old man looked at the frail woman with a heavy suitcase in her hand. His kind heart couldn’t resist, and he agreed. He got down, heaved the trunk on the place where he had been sitting, and walked beside the cart, holding the reins.
A fierce sun climbed at the zenith. It burnt like hell. The cart arrived at the station, where a green train with red crosses stood motionless right before the mass of mangled metal – rails damaged by yesterday’s bombardment. Women, children-teenagers, oldsters, soldiery, and men in civilian clothes scurried around repairing the railways.
Military medical train
‘You have to understand!’ a tall sixty-five-year-old army doctor in a uniform shouted at Vera, ‘It is a hospital train! We do not take passengers! We head into the thick of the fight and pick up the wounded! Furthermore, Kirov is back that way! And that is the way you are to go!’
He turned and quickly walked away.
‘I know,’ Vera tried to catch up him dragging the heavy suitcase which was skidding from side to side, ‘But your trains don’t usually come here. Only a local ambulance train goes through the station. Their final destination point is about forty kilometers from here, and then you go back to Kirov.’
The man quickened his pace. Having failed to keep up with him, Vera shouted in despair,
‘I am a doctor! A surgeon!’ I’ll assist you with the surgeries!’
The doctor’s foot hovered in the air for a second and slowly put down. All of a sudden, the man turned and looked at her skeptical. Only then he noticed that the woman wore men’s trousers and a plaid shirt looking like the one of a man too.
‘Okay. There are the wounded from the village. Let’s see what you’re made off. The ninth car – surgery, wait for me in there. I’ll come in no time.’
The doctor left quickly, and Vera hurried to the ninth car. She hauled the suitcase into and ran to the train driver.
A thin low man in oil-stained overalls was doing the check. He was moving along the cars while Vera, mincing after him, tearfully begged him to allow the dog on the train.
‘People starve, and she wants to keep a dog!’ shouted the man, then bent down, and climbed under the car with a massive wrench in his hand.
Vera grabbed his foot and pulled with all her strength back.
‘You, piece of trash!’ he fought back with the other foot and shouted, ‘Get out of here!’
‘We can’t leave this dog! It is exceptional! I’ll feed it my rations!’ Vera’s voice was breaking into shrill from tears.
‘Let it be,’ the machinist frowned, ‘I suppose it’s really something special if you’re ready to starve for it. Drag your goddamn dog here.’
* * *
Darkened. Vera and the doctor finished the operation. She’d been up for eighteen hours, and eight of them she had been standing rooted to one place. Pain in her legs felt like one tried to tug veins out of them. She bent one leg and rubbed the other under the knee. ‘It’s alright. I’ve had worse,’ kept encouraging herself the woman.
Vera proceeded to stitch up the incision. The doctor watched her closely and observed mentally, ‘Perfect. That’s pretty good, lady. How old must she be?’
The woman cut the thread with scissors and carefully put the tool on a metal tray. It clinked softly onto the iron. The doctor considered that curious and glanced at Vera – his stern look vanished. His eyes were weary.
‘Thank you, comrade,’ said the doctor.
‘I’ve never worked with the gunshot wounds before,’ replied Vera, a bit defensively.
‘It’s okay. No one has. I was taught by Burdenko. And I’m going to teach you. The way you bandage wounds looks quite peculiar. It takes so much time and lots of bandages. Where did you graduate from?
Vera got taken aback. She couldn’t tell the truth, and the last thing she wanted to do is telling a lie. A confused woman waved her hand and, what was quite out of place, asked him to teach her how to roll a coffin nail. They left the wagon. Vera seated herself on the metal step. The doctor had pulled a scrap of newspaper and wrapped it around his finger, explaining how to roll joints. He filled one with tobacco and handed it to the woman.
‘We haven’t even introduced ourselves properly. I’m Konstantin Gavrilovich.’
‘My name’s Vera,’ with the fatigue in her voice, answered the woman lighting up a cigarette.
Injury
The train crossed the front line. At full speed, it raced through the rumble of exploding shells. Vera stood alone by the window thinking. She gazed at the black smoke spreading along the horizon. It was not death that filled her with torturing horror, but the risk of failing to bring her suitcase where it was needed the most.
She felt the train slowing down as it was arriving at the station. It started breaking, and came the noise of a decelerating train and the creek of its wheels grinding the rail. A steam engine stopped with a prolonged ‘f-f-f-f-f’ as if it exhaled its last breath.
The medical personnel got off the cars. The awaiting, among which stood children, women, old people and soldier men, dashed to the arrived. Konstantin Gavrilovich cried at the top of his voice.
‘Comrades! Split into groups of four or five. As soon as the wounded are sorted, you begin carrying them into the train. Soldiers with a red mark on the forehead or hand are to be loaded into the seventh and eighth cars.’
‘Vera, you take the station’s right-wing,’ the man instructed and hurried to the first group.
The railhead was packed with people. Moreover, it severely lacked medical stuff. Vera rushed from one man to the other. There was a Red Army soldier – not alive, but yet not dead: his eyes motionless, the pulse barely palpable. Vera yelled,
‘Eighth car!’
In a hurry, she explained how to place the wounded on a stretcher. Cramped by nervous tension, her hands shook, the beads of sweat ran off her forehead, and the shirt, wet with cold sweat, chilled her back. She had never worked with such an amount of injured people before. The white coats desperately lacked stretchers. The people, suffering from pain, were laid on the blankets, torn bedsheets, and dirty doormats. The cars soon got crammed. The number of men in each one was 50—70 more than it was supposed to take and far much more than any regulations and the number of seats could allow. Lying densely to each other, the wounded hid the car’s floor.
The load was finished. A crowd of worn off faces, silhouettes in bloodstained clothes stepped back from the railways. Vera waited for Konstantin Gavrilovich. She ran along the train, checking if it was ready to depart. But then a whistle came. It meant the air raid.
Germans had waited until they finished loading the wounded onto the train and now were starting the raid. A low-flying plane had shown circling over the station, it was easy to make out black crosses on its wings. The panic-stricken crowd bolted. Chaos. Vera looked up to the sky. A slanted chain of black grains – the shells – had been breaking off the plane. Tearing the air through with a paralyzing noise, they dived down. The earth shuddered. The whole world turned into a wailing and hissing thunder of black smoke. The woman stiffened petrified.
‘Vera, run!’ the scream of Konstantin Gavrilovich came from the smog.
She turned her head sharply toward the sound of his voice and saw the doctor falling. Vera rushed to him. Gripped by panic, fleeing in all directions, people knocked her down. Their eyes were mad with terror. The woman got on her feet and ran, keeping close to the train. The smoke burnt her airway and nose and was getting into her eyes. The pitch-black