The Winter Soldier

2.

At first Lucius did not appreciate the opportunity of war, declared that July. He saw the efforts of mobilization as disruptive to his studies and feared the rumors that classes would be suspended. He did not understand the patriotism of his classmates, so drunk with a sense of destiny, vacating the libraries so that they might attend the marches, lining up together to enlist. He did not join them when they gathered around maps showing the advance of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army into Serbia, or the German march through Belgium, or the engagement with Russian forces at the Masurian Lakes. He had no interest in the editorials exalting “the escape from world stagnation” and “the rejuvenation of the German soul.” When his cousin Witold, two years his junior and recently arrived from Kraków, told him with tearful eyes that he had enlisted as a foot soldier because, for the first time in his life, the war had made him feel like he was Austrian, Lucius answered in Polish that the war had also apparently made him an idiot, and he would do nothing but get himself killed.

But the celebrations were hard to ignore. It seemed as if the entire city reeked of rotting flowers. In the city parks, errant streamers tangled themselves in the rosebushes, and everywhere, Lucius saw garlanded soldiers walking with beaming girlfriends on their arms. Cinemas offered wartime specials with short clips like “Our Factories at Work” and “He Stops to Bandage a Friend.” In the hospital, the nurses debated the problems of gauge coordination for Austrian trains advancing over Russian rails. Portraits of the enemy appeared in the papers to illustrate their brutelike physiognomies. At home his nephews sang,

He ignored them.

Zeppelins flew past, dipping their noses above the Hofburg palace in deference to the Emperor.

Then, a few weeks in, rumors of physician shortages began to come.

They were only rumors at first—the army would not publicly admit to such poor planning. But quietly changes were announced at the medical school. Early graduation was offered to those who would enlist. Students with but four semesters of medical studies were made medical lieutenants, and those with six, like Lucius, offered positions on staffs of four or five doctors, in garrison hospitals serving entire regiments of three thousand men. By late August, Kaminski was at a regimental hospital in southern Hungary, and Feuermann assigned to the Serbian front.

Two days before his friend’s departure, Lucius met Feuermann at Café Landtmann. It was covered with bunting and overflowed with families on one last outing with their sons. Since his enlistment, Feuermann seemed to be whistling constantly. His hair was trimmed; he wore a little moustache of which he seemed unduly proud. On his uniform he had pinned an Austrian flag next to his Star of David badge from the Hakoah sports club where he swam. Lucius should reconsider, he said, sipping from a beer decorated with a black and yellow ribbon. If not out of loyalty to the Emperor, then loyalty to Medicine. Didn’t he understand how many years he would have to wait before he saw such cases? Galen learned on gladiators! Within days Feuermann would be operating, while Lucius, if he stayed in Vienna, would be lucky to be the twentieth to listen to a patient’s heart.

In the street, a band led a festooned ambulance from a Rescue Society, followed by a rank of wasp-waisted women in white summer dresses and fluttering hats. Little boys weaved through them, waving streamers of colored crepe.

Lucius shook his head. More than any of his classmates, he deserved such a posting. But in two years they would graduate. And then on to academic posts, real medicine, to something worthy of their capabilities. Anyone could learn first aid…

Feuermann removed his glasses and held them to the light. “A girl kissed me, Krzelewski. Such a pretty girl, and on the lips. Just last night, in the Hofgarten, during the celebration after the parade.” He put his glasses back on. “Kaminski said one actually threw him her knickers at the train station. Frilled and all. A girl he’d never even met.”

“You don’t think that she was throwing them to someone else and Kaminski intercepted?” asked Lucius.

“Ah ha!” laughed Feuermann. “But to the victor go the spoils, right?” And he kissed his fingers like a satisfied gourmand.

Then he brought out a surgical manual, and they read through the standard hospital kit.

Morphine sulfate, mouse-toothed forceps, chisel, horsehair sutures…

On and on, like two children poring over a catalogue of toys.

“Well?” asked Feuermann at last.

But Lucius hadn’t really needed to read past chisel.

At the recruitment office, he waited on a long line before a single clerk. He left as a medical lieutenant, with a drill handbook detailing bugle calls and the hierarchy of the salute. After, with Feuermann, at a wine tavern out in Hietzing hung with garlic braids, he got drunk with a group of Hungarian recruits. They were rough, heavy country boys, who spoke scarcely any German, and yet they all drank together until they could scarcely stand. They seemed completely unaware of the whispers that it was Austria’s war, that the so-called Territorials—the Poles and Czechs and Romanians, etc., that made up the rest of the Empire—were being asked to sacrifice themselves in Austria’s name. By the end of the evening, they were singing that they would die for Lucius, and Lucius was singing that he would die for them. None of it seemed real. Hours later, stumbling home through the hot night, he turned a corner to find himself facing a shirtless, gap-toothed child, ribbon tied around its head. For a moment, they paused, staring each other down. Then the child grinned, raised his fist and cocked a finger, whispered, Bang.

Back at home, his mother was thrilled by his enlistment, but felt that medical duties, out of the line of fire, would seem like cowardice. So she bought him a horse and called upon a friend in the War Ministry to cancel his commission and speed his entry into the lancers, like his father, even though he’d last ridden when he was twelve.

Lucius received this news with quiet fury. The calculus was clear. Krzelewski Metals and Mining was about to be made even richer by the war. Every sabotaged railway would have to be rebuilt, only to be destroyed again; again rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt again. But in the end there would be a reckoning. She needed at least one patriot to prove they weren’t profiteers.

His father, overjoyed by the prospect, now filled with affection, spent hours versing Lucius on the history of the Polish cavalry, lavishing especial praise on the lancers. He had often dressed in some version of his old uniform, but now the outfit that emerged was something of an altogether different register of splendor: scarlet jodhpurs, bright blue tunic with a double rank of buttons, boots polished until one could see the far-off reflection of the plumed czapka on his head.

In his library, he brought down volume after volume of military history. His eyes grew teary, then he sang some very dirty cavalry songs. With the lights off, he showed Lucius hand shadows he had last performed a decade prior: The War Horse, Death Comes for the Cossack, and The Decapitated Venetian. For a moment, Lucius wondered if he had been drinking, but his father’s eyes were clear as he gazed into his great regimental past. No, God had made no greater warrior than the Polish lancer! No one! Unless, of course, one counted the Polish winged hussars, who rode with great, clattering frames of ostrich feathers on their backs.

“Of course, Father,” Lucius answered. The winged regiments had been disbanded in the eighteenth century; this remained a sore point with Retired Major Krzelewski. Since childhood, Lucius had heard this many, many times.

His father smiled contentedly and stroked the czapka strap, which bifurcated his smooth white beard. Then his pale blue eyes lit up. He had a thought!

Two full coats of winged armor flanked their entrance stairs. Together they hauled them, creaking, back up into the ballroom and strapped them on. The wings were so heavy that Lucius almost tumbled over.

“Can you imagine!” said his father, amazingly upright, looking like a wizened knight. Lucius wheezed; the breastplate had ridden up his thin chest and was choking off his breath. He wondered how long he could stand there without collapsing. But his father was lost in fantasy. “Can you imagine!” he said again, when, for a moment—finding his balance, the light glinting off the armor, a breeze from an open window fluttering the feathers, the image of the two winged men reflected in the ballroom mirror—for a moment, Lucius could.

“We should wear them out to supper with your mother,” his father said, and drummed his knuckles on the armor of his chest.

Later he realized Lucius didn’t know how to shoot.

“Father, I’m enlisting as a doctor,” Lucius repeated, but his father didn’t seem to hear. He opened all the doors along the grand hallway and the window that looked out onto a tall oak outside. From his study, he withdrew his old service revolver. He led Lucius to the far end of the hall and handed it to him. “See the knot?” he said, and Lucius squinted, his gaze coursing the corridor with its portraits and statues.

“I see a tree,” said Lucius.

“The knot is on the tree,” his father said. “Now shoot.”

His hand wavered. He squinted, pulled. In his mind, bits of marble burst from the busts of his parents, chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling, vases imploded. Again he fired, and again, the tapestries in threads, glass shattering from the chandeliers.

The revolver clicked, the chamber empty. His father laughed and handed him a bullet. “Excellent. This time open your eyes.”

His mother turned the end of the hallway and entered his range, Puszek trotting imperiously at her side.

Lucius partially relaxed his arm.

“Zbigniew, not again, please,” she said to his father when she reached him, lowering the muzzle fully with two fingers while her free hand stroked the dog.

She motioned behind her to a little man who had taken shelter behind the marble bust of Chopin. “Come,” she said. “They’re harmless.” He scurried forward, easel beneath his arm. The portraitist: Lucius had almost forgotten. A servant followed with one of his father’s old uniforms, which the painter had to pin so it didn’t hang so loosely about Lucius’s neck.

The portrait took three days. When the painter was finished, his mother took it into the light. “More color to the cheeks,” she said. “And his neck is thin, but not this thin. And truly are these the shape of his ears? Amazing! How extraordinary the things a mother overlooks because of love! But do even them out—his head looks like it’s flying away. And this expression…” She led the painter into the dining hall where the old portrait of Sobieski hung. “Can you make him more… martial?” she asked. “Like this?”

When the first portrait was finished, she sat with Lucius for another, for three more days. “Mother and son,” she said. “It will hang in your room.” And he almost heard her say, When you are gone.

By then Zimmer had also heard.

Lucius was in the library when his professor found him. “Come with me,” he said.

Outside, Zimmer made no effort to hide his anger. He understood Lucius’s patriotic impulse. Were he not so old, if he didn’t have this rheumatism, he would also serve! But to go to the front? If it was a military appointment Lucius wanted, this could be arranged. He could be given an assistant position at the University Hospital here in Vienna. With the expected influx of cases he was sure to find many new responsibilities. He would be wasted on the front lines. That wasn’t medicine anyway—it was butchery. War medicine was for nurses. A mind like his would not be content assisting amputations.

Lucius listened impatiently. It wasn’t patriotism, he thought. Morphine sulfate, mouse-toothed forceps, chisel—that was why he was going. Feuermann, on the front already, had written about a giant magnet for extracting embedded shrapnel. In Vienna, the senior surgeons would take all the best patients for themselves—they, too, were awaiting the complex wounds that war would bring. At best, he would be given abscesses or dilation of urethral strictures secondary to gonorrhea. More likely he would be assigned to examining recruits. No: Lucius, first in his Rigorosum, would not spend the war telling eager volunteers to turn their heads and cough.

Zimmer called upon the rector, and the rector offered Lucius a position as Second-Level Assistant at the Empress Elisabeth Hospital for the Rehabilitation of the Very Injured.

Second-Level Assistant! Lucius didn’t bother to respond.

He took the train a half day south to Graz, where his family wasn’t known. There he presented himself again at the recruiting office, giving the address of his boardinghouse. In the previous weeks, the Russian army had advanced into Galicia, the strip of Polish-speaking Austrian territory that descended the northern flank of the Carpathians. With Germany tied up in the west and north, Austria was forced to divert the Second Army from Serbia. To his great fortune, the Graz garrison was being transferred soon. For the entire Second Army of seventy-five thousand men, they had scarcely ninety doctors, forty of whom were medical students from the university in Graz.

He did the mathematics in his head.

His application was accepted instantly. The recruiter spent more time asking Lucius about how well he spoke Polish than questioning his medical training. Waving his hand vaguely toward the north, he said, “No one can understand each other out there. They give our officers Territorials to command, and the men don’t understand a word. How can you fight a war like this?”

Then he caught himself, and shouted, “God bless the Emperor!” but this seemed to make his blasphemy only worse.

The knob of the seal was burnished down to the red wood, and the stamp was barely legible. Thump, it went, on seven papers, seven times. In his life, Lucius had touched four living patients in addition to the old man he had liberated from earwax: three men and one blind old woman, the last who, truth be told, had clawed desperately at anyone nearby.

In Kraków, in his first communication home, he asked his mother to send his books.

Little did he know, but it would be nearly six months before he reached the front.

In Kraków, he was assigned to a field hospital near Rawa Ruska, but the day he was to leave, he was told that Rawa Ruska had fallen, and instead he was to go to Stanislau. Then Stanislau fell, and he was assigned to the Lemberg garrison. But Lemberg fell, too, as did Turka and Tarnów. The Austrian line was disintegrating, pushed back against the foothills; it appeared as if Kraków itself might soon be taken. From the train stations, on the wide roads that led out of the city, regiment after regiment departed for the east. Despite the losses, it was impossible not to feel awe at the immensity of the Empire: its spangled cavalry and multitudes on foot, its balloons and motorcars, its bicyclists, their chains clanking as they pedaled out over the rutted roads, rims flashing in the sun.

To think how these men need us, he wrote to Feuermann, hopefully, that they cannot live without our hands!

Still he waited for his assignment, pacing the city, his officer’s saber slapping impatiently against his boots. The boulevard chestnuts turned gold, then red. Day after day he went to the hospital, trying to assist in surgeries. But medical responsibilities in a regiment other than one’s own required a Document M-32, he learned quickly, and the train carrying the paymaster’s batch of Document M-32s supposedly had vanished somewhere between Vienna and Kraków. Fortunately, explained an irritated clerk the fourth time Lucius visited, they had received an extra delivery of N-32s, Regulations Regarding Marching Bands. Would Lucius want one of those?

He would have laughed were he not so frustrated. In the hospital tents, shuffling priests hurried past the orderlies to administer extreme unction, and little women slipped inside to deliver icons to the dying. It seemed as if he were the only one without a purpose. Then, in late October, following yet another reorganization, he was assigned to Boroević’s Third Army, which had just lifted the siege of Przemyśl, by then the sole Austrian holdout on the Galician plain. Again he prepared to leave. He had his tunic pressed, his boots polished, and he neatly folded his woolens to keep his textbooks from getting bumped. But Boroević pulled back into the mountains, and Lucius’s deployment was canceled yet again.

By his fourth reassignment, he’d begun to give up hope. In his billet at the Kraków Natural History Museum, in the Room of Large Mammals, amid skeletons of whales and sea cows, he tried to study. But the surgical textbooks seemed to mock him with their discussions of cancers in the elderly, while the medical texts devoted pages to rest cures for pneumonia, hardly useful for an army on the move.

The army-issued medical manuals were not much help, either. They consisted of:

–five pages on applying whale oil to the inside of boots to prevent abrasions

–ten pages on latrine building

–a chapter on “moral instruction for the soldier who misses the comforts of the wife”

–a glossary for Austrian medical officers attending to the needs of Hungarian soldiers ignorant of German, with such phrases as:

Hazafias magyarok! Mindebben mindannyian együtt vagyunk!

Patriotic Magyars, we are all in this together!

Nem beteg, a baj az a bátorság hiánya!

He is not sick, his disease is no bravery.

Persze hogy viszket Somogyi őrmester, nem kellett volna olyan szoknyapecérnek lenni!

Of course it itches, Sergeant Somogyi, you were out of control.

–a page on abdominal surgery, which concluded, after consideration of the opinions of various world-famous experts and some statistical discussion—abdominal wounds generally exceed 60 percent mortality despite intervention—that abdominal surgery should not be done.

He wrote to his mother again, this time asking her to send textbooks on wound care and basic first-aid techniques.

Briefly, he was appointed to a delousing detail, to prevent outbreaks of typhus among eastern refugees, mostly Jewish families fleeing attacks on their villages. The camp was set up in a cattle market, south of the city. It was miserable. A deep antagonism had developed between the medical personnel and the refugees, the most religious of whom resisted shaving their hair. The camp director was a former headmaster of a primary school, a viperous man, angry that the army was wasting Austrians to defend Poles and Jews. To Lucius, he said he was happy to have the company of another man of science, and in the evenings he liked to lecture him on his theories of heredity and the natural uncleanliness of certain races. Not once did Lucius see the camp director try to explain to his wards why they were rounded up and shorn, their ritual clothes taken from them for steaming. When at last Lucius grew sick with watching sanitary personnel tear off the hats and kaftans, he went alone to one of the rabbis and tried to explain to him why the measures needed to be taken. But the old man wouldn’t listen. He kept repeating how his people were being treated like animals. There had been no cases of typhus yet; why were they the only ones being harassed? Lucius tried to explain the transmission cycle of typhus to him, that it took time for the disease to develop, that rats and fleas were present, and already they had outbreaks in other camps. “What is it caused by?” the man asked, and Lucius had to answer, “We… I mean science… doesn’t know. Something unseen, a bacillus, a virus.”

“So you are burning our clothes for something unseen,” said the rabbi, shaking his head. “For a disease which has not been found.”

In January, he received news of his fifth redeployment, to a small village in the Galician Carpathians called Lemnowice. On the map it sat in a narrow valley, on the northern slope of the mountains, a finger’s-breadth from Uzhok Pass on the Hungarian border.

Uzhok, thought Lucius, a memory stirring. Uzhok: of course. For it was there a famous meteor had lit the sky two weeks before his father was shot in battle, an augury that had become part of family lore.

The Uzhok meteorite had been collected and brought back to the Natural History Museum in Vienna; a painting on the wall illustrated the event. Yes, he remembered this… he used to go there with his father. It was perhaps his only memory of sharing anything that didn’t have to do with the lancers, although, in a roundabout way (meteor-bullet-hip), it did.

But he couldn’t get there from Kraków—the war was in the way. He would have to travel to Budapest, they told him, and from there on to Debrecen, where he would board yet another train.

Given his disappointments, he didn’t believe it. He heard nothing for the next four days. But then, back in Vienna, in the Trains Division of the Headquarters of the Imperial and Royal Army, a Second-Level Clerk rose from his desk and, carrying a ledger, made his way to the corresponding Second-Level Clerk in the Medical Division, two flights down, returning with an order bearing a double-headed eagle stamp, which he presented to the First-Level Clerk in Trains for another stamp, then walked down four flights of stairs and out the building and through the snow to the Ad Hoc Office for the Eastern Theatre, where the order with both stamps was delivered to a corresponding Second-Level Clerk in the Transportation Division, who entered the name into a ledger, applied his own stamp, returned the order, wrote out a second order, and sent it down to the Head Clerk for Trains, in the Medical Division, Eastern Theatre, who, after a lunch of stale rye and egg sprinkled so heavily with paprika that it would stain the oily fingerprints he left in the margins of the page, rose, and with the ledger tucked inside his coat, went outside, stopping briefly to appreciate the beauty of the falling snow on a pensive putto above a doorway and on the glistening rooftops, before he crossed the boulevard to the military post office.

The route to Budapest passed back through Vienna. There, just across the Inner City from his home, Lucius only had time to buy a pickle from a station vendor before he had to board again. Three days later he was in the barracks in Debrecen, when he received the orders that he would take a final train to a place he had never heard of, called Nagybocskó, beyond another place he’d never heard of, called Máramarossziget, where he would be met by an escort from the hussars.

An escort from the hussars. An image then, of standing with his father in their ballroom, the great wings fluttering above their heads. Near Máramarossziget. He said the word slowly, like a child pronouncing the secret name of a fabled land.

To Feuermann, he wrote, At last.

The night before his departure, distracted by anticipation, Lucius was crossing the market square when a child dashed from a carriage and with a squeal ran straight into his legs. The street was slick with ice. He took a step forward to steady himself, caught his saber between his legs, and tripped, hearing his wrist snap when he reached out to break his fall.

For a moment he lay on the ice, clutching his arm. He waited for help, but the street was empty. Like a ghost, the child was gone, likely swept up by a mother afraid of the punishment for knocking down an Austrian officer.

Back in his quarters, he removed his greatcoat and undid the buttons of the cuff. The standard procedure would have been to get an X-ray, but he was already certain what had happened: a Colles’ fracture of the carpal extremity of the radius, the bone displaced dorsally, the sharp edge now palpable. Already it was so swollen that he had trouble opening the cuff. He cursed, furious at the child and his own incaution. He still had feeling in his fingers—at least there’d been no injury to the nerve. But the fracture would need to be reduced.

It would be safest just to report to the hospital, he knew. But he also knew that if he did so, there was no way he would be sent on to the front.

It could have been a joke. What does the Imperial and Royal Army call a one-handed medical student with no clinical experience?

Doctor.

He pulled lightly on his wrist, thinking that if he could bear it, he might reduce the fracture himself. But the pain was too great, and the muscle was in spasm. His will failed him. He needed help from someone strong.

He left the barracks and wandered toward town. He hoped to find a local doctor; even a veterinarian might do. But most of the signs were in Hungarian, and he couldn’t understand them. At last he saw the word Kovács, above a painted anvil—Blacksmith. Knocking on the door, he was met by a woman with a coat thrown over a nightgown. She stared at him suspiciously. In German she said, “We are full. No more billets. Already sleeping on the floor.”

“I don’t need a billet.” He lifted his arm to show his swollen wrist.

She disappeared inside and returned with a man of such shoulders and such a big, black beard that Lucius wondered if he had not stumbled upon Vulcan himself. Lucius showed him his arm, and the man whistled through his teeth. But he seemed completely unsurprised that an unknown soldier had appeared at his door in the middle of the night with a broken wrist. One of their boarders was a medic, he said, should he get him? Lucius shook his head—the medic would tell him to go to the hospital, he knew. He just needed a strong pair of hands.

The blacksmith led him to his worktable and lit the lamp. A pair of soldiers were sleeping on the floor. Speaking in a whisper, Lucius instructed him to grab the hand and forearm and draw them apart.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” said Lucius, though really he had no idea. His old textbook had an illustration that made it seem as if the bone simply popped back into place.

The man left, returning with a greasy cup of spirits. Lucius thanked him and downed it in a gulp. His eyes teared up; he presented his arm. The blacksmith was tentative at first, and because the muscles in the forearm were in spasm, Lucius had to instruct him to pull harder, then harder still. He could feel the edges of the bone scraping. He bore the pain until he couldn’t any longer, pushing away with a cry.

His head spun; he was afraid he would pass out. Mumbling gratitude to the blacksmith, he stumbled outside and into the cold air. He needed some kind of narcotic, not only to relieve him now, but also to endure the coming journey by horse.

The hospital was across the street from the barracks. The hall was dark, the soldiers sleeping. He passed a pair of nurses at the nursing station, but he acted as if he knew where he was going. Somewhere there would be a supply closet. He passed through another ward. At the far end, he found it, slipped inside, and rummaged until he found ampoules of cocaine and morphine, a syringe. He slipped them into the pocket of his coat.

The train was scheduled to depart at dawn. Back in his room, he broke the cover from a histology textbook, lined it with a shirt, and fashioned a rough splint. With his good hand, he set about packing his bags. He didn’t sleep—he was too worried that the swelling might cause compression of the nerve. Then he would have no choice but to report the injury, for they would have to open his wrist. He told himself that if he could still feel his fingers by morning, he’d press on. In any case, his destination was a hospital, where he’d get care if needed. There he could claim that the fracture had happened en route. And there, he decided, they wouldn’t send him back. He’d learn while it healed. When it was ready, he would work.

In the morning, he removed the splint and let his hand hang free. Only once did he have to lift it, to salute the officer who took his papers at the station. When the train began to move, he splinted it again.

He reached Nagybocskó in the late afternoon, where the hussar escort was waiting.

From the little station house, they followed the road through snowy fields, before it entered a valley thick with pine. Milky layers of ice glinted on the branches, which clattered as the wind came through. Teardrops froze in the corners of Lucius’s eyes and on his lashes, and the shawl that wrapped his face grew thick with rime. Binding his reins about his good hand, he tried to brace his broken wrist, but the narrow road was hard as metal, and the horses slipped from time to time. When at last the pain grew unbearable, he called out for the hussar to stop.

He fumbled with his rucksack until he found the ampoules of cocaine and morphine. They had frozen, so he slipped them into his mouth to warm them. He injected the cocaine directly into his fracture, then paused, ready to inject the morphine, but stopped. No. Best to be sparing; he didn’t know how far they had to go.

The land rose, the valley steep but broad. Soon they reached a wooded pass. The road descended, crossed into another valley, and began to descend again. They passed the entrance to a village, marked by a painted sign with a primitive death’s-head and the words FLECKFIEBER!!!—typhus—and BEWARE SOLDIER! DO NOT ENTER HERE! DEATH AWAITS!!! in German, Polish, and what he assumed to be the same in Romanian, Ruthenian, and Hungarian.

The hussar crossed himself, and though they were far from the village entrance, he gave it a wide berth. As if something fanged and taloned might burst out and chase them down.

Lucius’s arm began to throb again. Again he called to the hussar to stop, uncapped the old needle, broke the morphine ampoule, and injected it into his arm.

The forest thinned. They passed empty fields, now scarred by war. Bomb craters, abandoned bulwarks, trenches. From a tree, something was hanging: a body, now encased almost entirely in ice. At the far end of the field lay a dark pile of what seemed like boulders, but as he drew closer, Lucius saw that they were frozen horses. There were perhaps fifty, half-covered in snow. Garish, dark-red flowers bloomed from their heads. In the shadows of the forest, he thought he saw others. The hussar slowed.

A scrap of livery fluttered lightly from one of the exposed saddles, the letters k.u.k. still visible.

Kaiserlich und königlich. Imperial and Royal. His army. Suddenly Lucius was afraid.

“Cossacks?”

Shadows danced deep in the woods. He saw the horsemen, creatures of so many childhood dreams. Then nothing but the trees.

“Cossacks don’t execute horses,” said the hussar, disdainfully, from behind his mask. “This is Austria in retreat.”

At first Lucius didn’t understand. But he was embarrassed to show his ignorance, and it was only as they rode on that he recalled the stories of surrender, the animals shot to keep them out of enemy hands.

It was close to dusk when they passed their first set of travelers, a refugee family leading a goat cart down the snowy road. There were four children, two on the cart, two walking, their faces swaddled like mummies, jackets stuffed with straw until they were nearly bursting at their seams.

In Hungarian, the hussar commanded them to stop. He pointed to the cart and spoke. The woman protested. Lucius couldn’t understand the words, but it was clear what she was saying: nothing here, some old rags—that’s all. The hussar dismounted from his horse and walked, somewhat stiffly, over to the cart, where he began to search. The woman followed him. “Nincs semmink!” she cried, both hands in prayer. “Nincs semmink! Nincs semmink!” But by then the hussar had found what she was hiding. One by one, he drew them out: rabbits, twitching, eyes wide, breath steaming, kicking their long back legs against the air.

Cries rose from the swaddled faces of the children. The hussar offered Lucius a rabbit, holding out the steaming creature in his extended hand, like a priest before a sacrifice. Lucius shook his head, but the hussar threw it to him anyway, and he caught it with his good arm, against his chest. Then he hesitated. He wanted to return it to the family, but he could feel the hussar watching him through the thin slits in his leather mask.

The rabbit kicked as he slipped it inside his greatcoat. It wriggled out. He caught it by its leg and this time tucked it inside his shirt, against his skin, where, out of terror or from some physiological change provoked by the change in temperature, it released a stream that trickled down his belly and his legs. Lucius could feel its heart thrumming against his skin. He did not understand why the hussar hadn’t killed the rabbits there, but this choice, before the children, seemed almost kind.

He kept his eyes from the family as they rode on.

They returned to the road. After another hour, the hussar stopped and dismounted slowly, even more stiffly than when he’d stopped before. He fumbled with his trousers as if to urinate, and Lucius turned to give him privacy. But when the man didn’t move for several minutes, Lucius looked back. Now something seemed wrong. Another minute, and Lucius heard him curse, then groan as if straining, before he gave up and climbed back on his horse.

Close to evening, they entered an empty village, stopping to billet in an abandoned house. The walls were bare; the kitchen was empty, the cabinets open, the floor covered with broken plates. An icon of Saint Stanislaus of Poland lay in an open drawer, as if it had been hidden there and then discovered.

Poland, thought Lucius. Galicia. Somewhere, in the woods, they must have crossed the border. On a table, inexplicably, was a beautiful ceramic music box, which played an unfamiliar tune. The bed had been lanced open and emptied of its straw.

They kept the horses inside, in the dining room. Gathering bedstraw, tearing off the last remaining doors from the cabinet, the hussar lit a fire, killed and skinned the rabbits, and boiled them in a pot he carried on his horse. Without his mask, his face looked drawn and hollow now, and Lucius saw he ate only tiny bites. “Are you sick?” he asked at last. The man grunted, but didn’t reply. When they’d finished eating, they lay down, clothed, beneath a single blanket. Lucius remained awake. The anesthetic had begun to wear off, and his wrist was throbbing. Now he regretted his ambition to push on. How far was Lemnowice? He had enough cocaine for one more day. Constantly, he wiggled his numb fingers, worried again about a compression of the nerve. But the room was freezing—he could scarcely feel the fingers of his other hand either.

He was still awake when the hussar stirred, rose, and went to the wall to urinate. As before, he remained like that a long time, perhaps five minutes, more, before he began to groan and then to strike himself, his thighs or lower abdomen or penis—Lucius couldn’t see, only that the man did so with increasing violence.

Lucius sat up. “Corporal?”

The man stopped. His fists were balled. He lifted them high above his head and began to moan.

“Corporal?” Lucius said again. Then, very tentatively, uttering the words for the first time in his life, “I am a doctor.”

There was silence. Cautiously the man appraised him from dark, sunken eyes above unshaven cheeks.

Then tentatively, he said, “It does not come out. It is stuck… It hurts, here…”

It took Lucius only a moment to put the signs together. In the textbooks there might be a dozen different causes for an obstruction, but on the Eastern Front, with its garrison towns lined with whorehouses, there was really only one explanation in an otherwise healthy man. Back in Kraków, the clinics cared for a steady flow of men receiving urethral dilatation for gonorrheal strictures. He had seen massive, stoic soldiers reduced to sobs.

Lucius said, “Tomorrow, at the hospital, they’ll take care of you.”

The man said, “Nothing comes out.”

Lucius said, “I understand. Tomorrow, we will reach the hospital…”

“Nothing!”

“I understand. I…” He took a deep breath. “When did you last go?”

But the hussar didn’t answer. Instead, he turned, holding his penis in his open palm, as if to say to Lucius, Look. Lucius hesitated. Then, lighting a candle from his rucksack, he crouched before the hussar. Think. Remember the lectures on the anatomy of the bladder. Except he’d skipped them to work in Zimmer’s lab.

He told the man to bear down, and a single drop of urine appeared at the tip of his penis. Gently, Lucius palpated the man’s belly. It was tense, his bladder full. Once, chronic venereal disease was the kind of problem he might have joked about with Feuermann, hardly the glorious surgery he’d expected on the front. But now the possible consequences of an untreated obstruction ran through his mind. Did the bladder actually rupture? Or the urethra? Or did the kidneys shut down before anything tore?

“Tomorrow at the hospital…,” Lucius began.

The man shook his head. “I can’t get back on the horse.” He bent over, pushing his fist so hard into his belly that Lucius was now certain something would burst.

Leaving me alone with a dying horseman in an abandoned village, he thought. He didn’t know where he was going, nor how to return to Nagybocskó.

The soldier said, “Every month, I go… they use a little rod…”

“I know,” said Lucius. “It is called a bougie. But I don’t have one.”

The two men looked around the room, eyes passing over the saint’s icon, the music box. Then the hussar said, “For my rifle, there is a rod assembly…”

Lucius felt his stomach turn. “I can’t. They use petroleum jelly… For the rod to advance, we need…”

But the man was rummaging through his saddlebags, returning with a three-piece collapsible brush, with one piece screwing into the other. It looked like a medieval torture implement. But the pieces without bristles were thin and smooth, and even tapered at their threaded ends. From the bag, the man removed a tube of gun oil.

Lucius had two ampoules of morphine left, and he gave the hussar one, using the needle still dirty with his own blood. He told the man to lie down, and waited until the morphine took effect. Then he squeezed rifle oil onto the rod. Again he tried to recall what he’d read in the textbook. If he remembered correctly, the urethral canal took a sharp turn at the urethral sphincter. If he pushed too far, he could pierce through the wall of the canal. But if the stricture were closer, he might stand a chance. He took a deep breath. “Grab here,” he said, and had the hussar pull his penis straight. He placed the rod at the urethral opening and advanced it slowly in. The man tensed. Lucius stopped, now remembering that one of the risks of the procedure was opening a false passage. His left hand was trembling, and he braced it with his right. He found himself recalling how in Kraków, in the mess hall, he’d heard a pair of sappers talking about a certain kind of shaking that beset them as they gently wound the wires of their bombs. He advanced the rod farther, and then it reached resistance. He backed up, slipped it forward, again felt it stop. Then, with a push, past. Then the hussar roared, twisted away, leaving Lucius rod in hand, stumbling back, piss-sprayed as the man shattered a wall plank with his fist.

He’ll kill me, Lucius thought. But then the hussar began to laugh.

The next morning he was in tremendous spirits.

He sang as he urinated in many directions. “Orvos!” he said, embracing Lucius as he half-spoke, half-sang something in Hungarian, none of which Lucius understood. Save orvos. Doctor. It was enough.

They set out. Their trail joined with a rutted, empty road that climbed steeply into the hills. Now the hussar seemed positively garrulous. He sang and whistled and drummed on his thighs. It was good that Lucius was a doctor, he told him. Lots of patients. He made a sawing motion with his hand.

They stopped only for Lucius to inject more anesthetic into his wrist. By then the signs of war were gone, the forest clear. The only person they saw was an old man in the middle of a dark wood, rummaging through the snow. When the hussar slowed, Lucius was afraid that he would rob him just as he had robbed the others, but he only asked the way, and the old man pointed with a turnip as he leaned unsteadily on his stick.

Dusk was falling when they came over a low hill and at last found themselves before a village. It was tucked in a softly sloping valley, with two streets of houses descending from a single wooden church of rough-hewn logs. Above the church, the road kept rising. Below, the valley widened into snow-covered fields that flanked a frozen river. “Lemnowice,” said the hussar. They followed the road down to the fields and then up past the houses. They were low-ceilinged huts, made of wood, straw-thatched, with tiny windows, all covered with wooden shutters so that it was impossible to see inside. There were no chimneys. A pair of drays lay in the road, seemingly abandoned, half-buried in snow. There was a flutter over one of the rooftops, and a huge black crow took off into the sky.

There was not a soul in sight. He saw no garrison, no sign of the army at all, certainly nothing that could be a hospital. Perhaps it lay beyond the hill, he thought. Unless, this, too, had been a mistake. Unless, after such a journey, he would have to turn around.

The hussar stopped before the church, motioning Lucius to descend. He obeyed, approached the door, and knocked. He waited. There was a narrow window in the door that reminded him of a castle arrow slit. The hussar told him to knock harder, and only then did he hear movement, the sound of footsteps. In the window, an eye appeared.

“Krzelewski,” said Lucius. “Medical lieutenant. Fourteenth Regiment, Third Army.”

Then a key in the lock, a clang of the mechanism. The door opened to reveal a nursing sister. She wore a stiff grey habit, and in one hand held a Mannlicher rifle, standard issue of the k.u.k.

“May I speak to the supervising physician?” he asked in German.

When she didn’t answer, he tried Polish.

“The doctor?” she replied, still staying back, in the shadows. “Didn’t you just say you’re him?”