The Story of a Life

46

Medical Orderly

In October 1914, I left my job with the Moscow tramway and signed up as a medical orderly on a hospital train operated in the rear by the Union of Cities.fn1 I couldn’t bear to stay in Moscow any longer. All my thoughts were directed to the west, to the muddy battlefields of Poland where the fate of Russia was being decided. I looked for ways to be closer to the war and finally to escape the despondency of our shattered family.

Almost all the orderlies on these trains were student volunteers. We wore soldiers’ uniforms but were allowed to keep our student caps, which saved us many a time from abuse and bullying at the hands of the officers. Each orderly was in charge of a passenger railway carriage set up for forty wounded men. It was a point of honour to keep one’s carriage as highly polished as a ship’s cabin, so spotlessly clean that when old Dr Pokrovsky, a member of the Imperial Duma, made his regular inspection before the start of a run, he could find nothing to criticise and would be left smiling into his auburn imperial. And this from a man who was strict and mocking.

I was very nervous before my first trip. I didn’t know whether I would be able to cope with looking after forty bed-ridden men. There were few nurses on the train. We simple orderlies not only had to wash and feed all the wounded, but also check their temperatures, monitor their dressings and remember when to give them their medicine.

I learned on our first run that the most difficult job was feeding the men. The kitchen was far from my carriage. I had to haul two heavy pails with hot cabbage soup or boiled water through forty-eight doors. The orderlies near the kitchen had to struggle through no more than ten or so doors. Blessed by fate in our eyes, we envied them and took malicious pleasure in spilling soup in their carriages on our many daily trips back and forth through the train. Down on all fours, messy rag in hand wiping up our messes, they would swear at us as we passed by, one after another, with our leaky pails.

At first those forty-eight doors brought me to despair. There were ordinary doors that one pushed or pulled and then there were folding doors that worked like accordions. Every door had to be opened and closed, and to do this one had to set down one’s full pails, trying not to spill anything. The train moved fast. It swayed and shook as it went over a set of points, and this is no doubt why to this day I can’t stand the sudden jolting that comes with riding on trains. If this wasn’t enough, we had to hurry so the soup or tea wouldn’t get cold, especially in winter as we scurried over the icy open footplates between the carriages, a cutting wind howling and mocking our efforts. All it took was one little slip and you’d end up under the wheels of the train. If one considers that we had to visit the kitchen at least a dozen times a day (for bread and crockery, for tea, for soup, for kasha, and then back to the kitchen with the dirty dishes and empty pails, and so on), it’s quite understandable why we cursed the long-dead designer who had considered it wise to put as many as eight doors in each carriage.

We thanked heaven when mealtime coincided with a stop. We would jump out of the cars onto the platform and hurry up and down beside the train on the solid ground with our pails, instead of over the wiggling floors. Many of the wounded couldn’t feed themselves, and so we had to do this for them. In the mornings we would bathe them and then wash the floors with a mixture of water and carbolic acid. Only in the evening, after supper, did we get to rest, but not for long for then began the nightly struggle with the candles in their tin lanterns. The candles invariably went out, or melted into a pile, or blazed wildly like torches. The candles over the couplings were always being stolen by one Uncle Vasya, a stumpy brakeman with a big nose whom we dubbed ‘Candle Snout’. None of us would have managed all the work if at least one of the more lightly wounded soldiers didn’t help out.

But in fact these little troubles weren’t the real reason I feared going on that first run. There was another, much larger problem that all of us orderlies secretly dreaded. The real hardship, especially for us, students exempted from military service, was to be face to face with forty maimed men. We feared the scorn and disgust of men who had borne all the burdens and dangers of war while we, young and for the most part healthy men, lived in safety, lacking for nothing. As we got under way on that first run I simply had no time to speak to the wounded or listen to their conversations. Things finally quietened down that night. I sat down behind my partition, lit a cigarette, and looked out of the window. Lanterns threw shafts of light over the carriages one by one as we raced through some station. And then once more there was nothing but the rhythmic clatter of the wheels and the dark of night, broken here and there by the flickering lights of some forgotten village.

‘Orderly!’ cried a raspy, demanding voice. ‘Orderly!’

I jumped up and set off down the car. I had been summoned by a wounded soldier with a puffy, brown face.

‘Hey you, quack, asleep, were you?’ he asked calmly, no scorn in his voice. ‘You’re not supposed to sleep on duty. Give me a drink. Or else I’ll lie here suffering with a parched throat all night.’

‘Everyone has to sleep,’ came a high, childlike voice from the next bed. The man had a scraggy beard and a drawn face and was trying to be conciliatory. ‘Some for eternity, some for just a while.’

‘What are you, some sort of monk?’ the man with the puffy face laughed.

‘Ah, fella, they’ve not even built a monastery yet I’d be willing to join,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’d need a special sort of monastery, one in keeping with my views on life.’

‘Oh, aren’t you some special little flower!’ another man with a heavily bandaged face said crossly. His weaselly little eyes gleamed in the slits of his white gauze.

‘So here we are making fun of each other,’ the bearded man said, ‘but we have no idea what life is really about. Or what its purpose is.’

‘Well, go ahead and tell us, then, don’t keep it to yourself,’ rudely demanded the man with the puffy face. ‘What’s the point of it all, how’s it all fit together?’

‘All right, I will.’ He paused. ‘There once lived here in our Russian land an old and quite well-known man. His name was Count Tolstoy. He wrote so many books it was said that his right hand began to tingle and go numb. It hurt, his hand did, and so he always went around with it tucked in his belt. I guess this made it feel better, it didn’t hurt so much.’

‘That’s true,’ said the man with the bandaged face. ‘I’ve seen it myself in photographs.’

‘There’s nothing worse than when an arm or leg falls asleep,’ corroborated the puffy man. He shifted uncomfortably in his bed to make room for me. ‘Have a seat, orderly. I woke you up so you might as well sit with us a while and have a listen.’

‘It’s wrong to wake a man for no good reason,’ came a sleepy voice from deep in the car. ‘It sours the blood.’

‘Shut up, you! We’re talking here!’ shouted the puffy man.

‘Yes, yes,’ the other fellow went on with the story, licking his lips. ‘The old man was a bit dried up and his name was Leo. And the name fitted, for it seems, as people tell, he had the strength of a lion. His brain, I mean, of course, his intelligence. His body wasn’t anything unusual, he wasn’t even tall. Well, so, we had this painter who lived in our village, name of Koler, and once he happened to get into a dispute with this Count Tolstoy. Not so much a dispute, I guess, but more of a conversation. Koler was sitting waiting for a train at some station Lord knows where, just a little way south of Moscow, I think, and he was waiting and waiting. He waited more than an entire day for a train. It was summer, hot and dusty, and the station completely empty, nobody there at all. And then Count Tolstoy showed up and he too sat down to wait for a train.

‘Naturally, they asked where the other was heading. Koler said: “As for me, I’m making my way to the south, to Odessa, because I’m sick and tired of painting around here.”

‘“Why’s that?” Tolstoy asked him.

‘“Because up here they all paint their houses dark colours, and down there, light ones. And that’s much more cheerful. All you need to use down there is plain whitewash – Kreide, chalk, they call it in those parts – and as long as it’s put on clean and smooth, then that house will sparkle like a gemstone between the sea and the sky. It looks so light and airy you’d think the angels themselves had come down from heaven and painted it.”

‘“There’s no such thing as heaven,” said Tolstoy and laughed, in a mean sort of way.

‘“Yes, of course, even I know that. I just said it because it sounds nice. And where might you be going, if it’s not a secret?”

‘“And suppose it is?” Tolstoy asked.

‘“If it’s a secret, then I beg your pardon. I’m always putting my foot in my mouth.”

‘The old man embraced him, gave him a warm pat on the back and said: “Now, now, that’s obvious. Think nothing of it. You’re a true artist, an artist of life, and deep down you know this yourself. Keep on as you’ve been doing, keep making other people happy. That’s the way to live. As for me, I’m searching all over Russia for the quietest possible monastery, a refuge, where I might live in peace and finish my final book without care or bother.”

‘Koler asked: “And what might this book of yours be about, if you’ll excuse my ignorance once more?”

‘“About everything that is good in this world, everything I’ve lived long enough to see,” the old man replied.

‘“That’s a tall order,” Koler said. “Too much to pick from. Take colours – there’s so many good ones, dozens of them. How can you possibly write about all the good things in this world?”

‘“I’ll write as much as I can. I’ll start with an old man who lived in a hut by a river. Every morning he went and stood on his doorstep to watch the yellow buntings bathing in the wet grass. And he thought: ‘Perhaps I should go and pick cowberries in the forest. I’ll pick an entire basketful, or perhaps I shan’t pick any, but shall lie down under a pine tree and take my eternal rest,’ for he was quite old, you see. ‘But none of it matters, it’s all the same either way, whether I live a bit longer here on earth or make way for the young. I’ve lived a long time and have had much joy in my life, so why not let someone take my place and live and love life as I have?’”

‘“No, no!” said Koler. “I don’t understand that kind of talk. Happiness is when chips fly from a man’s chisel, or paint spreads as smooth as a lake from his brush. As for me, the greatest joy comes from work. Your words, Leo Nikolaevich, I find useless.”’

‘That’s right!’ the man with the bandaged face exclaimed. ‘It’s work that makes the world go round. The working man, now he’s the basis of everything. Get your work done, I say, then you can go and stare at the buntings or the dewy grass or whatever you like.’

‘No one ever worked harder than Tolstoy,’ came the sleepy voice from back in the car. ‘I know, I’ve read him.’

‘True!’ shouted the puffy-faced man unexpectedly. ‘Take me, I pick up a clump of earth before planting, I rub it in my hands, I smell it, and then I can tell how the seed will take to the soil – how much moisture it has in it, and whether it’s enough to see this seed through until harvest time.’

‘There’s no need to shout,’ said the same sleepy voice. ‘Maybe that Koler made the whole thing up. House painters are well known to be liars. It’s just too bad that Leo Tolstoy never did finish that book about all the good things in this earth. We’d have read it.’

‘Orderly!’ came the same demanding tone from the puffy face. ‘Open the curtain! The sun’s up. Let me look out of the window and see where we are. I expect we’ll soon be in Kostroma, that’s my home.’

The men stopped talking. I drew back the stiff linen curtain and looked out on the autumn landscape of northern Russia. The misty gold of its birch groves, fields of stubble and nameless meandering rivers stretched all the way to the horizon. The train raced over the tracks, covering the sentry boxes in steam as we hurtled along. Never before had I seen an autumn like this: such bright skies, brittle air, glittering silver cobwebs, ravines overgrown with crimson sorrel, ponds so clear their sandy bottoms caught the sun. Never before had I looked out into the distance and seen such a shimmering haze or such gentle clouds floating motionless in the moist blue sky of morning. I was so absorbed I didn’t immediately notice the weight on my back. The puffy man had put his cast-iron arm on my shoulder and pushed himself up to look out of the window.

‘Oh, let me tell you, brother,’ he said almost as if in song, ‘how I’d love to walk all over this land barefoot and be served tea in every single hut. Except for now there’s one little problem. I’ve got nothing to walk on.’

I turned round and saw through his gown the outline of the tightly bandaged stump of his amputated leg.

As the train sailed over the dewy hills, the engine gave a shout, as if it were the bearer of some long-awaited joyful news.

‘Ah,’ said the puffy man, ‘the faster we go the sooner our wives and mothers will weep. It’d almost be better if we didn’t go home. But that’s no good. Nope, that’s no good either.’