The military hospital

In May 1917, Oskar Serti was taken to the military hospital. Each morning, a nurse would come into his room when he was still half-asleep. She would go up to the chest of drawers and open the drawer in which he kept his toilet bag. She would leave the drawer open for a minute, while Oskar breathed in the smell of the soap, then slam it shut, then open and shut it again very quickly twelve times. Then she would open the drawer where he hid his chocolate bars, leave it open for two minutes, slam it shut, then shake it to make eight banging noises. Then she would move on to the drawer where he kept his tobacco…
This complicity with the nurse enabled Serti to imagine waking up in his own bathroom, hear himself going down the twelve stairs to his kitchen where he would smell a big bowl of hot chocolate, then noisily go back up the eight stairs to the entresol before repairing to his office and lighting his pipe…
But one morning, Serti asked for too much; he would no longer leave the memory of his house. After the kitchen he wanted to go back to the bathroom, then into the conservatory, then back to his office, then a third time into the attic. The nurse lost track of the drawers and Serti could tell she was exasperated. She nastily caught her finger in one while making a stair crack. She stiffened, held her breath, then opened a drawer she had never opened before, a drawer that reminded Serti of nothing at all. She left it wide open, then left the room without saying a word.
Oskar Serti did not know what was in that drawer. But the unfamiliar smell it gave off wafted into his house and took away all his memories, one by one.

Oskar Serti left his comrades for the military hospital with the painful feeling of leaving them in what he called the shameful slits of the world.
Upon his admission, a nurse wanted to wash his feet. Such a layer of grime had built up between his toes that it had almost become a part of him. Serti tried to protest, but the nurse was as good as her word and immediately plunged his feet into a basin of hot water. At once a smell of clay coming straight from the trenches spread around the room; like when a violent storm passes over a dried-out town and loaded effluvia from the bowels of the earth rise up between the paving stones.
The nurse vigorously scoured the gap between each toe, congratulating Oskar on his regained dignity. But just as she was leaving the room, Serti deftly tripped her up and the contents of the basin were spilt over the floor. Ever since, every time they cleaned his room, Serti felt a whiff of shame oozing out from between the floorboards.

If he was to have any chance of regaining the use of his left leg, Oskar Serti had to force himself to flex it more than a thousand times a day.
Each afternoon, he waited eagerly for the nurse to come so that he could cling onto her shoulder and get on with his physiotherapy exercises.
Serti was annoyed with himself for being so attached to this nurse, for maybe, for all her smiles, she was working to get him back on his feet in order to have him sent back to the front line that much sooner.
So, to escape from this awful prospect, he imagined himself, each time he bent his leg, making a stride down the road taking him back home. As if by magic, forgotten landscapes passed through his head, giving him a foretaste of going home. Within a month, Serti had almost regained the use of his leg. However, the day he tried to go it alone, he hadn't the strength to leave his room. The hope of a return home, the fear of being sent back to the front, all this was mere illusion. He remained attached like the fixed pointer on a compass to his nurse who had achieved nothing beyond teaching him to walk in circles round his room.

When night fell in his room and the furniture stood out silhouetted in the moonlight, for no particular reason Oskar Serti would feel fears rising up in him. He put his state down to long-standing childish fears and, to help him drive them away, he would extend his arm, turn up his thumb, stretch out his index and middle fingers, tuck in his ring and little fingers, then open fire on any suspicious-looking shape, while imitating the sound of the gunshots. Often Oskar would be overcome by sleep before he had laid down his arms. The nurse on night shift never missed a chance to come and see his clenched fist lying on the edge of the bed. She knew she only had to stroke it for Oskar to relax and to release him from his old demons; but she would not interfere in any way. To her this armed fist seemed to be loaded with so many beliefs that she felt protected by it while on her rounds of the hospital in the dark.