TMIAP Chapter 31

Monica at eighteen knew little of war.

A natural consequence of having spent her entire life in the capital's orphanage.

The war had scarcely begun. Stories of young men receiving conscription notices and departing, of families and sweethearts weeping as they saw them off—these were common enough. But injury and death remained remote concepts to Monica.

She suspected, however, that it would prove no comfortable place. Most orphans are pessimists by nature.

Monica had always cultivated the habit of imagining the worst, and so she was hardly surprised when the rear hospital to which she was first assigned proved both filthy and malodorous.

"Your uniform. Your shoes. No time to unpack on that bed—change now!"

The moment Monica arrived at the hospital, some girl flung a nurse's apron and a pair of slippers at her.

This girl held no authority over Monica, nor was she particularly advanced in years, yet she issued commands and shouted from the outset. She was even spiteful.

When Monica, awkward in all things, trembled while attempting to administer an injection to a practice dummy, the girl struck her hand sharply.

"Why do you treat me so coldly?"

When Monica could bear it no longer and asked, the girl looked down at her obliquely and snorted.

"You'll be just like me soon enough."

Then she struck Monica's shoulder as she passed.

Monica's first patient was a soldier with a bullet lodged in his lung.

The man, whose hair had just begun to grey, had survived the surgery to remove the bullet without incident, yet every night he coughed up what seemed like a bucketful of phlegm.

"I ought to die. This misery won't end unless I do."

Even as he said this, his breathing came in labored gasps.

"Yet here you are, breathing so industriously while speaking of death."

By that time, Monica had grown sufficiently accustomed to toss off casual jokes to the wounded men. The soldier with the damaged lung would lean back against his pillows and mock her.

"A scrawny, uselessly cheerful girl like you would do better to go home quickly."

"I can't. I'm going to endure two years and go to university."

"University! What university!"

Most of the wounded brought to that rear hospital bore injuries or aftereffects severe enough to prevent their return to the front.

Since they required long-term treatment, Monica naturally came to know the minutiae of their personal histories.

The wounded men under Monica's care knew that she was an orphan, that she served as a nurse in order to attend university. The man would groan in pain, yet whenever Monica approached, he would faithfully and earnestly mock her ambitions.

"A girl's best course is to find a good man and marry."

Monica both disliked and liked the man.

She hated him terribly when he mocked the orphan girl for presuming to attend university beyond her station, yet she also wished he would never stop scolding her. The middle-aged man claimed to have a daughter who had just turned fifteen.

"Look at that—I'm terrified my daughter will turn out like this girl."

Even as he said this, the man would occasionally press the black bread from his meals into Monica's apron.

"I'm terrified to death my daughter will go hungry like you!"

When the man who gasped out such words died, Monica wept a great deal. So much, if one wished to exaggerate, that her eyes might have melted and run down her face.

The war situation deteriorated steadily. Before even a year had passed, Monica was requisitioned to Arvidd.

Arvidd, close to the front lines, presented an entirely different situation from the rear hospital. More than ten soldiers died during transport each day. Monica was responsible for caring for thirty soldiers simultaneously.

All the nurses at Arvidd wore loose trousers, and Monica recognized at a glance that these were the trousers of dead soldiers—she recoiled instinctively.

Yet a month later, Monica wore military trousers patched at the knees with tarpaulin, her boots soaked through, hurrying about on quick feet all day long.

Until eighteen, Monica had considered herself the world's most pessimistic cynic. But at nineteen, she was different. Arvidd's hospital overflowed with pessimists far more formidable than Monica could ever match.

"Still, this is better than the front lines."

"You mean this isn't the worst of it?"

"Of course not."

The soldier whose leg had been amputated below the knee grinned fiercely.

"Do you know where the medical officer cut off my leg? On a tarpaulin spread over bare earth!"

Though he had been left lying on that same tarpaulin for days, at Arvidd's hospital he worked diligently to walk.

Monica was moved watching that one-legged soldier pour sweat like rain as he attempted to walk, step by laborious step, supporting himself on a crutch.

And that soldier, on the day he managed to walk fifteen steps unassisted and climb onto his bed by himself, hanged himself from the ceiling.

There was no time to grieve his death—they hauled down the corpse and changed the bed sheets. The moment the sheets were changed, a soldier with an eye injury was brought in. While still unconscious, he moaned in agony; Monica changed his bandages and administered an anesthetic injection. Her fingertips had long since ceased trembling.

By the time they reached the soldier with the eye injury, no one knew where he had been transported from.

His identification tag was half blown away, rendering both the soldier's name and unit unknown. Only the letters spelling "Sol" remained.

Even without being told to ask which unit he belonged to once the soldier awoke, Monica would have remained at his side.

A man who had lost one leg had killed himself the moment he could walk again. How could someone rendered permanently blind possibly wish to live?

The soldier with the sensitive injury neither slept easily nor properly regained consciousness.

After three days of watching the wounded man suffer, Monica could bear it no longer and fetched sleeping medicine.

But sleeping medicine could not solve everything. Anesthetics could only be used for soldiers requiring urgent surgery.

"Just give him the green medicine!"

Someone advised Monica thus, yet in the end she went back out and scoured the fields. At that time, the dangers of the 'green medicine' were not yet widely known.

But Monica found it eerie how soldiers who took that medicine would sleep like corpses all day, unable to regain consciousness.

The orphanage director's nervous insomnia proved helpful then. With no time to dry the herbs properly, Monica crushed them, squeezed out the juice, mixed it with cheap liquor, and poured it between his lips. Whether the sleeping medicine took effect late or the alcohol proved effective, she couldn't say.

In any case, the wounded man finally slept deeply. To grant him a mere five hours of sleep, Monica had stayed awake all night while caring for sixteen other wounded soldiers.

"So then..."

Monica surveyed her surroundings with eyes still heavy with sleep.

Beautiful white walls finished with molding. A clean bed that smelled pleasant. A fine mansion where birdsong could be heard through the windows.

She yawned long and deeply, raising herself halfway. Then, rubbing her face with one hand, she sat on the bed in a daze and murmured.

"A person with four personalities is nothing at all..."

"Mr. Mekal. Do you have sleeping medicine? I heard Miss Liella received a prescription for sleeping medicine from you."

"Do you suffer from insomnia as well, Miss Monica?"

The doctor raised his eyebrows with interest and pushed up the spectacles perched on his aquiline nose. Monica shrugged.

"The change in environment has kept me awake until dawn."

"Oh. As it happens, I've recently acquired something quite interesting. I'll give it to you free of charge—would you like to try it?"

"What is it?"

Mekal smiled broadly, showing his teeth.

"It's called laughing gas, and if you inhale it rather deeply..."

"I'll decline."

It sounded suspicious just from the description. For him to be so delighted while offering it free of charge meant something would certainly go wrong. Mekal's face fell.

"If I inhale it myself, I'll fall asleep immediately and won't be able to observe the effects."

"Which means you intend to observe me while I sleep."

"Naturally."

"I refuse."

Mekal made several more attempts to persuade Monica but ultimately failed. The doctor grumbled and told her to follow him to his house. That evening, Monica obtained a bottle containing a small amount of white powder.

'Let me buy some time.'

She had already anticipated that Enrique would have tried every conceivable sleeping medicine. Yet she was also reluctant to rashly administer the green medicine.

Monica had seen far too many people rendered strange by that medicine on the battlefield. She wanted to observe his symptoms while at least offering sleeping medicine first.

Of course, that wasn't the only reason.

Beryl Academy. When the man mentioned the name of that tremendous institution, Monica thought perhaps she might accomplish what she had dreamed of all this time.

When Monica enlisted, she had thought it would be good to become a governess.

After completing her service and attending a women's college, her goal was to become a governess for a wealthy merchant family—if not an aristocratic household. Being a governess was the most respectable profession available to university-educated women.

Children existed everywhere, and many parents wished to educate them well. It would suffice for a lifetime. Without getting dirt on one's fingers.

But if she could dare to attend Beryl Academy, she wanted to become a doctor.

At Arvidd's hospital, the doctors were mostly occupied attending to the officers' wards. Only nurses remained at the common soldiers' bedsides.

There, orphan Monica learned that she was not the world's most unfortunate person.

She had wanted to give the man who pressed bread into her apron a proper prescription instead of meaningless painkillers.

Monica always thought she might have been able to do something different for the soldier whose leg was amputated on a tarpaulin, who had his remaining hope in life cauterized along with the stump when they burned it to stop the bleeding.

Though she had told Enrique Solivén that day she would somehow try to make the 'green medicine,' truthfully, Monica didn't want to do so.

Setting aside the fact that she didn't know the formula, she wanted to do what she could for him.

It didn't suit Monica's character to irresponsibly bring medicine to someone who might make her a doctor and say, 'My work is done.'

...Besides, there was something she had wanted to ask all along but hadn't dared.

So Monica said she needed a little time since she couldn't recall the detailed recipe. Enrique Solivén nodded. He also told her to come to the Solivén family townhouse from now on.

However, Monica deeply regretted agreeing so hastily then. The reason was that she was a servant. She had insufficient personal time.

'Damn it, I even skipped dinner.'

To make time to visit Mekal's house, Monica had used her dinner hour. It was inevitable, being tied to Martinael all day.

To deliver the sleeping medicine, it would have to be late at night. At least it was fortunate that Martinael went to prepare for bed earlier than the adults.

Monica clutched her growling stomach and wrapped her bonnet around her head. She needed to hurry to the city center and return before night fell completely. The Solivén family townhouse was located in La Spezia's city center, not in the wealthy residential district.

"Where are you going?"

Just as she was leaving the mansion, someone suddenly appeared. Monica jumped in alarm, then patted her chest in relief. It was Hans, wearing his good-natured smile.

"Oh, you startled me."

"Oh dear, I apologize. I do hope I haven't frightened a lady!"

Hans bowed with exaggerated courtesy, his hands clasped behind his back like some nobleman he'd learned from somewhere. He seemed to have noticed Monica's wariness and was behaving with deliberate propriety.

"Ah, I have some urgent business in the city."

"At this hour?"

"Well..."

Monica shifted her eyes, then showed him the medicine bottle in her hand.

"The medicine I received from the doctor seems wrong."

"Ah, but it's rather late. Shall I escort you?"

That wouldn't do. Her dealings with Enrique Solivén should remain unknown to as many people as possible.

Was it not so? That the precious eldest daughter of this family had marriage negotiations proceeding with the Solivén son was publicly known even among the servants. Monica hunched her shoulders and said quietly.

"I can manage alone."

Perhaps she was being too guarded. But Hans withdrew surprisingly readily.

"I see. Then let me at least show you to the fork ahead. It gets dark there and people often lose their way."

Hans blinked his murky green-yellow eyes several times. He seemed to harbor no ill will. Monica hesitated, then nodded.