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.
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 much 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!