Ein Wintermärchen
Doc Gene Roe/Renee, Babe, PG

He’s running, running so fast his lungs sting and his knees buckle, but he keeps on going. Around him, the world is a tangle of snow and explosions, vision careening like a see-saw. There’s snow in his eyes and he can’t see a thing, no clue if he’s even going in the right direction.

“MEDIC!” There it is again, to his left; he turns and slips, hip connecting with the icy ground so hard it takes the rest of his breath away. The sky is dotted with fire, and he stares up uncomprehendingly, pain shooting up his spine so violently everything swims out of focus.

“MEDIC,” and he rolls over, agonizingly slow, fingers clawing at the frozen ground to give himself some leverage. Curses explode from his lips in a silver cloud as he scrambles to his feet, pain twisting like a knife. It’s torture to put pressure on his leg, but he doesn’t think the joint is broken. His limp makes going slow; detonations spatter snow ten feet high, and he thinks, bizarrely, that this is what being in a blizzard must be like.

“MEDIC!” It’s closer this time, right ahead, and he manages the distance still left in an unsteady trot. The foxhole gapes like another crater in the snow; Eugene drops to his knees and slides down. It hurts, hurts worse than anything he’s ever put himself through, but his choked groan gets lost in the inferno.

He has no breath left to speak, and his teeth are chattering with anguish and cold. It’s a replacement with shrapnel sticking out of his shoulder, blood gushing from between his fingers. Eugene has to tell him twice to let go while he fumbles for a syrette, fingers groping unsteadily for the right place to stick it under blood and grimy fabric.

The injured boy’s eyes fly open when the needle goes in, and Eugene can feel his body go limp under his palm. His breathing goes shallow, almost peaceful as he stares up at Eugene. “Took you long enough,” he croaks, words almost lost as a tree explodes above.

...

"Eugene,“ she calls, and her voice is warm and brittle, echoing in the vastness of the arches above. He has to blink, because something is wrong with the picture in front of him, something is askew. It’s her, he realizes after a moment’s thought, it’s Renée who seems jarringly out of place with her cheeks round as a child’s and her hair so soft. She doesn’t fit here, among dirt and blood and metal. “Eugene,” she says, urgently, and she shifts as if she wants to move toward him. “Are you –“

Alright, she’d wanted to say, Are you alright?, and Eugene wants to tell her desperately how much everything is not alright. He wants to tell her about Heffron’s cough and Joe Toye’s trench foot, and how he’s almost certainly going to lose it. About Skinny Sisk and the shrapnel in his leg, and that poor kid Julian with a bullet ripping his throat. About the way Eugene’s heart clenches each time he stays behind, the way he listens into nothingness until his head hurts.

He wants to tell her all of it and none of it, and now he understands why his grand-mère used to pray so much. Asked God to carry the pain away, but he can’t somehow, and he can feel the pain in him all the time, welling up in his stomach like a wave of ice, trickling into his lungs and suffocating him from the inside out. He wonders if this is what it feels like for her, too.

Her eyes beg him to answer. Eugene opens his mouth, but with all his words he can’t find any. Again she moves, just the barest hunch of her shoulders, and then she turns and hurries into the back of the chapel. Don’t go yet, she tells him with a wave of her hand.

He aches to stay down here, where there’s at least the pretense of protection under blue walls with stars painted on them like in a children’s coloring book. But there are other men still at the front line, and Eugene can’t know who might be needing him. He searches for Renée, but the light is too dim and the crush of bodies too thick for him to spot her. An explosion outside reverberates through the stone. In his pocket, Eugene finds his makeshift rosary, coarse between his fingers.

Grant that I shall never seek so much to be consoled as to console, but the words taste like ash in his mouth as he turns to go.

...

Eugene’s sister had a collection of dolls. No fancy ones, they were handmade from wool and patches of fabric. Each birthday and each Christmas she’d get a new one, and their father built each doll a small bed from a wooden packing case, sanding them down as thoroughly as possible to get rid of the splinters. She would take turns playing with each doll, sitting outside on the porch even in the summer heat for hours on end. She was immersed in her game until their mother called her inside for dinner. Then she’d jump up with that day’s doll still in hand, and fling it carelessly aside somewhere on her way to the screen door.

Strangely, Eugene thinks of these dolls when he sees Renée half-buried under rubble and debris, neck slack, arms limp and graceless by her side. One half of her face is covered with tiny abrasions, but beneath the blood and soot, it’s as beautiful as Eugene remembers. The other half is gone.

Somehow, he had thought she would look lovely even in death, unlike the soldiers he sees every day. But there’s no peacefulness to the way she’s lying there, no special beauty. She looks like them all, grey and tired like a half-hearted replica of herself.

He is not sure why he takes her kerchief. It is clutched in her hand, as if she had just pulled it off her hair when the roof came down on them. Maybe she was taking a break, coming outside for some fresh air. Maybe she was going to look out for him. It’s too early yet for rigor mortis to have set in, and he pulls the fabric from between her fingers without difficulty. It’s cold and stiff, with no trace of her, no warmth, no scent. He shouldn’t have hoped for it.

His throat feels sore, like something is trying to claw its way out, and Eugene tries to form a coherent thought from the helpless tangle inside his head. He doesn’t know what to do with no wound to tend to, no way to get to her body. The attack is not over yet; like he’s emerging from under water, he suddenly becomes aware of the explosions again. Light from the detonations flickers on the walls around him like some macabre galanty show.

“Medic!”

The shout is like a bucket of ice down his back, and Eugene breathes in sharply, the sting behind his eyes slowly subsiding.

“Get your ass out here!”

To be understood as to understand, and he tries to remember the number of times he has prayed for it while he turns the kerchief in his hand, a simple piece of fabric that belonged to a woman who always tried to understand.

“Come on!” And Eugene does.

...

After that day, Eugene avoids going into Bastogne as much as he can. He knows that Winters is worried about him, thinks he doesn’t get away from the line enough. Truth is, it does Eugene good to be among the company. He tends to the wounded and makes his check-up rounds, and each day he gets one foxhole further without thinking about Renée.

Babe is still wearing her scarf wrapped around his hand. Sometimes when he sits awake at night, Eugene just looks at it, a vague shadow against Babe’s skin which glows palely in the moonlight. But when he tries to picture Renée wearing it, he finds with an odd feeling of trepidation that the memory of her is geting duller and less precise. Were her ears large or small? How long were her lashes? What color her eyes? He is sure he must have known at some point, but the image is blurring inside his head with every day that passes.

...

“Aren’t you ever,” Babe asks, words clipped neatly by the chattering of his teeth.

Eugene looks up at him from the syrettes he’s sorting into his bag as carefully as possible. Five. They will last two days, three if he’s lucky. The snow is falling thicker now, limiting his view to about twenty feet. He hopes they’re done with shellackings for tonight; it will be hell to get out into that weather and find anyone.

“Am I what?” he asks quietly, stuffing both hands into his pockets hard enough to hear the seams cracking. There’s something in there under his knuckles, and probing fingers manage to pull out a single cigarette, one that doesn’t even look too soppy. He thought he’d run out yesterday. His lips are chapped from the cold, and as they stretch into a smile there’s a sharp pain and the taste of metal on Eugene’s tongue.

Babe hands over a lighter, movements made awkward by the cold and various layers of clothing. “You know, scared. When you go out there.”

The lighter gives a small hiss when it ignites. The first lungful of smoke is scratchy as always, and Eugene coughs, handing the cigarette over to Babe unasked. “No,” he says, “not really,” watching as Babe takes a drag. There’s blood from Eugene’s lips on the filter, but Babe doesn’t seem to mind. Eugene shrugs, squinting out into the snow flurry. He’s not sure how to explain. “It’s just - I don’t really think about what I’m doing.”

Babe looks up at him, and there’s a fat snowflake caught between his lashes. He doesn’t flinch when Eugene shifts closer, links one palm behind his neck to hold him in place. Eugene’s fingertips are icy, and Babe recoils slightly, but there’s nowhere to go but the frozen earth against his back. Gingerly, Eugene brushes away the snowflake with a steady finger. Babe blinks, but holds very still, eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Eugene’s shoulder. “There you go,” Eugene says softly, and plucks his cigarette from Babe’s mouth before drawing back.

Babe stares at him for a moment or two and then laughs, a raspy little sound that ends in a cough. “You’re a strange guy, Gene,” he says softly. He wipes his face; Renées kerchief is starting to come apart at the edges now. It’s flecked with dried blood, probably soiled beyond repair. But Eugene thinks that Renée would have liked seeing it on Babe’s hand.

“Again!” The hand with the kerchief is flying up into the air in accusation. Babe glares at Eugene; between his helmet pulled down low and his scarf pulled up high, his face seems to consist only of a furrowed brow and a nose with an intensely scarlet tip. “You’re not even listening to me, are you?”

Eugene smiles around a mouthful of smoke. “Watch the line, Babe,” he says, eyes following the wisps of smoke as they go flying from his lips, rising to dissolve amid the steady fall of snow.