The truck brakes noisily and suddenly in front of the house. Moments later Stefano exits the front door and walks to face the two soldiers who have jumped out from the back of the larger vehicle, with guns drawn. Rosalind watches nervously, her heart thumping hard in her chest. She turns back to look at Georg, who has stopped scratching and is focused on a small photo of Monique he holds in front of him. She only briefly takes this in, because she can’t afford to miss what is unfolding outside, and her mind is clouded with indecision, whether to take Georg and run from the back door.
Stefano looks calm as he approaches the soldiers. Another Russian, with a more senior-looking uniform—a fitted jacket with several red-and-gold badges—steps out from the car. The Uniform speaks to Stefano in Russian. They shake hands, and Stefano hands the officer a piece of paper, which she presumes shows his identity. But she is still trying to process the handshake, still trying to absorb this act of familiarity. Behind her Georg is whimpering like a child. She doesn’t turn to look at him. She can already see in her mind that the tears have something to do with the photo. She has urged him many times to articulate his feelings, but for reasons also she is relieved he doesn’t. She does not want to be reminded that he and Monique shared something special, something she was excluded from.
Her thoughts are scattered with Georg unsettled, but he isn’t what features most this time. The immediate danger lies just outside her house with the Russians. The ones she faced in Berlin were different from these, but the detached glares toward her house are just as frightening. She wonders if they are here on behalf of Erich, if he has somehow double-crossed Georg, and if the untold truth of his drug-fueled rage against the Russians prior to his wounding has surfaced. But the thought comes and goes in less than seconds. It would do no good for Erich to talk. If they take Georg, they will likely take her, too. And Erich needs her silence as much as she needs his. They both have secrets now, and the best they can do is to despise each other silently.
The sudden distraction of another Russian voice confuses her while she processes its familiarity. She tilts her head slightly toward the glass to view the speaker, Stefano, but his back is to the window. He talks in a hushed tone, and the soldiers listen intently. Those from the truck wear helmets as if they are expecting a confrontation. One of them takes out a notepad and writes something down. Stefano is pointing to the track that leads to town.
There is commotion behind her, and the floorboards jiggle. She turns to see Georg’s final stride to reach the top of the stairs.
“Georg! No!” she hisses loudly. But he is going down the stairs two at a time.
He is across the floor downstairs, and she turns back to the window to watch him rush out the front door below. One of the soldiers shouts a warning, and Stefano turns and pushes his palm forward to halt him, but Georg disregards the signal and rushes at the Soviet officer.
“Nyet!” Stefano shouts to the two soldiers who have already drawn their guns. One of the soldiers fires his weapon, and the bullet strikes Georg’s side, causing him to fall. By the time Rosalind reaches the front door, the Russian weapons are aimed at her. They are halted by another signal from Stefano.
Rosalind ignores them all, uncaring of their guns, and races to kneel by Georg’s side. At the sight of him, pale and breathless, she is panicked. With her hands she attempts to stem the bleeding, but it is useless as Georg’s blood spills out from between her fingers.
“You have to help me,” she shouts, overwrought. “You have to help stop the bleeding!”
Stefano appears beside her with linen from the house, then commands the soldiers to carry Georg to the back of the truck.
“No,” says Rosalind, who does not let go of her husband, though it is to no avail as the soldiers are strong and lift him away from her.
She shouts at them that she is a nurse, that she must attend him, but they don’t listen. They carry Georg and lay him in the back of the truck. She doesn’t know who is holding her arms, but she is restrained tightly enough that she cannot step forward toward Georg.
Stefano says something else to the soldiers in the vehicle, then steps back as this first group of Soviets prepares to drive away.
“No!” shouts Rosalind, her arms released. “They can’t take him!” She storms toward the truck.
Stefano wraps his arms around her, and she struggles unsuccessfully to free herself. She continues to shout and call for Georg, and Stefano yells above her that Georg is going to a military hospital and they will do everything to save him.
“It was a mistake, Rosalind,” he says. “They thought he was dangerous.”
Only when the truck has disappeared does Stefano release her to move away and whisper hurriedly in the ear of the officer who returns then to the second vehicle, which then departs also.
Rosalind is breathing heavily and tears are falling and she is thinking of Georg, bleeding in the hands of the enemy. She will never stop loving him, and she is sorry for nearly giving up. Rosalind doesn’t realize she has said her thoughts aloud.
“There is no enemy,” says Stefano.
But there is. There is always an enemy. She knows that even more now. There is always someone to hurt her. She is always being punished.
April 1945
Chests rose and fell with the uneven, rasping breaths of soldiers back from the Eastern Front, the German line rapidly disintegrating. The wounded were coming in too many, too fast. Doctors yelled commands above anguished howls. There were so many to suture, so many legs and arms to amputate. Temperatures were checked, wounds packed, and patients cleared hastily from operating tables. Nurses rushed from patient to patient, blood smeared across their aprons, calling the nursing volunteers to bring more supplies and remove surgical dishes stocked with shrapnel and fragments of bones.
At dawn, after a fourteen-hour shift, Rosalind was ordered to check on the new arrivals. She had passed the point of tiredness hours earlier to reach the stage of frayed, ignoring blisters on her feet that burst hours ago. Seconds later a siren sounded to alert hospital staff to commence evacuating patients to the lower ground floor, and the sounds of shelling nearby filled everyone with a grim reality. In those moments that she descended the hospital’s marble staircase for the last time, Rosalind recognized that nursing was something expected of her, a choice driven by her sense of duty, by her desire to impress and to stand out finally, rather than something she chose from the heart. And she admitted to herself that she did not do it as well as other nurses. They may not have been as meticulous at organizing the surgical tools, but their ability to care was something that came naturally to them. They knew what to say to those who were dying. They felt more than she did perhaps. She couldn’t say for certain, but she was flawed in some way. She recognized it then.