The Winter Soldier

13.

He became, then, two men.

In Przemyśl, given his months of service, he was promoted to Oberarzt, Chief Physician, of a ten-car ambulance train. He was given a new uniform and saber, a raise in salary, and the same copy of the drill book he had been given in Graz, two years before. Under his command were two assistant physicians, three orderlies, and ten lay nurses.

According to the papers he had been ceremoniously provided, the train was a state-of-the-art evacuation hospital converted to care for soldiers with advanced injuries. He had seen enough of the war to be skeptical, but even skepticism didn’t prepare him for the moment, on the day of his departure, when the district medical officer led him across the railyards. There were no windows; half the doors were missing. Were it not for the giant red crosses painted on the siding, he would have thought she was destined for scrap. In the hollowed-out carriages, the “wards” consisted of rows of double-bunked litters hanging on springs from the ceiling. The supplies, in dented metal cabinets, were as scant as in Lemnowice; rat droppings littered the floors of the latrine. His bunk, behind the engine, consisted of a horsehair mattress that had begun to spill its stuffing. There was a ceramic basin, no mirror, and an abandoned shaving razor that the district medical officer pocketed with embarrassment. The closet opened only with a kick.

In the beginning, they were based out of Kraków, leaving weekly for distant cities, where they picked up patients who had been collected from casualty clearing stations along the Galician front. Slowly, screeching, the train moved through southern Poland, past abandoned fields and sprawling army camps. The light sockets were all empty, and when night came, the train was lit by kerosene lamps, until a jolt sent one crashing into a stack of bedsheets. From then they rode in darkness, the ceiling flickering with the light of distant fires. There was no oil for the wheels, which screeched so loudly they could hardly hear each other talk. His assistants were a Moravian village dentist and an overeager medical student from Vienna who had just finished his fifth semester and had so little understanding of practical medicine that Lucius couldn’t let him out of his sight.

Like me, once, he thought, and were he not so terrified of what the young man would do, he might have stopped to marvel at how far he himself had come.

At times, hurrying through the swaying wagons, Lucius caught a glimpse of the mountains to the south. But while moving, there was gratefully little time to lose himself to memories. There was no order; he attended to whoever screamed the loudest or grabbed him as he passed. Many patients had been only minimally stabilized in the field. Bones had not been set, tourniquets left on for days. Back at Lemnowice, Margarete had taught him to be conservative with his amputations—now he removed many fractured joints just to spare the soldiers the agony of the constant jostling. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like medicine. Butchery, again. Carver of flesh, sawyer of bone.

After the amputations, he ordered the nurses to take the limbs to a separate carriage, where—he told the soldiers—they would be incinerated in accordance with a solemn protocol. But there was no protocol, no separate carriage for limbs. There wasn’t even a carriage for the dead. If they were near a station, they handed the bodies over, but if not, they buried them by the track.

This was the first man. The second had realized something only moments after he had been given his assignment: trains meant travel, and travel meant new stations, new churches, new garrisons, new hospitals, where he could look for Margarete.

He had begun at their very first stop, in a garrison hospital outside Przemyśl. Walking through the crowded wards, he had found his way to the head nurse to tell her the story of the evacuation and ask whether she had met anyone of Margarete’s description. A tall woman, with freckled cheeks and wisps of red hair emerging beneath a starched cornette, she looked at him inquisitively, unaccustomed to such a query. Yes, people came and went, she said. But she knew no one with that story, though he was welcome to ask the other nurses. He did. None of them had met her either, nor had the nurses at the No. 113 Garrison Hospital in Tarnów, nor the Sisters of Mercy at the Army Hospital for Officers in Rzeszów, nor the Red Cross Hospital in Jarosław…

Still, he wouldn’t be deterred. In late July, as the Russian offensive under General Brusilov surged through the mountains, he was in Brünn, far behind the lines, searching the vast wards of hospital pavilions set up in the cornfields. By then he had come to look not only for Margarete, but also Zmudowski, Krajniak, even Schwarz with his pockets full of ammonites, or any other of the thirty, forty patients he could remember from his last days at the church. It was madness, he knew; there were hundreds of thousands—millions, some said—of Imperial and Royal troops deployed across the Eastern Front, and he was looking for a common name like Schwarz. But still it didn’t deter him; with Lemnowice behind the lines, he had no choice. He felt at times as if he belonged among the crowds of kerchiefed women who haunted the stations with portraits of their sons and names painted on placards, endlessly imploring anyone who met their eyes if they had seen their Franz, their David. Like the three old peasants in the Nagybocskó station. Oh, how quickly he’d dismissed their vigil then! But now he understood; he lived for each new stop.

The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he made his way up driveways to baroque châteaus where ballrooms had been converted into rehabilitation wards. He visited converted schoolhouses and sawmills in frontier towns with geese wandering across the yards. Autumn rain thrumming on the tin rooftops, he paced through typhus wards in Kovel, peered over the high, coffin-like walls of cholera beds, and stopped the nurses as they recorded fever curves in the malaria pavilions. While once he hadn’t cared for rank, now he wielded it to press lazy clerks to search their books. In September, as the Russian Ninth took Stanislau, he was back in Kraków, on cargo ships converted into floating hospitals on the Vistula. He found Zmudowski’s old address through the post office, only to learn from neighbors that his wife and daughter had gone to live with family far away.

In November, he was at a commandeered cathedral hospital in Zamość, when news came that the Emperor had died. It was a grey winter morning, and Lucius stood in the crowd of patients as they listened to the announcement. It was almost inconceivable; Franz Josef had ruled for seven decades, and not a single person present had been born outside his reign. There was a sense, almost palpable, that this was the end, not only of his reign but also of the monarchy, and, perhaps, the war. But then lunch came, and the nursing sisters swept the patients back into formation. Far off, in Vienna, another man would be ascending to the throne.

Lucius registered almost none of this. By the time the Imperial and Royal body reached its catafalque inside the Capuchin Crypt, delivered by decorated horses in silent rubber shoes, he was searching again.

Still no one knew Margarete. In the registers of nursing sisters, he found Renaldas and Anastasias, Elizabeths and Lieselottes, Paolas, Zenias, Hildegardes, Iannas, Anets and Evas, Kunigundes, Katas, Livias, Magdalenas, Rekas, and Matilds. In Tarnów, he found a Margarete, but she turned out to be a lay sister in her early seventies, who reddened when the “gentleman” was presented by the chief nurse. Another Margarete, in Kraków, impossibly plump in that time of hunger, tapped her large fingers together excitedly and asked if he had a wife. There once had been a Margarete in Jarosław, but she had died of septicemia long before the fall of Kolomea, while Sister Margarete at the Lemberg garrison hospital had just returned to a dying mother in Berlin.

Then, one day, in Rzeszów, in December, at a converted leprosarium, a Sister of Mercy smiled at him in recognition. She had bright blue eyes and a happy little upturned nose. Didn’t he remember her? He’d asked her the same questions at the hospital in Stryj, where she had been working back in August on the infection wards.

He apologized, blushing. But she had since thought of him, she said; she wished that she could help. Perhaps if he knew which Catherine this Sister Margarete was devoted to? There were, after all, several, all worthy of devotion. Perhaps the Italian Catherines of Bologna or Siena? Or Saint Catherine of Sweden? Or, the most magnificent Saint Catherine of Alexandra, the Great Martyr of the Wheel?

He didn’t know. But wait… “The one who ate the scabs of the afflicted,” he said. The words returning to him from that night he first arrived in Lemnowice.

The Rzeszów sister brightened. “That would be Saint Catherine of Siena,” she said piously. “May we all be so devoted.” But she knew of no such convent in Poland. She wasn’t from Friuli or Tyrol? Are you sure, Herr Doktor, she was telling you the truth?

“Perhaps Friuli, or Tyrol,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment, with an expression that might have been curiosity or might have been compassion. “Ask at the diocese in Kraków,” she told him. “Perhaps they can help.”

Ten days later, a cherubic factotum of the archbishop ran his finger down the column of a volume bound in calf.

“Here,” he said. “A convent of Saint Catherine. In Trieste.”

It was impossible. Lucius had been there as a child, recalled the sun-washed seafront on the Adriatic, the puckered smell of drying fish. A world completely distinct from Margarete.

But he wrote. A simple note at first, in German. To whom it may concern, I am looking for one of your Sisters. If you know where she is, would you please forward the enclosed? The second letter was sealed. He wrote first of how he had been separated, of the attack on Sloboda Rungurska, how he had tried so hard to return. He wrote that he thought often of her, crossed this out, wrote all the time, the truth is, Margarete, I cannot stop.

He posted the letter that night from Kraków, leaving the regimental office as his address.

But by then he had begun to question.

It was more than just the doubt on the face of the little nurse in Rzeszów. Wandering in the wards, watching the other sisters, their silence, their brisk, efficient deference, he began to consider one final possibility: that she had never taken vows at all.

Of all the possibilities, it stunned him now to think he had never really considered this. On the surface, of course, there was the evidence of their lovemaking. But this in itself hardly proved she wasn’t a nun. Vows were broken; indeed, he had inherited a culture keenly aware of all the erotic potentialities of the convent, whether the garden couplings in Boccaccio, or the baser perversities of de Sade. If anything, there was something in the very denial of the flesh that acknowledged the power of flesh’s pleasures. He had not needed to read Freud to know this; they took breaths from the same air.

No, it was something else that held him. And something other than the fact that she carried a rifle, or cursed, or drank before her surgeries. Or that she kept Drill Regulations on her desk and Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance, but not the Bible. No, it was something subtler, unspoken, something dramatic about her manner when she spoke of God and his angels. Almost as if she were playing at devotion. As she had played at typhus before Horst.

He was in Jarosław when this thought came to him. He was sitting in the office of a mother superior of the Sisters of Mercy, a handsome woman in her early forties with the kind eyes of someone accustomed to being present at the bedside of people who were very scared. He didn’t know what it was about the woman’s sober, steady manner that made him think, This wasn’t her, but once thought, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

But why? Why would a young woman pretend she was someone who she wasn’t, only so that she could spend the next two years surrounded by the horrors of dying soldiers, often sleepless, only hours from the front?

Like me, he thought. He was walking down the steps of the Jarosław hospital. Briefly, he stopped. Pretending to be someone I was not.

Outside the hospital, unexpected sunlight coruscating on the snow-wet rooftops, he followed a road that led down to the San River. Huge ice floes jostled noisily against the bridge columns. Moments from their conversations now drifted back to him. My vows. My holy service. The earthly life I left behind. But what then was she hiding? He wished that he might have doubted this before, in Lemnowice. To know whom he had truly fallen in love with. He felt as if he’d missed so much, not just to get to know her then, but to know how he might find her now.

Back in Kraków, a letter was waiting, postmarked from Trieste. It was from a nun, a Sister Ilaria. She had never known a Margarete, she wrote to him in German. There were no Polish sisters in her order; nor was it their custom to assume a different name. She would have wished him luck had she not had a Polish shopkeeper translate the contents of his second letter for her. I cannot dare imagine what has transpired between you and the unfortunate Margarete, Signore. But it is my duty to remind you that all corporeal delights are strictly forbidden by the vows of any Order. Please, Signore. What is at stake is no less than her salvation. Hot are the fires of hell. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.

That night, for the first time since he had joined the trains, he allowed himself to get drunk at the officers’ club, just beyond the garrison gates. The room was crowded. On the piano in the corner, a lieutenant of the lancers played military marches, which his comrades urged into a rapid tempo with a banging of their cups. He sat alone in a booth, beneath an old painting of a young Franz Josef that had yet to be replaced by one of Karl I. Twice he unfolded Sister Ilaria’s letter, twice he read it, growing angrier each time. It was not just me, he wanted to write back to her. She came to me first. She kissed me. She led me to the river to make love. And now she was not only missing, but had absconded with a part of him he hadn’t even known existed before they met.

He ordered another slivovitz. The spirits ran over the top of the brimming glass, burning a scrape that ran across his knuckles. The heat, the smell, the tingling on his fingers now reminded him of the horilka they drank to warm their bellies before surgery. He leaned back and ran his hands through his hair, moist with sweat from the warmth of the room; he couldn’t even get drunk without being driven back to her. In his left hand he crumpled the letter on its flimsy ration paper, flagged down the waiter with his right. Another slivovitz, burning his lips as it spilled into his beard.

At last he rose, unsteadily. Now his desire for Margarete was so pressing it was almost clinical. He was infested. The room was small, too small for him, the laughter and the regimental marches pitched forward in a frantic pace. As he turned, his saber clattered across the table, sweeping a pair of glasses to the floor. With the songs and laughter no one noticed. The waiter scurried over, apologizing, as if his placement of the glasses had led to such a mess.

Hot are the fires of hell. He had to get outside. Unbuttoning the collar on his tunic, he stumbled, apologizing, pushing through the other officers, none of whom gave any heed. At the entrance, he steadied himself against the wall as the doorman fumbled interminably through the rank of greatcoats. Then he was outside, the air was cold; he paused, breathing deeply, as his breath made spirals through the yellow columns of light. More singing, coming now from a raucous crowd on a wooden sidewalk outside another establishment up the street. Women’s laughter rose from shuttered windows. Now he knew why he had gotten drunk that night, what he was searching for. Ahead the crowd churned as the door opened, and a pair of privates stumbled out to the hurrahs and congratulations of the others. They pulled up short, saluting as they saw Lucius approach, a crimson light over the door casting their flushed, warm faces in a devilish glow. But he was an officer, and the red light specified an establishment for enlisted men. He dismissed them with a nod, and they melted back into the crowd. The world deserved its war, he thought. In Lemnowice, he couldn’t get the anti-tetanus serum he needed, but there were rules on how to divvy up the whores.

He stumbled on, looking now for the green lantern that would signify an establishment for officers. The cold began to seep through his open collar, and he fumbled with the buttons as he walked on. The streets were dark, clotted with soldiers. Somewhere were the dynastic crypts of the Royal Capital City, but the Kraków that unfolded before him now had the air of a frontier town. The smell of burning coal was everywhere, and a dark bird, a shadow, banked above the scattered nimbuses of light.

At last, before a flickering emerald lamp, he stopped and watched a pair of officers enter a doorway, behind which the sound of dancing music could be heard. A doorman beckoned to him; he hurried off. His heart was pounding in his ears. What had seemed necessary minutes before now seemed impossible. He could not stand the thought of sitting in a parlor getting drunk with fellow officers and singing regimental songs until each of them paired off.

A light snow was falling when he reached the Central Market Square.

Ahead he could see them gathered beneath each of the streetlamps. Snow had been falling all evening, and a smooth field of white covered the square. Now approaching, he hesitated, then put his head down, keeping his gaze away as they called out. He saw no one else. Just the women, like sentries, retreating in the distance beneath the spotlights of the lamps.

“It’s cold.”

She was tall, almost as tall as him. She wore a black cloak down to the tops of her boots. A strong perfume preceded her as she stepped out of the shadows of the Cloth Hall. She wore a woolen cap, pulled low and decorated with a woolen rose; her cheeks were lightly rouged.

“Yes, cold.” He had stopped. He looked down at his feet, then back along the street, as if there were something of great interest there. “You have… a place to go?”

She named the street.

He nodded, his throat dry, suddenly sober, utterly.

They walked side by side. After a block, she took his arm. For a moment, embarrassed by the intimacy, he resisted. But it seemed less part of seduction than a formality; it would be stranger for them to walk apart. He wondered if he should speak. He felt as if he were already failing, an absurd thought given the nature of the transaction. But the thought was there; it was his duty to entertain. Like a child again. Stone prompts in my pocket. The portrait of Sobieski means I’m to speak of holidays; the bust of Chopin that I’m to inquire about my guests.

But his lips were numb, his tongue tied, and she asked for nothing. Indeed, her whole manner projected a professional’s indifference, the kind of assuring competence one might feel before a doctor or a priest. He felt, briefly, a kind of relief. They passed another woman, who exchanged familiar glances with his partner but didn’t speak. Her gaze, as she took in Lucius, had a strange, almost orchestrated quality, and for a moment, he felt as if there were others watching—his parents, or Margarete. He was relieved when they reached the door. There a price was mentioned, “for the normal.” If he wanted something else, it would be more.

They entered, a pocket of winter air accompanying him like a second traveler.

Inside, a doorman in threadbare livery greeted them and took her coat. Another portrait of the Emperor hung on the wall behind, and a flowery scene of nymphs pinching each other’s nipples was just above his desk. Feuermann would have had a laugh, thought Lucius, as the man briefly disappeared behind what looked to be a hidden panel. Ah, you cultured Poles! A bit of Neoclassicism with your pornography? But the thought was subsumed in a new worry that he had found himself in exactly the kind of establishment he had wanted to avoid. An unmarked doorway! Hidden panels! The doorman in his uniform gave off the sense of a time capsule, the faded decadence of a different age. As if he were about to find himself among a group of masked aristocrats fondling one another in a prelude to an orgy. Or worse, that he would have to dance.

Oh, he was nervous! He shifted, looking furtively at the woman, who was studying the contents of her purse. She wore a plain white blouse, a long, pleated skirt. If not for the rouge, she would have looked like a schoolteacher or governess. Briefly, he had the wild thought that she was not actually a prostitute. That they had met to read, or paint.

The man returned, with a key. She thanked him, then stepped through a doorway to a narrow, unlit caracole of stairs.

On the second floor they stopped, turned left, the boards creaking beneath their feet. The hallway was long and branching, rose up a set of stairs, turned and dropped a flight, then zigzagged before rising and falling again. He realized that the hotel must have been built outward, piercing the neighboring buildings, twisting like a corkscrew. He told himself to pay attention, in case, like Hansel of the folktale, he might need to find his way out. From around them came sounds of footsteps, voices, but they must have come from another hallway that turned helically about their own and never met.

At last they reached their destination. For a moment the key seemed stuck, and he wondered if they would have to go all the way back. But then the mechanism engaged, and the door opened to reveal a room with peeling wallpaper and a mattress on the floor. The woman sniffed; the room smelled sharply of paraffin. He suspected that whoever had last used it had overturned the lamp. When she lit the bedside candle, he half expected, half hoped everything would explode.

She closed the door. From the other side of the walls came a grunted mewling, but she didn’t pay it any heed. Without another word she removed her blouse, then, after a moment’s assessment of his initiative, took off her skirt, and then her button boots, until she stood there in garters and brassiere. He was still in his winter coat.

“Do you need help?” she said, after a while.

He shook his head.

“Take your time,” she said.

But the sight of her body brought his thoughts suddenly to the consequences of the act. Memories: his father inspecting the Croatian girl’s certificate of virginity with his monocle, a madwoman in the General Hospital, staggering from syphilis in her spine. The warnings of von Holzheim, eminent Professor of Dermatology, finger waving maniacally in the air, that nothing, nothing, not antiseptic douches, not leaky prophylactics made of rabbit intestine, nothing—Nothing, my students, nothing!—save blessed coitus abstentia would forestall this plague.

It eats the brain, devours it, my boys—and you, lady-student—until the patient knows nothing but pain and madness. The most excruciating of pains…

Speaking of our patients, of course.

Lucius recalled the woman clinging to him as she had crossed the market square. Had there been a slight shuffle to her gait?

But it already had been decided. Where could he flee to? More dreams of Margarete that left him trembling with longing? More fruitless searching? More humiliating scoldings from far-off nuns who dared to think they understood? No, if Longing were to be extinguished, it must be done so completely. “Walk for me,” he said, and confused, thinking he was asking her to put on a little show, she sauntered toward him. “No, walk normally,” he said, but now saw no evidence of tabetic gait, no sign of blue streaks of mercury injections in her buttocks. He placed his palm on her breast and felt no murmur of aortic insufficiency. He lowered his hand to feel for a chancre on her sex. Misunderstanding, she began to murmur, feigning pleasure, then licked her hand and lowered it to his.

In the room next door, the moans were getting louder. There was a candle-lamp; his last thought was that he should bring it between her legs to complete the examination. But the demon inside him was impatient. Now, it said. Eradicate her, or she will be with you forever. He withdrew his hand. The woman lay back on the mattress, exposed. Her breasts fell loosely back from her brassiere, and her abdomen bore the broad scar of a Caesarean. For a moment, the humanness of this—though less the fact that she had once been someone’s mother than that she’d been someone’s patient—almost scared him off. But he was a persistent person, not used to giving up.

After, he lay with her. He had fallen to her side. She had long black hair, and he breathed in deeply, drawing its perfume over the clipped, carbolic memory of Margarete. He recalled the hundred depot stations, the thousand soldiers gathering one last kiss by which to remember their wives. He felt that this was somehow what he was pursuing, but in inversion—not to remember, but to forget.

“Come from the mountains?” she asked. For a moment, he feared that she would tell him she had a husband or a son there, that he would have to consider the possibility that they were one of his. But she said nothing else.

He had.

“I knew,” she said.

He waited a long time for her to tell him why she asked.

“Hour’s up, soldier,” she said.

Soldier. But she was talking to him, of course. He could stay longer, she added, but it would cost.

It was close to one when he descended to the night.

Wind swirled the snow around the streetlamps as he walked away. It looked like Lemnowice, he thought, in winter, when the snow spun in eddies outside the light of Margarete’s room, when hurrying from the church, he would stop and breathe the air and pines, and look back at the shadow of that house of God in all its greatness, when sometimes, sometimes, if he listened closely, he could hear her sing. He remembered this, and for the first time in years, he began to cry.

He submitted his petition for leave the following morning.

He was granted two months. So distant did Vienna seem that he could scarcely believe that it was only one long day’s ride away.

It had been two and a half years since he left. As he stepped from the train, he was herded by a line of military police toward a pavilion at the end of the station. He protested, impatient.

“You come from the east,” a policeman said. “Everyone from the field must be deloused.”

Deloused, the word now mystical in all its connections. As we began.

In a cold room, separated from the rest of the station by a dirty hanging canvas, he stripped with the other soldiers. They left their clothes in a steam chamber and then walked on, naked. He looked down at himself, his hands nicked and calloused, his long toes pale as a cadaver’s, his chest narrow and wiry, its coarse hair seeming, in its whiteness, like that of an old man.

In a new line that had formed in front of him was a small man in a wheelchair, an amputee with Horváth’s distant gaze, and for a moment, Lucius felt his heart lurch. But it wasn’t him, of course it wasn’t him; he was gone, and Lemnowice was gone, and Margarete, and it was time to scavenge what was left. Around him, the soldiers were missing hands and feet and they all were gaunt and filthy, but now, trembling in the cold as they filed forward, they forced themselves to laugh about the meals they’d eat and the girls they’d visit, and what the warmth of beds would be like after so many months on straw. Ahead of him, the amputee had risen from his wheelchair, and Lucius followed as he took great whipping leaps to where they sat on a bare bench beside a disinfectant tanker, where a sanitation officer turned on the spray. There, Lucius kept his eyes open for as long as he could, watching the pink bodies disappear into the fine mist. He could taste the cresol, even through pinched lips.

It was then, in the haze of disinfectant, that his memory of his first night swept up and over him, and through the mist he could see it almost as if he were there again: the disemboweled soldier, the wandering man with his head wound, Margarete running between them, shouting, as he uselessly stood by. He could hear her voice scolding him, see the change in her expression as he saw the understanding settle into her, this rarest understanding of who he was.

“Close your eyes,” said the sanitation officer, and he did.