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.
“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.