Dancer Read Online Free

full of men. The beds were stacked five high, nailed to the walls like shelves. The walls themselves were splattered with blood and grime. The only good thing was the children who came in to perform on occasion, and also the music that came through the loudspeaker—one of the nurses had set up a system where they could play the gramophone from the front office. The music could be heard all over the hospital, lots of wonderful victory songs. Even still, the men moaned and shouted for their sweethearts. Some of them were glad to see me, but a lot of them didn’t recognize my face at first. When I reminded them, they smiled, and one or two of the cheeky ones even blew me a kiss.
    Of all the soldiers there was one boy I remember best—Nurmahammed, from Chelyabinsk, who had lost his foot to a mine. He was just an ordinary Tatar boy with black hair and high cheekbones and wide eyes. He hobbled in on crutches made from tree branches. We sprayed him down, and I unwrapped the bandages from around the top of his stump. He was bad with the parasites, so I had Nuriya take good care of him. She swabbed the wound well while I got the bath ready. I checked the water temperature with my wrist, and then three of us supported him, walked him across to the bath. He was silent the whole time. I washed him down, and finally he said, Thank you.
    When he was clean and dressed in hospital pajamas he gave me a strange look and began to tell me all about his mother’s vegetable patch, how she spread chicken manure to make the carrots grow, how they were the most wonderful carrots a person could want in his life, how he missed those carrots more than anything else.
    In my lunch box I had some leftover martsovka. Nurmahammed put his face to the food, smiled up at me, kept smiling while he ate, his head rising up from the plate as though making sure I was still there.
    I decided to go up to the hospital with Nurmahammed. We got on the back of a horse wagon, the animals clopping their way forward.
    All sorts of things were going on that day because of the celebrations—a special food truck had pulled up to the hospital kitchens, red flags were flying from the windows, two commissars had arrived to pin medals on the soldiers, a man sat on the steps playing a balalaika, and children were walking around in Bashkirian folk-dancing costumes.
    â€œThe Song of the Fatherland” came over the loudspeakers, and everyone stood still while we sang it together.
    I squeezed Nurmahammed’s hand, and I said: See, everything will be all right.
    Yes, he said.
    Usually the men were pushed around the hospital in wheelbarrows, but to our pleasant surprise there was a wheelchair for Nurmahammed that day. I helped him with the paperwork and wheeled him along the corridor to his ward. It was noisy in there, all the men shouting under a big cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the soldiers had gotten hold of a huge vat of methylated spirits and they were dipping cups into it, passing them along the bunk beds.
    Everyone wore bandages—some of them were wrapped from head to toe—and things had been written on the walls by their beds, names of girlfriends, favorite soccer teams, poems even.
    I pushed Nurmahammed on through to D368, halfway down the ward. His was the second of five bunks. He used his one leg to prop himself on the edge of the first bed. I pushed from below, but still he couldn’t heave himself up. Some men came and got their shoulders under Nurmahammed’s weight. He flopped down on the bed without even lifting the sheets, lay there a moment, smiled down at me.
    Just then the big troupe of children came into the room. There must have been about twenty of them, all in costumes, green and red, with caps. The youngest was maybe four or five years old. They looked so nice and clean and scrubbed.
    A woman in charge made an announcement for silence. For a moment I thought it was my neighbor, but thankfully it wasn’t, this woman