"But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move:
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave" (Keith Douglas, Vergissmeinicht.)
She quickly searched the pockets of the man lying face down in the mud. Two dollars, a photo of a naively smiling girl, address written on the back, a golden crucifix on a dirty cord, a piece of chocolate and a blackened letter. She put the chocolate in her mouth. He wouldn't need it anymore.
"Elizabeth!"
His cry got lost in the sound of exploding grenades around them. For a moment Leo thought his tympanic membranes would explode inside his head and drip out from his ears. Under his hands the wounded man got into a spasm, barely conscious that Leo was trying to staunch the flow of blood from the his temple.
"Elizabeth, I need more gauze!"
She turned, put the crucifix, photo and letter in her pocket, and searched the battlefield for the source of the sound. She found Leo in a slit trench, desperately trying to apply pressure to a man's head wound with one hand while trying to restrain his convulsive body with the other.
A soldier down. Another soldier down. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. She sighed and shook her head while she looked at the shattered body.
"It's a goner, Leo."
"None of that, Eliza, we have to try!"
She concentrated on restraining the soldier's spastic body, partly to keep him from hitting one of them, partly to avoid Leo's reproachful eyes.
Often he called her a seasoned pessimist. She rather referred to herself as a pragmatist. She teasingly called him a misguided Samaritan.
They had met on the flight to Europe. He was trying to write his wife a letter. He had promised to write her. She borrowed him a pencil. Two medics going off to fight a fight that, up till then, had not been theirs. The war made them friends. Where possible she watched over her idealistic, but sometimes naive, colleague. Yet, deep down she wished she could be more like him. Young, innocent, passionate. Once she was all those things. But years of violence, pain and fear had hardened her, perhaps too much, and the innocent Elizabeth had died a slow, agonizing dead. The only thing that remained of the careless free spirit that she once was, was a vague memory.
Leo was too gentle for this work, for this world.
"Save your efforts Leo. He's already gone." The man had gone limp in her arms.
She stretched her back and froze at what she saw.
"No," it was barely a whisper.
From the corned of his eye Leo saw Elizabeth standing up. "Eliza, keep low." Motionless she looked at a spot right behind him. He turned to see: nothing. Slowly the dark shadow behind Leo converted into the shape she knew so well. Leo reached out, grabbed her shirt and tried to pull her down.
The projectile just missed his hand but ripped open Elizabeth's stomach.
"The burst stomach like a cave"
For Leo time slowed down. He tried to scream but his lips remained soundless. Blood gushed from the wound, turning his hands and sleeves dark red.
Elizabeth looked down and placed her hands across the gaping gap to prevent her intestines from falling out.
She breathed deeply, pushed the edges of the gash towards each other, and under her hands the wound, to Leo's horror, closed itself. The only thing that reminded of the hit was her torn, bloodstained shirt.
Leo gasped in amazement and in a moment of bewildered, reckless concern for Eliza he stood up, which was why the bullet went straight through his head.
A sudden sharp pain, and then bright white lights.
"Where is he?" she demanded from the shape behind Leo, which had gradually taken the form of a tall man dressed in black.
She stepped over Leo's fast cooling body. "Where is his ghost? Why can't I see him?"
"He is not here. Apparently his destiny lies not with me," said Death.
The anger on her face turned into wonder.
Death looked up at the sky. "It lies up there, with them," he said.
"He is to become a whitelighter?"
"That surprises you?"
She sighed. "No, it doesn't. It's just, he saw what happened to me. My amazing recovery. If he hadn't tried to pull me down, if he had just stayed low…"
"He still would have died, it was inevitable."
"It always is," she said bitterly.
Elizabeth looked at Death's face. "Any chance they changed their minds, you know, regarding me? I'm a field medic in a war after all, it wouldn't be that difficult."
Death suddenly took a great interest in the noses of his shoes, not wanting to meet her hopeful green eyes.
"I don't think so," he muttered.
She looked down at Leo's body, knowing that when she would look up Death would be gone.
"Till we meet again" she whispered both to Leo as Death.