“You shouldn’t be here!” the Cossack shouted. “You shouldn’t be here!” He waved his hand and then wheeled away.

For a moment, Ruzsky stood with his eyes closed, swaying with relief. He tipped himself forward and stumbled into a run, focusing on the carriage ahead once again. When he reached it, he almost threw Maria onto its floor. “The Hospital of St. George,” he shouted.

The startled driver snapped the reins. “Quick,” Ruzsky shouted. “She’s badly hurt.” He knelt over Maria. He checked her pulse and then bent his face low over her own to check that she was breathing.

He couldn’t see any blood, but looked carefully around her scalp, her ears, and her neck. He bent down. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “I’ve only just found you. Please don’t go.”

She didn’t move. Her face was still and cold to the touch.

40

A crowd thronged the entrance to the hospital. Two orderlies carried a patient on a stretcher out of a motorized ambulance, shouting at the wounded to allow them passage. Ruzsky swept Maria into his arms and jumped down into the snow, trying to push his way through the crowd. “Let me pass,” he shouted.

“Wait your turn!” a woman in front hissed. She turned, half illuminated by the gas lamp high on the wall above the great wooden doors at the hospital’s entrance. She had blood streaming down her face.

Ruzsky swung around, so that he was walking backward. He shoved hard, using his height, weight, and strength to push through the jostling, cursing crowd. He glanced down at Maria, but she hung lifeless in his arms.

There were two soldiers at the entrance to the hospital, trying to keep people back, but he pushed past them into the hallway.

Inside the cavernous reception area, the wounded were lying on the floor in all directions alongside soldiers from the front for whom no bed had been found. There was no one behind the reception desk and nurses in dirty blue and white uniforms, with a red cross on the chest, darted through the lobby trying to avoid cries for help.

The orderlies who had been carrying the stretcher lowered it to the floor in the center of the room and began to shout for assistance. The body of the injured woman was covered with a dark blanket, but her head jerked violently from side to side.

Ruzsky looked down at the woman in his arms. “Maria?” he whispered. But she did not open her eyes.

Ruzsky moved to the far corner and laid her down gently. “I’ll find a doctor,” he said.

He ran through the enormous wooden and glass doors to the ward beyond, the fetid smell that assaulted him so violently unpleasant that he almost gagged. The room was full of the dead and dying, mostly soldiers covered in putrid, leaking bandages. There were many beds, but the injured were laid out on the floor between them and even in the aisle in the middle of the room.

This part of the hospital had once been a school and the tall windows and high ceilings ensured that it was freezing cold, despite the crush of human bodies. Ruzsky saw that several panes on the window closest to him had been broken. Few of the injured had blankets.

He ran forward past the hollow faces of the wounded-mostly peasants with long black beards, many of whom were unlikely to be leaving here alive and returning to their families in the Russian hinterland.

A patient began to scream at the far end of the room and Ruzsky caught sight of a doctor bending over a struggling soldier, trying to restrain him. After a few moments, the medic turned away.

“Doctor?” Ruzsky asked.

He looked up. He was a young man, a boy even, no more than twenty or twenty-one, but his face was as haggard and lined as that of someone twice his age, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. “Doctor, I need your help.”

The man stared at him.

“I need your help.”

“Everyone does.”

“Please, could you come this way.”

“I have work to do.”

“It will only take a minute.”

“Please wait your turn!”

After his explosion, the doctor looked as if he might cry. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, swaying unsteadily on his feet.

“Just one moment of your time, Doctor.”

“One moment,” he repeated, “my life is measured by moments.”

Ruzsky took his arm and began to lead him carefully down the center of the room. Briefly, it looked as if it might work, but the doctor soon rebelled against the way in which he was being maneuvered.

The doctor released himself from Ruzsky’s grip, turned around, and began to walk away in the opposite direction. Ruzsky ran after him. “Please, Doctor.”

“No!”

Ruzsky swung around in front of him. “Please. For Christ’s sake, don’t make me beg.”

“There are hundreds of patients.”

“But none like her.”

A glimmer of humanity flickered in the doctor’s exhausted eyes. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”

Ruzsky did not respond and the doctor rocked gently on his feet. “Fine. Where is she?”

Ruzsky turned and led the man down into the hallway. Maria lay on the floor, her eyes closed. He knelt down and touched her cheek.

The doctor knelt also.

“Doctor!” an old woman shouted from the other side of the hallway, but he ignored it. Ruzsky noticed that most people around them were waiting with quiet dignity and he felt ashamed, but unrepentant.

“What happened?” the doctor asked, as he took Maria’s pulse.

“The full impact of a horse,” Ruzsky said.

The doctor listened to her chest and then began to check her body with his hands, starting with her head and neck and shoulders and then moving down her chest. She opened her eyes, wincing as he touched her ribs, her face suddenly distorted by pain. She did not make a sound. Relief flooded Ruzsky.

“Any blood?”

He checked her clothes to answer his own question.

“Was she knocked out?”

“Yes,” Ruzsky answered.

“For how long?”

Ruzsky looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes,” he answered. “Perhaps twenty-five.”

The doctor held up three fingers.

“Three,” Maria answered weakly.

“Now?”

“Five.”

There was a piercing, haunting scream from inside the ward ahead of them, the roaring bellow of a wounded lion, but it had no impact whatsoever on the doctor. He covered each of her eyes in turn, checking the response of her pupils to light. He straightened. “Shock,” he said. “Take her home, keep her quiet. If the pain doesn’t lessen, bring her back.”

And before he had even finished his sentence, the doctor had mentally moved on. He stood and stared into the middle distance, oblivious to the cries for help all around him. Ruzsky saw a young boy lying on the floor on the opposite side of the hallway. He was painfully thin, his skin yellow and body wasted. He was with his mother and they both just stared at him.

Ruzsky bent down and scooped Maria into his arms. As he walked toward the exit, she leaned her head against his shoulder, her breath warm against his face.

Ruzsky let her down gently by the door to her apartment and supported her as he fumbled for the keys.

Once inside, he lowered her slowly onto the chaise longue, then took the sheepskin rug from the floor, laid it over her, and set about making and lighting a fire.

As it began to take, he turned to see that she was looking at him.

Ruzsky sat by her feet and they both watched the flames in silence. He moved closer, took her pulse, and then placed his hand against her forehead. He held up three fingers.

She did not respond.

Maria looked up at the changing patterns on the ceiling. The fire crackled loudly. Her skin glowed a soft, honeyed yellow.

“Are you in pain?”

She still did not answer. She closed her eyes.

Ruzsky waited, watching the firelight flickering on her face.