Nightingale (29 page)

The wind moaned through the cardboard flaps over the open walls of his flat. The cement and stone wall had crumbled onto the street from the incendiary bombs, the heat of inferno during the Allied bombing of the city in February 1945. Peter had torn a flap into one of his makeshift walls where he remembered a window and draped over it a tablecloth he'd unearthed in the rubble, the cranberry roses sooty as it flapped with the wind, carrying in the stench of human waste, old ash that he feared might be human, the apparition of death seeking lost souls.

Sometimes, in the pitch dark of night, he didn't know whether he slept or simply relived that night through the crying of his neighbors huddled in their own pitiful rag beds, still grieving their own survival.

He'd heard so many stories that the heat of the blaze blistered his own skin, the smoke scorched his lungs.

He became the man in the cellar, fleeing the grip of carbon monoxide in the tunnels under the apartment buildings, running for air until
he slammed into a dead end, clawing through brick and mortar to find air, any air—the air that rushed in and incinerated his lungs.

He was the woman who fought the tornado of flames sucking her into the furnace, losing hold of her baby, wailing as the fire gulped the child whole.

He saw himself in nine-year-old Heidi Maas, clutching to her young breast the shattered, deformed plastic of her doll, her six-year-old eyes glassy with the image of her mother turning to ash before her.

The firebombing of Dresden haunted the countenance of his patients, words sometimes buried too deep to crest, bubbling forth in nothing more than a moan.

Outside, a truck backfired, and in his bed made from the broken, seared wood of his parents' bed and the mattress stuffing and clothing he'd scavenged from the neighborhood, Peter flinched.

Please, God, don't let Mother have burned to death
.

Honestly, he didn't know what to pray for, his words brittle in his parched throat. Had he wished, instead, that the Nazis rounded her up, sent to her a work camp?

To Terezin? Or Treblinka?

A dog barked, feral on the streets, fighting for the scraps with the rest of the desperate.

Footsteps. They scuffed against the hallway outside what might be called his living quarters, although what did one call the gutted remains of one's childhood home?

Peter stayed because in the deepest crannies of his faith, he believed they might return. Believed that if he stoked the tiny fire he'd crafted inside a dented metal canister, and bartered with the
hamsters
that ferreted the farmlands outside the city each day for food, and hung on
to faith until the country might again find its footing, then his family might find their way back.

He
might find his way back.

“Doctor?” The rap came on his door—the one he'd fashioned together, at least, and the quiet urgency of the voice drew him from the darkness of his restless slumber into the shadowy gray of early morning.

He hadn't slept, really, just longed to.

Hadn't really slept, perhaps, for two years. Since maybe that night, back in Wisconsin, after watching Esther leave camp.

That glance back over her shoulder. That smile.

Yes, he'd slept that night, letting her wander through his dreams.

Hold on, Peter.

He got up, brailled his way across the room, found the door latch. A woman, life shaken from her countenance leaving only the rivulets of suffering, illuminated her face with a candle on the other side. She wore a man's trench coat folded around her against the chill of the September night.

“Elise?” Peter asked.

“The baby. I think it's coming. She's hurting badly.”

“Yes. I'm right behind you.”

He was thankful Rachel had slipped him fresh supplies just yesterday—he'd need the antiseptic, the suture kit. The antibiotics. Ana was only fifteen. Too young to have an enemy soldier's baby.

Elise nodded, turned, and he followed her down the stairs, veering to the right and slowing at the fifth—or what remained of it.

The cellar, darkened, sooted, yawned at him as he scuttled by it through the alley. He always veered wide, fearing his mother's screams caught inside the cauldron. He swore he could hear them echo against his steps.

No. She hadn't been there. He'd interviewed neighbors—the few that ventured back to their crumbled homes. They hadn't seen her that night.

Perhaps she had left long ago.

Left. Not taken. Left.

Not taken.

Not like his father.

“When did she go into labor?” Peter asked, his voice low against the movement of the night.

“I heard her moaning this morning, but she didn't come to me. I was gone all day, clearing the streets, and came home to find her in her bed, her face pale.” Elise turned, her hand reaching for his arm. “I believe she is afraid to have this child.”

Why not? What kind of fate could this child hope for, a child of violence, of discard? Yes, some of the women had embraced their rape-conceived infants, stirred by the hope of life, regardless of its conception. Others…

“There is a home, outside the city. Run by the International Red Cross. For babies who—”

“Nein.” Elise released him, her face broken in the flickering light of her flame. “We will bear it.” She swallowed, her eyes flashing, sharp. Lightning against the pane of hollowed darkness. “We will bear it.”

Of course. Against the fragmented landscape of Dresden, with the Church of Our Lady lain to waste, the people of Germany could do nothing but bear it.

The streets, even two and a half years after the bombing, bore the scars, the bouldered ruins of apartment buildings, mountains of charred furniture, walls, even human remains.

Too many human remains, even now.

Raucous singing lifted to his ears, pitched sour by the Russian syllables, the slur of their guttural tones. As with every other rule, the Russian conquerors raised a fist to the curfew, mocked it away with their vodka rations. The buzzards, they stripped the city of rations, even those dropped in by the British, the Americans, stealing hope from the dying.

Here and there, fires flickered in the open shells of apartments or down alleyways, the crude dwellings of the desperate.

Well, they were all desperate.

The memory of the terror still stenched the air.

Overhead, the early dawn had already swept the stars from the sky. Too late to pocket one for luck. Because if they were caught by the Russian soldiers, out past curfew…

“Hurry,” Elise said, ducking through an archway, her steps sure, soft.

Elise and her daughter lived in the old grocery store. The building now sequestered families—twenty or so—into nooks, behind the shattered fish counters, the kiosks, the butcher's room-turned-ward, of sorts. On one end of the building, someone had built a communal stove, and it glowed like the eyes of a beast, smoke curling between its teeth.

Debris partitioned off Elise's “room,” the walls made from wedged timbers, cardboard, and patched clothing. At least they had a bed, the remains of a settee, the tapestry mended with a burlap bag, the legs splintered off.

A bag of vegetables, hamstered from the fields outside Dresden, hung on a nail wedged into the chipped cement wall.

Ana writhed on the settee, her moans ghostly through the concrete building. In the wan candlelight, she seemed to almost turn in on herself, a ghoul with dark eyes, a scream on her face.

“Shh… It's going to be okay.” Although he'd stopped believing his words long ago.

Or, nearly.

He gestured to Elise. “We'll need clean water to wash the baby.”

She managed a stricken nod, slipped away with her candle. He heard her soft murmurs, waking her tenants with her need.

Ana wore a long skirt, a man's shirt over her stretched belly. Peter touched her leg, and she drew back, flinched. He wanted to howl at the wounds in her eyes.

“I need to check you.” He gave her a smile that he hoped she believed kind. Still, she shivered under his touch, and he tried to be gentle.

She would have this child before dawn. Worse, the infant lay breeched.

“Lie back,” he said and touched her forehead. A fever raked through her, judging by the simmer of sweat, yet still she shivered.

Influenza.

Elise returned, a dinged porcelain basin of water sloshing over her feet. “I'll stoke the fire.”

“I need to get her to the hospital, or I fear we'll lose them both. If we cannot turn the baby, she'll need a cesarean delivery.”

His words should have elicited a flare of panic, but Elise only closed her eyes.

Peter took a breath then knelt beside Ana.

He swept her up into his arms, ignored her howl of pain, swift, sharp.

Then she sank against his chest, her body a sack of bones.

“Bring my bag,” he said to Elise and stepped out into the night.

The crash of glass shattering nearby, the guttural sounds of challenge between pie-eyed soldiers, fractured the lumpy darkness, thick with
shadow. He ducked through alleyways, darted across streets, allowed for Ana to hunch into herself in his arms when a contraction took her.

Her baby moved in her womb, and he felt it against his chest. She hooked her arms around his neck, her mouth open in soundless pain.

The Red Cross had set up a center in the bones of the old university hospital, a makeshift surgery theater, trauma rooms, burn wards. Jack-o-lantern eyes surveyed the street from the three-story building where he'd dissected his first cadaver. Where he'd watched his Jewish friends vanish from class.

He hid in the alley across from the hospital, his eyes on the entrance, ears for the Russian patrols.

From down the street, an engine growled, choked, perhaps an ambulance trying to navigate through the carotid streets. Over the bones of the buildings, the sun began to sluice through the city, the rays molten between him and the entrance.

“Please… Oh,
bitte
…”

She vised his neck, arching against him. “Please!”

“Hang on, Ana,” he said into her ear then trundled her close, glanced both ways, and dashed into the street.

A Russian patrol car rounded the corner as he tripped against the cobbled sidewalk on the opposite side, even as he spilled toward the yard of the hospital. He stumbled, caught them on a chipped stone column bracketing the door, rending the flesh from one hand but righting himself before he tossed Ana onto the front steps.

Whistles behind him, shouts—he edged the front door open, tracked into the tiled, mosaic entryway. A gurney lay empty in the entrance hall, and onto this he settled Ana.

Elise took her hand.

Ana opened her mouth and bore down.

“Not yet, Ana,” he said, feeling her stomach. “The baby hasn't turned.”

She let out a cry that turned his stomach onto itself.

“Doctor?”

Rachel. He knew her voice anywhere, the Midwestern accent, flat, calm tones. He turned, found her dressed in her blue uniform, the white apron, and for a moment, like always, the image of Esther, her hand in his as he awoke in the ward, took him. Even Rachel's blond hair, those eyes that followed him—she'd scourged up images he'd long ago eulogized. He'd had to, despite carrying Esther with him into the prison in Fort Robinson, then to England and the debris of the minefields, and finally home. In his memory, however, she'd become a specter, pale and gaunt, her voice reedy thin, hungry for the nourishment of her letters.

Except at night, sometimes. She found him in his bed, slid her hand into his… Hold on.

Still, after two years, without one letter, a telegram, even a scribbled postcard… How long, really, should a man hold on to the stars as they turned to ash in the light of day?

You'll write?

Every single day.

He shook the words, and their power to slay him, from his mind. “She's having a baby. It's breech.”

Rachel nodded, glanced behind her to the flood of lights outside, the guards not stopping at the gate. “Follow me, and hurry.”

He pushed Ana down the hallway, past patients lounged on the floor, sprawled on the priceless real estate of wooden benches. The wards, too overflowed with humanity. The stench of unwashed bodies, antiseptic, the chlorine in the cleaning supplies, smelling salts—they
turned his hollow stomach as they wheeled Ana in to the operating theater.

Rachel turned to him. “I'll call the doctor.”

“There's no time.” He had already opened Ana's shirt, pulled the waistband of her skirt below her belly. The baby lay sideways under her skin. “Brace yourself, Ana,” he said and laid his hands on her body.

Ana nearly lifted from the table. “
Halten
, oh, bitte,
stop
!”

Rachel met his eyes, shook her head.

“Prep her for a cesarean delivery.” He stepped to the sink, grabbed the soap.

“You're not allowed.”

He glanced at her. “Prep her, please. You can arrest me afterward.”

Rachel took a breath, reached for the ether.

Ana gave violent, bloody birth to a little boy, red-faced, chubby, despite her fragility. Hardy Russian stock, and he placed him, squalling and miraculously perfect, in
Oma
Elise's arms, who looked upon him with an expression of redemption.

Yes, they would bear it.

He helped Rachel clean the theater in silence, dumping the bloodied clothes, sending the surgical instruments to sterilization. She hadn't spoken to him since he'd ordered her, in his physician's voice, to obey.

“I didn't know you were a doctor.”

He picked up the needles, disassembled them. The points would be sterilized, sharpened. “I am. I served in a field hospital.”

She dropped the bloodied surgical drapes into the laundry basket. “That's what you do with the supplies. You're—the one.”

He picked up two vials of penicillin. Held them up to her.