Blue Glass

Sleeping

July, 1917

The screams of the man on the operating table would probably fill my ears for a long time afterwards.
Me and a few nurses stood by in apathetic silence as the doctor signaled to his orderlies, who promptly sat on the patient to be operated on. Apparently, there had been a horrible gash above his head among others that needed to be sewn up, and although he had handled the sewing of all the others rather well, he totally snapped on this last one.
"Sons of bitches!!!" He bellowed in delirium, struggling against the weight of three grown men sitting on him as the doctor approached with his surgical needle threaded.
The last thing he said before he made the first stitch was, "If you don't permit me to sew your eye, you will never see pretty girls again."
I stifled a laugh at that. He wasn't wrong.
The stitching was laboriously completed, and the doctor signaled for us to inject him with morphine for the pain. I poised the needle as expertly as I could—I had seen my mother take shots of heroin through her veins with needles before many times—and pressed the plunger down, watching the liquid inside disappear into the man's veins.
Two other nurses opted to wheel the now unconscious man out of the operating room, leaving the rest of us to disinfect the equipment for the next case. I winced as I began to spray down the operating table, the chemicals stinging my nose.
"To work in the field hospital where one of Germany's greatest heroes is convalescing," one of the nurses in the room gushed to her counterpart. "It's a dream come true, I tell you."
I stiffened. There was no mistaking who they were talking about.
"My brother is constantly praying to get transferred to his Staffel," another said. "He's in the Flying Service as well, and it's all he writes to me about."
"I've written to him a dozen times," a third said. "I truly hope my letters stand out. Imagine if he were to reply!"
A collective titter filled the room, and I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes.
If only they knew...
I hadn't gone to see Manfred Von Richthofen ever since that incident with the fan mail. It had been a good two days since that had happened, and I hadn't bothered Käte with going to see him until now. I had no intention of starting again, either—especially not after hearing this conversation.
"He's so handsome!"someone was saying from across the room. "If he doesn't marry me, I can only hope the man I marry looks like him."
I wanted to throw up. Why had I been so naive and assumed he was interested in me or even set store by the fact that he wrote to me or had made an effort to call me? He most likely did that to girls like these on a daily basis simply to stoke his ego.
"...you sleep with a stack of his pictures beneath your pillow; don't deny it," another was saying. "Wouldn't you love to go take pictures of him now?"
"All bandaged up and most likely filled to the brim with morphine? No thank you! I prefer pictures like these of him," said the girl who had spoken first, and held up a Sanke card. I realized with a jolt that it was identical to the one I had bought in Berlin.
Now thoroughly disgusted, I quickly finished scrubbing the table and hastened out the door. The hallway was deserted and quiet. I breathed a sigh of relief and sank to the floor, leaning against the wall with my knees pulled to my chest and my head between them, feeling lightheaded from the chemicals.
Poor Manfred. It's all well and good to have countless girls throw themselves at you but most of them love you for who you pretend to be and not who you are. I find it hard to believe you're the same person behind closed doors..
I allowed my mind to momentarily drift off, to look past what transpired in the present to what could be in the future, to imagine what I knew I couldn't have. To imagine rolling over every morning and coming face to face with a pair of sumptuous blue eyes. To imagine being able to call him mine in every sense of the word, to be able to look at every single girl who ever swooned over his picture and feel a satisfying rush of pride knowing that what she and so many others wanted,I had. To one day stand at the altar after this war was all over...
I could feel my insides turning to jelly as I let my mind conjure a rendition of the scene. He would of course be wearing a dress uniform, preferably with all his medals and a dress helmet. I would have my hair down, with countless strings of pearls woven through it, and a sheer veil on top—
"Lea! Lea Schwarz, is that you?"
I jumped at the sound of my name. My daydream shattered into a thousand pieces when I looked up to see Käte standing over me, looking concerned.
"I've been looking for you forever. Is this where you've been the whole time?"
"Well, not exactly. I assisted them with an operation not too long ago."
I rose unsteadily to my feet. "Why were you looking for me?"
"Well...it's Richthofen."
My blood turned to ice. "Richthofen?"
"He wants to see you. He's been asking about you constantly. I don't know what made him take such a liking to you, but ever since you stopped coming with me to see him, the first thing he asks me every day is regarding your whereabouts." She gave me a strange look. "You told him your name was Natalia?"
I nodded. "I don't feel comfortable using my real name with strangers."
A blatant lie, but I wasn't about to reveal the truth quite yet.
"Anyway...he's sleeping now, so you might want to go and clean up in there as best as you can." Käte started off down the hallway, talking over her shoulder. "I'll bring his lunch in a little bit."
I watched her until she had disappeared into another room, then headed the opposite direction in a slow walk.
So Manfred wanted to see me. So what? I would be cordial and polite to him as best as I could. That was what a nurse was supposed to do...wasn't it?