The Winter Soldier

18.

He passed the night in an abandoned station, on a decommissioned railway south of Dolina. It was of standard imperial construction, and not yet stripped of its Habsburg double eagle. Were it not on the other side of the mountains, it might have been the same building in which he found the hussar waiting with their horses years before. The same board for posting timetables, the same bench that once had sustained the troika of waiting mothers. Roof now caving. Walls already beginning their crumbling return to earth. Otherwise empty, save a tall trapezoid of goldenrod in the light cast by the empty door.

He slept inside on his jacket, on earth wet with summer rain. It was a tentative sleep; in a dream that seemed to cross into his waking moments, he found himself back on the train, running through the corridors, searching compartment after compartment for Margarete. At last, the dream was broken by a pittering reconnaissance about his rucksack, whiskers on his cheek. Nose to his nose: he lurched awake.

Outside, the mountains were beginning to declare themselves against the early summer dawn.

From his bag, he extracted the page torn from the imperial atlas and spread it over the bench. Back in Vienna, he had focused his attention on a highway that skirted the foothills before joining the road that climbed through Bystrytsya to Lemnowice. But after the attack on the train, he wanted to get away from the flatlands as soon as possible. Light dashes through the mountains suggested roads passable by horse. Assuming they were still there fifteen years after the atlas was published, they’d serve well for someone on foot. It was lonelier, but he now worried much more about men than wolves.

From the station, the road south was broad, the mud thick and heavy. In the fields, high grass crowded out the maize and sunflowers. My God, thought Lucius as he stared into the green expanse, he had almost forgotten the land’s fecundity. Great heaps of flax and St. John’s wort rose on the roadside berms, and the road itself, a paisley of mud and tire tracks, was overgrown with brome. Ahead, the mountains rose before him in their grandeur, looming, massive, like the rumpled repose of a stage curtain with its rich, brocaded pleats.

So here he was, in the little hatch marks on his father’s map, the word KARPATEN splayed before him across the land. But a finger’s-breadth to travel yet.

He walked swiftly, his eyes alert for the possibility of other travelers, but he saw no one else. After an hour, at a crossroads, he came across the remains of a field camp, deep in mud, as if half-buried by a deluge. There were dented tins, a bent fork, and an old decaying tarp. A band of sparrows argued in the shadow of a rusting field oven, where a burst of hound’s-tongue had begun to seed. Beyond this: some scraps of uniform, flapping in a morning breeze. A skull and scattered teeth, a rind of scalp, a pair of rib cages, white as stone.

Like Cadmus, he thought, recalling the painting hanging above the chair for minor surgeries, the earth sewn with the dragon’s fangs, from which would grow a fiercer race of men.

It was not yet nine, and already the grass was seething with heat and life. He rolled up his coat, tied it below his rucksack, and pulled up his sleeves, still dirty with their snail’s track of snot. Butterflies had settled on his shirt collar, and he shook them off; then, feeling generous, let them remain there. After another hour, he saw his first people, two farmers in a distant field. They stopped their work and watched him, without greeting. Then two young boys, leading a pair of reluctant, mud-caked sheep.

He walked until dusk, stopping only to eat, staying clear of settlements, wary of how they might treat an unfamiliar visitor at night. At last, alone, exhausted, he turned off the road and, near a narrow stream, lay his coat down within the shelter of a willow.

A frog was croaking. As he rested, memories stirred by the day descended. The crushed-grass smell, the hint of pinesap drifting from the distance. The way the sparrows swayed balletically on the umbels of the wild carrot, snipping at the insects they encountered in their orbits. The way the mud caked on his boots. Yes: wrapped in the rustling of the willow he could almost hear Margarete’s laughter. She seemed so close now that he had to remind himself that he couldn’t expect to find her yet. That he couldn’t lose himself to hopes and expectations. If he was lucky, very lucky, there would be a villager who knew what had happened, or perhaps a clue left in the church. Like a seam running through the great mass of possibilities. And from there he would push on.

There were other possibilities, of course, he realized. He could find the village ransacked, destroyed like so many others. The church in ruins. Corpses left behind to decompose across the Cadmean earth.

He stared up at the night sky and fought very hard to keep this from his mind.

He began again before dawn.

The land grew hilly, and he checked the map and compass, following a narrow, rocky road. His stomach growled. His feet, in his old army boots, began to ache, and when he stopped to readjust his socks, he found blisters on both his heels. Inside his shirt, a spray of bug bites had appeared after his night sleeping in the grass. His face was burnt; his head throbbed. He’d forgotten a hat. He, with his Icelander’s complexion, had brought a half-century-old revolver and forgotten a hat.

He passed a man leading a donkey and a wagon, piled with belongings and a pair of children. Its wheels were spokeless, cut from solid blocks of wood, like something out of a children’s encyclopedia entry on the ancient history of transportation. He recalled the family he had encountered with the hussar, the pilfered rabbits. As if they had been wandering ever since. But now there was no mother, and the children’s summer clothing was ragged, sustained by fraying knots of string.

He had been taking small bites from a loaf of bread purchased two days before in Bohumín. Seeing them, he felt ashamed in front of their hunger, so he offered it. They looked to their father, who nodded, and then they scrambled down from the wagon to seize it, retreating to the safety of their bags.

“Where are you going?” their father asked, in something halfway between Polish and Slovakian, after trying out two other tongues.

“Lemnowice.”

“Ah.”

“You know it?”

“Yes.”

“Far?”

“Not as far as where you’ve come from.”

The children gnawed at the bread, watching him.

“And you’re alone?” the father asked.

“Yes.”

A long pause.

“You have your reasons,” the father said.

The road wound on, through meadows and scattered copses of trees. He finished his water and the last of his food. The land was steeper now; the earth shimmered with runoff. Rain clouds came, opened, and left.

Soon he began to regret his fit of charity. He was hungry, and the water in the rivers was too muddy to drink. Instead, he grabbed clumps of high grass and sucked the rain, as Margarete had taught him. Calamus on the banks—he ate the shoots. See, I still remember. Beyond, the earth was chalky, greedy for his boots.

In the early afternoon, he passed a pair of villages, both destroyed. The first must have been of some size in 1904, for it was there in the imperial atlas, unnamed but recorded with a little square. In the second, the walls of a synagogue were charred and broken. An old man in a black hat and robe was pushing a plow through a garden behind one of the ruined houses, and a young boy led a frail old woman down a path. Who had done this? Lucius wanted to ask them, but the child panicked when he saw Lucius, disappearing with the woman into the ruins.

Later, he passed another hamlet, this one completely burnt to the ground. This time there was no one, and by the size of the trees growing up from the remains of the houses, he guessed that it had been that way since the first days of the war.

After that he stayed away from the villages.

Sometimes, far off in the trees, he sensed the presence of other people, and once, in a far-off valley, he saw a figure on horseback, with a plumed helmet and lance, uniform glittering. For a moment Lucius blinked, wondering if it was an illusion, but the man remained, seemingly lost and wandering in time.

Dusk fell. Clouds of midges lifted from the high grass. A flock of black birds appeared above the valley, dove and rose again in teeming ranks, unfolded, colonnaded, burst.

Now the woods grew denser, pines and spruces appearing among the oaks.

Her woods. Around him, everywhere: her bracken, thistle, goosefoot. On a ridge, he found a foxhole and machine gun, its barrel bent and rusted, draped with a muddy scarf. A line of grave mounds, now covered with a thin growth of pine trees. A half-torn pickelhaube, a leather glove.

The ground was thick with old, spent shells, like acorns after a masting.

Darkness had fallen, and he spent the night inside the foxhole, in a corner worn smooth in the shape of a sleeping man. It was empty, save a discarded canteen, half full of water. How long had it rested there? he wondered, and though he was thirsty, he didn’t drink.

It was raining when he awoke. Droplets drummed down on the oak leaves. He walked faster now, hungry, not trusting himself with the mushrooms and too impatient to stop and strip the cambium from the bark. For everything told him he was getting closer, memory a landscape with a topology of its own. Something faintly different in the smell of the forest, in the softness of the earth. The rushing streams now lined with horsetails. Stones of familiar shape. He began to walk more swiftly. Yes, he recognized it: here was the ridge where Margarete had once stopped to remove a pebble from her boot. Here was the rocky overhang where once they’d taken shelter. Faster, off the trail, twigs snapping as he hurried toward a light. And then before him, where the land began to drop and the forest opened, he stopped. There, he saw it. The church, the houses, the valley, the thin stream of mist rising through the same trees through which it had risen on the night he’d left.

He stood for a moment, almost in disbelief. Heart pounding from the exertion, taking in the vision before him, preparing for what he was about to learn.

In the wind from the valley, the leaves rustled, hiding the sound of the footsteps behind him as three men stepped out from the woods.

They were very gentle, considering. A dusty sack came down over his head, and the fabric was pushed into his mouth and bound there with a stone. He had no time to speak. Then his rucksack was stripped, his hands tied. Standard Imperial and Royal procedure for moving a POW, he later thought, though the stone in his mouth seemed a local innovation. Images, then, of hooded prisoners, marched off into the snow, prodded with the barrel of a gun.

He waited. There it was: cold against the bare base of his neck.

They led him down the hillside and into the valley, one man on each arm, the third behind him, reminding him of his presence with intermittent nudges of the muzzle. The path was muddy, and he stumbled constantly. From time to time he could hear the men speaking in Ruthenian, but what he could understand helped him little: morning, captain, bag. He assumed they were remnants of Ukrainian units, having taken to the mountains after being pushed out of the plains by Polish forces. By then they would have found the gun, the sundry coins, the map, and, if they could understand Polish, they would have read the letter from the general. Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland. His story, that he was a doctor returning to the village, now seemed completely improbable. They would be fools to believe him. If they even let him speak.

His stomach knotted, and for a moment, he was afraid that he might soil his pants. Like so many of his patients—this sordid fact never mentioned in the manuals. But the heat passed through him, sparing him. He felt his face flush, and in the dusty chamber of the sack, he sneezed.

The trail began to level out. They left the woods. In the light that filtered through the fabric, he could vaguely make out the shapes of low-slung houses. He could feel the sun’s warmth now, smell the musty odor of a barnyard, hens. Some children’s voices, the sound of more footsteps on the road. This comforted him a little. They wouldn’t shoot him in front of children, would they? They turned from the road and climbed a short path and stopped. A door creaked. They entered a darker room. Smell of stable dust and linseed and manure. He was shoved down onto a stool. The rope was untied from around his head, the stone removed. They left the sack. His lip had been wedged between the stone and his teeth, and now he licked it, salty with blood.

An old memory, the metal apparatus in his mouth, his bleeding tongue.

They bound his feet.

Now the men addressed him directly, but again he didn’t understand. The gun barrel moved from neck to head. He had to speak, he knew. Roughly, he tried what he could remember of Ruthenian. I am a doctor. Worked here, wartime.

“Polyak?” said the soldier.

Pole. It depends who you ask, he thought. By name, but not by passport. He took a gamble. “Avstriyets.”

Austrian. There was silence. Whispers. Then the door opened and someone left.

Now, he could vaguely make out features of the hut. A guard sat by the door, beneath a rank of farm tools. It occurred to him that they might be useful in an escape, but he knew this was an insane fantasy. The truth was that he probably couldn’t have fought off a single guard, even without a sack around his head. Now his thirst and hunger began to grow acute. Voda, he said to the soldier. Water. But no answer returned to him from across the room.

Alone, his head bound, sitting uncomfortably on the stool, he found his mind surprisingly empty, slowing, as if somehow preparing to meet death halfway. He was scared, very scared, but very tired, too, and he found the thoughts of what would happen to him now almost too difficult to bear. He wondered if this was what others felt. If so close, death seemed almost welcome, not something to be feared. Perhaps it would be easier, he thought, if his journey ended now. There would be something fitting to this: back at the church, where his new life had begun. Was this what he’d been drawn toward, a kind of ending, a release?

Then panic surged in him, he felt his eyes tear up, and his stomach seized again. Now, more than fantasies of fleeing, he felt a wish to fall and curl upon himself until someone came to carry him away. Light and elemental, like a shell or husk.

It was afternoon when at last he heard the sound of horses outside, and then someone dismounting. The door opened again. More steps.

“So you’re the Austrian?” This, surprisingly, spoken in German.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

He hesitated, trying to gauge his answer, but the vastness of the war and its allegiances were too great to outmaneuver. So he decided on the truth. “I once lived here, during the war. There was a field hospital. I was the doctor. I’ve come back to look for a friend.”

Silence. Through the sack, he saw the newcomer turn to the guard and say something. Probably asking for papers, for he heard a rustling. He braced himself.

“Krzelewski.”

Pronounced correctly, though with a faint Ruthenian hum.

He answered. “Y… yes?”

Then, suddenly: the light.

A one-handed man stood there before him, his good hand holding the sack, while he sniffled and wiped a runny nose with the stump of his other wrist. A colorfully embroidered highlander’s vest covered an old grey Austrian uniform. On his head, despite the heat, a sheepskin cap, with upturned earflaps. A thick moustache overhung his mouth.

“Doctor!”

Lucius stared, uncertain how to respond.

“It is I, Krajniak! Krajniak! By God’s beard, don’t you remember?”

Ah, yes: the missing hand, the sniffles. The French dine out on foie gras. The Brits beef in a pot. Saluting with his stump that final evening when they went looking for Margarete. The cook.

But now the face was sunburnt, hardened, and the moustache long.

“Of course!”

Krajniak turned to the guard and motioned him to untie the rope that bound Lucius’s hands and feet. Then he approached, cupping Lucius’s cheeks in palm and stump. “Pan Doctor! Oh, my friend, you’re lucky. They were debating whether to hang or shoot you first.”

Krajniak took him outside to a table that was set up at the back of the house, where a bottle of horilka and two cups of hollowed wood quickly appeared. A village woman emerged from inside, in a smock and patterned kerchief. With one arm, she pinned a long grey piglet to her breast, while the other held a curved, thin knife. A little girl of six or seven followed, carrying a baby, nearly bald with a mottled skin infection of the scalp.

“My wife,” said Krajniak, placing his hand on the small of the woman’s back. “From the village, perhaps you remember. The little one is ours.”

He spoke to the woman in Ruthenian, and her face opened in recognition. Vaguely, Lucius recalled her: heavy epicanthic folds, a pale mole in a crease of her nose. She laughed. Then, still holding the pig, she drew back the shirtsleeve of her free arm with her teeth, and presented Lucius with her wrist.

For a second, he wondered if this was some sort of highland custom he had never learned. Was he supposed to kiss her wrist, perhaps the knife? She waited, shook it at him, and spoke again. Then Krajniak said, “You lanced a boil on her arm, remember? Gone! It never came back.”

Lucius was fairly certain that he was not the one who lanced the boil, but he saw no reason to dampen his reception. He touched it with his finger.

“How it’s healed!”

The woman spoke again, and Krajniak answered. He turned to Lucius. “Tomorrow, you will go, but tonight you are our guest. You’re hungry, I imagine?”

The pig twisted, as if it understood.

“Only if you’re cooking,” Lucius answered, as lightly as he could. He watched Krajniak as he poured out the horilka. Now I’ll ask him, thought Lucius. Now I’ll learn. But the fact that the cook had yet to mention Margarete’s name gave him pause. Hastily, Lucius took a gulp, as if to fortify himself for what was coming next. The smell familiar, reminding him of the moments in the surgery when they sterilized their hands. But he had forgotten how hot it was. He coughed.

Krajniak laughed and pinched the nose of the piebald baby, who broke into a grin. “Ah, the city made the doctor soft.” His single hand dove into his breast pocket, removed a metal cigarette case, and held it out to Lucius, who, still hacking, shook his head. Krajniak flipped it open, extracted a cigarette between his fourth and fifth fingers, closed the case and palmed it, lifted the cigarette to his lips, then exchanged the case for a matchbox in his pocket, bracing it with his pinkie as he struck a flame. A deft, practiced motion, suggesting an unexpected physical confidence. He puffed. A cat leapt onto his lap, and he stroked it with his stump.

For a moment, Lucius wondered if Krajniak would explain the men, the weapons, the colored vest he wore over his old uniform. By then the absence of livery or any sign of field organization suggested the men were not part of either the Polish or Ukrainian armies. But who? Krajniak, if he remembered, was from a nearby village. The men had the air of a local defense force; with the fall of Austria, even highlanders had begun to proclaim their own republics, Lucius knew. He thought of his father’s words that evening by the war map in the sunroom, of the burning embers splintering into ever smaller flames.

But Krajniak said nothing, and his gaze seemed to catch on the steeple of the church just up the road.

“You said you came looking for a friend,” he said, turning his dark eyes on Lucius. “I assume you mean our sister nurse.”

She had returned late the night the men went looking.

She did not explain her absence. She was distracted, said Krajniak. Something clearly had upset her, but she wouldn’t tell them what.

They rang the church bells. Zmudowski straggled back, then Schwarz—you remember, Pan Doctor, with the fossils? All save Lucius. When a few hours passed, Margarete and a group of others set out to look for him. But by then the fog was so thick, they could scarcely find the path. Still they searched. Our good sister wouldn’t quit.

It was only later the next morning that they heard the first sounds of artillery. Again they sent a search party. But still they couldn’t find him, Pan Doctor knew that part. And with the fighting over the hills, they didn’t dare go far. She was frantic then, said Krajniak. She paced the church, the road, went back up the river to look again.

By afternoon, a messenger had appeared from down the valley. Russian cavalry was advancing across the foothills, he told them. Their orders were to evacuate the patients into Poland, on intelligence of a Russian pincer movement to the south.

Krajniak took another swig. “But still she didn’t want to leave.”

How she was stubborn! But by the time the evacuation crews arrived, there were reports that Cossack cavalry were already in Kolomea. Chaos descended on the church. One by one they transferred the men into the lorries. Margarete waited until the very last ambulance was loaded with the sickest patients, then climbed on board. By the time they reached the mouth of the valley, they could see smoke on the plains, and the roads were filled with marching troops. In Nadworna, the soldiers were separated based on their injuries, the frailest men sent on to Sambor; Zmudowski stayed, she went along. It was the last time that Krajniak saw either of them. No sooner had he reached Nadworna than he’d been sent back toward the front. Not as a cook this time, but as a soldier.

“With this.”

He held up his stump.

But Lucius had scarcely heard anything after the word Sambor. Now the railway map, burned into his mind during his time on the ambulances, appeared before him. Sambor. He’d been there shortly after his new commission. Our paths had crossed. He felt his mind yield, buckle in accommodation as this fact was taken in. Summer, August. Yes, he could recall the sweltering wards.

“Do you know which hospital?”

“Which hospital? I told you, we were separated.”

“But perhaps you heard from someone else…”

Now a look of sympathy crossed Krajniak’s face. “No, Doctor. I didn’t hear from anyone. I told you: a week later, I was carrying a gun.”

Lucius nodded slowly, still reluctant to accept that this was all. But alive, he told himself. And last in Sambor. This is what he had hoped for: a glowing pebble left on the forest floor.

Sambor, safely in what was now Polish territory, just west of the Lwów-Dolina line.

The sun was beginning to go down behind the hills, and above them, the sky had turned a coral red. In the yard, a chicken summited a dung heap, a glistening yellow grub twisting in its beak. Nearby, a cat watched it hungrily. In a neighbor’s yard, one of Krajniak’s comrades was cutting wood. Now food came: beet soup, rye bread, and onion dumplings. They grew silent as they ate from old tin army plates, spoons clanging as they had at mealtime during the war.

Then Krajniak spoke. “Pan Doctor? Do you remember Zmudowski’s story, about the stamps?” He took a bite. “You know, it wasn’t true.”

“No?” Slowly, Lucius set down his cup. Wondering what this had to do with Margarete. Why Krajniak was telling him this now.

“Not the way he told you, at least,” Krajniak continued. “That Russian soldier? He couldn’t have cared less for stamps. He wanted something to send his girlfriend. So one day, when Margarete was out, Zmudowski snuck into her room, hoping to find something, a pair of stockings, a chemise, anything he could trade. As you could guess, there wasn’t much other than the habits of the other sisters who had died. But beneath her pillow, he found a handkerchief, a silk one, with the names Małgorzata and Michał, joined at the “M.” The kind a young man might buy for his betrothed. So he took it. That’s what Zmudowski gave the soldier for his stamps.”

Małgorzata, thought Lucius, turning the word over in his mind. Polish for Margarete. So it wasn’t really a new name.

A pair of different children had materialized, chasing a hoop from an old army food barrel across the rutted yard. The summer sun had long set. They moved in shadows.

“And what did she do when she found out?” asked Lucius.

“That’s the strange part,” said Krajniak. “She wasn’t one to keep quiet, but she never said a thing. If it was from a brother or a father, or even a friend, I think she would have asked us if we’d seen it. Or denied the soldiers their morphine until someone gave it back. It made me think that there was a story she was hiding: of a husband maybe, or perhaps she was engaged. But she never mentioned anyone, never received a single letter. She never said anything about home, but I knew, just by the way she spoke, that she was from the mountains. If this man of hers was still alive, she would have gone to see him. But nothing. For two and a half years.”

“And what do you think that means?” asked Lucius. Thinking: Małgorzata. The earthly life I left behind.

“What do I think?” The cook paused and watched the children. “There are many ways for young men to die in the mountains, even before the war. I think she lost him. Maybe before she entered the convent. Or maybe there was no convent; maybe she just came straight to us.”

Lucius looked up toward the steeple, now a shadow against the sky. He nodded slowly. A memory of her came to him, standing at the door to share the news of Rzedzian’s passing. One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor.

Her forest songs of weddings and midsummer festivals.

Her tears, her flight, when he asked for her hand in marriage.

“I understand,” said Lucius slowly, his memory of her shimmering, like a body in the water, threatening to break apart. “I’ve also wondered who she really was.”

Krajniak blew his nose again. “If I may, Doctor? You were rather in love with her, weren’t you?”

The children sprawled over each other; the hoop bounced loose.

“A little,” Lucius said.

By then it was past midnight, but Margarete’s mention had released memories of their time in Lemnowice and neither of them wished to stop. Now, the stories tumbled out of them. Lucius spoke of the food they gathered during the spring scarcity, the hasty winter sunbathing, the games of soccer in the snow. Krajniak reminded him of Margarete’s breeding programs—“Cats everywhere now, Doctor! Don’t eat the goulash!”—and the way everything had seemed covered in powdered lime. Lucius recalled the drunken summer singing, the card games played out beneath the stars. Krajniak waxed poetic about the accidental pickles, the wine pilfered from the summer estates. Together they recalled Rzedzian and the way his tears would gather on his moustache, and Nowak with his fear of handwashing, and Zmudowski’s photo of his daughter, and all the others they could summon up from memory: the chastened Sergeant Czernowitzski, the clarinetist with his instrument of tin and wire, the Viennese tailor, the cobbler with the dented head.

By then, Lucius’s wristwatch read four, and a hint of dawn was in the sky. He felt the fatigue of his journey, but still he didn’t wish to stop. He was starving for this, he realized. It was more than simply recollection; it was as if Krajniak contained a part of him that once he thought was lost. Now he was hungry to reconstruct that person, greedy even, given the knowledge that he would likely never see this man again. Do you remember when I first arrived? he asked. And that first night? The soldiers, with the missing jaw, the belly turning inside out?

Krajniak remembered.

And those first surgeries?

Yes, Pan Doctor. Truth was there were some of us who didn’t think you knew what you were doing.

And the doctors Brosz and Berman?

He remembered.

The first shell-shock cases?

Yes.

“Do you remember József Horváth?”

The words came out almost without his knowing.

There was a long pause. Even the name sounded impossible; it had been two years since he had uttered it aloud.

And Lucius said, though it wasn’t necessary, “The Hungarian that peasant brought in by wheelbarrow that first winter, who’d been found up by the pass.”

Whether Krajniak’s eyes were watery from the horilka or the memories, Lucius didn’t know. He was sitting sideways with one arm on the table as he gazed off to the lightening sky. Now he nodded slowly. “I remember. Of course, I remember, Pan Doctor. I can’t forget.”

There was a long silence. Then slowly, without premeditation, Lucius began to speak. He told Krajniak about the nightmares that had begun upon his return home, the blame he placed on himself for not letting Horváth leave, thinking that he could cure the man himself. He spoke of the many times he thought that he’d seen Horváth among his patients and on the Viennese streets, the impossibility of finding any peace with memory, or any absolution or release. He feared, he told Krajniak, that he would be stuck forever in that winter. That even if he found Margarete, he would not be able to escape the fact that Horváth had been sacrificed for any joy he might attain.

Strangely, for thoughts that had possessed him for years, it took no more than a few minutes for the story to come out.

He was silent. He waited for Krajniak to answer.

But Krajniak did not say anything at first. Lucius felt suddenly ashamed that he had burdened him, had let their stories stray from memories of cats and pickle barrels. Or did Krajniak blame him for Horváth? Was that why he’d said nothing until Lucius brought it up? In the half-light, a pair of bats flitted in and out of the shadows. Krajniak poured another cup of horilka.

Lucius was about to speak again when Krajniak lifted up his stump.

“I can still feel it, Pan Doctor.”

It took a moment for Lucius to realize that Krajniak was referring to his hand. “Yes…,” said Lucius, wondering now whether this was a way of changing the subject, or whether Krajniak’s thoughts had drifted off. Perhaps they both were lost in their own worlds. “Some of my patients say the same…”

Krajniak’s voice was strained now. “Sometimes it feels as if it’s burning, and other times I feel as if it’s touching something, my fingers moving over something on their own. The fur of an animal, a coin, a piece of meat. For a long time, I couldn’t stand it. I’d close my eyes and squeeze at the place where I felt my hand to be. I’d punch and stab it, and once I tried to remove it with a knife. Not the stump, Pan Doctor: the hand, my missing hand.”

He stopped and finished off his cup. Lucius waited for Krajniak to say something more, to offer some kind of redemptive wisdom, to share how he’d gone on.

The bats returned, now visible in all their flitting detail in the morning twilight.

But Krajniak just poured the last of the horilka. Now when he spoke, his voice was steadier. Lucius would have to leave soon. He could escort him down to the mouth of the valley, though unfortunately no farther. But the territory north of them was well secured by Polish forces. You’ll be safe there. And on the plains, with the letter, Lucius would find frequent Polish convoys that could take him to the Sambor rail.

So that was all.

“I would offer you to stay, Doctor, but there are many reasons we should go our separate ways.”

“Of course.”

Krajniak stood. He’d get the horses. It would take an hour to get everything together. Lucius must be tired. If he would like to get a little bit of sleep…

But Lucius’s thoughts were elsewhere. A light breeze had arisen, and in the distance he thought that he heard branches rustling. In his mind, he saw the beech tree, the courtyard crowded with patients, the winter soldier vanishing into the white expanse. Krajniak was right; there were some wounds that couldn’t be amputated. But he had respects to pay.

He walked the last hundred paces alone.

The sun had just begun to peek above the hills. Around him, from the yards, came snorts and clucking. Faces of old women turned to watch him pass. Smells of cooking oil and onions rose from the huts, and smoke seeped through the thatch. He recalled the days that he had gone with Margarete to visit the soldiers distributed among the rooms musty with feathers and tallow, the children bearing silent witness. He wondered how they remembered him, friend or invader. He heard a clattering, and a pair of jays alighted on a fallen fencepost. Then the road opened before him and he was there.

It had changed little from the outside. The wooden facade still dark and faded; the base of the walls now a little overgrown. A pair of black storks were nesting in the belfry, and tufts of wallflower had begun to creep up around the doorframe. But everything else was otherwise unchanged. In the arrow slit, a haunted darkness hovered, as it had hovered four years before.

The doctor? she replied, still staying back, deep in the shadows of the world that awaited him. Didn’t you just say you’re him?

This time it was unlocked.

It was, in many ways, how it had remained in his memory, only smaller now, and this time light spilled in from a southern breach, not from the north. And empty. Gone were the soldiers, of course. But also the blankets, the pallets, the operating table built from pews.

All used as firewood, he assumed. Fitting, even. He begrudged no one; hopefully it had kept somebody warm.

The air was cold, also empty of that old familiar smell: the lime, the iodoform and carbolic, the straw beds, the spoiled wounds.

He walked slowly up the center of the nave, following the path he had grown used to taking through the patients, and turning at a right angle when he reached the crossing, he entered the old ward for the dying. The floor was bare; he could have walked there directly at a slant, but the daily circuit was entrenched in him, and it felt wrong to step where men once lay.

This is Brauer, Pan Doctor Lieutenant, frostbite; this is Czerny of the Fourteenth Fusiliers. Moscowitz, Gruscinski, Kirschmeyer. Redlich, professor of Vienna, shot by Cossacks near his tail…

He could see the outline of the crater in the floor. The roof they had repaired still held, though in the south wall a new shell had burst a hole.

Nature had followed, ferns and grass sprouting from the shattered wood. The floor was littered with dung and leaves, and a pair of stunted saplings stretched up toward the light. Streaks of bird droppings painted a scene of the Crucifixion, and following it upward he saw movement in the rafters, a face, an owl, looking down. As he took a step closer, the bird, perturbed, awoke and, with its great wings out, fell toward him, banking skyward in a silent puff of down.

He walked on. Water had crept in behind the Annunciation in the chancel. The paint was blistered, cracked, bursting around Gabriel, as if Mary had fallen in ecstasy not at the visitation of the angel, but the rift in her gilded world.

He stopped at the cabinets that once had held the medicine. Empty, now, save a handful of ampoules of atropine and chloral hydrate amid the rat droppings. No Veronal. He found a package of old bandages, gnawed open. Cats aside, the rats had likely wasted little time once Margarete was gone.

He paused before the door to the sacristy as if he might yet find her inside. But it was empty, completely empty, stripped just like the rest of the church. On the floor, he could see the indentations where once her bed had stood. Now it, too, had been taken. Even Horváth’s country sketch was missing. In the chaos of the evacuation had she thought to bring it with her? That was one great difference between them. That for Margarete, József Horváth was a patient she might remember with affection, even love, as one can love a person one has cared for, even if they couldn’t be saved.

For a moment, he stopped and looked out the window, the square of sky he had beseeched so many times when she was ill. Through branches he could see the outline of his old quarters, which now seemed so close to hers. How often had she sat there, looking toward his door? Then he touched the sill and froze.

There someone had placed two small, white, almost perfectly round stones.

It could have been anyone, he thought, his world contracting to these points. Any soldier, any village child.

They were cool in his hand and left bare circles in the dust.

Then he had one place left to go. The door to the courtyard from her room creaked as he pulled it open, through a scrim of gritty soil that had been washed beneath the molding. Outside, the yard was thick with uncut grass. The air hummed with mayflies and little moths, gnats and butterflies. The beech tree was in leaf, its towering branches garlanded with catkins. His oracle, his monument of memory, the bark grey and smooth and utterly unscarred. No soldier. No disfigured revenant. No screams, no tinted snow. Nothing at its base but high green grass, now swaying in the wind. Just the old, indifferent monument to what was lost.

He thought of the city’s war memorials, and the way the mourning knelt before them, laying wreaths and candles and praying for a son’s return. But what he was seeking was forgiveness and atonement, and he couldn’t think of any worthy offering to give.

Another shiver passed through the beech’s branches. High above, a squirrel chattered.

Yes. I know. It’s time.

They rode out on a pair of Carpathian ponies, small, mouse-colored creatures who ambled amiably through the mud. The forest was damp and warm. Billows of midges hummed in the light shafts that descended through the canopy. Krajniak ahead, rifle across his saddle, watching, silent now. By then it was clear he would not tell Lucius who his men were, or what they were fighting for. But Lucius didn’t press him. The little band seemed so vulnerable against the armies of the plains. Perhaps they all were safer if he didn’t know.

Once, in a clearing, Krajniak whistled, low, and an answer came from somewhere in the woods. But they saw no one else, and the forest was so still that at times Lucius nodded off to sleep.

It was evening when the land opened and Lucius dismounted. Krajniak followed. Standing at the edge of the forest, Lucius searched for the right words to thank the cook. But what to say? That somehow in their drunken chatter about pickles and games of winter soccer and a soldier who carried fossils in his pockets, Lucius felt as if something had been returned to him? That Krajniak was the only one of all of them to whom he had truly bid farewell?

“Goodbye!” said Krajniak. He kissed him once, twice, on the cheeks, and a third time on the head.

“Goodbye!”

And taking the reins of Lucius’s pony, the cook wiped his nose and disappeared back into the woods.

It was midnight when Lucius reached the empty highway to Dolina.

He slept off the road, a deep sleep in the shelter of an overturned wagon. In the morning, a Polish convoy passed him heading west. When he presented Borszowski’s letter, they hoisted him on board, without even bothering with the elaborate story he had prepared.

Two days later, he was in Sambor.

He spent the night at a Hotel Kopernikus, near the center of town.

It had been over a week since he had bathed, and his shoes and clothes betrayed the journey. He found a shave just down the street from the hotel, from a squinting man with raw, pink hands and a suspicious absence of customers, who berated him with a conspiracy theory about the shortage of badger hair as he drew a dull blade across his throat. Freed, he found a clothing shop across the square. The racks were mostly empty; the longest trousers still fell short. Pale khaki, like some tropical explorer. But they would have to do.

He found the district hospital in the same building as the old army regimental hospital, which itself had occupied the site of an even older cholera hospital, behind centuries-old ramparts that gave the impression it was under siege. He had been there once before, during his service on the ambulance trains. But inside the walls, the grounds were nothing like the place of constant movement he had remembered from the war. A tall statue of a man with an unfamiliar name stood along the entrance path, presumably the cholera-fighter of old. Some goats wandered over the grass. A family was picnicking.

He stopped. Beyond them, a nurse sat by a young man in a wheelchair and gently fed him from a bowl. In his throat Lucius felt that same familiar quiver that he felt each time the amputees back in Vienna reminded him of Horváth. It wasn’t him, of course, or her, but there was something to the nurse’s gentle manner that reminded him of Margarete with their soldier, so long ago. This man was missing both hands, both feet. Frostbite, most likely, Lucius thought, finding shelter in clinical considerations. Though by his stillness, by his vacant stare, Lucius suspected frostbite wasn’t all.

Near the entrance to the building, a group of old men played tarock, and didn’t seem to notice when he passed.

He walked up a short flight of stairs and went inside. During the war, he recalled that even the foyer had been filled with patients, but it was empty now. There was an unmanned desk and chair, and a small sign that indicated visiting hours. On the far wall was a low display case, flanked on either side by the annual staff photos that hung on every wall of every hospital he had been to in his life. Over the doors that led into the wards were the words Oddział 1, and Oddział 2. Ward 1 and 2.

Through the small windows in the doors, he saw movement. But now he hesitated, as he had hesitated back with Krajniak. It was less the chance of finding that the trail was cold again; it was the other possibilities he might learn. All he knew was that in 1916 she had been alive in Sambor. Before the full brunt of the Russian assault, before the typhus outbreaks in the crowded hospitals, before the flu.

He walked over to the display case, as if somehow what it held could help prepare him for what came next. Inside were photographs related to the history of the hospital, an old brick used in the first foundation, a medieval-looking tooth extractor, and a pair of stuffed birds without a label, one of which had fallen on its side. He looked above, at the pictures on the wall. The first showed a pair of somber doctors, standing on the same steps he had just climbed, flanked on either side by nurses. And on the frame, the year, 1904…

Quickly, he began to scan the dates, 1905, 1906… He followed them to the other side of the door. They stopped in 1913, resumed in 1916. By now the people had changed: gaunter, the intricate wimples replaced by the simpler habits of the Red Cross.

1917. And there he stopped.

She was standing in the first row, second from the right. Even in the poor light of the foyer, even with the dark long hair that hung down beneath her simple nursing cap, she was unmistakable. The same wonder-filled eyes, lips parted, ready for laughter, her gaze off and to the sky. She wore the costume of a lay nurse. No more habit. But he was no longer surprised.

He looked to the neighboring photo. 1918. Gone. There were many explanations, Lucius thought, but only one he couldn’t shake from his mind. The full force of influenza had begun to build that autumn. 1918.

In the photo, there was snow upon the ground; but was this January or December?

He stopped himself. There were so many other explanations! But he recalled the fury with which the flu had swept through the ward, the soldiers and nurses who had succumbed.

He took down the photo and removed the print, part of him now wishing that it wasn’t her at all. On the back, he hoped to find a name as if to prove it, but there was nothing other than the address of the studio, stamped in decorative lettering.

“Is that someone you know?” From behind him. Polish.

Lucius turned to see a small man in a white coat. Balding, tiny circular eyeglasses neatly repaired with wire. A thin moustache over his lip. He motioned to the photo in Lucius’s hands.

“Yes,” said Lucius. He realized he owed an explanation. “So sorry not to have introduced myself. I entered, and I saw this and…”

He took a breath, stepped forward, and held out his hand. “Doctor Lucius Krzelewski of Vienna.” Doctor. No need to mention he was a medical student again, and technically, given classes had yet to start, not even that. His only hope rested on professional courtesy. “I served at a hospital in the Carpathians during the war. I’ve come to look for my nurse. I was told that she was here.”

For a moment, the doctor considered this apparition, the too-short trousers, the bruised lip, the sunburnt skin flushed now by the barber’s blade. The bare photo in his hand, its empty frame behind him on the cabinet.

He came and looked.

“Here.” Lucius pointed. “This is her.” The doctor leaned forward, wrinkling up his nose to keep his glasses from sliding off. A healthy bramble of grey hair filled his ear. He straightened. “I don’t recognize her. But I’ve been here only for a year.” He paused, then pointed to another nurse in the photograph. “But this nurse is here. Perhaps she knows.”

The doctor led him through Ward 2. It was a men’s ward, crowded, but clean and tidy. Patients’ names and diagnoses were written on little chalkboards at the foot of every bed. There were many families, sitting with the patients, playing cards or reading newspapers, or holding squirming children as they talked. The nurse was at the far end of the hall, carrying a stack of bedpans. When she saw them approach, she stopped.

The honorable Polish doctor from Vienna was presented, the story told.

The nurse studied the photo for a moment before beginning to nod. “Yes. Yes. Małgorzata, yes. Last name Małysz, I think. She came with the evacuees in ’16, right? She was good. A little bossy, acted like she knew more than the doctors. But good, especially with the shell-shock cases. If I remember correctly, there was a group that went that winter to a rehabilitation hospital in Tarnów.”

“That winter?”

“March, I think. I remember only because it was around the time the army began to use the gas, when we began to see all the men with phosgene blowback and needed to make space.”

“’17, you mean?”

“Yes, Doctor.” On her face there was a question of why it mattered. But it mattered. Tarnów, 1917. Flu and typhus still lay between them, but he knew that he’d drawn closer. To where, and when, and who.

Małgorzata Małysz. A stranger’s name.

Downstairs, the doctor handed the photograph to Lucius. “Take it. I think you need this more than I.”

Again he was moving, back on the train. Chyrów, Jarosław, Rzeszów: these towns now part of him, the familiar stations from his ambulance days. Again the crowds, the children with their sprays of currants. He felt as if he were on some pilgrim’s route, only this time not stopping. This time only one place mattered: Tarnów.

But would he find her there? In Jarosław, waiting for what seemed like hours for some unexplained problem on the line, he took the photo from his rucksack and looked at it again as if to reassure himself that it was her. No phantom, no fleeing peasant, no South Station apparition. How astounding that it had preserved that gaze familiar from the moments she had looked up at him across the surgery, a gaze that now suggested astonishment at the great game that she’d been playing. In the seat next to him, his neighbor, an older woman in a winter coat despite the summer, made no attempt to hide her curiosity about the image that commanded such absorption. Should I ask her? he wondered. Like Adelajda, interrogating everyone she met? For who was to say that his search would end in Tarnów? That it would not be just another stop, another hospital? Yes, Doctor, we remember her. She went to Kraków. No, she went to Jarosław. No, to Sambor. No, to Stryj. She was from the mountains, Doctor, wasn’t she? She was going home, she said.

Perhaps if you go there, they will know.

And on. And he would continue, a ghost searching for its flesh.

“Let me see,” said the clerk in the Tarnów District Hospital, running an efficient finger down a staff register. “Yes, here’s her name, just as you said. Rehabilitation pavilion, up the street.”

“I’m sorry?”

“She’s here. Unless it is someone else by that name. But if you want to catch her, then I’d suggest you hurry. She’s on the day shift. They are about to come off work.”

A narrow street led between the complex of hospitals, signs pointing to Maternity, Pediatrics, Surgery, Tuberculosis. It took him a moment to find the path, flanked by box hedge that led to the Rehabilitation ward. Dusk was beginning to fall. Now, from the building, far up the path, the nurses began to file out. He stopped as they broke around him, hurrying in twos and threes, some still in nursing caps, others having loosened their hair. They laughed or chatted, passing without paying any heed.

He stood there, eyes jumping from one nurse to another. Uncertain of what he would do when he found her, what he would say, how to begin.

“Lucius.”

She’d seen him first. Not Pan Doctor. Lucius. Like the night she had descended to him in the dark.

They stood in the path, between the hedges, facing each other a few paces apart. Behind her, others were still coming, parting around the two of them like water around stones. On either side of the path, brick buildings rose to their slate roofs, to the late evening sky of midsummer, now salmon, mauve.

Over his shoulder, were he to look: a scoop of moon. The air gilded with the pollen from a line of pines beyond the buildings. A fringed white curtain fluttering in an open window. A pair of sparrows, garrulous, as if urging their terrestrial counterparts to speak.

“Lucius.”

She was asking for an explanation. But once again she was more prepared than he. He needed just to stand there a moment and take her in. He hadn’t anticipated that she had changed, that life, of course, had carried her along as well. It was her, Margarete, yes… And yet! Her face was fuller now, the worried circles gone from beneath her eyes. She still wore a nurse’s uniform, now white, different from the familiar grey from Lemnowice. She had thrown a light-blue blouse over it, buttoned over her chest. In place of her old sturdy winter boots, she now wore laced white patent shoes, with heels.

And her hair! Long and smooth, and russet-colored, now clearly styled, though he couldn’t name the fashion. It was combed back over her ears, where it tumbled in smooth waves to her shoulders. She must have combed it just before she left the hospital. For someone else: this should have been his clue.

Across her cheekbone, he saw the scar from Horst’s boot, bone-colored against a blush. She clasped a handbag—no Mannlicher!—and squinted slightly, as if she too were trying to take him in. Should he embrace her? There? Before the others? Memories rising now of soldiers descending from the trains with arms outstretched to meet their wives.

The footsteps sounded on the gravel as the nurses continued to stream past. He waited for her to take his arm, or ask him to follow her, to someplace quiet, where they could sit or be alone. He hadn’t imagined it like this, amid so many other people, before the open windows of the ward.

“Lucius. How?”

Her lips parted, as if in wonder. She touched the scar. Still he wanted just to stand there in her strange, new presence, not to speak. But she was waiting, and so he stumbled through his story: the Brusilov Offensive, the ambulances, the hospital in Vienna, his trip to Lemnowice. Then: Krajniak, the hospital in Sambor, the photo, the other nurse, the train. Details that now seemed so unimportant. But that was how.

“Lemnowice…” She said the word with some astonishment. As if it had been a long time since she had thought of it. While he had thought of nothing else.

“Yes.”

“And you came for me?” Now in her voice he heard a different timbre, less slushed, less song.

“For you, yes.”

“Oh, Lucius. Oh, Lucius.” For a moment, she just stood there and shook her head. Again she touched the scar, a habit apparently acquired since they last parted. He had the impression of some confusion, then of someone mourning something delicate that had just been broken. “Oh, Lucius. I don’t know what to say.”

Now most of the day shift had moved off. They were almost alone. He recalled their sudden, surreptitious kisses, outside the church, in the darkness of the forest. He stepped closer, ready to take her in his arms.

She closed her eyes. “Please. Please, don’t.”

A line then, from the nun Ilaria’s letter he’d read so many times. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.

But her hair, her shoes…

“I didn’t think… You’ve kept your vows?”

“No. No… Oh, Lucius.” She worried her hands. “There is so much to tell you. So much, but where can we start? There were never any vows.” She took a breath. So there, another question had been answered. “No vows,” she said again. “But… Oh, but I’ll just say it! I have a daughter, Lucius, a little girl.”

The sparrows had fled. Suddenly, he felt very cold.

“A daughter.” He let the word sink in.

That moment by the river now lay before them. Her legs cold from the water; the trundling katydid. Neither able to speak of what he wished to ask.

“And she… is…” But he couldn’t say it. Mine?

“She’s six months old.”

This also answered it. He looked now at her hands, God’s little hands he’d come to know so well. A simple ring, no stone. “You’re… married?”

“A year ago. But yes, we… oh, Lucius!” she exclaimed, her voice now plaintive. “You’ll understand! You were lost… and then…” She paused, closing her eyes. It seemed as if she were trying to prepare him, to do this kindly. “He is someone that you know. He… Oh, the world is very strange and wonderful…” But now, for once, she was at a loss for words; now she had begun to tremble, too.

“Lucius, I tried to find you. I dreamed you were alive. For months, I dreamed I saw you. I knew! I sent a letter, two letters to you, care of the army. I thought of going to Vienna, but the hospital, it needed me. And then… then I found him.”

She stopped. “I should be so happy!” She forced this, her words breaking. “My friend is alive. You are alive. I thought I would never see you again. I am a mother, and my child’s healthy, beautiful…”

But he was having trouble hearing everything she’d said. He repeated, “Someone I know.”

She looked off, now unable to meet his gaze. She took a breath. “I found him, by chance, in Sambor,” she said. “In the hospital. Among the other amputees.”

Still she couldn’t say his name.

“He was so sick,” she said. “For three months, he couldn’t even move. His amputations had healed, but he was like he was that winter day the peasant brought him to us. I knew my duty wasn’t over then. I knew. I asked to be his nurse. It wasn’t hard; the others didn’t want to work with him, moaning like that. I was with him for almost six months in Sambor before he was transferred. I went with him. First to Przemyśl, then Jarosław. I couldn’t leave him, after all that’d happened, I couldn’t let him go. By then, he’d begun to recover. By the time we were transferred here, to Tarnów, he had begun to talk again, and for the first time he could tell me about his life before the war. I helped him write to his family in Hungary. They came to see him. His mother and his brother—he lost his father when he was very little—and a sister from his mother’s second marriage, a beloved little girl he often drew. But when they left, he chose to stay here, with me. By then he was so much stronger. Still there are nights when he wakes screaming. Days of sadness, or when the trees or clouds call out to him in ways that I can’t see. But that will take time, you know. Many soldiers take such time to heal. We have a fine wheelchair for him, and in the day, while I work, he looks after Agata, the baby. He loves the baby. He’s become an illustrator of children’s books, for a publisher in Warsaw, and…”

But there she stopped. It had been said.

She was a little out of breath from the story, as when they first had met those years ago. Now, she looked up at Lucius, eyes full of concern about how this news would land. But something extraordinary was happening. It seemed to him as if the world were changing, as if some great force was gathering about him, in the cobbles and buildings, in the rails, the trains, the clouds and light, the distant mountains in the sky.

A shadow moved; a great winter bird unclenched him from its talons and exploded into flight. And then a drifting, a sparkling silvered drifting down.

And he was there.

“I should like to meet your daughter,” he said.

Margarete looked up at him, with the gaze of patience and understanding he had come to know so well. “I would like that more than anything else in the world,” she said. “But I can’t. For József. He’s come so far. I can’t. If he were to see you… You remember… You understand.”

Then suddenly, she began to cry.

“Margarete.” Lucius took a step toward her. Not Małgorzata. Her old name, her nom de guerre.

She looked at him. Tears were running down her face. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. Then she began to laugh. “Oh, how silly all this is. Look at you, you’re crying, too! Oh, Lucius, he loves our little girl. He laughs, can you imagine? After all that’s happened to him. Oh, what I would give for you to hear him laugh…”

What I would give, thought Lucius. He watched her wipe the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she sniffed and rubbed her nose with her palm, a familiar motion, from the coldest days.

In his pocket, he felt the little stones. I will keep these, he thought. Then, very slowly, he leaned slightly toward her, as if what he was about to say should be a secret, though there was no one else around.

It was still there, he thought, that faint smell of carbolic. I did not forget.

“Thank you,” he said.

In the distance, a train whistled. She looked up one last time at him. Then, for a brief moment, he sensed that she would ask him something else, about his life, or more of what happened since they had parted, or where he’d go from here. For there was so much left to say. But something she saw must have given her his answer. She lowered her gaze. Then quickly, as if she was worried she might change her mind, she hurried off, hesitant at first, then more determined, the stride of someone expected somewhere, someone going home.

He watched her as she walked down the street and turned the corner. In the sky, the clouds continued on their march. A cold wind passed. At his side, the curtain snapped and billowed. The sparrows returned now, chattering. He took a step. The world received him.