The questions yielded nothing. Sometimes the man watched them with his wide eyes, his gaze shifting from one person to another, before settling on something hovering in the air beyond. Other times he squeezed his eyes shut and pursed his lips tight beneath his nose, almost cutting off his breath. He didn’t speak, didn’t rise; he soiled his blankets and his clothes, leaving Zmudowski cursing as he shoveled away the rank, wet straw.
After accepting the broth on the night of his arrival, he began to refuse his meals.
Margarete sat vigil at his side, gently pressing his lips with the edge of the spoon, wiping his chin and neck as the soup dripped down.
“You’re safe here,” she said. “Whatever happened to you in the woods, it’s over now.”
But he never swallowed when she fed him, and the mess of food only attracted the rats, who sniffed about his neck without eliciting a stir. His eyes took on an empty gaze, his eyelids seemed almost translucent, his skin became like crepe paper and tented when Lucius pinched it. His blood pressure began to drop.
Is this what it looks like to die from losing one’s mind? Lucius wondered.
He returned to his books, but he found nothing.
The hospital had a spare nasogastric tube of India rubber, untouched since the last soldier using it had died. They boiled it and slipped it through the new man’s nostril and down his throat. Now three times a day, Second Nowak stood above him, pouring lukewarm broth into a funnel attached to the free end of the hose.
Outside, the storm grew worse.
A north wind, howling out of Russia, colder than any Lucius had known. Huge drifts built up against the north transept, and the walls creaked with their weight. Branches snapped from the beech tree, skittering across the roof.
The transport of the wounded ceased. There were no new cases, no evacuation convoys to take the wounded to the rear. All efforts turned toward warmth. Firewood details put on three layers of greatcoats and forged their way into the cold. Wet logs steamed against the stoves. Ad hoc fireplaces blazed in the corners, yet by morning, the slush in the night pots had frozen solid. The soldiers began to sleep together, three beneath their blankets, the outside men rotating to the middle during the night. At mealtimes, the cooks hurried the food across the courtyard, shattering the ice that formed over the soup pots during the short transit through the cold. Lucius took his notes in pencil, because the ink froze in its well.
They moved the kitchen to the church. The smell of boiled onions filled the air, and the soldiers gathered around the bubbling vats of soup.
At times, patrols emerged out of the snow, just seeking warmth. They came on skis, or hand-built snowshoes, their bodies swaddled in blankets, faces wrapped in scarves, even their eyes covered with thin layers of gauze. They told incomprehensible tales of the winter. Trains buried inside snowdrifts. Crows frozen out of the sky like black scythes of ice. There were no wounded, they said. The cold took anyone who couldn’t move.
Without new patients, Lucius turned to the drawings they found stuffed in the lining of the silent soldier’s coat, hoping they might provide some clue.
Piece by piece, he peeled them apart. There were dozens, their ink faded with the cycles of freeze and thaw, each page bearing ghostly impressions of the next. The man’s skill was formidable; he must have been an artist once. Briefly Lucius wondered if he had been hired to document the war. There were lonely pastures, village scenes, sketches of city streets. Camp life with its kaleidoscope of infantry and cavalry. Lancers with their plumed shakos, and infantry in puttees and spiked pickelhaubes, leather rucksacks on their backs. Priests offering the Eucharist to ranks of genuflected men. There were trains and stations, crowds of cheering families, field kitchens, a lone horseman galloping down the road.
Looking through them, it was possible to build a story of deployment, thought Lucius: from town to city, city to camp, camp to plains and on into the forests, to primeval scenes of fallen logs and bracken and filtered sunlight, wild boar and roe deer, sketches of little songbirds, a hare, a winter fox.
And then among these, he began to turn up others, not so easily explained. Eyes hidden in the bracken and the beech leaves. Skies tiled with airships. A lonely wheel perched high upon a pillar in an empty field.
A crowd of naked children with carnival heads of wolves and boar. Serpentine dragons, curling in the corners of the pages. Faces in the torn anatomy of fallen soldiers, and shadowed creatures lurking in the darkness of a crumpled coat.
Sometimes Margarete joined him.
“Does it tell you anything?” she asked.
He didn’t know. Save that whatever had happened no longer seemed as simple as the effects of a bomb blast. It went deeper, farther back, it seemed.
“Dreams?” she asked, picking up the sketch of a tree, upon which bodies hung like fruit.
A recollection of his journey from Nagybocskó: the open field, the hussar, the carnations blooming from the horses’ heads. And in the darkness of the forest, the frozen, turning body. “Perhaps,” he said.
She set the image down and slowly ran her fingers over the hanging bodies. “Do you think he will get better?”
Again, he didn’t know. If this was madness, he had even less of a chance of curing it. He had been to three lectures on insanity, seen a single patient, a man diagnosed with dementia praecox, who believed himself controlled by electric wires emanating from the Emperor. But how were such men treated? Bromides, morphine, cold baths, gardening… and did any of this even work? Then he thought of other madnesses, of the myths he’d pored over as a child, the sudden assaults of screaming Furies, their victims scuttling back in horror from the beating of their tormentors’ wings.
They both looked down again at the page, to where a line of little dragons curled through a group of portrait sketches, eyeless, with waving manes and cryptic markings on their bellies. The creatures now were strangely familiar, as if Lucius had seen them once before. In some tale of knights and monsters, though he couldn’t remember where.
After a week, the soldier began to moan.
It started at night. Eyes wide, back and forth he shook, the nasogastric tube dragging across the blankets rank with piss and broth. The sound was low, less a scream of pain and more a frantic prayer. It rose and fell, a wind of his very own.
Across the church, the other men began to protest. Quiet! Stop crying, or I’ll come and make you stop. Even the disoriented soldiers in Heads grew agitated, cursing him with stuttering lisps.
“Shhhh,” said Margarete, crouching by the soldier once again, caressing his hair, hushing him until he calmed.
They left. An hour later he began again.
This time they found him sitting up, his hands clenched in his hair. Spittle formed around his mouth; his limbs were tense as pipes. On his wrist, his pulse raced, faster than Lucius could count. Eyes pinched, lids white. The hum horrid, from somewhere deep within his throat.
Zmudowski looked out over the ward. “You have to give him something, or another patient will kill him before the night is done.”
Lucius rummaged through the medicine chest, found some hypodermic tablets of morphine sulfate, dissolved one, and drew it into a syringe. He approached, thumb in the plunger ring, ready to inject.
The humming was constant, louder now. Lucius looked to Margarete, and she turned to the orderlies. “Hold him, tight,” she said.
But the soldier didn’t even seem to register the needle. Half an hour later, they tried another dose of morphine. Then potassium bromide. Atropine. Chloral hydrate. Morphine again.
Finally, after an hour, he began at last to nod off. It was close to two.