The Winter Soldier

10.

It was late the following morning when he awoke to find her gone.

Without thinking, he reached out to touch the place beside him where she had fallen asleep. Empty, and nothing but the tousled blanket to suggest that anything had happened. Above him, her pajamas were folded neatly by her pillow, her bed shipshape.

A square of light fell on the far wall, the room was already warm. He looked at his watch: nearly ten. He rubbed his face. It had been his first real sleep since she’d been ill.

Missing her already, he found her in the nave, with Zmudowski. By then she had already learned the stories of the handful of patients who’d arrived during her illness, repacked a pair of wounds, and begun to organize the surgery for the amputation of an arm that had grown gangrenous overnight. She was dressed neatly in her habit, indistinguishable from the nurse he’d known, were it not for a slight new gauntness, the scar healing on her cheek.

He had approached them slowly, uncertain how to address her, what to say. She led, of course; he should have known. The doctor had slept well? she hoped. She hadn’t wished to wake him. Was he ready to get started? With due respect, she was a bit surprised by how they’d grown lazy in her absence. So many untucked corners. And Sergeant Lukács had stopped doing his exercises? And why wasn’t Roth’s leg in traction anymore? She’d found a chocolate wrapper mixed in among the dirty laundry. It was beginning to look like a boardinghouse, Pan Doctor, with due respect.

“Of course, Dear Sister.” He watched her with some astonishment, feeling a little thrill at the playacting. “I will remind you I was attending to another patient.”

In her eyes, he sought some flash of acknowledgment. But by then she’d turned.

They began with the amputation. A Hungarian from Munkács, eighteen by his papers, but Lucius suspected this had been an exaggeration so that he could serve. They had removed his hand shortly before Horst’s return. The kid had borne it admirably; only this morning it had begun to turn a dusky green. At the operating table, waiting for Zmudowski to apply the ether, he watched Margarete out of the corner of his eye. Still she revealed nothing, and for a moment he found himself considering, briefly, if the night before had been a trick of his imagination. Or if she had come to him still slightly delirious and now couldn’t recall…

“Doctor?”

He looked up. Zmudowski speaking. “Your patient has been etherized. Do you want to start?”

Lucius looked to Margarete, who handed him the scalpel. Now, briefly, he thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes. Something insouciant, an awareness of the secret shared. In reflex, face behind his mask, he touched his tongue to the place on his lip where she had lightly bitten him. Then he took a deep breath and turned his gaze down to the work.

But oh, how hard it was to concentrate! By then he’d carried out nearly a hundred amputations, and yet he felt as if he were starting everything anew. Even when he forced himself to keep his eyes from Margarete, he found himself acutely aware of each of her movements, how close her hands came, how long she let them touch.

By late morning, the operation completed, rounds over, he could think of little else.

When the men gathered for their midday meal, he said that he had to complete some old reports, and left for his quarters before they served him food.

Inside, he paced. He was shaken by how easily he’d been unmoored, how his heart had started racing simply when she gazed at him or when her shoulder brushed his arm, how pathetically he had watched her cross the church. He felt like some stupid animal awaiting even the faintest acknowledgment of its master, all while she had seemed so utterly unfazed. Was she trying to tell him something? That what had happened was an error? That the consequences of her breaking her vows were great, too great, and couldn’t happen again?

A knock. Before he could reach the door, she’d stepped inside, closing it behind her.

She pressed her mouth to his.

They stayed like that without moving. He was almost too surprised to hold her. Outside, from the courtyard, he could hear the voices of the men laughing as they ate, the tintinnabulation of their spoons.

She broke away. “They’ll suspect something.” She looked up at him. “My lips, they do not look as if I have been kissing?”

Her skin was flushed.

“A little. Yes.”

Her eyes flashed. She had been there less than a minute. She bowed a little, as she often did when taking leave, and left.

For the next week, they found each other in moments stolen from the day’s responsibilities. In the darkness of the narthex, the shadows behind the church, the edge of the garden, amid the jubilating crickets in the arbor of the pears. Never long: a kiss, a brief caress. And then her whisper, Enough now, Lucius, Let me go, They’ll find us. Lucius, I must…

Let them find us! he wanted to say to her, but he had begun to live for those brief moments, and feared she might deny him even them. The first night apart, he had waited in his room, trying to discern the sound of footsteps in the whispering of the wind. She didn’t come, and he had gone out into the summer night to watch the sacristy window for any sign that she was sleepless, waiting, like him. Staring at her door, he willed it to open; it would be so easy to cross the courtyard and knock! But he knew already she had decided on their terms.

And so it was she who always came to him, and she who always pulled away. There was no discussion of what was happening. No recognition of the vows she’d broken, of what had changed, and how, and where all of this could lead. Her hours alone, once a matter of curiosity for him, now took on the agonizing quality of a mystery from which he’d been excluded. But he didn’t ask. He was terrified of saying something wrong, and that she wouldn’t come again.

In the middle of the week, a trio of new patients arrived after a lorry had turned over in a landslide near the pass, and on the second day of their arrival, one of them had begun to seize. For a moment, the flurry of activity broke his spell. To his horror, he discovered a thin fracture in the man’s skull that he had missed on his initial assessment. They had to drill the bone, evacuate the blood, and wait and watch until two mornings later, when the man awoke and asked for food.

He cursed himself. The truth was that he probably wouldn’t have done anything different had he found the fracture earlier. But what mattered was that he’d missed it. He was letting his own interests, his own affections, go before those of his patients. It was a warning, he thought. What happened once could not again.

But this was easier said than done. The truth was that, if Margarete was late in visiting, he found himself in a state quite close to frenzy. If only he had a companion to confide in! he thought. But whom? Zmudowski? Feuermann? His father? But he could never betray Margarete to Zmudowski. And Feuermann, now days away, would have congratulated him and laughed it all off so lightly, while his father’s chivalry seemed of another age.

Then, just when he doubted he could bear this purgatory any longer, it rained. With the mud, there was a lull in arrivals. When the sun returned two days later, and the wind from the forest brought forth the smell of moss and rotting wood, Margarete, after rounds, said offhandedly to Zmudowski that she would like to go mushrooming, and as always, the doctor would come along.

And so, once again they set out into the woods, as they had done the year before. The rain had softened the earth and swollen the streams that fanned across their trail. In the bright light and the glittering refraction of the dewdrops, the mats of moss seemed almost phosphorescent. Wood wrens dashed between the tree trunks. The crinkling sound of falling water filled the air.

Again, she led, again she brought a rifle, again her pace was swift. He found himself a little disappointed to see that indeed she wished to gather mushrooms, snapping fresh sulphur shelves from the oak trunks or barreling off the path to uncover fairy rings of dew-soaked chanterelles. Stopping her on the trail at times, he kissed her, bolder now, and she let him pull her closer, let his hands seek out her form beneath the habit, before pushing him away. Patience, she told him, now having fun with it. We can’t come back empty-handed. What would the others think?

From the church, she followed a path up the valley, breaking off toward the river when the trail turned toward the pass. The harvest was bountiful, and to the mushrooms they added clutches of sorrel and sprays of currants and early barberries. She led, keeping them close to the rustling of the water, at times pushing through the high grass when there was no trail. He had never been to this part of the river, and unlike the forest, where decades-old paths had been worn through the banks of moss, the route seemed untraveled. Now, alone with her, he felt embarrassed for the fretting he had endured all week, the constant doubts, the fears that she would call off the affair. That evening, they would have to return to their ritual of deception, but now, alone with her at last, it felt like something he could endure.

They had walked for close to an hour, the bags full, their clothes damp and speckled with grass and yellow mustard petals, when at last they passed beneath a willow and she stopped. Outside the shadows of its branches, a bright light swept across a bank of high green grass. Beyond a pair of high boulders, he could hear the babble of the river. He realized that she must have known this spot, known that they could go there undiscovered, and as she set down her gun and bag, and brought out a pair of army blankets, he felt a thrill to think that she had planned it. He hoped then that she would kiss him, but instead she sat on the blanket and began to untie her boots. She said nothing at first, and he watched dumbly as she undid the laces of first one boot and then the other, and then began to roll her stockings down. It had been so dark in her quarters when they’d made love, that the only time he’d seen her skin was during her fits of fever. She had her second stocking halfway down her calf when she stopped.

“What is it? You don’t expect me to swim alone?”

Somewhere a frog was croaking. His fingers fumbled with his shirt, a task made unexpectedly difficult by a sudden nervous trembling and his reluctance to tear his eyes from her. She seemed almost unfamiliar to him now, her short hair grown longer since the night she first came to him, her skin pink and pale, one arm pressed modestly across her chest. Unlike his awkward movements, she seemed utterly adroit, somehow preserving a sense of propriety despite her nakedness. It was as if alongside the pious little nurse, the gun-draped forager of mushrooms, he now found himself in the presence of a third person, younger, playful, who laughed now as she shimmied from her drawers and disappeared beyond the willow’s leaves.

Nearly stumbling out of his trousers, he followed, out into the sun, the dew-wet mustard brushing against his thighs. He followed the path that she had broken in the high grass to where a short bank descended to the boulders. There he saw her disappear between the rocks and heard a splash. He followed. He had to turn slightly sideways to pass through the portal, and coming out onto the short beach, he found her already neck-deep in a dark pool of water. He stopped, taken by the vision of the familiar face above the water, the shimmering white form beneath.

The cold water licked his feet. She was staring at him, smiling. He was attempting to be modest, not anticipating that she would catch him so exposed.

“You’re scared!” She laughed.

“Not scared. It’s cold.”

“It’s June!”

“Early June. Very early June,” he said.

“You’re stalling.” She took a backstroke away from him, a breast breaking the surface of the water. “If you don’t come in, perhaps we should be heading back.”

Wait! he wanted to shout. The cold was hardly the greatest shock. She began to swim away from him, only a half-dozen strokes, but enough to prove herself a strong swimmer. This too a detail, a secret offered about the life she wouldn’t reveal.

He dove. His skin burned with the cold, but he stayed under, savoring the overpowering sensation, taking swift frog-strokes until he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He came to the surface, spluttering. Around him, sunlight flickered through the branches of an alder, and wisps of cotton spun in an eddy of the pool. She swam to him. He felt her hand touch his forearm. His toes dug into the pebbles of the riverbed; she treaded water. “It’s too deep for my feet to touch the bottom,” she said, as he felt her limbs close around his back.

The cold water had made her flesh taut and goose-bumped, and his hands were so cold they seemed not to be his own.

“Come,” she said, after she had kissed him. “Your lips are blue already; the bank is warm.”

They lay on one of the blankets in the high grass in the lee of the willow tree, sheltered by the swaying ranks of mustard.

Now out of the water, they both found themselves beset by sudden modesty. He didn’t know what to say. It occurred to him that he had never seen a woman completely naked who wasn’t on an autopsy slab, but decided this was a thought best kept to himself. A breeze came; he shivered, debated asking for a shirt. The ground was stonier than they had expected, and the army blanket itched. Pollen from the pines swept through, and he fell into a fit of sneezing. A scuttling startled them: but it was only a sparrow! Then an invisible sand fly raised pink, vampirish welts upon their necks.

At first this mattered, then it didn’t matter very much.

After, they found they had rolled far from the blanket. Laughing, they crawled back. She wrapped the second blanket around her torso and drew out the bread she’d brought along. It crumbled as she broke it open and spread crushed currants with her knife. She took a bite and then a second, before passing it to him. Her hands, despite their swim, still smelled of mushrooms and soil. Neither spoke.

The only questions that he could think of now were questions that seemed too great to ask her. How long she had felt like this. If she’d imagined this would happen. What was next.

He thought of the roads leading away from the hospital, which led to thoughts of distant hospitals, which led to thoughts of Horváth. Against the summer forest, he saw the snow, the evacuation lorry disappearing on the winter road. I do not deserve this kind of happiness, he thought.

Then he shivered. She had touched his back. The winter vanished, the hills burst forth in green. They kissed, then parted. Her lips tasting of currant, her chin dusted with the flour from the bread.

On his shoulder, his skin was bruised where earlier she had bitten him. Was it a specialty of the nurses of Saint Catherine? he almost asked, feeling giddy again. But he had no interest in reminding her of broken vows. Instead, he lay beside her and ran his fingers tentatively up her dirt-flecked calf. He stopped at her knee, now shy again. A katydid trundled across the blanket, below the double arch of her knees. He waited, watching. He broke a blade of grass and ran it along her ankle. She slapped it away. He felt bold, flirtatious. Again, he tickled her. “The Louse,” he whispered.

“Lucius!”

“Oh, no! The Louse!”

She dug her fingers into the earth and threw a clod at him.

A moment later she was picking through his hair. “I’m sorry! Your poor face! Oh, your eyes!”

She licked a finger and wiped dirt from an eyelid, brushed his lashes gently, kissed him. “There. You’re clean.”

But really, he shouldn’t joke like that.

He lay back, looked up where he could see her neck and shoulder silhouetted against the sky.

It seemed impossible, not simply the circumstances, but the change she’d undergone. A month before, he had never seen her ears, would have apologized for having bumped against her in the narrow aisles of the ward. Yet his first impressions of strangeness—the shock of her kiss, the vision of her folded habit beneath the willow, the foreign feeling of her cold, wet limbs—slowly, these had retreated, leaving the sense of something familiar. In the boldness bordering on incaution, in the appetite, even in the ease of her movements, the same physical confidence he had seen on their walks and at the operating table, the same sense that the world was something to be seized and held.

He touched his cheek briefly against her hip and secretly inhaled the scent of the wet blankets and her skin. Again, and deeply, as if it was something he was about to lose.

She shifted to let his head rest on her thigh. He felt the sunlight on his eyelids and let his gaze run down her legs. Bits of grass stuck to the thin down on her calves. Her toes pale, brushed with sand. Above him, her belly rumbled, a little. He closed his eyes.

It was she who broke the silence, with the words that he’d been dreading. “They’ll be waiting.”

He didn’t answer. Looking up he saw there was a slight rose to her shoulders, as if she had already begun to burn.

“Lucius.”

“Of course.”

They bathed separately before dressing and gathering up their belongings, and started back down the trail. A silence fell. Twice, they stopped; both times he kissed her, but now it seemed a little more that she was letting him, that she was impatient to return.

Scattered clouds drifted down the valley, gained and overtook them. His wristwatch showed close to two; they had scarcely been gone four hours, yet it felt as if they were returning from a different world. He recalled the summers in Vienna, the boulevards, the lovers walking hand in hand. But she was always slightly out of reach, and as they walked, he felt a distance open again between them. He fought this feeling, forced his thoughts back to her floating in the water, calling him. But he knew that she was thinking of something she wouldn’t share.

At last the trail left the river, and they passed again through the deeper woods. Crushed leaves marked the paths where she had traipsed off for mushrooms. He now regretted that he had let the moment in the sun pass in so much silence. Only minutes remained before they reached the road, the possibility of other people. Before he’d lose his chance to speak…

In the operas, the novels, he had always been somewhat amused, incredulous even, by the manner in which seemingly sane men and women put so much weight into the words he wished to utter. Three in German, two in Polish, one in Hungarian (though everything in Hungarian seemed to be one word). It had always seemed a bit excessive, he had thought, a bit maudlin and sentimental, a failure of imagination by the poets to put that same phrase upon the lips of dying knights, returning soldiers, weeping maidens, as if worshippers of a faith with but one prayer…

Except that now he understood. Three words, or two, or one if he was too self-conscious (for at times self-conscious lovers resort to other tongues). A spell. And like a spell, they’d be transformed…

He had wanted to say it the night her fever broke.

And when Horst had come again.

And when he’d watched her care for József Horváth after the Anbinden.

And the afternoon when they had gone up to the ruins of the castle, and he had dared to ask her where she’d go after the war.

They gained the road. The first houses of the village appeared just beyond the trees. Steam rising from the thatched roofs and the dark wood of the church. A clattering of squirrels above them. She, too, seemed to slow.

“Margarete.” I love you. It would be so easy, just like that.

She stopped. She hadn’t even fully turned, when he found himself speaking, so haltingly, so formally, so unsure…

“Margarete… I… I would like to ask you if you would consider marrying me. Not now, of course. Nothing has to change now, I promise. But if you wish, after the war…” He twisted his hands. “Margarete… I… I… you understand that I…”

But there he stopped because he saw that she was crying. Impulsively he touched her cheek, and she took his hand and kissed it, first his fingers, then his palm. “Oh, Lucius,” she said. And then she was running, down the path and around the bend in the road that led to the village and the church.