Page 26 of The Moonlight Healers

There was a muffled sound behind her, a man’s voice speaking in German, another answering it. She had been so sure they would all be like Lieutenant Vogel, would look at her with the same cold eyes, make every hour spent there feel like walking a tightrope, always an inch away from falling into an abyss. But they were mostly just boys, young men who were hurt or sick and a thousand miles from their mothers. They were quiet and they were scared, their jaws clenched as the nurses cleaned their wounds or adjusted their splints or administered medicine to bring down fevers.

She hated the kindness she sometimes heard in her voice when she talked to them, the gentleness in her hands when she helped them down the hallway to the bathroom. She tried so hard to shut it out, to close her eyes and think of her uncles, of her grandfather’s boat and livelihood, seized from him, of the yellow stars on the clothes of her Jewish neighbors or plastered on shop windows, of a thousand other crimes they owned, no matter how polite or young they were.

She wished she could be like Elisabeth, whose hardness hadn’t slipped once in her time on the ward, who was brisk and stony as she performed whatever task she was assigned. Helene searched the ward for her friend now and found her near the door, shoulders rigid, speaking in hushed tones with Matron Durand, who had one hand on her forehead, clearly frustrated.

Helene wondered what slight she had committed, a missed medication, perhaps, or forgetting to document a temperature or blood pressure on a patient’s chart. She tried to catch her eye, but just as Elisabeth looked up, Cecelia strode into the room, her normally perfect habit slightly askew. Helene’s body stiffened at the sight of her cousin. She had seen her occasionally since their first conversation, during meals or at mass, but they hadn’t spoken. Helene had been grateful to avoid her.

Helene had tried to heal once, two weeks previously, on her second shift on the military ward. It had been a rash moment of resentment, toward Cecelia, toward her mother for not allowing her to come back home, for sending her there in the first place. There was a soldier from the front, his back torn up by shrapnel. Despite the morphine, he continued to writhe in pain each night. She was assigned to baths that night, and when she reached him, every movement was clear agony. His entire body shook as she turned him, his face pale. And without really thinking, she tried to take away his pain.

But she couldn’t. Her hands were cold as she touched him. All she could see as she closed her eyes was her father, who had once been a boy just like him, a wounded soldier in the muddy field hospital where he met Helene’s mother.

“Something’s happening,” Elisabeth said beside Helene, who was so lost in her thoughts that she jumped at the sound of her friend’s voice. She hadn’t even noticed her approach.

Cecelia and Matron Durand were huddled in conversation, their backs to the ward. Helene didn’t want to imagine what they were discussing so urgently, but she felt a deep sense of foreboding. Helene could only understand the war in fragments, information passed in rumors or whispers through the hospital, the Germans advancing farther into Russia, reprisal killings for resistance in a Czech village, the mass arrest and deportation of Jewish people throughout France, each piece of knowledge more dismal and catastrophic than the last. There was never positive news in France. Only defeat and surrender and collaboration.

The door swung open and the German head of the hospital, Dr. Weber, entered, his usually clean-shaven face covered in white stubble, his skin as pale and anxious as Cecelia’s.

Cecelia broke away from Matron Durand to meet the doctor. A few soldiers stirred in their beds at the sound of so many footsteps.

“What are they saying?” Elisabeth whispered.

They were too far away to hear anything. “I can’t make it out.”

“I’m going to try to get closer.”

“Are you sure you should do that?” Helene asked. She didn’t like the thought of Elisabeth being subjected to Cecelia’s wrath.

Elisabeth rolled her eyes. “I’m not as scared of your cousin as you are.”

She walked toward Weber and Cecelia, her posture confident as she carried her tray of medicine cups toward a cabinet near the door. Weber’s and Cecelia’s heads were bowed together, their voices indistinguishable but urgent, and they didn’t seem to notice Elisabeth as she carefully placed the tray inside the cabinet. She hovered there for several moments, rearranging vials and syringes, trying to appear busy, until finally Cecelia caught on and cleared her throat loudly.

“Thank you, Nurse Laurent. That will be enough. Please go and make sure the clean linens are ready for the day shift.”

“I think there’s been a landing,” Elisabeth said when she returned to Helene, the words tumbling out of her mouth, her expression almost giddy.

For years Helene had waited for news of a landing, so long that the hope of an end to the war, so bright inside of her in the early days of occupation, had waned like a once-full moon.

“Did you hear me?” Elisabeth asked. “I heard the doctor tell Cecelia to ready nurses for an influx of wounded. He mentioned Dieppe.” She let out a shaky breath and then to Helene’s surprise leaped forward, embracing her with so much force Helene was almost knocked off her feet.

Helene had never seen her this way, like the girl she was under the layers of guardedness.

A feeble hope stirred in Helene’s chest. And it remained, tiny but persistent, as they finished their work and left the ward at the end of the shift, as the hospital came alive with whispers and rumors and talk of the coast. They could all feel it, their small, insular world stretching and shuddering toward the expansive, imminent dawn.

* * *

Shortly after Elisabeth and Helene returned to the dormitory, Mother Elise, followed closely by Cecelia, walked through the doors.

Mother Elise never came to the dormitories. She rarely spent time in the lay side of the Hôtel-Dieu, was mostly cloistered in the convent except for mass and shared meals.

“Gather, girls,” Cecelia announced, her stern voice cutting through the babble of excitement.

The nursing students lined up and faced the nuns at the front of the room. Some of the girls giggled or linked arms as Mother Elise stepped forward to speak, but Helene was focused on Cecelia, the emptiness in her eyes. She felt the last, tattered remnants of her hope extinguish.

Mother Elise was quiet for a long moment, her elegant features hesitant. A few girls still whispered to each other. They didn’t understand the look on her face. But Helene knew it well. She had seen it on her grandfather the day after the Armistice, when she’d walked down to breakfast in one world only to have it taken from her by supper, when news of the surrender reached their town, solid ground replaced by a bottomless void.

Mother Elise steeled herself. “As you girls may have heard, there was an Allied landing in Dieppe this morning. We don’t have much information, only that the fighting began early, before sunrise.” She paused. “And that it appears to now be nearly over.”

She clasped her hands at her waist and stared out at their faces. Expressions changed slowly, as one by one the girls understood what Helene had known immediately, that if there had been an attempt at an Allied landing, the only way it could already be over was by a catastrophic defeat.

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