His ruined hand … He had wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. Trying to open one one-handed was something no wounded, half-addled man should have done-except he had no choice. He did a shitty job-there was no other word for it-of wrapping gauze around the wreckage. Then he had to do what he could for his friend.
All that time safe. All that time lucky. Both of them. He hadn’t caught any real wound at all, and Mike only the one in his leg. Well, that streak got smashed to hell in a split second. Mike had wound dressings, too, but he had more wound than they could hope to dress. He also had a couple of morphine syrettes. Chaim injected him with both of them. Even that was plainly sending a very small boy to do a man’s job, but it was the last favor Chaim could give his buddy.
He’d thrown away the second empty syrette when he wished he’d given himself some of it. Too late. He didn’t have one of his own, even if he had reminded himself to get hold of one. His hand was screaming louder every second. He wanted to scream himself. He wanted to, and a moment later he did. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the right.
Mike’s groans quieted. Either the morphine was easing his pain or he was dying. Maybe both those things were true at once. Chaim didn’t know. Even if he had, he couldn’t have done anything about it.
“Senor …,” someone behind him said: one of the Spaniards who’d joined the Abe Lincolns. Chaim turned to face him. The kid blanched and crossed himself. “?Madre de Dios!” he gabbled. As Chaim had seen with La Martellita, Catholicism stuck to even the Spaniards who reckoned themselves most aggressively modern and secular.
“I seem worse than I am,” Chaim said, hoping like hell he was telling the truth. “See to Mike first, por favor. I gave him morphine, but.… ” He started to spread his hands, but arrested the gesture before it was well begun. Moving the left one, even a little, made it hurt more than it already did.
“You have not had morphine yourself?” the Spaniard asked. Chaim shook his head. That hurt, too. The kid took a syrette out of his own belt pouch and stuck him. Then he bent down beside Mike Carroll. He crossed himself again-a quick, convulsive motion. He looked up at Chaim. “I do not believe he can live, Senor.”
“Do what you can for him.” Chaim sounded eerily calm. The drug was hitting almost as hard as the mortar bomb had. He still hurt, but it was as if his body were several kilometers from his brain.
The Spaniard yelled for stretcher-bearers for Carroll. Then he said, “And I will take you back to an aid station. Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. We’ll both find out, won’t we?” Chaim said. What would they do with his left hand? No-what would they do to it? Would he keep it? If he didn’t, how would he, how could he, get along without it? The morphine made all the questions seem much less urgent than they would have without it. He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sorry as hell.” He draped his good arm over the Spaniard’s shoulder. “Let’s go. We’ll see how far I get.”
He made it all the way to the aid station. That surprised him, and seemed to surprise his helper more. By the time he got there, though, the shot was wearing off. But a doctor took one look at the blood all over his face and at the dripping bandage on his hand and stuck him once more. The pain receded again.
Morphine or no morphine, he whimpered when the man peeled off the bandage and examined the ruin of his hand. “Can you save it?” Chaim asked.
“No se, Senor,” the man replied. “It does not looked good, but … Well, perhaps.”
By the way he spoke, Chaim realized he hadn’t even intended to try till he heard the question. “Do what you can, please,” Chaim said. “I don’t think I can use a rifle one-handed, and I want to get even with Sanjurjo’s putos.”
The ghost of a smile briefly bent the doctor’s lips. “Let me do what I can here. Then I will send you back to Madrid. Dr. Alvarez there has done some things that surprised more than a few people.”
“Gracias. De la corazon de mi corazon, gracias.” Chaim did the best he could with his clumsy Spanish. From the heart of my heart? He wouldn’t have said it that way in English.
He got the message across. “De nada, Senor,” the doctor said. This time, his smile lingered long enough to let Chaim be sure he really saw it. The man went on, “Now I will give you ether and make some preliminary repairs. Then-Madrid.”
“Madrid,” Chaim echoed. The ether rag came down on his face.
He thought he would go back to Madrid in an ambulance. He rode in the back of a beat-up Citroen truck with three other wounded men. He was groggy and dopey and hurt a lot in spite of the dope. His hand was swaddled in thick white bandages that got redder and redder as the truck rattled along. His scalp, he discovered, was also properly bandaged. He’d had his hair clipped or shaved off, too. No doubt he looked stupid as hell.
When they got to the hospital, a male nurse asked, “Which is Dr. Alvarez’s patient?”
“Aqui estoy,” Chaim answered. Here I am.
Dr. Alvarez proved to speak English with an accent much more elegant than Chaim’s. He’d studied medicine in London. He cut off the bandages and examined the wound and what the sawbones at the aid station-a man whose name Chaim had never learned-had done to it. Thoughtfully, the English-trained Spaniard rubbed his thin, dark mustache with a forefinger.
“What do you think, Doc? Can it stay on?” Chaim asked. Speaking English was a relief. Half addled by pain and morphine, he suspected he would have made an even worse hash of Spanish than usual.
“Oh, yes. I am certain of it-as long as we can avoid an infection in the wound, anyway,” Dr. Alvarez said. “And I hope … No, I believe … I believe that, once the surgical repairs are complete, you will have some function in it. Not full function, perhaps, but you will be able to use your thumb and some of your fingers.”
“Surgical repairs?” Chaim repeated. “You’re gonna carve on me some more?”
“It is necessary,” Alvarez replied. Maybe he thought Chaim didn’t want more surgery and he had to talk him into it.
If he did, he was dead wrong. “Let’s get on with it, then,” Chaim said. The operating room was spotless and had the antiseptic smell of carbolic acid. As long as Nationalist planes didn’t bomb the hospital, Chaim figured he’d come through fine. He smiled at the nurse who put the ether cone over his nose and mouth, and she had gray hair and a face like a horse. Oblivion swallowed him.
Anastas Mouradian played indifferent chess. Even if it wasn’t the microcosm of war people who didn’t know much about war (or, sometimes, about chess) often claimed, it was a way to make time go by when you weren’t flying. It was less popular than swilling vodka, but easier on the liver.
He found himself playing more now that he was flying with Isa Mogamedov. The Azeri not only didn’t drink like a Russian, he didn’t even drink like an Armenian. He hardly drank at all, in fact. Stas wondered if he was a pious enough Muslim to find alcohol sinful.
Mogamedov didn’t say he was, not even when Russian pilots and bomb-aimers teased him for his abstemiousness. Stas didn’t tease him and did play chess with him. Isa would have been an idiot to admit he was a serious believer. The war had put a damper on the Soviet Union’s aggressive atheism, but hadn’t stifled it altogether. Mogamedov just smiled and shrugged and said things like, “If I drink a lot, I get sick, so I don’t drink a lot.”
He played better than Stas did, but not so much better that Stas had no hope of beating him. He managed a victory about one game in five, which encouraged him to keep playing even though he got trounced most of the time. He sometimes wondered whether Isa threw a game every now and then to keep him interested, but asking about that might have been even less polite than inquiring about religion, so he didn’t.