Thorne hung about long enough to check that she was going to be alright and then went off to visit members of his group in the hospice. For a while, Revell tolerated being harried and shunted about by the overworked and tired nurses, then after being told to go for the fifth time, he went to give blood. It was the only way he could think of staying near to her.
Even patients about to be discharged were there. Many of them looked far from well, but they insisted on donating at least a half-litre. Often they must have been giving back what they had themselves received by transfusion only days before. Afterwards he sipped without tasting a lukewarm cup of tea, before leaving it half drunk and going back to the theatre.
She wasn’t there, but he managed to corner a charge nurse long enough to discover that Andrea had been moved to what had been the porter’s locker room at the back of the building, and would be there for two or three days while the wound began to heal.
It took some doing, but he managed to evade the determined efforts of the nursing staff to let no visitors into the crowded makeshift ward and found her wrapped in a bright yellow sleeping bag between an old woman who had lost a hand, and a little girl whose bowels lay in a bag beside her.
In that room was all the misery of the war. The whole spectrum of violent injury was there: amputations, chest wounds, disfigurement. She’d had only the local anaesthetic for the operation but tranquillisers administered afterwards had put her to sleep. Her face had been washed hurriedly and her fringe left wet and pushed back. It gave her a childlike appearance, very touching, and he wished he could stay there and look after her. He’d have done anything for her, anything, but he couldn’t stay. Already a nurse had spotted him and from the doorway was trying to catch his eye.
Revell knelt beside Andrea. With just the tips of his fingers he stroked her fringe back into place and saw that even by that light touch he had soiled her smooth suntanned skin. There was a small dark mark on her cheek that no washing would have removed, it was a shadow of the extensive bruising she’d received from a wound on their last mission. Then he’d been tempted to leave her behind, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to exclude her, to exclude himself from her company.
She’d never allowed him near, given any hint of encouragement or indication that she was ever likely to, and still he hoped… There was a faint smile on her face, it played at the corner of her lips and fractionally accentuated the curve of her cheekbones. He could only wish that it was a real one, and directed at him. He was very tired. It would have been good just to lie down beside her and hold her hand, and sleep. He was tired and lonely .The war; command; frustration; they towered over him, crushing him down and he felt his will to resist the pressures crumbling.
A hand was on his shoulder, and he turned to see the nurse making an urgent pantomime of ejection towards the door. One last look at Andrea, and he complied. He didn’t know if he would ever see her again. Thome was not at the hospice. No one remembered seeing him, or knew where he was. For the second time in a day, Revell had no unit. He sat on the steps of the building, fighting the temptation to lie down and sleep. It was hunger as much as willpower that prevented him doing just that. Even the condemned man ate a last meal, a pathetic act under those circumstances, as if it mattered when death was only a little way off, but the sensation was not about to be allayed by the application of reason, and he looked around for the kitchens. ‘Are you hungry?’
It was the blonde with the camera. She stood in front of him, proffering a piece of sausage and a half-loaf of bread. ‘I am, yes, but those are your rations.’ ‘I can get more, here, take it.’
Just to hold it felt good. Revell took a bite from the sausage. It was full of meat and rich with flavour. ‘Where do you get food like this?’ ‘Friends. I have lots of them. My name is Inga. Come with me, there is something I would like to show you.’
Revell stood up and followed without question, like a schoolboy called from the dinner table by the headmistress. He didn’t know where she was taking him, and at that moment he didn’t really care. She laid a hand on his arm to caution him against some inert power lines drooping low across an alleyway and the slight pressure of her long slim fingers made him tingle. The sensation remained for a moment after she later, and slower than she need have, let go. She chatted as they walked. There was a trace of accent in her voice, but he couldn’t place it. Swedish, Swiss? Something about it was familiar, but precisely what escaped him. Apparently the city-fathers of Hamburg had decided to record history in the making, she was to chronicle on film every detail of the siege. Her job meant a pass that would take her anywhere, extra food, and if she needed it a car with petrol.
As they walked she linked her arm through his. It seemed an innocent gesture, but he sensed a fraction too much pressure for it to be quite that. Being with her made him feel good. The distant, and sometimes not so distant, hammer of the guns was a barely heard background noise.
With a genuine-sounding interest she asked him about his family, and he talked of his parents, and as her gentle probing prompted, about the bitch, and the divorce, and about Andrea. He had known her only minutes and already he had told her about years out of his life. She wasn’t Andrea, but she was attentive and attractive, and as he felt through the sleeves of their clothing, warm. There was such a lot he had kept bottled inside him, now there was someone who really seemed to want to listen and the pent-up thoughts and emotions became words and he talked as he had never talked to anyone. He wanted their walk to continue, until the burden he’d made for himself was lightened by being shared.
Star shells lit the city. Shells pounded whole suburbs, but Revell heard and saw nothing as Inga guided him through a labyrinth of ruins, occasionally commenting noncommittally, but mostly just listening. For this duration, however short it might be, he’d escaped the war.
‘Fucking half rations! Half fucking rations!’ Dooley looked at the miniature pool of potato soup swilling about at the bottom of his bowl, and hurled it and its contents at the nearest wall. ‘I’ll tell you, fucking Colonel fucking Horst, what you can do with your fucking half rations!’
‘Yes?’ Horst was unmoved by the impressive display of temper by the giant American.
‘I fucking took out a shitty T72 with my fucking bare hands. I jammed a fucking log in its fucking tracks then broke the fucking necks of the fucking crew as they came out, and you stand there like some fucking comic opera general from Ruritania and tell me I’m on half fucking rations? Piss off!’
‘Why did you have to kill the,’ Horst paused, ‘the crew with your bare hands?’ ‘You know fucking why. Because my fucking weapon had jammed, that’s fucking why.’
‘And your weapon jammed because you fired a burst. A burst! You used more ammunition in three seconds than my unit has done in the last three days. If we have no food to spare, we have even less ammunition. That is why you are on half rations.’ Dooley made to say more, but didn’t. He sat beside Burke against the cellar wall and watched his meal trickling down until it had absorbed so much dust it could run no further, but stopped, and began to harden.
‘If it’s any consolation, mate,’ Burke slurped noisily on his soup, ‘the Ruskies are a bugger sight worse off than we are, even you, on half rations.’ With the last of his bread he mopped every drop of moisture from the bowl. ‘I stuck my bayonet through a Commie who weren’t anything but skin and bone. I’ll swear the bugger looked almost happy to die. He couldn’t have weighed above eighty pounds, and I saw others who weren’t no better. If what we’re getting ain’t good, what they’re getting ain’t nothing.’