The Winter Soldier

9.

He remained out in the cold for a very long time.

In the distance, he watched the convoy descend the road, disappearing behind the houses before it reappeared again, a tiny black shape that vanished at last within the drifts.

A southern wind was beginning to stir, whipping the tops of the pine trees. Still he waited. He waited until his hands ached and the tears were frozen in the corners of his eyes, and the burning cold had risen up his feet and into the bones of his legs, and he began to wonder if, by sheer will, he too could wait beneath the beech until it all went numb.

Inside, the warmth of the church drew blood so swiftly to his head that he had to brace himself against the door.

Margarete was crouching by Horváth’s pallet. She must have sensed Lucius approach. She turned.

“I don’t think you should come closer, Doctor,” she said.

He took another step, but she rose to block him, her voice firmer. “Pan Doctor, you should rest. You must protect yourself.”

Then he tried to force past her, but she lifted up her arms to stop him. “Doctor, I don’t think that you should see.”

József Horváth remained in Lemnowice for another week.

Margarete moved him to the chancel and hung a sheet around him. Lucius wanted to go to him, to apologize, to explain that he’d been powerless to stop Horst and his men. But Margarete prevented him. Now she was blunt. It was no longer for Lucius’s sake, she said. Horváth thought Lucius had done this to him. “That you wouldn’t let him leave. That you kept him. That you brought Horst.”

“That I brought Horst?” Lucius protested. But it was the other accusations he couldn’t repeat. That you kept him. That you wouldn’t let him leave. He looked again at her, her face now drawn and tired. But the reasons! he wished to say. The cold evacuation lorry, the Muck balls, the fact that they had come so close to cure. Oh, but who was he arguing with? “I thought…” He tried again. “I didn’t know that this would happen. I thought that it was best…”

“I know, Pan Doctor. I know you thought that it was best.”

He waited, trying to decipher the intent behind her words. He expected that she would remind him of what she had said just days before. You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope. That she would tell him what was now so clear to him, that in his hubris, in some fantasy about shared childhood memories of silly little salamanders, he had committed one of the great sins of medicine, choosing to work a miracle over the mundane duty not to harm.

But he heard no blame, only compassion.

He wrung his hands, began again. “Please,” he said. “Please, let me see him. I will do anything to…”

Again he stopped. To what? Atone? He knew, and Margarete knew, and Horváth, or what remained of Horváth, knew. Barring a miracle, another miracle, it was too late.

Alone, Margarete amputated both of Horváth’s feet because of frostbite, and then his left leg when a wound infection spread above his knee. As for his mind, after a day Horváth was back to where he’d been before he arrived in the wheelbarrow. He didn’t eat. Margarete had to catheterize his bladder, perform enemas when he retained his stool. Behind the curtain, she spent hours with him, murmuring her soft incantations as she’d done before. Indeed, it seemed as if she rarely left him. One night, sick with remorse, Lucius had returned to the church to find that in exhaustion she had fallen asleep by Horváth’s pallet. Watching her—sitting on the floor, knees to one side, habit pooling, shoulders slumped, her head resting in her hand—he had wished that he could take her place. It wasn’t only his desire for repentance, he realized. He felt as if he were an intruder on a secret, a rite he didn’t understand. He wanted to share what she shared, not only with Horváth, but—and this appeared to him now with such clarity—all their patients. Something that he, with his distance, his learning, his diagnoses and orders, could never know. He had not forgotten that in Horváth’s drawings, somewhere, were the portraits of Margarete, while the sketch of the doctor was a looming, shadowed figure. As if Horváth had already known.

Alone, outside, at dawn, Lucius dug up the snow around the tree. But no matter how deep he dug, he saw the stain, pink and glistening, like the ice of a fishmonger’s stall.

When the next ambulance detail came to Lemnowice, they wrapped Horváth in blankets and carried him out of the church on a stretcher. The detail was heading north, away from Horváth’s home in Hungary, but they couldn’t wait much longer. His pulse had become irregular; they worried that another infection secondary to his wound had spread. Perhaps, at a larger hospital, they could help him, Margarete said, and Lucius nodded. Now, he had little hope that Horváth would survive the journey through the snow, but he would not disagree with her again.

Indifferent to all this came April.

Beams of light burst across the nave as one snowdrift after another slid from the roof. The light, the smell, the melting hills brought back his memories of the Scarcity, the foraging for potherbs in the hills. But by virtue of a supply oversight no one was eager to correct, they found themselves well-stocked with food.

Still, he waited, hopeful that he might resume his excursions with Margarete. If only he could walk with her again, return to the ruins of the watchtower, or sit in the forest’s slanting light and hear her songs. Perhaps then, and there, they could begin to rebuild what he’d destroyed.

But the new soldiers had begun to come.

Like the songbirds, like the snowmelt, like the march of wildflowers, they seemed to follow spring.

The first came in the middle of the month, following a brief skirmish in the valley of the Pruth. A nameless, rail-thin, red-haired man found wandering in a tunic but no trousers, eyes empty, grinding his teeth.

From Uzhok Pass: a cook who left his tent at night to urinate and collided with the bayoneted belly of a village girl hanged for alleged spying. Pásztor was his name: Hungarian, a once-dapper moustache now disappearing beneath an unshaven beard. Incontinent of bowel and bladder, fingers constantly fretting his forehead as if there were still something sticking to his brow.

From Stanislau: an infantryman named Korsak, spine arched, pigeon-toed since being thrown by a land mine, neck twisted despite all efforts to keep it straight.

And on. Ungvár: right leg severed by a derailed train car, now unable to move his left. Gesher, from Turka, who had discovered a group of rotting bodies in a granary, tasting flesh each time he ate. Wechsler, Kolmar, blind and deaf, but not.

He thought of what Berman and Brosz had told him about the Western Front. An epidemic, something driven up from Flemish soil, now come east.

Just weeks before, he thought, and they would have fascinated him, these mysteries. But the specter of Horváth hung over everything. Now he could only think of what Horst would do if he found more of these soldiers without wounds.

He tried Veronal.

He tried Veronal, chloral hydrate, morphine. He tried potassium bromide to calm them and oral cocaine hydrochloride to wake them up. He tried atropine until they were delirious, adrenalin chloride when they were slow. He massaged twisted arms with whale oil, only to watch the loosened muscles seize back up. He tried pleading, tried walking them, moving the jaws of those who didn’t eat. He read to them, whispered, sang. Tried sunshine and cold. Gave them double rations, threatened to withhold their food. Urged them to remember wives and children, sweethearts, parents. Warned them of what would happen if the recruiters came.

But nothing worked. There was no sense to the disease, he thought, no pattern in the damage to their nerves. Now he began to doubt everything. Had he even helped Horváth at all? Had the man’s recovery all been Margarete’s doing? Or did most wounds, whether of the mind or body, just heal up on their own?

Margarete, too, had changed. She moved slowly now, always watching the door. At mealtimes, they tried in starts to speak, but she broke off with the slightest sound. Twice, falsely alerted, they hurried to the door, certain that Horst had returned. But each time, as they peered out through the arrow slit, there was nothing but the empty street.

And then there were others, soldiers who could have fought again but now refused.

Their war was over, they told him with finality. They had once been patriots, but all reasons for their patriotism had long been lost.

Why should I shed blood for Austria? the Czech and Polish and Hungarian and Romanian and Ruthenian soldiers asked him. When Austria sends us into battle in front of her own?

With shoes made of cardboard!

And two men for every gun!

“They will hang you for desertion,” Lucius told them.

Ha! Then let them come!

He stood with Margarete outside the sacristy. Late April. The days now warm.

She had brought him there so that they could be alone. “Zeller, the new boy from the dragoons, said that conscription details have been canvassing the hospitals up and down the line,” she said. “He was in Delatyn, saw them hanging men for desertion. I think it will only be a matter of time.”

She paused. “Have you thought of what you’ll do when they return?”

For the past month, Lucius had thought of nothing else. Now slowly he spoke the words for the first time. “With the nervous cases? I don’t think I have a choice. It’s too warm for Anbinden, but not for hanging. At least with redeployment the soldiers will stand a chance.”

Nearby, a knot of sparrows was bickering over seeds liberated from the spring melt. She watched them, eyes drifting to a shivering of something passing in the grass. “Yes,” she said, at last. “Yes, I understand.”

He searched her face. “You don’t seem convinced.”

She now spoke slowly. “I think that this time you’ve done everything you can, to get them well, or home.” Then she paused. Her eyes were dark with sleeplessness, the slight plumpness of her face now gone. The wimple, which she had always worn so crisply pressed, was rumpled and uneven. Yet all about them, in the courtyard, were birds and bright green leaves and flowers, so much life.

When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It was softer now, almost as if offering a valediction. “Doctor, you know that your duty is to return men to the front. That is your oath. Patch and send. Know that I understand this.”

He turned to face her. “And what does that mean?”

“Just that. Because I think, for the first time, our oaths are different. That is all.”

May.

Hills redolent of peat and mint and wild anise; the clouds cirrus, mosquitoes swarming around the courtyard doors. A mound of fresh soil behind the church. Were anyone to look, drops of candle wax still lay on the earth; the name in the ledger with the rest.

It was afternoon when the whistle rose above the nave. She: south transept, dirty bandage in her hands. He in the chancel. They both stood. Then the words, Horst. He’s back.

He felt a cold wind, heard a man screaming, saw the eyes.

She ran.

The rest happened so quickly that it was only afterward that Lucius could piece it all together. The rush of her robes as she leapt over the pallets. The soldiers’ turning faces. His own swift steps, his hand on her shoulder, her gaze flashing with warning as she tore herself away. Then out from the narthex, door slamming behind her as she burst into the light, leaving but the narrow arrow slit of day.

The lieutenant was in his saddle, finishing a cigarette, when he heard the wailing, caught the grey flash of her robes. A single batman at his side, also smoking. Wagon farther down the road. She was upon him before he could react. “Save us!” she screamed. She seized his leg, kissed him, his horse. “Save us! Save us! All dead!” In German, her accent slushed and strange.

“What is it?” said Horst. Horse snorting. Two steps, ears erect, flies lifting from its flanks.

But she didn’t answer. She wailed, clung to him, as if trying to pull him from his mount. Head now bare, wimple around her neck, her hair cropped short.

Her hair: even in the terror of the moment, behind the door, watching, Lucius noticed. Her hair, auburn, the whiteness of her neck.

Screaming. “Come, come! The Beast! The Pest! Oh, it has taken them, oh, God, oh, God in heaven, She has taken all.”

By then Horst had begun to look about uneasily. The empty courtyard, the silence, the wailing nurse with her shorn head.

“The Louse! The Louse!”

“Speak sense! I don’t understand.”

“Her! Her!”

“Calm yourself! What do you mean? Typhus?”

An inhuman sound rose from her throat. She clawed her face with fingers muddy from the horse’s flank. Now Horst stared down at her with unadorned revulsion. A flash of recognition, of other abandoned outposts, other maddened survivors of a plague.

She surged, grabbed him by his riding boots, clawed at his leg. Head teeming with lice, waving her robes rank with pestilence. For a moment it seemed as if she would drag him down, but Horst lifted his crop and struck.

Again she was upon him. “Don’t leave! Save us! Please! She’ll kill us all!”

Again the crop. Again she came, now he was ready with his boot. Twice. The crack loud, seeming to echo off the hills.

And that was it. Spray of red, shimmer of horse flank, and he was gone.

She was on her knees when Lucius reached her.

She held her face in both hands, rocked, tried to rise, but fell, then tried again to stand. Blood ran down her hands and into the sleeves of her habit. She didn’t see Lucius coming and fought him off at first.

“Margarete. It’s me.”

“Go, hide!”

For a second, Lucius froze, aware now of his incaution. He turned back. The road was empty. Clothes flapped on a clothesline. A pair of chickens had resumed their survey of the mud.

“He’s gone.” He looked at her. Blood was running freely. He pressed the wimple to the wound. “Inside, quickly. The bleed looks arterial.”

By then Zmudowski had arrived. “My God.”

“Hurry, go and get supplies,” said Lucius.

“Not in the church,” said Margarete. “Take me to the sacristy. I don’t want the pity of the men.”

Zmudowski looked to Lucius.

“Go,” said Lucius, “Hurry. Please.”

He led her, stumbling, through the gate and into the courtyard, and on into her room.

It was his first time inside, and he was struck by a sense of having suddenly entered into a private world, and one quite different from what he had imagined. It seemed almost too empty, too small, too sad even, to think that she passed so many hours there alone. Too human, he thought. As if he had stumbled upon her diary only to discover that she thought the same simple, common thoughts as everybody else. Bunches of dried wildflowers decorated the bare walls, her greatcoat hung from a peg, and a single shelf of rough-hewn pine held a blanket and a pile of folded garments. A stool sat at the priest’s desk, where several medical handbooks had been neatly stacked. Wounds and Dressings. Drill Regulations for Sanitary Officers. Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance. Her bed sat beneath the single window, and a piece of paper had been pinned to the wall under the sill. As he approached he saw it was one of Horváth’s sketches. Movement stopped; the world emptied of air. But it was just a country scene, a little Carpathian village nestled on a mountain slope. Valley of trees and pasture. On a road, a little girl was walking, a bundle of hay upon her back.

If Margarete sensed the tremor that passed through him, she said nothing. By then Zmudowski had arrived, and together they lay her down beneath the window light, placed a towel beneath her head. Lucius leaned over to examine her, slowly peeling off the wimple from where he had pressed it to her face. Slowly, he palpated her head, her neck, then, gently, her face, conscious of the intimacy of it all, how close she was. His first fear, that Horst had fractured her skull, was now replaced by a worry that she’d suffered damage to her eye. In this case, the manuals were firm. A globe which has been damaged should be trimmed off and the orbital vessels ligated. He had done this twice before, could do this, but he didn’t know if he could do it to her.

He looked. Her lids were now swollen shut. Lacerations circumscribed her eye, now black with dirt and blood. “Tetanus antitoxin,” he said to Zmudowski, who already had the needle prepared. Then, “Saline.”

Zmudowski handed him the bottle.

“Dressing.”

He cleaned her gently. Beneath her eye, a small artery was oozing swiftly, blood welling with each pass of the rinse.

“Sutures,” he said. Then to Margarete, “There is a laceration of a branch of the facial artery.” As if she were operating by his side.

“Yes, Doctor. That would explain the quantity of blood.” Her voice calmer than his.

He removed the dressing, placing the little finger of his left hand on the bleeding vessel, while he irrigated the wound again. Then with his right hand, he looped the suture around the vessel and tied it off. Again, he washed the wound. Dirt and dried blood ran over her cheeks and into her ears and hair. Again he irrigated, this time with antiseptic. Gently then, he began to palpate the area for fractures. He saw her wince.

“Cocaine.”

Zmudowski handed him the syringe.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“The bone seems stable, thank God. I am going to check the globe.”

Slowly he parted her lids. He had never seen her eyes so close. A burst vessel on the cornea had flooded the white with a vivid scarlet fan. Against this, the grey iris seemed rimmed in green, gold-flecked. He saw her pupil accommodating to take him in.

“Can you see?” he asked.

She could.

He irrigated her eye again, applied drops of atropine to prevent adhesion of the iris, and let it close. Again, the wound was bleeding, but more slowly now. He placed another dressing and pressed it gently, then held it there. For the first time since the whistle had risen across the nave, he allowed himself a deep, slow breath. Her good eye followed him. He looked again at Horváth’s drawing. Then back at Margarete. She looked so much smaller now that she wasn’t storming across the ward. Above, in the close crop of auburn, he could see the paleness of her scalp. “You planned this,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your hair. Shorn.” He felt self-conscious even noticing.

She smiled a little and then winced.

“May he feel Her crawling in his stockings back to Stanislau,” she said.

“Amen,” Zmudowski said.

Lucius removed the dressing to check the bleed. It had stopped.

“Hypertonic dressing,” he said to Zmudowski.

“No,” said Margarete. “Close the wound.”

He turned back to her, a dripping square of cotton in his hand. “The wound is dirty. You know procedure. You rest and let the wound close itself. Unless you have invented a way of curing an infection. We can attempt secondary closure once the granulation tissue forms.”

“With respect, Doctor Lieutenant. I’ll be bed-bound for days.”

“And if you’re walking about, the wound won’t heal. We’ll manage. It will be good for you to rest.”

“But I don’t want to rest. I want you to stitch it up. It won’t get infected. I promise.”

“You promise!”

“Then I can do it in a mirror if you’d like.”

Lucius looked off, clenching his jaw as if to let her know his disapproval, then turned back and touched the wound again. He considered it… Already it looked pinker, cleaner, now that it was clear of all the dirt and blood. He lifted his hands up in surrender. Okay: you win.

He turned to Zmudowski. “Silkworm.”

Margarete slapped the bed. “Silkworm! God in heaven, Doctor! Can’t you spare something a little finer? This is my face. I am not going to need to march on it.”

Lucius pinched his lips to hide a smile. “Okay. Zmudowski: horsehair suture. Please.” He looked at Margarete again, trying to capture some of her levity. “Horsehair. From a Lipizzaner stallion in the service of His Royal Highness. Only the best.”

Zmudowski handed over the thread. “How about this one, Doctor Lieutenant? From the backside of His Majesty himself.”

Lucius laughed, thrilled at the irreverence, grateful, so grateful now. Margarete glowered. “I will remind Sergeant Zmudowski that bad jokes are a privilege of rank. If the doctor wishes to try to be funny, we must endure it. We need not join in.”

“Of course not, Dear Sister,” said Zmudowski. He looked to Lucius and, smiling, touched his temple. Still crazy, if just a little bit.

Lucius leaned closer. There were three main lacerations, one coursing through her eyebrow, and a longer, deeper cut from the bridge of her nose to the crest of her cheek. As he placed his first stitch, the flesh tented a little, then the needle appeared beyond. He pulled through, and tied and held as Zmudowski cut. Another and then a third. She was very still now, and he realized how close their faces were. He touched her chin to turn her gently, so as to check the symmetry of his work. He placed a fourth.

This time she grimaced.

“Cocaine,” said Lucius.

“No.” She lifted her hand to stop him. “You just went a little deep.” She paused, then smiled with the good half of her face. “Someone should talk to you someday about your technique.”

The fever began sometime in the early-morning hours.

He found her in the sacristy, coherent just enough to tell him what had happened. She had awakened sweating, shortly before dawn, wandered into the church and found a thermometer herself. She hadn’t told anyone, didn’t want to scare them. But back in her room, she’d fallen when she tried to stand.

She wore soldiers’ pajamas, damp with sweat. Her skin glazed, her forehead hot.

He cursed himself for listening to her when she’d asked him to close the wound. A fever could mean that an infection was spreading through the fascia, or worse, was already in the blood. If so, he would be powerless to stop it. Now he worried about more than just her eye.

“I should take the sutures out,” he said.

But she only grimaced and asked him for another blanket, for she had soaked through hers.

For the next week, he scarcely left her side.

He cut the sutures, saw the wound now weeping pus. Her fever rose, then fell, then rose again. She shook, cried out. Her head lolled; they had to take away her pillow, tie her arms, to keep her from rubbing her face against the bed. She rambled, calling out to soldiers long lost to them—Horváth, Rzedzian. Let me go! she told him. She had to care for them. They were so sick!

“Doctor!” she cried, when he was next to her. “Water! Water!” Then she spat it out. It was so hot there! She’d seen the child. Hurry, it would drown! So hot! So hot!

He sat and touched her hand, her forehead, praying for the fever to relent. Where did it come from, this fire? He’d cared for hundreds of febrile soldiers, but they had seemed so quiet; never had he known that it could be such misery as this. Indeed, disease itself now appeared to him as something different, unrelenting, deliberately cruel. Was this what they all went through? he wondered. All of my patients? But what a question! It felt like the petulant protest of a child, not someone who’d seen so much death. How could he have such a poor understanding of illness? But for all his time in medicine, he realized, suddenly, he had worked, somehow, impossibly, under the magical assumption that when he stepped away, the misery abated. When the patient was led out of the amphitheater, or the crowd of students moved along, or the soldiers were carried off into the darkness of their corner of the church, the misery abated. It must abate. The world couldn’t bear it. There must be some relief.

She shook. Cracks opened on her lips; for a reason unclear to him, she began to scratch herself with such intensity that it seemed as if the itching were a torment greater than the thickly weeping wound. Her breath grew short. When he couldn’t bear to watch her but couldn’t leave her either, he let his gaze shift from her body to her convulsing shadow on the wall. But there his gaze would settle on the little sketch by Horváth, the idyll now so horrible in the way it conjured up the soldier’s memory. For it was not too hard to see that Margarete’s illness was also of Lucius’s doing. If he had allowed Horváth to leave, there would have been no Anbinden, if no Anbinden, then Margarete would not have risked her life to drive off Horst.

He set up a makeshift bed on her floor. He couldn’t sleep. Her breath grew labored; her pulse was almost too swift to follow. Again he checked it against the ticking of his watch, keeping his fingers for a long time on her wrist. Now his mind teemed with possibilities. Could the spots on her mouth be signs of meningitis? Could tetanus explain the spasms? He had given her the serum; had it been spoiled? Gas gangrene of the face was almost unheard-of—and he wouldn’t expect it with such pus… but then again he’d seen a crackling jaw wound invade a soldier’s neck until he choked to death.

He gripped his hair, as if he could extirpate his thoughts. It was a curse to be a doctor, to know anything! In this at least his patients were lucky, oblivious to the horrors that could happen. Now the possibilities seemed endless. He hesitated over her, wanted to touch her swollen face, palpate it to assess how far the infection extended. But the pain this would cause! And what then would he do? A leg, yes. A leg one could amputate. A face… and now he saw the others rise before him, men whose wounds had rotted into their sinuses, their mouths. All dead.

Oh, but she couldn’t die! Not her, not like some common soldier… He stood and paced and ran his fingers through his hair, collided into a chair and sent it tumbling. Shaking, he bent over to pick it up. The thought was blasphemy. But he would sacrifice the ward, every last one of them. Let them all fall dead but leave her, please.

“Doctor.”

It was Zmudowski. Lucius hadn’t heard him enter.

“Of course, it’s time for rounds.”

The orderly looked kindly at him. There was nothing urgent, he told him. Two new patients had arrived, but they were stable; for now, the others could manage things alone. “Pan Doctor has been up all night. You need to rest.”

He couldn’t rest. He paced the church, then went outside. But now, he moved as if through poison. The air was rank and brown, everything he saw seemed cursed. He wanted to go into the little huts and ask the villagers for their icons, beg them to sit vigil with him. In the road, an old woman passed; surely she had watched disease take someone she loved? He wanted to ask her how she had done it, if she had blamed herself.

She pulled a horse cart through the mud. He let her pass, huge clods rising on the wheel, then dropping to the earth. The mud… His sole mercy was the mud, the mire in the passes. That there weren’t others to keep him from Margarete. He hurried back.

It was only when it came time for bathing that he left again. He could touch her forehead, auscultate her lungs, he could bear the weight of her breast against his hand as he listened to her heart. But bathe her as she had bathed the soldiers? When he had once touched the rim of his canteen just to feel where she had pressed her lips? No: once in her ravings, her shirt had lifted to reveal her navel, her iliac crest, a little curl of hair above the symphysis, and Lucius had frozen, unable to look away. No, the thoughts of undressing her, the complex mix of fear and yearning, were too much for him to bear.

But she was burning up. Better Zmudowski, uxorious philatelist, responsible paterfamilias. Lucius stood outside the door and watched the sparrows, listening to the slosh of water, the squish of sponge.

Day three: the fever broke. The wound looked better, less purulent, its color less exuberant. He felt himself buoyed, only to touch her head two hours later and sink. The mercury reached the highest notches on the glass. This was worse, he thought—it meant the infection was within, unseen, a witch’s hex.

At night, he dreamed of elixirs, of magical and blessed pills, which when swallowed might clear the bacillus from her blood. She groaned and woke him. She was so hot! He stripped her bed. She was so cold! She shook.

And if she died? he wondered, her body giving up its heat at last? Imagining himself rising, the world now ruined, the spheres shattering as they strayed off course. He now understood why one might die for someone else. It wasn’t mercy; it was torture to remain.

But then she didn’t die. On the morning of the seventh day, the fever broke again. She lay with one eye sparkling, like someone tumbled by a wave. Scalp wet, cheeks red, goose pimples on her skin.

“What day is it?”

The truth was, he didn’t know.

By evening, she was laughing, hungry, eager to get up. Look, the swelling had gone down, her eye was open, just a little. She could see!

Still he didn’t leave her. He owed her this vigilance. But something was different. Something vital had returned.

Before bed, she ate and drank and bathed herself. Then sure enough, that night, he heard her stirring once again. The room was dark, the night moonless. From his bed on the floor, he called her name. She didn’t answer. He waited, then rose. Looking down at her, he hesitated, not wishing to wake her, but terrified her fever had returned. At last, he gently touched his fingers to her forehead, but it was cool. For a moment he stood and let himself look down at the shadow of her sleeping form. He climbed back into bed.

Later, the sound of movement woke him again. Margarete? He sat up on his pallet. More rustling came from the bed, and then her silhouette appeared above him, and before he knew it she had descended to his side. He hesitated; he didn’t understand. Now in the darkness, more rustling. Her hand, his hair, his neck, his face, his mouth, then hers.

“Margarete.”

“Lucius.” Not Pan Doctor. Lucius. Her breath hot against his lips.

She pressed her mouth again to his. Her cheek smelled sharply, wonderfully, of carbolic.

For a moment, they stayed like that. Outside, he could hear the trill of crickets. Then she pressed herself to him more urgently. At first, he found himself resisting, thinking of her vows, afraid that by acquiescing, he would draw her into something she’d regret. But she seemed a different person altogether now.

She must have sensed his pause. “I know what I am doing,” she said. She sat up. Her hand was resting on his chest, as if to keep him from fleeing. Then, quietly, she undid the buttons on her pajamas and let them drop. The blanket was lifted. He felt her shoulders, cool and smooth, her back, her waist. Again, he said her name. She answered. Lucius, hush.