The White Rose of Stalingrad: Chapter 8
The Nurse and the Sentry.
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In the previous Chapter 7, Marina Raskova visited the female volunteers’ train car and Lilya remembers the flight of the Rodina that had made Raskova famous.
VIII
THE NURSE AND THE SENTRY
(October 21, 1941)
Gypsy woke, tucked and warm under her covers. It was evening, judging from the purple hue in the hospital window curtains. She sensed a patched-up energy rising inside of her but she fought the urge to move. She stared at ceiling, at two particular knots in the roofing plank directly above her, frozen in whirlpool whorls. Her breath moved in and out of her throat with the sound of brushing velvet and it felt odd to be so comfortable. The headaches had subsided by the end of the second day and the vertigo had stopped the previous evening, but her ribcage still felt like a barrel of bruises.
Gypsy had been treated well. Black bread, potatoes, white cheese, sausage and even the occasional egg had been served like clockwork by Nurse Denisova on metal trays. A pad of butter appeared once, and Gypsy slathered all of it on her bread. Much tea, weak stuff but hot, had been supplied. Her wounds had been treated with disinfectant and fresh gauze. Funny, Gypsy had thought at one point, patting her full stomach and smoking one of Mitya’s hand-rolled cigarettes; she was a prisoner and her captors were waiting, healing her, fattening her up for something.
Occasionally Gypsy’s thoughts drifted to Saturday afternoon matinee scenarios of escape, belly-crawling past spotlights and barbed wire and clambering under hay in peasant carts, but where could she run to? She could do nothing but be patient.
She had been asleep much of the time since the commissar’s interview, which by her estimation had occurred three days prior. Her waking hours were heavy, muffled by the effects of morphine and whatever other horse pills the Bolsheviks were giving her, but it was all hauled down, lock, stock and barrel by an undercurrent of sadness; the harsh nightmare of riding a dying plane until it struck blackness, of fire in the night, of unbearable heat and of a friend, Harry, lying dead in the glowing mud.
Harry Sullivan, the Irish communist, had been her closest companion. She had seen friends die before and, if they were still in one piece, they never looked complacent in death. No, their faces were always either beautiful or horrifically contorted, as if they had stared into heaven or hell at the moment of expiration and the muscles froze. Harry had looked happy, even pleased. She took some comfort in that. She still fretted about what might have been done about burying Harry, but there was no one to ask about it.