I poked my head through several doorways, only to find empty wards, or piles of bloody linens. I was having a hard time staying calm. The last thing I wanted was to give that horse’s ass of a doctor an opportunity to criticize me, but more than that I was developing a panicky conviction that I’d never find the right place. I couldn’t seem to find anybody to ask, either. At the end of a hall I thought I heard voices behind a closed door, and so I opened it.
But nobody was talking in there. The first thing I noticed, when I pushed open the door, was the smell. I knew that smell, of course, but it took me a moment to place it, because my mind could absorb neither the evidence from my nose nor the evidence from my eyes. Bodies. Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. I saw a foot. I saw a hand. Was this what the Germans had done? Or was it what we had done?
And then I saw the boy atop the pile, like an answer to that question. Flung there, it looked like, the way his arms were splayed. His eyes still open. His mouth still screaming. He’d died brutally, and this, too, was a brutality, that he’d been flung atop this pile of corpses like so much junk. Did it matter, now that he was dead? It was hard to know what mattered anymore.
Somebody touched my shoulder. It startled me, but I made no sound. I turned to see a corpsman. He said, “Ma’am, you don’t want to see that.”
“I already saw it,” I said.
“They’ll be buried eventually,” he said. “When there’s time to stop and identify them. This is temporary. Come away, now. You don’t want to see.”
But I’d already seen. There was no making the best of that. There was only looking, and then looking away.
“Come away now,” the corpsman said again, and I was all docility. I let him pull me away. I let him shut the door. I asked him, very politely, to take me to central supply.
I remember taking the needles and syringes back to the doctor, and I remember that when he took a syringe from me—snatched, more like—I snapped, “What do you say?”
“Thank you,” he said, like a scolded little boy.
Later it was midnight, mealtime, and a corpsman was telling me I was in for a treat.
“We’ve been eating well,” he said. “The Germans left behind some beef.”
He offered me a plate. I looked at the slab of meat upon it, and I didn’t think, Flesh and flesh and flesh. I sat down and ate it, like I was starving. I ate it all.
A jeep dropped me off. It had started to rain, and by the time I climbed out of the jeep it was pouring. I ran for our tent, and just as it came within view I tripped over a tent rope and went flat. I was covered in mud. I found Kay awake inside the tent. She didn’t sleep well anymore, from the pain. “Should we start building an ark?” she asked, then, “What happened to you?”
“It’s only mud,” I said.
“Do you want to clean up?”
“Why bother? Why not just stay covered in mud all the time? Simpler.”
“Not terribly sterile, though,” Kay said. She’d been rummaging around while I’d been talking, and now she unearthed a towel, sniffed it, made a face, and handed it to me with a shrug.
I mopped at my shirt, took it off, mopped at my skin. Though we’d put Vaseline on the tent seams in an effort to keep them from leaking, water still ran down from the spots we’d missed or hadn’t been able to reach. I hunched under one of these trickles and did my best to pretend it was a shower. I kept seeing that room, that boy. His open mouth. I felt like I could no longer bear it. And by “it” I mean life, I mean everything.
“Much more of this rain and we’ll just float out of here,” Kay said.
“I’m going to give up this futile effort, then,” I said. “I’ll just lie down and wait for the floods to cleanse me.”
“Of mud and sin,” Kay intoned.
“Of mud and sin,” I repeated, more grimly than I had intended to.
There in the dark, where it was sometimes okay to ask such questions, Kay said, “Do you think you’ve sinned?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel bad about something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to tell her. Not wanting her to know. “Maybe it’s something I haven’t done yet.”
“I forgive you now,” she said. “Ahead of time.”
I lay down, then sat right back up, yelping. Something had pricked my shoulder, something that left it throbbing with pain. A bee. A bee had stung me.
“What happened?” Kay asked.
“A bee, Kay. Oh my Lord. I got stung by a bee.” I noted with detachment a certain hysteria in my voice. “I’m plagued, I’m plagued, I’m plagued.”
“Shhhh,” Kay said. She got out her flashlight and checked my wound. “The stinger’s still in there,” she said. She found some tweezers and removed it. She touched the throbbing spot lightly with her finger and for an instant it seemed to cool. What a good nurse she was. I wanted to talk to her like the boys on the tables talked to me. I wanted to say she made me feel safe; I wanted to beg her not to let me die.
“I’m going crazy,” I said.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” she said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”