The Winter Soldier

7.

It was late afternoon when a whistle at the entrance announced a new patient had arrived.

Lucius found Margarete outside the church, with a peasant draped in a giant sheepskin cloak.

A coating of hoarfrost glistened on the wool like finely shattered glass. Steam rose from a great grey beard, which he had tucked into his collar. Over all: a cape, also of sheepskin, and atop this mountain, a black sheepskin hat.

“Look,” said Margarete. The man leaned over and pulled back a blanket covering a wheelbarrow to reveal a body, curled up among a pile of roots. “Alive,” said the man. “From over the valley. But it doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.” His Polish was halting, heavy, thick with Ruthenianisms, all throat and hum.

Snow was falling. They replaced the blanket and led the peasant through the gate and along the beaten path to the quarantine. By then Zmudowski and Nowak had arrived. As the orderlies prepared a fire, the visitor hooked his thumbs inside the hempen belt that bound his cloak. He spoke. It was his wife who found the soldier. They had been up by the pass, searching the woods for brukva—Lucius didn’t know what this was—when they came across a wagon. It must have been abandoned only recently, as it had yet to be stripped for firewood. Intact, too, no sign of shell-strike, just abandoned. A Christian truck, the man said, with a big red cross on its side. Inside were the men. All dead, nine of them, all but this one, buried at the bottom, beneath the other bodies. No life anywhere nearby but this one, and barely life at that. They had brought him here, for reward.

“Did he say anything when you found him?”

“No. No speak. No move. Breathe, just. If no breath, we don’t know it was alive.”

By then the orderlies were ready. Again, Margarete removed the blanket. Before them the soldier in the barrow was completely still, the only movement the flickering deliquescence of the snowflakes dusting his coat. For a terrible moment Lucius thought that between the church and the quarantine house, the man had died.

Then a wisping of a piece of dried grass on his lip betrayed his breath.

Gently, Lucius touched his fingers to the man’s shoulder. “Soldier?”

Instantly, the man recoiled. In truth, he only twitched, but the suddenness of it, and the stillness of the moment that preceded it, made it seem as if a small explosion had just detonated in the barrow. His head turned, his arms drew across his chest. Lucius stepped back. The man’s eyes were wide, whites visible around a pair of dark brown irises. His nose flared as he tried to take in breath. But no words, nothing save the flinch, the stare. Unbidden came the memory of the rabbits pilfered by the hussar on their journey to Lemnowice, ears back, too terrified to move.

“There,” Lucius said. “There, there. You’re safe. You’re in a hospital. You’ll be okay.”

Still the eyes.

“Hospital,” Lucius repeated, in German. Then again in Polish, Hungarian, Czech. He could have gone on. These words now part of him in so many tongues. Doctor, hospital. Quiet. Still.

“We should get him warm and dry,” he said, looking to Margarete.

She knelt then, stroking the soldier’s hair. This time he didn’t draw away. His eyelids were puffy, his cheeks reddened from exposure, the swelling giving them a slight cherubic quality. A fine beard covered his cheeks, and a wing-shaped blur of mud ran down the flank of his nose. Gently, Margarete cleaned pine needles from his eyebrows, his lashes, brushed his forehead clean of dirt. She looked at Lucius to signal that it was okay to touch him. He knelt and showed the man his empty hands before beginning to palpate around his head and neck. He tried to assess his back, but the barrow was too tight.

“Gently now.”

Zmudowski had joined them. Fearing an injury to his spine, they tried to lift him from below, but the barrow’s walls sloped inward, like a coffin’s, and they couldn’t get their hands around him. It didn’t matter. The man’s limbs were clenched so tightly that they could lift him almost by his arms alone.

They set him on the stretcher, where he remained in the same position. “There,” said Margarete at his side. She hushed him, though he wasn’t making any noise. Again she stroked his hair. In a soft voice, in Polish, she said, “You’re cold, your clothes are wet. We will check you for lice, get you new clothing. Nothing bad will happen. Now you’re safe.”

The sound of words seemed to calm him, whether or not he understood.

Again she looked up to signal they should start.

Slowly they began to strip his clothes, first the greatcoat, heavy, stuffed with what seemed to be paper. Then a second, thinner mackintosh, two sweaters, a blanket. Two layers of long underwear. The man inside was moist and pale, like the pulp of a nut. Both hands, pink with chilblains, were swollen up like gloves.

Zmudowski carried off the clothing to be disinfected, as Krajniak approached with the cresol and began to spray. For a moment the man was naked, while Margarete searched his skin for any signs of lice, her fingers swift, making no concessions to modesty. They wiped him down, covered him in a blanket, his body still coiled tight. “Soldier,” she asked, “who are you? What’s your name?”

But he only stared back, eyes dark above the red sheen of his cheeks.

“Doctor, look.” Across the room Zmudowski crouched over the pile of clothing, disinfectant bucket in one hand. He rose as Lucius approached. “Look.” He had extracted a sheaf of papers from the lining of the coat. They were wet and matted, stained with ink, now dusted with clotted lime. Lucius took a stack and gently began to peel them apart. They were sketches, of men, soldiers, trains, mountains, all drawn in the same skilled hand. Then others: children, a woman, naked, then details of her hand, her breasts, her legs.

“You drew these?” asked Zmudowski, looking at the soldier. There was no answer. He waved one of the nudes. “Can I keep it?” he asked, smile flashing within his beard. He lifted the coat and pulled out another clump of papers, then another. Lucius was still amazed by what the men stuffed into their coat linings for insulation. Military circulars, billiard felt, love letters, scavenged newsprint. He could have made a museum by now, he thought. The 1915–16 Lemnowice Exhibition of Material Used for Warmth.

Now he remembered the peasant in his furs, still waiting just inside the door.

“Thank you,” he said, turning to the man, and then to Krajniak: “See what you can find in the kitchen. Some onions maybe, a bottle of schnapps.”

The Russians paid in meat tins for their wounded, said the sheep-man.

“Please,” said Margarete. “You’d be lucky if they let you keep your coat.”

By the time Zmudowski had returned, they had dressed the winter soldier in the same clean clothes that had been worn by several dozen men.

The peasant counted the onions.

“You can stay the night,” said Lucius, but the man only grunted, and with the rank, wet smell of stable, he was off.

Lucius turned back. “I thought I was generous.”

“Very generous,” said Margarete. “There is more belly beneath that cloak than on all of us combined. We should be asking him for food.”

She turned back to the silent soldier. “Now, this one. Shall we bring him to the church?”

“Please, Sister,” said Lucius.

“Diagnosis?”

“No wound? For now, we call it Nervenshock, I guess.”

“Yes, Doctor. This is also what I thought.”

Nervous shock: but what did this even mean? Back in Vienna he had never heard of the condition. No mention by Wagner-Jauregg, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, Great Crown Counselor to the King. No word of it in the textbooks, nor the military manuals distributed by the Medical Service. All he knew came from Brosz and Berman. A new disease, born of the war, they told him. No sense to its symptoms, which seemed to simulate damage to the nerves, without yielding anything on autopsy. No agreement as to cause. The penetration of the skull by microscopic particles of ash or metal? A concussion of air? Or the effect of terror? In the field stations, in the regimental hospitals, they couldn’t even agree on a name.

Granatkontusion. Granatexplosionslähmung. Kriegszitterung. Kriegsneurose.

Shell-contusion. Shell-explosion paralysis. War-trembling. War nerves.

It was even worse in the west, they told him: an epidemic, like some kind of virus first stirred up in Flemish soil, now come east.

And treatments? he had asked them then. There the two had laughed. How do you treat something when you don’t know what it is? But he was earnest and they tried to answer. Many of the men got better just with rest. And the others… In the beginning, the sicker cases were sent back to Budapest and Vienna, for rehabilitation, which might take months. But now there were new cures, electricity applied to the limbs to stimulate movement, to the throat to get mute soldiers to talk. It was not clear if the electricity worked because it caused their frozen muscles to contract or because it also hurt and scared them. Sometimes they attached it to the eyes or testicles. Dr. Muck of Essen had devised a metal ball to drop down the throat of soldiers who had lost their speech, the sensation of suffocation causing them to gag, gags turning to sounds, then sounds to words.

“These men are cured?” asked Lucius, and Brosz raised his finger. “Ah, but since when was our goal to cure them? It’s to return them to the front.”

In Lemnowice, his first case of Nervenshock had been in late February, scarcely two weeks after he’d arrived. An Austrian private, one Georg Lenz of Wiener Neustadt, one of three men to survive when a shell struck his foxhole near Dolina. He had arrived pockmarked with tiny bits of gravel but otherwise unscathed. Except that his legs had ceased to work. His knees buckled when they tried to walk him, and when they asked him to move his toes, he stared at them with a strange indifference, as if his feet belonged to someone else. But his reflexes were normal, as was the function of his bowel and bladder. From an anatomical perspective, the injury was impossible, and yet Lucius couldn’t bring himself to diagnose Lenz as faking. There was something to the soldier’s terror, the way he watched the others, his screams at night, that couldn’t be feigned. They had found bits of the other soldiers in his hair and pockets. He had stayed just three days before he was evacuated to the rear.

The others followed similar patterns. A shell-strike against a foxhole, a trench, a transport vehicle. And then, sometimes after hours, the symptoms. The tremors, the paralysis, the twitching, lurching gaits, the bizarre contortions of their arms.

But there wasn’t always a blast. In May, a young Czech sergeant had been found wandering across the battlefield after he shot a dog for food and found a child’s hand inside its mouth. It had taken days before he said what happened. By Lemnowice, he was hollow-eyed, emaciated, gagging every time he tried to eat.

They kept the men in Heads, on the assumption that the injury was to the nerves, to the brain, but also because the other soldiers, with their missing hands and feet, didn’t take well to men without a wound. As they were often the only soldiers medically stable enough to make the journey back across the pass to a second-level hospital, they usually didn’t stay long. But when they did, and when duties were light, Lucius returned to their bedsides, intrigued, to repeat their exams, to try to wrench from them the story of what had happened. He wrote to Feuermann, then at a regimental hospital in Gorizia, and received similar stories in return. Feuermann subscribed to a psychological explanation for the injury, that the horror of the fighting produced a disruption in the fibers of the brain. But Lucius wasn’t satisfied by this. The horror? he replied. Since when was this a scientific term? And a disruption in the fibers? Brosz and Berman said the autopsies on men who’d later died showed nothing; their brains looked like everybody else’s. What was the mechanism? he asked Feuermann. War and fear had been with them forever. But cases like these had never been described.

It is like the mystery we once searched for beneath the microscope, he wrote, aware that his words were getting lofty, but unable to hold back. Or that I once was seeking with my X-rays and my dogs. Something beneath the skin, imperceptible, waiting to be found.

In the days that followed, the winter soldier didn’t leave his bed.

“What’s your name?” they asked him in the morning. “Where are you from? What happened?”

The questions yielded nothing. Sometimes the man watched them with his wide eyes, his gaze shifting from one person to another, before settling on something hovering in the air beyond. Other times he squeezed his eyes shut and pursed his lips tight beneath his nose, almost cutting off his breath. He didn’t speak, didn’t rise; he soiled his blankets and his clothes, leaving Zmudowski cursing as he shoveled away the rank, wet straw.

After accepting the broth on the night of his arrival, he began to refuse his meals.

Margarete sat vigil at his side, gently pressing his lips with the edge of the spoon, wiping his chin and neck as the soup dripped down.

“You’re safe here,” she said. “Whatever happened to you in the woods, it’s over now.”

But he never swallowed when she fed him, and the mess of food only attracted the rats, who sniffed about his neck without eliciting a stir. His eyes took on an empty gaze, his eyelids seemed almost translucent, his skin became like crepe paper and tented when Lucius pinched it. His blood pressure began to drop.

Is this what it looks like to die from losing one’s mind? Lucius wondered.

He returned to his books, but he found nothing.

The hospital had a spare nasogastric tube of India rubber, untouched since the last soldier using it had died. They boiled it and slipped it through the new man’s nostril and down his throat. Now three times a day, Second Nowak stood above him, pouring lukewarm broth into a funnel attached to the free end of the hose.

Outside, the storm grew worse.

A north wind, howling out of Russia, colder than any Lucius had known. Huge drifts built up against the north transept, and the walls creaked with their weight. Branches snapped from the beech tree, skittering across the roof.

The transport of the wounded ceased. There were no new cases, no evacuation convoys to take the wounded to the rear. All efforts turned toward warmth. Firewood details put on three layers of greatcoats and forged their way into the cold. Wet logs steamed against the stoves. Ad hoc fireplaces blazed in the corners, yet by morning, the slush in the night pots had frozen solid. The soldiers began to sleep together, three beneath their blankets, the outside men rotating to the middle during the night. At mealtimes, the cooks hurried the food across the courtyard, shattering the ice that formed over the soup pots during the short transit through the cold. Lucius took his notes in pencil, because the ink froze in its well.

They moved the kitchen to the church. The smell of boiled onions filled the air, and the soldiers gathered around the bubbling vats of soup.

At times, patrols emerged out of the snow, just seeking warmth. They came on skis, or hand-built snowshoes, their bodies swaddled in blankets, faces wrapped in scarves, even their eyes covered with thin layers of gauze. They told incomprehensible tales of the winter. Trains buried inside snowdrifts. Crows frozen out of the sky like black scythes of ice. There were no wounded, they said. The cold took anyone who couldn’t move.

Without new patients, Lucius turned to the drawings they found stuffed in the lining of the silent soldier’s coat, hoping they might provide some clue.

Piece by piece, he peeled them apart. There were dozens, their ink faded with the cycles of freeze and thaw, each page bearing ghostly impressions of the next. The man’s skill was formidable; he must have been an artist once. Briefly Lucius wondered if he had been hired to document the war. There were lonely pastures, village scenes, sketches of city streets. Camp life with its kaleidoscope of infantry and cavalry. Lancers with their plumed shakos, and infantry in puttees and spiked pickelhaubes, leather rucksacks on their backs. Priests offering the Eucharist to ranks of genuflected men. There were trains and stations, crowds of cheering families, field kitchens, a lone horseman galloping down the road.

Looking through them, it was possible to build a story of deployment, thought Lucius: from town to city, city to camp, camp to plains and on into the forests, to primeval scenes of fallen logs and bracken and filtered sunlight, wild boar and roe deer, sketches of little songbirds, a hare, a winter fox.

And then among these, he began to turn up others, not so easily explained. Eyes hidden in the bracken and the beech leaves. Skies tiled with airships. A lonely wheel perched high upon a pillar in an empty field.

A crowd of naked children with carnival heads of wolves and boar. Serpentine dragons, curling in the corners of the pages. Faces in the torn anatomy of fallen soldiers, and shadowed creatures lurking in the darkness of a crumpled coat.

Sometimes Margarete joined him.

“Does it tell you anything?” she asked.

He didn’t know. Save that whatever had happened no longer seemed as simple as the effects of a bomb blast. It went deeper, farther back, it seemed.

“Dreams?” she asked, picking up the sketch of a tree, upon which bodies hung like fruit.

A recollection of his journey from Nagybocskó: the open field, the hussar, the carnations blooming from the horses’ heads. And in the darkness of the forest, the frozen, turning body. “Perhaps,” he said.

She set the image down and slowly ran her fingers over the hanging bodies. “Do you think he will get better?”

Again, he didn’t know. If this was madness, he had even less of a chance of curing it. He had been to three lectures on insanity, seen a single patient, a man diagnosed with dementia praecox, who believed himself controlled by electric wires emanating from the Emperor. But how were such men treated? Bromides, morphine, cold baths, gardening… and did any of this even work? Then he thought of other madnesses, of the myths he’d pored over as a child, the sudden assaults of screaming Furies, their victims scuttling back in horror from the beating of their tormentors’ wings.

They both looked down again at the page, to where a line of little dragons curled through a group of portrait sketches, eyeless, with waving manes and cryptic markings on their bellies. The creatures now were strangely familiar, as if Lucius had seen them once before. In some tale of knights and monsters, though he couldn’t remember where.

After a week, the soldier began to moan.

It started at night. Eyes wide, back and forth he shook, the nasogastric tube dragging across the blankets rank with piss and broth. The sound was low, less a scream of pain and more a frantic prayer. It rose and fell, a wind of his very own.

Across the church, the other men began to protest. Quiet! Stop crying, or I’ll come and make you stop. Even the disoriented soldiers in Heads grew agitated, cursing him with stuttering lisps.

“Shhhh,” said Margarete, crouching by the soldier once again, caressing his hair, hushing him until he calmed.

They left. An hour later he began again.

This time they found him sitting up, his hands clenched in his hair. Spittle formed around his mouth; his limbs were tense as pipes. On his wrist, his pulse raced, faster than Lucius could count. Eyes pinched, lids white. The hum horrid, from somewhere deep within his throat.

Zmudowski looked out over the ward. “You have to give him something, or another patient will kill him before the night is done.”

Lucius rummaged through the medicine chest, found some hypodermic tablets of morphine sulfate, dissolved one, and drew it into a syringe. He approached, thumb in the plunger ring, ready to inject.

The humming was constant, louder now. Lucius looked to Margarete, and she turned to the orderlies. “Hold him, tight,” she said.

But the soldier didn’t even seem to register the needle. Half an hour later, they tried another dose of morphine. Then potassium bromide. Atropine. Chloral hydrate. Morphine again.

Finally, after an hour, he began at last to nod off. It was close to two.

At five, Margarete found Lucius in his quarters.

She was sorry to wake him so soon, she said, but the soldier had begun again.

The snow swirled about them as they hurried together across the courtyard. Inside the church the man lay on his back, his chin contracted to his chest. He looked like someone who’d been bound there, raising his head to watch his torturers. His body was as rigid as the night before, his breath sharp and sudden, the veins of his neck and face so distended that, despite all medical knowledge to the contrary, Lucius feared that they could burst. A nostril was dark with clotted blood, and a stream of blood and mucus had dried against his cheek. “He was up at four,” said Margarete. “He tore his nasogastric tube out.” She placed her fingers on his wrist. “And his pulse, again…” Still the man stared past them to his devils in the air.

Again, Lucius rummaged through the cabinet. The soldier seemed even worse now, his eyes wilder than earlier that night. Was the morphine making him delirious? But what were they to do? The army manuals recommended tranquilizing anguished soldiers into sleep. More chloral? Bromides? Ether? But this felt like veterinary medicine, and this case was different from the common soldier delirious with pain. But what then? Rub his chest with camphorated oil? Feed him more beef tea? Besides the morphine, the bromides and atropine and chloral, the only drug for nervous agitation was some Veronal they hadn’t used for months. He stopped and looked at the vial; half the pills had crumbled into dust. For seizures, but also a sedative, in fashion in Vienna with his mother’s set, though not—of course—his mother, who seemed spared of any nerves to calm. He hadn’t thought to use it for his soldiers, had no need for it, not with the industrial quantities of bromides provided by the Medical Service. He tapped out a pill, then two, and returned to the soldier’s side.

Unable to open the man’s mouth, he parted his lips and crushed the tablet against his teeth. Fragments dribbled down his chin. Margarete, at his side, wiped them back up with her thumb and pushed them far inside the soldier’s cheek.

The man remained motionless, his face red, his fists clenched so tightly that they would later find his nails had pierced his palms.

From the high windows came a cobalt hint of dawn.

“I think we should make rounds on the other patients, Doctor,” said Margarete. “Before he starts to scream again. If he is not sleeping in an hour, we’ll try something else.”

Their ritual began again in Limbs. They were halfway down the second aisle, when a whistle from the south transept broke across the church.

Hurrying, they found the soldier resting on his side, breathing softly. His eyes closed, but lightly now.

“He spoke,” said Zmudowski.

They crouched at his side. Again it came, a murmur, low and soft.

“I can’t understand,” said Lucius.

“Szomjas vagyok,” said Margarete. “It’s Hungarian: I’m thirsty.”

They brought him a bowl of soup from the kitchen in the transept.

The man let Margarete feed him, opening his mouth to meet each spoonful. He didn’t move his arms. He kept his eyes away from her, and from Lucius and Zmudowski, both crouching behind her, more than a little awestruck, as if a soldier eating soup was one of the most amazing sights that they had ever seen.

The effect lasted until shortly after noon.

Then: staring again, body rigid, save the slight rocking back and forth. The same incantatory hum. From his greatcoat pocket, Lucius took the bottle of Veronal and tapped out two more pills. This time he pushed them far back into the soldier’s cheek.

Again, after an hour, they found him sitting, staring at his fingers in his lap.

“Soldier?” asked Margarete.

She touched his shoulder. He jumped but she didn’t withdraw her hand, and he didn’t move away. In Hungarian she asked a question Lucius couldn’t understand.

His answer was whispered.

She spoke again in halting Hungarian, her eyes darting quickly to Lucius’s, as if unable to contain the miracle of this awakening alone. And again the man answered, his voice slightly louder, occasionally catching on his words.

At last, after what seemed like a very long time, she looked up. “This is Sergeant József Horváth, Doctor. Hungarian, from Budapest, he says. He thinks it is October, that he’s at his garrison in Hungary. That he is just waiting for his mother to come and get him. That’s all I could get. There is a stammer, as I think you can perceive.”

A stammer. Lucius felt the old twist in his tongue, the metal of the apparatus.

He looked back at her. “Did you ask him what happened before he came here?”

Margarete leaned forward again and spoke.

They waited a long time, but this time the soldier just stared past them into space.

They began to schedule the doses twice a day, at the start of morning and evening rounds. They didn’t want to wait for the rocking or the moaning or the tension in his body to return. While once Lucius had worried that the man would die before the evacuation convoys reached them, now he feared the opposite: that they would take him back before he could be cured. Through the winter, to the second-level field hospitals with their prowling conscription officers. Or worse, to Vienna, to Budapest. To the specialists, with their electricity and Muck balls.

This weeping, stuttering man, an orb of steel pushed down his throat.

Outside the snow kept falling. The snow: soldier’s curse and soldier’s friend. Now, it only was the snow that gave them time.

What is happening seems nothing less than a resurrection, he wrote that first night to Feuermann, rhetoric soaring once again, but needing to share his exhilaration. I’ve seen men come out of comas, and others gently thaw to life after being pulled from frozen rivers. But I’ve never seen such a transformation. Someone so unreachable return with just a little pill. Someone in such despair. Woundless, and yet seeming to bear, like some scapegoat, the misery felt by everyone else.

But how? Looking down at his thumb, he could still feel the wet pills crumbling as he pushed them deep into Horváth’s cheek. He had no explanation for the strange magic he had just discovered. But most advances in medicine involved some serendipity. What was important now was that he watched, and studied, carefully, and learned.

Like Lazarus, he wrote to Feuermann, then crossed this out, embarrassed by the grandiosity it implied. If Horváth was Lazarus, then who did that make him?

But now, almost daily, Horváth was changing, awakening, gaining strength.

He began to sit up on his own, to accept the spoons of broth without much prompting, to use the basin for his needs. Soon he was holding his own utensils. He stood. He stood and fell, but then he stood without falling. He took a step. On the first of March, Lucius watched as Margarete walked him, shuffling, up and down the aisle of the church, her arm in his. It’s like we’re going to be married, Margarete joked, and Lucius laughed, though inside he felt a twinge of jealousy, just a little bit. For Horváth, because of the way that Margarete held his arm, but also for Margarete. It was my pills, my Veronal, he wanted to remind her. He felt almost as if there were an unspoken competition for who could be the one to claim this victory. As if they were both falling a little bit in love with their silent visitor or, more, with the cure that they had wrought.

And they weren’t alone. The others, who had once cursed Horváth for his screaming, had repented, and in their repentance, now showered him with hope. They filed past to look at his drawings, set him closest to the fire when the men played music, and held out their cigarettes so he could take a puff. When the sun made a miraculous appearance on the fourth, and some of the braver souls took off their shirts to take in the fleeting rays, and others, armless, heads in bandages, played soccer with a bundle of rags, they brought him out with them to serve as a goalpost. He said nothing, only stared up at the great beech tree or watched the playing men. But peaceful now, almost angelic, breath steaming from his chapped, pink lips.

Yes, it was extraordinary, Lucius thought. The joys of diagnosis, the ecstasies of study: none of it could have prepared him for this. He wished not only Feuermann could see it, but also Zimmer, and Grieperkandl, and the rector, even his mother. See, he wished to say. Not your kind of doctor; this is the kind of doctor I will be. And Father, too, would understand the glory of the discovery. Yes, he could feel the presence of the old retired major in his polished boots, standing beside him in the churchyard as they had once stood in the mirrored hallway, the glorious wings of ostrich feathers mounted on their backs.

And I was once content with being just a barber surgeon, a bone-cutter, a setter of broken limbs.

They gave him paper, pencil, and asked him to draw. Slowly, with encouragement, and usually with Veronal, he began to sketch out shapes, fragments of landscapes, faces. He squinted, working with great effort; at times he licked his lips in concentration. By then the apple-like swelling in his face had gone away, leaving the finest craquelure of reddened vessels across his nose and cheeks and slightly puffy eyes. He must have been quite handsome, Lucius realized. There was something almost ethereal in the glow of his skin and the faint tint of plum around his eyes, and Lucius couldn’t help but feel another pang of envy as Margarete shaved his beard and combed his wavy hair, and dressed him in a clean pair of salvaged fatigues.

Slowly, Lemnowice began to fill Horváth’s pages, like a memory album, and as the village had likely never seen a camera, perhaps the only one. The church. The soccer-playing men, the soldier in the bed beside him. A sketch of Margarete in three-quarter profile, then other sketches of her eyes and mouth and hands. A taller, looming figure in a greatcoat: Pan Doctor, said Margarete, though its features were indistinct. And then: more airships, the portraits of mysterious children, the eyeless dragons crawling everywhere across the page.

“What are these little creatures?” Margarete asked Horváth one day toward the end of his second week of convalescence. But then, all of a sudden, Lucius, peering closer, knew.

The long, thin bodies with their manes and eyeless heads. The cryptic markings on their chests. Not manes but gills. Not dragons. Not on their chests, but inside. Their hearts.

“Grottenolm,” said Lucius.

Horváth looked up, and his dark eyes met Lucius’s.

“Sorry, Pan Doctor?” said Margarete.

“Grottenolm,” said Lucius again. “As a boy, I used to visit them in the Imperial Collection. They are little salamanders, with translucent skin.” A memory now, of the frightened girl in the Ludwig II suite on that night of his supposed deflowering. But how strange to find them here, he thought, these rarities from the darkest corners of the aquarium, where lonely little boys pressed up against the tanks and harried governesses wiped their nose marks from the glass.

His eyes hadn’t left Horváth. Had he been there too, in the museum? And what now did it mean that they had reappeared within his anguished drawings? A nightmare? A hallucination? Or like the recurring faces of men and women he suspected to be Horváth’s family, were they something to cling to, an escape? Were they like the shadowed monsters in his sketches, or their antidote?

“You know them, Grottenolm,” said Lucius, and with this third utterance, he saw something else register in Horváth’s gaze. It was almost imperceptible—a sense of recognition, a flickering of memory—but he had seen it. There had been some kind of connection, not only between the two of them but deeper, to something farther back and shared in childhood, suspended in that word.

He turned to Margarete. “Tell him that we’ll get him home,” he said.

The following afternoon, an evacuation detail arrived in Lemnowice, looking for men sturdy enough to make the journey down to Nadworna through the cold.

Slowly, Lucius and Margarete led the ambulance driver past the patients. They chose a Polish private recovering from pneumonia, a Czech infantry officer from Heads who was ready for rehabilitation, and twelve others from Fractures and Amputations.

“I think he’s ready,” said Margarete, when they reached Horváth.

Lucius hesitated, looking down at the soldier, now sleeping peacefully, arm draped across his face. No, he thought. Not before his resurrection was complete. There was little doubt Horváth was strong enough to go. But what would happen then? Nadworna was but a stopping point. From there they would have to take him farther, to another hospital, and Lucius worried that the other hospitals wouldn’t know how to care for him. There, Horváth could lose everything Lucius’s alchemy had wrought.

Margarete listened quietly as he told her this, in more careful, sober words.

“He wants to go,” she said at last.

“Wants to go? He told you?”

“He asked for Mama. Haza. Home.”

Lucius hesitated; he had not expected this kind of opposition. Hadn’t Margarete felt the same thrill at his discovery, the first steps of Horváth’s rehabilitation, the first inklings of the person who was going to emerge? She had been with him the day before, had seen Horváth’s face, the fleeting awakening as Lucius recognized the salamanders in his drawings. Wasn’t she also tiring of amputations? Surely, she wished to see what happened next…

A whistling came from the walls as the wind picked up outside. “I’m not sure he understands,” said Lucius. “It’s freezing. And the ambulance is heading north, deeper into Galicia. Not to Mama. To a hospital in Poland. And if he’s better, back to the front.”

“I know. But that’s true of any patient, Pan Doctor. He’s been here three weeks already. They can give him Veronal just as well as we can, can’t they? We’ll send instructions. We can’t treat him as if he’s different. You know that.”

“But he is different, you’ve seen the progress…,” said Lucius. He felt now that he was arguing not with her, but with a second presence, invisible, but very near. So he added, “You’ve heard what they are doing to such men to get them battle-ready, using electricity, Muck balls… It’s torture…”

“I’ve heard,” she interrupted. “But we’re a field hospital, not a rehabilitation hospital. Patch and send, no? If a man is healthy enough to make the journey, we evacuate him. If I must remind Pan Doctor Lieutenant, there are Cossacks just across the plains.”

“The front is a hundred kilometers away, Sister.”

“Pan Doctor. The front moves fast.”

Outside, the snowdrifts creaked against the roof. They stood facing each other, in the crossing, in the thin light from above. For the first time in memory, he found himself angry with her. He sensed his voice had risen, that he was uneasy that he felt so much at stake.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have an oath. To do no harm.”

“Of course.” Lips pinched, she curtsied, a sign of disagreement he had come to know quite well. She turned to go, then stopped.

“Pan Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope.”

The lorry was waiting outside the church.

Snow dusted the hood and canvas shelter. A pair of village children, carrying firewood, had stopped to watch them. Lucius followed the evacuees outside, where they saluted him, one after the other, and climbed into the back. The canvas door was buttoned shut. Were it not for the faint coughing of the Polish private, there would have been no sign of any life inside.

The driver knelt before the engine and turned the crank. The engine wheezed, then failed to catch. Again the driver tried. This time it didn’t make any sound at all.

He rose, cursing. “The hoses have frozen. I’ll need hot water.”

He went back into the church, leaving the patients behind. Lucius remained outside, uneasy that the men had just been left out in the cold. And this driver seemed careless, he thought, and he didn’t like how small and vulnerable the lorry looked. Inside the canvas shelter, the benches were bare; the men would have nothing but their blankets, and one another, to stay warm. What if the Polish private’s pneumonia worsened again? Was this why he was coughing? And the Czech officer—he still grew confused at times. And now the sun was setting. What if they had to stop at night?

At least Horváth wasn’t among them, he thought. Yes, he tried to reassure himself: he was relieved he’d kept Horváth behind.

But the others… He had half a mind to unfurl the canvas door and get his patients, when the driver returned, lugging a pot of steaming water that heaved and splattered on the earth.

That night, paces away from József Horváth, Lucius poured the remaining Veronal out onto a piece of paper.

Sixteen tablets. Eight days before they began to lose him again; nine, ten if one counted the pills that had turned to dust.