The Orderly

II

When he woke, it was snowing outside, but the building was like a sauna. From the window of the orderlies’ quarters, he could see the quadrangle already several inches deep in snow. According to gossips, most of the dead had been private soldiers. More of the living were officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, kept as valuable trophies of warfare.

More taunting, he thought. As soon as this is over I’m going back to the brewery. It’s pointless joining up if all I see is the barracks, two months in the mud firing and charging at straw dummies, and then cleaning up sick or dressing wounds.

A doctor pulled him over just before he was to get his cup of tea at eleven hours. A skeletal man lolled at his side, head and arm bandaged but with very little blood anywhere to be seen. “Take this patient up to room 17.”

The patient slid onto a nearby bench. He was red-haired. His chin was covered in russet stubble, and his only significant injury seemed to be to his hand. He was already wearing clean pyjamas, but he was clad in a green military topcoat with captain’s insignia still visible on the sleeve, though the silver collar studs had been torn off.

“Perhaps I might have a bath-chair,” Kostya asked the physician, who was already consulting another chart.

“There aren’t any for men who can still walk,” the doctor said, without looking up. “Do as you’re told and hurry up.”

The captain vomited and swore in what Kostya thought must be Salvat. They always used the word for whore, kurwa, more or less as punctuation, and Kostya gently spoke to him in Deutsch, hefting his arm over his shoulder and asking him his name.

“Zbigniew,” the captain slurred. “Piech.”

It meant very little to Kostya, but he was obviously someone important. Private rooms were only assigned to the upper ranks – majors and so on – should they see combat injuries or illnesses. A major captured in more or less the first push and counterattack when even the staff headquarters could be wiped out, had been sent insane by the conditions at another camp, and they’d had to lock him in and fetch someone from the genteel asylum at Oryolka to handle his night terrors, sleepwalking and soaked bed.

Piech had to be half dragged upstairs. The doctor followed at a sedate pace, leaving Kostya to manage the staggering man on his own. Several times he was sick, until Kostya wondered what more was left inside him to come out. He was soaked with sweat and in a terrible fever, which the doctor who examined him up in room 17 was convinced was typhus aggravated by anxiety.

“Shave his head,” the physician ordered, “so I can get cold water close to his scalp.”

Kostya was in and out of that room for most of the afternoon and well into the evening. The coat had to be taken away to the incinerator once the patient was calm and willing to part with it, and without his red hair Piech looked strange. With him lying there bald and denuded of anything that might identify him, Kostya felt more pity for him than for anyone else.

Just wait, Kostenka, he thought. Once he wakes up properly, he’ll be just the same as all the others.