The Winter Soldier Page 10

  “There you have it,” said Second Nowak, stroking his moustache and rising. “War.”

  6.

  As the winter progressed, the offensive to liberate Galicia from Russia faltered. At Przemyśl, the Austrian commander shot his horses, fired off his artillery, and destroyed his guns with overloads before surrendering. By late March, snow still thick on the ground, fighting came within a few kilometers of Lemnowice, rising slowly up the valley like a flood.

  All day long they could hear the rumbling of artillery. At times the shells struck so close they shook dust from the crossbeams. Then, for a few weeks, a field camp occupied the village, and Lucius found himself working alongside other doctors, while a trio of severe Hungarian nursing sisters joined Margarete in the sacristy.

  The doctors were named Berman and Brosz, both Austrian, both ten years his senior. Brosz, small and thin, with hands so delicate as to give the impression of fragility; Berman, plump and always laughing, with a large port-wine stain across his cheek.

  In the beginning, he expected them to be surprised by the limited supplies, the lack of an X-ray machine or bacteriological equipment, his single nurse. But the last hospital had been even worse, they told him, the morale abysmal, with the neighboring garrison’s commanding officer resorting to punishing suspected shirkers by Anbinden, stripping them and binding them to trees.

  “In the winter?”

  “In the winter.”

  Lucius thought of the ice, the driving wind. “But I heard Anbinden had been banned.”

  To this they only laughed. When eventually they asked him about his training, they seemed surprised to hear he had enlisted as a medical student, before Berman said, “At least you’re not a veterinarian like the last one.” Before the war, Berman had specialized in nervous and mental disorders, while Brosz had operated a sanitorium for tuberculosis. So in some respects, they were as inexperienced as him.

  But how had he learned to operate?

  “There was another doctor who taught me, Szőkefalvi, a Hungarian who has since moved on.”

  In a way, it was true. And he knew, even if Margarete hadn’t told him with a flashing of her eyes, that he was to say nothing of her.

  But they had little time to talk. The stretcher-bearers, dragging the wounded by sled, or dray, or skiing in with them on chairs bound to their backs, came almost hourly up the valley. Soon the quarantine room was converted into a ward of its own, and then the bathhouse, and then the hospital began to spread into the neighboring houses of the village. Lucius saw Margarete trying futilely to impose some order, pleading with the doctors and nurses to carefully check the men for lice. They didn’t listen, not even when Lucius took her side. But what could they do? There were simply too many wounded. There weren’t even enough blankets to go around.

  Sometimes, on his rounds, he was joined by Rzedzian or Zmudowski, but usually just by Margarete. In the village, visiting the soldiers in the low, dark huts, she spoke in broken Ruthenian to the women. It was the first time Lucius had been in any of the houses, crowded with rough-hewn tables and pens for rabbits and chickens, these empty now. Wooden cradles hung above the beds, and the light came from saucers of tallow with burning wicks of cloth. On the wall hung woolen festival ribbons, wreaths of bells. In comparison to the church, with its constant clamor, the huts had the hushed, sacred air of deathbed scenes, the light barely illuminating the pallid faces of the soldiers, the village women moving slowly in their dark shawls, their children sitting in transfixed vigil by the beds. For these, Margarete always had a crust of bread, a piece of carrot. Sometimes Lucius entertained them by showing them his father’s hand shadows, other times by letting them listen to their hearts. Their wide eyes grew wider with the cold bell of the stethoscope, not seeming to understand what they were hearing, but astonished nonetheless. Manifestly, he did this out of kindness, or a sort of effort at improving relations, though in truth there was something fortifying in the chance to touch skin without gangrene, without fever, the bodies without a wound.

  He was aware, too, that Margarete was watching him in these moments, occasionally exchanging words with the women, but these he didn’t understand.

  Then one morning he woke to an eerie silence.

  It was late April. For two weeks, the artillery had pounded them, contrapuntal with the storm.

  Sitting up in his bed, in his greatcoat, beneath his blanket, in his boots, he waited for the sound of shelling to resume. The small window, behind weeks of snow, glowed silver. He rose.

  Outside, the sun was out, the courtyard glittered. He walked beyond the church’s shadow and stood a moment, his eyelids warming in the light. From the distance, he heard a shout, and a man on skis appeared. He wore a gunpowder-grey trench coat and aviator goggles. Snowflakes glittered on his pale blue cap. He was pink-faced, out of breath. Fighting had stopped down in Bystrytsya, he told Lucius. The Russians had pulled back overnight.

  By the next day, messengers had arrived from Nadworna, on the plains. The story was confirmed. The Austrian Third would be pushing north. The soldiers billeted in the village were given an hour to gather their belongings. Soon they stood shivering in formation before the church, rucksacks loaded, lips steaming. The field kitchen, communications station, and artillery equipment that had accompanied them were all loaded onto lorries, drawn by tiny Panje horses.

  Then with a whistle, they began to march.

  Berman and Brosz had been given orders to report to a field hospital being established in Nadworna. Lucius was with Margarete when the news came, and he feared he would be summoned, too. On and on, the courier intoned the orders. But there was no mention of his name.

  When the man finished, Lucius realized that he had been holding his breath. He sensed Margarete standing very close to him, and wanted to turn, to see her face, now that she knew that he would stay.

  April turned to May.

  The sun grew warmer. The snow began to melt. Harp strings of light broke through the nave.

  Everywhere the valley was filled with crinkling whispers, the whine of shifting snowdrifts, the rustling of rills. Beneath the ice, the river began to murmur. Deep holes formed under dripping icicles on the corners of the roof. Stones gleamed in the runoff, and boughs heaved as they released their burdens, the snow shattering in its descent. Life appeared, incautious roe deer, boar, astonished waxwings flurrying as if released from the melting snow.

  In the courtyard, lime-green buds speckled the tips of the beech tree, still streaked with snowmelt. A world yet unknown to him—graveyard, hedges, discarded wagon wheel—began slowly to announce itself. Fallen fences around the village houses. Moldering haystacks. Pig troughs, though no pigs. A graveled walkway across the courtyard. A pair of tiny wooden statues of Christ and Mary, both so weathered as to be almost identical, were it not for the liberty the carver had taken with Her bosom, and His mountain-man’s beard.

  Stone urns. A pile of grey firewood. Then: color. Blue sky. Green leaf. A yellow burst of goldenrod. The waggling crimson crest of an unanticipated rooster. A tiny field of rose and purple asters on the first bare slope.

  There were few new patients. Now with the fighting distant and the passes melting, the routes of evacuation had also shifted down onto the plain. At first this was met by everyone with some relief. Lucius slept his first full night in months, in early May. He shaved and bathed, and wrote his letters home. Margarete, too, seemed to relish the hiatus. The rings disappeared from around her eyes. In her step, he noticed a new lightness, which he hadn’t known she’d lost.

  One afternoon, he ran into her as she was leaving the washroom, her cheeks rosy, her skin damp. Though she was fully dressed, her wimple neatly arranged, she seemed almost embarrassed to be caught like this, as if he had actually stumbled upon her bathing. But he understood. He, too, had lingered in the washroom, his skin alive to the same hot water and same rough stone.

  Soon, the soldiers awaiting evacuation began to colonize the courtyard, to smoke and drink ho
rilka, whittle dolls as gifts to send home to their children, and play bocce with the garden stones. Yes, it was good to have been forgotten, briefly. And then as the weeks drew on, and the supplies left by the departing army dwindled, they began to realize that with the shifting of the front, the food wagons seemed to have forgotten them as well.

  The pickles were the first to vanish. Then the rice, the hunks of gristly meat, the potatoes. Then onions, lentils, carrots, the tins of cooking fat. The bags of flour: three, two, one.

  They began to grow hungry.

  The cooks diluted the soup, cut thinner slices of bread. They finished the turnips.

  Przednówek, Margarete said.

  The Scarcity. Lucius also knew the word, an old farmer’s term for springtime, when last year’s rations had begun to grow low, but it was too early yet to plant.

  They sent Second Nowak north to Nadworna to request supplies, but he came back empty-handed two days later, saying the plains were all but impassable for the mud, the road littered with abandoned lorries and harried squadrons trying to advance.

  They thought of sending someone south, but the road through the pass was even worse.

  They turned to the woods.

  Those able to walk set off together. It was Margarete who taught them how to gather, showed the city-men from Budapest and Kraków and Vienna how to identify goosefoot and club-rush, to select saddle fungus and pig’s ear mushrooms from the tree trunks, horsetail cones from the river, sweet calamus shoots, and tender bracken stems to roast. On the green, open slopes, they picked potherbs: sorrel and saltbush, dandelion, lungwort, goosefoot, swine thistle. They found fresh pine needles to stretch their bread, made gruel from the green seeds of manna grass; they fermented hogweed in ammunition tins and boiled the budding leaves of the lindens. She showed them how to strip bark from the lindens, the birches, the maples, the hazels, to dry and roast and bake into their breads. To make soups of birch buds. Butter out of birch sap. Bread from the roots of quack grass, sweet snacks from mallow seed and roots of cocksfoot and polypody. She warned them against the roots of the calamus that would make them see ghosts.

  When they split into pairs after a week, she said, “The doctor will come with me.” Lucius was self-conscious by his selection, sensed the men exchanging glances, and yet he told himself that it was only natural; she remained cautious of soldiers, as she should. She wore a single soldier’s greatcoat, hemmed so as not to drag in the mud. Over her shoulder, she hung a burlap sack from the muzzle of her rifle, as if it were a milkmaid’s yoke. It was clear now that his early speculations as to her origins in the mountains were correct. He struggled to keep up. She was swift, moving over stones and fallen logs without breaking stride. She plunged her hands gloveless into dirt or snow, tore bark from the trees, brushed off a tuber before testing it with a bite. He was struck by how she never hesitated. But this was a familiar movement from her approach to wounds.

  They spoke little while they walked. Around them, the whole world seemed to be turning to water. The earth was sodden, the trails shimmering with runoff. Ferns the color of mantises unfurled from the black rotting mosses. Steam rose from the wet bark, and from the upper slopes, the remaining snowfields calved in little avalanches, thundering through the trees.

  At times they passed women from the village, similarly following the narrow paths in search of food. He felt uneasy then, as if it were their woods in which he was foraging. But the women seemed less suspicious there, in the forest, smiling with a kind of fellow spirit as they passed each other on the trail.

  They were hesitant to wander beyond the valley at first, distrustful of reports that the war had moved off. But as the snow melted away, they ventured farther into the neighboring valley, where another river tumbled, swollen with runoff. There Margarete broke apart calamus and handed him the inner shoots to eat, or brushed dirt from chanterelles. Her hands still had the tarry smell of the carbolic, but the mushrooms were like nothing he had ever tasted, and he had come to like the smell of carbolic by then. When she was thirsty, she asked for his canteen. He was acutely aware that her lips were touching the same place his had touched, but he dismissed this as simply another habit from where she had come from, just as she seemed to think nothing of his taking food from her fingers, that it meant little else.

  It was on their fourth or fifth sally, sometime in April, that she asked him if she could sing.

  Of course, he said, surprised, but she didn’t seem to think it was strange at all to ask. From then, when they weren’t talking, she sang softly, usually to herself, but at times it seemed, for him. Nursery rhymes and cradle songs, love ballads and battle hymns, songs of summer, of horsemen, of sweethearts and stolen kisses, dances, christenings, weddings, midsummer, songs of night spirits and glen witches, wolves and cats and kittens, swallows and pines. Songs of sounds, wordless, rhymed. There were times he recognized them, distant cousins of the folk songs sung mostly by his governesses, but the tunes were different, wilder, the singing at times nasal and strange. She tried to teach him, but he was shy and always a bit breathless, and preferred to listen anyway, as he watched her figure move ahead of him, greatcoat and habit swaying, allowing himself briefly, very briefly, to imagine the form beneath.

  One day, she took him high in the valley to see the ancient ruins of a watchtower. Grass grew from between the lichen-covered stones, and the vague outline of a spiral staircase could be made out amid the rubble. Wind-stunted pines and chestnuts grew in what had once been rooms. As they arrived, a band of crows took off, leaving behind a scattering of shattered pinecones.

  She had first found the ruins last September, she told him. The chestnuts were abundant then, and throughout the fall, she’d come to gather them. Later, on days when so much sickness became almost too much to bear, she came there, too, to seek guidance for questions she couldn’t answer. Or to imagine that the war was over, that she would return to Lemnowice to find the hospital had become a church again.

  Her cheeks were still red from the exertion of the climb. They were sitting close to each other, and he could sense her warm, human smell, distinct from the forest, the wet moss, the upturned mud, the sappy, savaged cones. She was quiet. He wanted to ask if, back in September, she had brought anybody else along.

  Instead, she spoke first. “What were they like, Pan Doctor, the nurses you worked with in Vienna?”

  He looked at her, surprised by the question, the undisguised curiosity about his relations with other women. The answer was that he didn’t really remember. Vaguely, he could summon up the starched white habits, the unrelenting efficiency, the courtlike decorum with which they seemed to run the wards. But that was all.

  “You are remembering someone,” she said, with a smile.

  He shook his head. “Oh, no. I was just thinking how mostly I was terrified of them. I was a student, remember. Mostly they just told us what we did wrong.”

  “Like me, Pan Doctor.” She laughed. “When you first came. Remember?”

  He noticed then the lashes of her eyes, and the way the grey iris seemed to capture the green of the glen. Her fingers stained with berries, a tiny mark of violet on her lip. “Yes, like you.”

  A wisp of hair had broken from her wimple, now silhouetted in the sun. She must have sensed him notice, for she tucked it back.

  A pair of squirrels chased each other on the low wall of the ruins. He picked at the grass about his feet.

  “Do you know what you’ll do after the war?” he asked.

  She turned to him, then looked off. With the stock of her rifle, she pushed a thin path through the pine needles. For a moment he felt as if he were with someone very different from the nursing sister of such fantastic devotions who had met him when he first arrived. Different even from the hunter of mushrooms and potherbs, from the steady companionship he’d come to know.

  She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the base of her palm. She looked up.

  “I don’t know.”

  He waited, wantin
g her to say more. To speak of her convent, or home.

  At last she said, “And you, Pan Doctor?”

  “After the war?”

  “After the war.”

  He rolled an awn of grass between his fingers. “Go back to medical school, I guess. I haven’t really any choice.”

  “And then?”

  “After that? I don’t know. Perhaps I will try and work at the university.” He paused. It sounded as if he were asking for permission. “It is what I was planning on before the war,” he added, but that world, with its amphitheaters, its gleaming lantern slides, its corridor statues, now seemed so far away. A question came to him, one he had often thought of, but never asked. Now, as offhandedly as possible, he said, “One day, I might…depending on where I go, of course…I might need to find a nurse to work with me…”

  She turned and studied him. He was aware of a little tilt to her eyes, a slight movement at her mouth, as if she had lightly bitten the inside of her lip. For a moment she seemed almost joyful, and then just as quickly, something darker crossed her face.

  The wind blew. The pines and chestnuts shivered, and a thin shower of catkins fell about them. A hubbub of birds suddenly descended, saw them, and just as suddenly departed, as if ashamed to interrupt.

  Still the question remained unanswered. He waited, wondering if he should apologize, if he should take back what he’d said, afraid now that he had risked the happiness of the day.

  She brushed a catkin from her knee.

  “There will be a lot of chestnuts this year, Pan Doctor,” she said. “With so much snow over the winter. We will just need to find them before the cursed squirrels. This fall, when we come back.”

  He nodded, a little miserable to think that she had changed the subject, before he realized that the future she had spoken of included him.