The Winter Soldier

17.

He returned to the hospital late that evening, through empty streets.

The night was strangely warm, and he let his coat hang open. The electricity was out, and in the windows, shadows moved in the yellow glow of lamps and candles. Silence everywhere, but inside, he knew, the same word was on everyone’s lips.

Armistice. Like him, they’d all been waiting, each one for something different: the return of a son, a long-promised wedding, the chance to see a baby who was now a little girl. The end of food lines—though with winter coming, this wasn’t certain. The loss of titles, lands. For his mother and his father: a new Poland, or—as they might correct him—the rebirth of an old one. But for Lucius, in the months he had been waiting, the word had come to mean the single place that might yet yield the secret of what had become of Margarete.

Lemnowice. For two long years in Vienna, he had felt as if every obstacle had been placed in front of his return: the Russian army, the flood of POW returns, and now, and this at his own bidding, Natasza. But Natasza was gone, vanished from his life as if she’d never been there, and Brusilov was back in Russia. Now, finally, after the trains, the listless wandering, the days spent dreaming of Margarete, his chance had come.

Yet in many ways the world that met him the Tuesday morning after Armistice was even more complex than that of Monday night. There was the practical issue of the trains, still packed with homecoming soldiers. The sudden appearance of borders within what used to be the Empire. The need for travel papers from the newly declared “German Austria,” which for effective purposes of governance was little but a name. There was also the matter of politics. His father’s clearing of the table had been a dramatic gesture. More accurately, they should have all sat down with little brushes, repainted the Austro-Hungarian forces in eight different colors, and turned them to fight each other. Already the week before, Serbia had attacked Hungary, Czechoslovakia had attacked Hungary, and revolutionaries had stormed the Reichstag in Berlin. There were murmurs that the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia was mutually unacceptable; Russia, of course, was still in civil war. And, most worrisome for Lucius, in Galicia, skirmishes had broken out between Poland and Ukraine.

It was, his father told him, as if someone had stomped on a fire, scattering the burning embers before they put them out.

But all these obstacles seemed surmountable, all, save one. Since his pneumonia, Zimmer’s mind had continued to decline, and for Lucius to leave his patients alone with his old professor as their only doctor was no less than abandonment. Almost immediately after Armistice, he began to petition for a temporary replacement. He would not need long, he wrote in various letters to various ministries. The flu had receded, it had been nearly two years since he had taken any leave. Two, three weeks was all he wanted. That would be enough, he thought, to get to Lemnowice, to find anyone, anything that might lead to Margarete. Now, short of searching all of Galicia again, short of knocking on the door of every hut in every village, only Lemnowice remained.

But he received no reply. And soon, with the Medical Service of the Austro-Hungarian Army no longer even in official existence, and Archduchess Anna, fearing some Jacobin revolt, decamped to Switzerland, he didn’t know whom to ask.

And then, at last, in May, a letter came.

He received it at the hospital. At first he thought it might be a reply to one of his petitions. But this was from an unfamiliar department. The hospital was moving, the letter said, the patients transferring to a government sanitorium in Baden. It had come to their attention that he was not a medical graduate, that the wartime degrees were null and void, and that if he wished to practice medicine, he would have to re-enroll at the medical school that fall. The tone was severe; it was a travesty of the imperial government that he had been given such responsibility. The archduchess would be selling the palace. They would close the wards later that month.

He found Zimmer in his office.

“Herr Professor Doktor has heard the news?”

His old professor nodded as he chewed a toothpick, and for a moment Lucius feared it was more plunder from the archduchess’s wunderkammer, some scrimshawed urchin spine or gilded rodent penis bone, or the exquisite little scepter of a dollhouse king. But it was just a toothpick, and for the first time in recent memory, there were no jarred monstrosities on his desk. Zimmer’s fingers clasped each other as if searching for something that had been taken from him. He reminded Lucius of one of his great-uncles, a baron, who had spent his last years tending the geese in the ponds behind his castle, clapping as simply as a child when they snapped the bread out of his hand. But Zimmer seemed to understand what was at stake.

“Where will you go?” he asked.

Behind Zimmer hung a faded tapestry showing a unicorn sipping from a rushing forest stream. Snowy peaks rose high above it, the sky filled with soaring birds. Strange, thought Lucius, that he had never noticed it before.

He saw her walking, figure swaying in her habit, her fists full of roots and potherbs, saw her lowering herself to him that sun-dappled morning, beneath the willow on the bank.

“To find a friend,” he said. At last.

The army ambulances arrived the following week.

They were the same lorries he had grown familiar with at war, and pairs of porters appeared carrying the same stretchers. One by one the patients left, bowing or saluting, or kissing Lucius’s hand. This is Zoltán Lukács, a hussar thrown from his horse, an epileptic… Maciej Krawiec, Daniel Löw… Now, saying goodbye, there was part of him that doubted his departure, and he had to remind himself that it was not his choice. His expression must have betrayed his emotion, for one of the nurses appeared at his side. “There, there, Herr Doktor,” she whispered. “They’ll be taken care of. The hospital of Baden is lovely, state-of-the-art.” He nodded. He did not say what he was thinking then, that it was the fate he wished he could have given his patients at Lemnowice, a discharge to a sanitorium at Baden, not to more horrors of the war.

The ambulances departed, gravel crunching beneath their wheels; then more returned. When the men were gone, movers came and carried out the beds and the cots, cleared out the supply closet, and disassembled the nursing station in the center of the ballroom.

Zimmer left in a fiacre for his old office at the university. Lucius would visit him, he hoped, and Lucius nodded. They shook hands. Over the past month, the cataracts seemed to have grown even thicker, like inlaid pearls. Then the nurses followed, bowing neatly in sequence to Lucius as they filed out. Soon there were only a few small scattered pieces of furniture, but still Lucius waited. The room was empty then, the light from the high windows illuminating the frescoes of the ersatz sky. Once, in the days before it was the hospital, there would have been grand balls and dinners, but it seemed as if it had been abandoned centuries ago. Scratches and stains covered the parquet floor. Cobwebs on the chandeliers. The painting of Cadmus and the dragon back in its place high upon the wall.

A door at the end of the great hall opened. For a moment he expected a new arrival, a patient who hadn’t heard the news. But beside the race of warriors emerging from the dragon’s teeth, he was alone.

Outside, a cold wind had begun to blow.

The question then was how to return.

His best hope was to go by train to Dolina, by then the closest stop in Polish-controlled territory to Lemnowice. At the North Station, crowded with travelers, he inquired about tickets. Yes, the old Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway to Kraków was fully open, the ticket seller told him; from there one could go as far west as Lemberg, now known by its Polish name, Lwów. But with the Ukrainian insurgency, the railway south of Lwów was under Polish military control. Civilians were forbidden.

“Thank you,” said Lucius, leaving the ticket window, as another traveler pushed into his place. From Lwów, he might hire a motorcar, but from what he’d heard, the roads were in such disrepair as to be almost impassable. And, just that month, his mother, not one to be intimidated, had canceled a trip to Drohobycz after vigilantes had held two of her agents until she paid their ransom.

Thinking of his mother, he wondered if he might approach her, asking for her influence in securing passage from friends in the Polish Army. But he knew she wouldn’t permit such madness. Think what kind of kidnapping target you would make, she’d tell him. And for your pretty little nurse who likely isn’t there at all.

A rowdy flock of pigeons was scuttling in the station rafters above. Around him the crowds continued to press toward the ticket windows. For a moment, he felt his hopes again collapse, before his thoughts circled once more to his mother, to the army, and he knew what he could do.

He found Natasza at her apartment on Hohlweggasse.

It was a hot day. She came to the door in a kimono, a cigarette between her fingers, her hair done up in a chignon.

“Lucius. What a surprise.” By the old laws of the state, she was still his wife, but she waited for an explanation for his visit, as if she could dismiss him without inviting him to come inside.

But this time he was not so easily disposed of. He looked past her. “May I?”

“Of course. Do enter. It’s been some time.”

They sat together in the living room, where he used to pass the hours of the night. If she remembered, she gave no indication. Now, she was coldly civil, asking crisply after his family, his work. He told her about the hospital closing, how he planned to return to medical school that fall.

“You! Back at school!”

He didn’t mind, he said. What he had learned was war medicine; it was time for something else.

In turn, she told him how she had lived the past six months in Italy. Now that the new Austrian government was supposedly planning to reform the imperial marriage laws, she was secretly engaged again, to an Italian, a sculptor. Yes, truly an Italian sculptor; it was so predictable. The wedding would happen as soon as paperwork for the divorce was put in place.

Our divorce, he thought. He said, “I suppose I should offer you congratulations.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “Well. I am guessing you’re not here just to pay a social visit.”

Across the room stood a mirror, paints, a canvas. Briefly he wondered as to their purpose. But he, too, was finished with small talk. “I need a favor.”

“Oh?”

“From your father.”

She listened coldly as he explained the situation with the rails. All he needed was a letter, he said. He could get to Lwów alone; but from there he needed permission to travel south on the Polish Army trains.

She lit another cigarette and shook her head. She was sorry. Her father was in Warsaw now, meeting Marshal Piłsudski. There were wars with Russia and Ukraine, hadn’t he heard? And if Russia wasn’t enough to deal with, the general wasn’t happy about her new fiancé, always having wished she might marry another Pole. The last thing she wanted was to remind him of Lucius.

As she spoke, Lucius could feel his temper rising. “It would take nothing but a telegram,” he protested. “All he would have to do is dictate a letter to an aide.”

“And I told you, he can’t be bothered. Maybe in a couple of months, when I see him in Kraków.”

“Just a letter. A single sentence. Eight words, maybe ten. He dictates hundreds a day.”

“And I said not now. Why do you need to go there anyway?”

Lucius leaned back, fighting the urge to raise his voice. After everything, he thought, at least you owe me this.

She had grown silent, her way of saying she was done. But he didn’t move.

“Is there anything else?” she asked at last.

Lucius looked down at his hands, then back at her. “My mother says the general’s reputation is impeccable. Especially in a time of so much graft.”

Natasza eyed him cautiously. “And what does that mean?”

“Just that I was always surprised to hear your story about his buying champagne from the enemy, or how you and your sister were escorted by soldiers of the Third Brigade to Zakopane to go skiing during the war. Soldiers diverted from the front.”

She froze. The tiniest movement, almost imperceptible. But he saw, and she knew that he had seen.

She drew on her cigarette. “Blackmailing us won’t work, Lucius.”

“Oh, I have no interest in blackmailing you,” he said. “Not me.” He paused, realizing that for a brief moment, he was actually savoring the revenge. “But then, it’s the kind of story that my mother loves.”

Across the room, he noticed the image on the canvas for the first time, a self-portrait, a nude. He waited briefly for the pang, but there was none.

It took a week for the letter to arrive.

A single sentence, guaranteeing Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland, passage from Lwów to Dolina, and return.

The return was a nice touch, he thought. Generous of her. He hadn’t asked for that.

He went directly to the train station, buying a ticket departing the following morning for Lwów, through Oderberg, now called Bohumín, in the nation of Czechoslovakia, just eight months old.

That night he slipped into his father’s study. Both of his parents were out at a reception somewhere in the city, and Jadwiga had been given the week off to visit her family. A menagerie of lances, arquebuses, and bayonets covered one of the walls above a case of handguns. There, among the antique duck’s foot pistols, three-barrel volley guns, and Italian hand cannons was the old service revolver his father had tried to teach him to use when war broke out.

The case creaked as he opened it.

On the shelves built into the walnut paneling, he found an imperial atlas, thumbing through the pages until he found a map of the Carpathians. 1904. But the mountains hadn’t changed. He tore it out. From his father’s hunting kit he took a compass. He’d been lost once. This time he couldn’t take the chance.

Deep in his closet, he found the rucksack and old canteen he’d been reissued on the trains. He ran his fingers over the buckles; despite the months that had passed since he had worn it, he could still recall its weight, the way that snow collected in the seams, the creak when it was loaded. He slipped it over his shoulder. He had almost forgotten this other part of him, unbound from the house on Cranachgasse. This other person, who had spent two years with only what he could carry on his back.

From the kitchen: a round of heavy rye, a jar of pralines, and a piece of cheese. From his desk drawer: a stash of kronen, and then, uncertain if he could use Austrian currency in Czechoslovakia or Poland, his boyhood collection of silver coins.

Back in his room, he pored over the map, tracing the knuckles of the hills. Lemnowice was unmarked, but he found Bystrytsya and, following the valley up, the bend in the river where the village perched. From there the thin blue line wound through the green swath of forest. A willow, somewhere there. Two boulders by a riverbank.

With one of his old medical school pencils, he marked the village with a little x.

His parents returned late that night while he pretended to be sleeping. He slipped out early, before they woke. On the table in the dining room, where his mother had proposed he find a wife, he left a simple note. He was going to Galicia to see an acquaintance from his army days. Don’t worry about the ransom, he thought of adding, but the letter alone felt spectacularly defiant. She would know exactly what it meant.

On the Ringstrasse he hired a fiacre to take him to the North Station, where, within the crenellated arches, his train was waiting.

The sun was beginning to rise as they left the city.

He sat by the window, facing forward. In the compartment: a family of six, four wide-eyed children piled onto two seats, a soldier, a young man, dandied for the voyage, theatrically solicitous of his young, pregnant wife. Outside, a low light fell across the stockyards, where rail workers loaded up a car with rusted pipes. Farther along they passed a row of decommissioned trains, paint peeling now and windows empty, grass tufts growing from the narrow sills like old men’s eyebrows.

They slowed as they crossed the Danube on a rattling iron bridge.

They picked up speed. Across from him, the children ate sunflower seeds, neatly spitting out the wads of shells into a tin can they passed back and forth. The light was bright now, warming the window in an amber glow; he had to squint to watch the country pass. Boys played along the railway, miming aim at the passing carriages, then gesticulating dramatically as if they had just been shot. Passing Deutsch-Wagram, he recalled a visit long ago with his father and two older brothers, to see where Napoleon had gone to battle. A memory now, his brothers searching the fields for bones and bullets. Father scanning the horizon with binoculars, while a sunburnt Lucius held out the Orders of Battle like a little aide-de-camp.

Can you imagine? said his father. The bodies, the horses. This would have been bodies as far as the eye can see. But no, Lucius couldn’t imagine, then.

At the March River, the railway turned north, leaving the floodplain, and the land began to rise.

It was noon when they reached the border. At Břeclav, once Lundenburg, the train was boarded by Czechoslovakian police wearing old Habsburg uniforms, the imperial insignias torn from their epaulets. They had an air of make-believe, as if they were imperial officers playing officers of the free nation of Czechoslovakia. They stopped briefly in the compartment and collected passports, though neither the passengers nor the policemen seemed to know what for. Lucius thought briefly of his father’s revolver in his rucksack on the rack above him, the stories of militiamen, the shifting loyalties, now wondering what the police would think.

They didn’t check.

Beyond the city, the fields gave way to forests. The Morava appeared, dark blue and beaded with little hamlets. Barges moved in the distance. Across from him, the young man and his pregnant wife began to eat a pungent sandwich of egg and onion. The domesticity of the scene seemed almost impossible against the knowledge that within hours they would be entering territory once wracked by war, but with the warmth, he soon found himself beginning to doze off.

It was evening when they crossed the Oder, and night when they entered Bohumín.

In the Bohumín station, he was told the train to Lwów would be leaving in the early morning.

He left to look for lodging. It was hot, and the air was heavy with smoke from factories flanking the track. An oily film seemed to coat the buildings, the peddlers with their carts of pears and leeks, a pair of skinny horses who fought their bridles at the entrance to a dry goods shop. There were beggars everywhere; only seven months of independence, and already it had the air of a frontier town, the sense that things had been pushed there only to get stuck, like the detritus gathering at the corner of a wall.

A light rain began to fall, and the streets exhaled a fetid breath. At the station, he had been given the name of a hotel in an imposing imperial building off the main street, with a thick red carpet leading up the stairs to the reception. A heavy woman sat at the desk, dressed in a kind of black nightgown that seemed to have been cut from mourning. Her arms were bare and dewlapped, her face plethoric, her breath labored and wheezy as she passed him a key from the pigeonholes behind her desk.

He slept fitfully. The walls were covered by peeling, blood-red paper, and the light came from a candle, stuck directly to his nightstand in its wax. The sheets were pilled and dirty, and twice he turned on the light, certain that he would find them full of lice. But there was nothing. Just my imagination, he thought, trying to find some lightness in his panic. Once you feel Her, Pan Doctor, you can’t escape.

Around midnight, he was aroused from half-slumber by hammering and shouts of authority, and he braced for someone to burst through his door. Later he heard weeping. It rose, gasping, so loud and urgent that he ran into the hall, thinking someone was dying or giving birth. Then it went silent. By then it was four. He did not return to sleep.

Back at the station, he made his way to the platform for trains heading east. Even in the two hundred paces that separated the eastern and southwestern lines, the difference was palpable. More and more people speaking Polish, more scraps of Galician costume: vests, embroidered blouses, the occasional woman in a highlander cap. It was not hard to imagine Margarete there, among them. He was getting closer. If not to her, to the place where he would begin to search.

At the platform, he learned that the train to Lwów had been delayed because of problems with the gauge changes on the Breslau line. From a station vendor, he bought a dry piece of cake and a cup of roasted chicory advertised as coffee.

The train came.

The compartment sat six and was full when he entered. On the far wall, a pair of old women sat side by side in identical dresses of a coarse brown muslin, buttoned to the chin. There were two old men in stiff green vests, whom he took to be their husbands, one reading a Czech newspaper, the other Polish, each creased neatly along a column. The other two seats were taken by a woman in a light-blue blouse and a sleeping child in a gown.

Lucius stepped back out of the door to check his ticket against the number of the compartment, but by then the young woman had gathered up the child in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said in Polish. She shifted over to the window, freeing the middle seat.

Lucius nodded to her in thanks, set his rucksack on the rack above them, and took his seat. Outside there was a long whistle and then the train began to move.

Through the pipe yards again, the brick factories and smokestacks giving way to smaller workshops. It wasn’t yet nine, and already the day was warm. He removed his coat and folded it on his lap. Outside, the city began to drop away. Fields again. In the distance he could see low hills, and perhaps the hint of mountains through the haze.

“I noticed your ticket. You are going to Lemberg… I mean, Lwów?”

He turned. Her hair was honey-colored, loose down her back. Eyes dark brown, skin pale, a little burnt. The child sleeping in her lap.

“Have you been there before?” she asked.

He hesitated, uncertain of her intentions. It was a bit brazen, he thought, for a woman traveling alone to solicit conversation. But he was grateful for someone to speak to. “Only during the war,” he said.

“You were a soldier?”

“Not quite. A doctor.”

“Oh. You weren’t in the Fourth Army, were you?”

He paused, struck by the specificity of the question. “No,” he said, more hesitantly now. “The Third. Later the Seventh.”

Her face lit up. “But after the Brusilov Offensive, many of the companies from the Fourth Army were integrated into the Seventh. Perhaps you met men of the Fourth?”

If her voice didn’t seem suddenly plaintive, he would have smiled at the incongruity of this young woman sounding like his father talking army organization. “You seem to know more than me,” he said. “I left the front after Brusilov. I was in the medical corps, on the trains, then at a hospital in Vienna.”

“I see.” But it didn’t really seem as if she’d heard him. Carefully, so as not to wake the child, she leaned forward to a canvas sack at her feet and extracted a package bound with yellowing twine. With one hand she untied and unfolded the wrapping paper, which clearly had been folded and unfolded many times. She withdrew a photograph, mounted on cardstock.

She handed it to him. On her hand he saw a wedding band, the nails on her fingers bitten to the quick.

“Did you ever see him? His name is Tomasz Bartowski, he was in the Ninth Corps, Tenth Infantry Division.”

In the photo, she was sitting with a young man in an outdoor café. A decorative cloth was spread over the table, and there was a single, extravagant piece of cake with two forks buried in its flank. His hand rested on hers, and both of them were smiling; he wore a boater, jauntily angled, and her striped white blouse rose all the way to her chin. Behind them stood a waiter with a tray of cigarettes and chocolates, his torso bisected by the frame.

“I’m so sorry,” said Lucius, now understanding why she knew so much. “I don’t recognize him.”

“Can you look more closely? If you were a doctor, you must have taken care of many men.”

Many, many men, thought Lucius.

But still the face was unfamiliar.

“I’ve been looking since the war,” she said, as she took the photo back. “I even went to Vienna, to the War Office. He isn’t on their casualty lists. So I have hope. They said he may have been taken prisoner of war, that even though most of the prisoners have returned, the Bolsheviks have kept some of them for labor. Then in Kraków, I met a man from his company who said he was pretty certain Tomasz had been injured at Lutsk, but lightly. That he was likely at the Regimental Hospital in Jarosław. He wasn’t there. But a nurse recognized him, said she was certain she had seen him among the wounded at the Przemyśl hospital. Except he wasn’t there either. Now, I’ve heard the hospitals are being emptied, to make space for the wounded from the Ukrainian war. So I’m going back to Jarosław, to start again.

“Maybe you just don’t recognize him,” she added, when she saw he didn’t have an answer. “It’s an old photo, from long ago.” Then she handed him another photograph. “I have this one, too.”

The second was from their wedding, the young woman dressed in a traditional wedding dress from the Galician lowlands. For a moment Lucius let his eyes linger. There was something striking about the image: her face a little flushed, her eyes darker, wilder. Her hair was braided, the braids folded upon her head and bound in a tumble of white damask and flowers. The skin of her neck glistened, and the weight of a breast pushed at the cotton pleats of her blouse. She had been dancing, he realized. Right up until the moment the wedding photographer had taken their portrait, and here she was, a little out of breath.

He felt as if he had been looking too long, but she didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed proud of her laughing self. “I was fatter then,” she said. She touched the photo affectionately. “The baby, and the worry, made me lean.”

He shuffled the photographs. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware now of her neck, bare that warm morning, and the fine sprinkling of freckles that ended just above her collar.

The third photo was a studio portrait, likely taken at the time of Tomasz’s enlistment. In it, he wore a crisp uniform and deeply serious expression, while at his side his young wife smiled as if she had just been teasing when the bulb went off.

“And this is the card he sent me.” She turned it over and showed Lucius the postmark. Tarnów. He couldn’t help reading, Dearest Adelajda! We are all well. I am still with Hanek; he too is well. I think of you always and carry your photograph next to my heart. Tomorrow we go to—but a blue censor’s pen had cruelly removed the following two lines. She peered at it, as if, after so many tries, the words might suddenly appear. Then she placed it in the stack and folded the paper back up. The child stirred in her lap. “There, there,” she whispered. “Shhh, sleep. We will find Papa. Sleep.”

She turned back to Lucius. “He’s had a fever for almost five days now. I had thought it would have gone away. But you’re a doctor, maybe you know what’s wrong.”

He hesitated. I was. Not anymore according to the new Republic. But this mattered less than the fact that lectures and clinics in pediatrics belonged to the seventh semester, which he had planned to start that first autumn of the war.

He thought of the village children back in Lemnowice, trying to teach them to listen to their hearts.

“My patients were all soldiers,” he said.

She didn’t seem to register his answer. “I’ve been giving him this.” She took out a bottle of patent medicine, its miraculous effects prominently advertised on a bright red label. “The pharmacist said three drops whenever he’s crying. But all it does is make him sleep.” She touched his forehead with the back of her hand, then touched her own, then again touched his. “He’s still so hot.”

For the first time since the start of their journey, Lucius looked closely at the child. He must have been around two years old. He was barefoot, and the gown, likely his nightclothes, was of cotton, stained about the neck and hem. He slept with his arms thrown up above his head, like a pantomime of a person falling. Cheeks pink, fingernails almost translucent, ears like porcelain.

Lucius felt the attention of the other passengers as he examined the boy, but the child was so flushed it was hard to discern a rash. Were there any other symptoms? he asked Adelajda. Cough? Oh, yes. Diarrhea? Yes, a little. Bumps in his mouth? Not that I have seen. But he’s not eating? He just takes a little milk. He tried to open the boy’s mouth, but the boy resisted. He pressed an ear against his rib cage. A murmur? But with the rumbling of the train, he couldn’t hear. Glands swollen, but not to the degree he might expect in quinsy; though he was thinking of adults.

“Has he had his smallpox vaccination?”

She shook her head; there had been shortages, the doses had been reserved for soldiers. But she’d seen smallpox; he didn’t have the blisters.

Not yet, thought Lucius grimly. The cough made it less likely, but just the thought made Lucius’s ear and cheek feel warmer where they had touched the child’s chest. But I’ve also been vaccinated; he had to remind himself of this.

Fevers of childhood. Roseola, scarlet fever, measles, rubella, influenza…

Feuermann, with his internship at the rural clinic, would have known.

He looked at the tincture, which appeared to be a preparation of laudanum, without any mention of a dose. She said she gave it to him whenever he was crying? She was lucky she hadn’t killed him. So he could help, at least a little. He gave it back. “I would stay away from this.”

They were passing fields again. Beyond, he thought he could see mountains. They entered Tarnów. Now the signs of war were everywhere. Broken artillery filled the junkyards outside the station, and the grass traced discarded skeletons of trucks. Adelajda had returned the packet to her bag, and after a time he realized that she was crying softly. One of the old women watched her, emotionless, but the other passengers made an effort not to stare. He had the impulse to comfort her, but he didn’t know what to say. That she should stop looking for her husband? Go home, at least until the little boy was well?

“I am also going to look for someone I lost during the war.”

The words came unplanned.

There was silence. She sniffed, then turned, eyes beseeching. “Your wife?”

Almost. Perhaps one day…

“No, not my wife.”

“You loved her, though.”

She said this with such naturalness, that he answered, “Yes. I did.”

She brightened almost immediately. “Then you’re like me,” she said. “You know, a customs officer once told me that half the continent was looking for the other half. Now you, too. See?”

He nodded. There was something in her hopefulness that touched him like a balm. He could almost see her as she had been the moments before her wedding photo, a swirl of color and laughter, her eyes flashing, her flower-embroidered tresses swaying as she danced.

She said, “And you think she is in Lwów?”

“Not Lwów. I don’t know where she is. I last saw her at a field hospital, in the mountains. So I was going to return there first.”

“Oh, and when did you last see her?”

“June.” He paused. “In ’16.”

“’16?” He sensed a sudden slackening of her optimism. “’16. And you haven’t given up.”

He did not know whether she had meant this in admiration or in pity, and was about to add that he hadn’t been searching this whole time, when the train lurched and, shuddering, began to slow. The luggage rocked above them; the little boy nearly tumbled from his mother’s lap. He began to cry.

They came to a stop. Outside, a lone road led off through fallow fields, blotched with scattered clumps of wild mustard. The passengers looked at one another. One of the men took out his watch.

“I didn’t know we were stopping,” Lucius said.

“We’re not. Not until Rzeszów.” Adelajda leaned against the window to try to see. “Sometimes they have trouble with the rail. We have to wait. Sometimes for quite some time.”

Outside, a group of horsemen rode past, and Lucius sensed Adelajda tensing. Then the men rode back. There was shouting in Polish farther up the line, something about boarding, but Lucius couldn’t make out everything they said. Behind them there was a clatter as the door to the carriage opened and a voice called out. Then footsteps, banging on compartment doors.

In Polish: “Everyone in your seats!”

Adelajda’s son, who had finally quieted in her arms, began to cry again. As she stroked his hair, she leaned toward Lucius, and said, very softly, “Militias, loyal to Poland. The same thing happened last month. They are looking for enemy sympathizers. Because of the wars with Ukraine and Russia.” Then in a much lower voice. “Last time they detained all young men traveling alone. Say that I’m your wife.”

He thought of the detailed map to the province of Galicia, his father’s revolver, tucked neatly in the bag above his head. His old army papers, from before Natasza. “But my passport says that I’m unmarried.”

Now Adelajda didn’t drop her gaze from him. “No. We were married in Vienna in 1916, but the new Austrian Republic asked us to resubmit our marriage license prior to traveling. But they bungled it; Poles love stories about how the Austrians bungle things. This is our son. His name is Paweł Krzelewski: that is your family name, right? I saw it on your ticket. And my maiden name was Bartowska, like it says on mine. We are going to Jarosław to visit my aunt, Vanda Cenek. She is a war widow; her husband died fighting for Polish independence in the Pripet, a great patriot. We plan to spend a month with her at a small farm belonging to my cousin. It is too hot in the city for our child, who, we must remind them, is very sick.”

“My ticket says my destination is Lwów.”

“Your ticket says your destination is Lwów because the ticket office in the Nordbahnhof bungled it. You will disembark at Jarosław with me, to visit my aunt.”

“But…,” Lucius began, as the carriage door slid open.

“Papers,” said a young man in an unmarked uniform.

Adelajda put her free hand on Lucius’s arm.

Lucius removed his passport and ticket, and passed them over with those of the older couples. “Yours,” the young man said to Adelajda.

“They’re in my bag,” she said. She leaned over and leafed through it with her free hand, struggling with little Paweł, who had begun to cry again.

“Hurry,” the guard said. At last she handed them over. The soldier studied the papers of the older couples before handing them back. His cheeks were pink, covered with peach fuzz, his eyes bright blue. He looked perhaps sixteen. A rifle was slung around his chest, and a pistol sat in a holster on his belt.

He looked at Lucius.

“You two are traveling together?”

Adelajda didn’t give him time to answer. “My husband met me in Bohumín. I was in Rybnik with my family. We’re going to Jarosław, to see my aunt.”

“Your ticket says Lwów.” He was staring at Lucius. “And your papers say you’re single. But this is your wife.”

Again Adelajda was faster. “We filed papers in January.”

“Really?” The young man smiled as if he’d unearthed a dirty secret. “The baby must be what, two years old? Three?”

Her face hardened. “That’s none of your business.”

“I’d say it is; your story doesn’t hang together.”

“And I’d say that not everyone had the leisure to file papers during the war.” She paused. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t know? My husband didn’t even meet his son until demobilization. You look like a baby. Were you playing with your dolls while your brothers served?”

Lucius looked at her. He had thought at first that her taking offense was calculated. But now he worried that something else was boiling over, that she was no longer in control.

He interrupted. “My wife means no disrespect,” he said. “I… I… it has been hard for all of us, you see…”

But the young man had retained their papers. “Come with me,” he said.

Lucius’s heart pounded; he began to rise.

“Not you. This one.” The young man pointed at her with his chin.

Adelajda shook her head. “On whose authority?”

The young man took a step toward them. Now Lucius thought of General Borszowski’s letter in his bag. Friend of Poland. Surely this would mean something, as would the signature of the general. But the letter made no mention of a wife.

“I can explain.”

But the young man ignored him entirely. “I’m waiting, Pani…”

She looked off in defiance. “I will not put up with this. I was born a Pole. I lost a brother for Poland, nearly gave my husband. My baby has drunk my love of Poland in his milk…”

“Good. You can explain that to my captain.” He paused. “Let’s go.”

“I’ll come,” said Lucius louder.

“Not you,” said the young man, angrier now. “You can stay with the baby while this patriot comes with me.”

Adelajda looked at him. He knew, just as she knew, that not to pass him Paweł would risk betraying them entirely. She leaned over and whispered something Lucius couldn’t hear. Then, “Stay with Papa. I’ll be back.”

But the moment she moved, Paweł began to grab wildly at her, her arm, her hair, her blouse. She had to pry him off. He grabbed a finger, then again her hair. A wail rose from him. “Please,” she said to Lucius, who reached over to help. But the boy, despite his illness, was fierce in his resistance, and it took a few more tries to pry him out of Adelajda’s arms. “Shhh…,” Lucius whispered, but the wailing only grew louder. He struggled to contain the child, at last enfolding him in his arms. It occurred to him that he had never truly held—not just touched, but truly held—a child in his life. It seemed impossible. There must have been a younger cousin, a nephew, sometime in the past, but the force of the little limbs was something he had never anticipated. And the fever was nothing like he had felt in his patients, a dry, searing heat that radiated through the light gown. Still Paweł twisted for his mother. “Shhh…,” Lucius whispered again.

He could feel every eye in the compartment upon him. What would a father do?

Roseola, scarlet fever, measles, rubella, influenza…

“Shhh…,” he said, lips touching the hot skin of Paweł’s head.

“Let’s go,” the soldier said.

Again, Adelajda looked to Lucius, her eyes betraying desperation. He had a sense suddenly of a new realm of loss that he had never really known existed. He looked up. “In my bag… I have a letter…”

But the soldier put his hand on his holster. “Do you want your son to see me make him an orphan, Pani?”

She rose.

“Now!”

She made it to the door. Life had left her; her skin was almost green, and for a moment Lucius thought she would collapse. She turned again. “Paweł,” she said. “This is Papa. Stay with him. He’ll care for you until I’m back. He’ll care for you…”

Her voice broke. The boy was screaming, his face scarlet, twisting with such a force that Lucius could scarcely hold him. He could see his little teeth, the trembling vibrato of his tongue.

But Adelajda couldn’t go any further. She turned and lunged for him. The soldier grabbed her by the shoulder and hurled her against the far wall of the corridor.

A shot.

Then voices, footsteps pounding through the train. More soldiers, pushing past them. Lucius saw Adelajda’s hands go up, covering her head. More shouts. Hurry! The soldier grabbed Adelajda and threw her back into the compartment, tickets and passports scattering on the floor. Paweł broke free and tumbled into her arms. Lucius looked back to the door, but the men were all gone, storming out into the fields, where a figure now was running. Another shot. He saw the figure go down in the grass, then come back up again, now at a slant, then fall again. Then three men were on him.

They lifted him, carried him back struggling toward the front of the train and out of view. Then from the rear came more shouts, then two more men were marched forward, hands on their heads. A horseman rode past, his open greatcoat waving in the wind.

Then silence.

In the distance, a hawk circled above the fields.

At Lucius’s side, Adelajda held Paweł tightly to her, pressed her face against his cheek, his forehead, his hands. She let her hair fall around him, willowing them together in its shelter. Around the little boy’s wrist was a rosary bracelet, and at times she stopped and kissed it, murmuring, “Mother Maria, Mama, Mama, Mama…”

Across the compartment, the old twin sisters watched them impassively. They would have heard much of the earlier conversation, Lucius knew. They could have betrayed them. He wanted to thank them for their silence, but to do so seemed to implicate them, to put them all at risk.

Another of the horsemen rode past. “Lower your window shades,” he shouted. “All passengers! Shades down! What are you staring at? Countrymen, lower your shades, there is nothing here to see!” Lucius rose and pulled the cord. His shirt was soaked with Paweł’s tears, and a strand of mucus spanned his arm.

Engines louder now.

Adelajda’s murmurs growing softer. “Mama Mama Mama Mama.”

They lurched forward, on.

The sun was beginning to set when they reached Jarosław station.

For the rest of the journey they’d been mostly silent. She had retreated into the child, holding him and cooing, chastened, Lucius suspected, by the risk she’d taken, by how perilously close she had come to such extraordinary loss. He sensed, and sensed she sensed, that perhaps they had committed some transgression. For all the gravity of their previous conversation, there had also been something unspoken, not quite a flirtation, but a hint of possibility.

Say that I’m your wife.

This is our son. His name is Paweł Krzelewski.

There was more than one way to understand these words.

My husband met me in Bohumín.

But now, they both had retreated from whatever dream they’d tested. He to his world; she to hers. In Rzeszów, where the train was swarmed by children selling fistfuls of currant sprays, he had purchased some for Paweł, but beyond a whispered Thank you, Adelajda said nothing else.

He looked out the window at the approaching station. The beginning of the journey—with the young couple and their egg-and-onion sandwich, the old men with their stiff vests and crisply folded newspapers—this moment, almost from an older, prewar age, had lured him into a kind of complacent fantasy about what lay ahead. But the encounter with the militia had cast the true recklessness of what he was doing into much sharper relief. Again, he had to remind himself that all reports said that the fighting was concentrated around the rails and cities. That in the mountains, he’d be safer. Or so he hoped.

The train had stopped, and Adelajda began to gather up her belongings. Lucius watched her, waiting for words to be exchanged. But she acted now as if she didn’t know him, and it was only at the door that she looked back. The little boy was sleeping on her shoulder. With a flicker of her fingers she waved goodbye. She left.

A moment later she returned. As she sat, her arm brushed against Lucius.

For a moment, he thought she had decided to travel on with him. Then, very softly, she whispered the name of a street in Rybnik. “Perhaps,” she said, “if you don’t find the person you are looking for, you can come and find me.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Again she rose. Across the compartment the old women watched him. He heard Adelajda disappear down the corridor. He turned back to the window as the train began to move. She was there, amid the crowd mingling on the platform, and he wanted her to cast a backward glance, but she seemed resolute now in her decision not to turn.

It was close to midnight when he reached Lwów. Now, everything moved swiftly, without a hitch. He presented the next morning to the garrison, where soldiers took target practice on the same slate-grey dummies he remembered from the years before. By noon, letter in hand, he was on the train to Dolina, in a cattle car with a drunk, deploying Polish rifle battalion heading off to their new war. They reached the station late in the evening. There, a small hotel was advertising vacancies, but he no longer wished to delay his journey, setting out on foot along the overgrown rails.