Rosalind entered the basement level and walked toward its only ward, the “arrivals crypt,” some called it privately, with a mass of bodies, some with fewer parts than when they left the field. People rushed past her along the hallway. With the evacuation in process, there was much commotion on the floor above her, as trolleys squeaked frantically across the tiles. Those from the basement, those with less chance of survival, would be the last to be moved. The ward’s street-level windows were still blacked out with heavy curtains from the night before, and under dim basement lighting that spread sparsely across the room, Rosalind scanned the bodies draped untidily on the dozen beds with soiled linen they had not had time to replace after earlier casualties. Some of the injured had been left on trolleys near the doorway, their flesh torn open, burned and flayed, harvested from battle. The first one she attended was dead. He looked too young for war, plump youthful cheeks and acne strewn along his jawline. A large red-brown stain on the center of his uniform shirt disguised the fatal wound. She moved to the next one. She was picturing Georg at these moments, though she was not afraid to see him. Not anymore. She was told that he was still fighting far away, fighting a losing campaign with no shred of hope.
The injured that had been arriving since the beginning of the year were some of the most gruesome she had seen. And it wasn’t just their individual wounds that suggested that battles had grown more savage and desperate, but the sheer number that spilled through the hospital’s hallways. Though half in this ward were different from past arrivals, picked up from the streets, boys, barely men some of them. Part of the skull was missing from one patient, and his arm was mangled, as if it had been ground with a pestle. There was so much blood and crushed bone she couldn’t tell how many fingers he had left. He was one of the few who didn’t cry out, hoping for death, far beyond the reaches of pain. His breathing was steady and his chest undamaged. The next one was missing both his legs, the tops of which had been bound tightly with uniform shirts, most likely by comrades, the medics likely dead. The patient stared at her, pleadingly, through blood-colored eyes.
You make a good cup of tea, but it’s not the same as having a healing hand, her mother had said when she was growing bitter with the reduction of food and her husband’s lack of employment. And Rosalind wondered then, whether the words were profound, as she approached each patient, whether she had tried to prove something to her mother, to prove her wrong.
Rosalind examined the wounds of the last patient—an old man in civilian clothing—then stood in the center of the room to review the carnage. Everywhere she turned, someone was calling her, and the wailing only exacerbated her unraveling, as well as the shelling that every so often shook the building. She could not do this alone. She went to the medicine cabinet for small tubes of morphine to be administered to several of them, into those most demanding. Each time, the crying and pleading would stop, and the eyes that were roaming in pain were then fixed on the ceiling or off to the side to the spaces beside them. It was simple, so easy to end their suffering.
She felt a kick in her growing belly, disguised by her loosely tied apron. More than ever she knew that she must take care of herself now, and the baby, until she and Georg were reunited. She had not had any contact with her parents since Christmas, a gradual estrangement on both sides as her parents grew more distant, despairing of times ahead and watching their friends and neighbors leave the city. Long before that, to avoid the travel, Rosalind had moved into shared nurses’ accommodations nearer the hospital, and she’d not been home since the deluge of battle-wounded soldiers and civilian casualties from Allied bombings began. Her parents were unaware she was carrying Georg’s baby, and she felt the sudden need to tell them her secret. She had written Georg the news but was unsure whether her letters had got through to him. She’d not heard back from him in months.
Rosalind took another morphine tube and emptied it into one of the patients, until he was completely at peace, and she suddenly knew why she was in the job now. It had been leading to this day. She was doing what was expected of her: destroying those who were no longer useful to the Reich.
And then she moved on to the next one, a soldier with a bandage to his stomach and his face burned beyond recognition. He begged for help, his eyes unusually bright beneath the black and swollen flesh, and she placed the tip of the needle into a piece of undamaged flesh in his neck, and he looked grateful even before she squeezed the tube. She did this twice more for him until the moaning stopped, and then there were no more calls for help. Her job completed, she was then free to go. Unaware of what had just occurred, a senior nurse walked into the room and directed Rosalind to start wheeling out the men on their trolleys. As though in a trance, she walked past the woman, ignoring her supervisor’s continued calls, and Rosalind lifted her apron over her head and discarded it at the front of the hospital. The woman’s voice was drowned out by a piercing whistling from behind her, and the crashing of bricks and plaster followed. The ground shook and groaned. Rosalind lost her balance briefly, then walked from the hospital grounds, the sounds of sirens suddenly silent, replaced by shrieks and the distant rattling roar of tanks. She would make it by luck alone, she thought as earsplitting gunfire filled the sky, returned with gold-and-green fire elsewhere.
Rosalind caught a transport vehicle for part of the way and covered the rest on foot. People were fleeing central Berlin, but Rosalind, determined now, strode toward it, toward her home. Mortar bombs dropped close by, and the blasts sent debris in her direction, the earth rumbling and causing her to stumble and reach protectively for the front of her stomach. People screamed nearby and someone white and red was carried in the arms of another. “Are you a nurse?” someone shrieked at her, and then louder as if she were deaf, but she kept walking. Closer to home, she could see familiar streets ahead while the landscape looked strange, missing the height, with buildings shrunken and shattered, and great gaps appearing. She could see into the parklands behind. Small fires were burning, and people pulled at arms poking through from the rubble as she walked to where her house once stood.
“Where are they?” she asked a person standing by, in a deadpan voice.
The voice replied, much like her own, telling her there were no survivors. “All gone,” said the woman as Rosalind stumbled across the remains of her house, her parents dead and crushed within the red bricks piled recklessly on top of one another. The only thing that resembled something from her past was a window frame, the one from her bedroom. She was too weary to feel anything and strangely disconnected with the house remains, as if she had left nothing of herself there to damage. And there was no time to grieve for her parents, for the past, for anyone. She and the child, and Georg, who must find her somehow, were all that mattered then.
Someone shouted to her that the Russians had entered the city, and she followed a group of strangers urgently through the streets. Several people disappeared inside buildings until only she and one other remained. Rosalind ran fast despite the pregnancy. It wasn’t her life that was at stake here but Georg’s child, who she must protect at all costs. A girl, a few years younger, pretty, with hair braided on top of her head, clung suddenly to her arm, seemed to think that Rosalind would lead her from danger. There was no time for introductions as they weaved through devastation. People bloodied and covered with white dust and the crumbled and fiery remains of buildings were a familiar sight at every turn.
The stranger followed Rosalind southwest of the city, where she had entered earlier, and where others were fleeing to, but the shouts in Russian from all directions hindered any escape. The pair ran into an apartment building, first to the basement where it was overcrowded with people avoiding the shelling, and then up several flights of stairs, checking doors until they found one that was unlocked and empty. From the window, they watched the city dissolve under a blanket of dove-gray smoke, and hoped the building would still be standing by morning. There were no more strident voices on the radio to promise a better Germany, just the sounds of artillery fire, which lasted throughout the night.