The Winter Soldier Read online

  He showed it to Lucius.

  Only it wasn’t a cushion: it was Zmudowski.

  “Look, Doctor: there, you can see my hand.”

  And sure enough, emerging from the dark rug were two pale fingers holding the baby by the wrist.

  The others apparently had also fallen for the trick.

  He had loved to take the little girl on postal rounds. She was crazy for it, he said. He hoped one day she would be the world’s first Polish postwoman. In addition to the great orange beard, dense enough to store a thermometer when he needed both hands free, he had ruddy skin and coarse orange eyebrows that overhung a pair of close-set eyes. The eyes, the sunburnt skin, a pair of missing teeth, a nose broken twice during his youth: all gave the impression of a certain oafishness, as if Nature had cast him more for the role of a stable hand than an agent of His Majesty’s Post. But he had a postman’s meticulousness and a postman’s spatial memory, and more than once, when Lucius was lost among the dozens of blanketed bodies, Zmudowski remembered which wound was where.

  The second orderly, Rzedzian, was originally from Drohobycz, some two hundred kilometers to the north, where he had worked in the oil fields before the war. Rzedzian’s great claim in life was that he had the same name as a character in the epic novel With Fire and Sword, save that the Rzędzian in the novel was spelled with an “e with a little tail,” while Rzedzian of Drohobycz was spelled with just an e. How the famous author had decided on this name for his character was a great mystery to Rzedzian. No, he, Rzedzian, had never met him, though he heard he lived in Kielce, not that far away. And no one in Rzedzian’s family had ever heard of any relative named Rzędzian. But since his discovery of this fact, at the age of nine, it had become one of the defining features of his life. The book was so famous, that often, when he met someone he didn’t know and said his name, they would ask, “Like Rzędzian who rescued Helena Kurcewiczówna?” and he would get to tell the story of the e. This happened almost every time they had a new Polish patient.

  Then someone decided to call him “Rzedzian without a Tail,” and he stopped telling the story, though by then it was far too late.

  Rzedzian was very big, nearly two meters tall. His hair was black, and he wore a dangling moustache in the Cossack style, which he liked to chew in contemplation. In civilian life he had once won a kielbasa-eating competition, and his specialty in the oil fields had been lifting. Barrels. Timber. Reels of rope, which they dropped into the wells. He claimed it had nothing to do with strength and only mental domination over the object to be lifted. Anyone could do it, even weaker people, Doctor, no offense.

  None was taken; what had served in Drohobycz also made him an excellent orderly: they needed patients lifted all the time. He also had amazing lungs, utterly untouched by the haze of lime they used in disinfection. His only weakness was his sentimentality, for he cried each time they lost a soldier, which meant sometimes he cried every day, tears running over his coarse cheeks until they streamed off the ends of his moustache. Like Zmudowski, he had a wife and daughter, but no photograph, though when he got home he was going to try the trick with the rug.

  “But your daughter’s sixteen. The whole point of the rug is for you to hold a child still.”

  This was Krajniak, the cook. Twenty years old. Pale, and thin, with an eternally drippy nose. A Ruthenian from a nearby village, he was one of the few people who could speak the language of the village women of Lemnowice. He had been in trade school when the war broke out, enlisted out of love of Empire, and lost his hand at Lemberg. But it had still been early enough in the war then that he hadn’t lost his patriotism, and he reenlisted as a cook. He was, he said, sniffling, with due respect, Doctor, the most powerful man in Lemnowice: he controlled the pickles, and who got sediment and who just broth.

  Zmudowski, wiping horilka from his beard, concurred: they were indebted to the famous sneezer. And he and Rzedzian began to sing.

  The French dine out on foie gras,

  The Brits beef in a pot,

  The Italians fettuccine,

  And we eat Krajniak’s snot.

  He had no wife, no daughter. His mother, who was illiterate, paid a woman in the local market to write him long missives telling him to wear warm clothing, stay away from fish when summer came, and be extra careful of the local girls, who, meeting a man from trade school, might surprise him in a haystack and so wrangle him with child and cut short the great trajectory of his life.

  And Nowak? An utterly unremarkable man who had once worked in his family’s dog-fancier shop in Kraków, where he had met his fiancée in the months just before the war. In his pocket, he carried a lock of her hair, quite a large lock really, which Rzedzian said looked more like her scalp.

  He was proud of his hands, which his beloved once had told him were manly. In truth, they looked like normal hands, but because of this vanity he didn’t wash them with the corrosive soap, contracted dysentery from a patient, and died in February, shortly after Lucius’s arrival. He was replaced by another Pole named Nowak, whom they called Second Nowak, whose most noticeable feature was the straw-colored moustache that he combed constantly throughout the day.

  “But it is beautiful, don’t you think, Doctor?” said Rzedzian. “It’s really so smooth. It makes me want to comb it myself. I am not sure who he thinks he is planning to make love to; the villagers would castrate him with their scythes. But if he is sad, all he has to do is remind himself that it is there, below his nose…”

  “…and above his lip,” said Krajniak.

  “Both places, Doctor, at once. That is why he’s always smiling. For the rest of us, this place is hell. But this man is always filled with bliss.”

  They told stories. They had already, Lucius realized, a mythology of the little hospital. The founding legend, the early plague, the exodus of X and VII Corps, the great deluges of soldiers from the plains. With awe, they spoke of the whirl and welter of the winter storms, the wolf pack that had attacked the Russian line in December, the Austrian dragoon who had come back to life despite being frozen two days in the middle of a river.

  The Tale of the Mysterious Tinned Sausage. The Stewed Boot. The Winter Bicyclist. The Czech’s Rash. The Hungarian Platoon That Convinced Their Austrian C.O. a Pornographic Novel Was a Copy of the Catechism so They Could Read It All the Time. Iskandar of the Wrong Army. The so-called Brothel of Uzhok Pass. The Man Who Vanished. What Schottmüller’s Wife Did to Him When She Saw What He Brought Back from Przemyśl. The Miracle of the Dud.

  And when Margarete wasn’t around: Margarete and the Cussing Hussar. Margarete and the Fate of the “French” Postcard. Margarete and the Perfectly Capable Slovene Who Wouldn’t Clean His Tin.

  Then, when they realized that Lucius was going to stay, could be trusted with a secret, they told him the story of Zmudowski and the Russian stamps.

  It had happened over Russian Christmas.

  For weeks, the line was very close, just down the valley outside Bystrytsya; at night they could see the light of shell fire. Fighting was heavy. The church was full, the mountain passes snowed in, all but blocking evacuation. Zmudowski was in Bystrytsya, working in a dressing station. For the previous few days the front had been quiet, spies had seen what seemed like an escort departing down the valley, and a rumor had arisen that the Russian commanding officer had retreated for the holiday, when on the morning of Christmas Eve a lone man appeared from the enemy line, walking across a pasture, carrying a white sheet raised high above his head.

  They let him approach. A thin man, with a scraggly beard, eyes lined with fatigue, woefully underdressed. He spoke some Polish, and one of the Poles spoke some Russian. The man carried no weapon, only a flask of Russian vodka. A peace offering, he said, for Christmas, an invitation for the soldiers stationed in Bystrytsya to come and drink. Their captain had gone back to occupied Nadworna to celebrate Christmas in the officers’ garrison, leaving in charge the first lieutenant, who was tired of the fight.

  There was muc
h debating. A trap, some said. But others believed the soldier. At last, the Austrian squadron leader agreed to send a single envoy, and the two men trudged off together across the snowy field.

  Two hours later, he returned. It was true, he said. The soldiers were alone. There were perhaps thirty. A handful were Ruthenians who could speak with the local women; it seemed like some had hit it off. There was dancing, not much food, but lots to drink.

  They went. Nearly fifty soldiers crowded in a tiny barn. Candles flickered on the tables. Several of the men from both sides were good musicians, and now that they could play without being afraid of giving away their location, they made a band with fife and bagpipe and basolia, rummaged from the village. They joked how when the captain returned, they would be punished for fraternizing with the enemy. But to the devil with the captain, with his Christmas dinner and his officers’ whores!

  The barn had been used as a dressing station and communication headquarters. It was when they were moving a crate to expand the dance floor that Zmudowski saw the stamp.

  Until then, the story had been a communal endeavor. Now Zmudowski took over alone.

  “So, the first thing to understand, Doctor, is that from a philatelic perspective, Russia really should not be considered one country, but many: it’s simply too large. Thus, immediately after the introduction of the first national adhesives, the Rural Councils, or Zemstvos, started to organize their own local posts. I had become aware of such Zemstvo stamps early in my collecting years, and had managed to obtain a precious copy of Chudovsky’s 1888 Description of the Russian Zemstvo Stamps, Envelopes and Parcels, which gives some order to the three thousand Zemstvo stamps issued until then. However, it was extraordinarily rare to encounter such a stamp arriving in Kraków, given its dedication to local use. Most of the stamps are decorated with provincial arms, so for example, one can recognize those from Perm by the bear, or Tambov by the beehive, even without understanding Cyrillic. But more extraordinary are the quaint and irregular printing processes, leading to the so-called tête-bêche varieties, in which one stamp is printed upside down, or in the case of the extraordinarily rare first issues of Zolotonosha, even sideways. However, the greatest appeal for the Zemstvo collector…”

  Rzedzian cleared his throat and suggested that Zmudowski “move things along.”

  “But the story won’t make any sense unless the doctor has the background.”

  “I think he has the background.”

  “I don’t think he has the background. It will seem I took unnecessary risks…”

  Rzedzian turned to Lucius. “So he saw a stamp from Astrakhan.”

  There was a long pause. Zmudowski furrowed his brow, pinched his lips, and breathed heavily through his nose. “You ruined it.”

  “I didn’t ruin it. Tell him about the stamp.”

  Zmudowski lifted his hands helplessly.

  Rzedzian twirled his long moustache. “The fabled city of Astrakhan—”

  “—on the Black Sea,” interrupted Zmudowski quickly. “Yes. I’d never seen one in my life, not even in Chudovsky’s book. From the Russian who spoke some Polish, I learned it belonged to one of their soldiers, who had died two weeks before.

  “Was it valuable? the Russian asked me.

  “Here I knew I had to play my cards carefully. Valuable? It depended on what one meant. It was no 1868 Kharkov one kopek blue—”

  “Definitely not,” said Rzedzian.

  “—no 1871 Saratov black. But for someone interested in a complete collection, it had great sentimental value, I told him. It…But there he stopped me and said I could have it for a cigarette. I hardly had time to assent when he asked if I wanted more.

  “The soldier led me to the mailbag of undelivered letters. It was testament to the horrific casualties that there must have been a hundred. He could not let me have the letters, of course, but if I wanted the stamps…”

  So while the others danced and drank, Zmudowski spent the rest of the night before a boiling kettle, steaming stamps off. He was a little disappointed, he admitted; most were common Russian imperial stamps, but he found at least a dozen Zemstvos. By then, the Russian had come to understand which ones interested Zmudowski. If he wanted more, the soldier told him, this could be arranged. The mail depot for the Russian Seventh was now at Delatyn. He was due to go there tomorrow and would be back in one week. He had a cousin in Kiev who collected stamps, too, he said; Zmudowski would bring him Austrian stamps, and he would bring the Zemstvos. A trade. But there was a catch. By then, their little armistice would be over, and they would be trying to kill each other. If Zmudowski returned to the village, surely he’d be captured, if not shot.

  The Russian had thought for a moment, and then led Zmudowski outside. There, at the end of the road, a second path led down to where a great willow tree dipped its bare branches into the frozen river. They would meet there one week hence; the Russian would arrange to be on sentry duty. They agreed upon a signal by matchlight. One, two, one.

  Back in Bystrytsya, the others told Zmudowski this was definitely a trap. How convenient that the Russian remembered he had a cousin only after Zmudowski had shown such interest! The time for fraternization was over. Already the shelling had resumed. He would be taken prisoner; for his capture, the Russian would certainly be rewarded with more than a bunch of useless stamps.

  But Zmudowski insisted. The great Chudovsky wouldn’t have backed down, and nor would he. Unless one was a millionaire and could buy one’s way to greatness, this was how collections were made. So the next week, he hiked back up to Lemnowice, avoiding Margarete, whom he knew would stop him, and gathered together what he thought was a good representation of Austro-Hungarian stamps for the Russian’s Kiev cousin. And on the preordained night, he put on his hat and gloves, wrapped a blanket beneath his coat for extra warmth, took a rifle, and headed into the night.

  The sky was clear, and the moon was full; anyone watching would have been able to see a figure slowly making his way through the bare woods. But no one was out. An owl called; far up the slope, he heard what might be wolves. But he pushed on, the snow at times above his waist. By then his mind was filled with fantasies of what the soldier might have found for him, blocks of shiny green Viatkas, tête-bêche Saratovs, dark-blue sheets from Novgorod. Now he regretted he hadn’t given the soldier a drawing showing how to recognize an offset, or told him to look particularly for those without heavy franking…

  Oh, but he was getting greedy!

  He reached the river, struck his match.

  Nothing.

  Again he repeated the signal.

  Nothing. His heart fell.

  Then, from across the river, from the darkness of a dugout, came the light. One, two, one.

  Slowly, carefully, he began to make his way across the frozen expanse. This was the moment of greatest danger. Until then, he had been able to stay mostly in the trees. But now he was totally exposed, the snow deep. Were they to fire, he’d be trapped. He thought of his daughter now in Kraków. How stupid of him to take such a risk! Rumors were coming that new Hungarian divisions would be arriving to reinforce the line. Soon the Russians would be pushed back. By summer the war would end. And here he was, in broad moonlight, begging for a bullet, all for some stamps.

  But what stamps!

  He pushed on. Faster now.

  He reached the bank. He was shaking, though he didn’t know whether it was from cold or fear. At his side, a rustling. He turned, but before he knew it, his head was in a headlock, a gloved hand over his mouth. He was dragged off behind the willow. Hands gripped his face and he found himself nose to nose with the Russian soldier. The Russian raised a finger to his lips to caution silence, then slowly let Zmudowski go. By way of hand motions, he let it be known that someone had seen them. A patrol was coming.

  Motioning for him to follow, the soldier led him downstream, through drifts of snow. Now, from above them on the bank came voices. Lanterns now, casting gigantic shadows of men across the snow. C
rouching, the two men huddled together. The Russian was taking an immense risk, thought Zmudowski. At a certain point, he would decide it wasn’t worth it and turn him in.

  But neither moved.

  At last the sentries, satisfied or just too cold, turned back. A name was shouted; the soldier at Zmudowski’s side replied with what must have been a joke of sorts, for it was answered with a satisfied guffaw.

  It was safe now, the soldier whispered. Go.

  The stamps!

  Of course!

  A rustling. Envelopes exchanged hands. Neither looked.

  “Good luck!”

  Back at Lemnowice, hands held before the stove, Rzedzian laughed. He never tired of the story, he said.

  “And the stamps?” asked Lucius. He was aware then that Margarete had appeared, still working, but hovering near their circle so that she could also hear.

  “Total rubbish. Not a single Zemstvo. I probably could have bought them in the Kraków stamp market for a couple of heller.”

  “But at least you have the Astrakhan Zemstvo,” said Lucius.

  “So, it turns out that was also a mistake. I must have wanted it to be from Astrakhan. But I misread the Cyrillic. It’s from Arzamas. That made more sense. Astrakhan was under Cossack administration; it never issued Zemstvo stamps.”

  “By the expression on your face, I’m guessing Arzamas stamps aren’t so rare,” said Lucius.

  “Oh, some are. Just not those issued last year.”

  “I see.”

  Zmudowski shrugged, smiled, and looked wistfully into his lap.

  “The stamp is worth about as much as it costs to mail a letter, Doctor,” said Rzedzian, helpfully. “In case you were going to ask.”

  Zmudowski opened his little book. Mounted on a page of its own was a tiny sky-blue rectangle, showing an even tinier deer. Lucius lifted it to the light, to stare at the little creature against its backdrop of snow and woods.