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, wanting 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.
On the highest peaks, the last snows melted.
In the gardens of the village, the women began to sow their fields. Now a kind of giddiness settled over the men. There were about thirty then, and they began to joke that they had been forgotten. Medical duties became few—the dying had died, and many of the others had recovered. Slowly, the hospital seemed to transform itself into a little village of its own. There was a carpenter among them who led the men in repairing the church. They finally secured the hole in the roof of the north transept and raised pallets in places where floor had turned to mud. There was even a cobbler, Austrian, in his late forties, forehead dented like a tin can, blind in one eye and missing an ear, who spent hours cursing the High Command for their carelessness in shoe construction as he mended the others’ boots.
Cautiously, small patrols slunk into neighboring villages. They brought back sheep’s cheese and hen’s eggs. Margarete interrogated them as to how they had obtained them, and when it became apparent that a lamb had been spirited away from its owner, she marched the soldiers back like guilty schoolchildren, threatening to report any man caught stealing, if she didn’t shoot him herself.
Still they prowled. In an abandoned country house in a neighboring valley, they found a hidden cupboard with old vintages of Romanian wine and stores of sugar, and a private library with the promising titles of Ten Beauties of Munich and The Touch of Satin, though the former turned out to be a travel guide and the latter about home furnishing. Back in Lemnowice, the wine was washed down with horilka. Krajniak, newly rheumy with the arrival of spring pollen, baked a cake. Nightly, there was singing; a soldier who had been a clarinetist in civilian life cobbled together an instrument of ingenious construction from trench wire and ammunition tins. There was an outbreak of gonorrhea, contracted from God-knows-where.
Rats returned. Briefly, typhus flared, taking two soldiers, then Rzedzian.
Lucius was sleeping when Margarete came to share the news. The orderly had been ill for scarcely three days, insisting it was just a flu.
“One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor,” said Margarete, when he came to the door, and he didn’t know if she was speaking for him or for herself. Her eyes were red, and he wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He had thought he was inured to death by then, even prided himself on the calmness with which he absorbed the news of the most recent passing. He who had once stared in shock at the frozen soldier without a jaw. But the great Rzedzian’s body seemed horribly small, the stiffening fingers too familiar, and the way his lip drew back over his teeth reminded him of the corpse of an animal.
They buried him beyond the blossoming pears in the graveyard behind the church. As his duty as the orderly’s commanding officer, Lucius wrote a short letter to his widow and daughter, struggling to capture all that Rzedzian had brought, his impious humor and excess of sentiment, his extraordinary way of lifting the soldiers, which seemed, at times, to transfer some of his strength to them.
He was my friend, he wished to write, but the words were too painful, and he told himself that such familiarity wasn’t befitting of a commanding officer. He was a friend to many.
For a day, Zmudowski disappeared, returning reeking of horilka, his thick beard matted with dirt, his eyes red, knuckles on both hands bruised and swollen.