At five, Margarete found Lucius in his quarters.
She was sorry to wake him so soon, she said, but the soldier had begun again.
The snow swirled about them as they hurried together across the courtyard. Inside the church the man lay on his back, his chin contracted to his chest. He looked like someone who’d been bound there, raising his head to watch his torturers. His body was as rigid as the night before, his breath sharp and sudden, the veins of his neck and face so distended that, despite all medical knowledge to the contrary, Lucius feared that they could burst. A nostril was dark with clotted blood, and a stream of blood and mucus had dried against his cheek. “He was up at four,” said Margarete. “He tore his nasogastric tube out.” She placed her fingers on his wrist. “And his pulse, again…” Still the man stared past them to his devils in the air.
Again, Lucius rummaged through the cabinet. The soldier seemed even worse now, his eyes wilder than earlier that night. Was the morphine making him delirious? But what were they to do? The army manuals recommended tranquilizing anguished soldiers into sleep. More chloral? Bromides? Ether? But this felt like veterinary medicine, and this case was different from the common soldier delirious with pain. But what then? Rub his chest with camphorated oil? Feed him more beef tea? Besides the morphine, the bromides and atropine and chloral, the only drug for nervous agitation was some Veronal they hadn’t used for months. He stopped and looked at the vial; half the pills had crumbled into dust. For seizures, but also a sedative, in fashion in Vienna with his mother’s set, though not—of course—his mother, who seemed spared of any nerves to calm. He hadn’t thought to use it for his soldiers, had no need for it, not with the industrial quantities of bromides provided by the Medical Service. He tapped out a pill, then two, and returned to the soldier’s side.
Unable to open the man’s mouth, he parted his lips and crushed the tablet against his teeth. Fragments dribbled down his chin. Margarete, at his side, wiped them back up with her thumb and pushed them far inside the soldier’s cheek.
The man remained motionless, his face red, his fists clenched so tightly that they would later find his nails had pierced his palms.
From the high windows came a cobalt hint of dawn.
“I think we should make rounds on the other patients, Doctor,” said Margarete. “Before he starts to scream again. If he is not sleeping in an hour, we’ll try something else.”
Their ritual began again in Limbs. They were halfway down the second aisle, when a whistle from the south transept broke across the church.
Hurrying, they found the soldier resting on his side, breathing softly. His eyes closed, but lightly now.
“He spoke,” said Zmudowski.
They crouched at his side. Again it came, a murmur, low and soft.
“I can’t understand,” said Lucius.
“Szomjas vagyok,” said Margarete. “It’s Hungarian: I’m thirsty.”
They brought him a bowl of soup from the kitchen in the transept.
The man let Margarete feed him, opening his mouth to meet each spoonful. He didn’t move his arms. He kept his eyes away from her, and from Lucius and Zmudowski, both crouching behind her, more than a little awestruck, as if a soldier eating soup was one of the most amazing sights that they had ever seen.
The effect lasted until shortly after noon.
Then: staring again, body rigid, save the slight rocking back and forth. The same incantatory hum. From his greatcoat pocket, Lucius took the bottle of Veronal and tapped out two more pills. This time he pushed them far back into the soldier’s cheek.
Again, after an hour, they found him sitting, staring at his fingers in his lap.
“Soldier?” asked Margarete.
She touched his shoulder. He jumped but she didn’t withdraw her hand, and he didn’t move away. In Hungarian she asked a question Lucius couldn’t understand.
His answer was whispered.
She spoke again in halting Hungarian, her eyes darting quickly to Lucius’s, as if unable to contain the miracle of this awakening alone. And again the man answered, his voice slightly louder, occasionally catching on his words.
At last, after what seemed like a very long time, she looked up. “This is Sergeant József Horváth, Doctor. Hungarian, from Budapest, he says. He thinks it is October, that he’s at his garrison in Hungary. That he is just waiting for his mother to come and get him. That’s all I could get. There is a stammer, as I think you can perceive.”
A stammer. Lucius felt the old twist in his tongue, the metal of the apparatus.
He looked back at her. “Did you ask him what happened before he came here?”
Margarete leaned forward again and spoke.
They waited a long time, but this time the soldier just stared past them into space.
They began to schedule the doses twice a day, at the start of morning and evening rounds. They didn’t want to wait for the rocking or the moaning or the tension in his body to return. While once Lucius had worried that the man would die before the evacuation convoys reached them, now he feared the opposite: that they would take him back before he could be cured. Through the winter, to the second-level field hospitals with their prowling conscription officers. Or worse, to Vienna, to Budapest. To the specialists, with their electricity and Muck balls.
This weeping, stuttering man, an orb of steel pushed down his throat.
Outside the snow kept falling. The snow: soldier’s curse and soldier’s friend. Now, it only was the snow that gave them time.
What is happening seems nothing less than a resurrection, he wrote that first night to Feuermann, rhetoric soaring once again, but needing to share his exhilaration. I’ve seen men come out of comas, and others gently thaw to life after being pulled from frozen rivers. But I’ve never seen such a transformation. Someone so unreachable return with just a little pill. Someone in such despair. Woundless, and yet seeming to bear, like some scapegoat, the misery felt by everyone else.
But how? Looking down at his thumb, he could still feel the wet pills crumbling as he pushed them deep into Horváth’s cheek. He had no explanation for the strange magic he had just discovered. But most advances in medicine involved some serendipity. What was important now was that he watched, and studied, carefully, and learned.
Like Lazarus, he wrote to Feuermann, then crossed this out, embarrassed by the grandiosity it implied. If Horváth was Lazarus, then who did that make him?
But now, almost daily, Horváth was changing, awakening, gaining strength.
He began to sit up on his own, to accept the spoons of broth without much prompting, to use the basin for his needs. Soon he was holding his own utensils. He stood. He stood and fell, but then he stood without falling. He took a step. On the first of March, Lucius watched as Margarete walked him, shuffling, up and down the aisle of the church, her arm in his. It’s like we’re going to be married, Margarete joked, and Lucius laughed, though inside he felt a twinge of jealousy, just a little bit. For Horváth, because of the way that Margarete held his arm, but also for Margarete. It was my pills, my Veronal, he wanted to remind her. He felt almost as if there were an unspoken competition for who could be the one to claim this victory. As if they were both falling a little bit in love with their silent visitor or, more, with the cure that they had wrought.
And they weren’t alone. The others, who had once cursed Horváth for his screaming, had repented, and in their repentance, now showered him with hope. They filed past to look at his drawings, set him closest to the fire when the men played music, and held out their cigarettes so he could take a puff. When the sun made a miraculous appearance on the fourth, and some of the braver souls took off their shirts to take in the fleeting rays, and others, armless, heads in bandages, played soccer with a bundle of rags, they brought him out with them to serve as a goalpost. He said nothing, only stared up at the great beech tree or watched the playing men. But peaceful now, almost angelic, breath steaming from his chapped, pink lips.