The Winter Soldier

4.

Lucius’s quarters were in the former priest’s house, a separate building that sat across a courtyard spanned by a massive beech tree, its upper branches high as the church steeple. The snow of the courtyard was packed down in paths between the two structures and a third, smaller house with two rooms, one for bathing and one for quarantine. Beyond this he could see a gate marking a graveyard, the crosses barely high enough to clear the snow.

There was a separate entrance to Lucius’s room, but it was locked, and Margarete led him around to a second door, which opened onto a kitchen. There two men sat peeling potatoes next to a set of field stoves and pots. One of them was missing a hand.

“This is Krajniak, head cook.”

A poplar-thin man with a red nose sniffled and saluted with his stump. “Humbly report, Herr Doktor! I hope you like pickled cucumbers, sir.”

“Ah. I haven’t told you that,” said Margarete. “In January they accidentally delivered two hundred kilos of cucumbers instead of cleaning lye. It is not to be mentioned to anyone. Agreed?”

At the far end of the room, the skinned corpses of pigs and chickens dangled from the ceiling. A third man sat in the corner, a shotgun across his lap. Margarete greeted them with a nod. “That one is Croatian, speaks some German. I don’t understand a word he says.”

“The gun is also for the rats?”

“Very good, Pan Doctor,” she said. “I would have thought you’d say it’s for the Russians, but my, you’re learning fast.”

On a plate, she placed a hunk of bread and a pair of boiled turnips, then led him into a second room, a laundry with pots for disinfection, strung with rope from which hung a maze of drying uniforms and blankets. Together, they pushed aside the wet, frozen wool until they reached the door to his room.

It was a small space, four long paces across, with a straw mattress and a sheepskin blanket, a desk, a chair, a wood-burning stove. It had been Szőkefalvi’s room, Margarete told him, and they had left it alone after his departure, waiting for the new doctor to take his place. She went and unlocked the bolt on the far door that opened onto the courtyard. “So you don’t have to crawl through potatoes each time you need to get to bed,” she said. There was a small window, already fogged by their breath, glowing with a gold nimbus from the light of the church. She set his food on the desk next to a casebook, and turned back the blanket on the bed, a gesture which at first appeared an act of hospitality, until he realized she was inspecting it for lice. The blankets lay directly on the mattress. No bedsheets: of course, he thought, embarrassed that he had even noticed.

Inspection complete, she turned back to Lucius. For a moment, he thought she would ask him something else, but she pressed her hands together and curtsied slightly. “My quarters are in the sacristy. There is a bell outside the door if you need to call.” She turned, and then turned back.

“Oh, and, Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t take your boots off.”

“No. My boots…”

“To run, Doctor, in case you need to run. And keep your papers on you—the Austrians have a bad habit of thinking everyone without their papers is a spy.” And with that she hurried into the night.

Lucius set his bag down on the floor and walked over to the desk. The food was already cold, but he was starving, and as he chewed, he turned the pages of the casebook. The names and injuries ran well into the hundreds, all recorded in the same careful hand. He tried to conjure up the man who had preceded him. Margarete had said nothing more about Szőkefalvi, no mention of his age or rank or training. Lucius imagined an older man, because to him all doctors were older men, but now thinking back, he realized there was nothing to suggest the Hungarian wasn’t also a student, perhaps an assistant to the other unmentioned doctor whose crime he suspected by then had something to do with Sister Klara’s. Nothing to suggest Szőkefalvi hadn’t been sent off to serve with just six semesters of study. Nothing, except that Szőkefalvi, whoever he was, apparently had known what to do with a skull fracture, while Lucius knew how to take an X-ray of a mermaid’s spine.

He sat. Thoughts of the mermaid now led to Zimmer, and then to Feuermann, now somewhere in Serbia. Had his friend also been so misled? But the hospital described in Feuermann’s letters, though small, was functioning, with other surgeons and sanitary officers and Red Cross personnel, a steam laundry, an X-ray machine and bacteriological laboratory, not some freezing first-aid station with an armed, half-mad nurse and an operating table salvaged from the pews.

He ran his good hand through his hair and lay back on the blanket, still in his coat. Was he supposed to sleep in his clothes, then, too? He imagined himself fleeing a horde of screaming Cossacks in nothing but his boots. But it wasn’t funny. He felt frightened by everything, the bomb-hole in the church ceiling, the rats like something from a nursemaid’s tale. Was this what his parents had tried to protect him from? Was it too late to ask them to help him to transfer? Oh, but this brought its own worries. If his father had his way, Lucius might find himself a lancer, joining a cavalry charge against a line of howitzers and mortar fire, while he tried to steer an unfamiliar horse.

He turned on his side, his wrist throbbed, and his saber poked into his hip. He had almost forgotten the pain; fear made a good anesthetic, he thought. When Margarete had learned of the injury, she had asked to examine it, carefully touching the tips of his fingers to assess for nerve damage and palpating the fracture to see how it had set. She had given him some vials of morphine from the supply closet beneath the altar. But now he was grateful for the injury, which was all that stood between him and total humiliation. He unclipped the saber and hung it from a bedpost. Yes, he thought: he was lucky for the scuttling child, the icy street. If Margarete was truly performing the amputations, then he could watch her, study, and perhaps, by the time he had healed, he could know enough to start. If a nurse had learned, he thought, then he could, too.

With this thought, he pulled himself farther onto the bed. His feet felt massive in the boots. He closed his eyes. Now sleep seemed futile, but he wanted to be absent, if only briefly, from his fear.

And somehow, he must have slept, for he was awakened by a knock at the door.

It was Margarete again. She wore a second greatcoat over the first, her wimple hidden in the hood, dusted now with snow.

“Quick,” she commanded. “Come.”

It was still dark as they crossed the courtyard.

A fire was burning in the quarantine, its light flickering through the swirling snow. Beyond the gate, men carried shrouded litters out of an ambulance. It was a small vehicle, scarcely longer than a man and not quite as tall, but its supply of casualties seemed almost inexhaustible. Lucius turned to Margarete, seeking some instructions, but she had vanished, leaving him alone. From around him came shouting, the crunch of footsteps, the clattering of doors, but all was muted by the falling snow. A pair of search dogs circled, as if someone had forgotten to tell them that their job was done. Polish ogars, hounds familiar from his father’s hunts. They were almost otherworldly, like eels in their constant gliding, smooth coats glistening, noses cutting shallow tracks across the powdery snow.

At last, one of the ambulance men, with a vulgarity that suggested ignorance of Lucius’s rank, shouted for him to help. He hurried into the lorry, nearly slipping from the snowy gangplank, lurched, and struck his head against a lantern hanging over the entrance. Thankfully, no one had seen him. He ducked inside, recoiling instantly at the smell. Two men remained, on litters that were stacked on racks. He hesitated. A face appeared at the entrance, shouting for Lucius to grab his end of the litter. He obeyed, realizing only as it left its bracket that he had forgotten about his wrist. Pain bolted up his arm, and he faltered, the body almost slipping off.

No one even acknowledged his incompetence. Another man climbed in, pushed him aside and took the body, and then the final litter was brought outside. He descended. Then the ambulance was empty, moving. Snow sloughed off in the vortices of lantern light. He saw his shadow swing against the wall of the church, and they were gone.

Inside the quarantine, Margarete hung her greatcoats by the door. He saw Zmudowski already at work, and two others that he hadn’t met. A pot of broth was steaming on a stove in the corner. The air was heavy, rank and damp. The wounded had been arranged on straw beds around the fire, and Margarete moved swiftly between them, asking questions while checking for a pulse.

Of the fourteen, eight were already dead and rigid. One had frozen in a seated position, his clothes in tatters, his mouth wide open in a scream. Lucius couldn’t tear his eyes away. He had never seen such a scream, teeth glittering in the crimson mouth…

“Oh, my God.”

“Doctor.”

“That man…”

“Please, Doctor, don’t stare, come.” Margarete pulled him on.

“That man, he lost his jaw, it’s—”

“He’s dead. He’s God’s. Not ours. Now, hurry, come.”

By then the living had been separated off. Three gunshot injuries to limbs; two head wounds and an abdominal wound. Almost all had frostbite. Margarete covered them with blankets and ordered soup for those who could drink. “Shouldn’t we bring them to the surgery?” Lucius asked. She shook her head. “Not yet. Not until they are warm and deloused. Unless they are heavily bleeding, Doctor, we clean them first. No one goes into the church until they are deloused. The last patient to bring a louse into the church killed fourteen soldiers and three nurses. I won’t let that ever happen again.”

Zmudowski had begun to strip the soldiers one by one, scrub them from a foamy bucket, and then send them shivering into a smaller, second room, where the others quickly swaddled them in clean clothing, powdery with lime.

Crouching by the moaning soldier with the abdominal wound, Margarete called Lucius over.

“See?” she said, lifting up the man’s fingers, his nails clotted with skin. “He’s been scratching. This, Pan Doctor, is the Beast.”

His tunic bore the insignia of a sapper unit. Beneath it someone had packed the wound with a sock, dinner linens, and photos, and as Margarete removed them, Lucius saw the lice, cupfuls of them, sloughing off in grainy clumps. There was a shout from the other side of the room, and Lucius turned to see that the patient with the head wound had risen and was heading toward the door. Margarete leapt for him, leaving Lucius alone. On the body before him, Lucius saw a last layer, a woman’s shawl that had adhered to the soldier’s abdomen by dried blood. He began to pull it off and found his hands full of intestines. Then Margarete was at his side. “What did you do? Oh! Mother of God! Never! Never remove the final layer until you have a new dressing ready. On the abdomen, no!” He tried to keep the intestines off the floor, but they continued to slip out in hot wet rolls. The sapper began to gasp. Lucius felt he was witness to a metamorphosis, a man turning inside out.

“Move, Doctor!”

Lucius fell back, sleeves wet with peritoneal fluid. Margarete grabbed a clean dressing and swaddled the man’s guts in one swoop and pushed them back inside, dirty with debris. She unrolled more dressings. With her free hand, she wrapped his belly.

She faced Lucius. “Wash your hands. Come with me. Now we operate. We’ll start with the head wounds, then amputate this foot, this leg, that elbow, this forearm; that arm we can let be.” She paused. “With Pan Doctor’s permission.”

“And this soldier?” Lucius asked, still looking at the sapper.

“Smelling like that?” She shook her head. “He’ll be dead by morning. Don’t worry. You didn’t do it; he was on his way. We keep him warm. If he wakes up we tell him he’s home; if he calls you his father, you call him son. Perhaps it is different in Vienna, but this is how we do it here.”

To the orderlies, who had whispered something Lucius couldn’t hear, Margarete said, “The doctor broke his hand. Soon it will heal. Until then, we will continue as before. Come, Doctor.”

But Lucius couldn’t turn his eyes. The soldier expelled something from his mouth and began to cough, his face twisted in pain. All around them the light seemed to have changed. The smells filled his nostrils, his head felt hot and damp…

“Come, Doctor.”

Then, to Zmudowski, she said, “Get that soldier morphine, now. See, Doctor, he will feel better. He doesn’t know what’s happening. I know it’s hard, but you’ll get used to it. Come.”

They burst into a cold blue light. Dawn was breaking. A glittering of snowflakes drifted from the beech. In the church, she grabbed a jug of amber liquid from the foot of the operating table, took a swig and splashed it over her hands, then passed it to Lucius. He sniffed, eyes smarting. “Horilka, Doctor,” she said. “Village specialty. Szőkefalvi called it Surgeon’s Courage. Keeps the hands sterile and the belly warm. Perhaps the only thing that’s not in shortage yet.”

A crate had been set out so she could reach the body on the table. Once more she washed her hands, this time in carbolic acid, its tarry odor lingering as she slipped on her gloves. She began with the soldiers with head wounds. The first was a young man, unconscious, a crush fracture extending from the top of the ear to the center of the forehead. It had been packed in the field, and when she removed the new dressing, she exposed an abscess extending deep into the brain. She whistled, “Our Mother in heaven. This is days old.” Slowly, she picked away the looser skull fragments, cleaned out the pus, and irrigated the wound, stopping to inspect the grey-pink tissue with a candle. “To think that’s where the thinking is!” she marveled, but she didn’t explore further. Instead she placed a rubber drain and secured it with packing. The orderlies gave him anti-tetanus serum and brought him away. She washed her gloves in carbolic and horilka as the second patient was brought to the table. This one had a simple fracture that did not extend past the dural membrane, and she only cleaned and dressed the scalp. Then she called for the amputations.

Zmudowski appeared with an ether mask and bottle, positioning himself at the head of the table. By afternoon, she had removed two feet and a hand with Lucius at her side, watching as she tied the limb off with a tourniquet, incised the skin and retracted the muscle, and with a single, fluid motion, sawed off the bone. She threw loose loops into the muscles and drew them together before setting the flap. To a patient with a shrapnel wound to the thigh, she asked, “How long ago did this happen, Private?” The answer was January. When he went under, she began to carve it away, murmuring as she went along, her voice like someone praying, cutting back the dead tissue until only pink, fresh bleeding flesh was left. By then, most of his thigh and hamstring were gone. The soldier stirred. They gave him more ether and cut off his leg.

By then, darkness had come, and Zmudowski returned with his lantern. Hopeful, Lucius wondered if they might break to eat, but then rounds had begun, as before, at the east end of the nave: the Austrian cavalryman, the Hungarian officer, the Czech sniper, and on. It was swifter now, the need for introductions gone. Halfway along the first row, flies circled above a soldier, an Austrian dragoon. She pointed. “God made flies to tell us where the rot is, Doctor.” She knelt to inspect the stump of his arm. “There,” she said. “It’s beginning. Can’t you see?”

He nodded.

“Now smell it,” she said. He hesitated a moment. “Closer, Doctor, with your nose.” And he leaned in, the sharp odor making his stomach turn. They brought the man back to the table, exposed an abscess reaching almost all the way to his axilla, and amputated the rest of his arm. An hour later they were back in the nave. Gruscinski, Redlich. Czernowitzski, docile as a lamb. Then into Fevers and Medical and Heads.

There she stopped suddenly, walked the length of the church, and returned with a shovel. “Move,” she said to a patient, his head wrapped in gauze. As if in drill, he rolled to the side, and she brought the shovel down hard upon his pillow of straw. She stirred it, and a pair of pink little heads rose up, twisting in the air. She brought the shovel down hard again.

“Szczur,” she said, as if it needed naming. Rat.

Zmudowski hurried off to get a pan. There were three more cases to see in Heads, and then the six men in Dying, down from eight the day before.

That night, Lucius slept again in his greatcoat, too exhausted now to be afraid. When dawn broke, there was a knock at his door, and they began again.

The next days were the same.

The ambulances arrived out of the black night, out of snowstorms, out of sun-glittering fields of ice. In his quarters, in the crossing, rounding in the church, he would hear the whistle, or the shout, “Incoming!” and the orderlies would deploy to help the stretcher crews while Margarete, in her two coats, breath steaming, directed them to the quarantine. They came from the mountains or the snow trenches dug into the sloping hills, many already dead from their wounds or from the cold, the others crying or staring out with terrified eyes as they were stripped and disinfected, as clods of frozen dirt and blood were dissolved in water, and tourniquets applied.

In the beginning, Lucius only watched. But by the end of the month, his hand strong enough to grip a scalpel, he began to assist Margarete with the simplest cases. Yes, a butcher’s work, he thought, this carving out of necrotic flesh, as Zimmer had promised. Yet it was extraordinary to think that he was allowed to do this, that he had been given permission, that there was no one there to ask him questions designed to humiliate him before the others, no famous professor to scold him for greeting the patient, no crowd of other students with whom to compete.

The first amputation he carried out was on the hand of an Austrian rifleman. A frostbitten purse of crushed bone, a single violet finger remaining, the hand had held together in the field by the simple virtue of having frozen, and once in the church it began to melt apart.

“A deep breath, Doctor.”

Margarete stood close to him as his scalpel pressed the forearm and finally broke the skin. He prepared the flap as she had shown him, dissecting back the muscle from the bone. But as he went to get the saw, she stopped him.

“Perhaps this is how it is done in Vienna, but in Galicia, you’ll need to cut a larger flap. In Galicia, that flap will never reach across the stump.”

“Of course. Like this?”

“More.”

“This?”

“No: more. Don’t be so shy.”

“Like this?”

“Like that.”

He looked up, glad his mask now hid a silly grin.

She handed him the saw. “Now go. Don’t stop. Zmudowski will hold him down if he awakes.”

But in Galicia, Pan Doctor…

Perhaps in Vienna they cut their suture knots too close; perhaps in Vienna, they let their dirty sleeves dangle in a wound; perhaps in Vienna they forgot cotton in a wound after they closed it, or left tourniquets on when they were no longer necessary and the patient was writhing.

But in Galicia, it’s done like this.

Perhaps in Vienna they took off the whole foot when only a toe was needed.

Perhaps in Vienna they are stingy with their drains, and make messes out of everything.

Perhaps in Vienna they didn’t step away to sneeze.

But in Galicia…

He learned.

Good, Pan Doctor.

Yes, that’s right. Stick your finger in, explore it. If you don’t do it, no one else will. Get the bullet out.

Good. Now tie off, Pan Doctor. Go.

Good. Very good.

Lovely.

Yes. Good. There.

Who taught you, Doctor? They should really be honored with a decoration.

There. Yes.

Go.