugs that infest the place. He knows he needs to get Carl moved from here if he is ever to recover. But he doesn’t know how. He lies beneath the bed, scratching at his itchy skin, the red bites covering every exposed part of him, as Carl tosses and turns and moans nursery rhymes and Morse code. He is not the only one: all the men on the ward mutter and scream in their sleep. Outside the window, washed bandages flutter in the breeze, the stains of blood like wine on a tablecloth.
The food in the hospital is diabolical – mainly black bread that gives the patients diarrhoea. Jack thinks longingly of the soup he was offered in the recuperation centre. Carl will never recover on such rations. There is no soap to spare, and soon Jack’s has run out. The only running water is downstairs as the pressure is too weak and can’t push the water up to the next floors. There is no disinfectant, no painkillers, nearly every surgical case becomes septic. There are no bedpans; the men use what they can – bottles, tobacco tins, mugs. In the transfer process, much of the urine ends up either on the sheets or on the floor. Every morning, there is another dead body, another sick patient all too glad of an empty space to crawl into, clutching the crusted sheets between feverish fingers. It is a matter of survival, and Jack is a boy from the streets. He knows how to survive.
Archangel is already growing colder. Summer is almost over. The wind howls along the streets and around the buildings. Two mangy horses drag a transport bus packed with people hunched against the cold. The horses’ bony hips and ribs press against their scarred skin. Their eyes and nostrils and mouths are black with flies. The city may look different, but when it comes down to it, one city is much like another, and Jack has no problem identifying the people who can help him. This is a world he knows, scavenging and bartering, where the strong prey on the weak. The children are thin and wiry, their bodies young, but their eyes old. They have seen much suffering. They hang around in gangs, just as Jack once did. He watches them work the streets. Their feet are bare and their clothes ill-fitting: loose strands of cloth frayed at the edges. Their trousers are no more than patched together. Jack cannot imagine how they survive once the snow starts. But for now their pockets bulge with roubles and they are only too happy to trade Jack’s cigarettes and clothes for food and soap. He even buys two thick Russian greatcoats, invaluable against the cold. He tries not to think of the men they once belonged to.
It is three days before Carl stops hallucinating. He tries to push himself up on one elbow but he is so weak that he collapses against the pillow. He smiles weakly at Jack. Jack doesn’t know what to say. How do you tell your best friend they’ve lost a leg? Despair is a bottomless chasm. Ashamed, he feels tears well up in his eyes. But Carl reaches out and touches his arm. ‘My dad’s going to kill me,’ he says. ‘I’ll never make an officer now.’
Jack smiles, swallowing the sob that threatens to bubble out of his chest. ‘It’s all a load of bull anyway,’ he says, and he bends over to hug his friend. Carl is covered in bedsores and bites, but his eyes are bright, and there is even colour in his sunken cheeks. But they both know he needs to get out of here as soon as possible.
