No Woman’s Land
I knew something was different about John Pale long before he started to ask to see me personally. None of the boys ever did that, not when they had a choice. They preferred the attention of the younger, prettier nurses. Not “Nurse Sunny”; not the oldest woman among the bunch that reminded them less of the pleasurable retreat of the female body and more of their mother, and mothers were terrible for morale at the Front.
There was confusion, more bitter than bemused, in the others when Private Pale walked into the tent, doffing his cap and smiling sweetly as he pressed it to his chest. His gaze was like the heat of the sun peeling apart the back of my neck as I worked, pretending that I hadn’t noticed his presence. He had become a familiar guilt; a ghost that refused to die.
“Pardon me, ladies,” he said. His voice hadn’t quite lost the pitch of youth yet, and there wasn’t even a shadow of a beard on his face. There was no haunted look in his eyes, either. Not like some of the other boys that had been there longer. Private Pale was the picture of the pre-War innocence and charm that the whole world was fighting to defend. I never understood how you defended something by sending it off to kill itself. “Is Suzannah here?”
I tried not to stiffen as I continued to work, changing the bandages of a legless soldier. The linen was tacky and dark with blood, stiff like bits of jerky as I peeled it away strip by strip. The soldier didn’t stir. One would be hard-pressed to even tell if he still breathed, but I could. I’d always had a knack for knowing when something was about to die. It made me a brilliant nurse, though a terrible woman.
I felt Private Pale’s presence before I heard him. He always stood too close, chest a breath away from my back. He liked to reach around to touch my hands, mouth near my ear, and pretend to flirt. He was good at it, too. One would never guess I could hear his heart hammering away like a Marlin machine gun.
“It’s rude to keep a gentleman waiting,” he whispered in my ear.
With his hands over mine, and the gazes of the rest of the ward searing into us both, I finished bandaging the soldier’s stumps.
“Then I’m lucky there ain’t any around.”
#
I am someone well-versed in being needed; what woman isn’t? But I’ve never known what it means to be wanted; to be loved to the point of yearning, like how the dawn yearns for the horizon or birds yearn to take flight. Love for me means being of use, it is an unnatural force that I fight for each morning, and once that truth may have hurt. But I’ve learned to cherish it, and if sometimes it bites the arms I put around it in my loneliness, that’s all right. The pain makes it real.
#
Where most of the boys from the trenches came to us with rot on their feet or shards of metal in their bodies, Private Pale came to me complaining of stomach pains. I walked into a secluded area of the ward with him close behind, squeezing in close until we were alone. No one was truly alone on the Front, however. Dead or alive, sick or healthy, male or female, we were all packed together like sardines from dawn to dusk. This was the closest either of us could get to being alone short of desertion.
When I pulled the thin curtain back, he eased away from me and sat at the edge of the single cot in the little sectioned off room. Something left him when we were alone like this. He was no longer quite a picture of innocence and charm, and more the suggestion of it. Like a soggy poster whose ink had melted and paper turned to pulp. He looked at me, then down between his legs.
“Those pills you gave me didn’t work,” he said. “Neither did those herbs. They just gave me the shits.”
I pushed a finger against a brass button of his cotton uniform, and without a word he began to undress. The coat, the color of a stormcloud, peeled away. He kept it close, like how most of the boys kept their helmets close when they managed to catch a few winks of sleep.
“You should have warned me,” he continued as I knelt down between his knees. He undid the ties of his trousers with one hand, shimmying out of them just enough for me to take a proper look. “I almost had to run into No Man’s Land to keep the other boys from catching on.”
I placed fingers roughened from long years of work against the insides of his thighs, urging them apart. He groaned at the contact, though whether for show or not I couldn’t tell. “Say something,” he urged.
I had my look, long and good, then stood. He took that as a sign to wrap himself back up in his uniform and stand.
“Well?” he asked.
You’re still entirely healthy.”
He cursed.
The trenches were a foul, bloody place. One lone soldier bleeding more than the rest drew little notice, not with death in the sky and the ground only a few meters away. I gave John Pale the sanitation pads and what I could for the cramps. He thanked me with a peck on the cheek, and a hand on the small of my back as I walked him out of the tent. I’m sure he thought it was a glorious favor for a spinster like me, to have so many pretty young girls staring at me with envy in their eyes.
#
I no longer believe in God. Familiar prayers became bitter on my tongue the longer I heard the wails of wounded things that couldn’t stop if they tried, that cried for their mamas like a ward of newborns in our triage tent. One day, I just simply forgot the words, and it was easy to never relearn them again. It was easier to learn not to see as often as I could manage.
John Pale saw me see him. He’d felt my hands on him during the initial health exam, feeling curves where they shouldn’t be. I hadn’t bothered to question how he’d managed to get sent there. We were losing the war by then, a slow, creeping, putrid death full of rot and soil. If the boys were blood and the trenches were veins, the land itself was bleeding to death for months around our ankles. I assumed it was only natural that women might eventually get sent down into those pre-dug graves, too. We know something of what it means to bleed for the future, after all. I don’t know whether or not John Pale pretended. He defied what it meant to simply be. He changed it for me, just as the Great War changed what it meant to wage war. In the few secret times we met, he never dropped the pretense. So I won’t, either. It only seems fair. I was the one that yearned to keep him around, this strange creature that defied what it meant to exist. Our eyes met that day. His really were quite beautiful, like the color of the horizon. Changing with the sky. I couldn’t tell if he was asking me to help him stay, or help him escape. I looked down at the paper before me, sealing his fate with a stamp of tacky blood-red. “He’s fit for duty.”
#
It’s a curious thing, to realize that you aren’t loved. It’s like breathing everyday as usual, until one morning you become aware of the action, take a deep breath until your ribs creak, and discover you’ve been suffocating your whole life.
John Pale did not love me, and I did not love him. We didn’t love ourselves either, and that somehow brought us together. We began to find our mutual disdain familiar enough to mimic love. On the day our small bend of the trench was attacked, it was sudden. Messy. An explosion of earth and screams all around us. It reminded me of birth, and I wondered if I could forget it. I’d never born a child, and I never would, but I’d heard how women experienced such agony during childbirth that their minds erased the memory for them. Would this happen now? Could the mind of a woman defeat the memory of war? Bullets whistled past, faces appeared and disappeared in the rising cloud of dust and filth. I ran. I ran until I stumbled, and I stumbled until I fell. I remained on the ground, face half-submerged in muck and fetid water, as boots stomped past.
I felt John Pale before I saw him, his hands hoisting me up as he ran, then stumbled, then fell with me in his arms. We kept this up for what seemed an eternity, rising falling, rising falling, until we ran, stumbled, and fell into a hole in the trench. A bunker.
An explosion sealed the way within behind us, sucking away what dusty light was left.
#
We were alone. We were alive, or perhaps everyone else was simply dead and we were the last to follow. It was dark, the sort of suffocating lack of light only capable in a cave. My mind came back to me, and with a shriek as I looked around in the darkness and saw nothing. A hand slapped itself across my mouth, digging nails into my cheek.
“Do you want to die?” John Pale asked.
I didn’t respond. He dragged us both further into the darkness, until he hit something. Perhaps a wall, perhaps his limit. One moment he was standing, and the next he was sitting, legs caged around mine.
We sat together like that for a long time, as sounds of war continued muffled above us. “Do you… want to die?” John Pale asked again, his voice softer.
I felt moist breath against my ears, words evaporating against my cheek. “Who do you think we are without the things that hurt us?” he asked.
The words opened a wound. They cracked stitches apart that had yet to heal. They tore into me like shattered shrapnel.
“I think that’s all we are.”
John’s arms quivered around me; his chest quaked against my back. The hard-packed earth above us shivered along with him.
“What about love?” he asked.
I didn’t want to answer. I preferred the silence in the dark, where we ceased to have the bodies of women, ceased to have life, ceased to despise and need one another, ceased to be anything except breath and touch. But he had asked. I’d made him ask.
“There’s nothing in this world that doesn’t hurt,” I said. “That’s what love is. Just another wound, slow to heal.”
The earth above us quivered, then parted. Daylight splashed into our darkness, drowning us both.
THE END