It rained. A rat’s nest was discovered beneath the chancel. Margarete set about on a campaign to mate the village cats. She tied a female to a chair in the sacristy and then conscripted all the local tomcats, one by one. The queen mauled four in quick succession before she was overpowered by a golden tom, “Tatar-style.” The patients planted a garden, planning for the winter to return.
An evacuation detail arrived at the end of June. There was space only for ten men in the wagon, so the others stayed. Later, zeppelins were sighted on their way to the east, and the men who could stand helped carry the others outside to watch. Lucius stood beside Margarete, in the crowd of the others, aware of the brush of her habit against his arm, waiting for her to notice his touch and move away. She didn’t. Instead, together they stared upward, watching the pair of giant fish drift slowly across the sky.
At the end of July, a small company of Austrian dragoons passed through. In the courtyard, they set out a table and the officers joined them for the midday meal, while a half-dozen kittens batted the tassels on their boots.
The men shared news from the front. Since the May breakthrough in the Russian lines near Gorlice, Przemyśl and Lemberg had been retaken. Now they expected even Warsaw to fall. Everything was shifting north. They should prepare themselves to move.
For weeks Lucius waited for new orders. They finally came in August, carried by a lone horseman from the north. Germany, fed up with the ineptitude of the Austrian High Command, had taken control of operations on the Eastern Front. The church, farther from the front lines, would be reclassified as a Second-Level Field Hospital, given more doctors, an X-ray machine, a laboratory, more drugs. It was, thought Lucius, what he had imagined when he first enlisted. It likely meant a larger kitchen, books, a regular post, sheets on the officers’ beds.
“This is good, no?” said Margarete.
“Yes… good,” said Lucius. They were sitting in the garden, eating pears, sweeter than any he had tasted in his life. A kitten rubbed itself against his leg. He wondered if at a Second-Level Field Hospital the nurses might be kept apart. But then another month, then two, passed without any news.
In late October, the first snow fell, a light dusting that vanished instantly. Then it was winter again, and Russia invaded Bessarabia and the Bukovina, places which once had been but the mystical words of map edges, now just over the mountains to the east. Once again snow filled the valley, and once again the wounded began to come. It was as if time were repeating itself, he thought, and it might have, had not one February evening a man appeared out of the cold.
7.
It was late afternoon when a whistle at the entrance announced a new patient had arrived.
Lucius found Margarete outside the church, with a peasant draped in a giant sheepskin cloak.
A coating of hoarfrost glistened on the wool like finely shattered glass. Steam rose from a great grey beard, which he had tucked into his collar. Over alclass="underline" a cape, also of sheepskin, and atop this mountain, a black sheepskin hat.
“Look,” said Margarete. The man leaned over and pulled back a blanket covering a wheelbarrow to reveal a body, curled up among a pile of roots. “Alive,” said the man. “From over the valley. But it doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.” His Polish was halting, heavy, thick with Ruthenianisms, all throat and hum.
Snow was falling. They replaced the blanket and led the peasant through the gate and along the beaten path to the quarantine. By then Zmudowski and Nowak had arrived. As the orderlies prepared a fire, the visitor hooked his thumbs inside the hempen belt that bound his cloak. He spoke. It was his wife who found the soldier. They had been up by the pass, searching the woods for brukva—Lucius didn’t know what this was—when they came across a wagon. It must have been abandoned only recently, as it had yet to be stripped for firewood. Intact, too, no sign of shell-strike, just abandoned. A Christian truck, the man said, with a big red cross on its side. Inside were the men. All dead, nine of them, all but this one, buried at the bottom, beneath the other bodies. No life anywhere nearby but this one, and barely life at that. They had brought him here, for reward.
“Did he say anything when you found him?”
“No. No speak. No move. Breathe, just. If no breath, we don’t know it was alive.”
By then the orderlies were ready. Again, Margarete removed the blanket. Before them the soldier in the barrow was completely still, the only movement the flickering deliquescence of the snowflakes dusting his coat. For a terrible moment Lucius thought that between the church and the quarantine house, the man had died.
Then a wisping of a piece of dried grass on his lip betrayed his breath.
Gently, Lucius touched his fingers to the man’s shoulder. “Soldier?”
Instantly, the man recoiled. In truth, he only twitched, but the suddenness of it, and the stillness of the moment that preceded it, made it seem as if a small explosion had just detonated in the barrow. His head turned, his arms drew across his chest. Lucius stepped back. The man’s eyes were wide, whites visible around a pair of dark brown irises. His nose flared as he tried to take in breath. But no words, nothing save the flinch, the stare. Unbidden came the memory of the rabbits pilfered by the hussar on their journey to Lemnowice, ears back, too terrified to move.
“There,” Lucius said. “There, there. You’re safe. You’re in a hospital. You’ll be okay.”
Still the eyes.
“Hospital,” Lucius repeated, in German. Then again in Polish, Hungarian, Czech. He could have gone on. These words now part of him in so many tongues. Doctor, hospital. Quiet. Still.
“We should get him warm and dry,” he said, looking to Margarete.
She knelt then, stroking the soldier’s hair. This time he didn’t draw away. His eyelids were puffy, his cheeks reddened from exposure, the swelling giving them a slight cherubic quality. A fine beard covered his cheeks, and a wing-shaped blur of mud ran down the flank of his nose. Gently, Margarete cleaned pine needles from his eyebrows, his lashes, brushed his forehead clean of dirt. She looked at Lucius to signal that it was okay to touch him. He knelt and showed the man his empty hands before beginning to palpate around his head and neck. He tried to assess his back, but the barrow was too tight.
“Gently now.”
Zmudowski had joined them. Fearing an injury to his spine, they tried to lift him from below, but the barrow’s walls sloped inward, like a coffin’s, and they couldn’t get their hands around him. It didn’t matter. The man’s limbs were clenched so tightly that they could lift him almost by his arms alone.
They set him on the stretcher, where he remained in the same position. “There,” said Margarete at his side. She hushed him, though he wasn’t making any noise. Again she stroked his hair. In a soft voice, in Polish, she said, “You’re cold, your clothes are wet. We will check you for lice, get you new clothing. Nothing bad will happen. Now you’re safe.”
The sound of words seemed to calm him, whether or not he understood.
Again she looked up to signal they should start.
Slowly they began to strip his clothes, first the greatcoat, heavy, stuffed with what seemed to be paper. Then a second, thinner mackintosh, two sweaters, a blanket. Two layers of long underwear. The man inside was moist and pale, like the pulp of a nut. Both hands, pink with chilblains, were swollen up like gloves.
Zmudowski carried off the clothing to be disinfected, as Krajniak approached with the cresol and began to spray. For a moment the man was naked, while Margarete searched his skin for any signs of lice, her fingers swift, making no concessions to modesty. They wiped him down, covered him in a blanket, his body still coiled tight. “Soldier,” she asked, “who are you? What’s your name?”