Elise handed Gretel’s chart to him. Without preamble, he marked the black box in the lower left-hand corner of the medical history chart with a bold red X, the last of three. He looked out the door and beckoned. Two orderlies arrived, strong and broad-shouldered in white coats with swastika armbands.
“Am I going home?” Gretel asked the doctor.
“Not yet, Mäuschen,” Brandt replied, smiling. “We’re going to make sure this never happens to you again.”
Gretel beamed. “Oh, thank you, Herr Doktor!” she lisped as the two orderlies escorted her back to her room to get dressed. She hugged her teddy bear to her small body.
“Take this to the nurses’ station,” Dr. Brandt said to Elise, handing her the file. He headed toward the door.
“What should I tell her father and mother?” During the course of Gretel’s multiple ear infections, Elise had come to know the child’s parents.
He eyed the cross she wore around her neck. “Just deliver the paperwork to the nurses’ station. They will take care of everything.”
Elise was stung by his brusque tone. “Jawohl, Herr Doktor,” she replied, following behind him.
Dr. Brandt turned and frowned in response but did not discipline her. “Go,” he said. “There are forms to fill out.”
Elise made her way down the hallways to the nurses’ station. She handed the file to the nurse on duty. “Another one?” the gray-haired woman grumbled, looking at the three red Xs on the chart.
“What does that mean?” Elise asked.
“It means a lot of paperwork.”
“What kind of paperwork?”
The gray-haired woman, Nurse Flint, gave Elise a sharp look. “The kind that keeps me here, instead of at home with my husband and children, that’s what kind,” she snapped, stacking Gretel’s file on top of similar folders.
Elise caught sight of Frieda, rounding the corner; her friend pointed up with one finger. Elise caught her meaning and nodded. She held up one hand, palm out—their code for meeting on the roof in five minutes.
Before she met up with Frieda, Elise wanted to check on someone. She walked down the corridor and into a ward filled with wounded soldiers in narrow white beds. Some moaned in their sleep, some stared listlessly out the windows at the leaden sky, others sat up in their wheelchairs and played cards.
Elise wanted to check on the temperature of a young man all the nurses called Herr Geheimnis—Herr Mystery. He’d been running an intermittent fever over the past few days. The patient had curly brown hair, an angular face, shoulders full of tension, and eyes wild with fear. Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have a girlfriend? Was he married? Why couldn’t—or wouldn’t—he speak?
“Is he all right?” Flight Lieutenant Emil Eggers asked, indicating with his chin the bandaged body asleep in the narrow bed next to him. Eggers, a beefy, blond man with the face of a cherub, was a Luftwaffe commander. He’d had a close call in France but survived his crash landing and had been brought back to Berlin to convalesce.
“Is that any business of yours, Lieutenant Eggers?” Elise admonished as she shook a thermometer and slipped it into Herr Mystery’s mouth. She might be young, but she was strict with the men, who often seemed grateful to be ordered about as they convalesced.
“Well, there’s not much to do in here …” Eggers said, trying his best to look winsome and failing.
“True,” Elise agreed in gentler tones, picking up the chart hanging at the end of the bed frame. “He’s one of yours—a pilot. Had quite a bad crash landing. A veterinarian from somewhere outside Berlin found him and patched him up as best he could and brought him in, but he had a lot of internal injuries.”
“Is he going to make it?” Eggers asked. He didn’t recognize the man, but there was a code of solidarity among pilots.
Elise may have been young, but she was also a realist. “I hope so.” She removed the thermometer from his mouth and looked. A hundred and one. “His temperature’s still a bit elevated.” She made a note in the pilot’s chart, then walked over to Eggers. “And how’s your leg today, Lieutenant?”
Eggers pulled back the rough sheet and gray wool blanket to reveal a bandaged stump. “Still gone, I’m afraid.”
After, Elise met up with Frieda on the hospital’s roof. The tar paper was littered with cigarette butts. A crumpled packet of Milde Sorte was stuck under a drainpipe. The sun was blisteringly hot—1941 was turning into Berlin’s warmest summer on record. Frieda lit a cigarette and took a puff, then handed it to Elise. “I hate this place.”