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 horilka, 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.