But no one moved.
“Close the door,” he told Margarete in Polish. “They don’t need to see.”
She started across the yard, but Horst motioned for one of the guards to stop her. “Let them watch,” he said. “Let them see what the punishment for desertion is.”
“Close the door, Sister!” Lucius said, his voice beginning to crack.
“If you touch the door, Sister,” said Horst, “I will need to take another soldier, until the lesson’s learned.” She didn’t seem to understand the German, but the guard now stood between her and the door. Lucius turned. Five paces away Horváth was struggling. Deep bruises in the shape of a boot could be seen on his belly, a shoe tread on his neck.
As he struggled against the ropes, violet lines appeared on his shoulders. He began to bleed. The blood turned pink as it froze, but he seemed oblivious of it. “Cold! So cold!” he shouted. He yelled at Lucius now. There was something particularly horrible in how he had chosen German, as if, despite his illness, he was making some final attempt to be understood. “Kalt! Kalt! Oh! Oh, oh! My feet!”
“He doesn’t sound so crazy now,” said Horst, and one of his guards laughed.
Lucius looked wildly between Horváth and his patients in the doorway. He knew what they were thinking. You chose to keep him here. This is your fault, your arrogance, your greed… He lunged forward. The guards restrained him. Again he tried to break loose. He knew they were stronger, but it didn’t matter. He wanted to have Horváth see him struggling, to have all his patients see. To prove to them that he had done what he thought best.
To turn back time.
But as the guards fought Lucius, hooking elbows, dragging him down, Horváth wouldn’t drop his eyes. He tried to speak but now his lips were trembling too violently to form the words. He made a strange twisting motion as if he were attempting to free his feet from where they had frozen to the ground. The skin began to tear, but he didn’t seem to feel it. Spit froze to his lips, his muscles shook, and his penis had shrunken into his pubic hair. His pale skin turned yellow, then blotched with white and pink, and then the pink began to retreat to pallor once again. The entire scene seemed leached of any color, the church walls clad in ice, the courtyard bare, even the tree trunk dusted white with snow, as Horváth vanished into it, leaving only a pale pink froth at his feet.
His voice grew quieter, just a hum. Still, he wouldn’t drop his eyes.
You did this.
The eyes: Lucius had the horrible thought that the eyes would freeze in place. Again, he begged Horst to cut the ropes. He didn’t know how long Horst wished to punish him, but already they were passing the point at which corporal punishment became an execution. A final anesthesia would be setting in. The pain was gone, the damage by now was probably irreversible. The sounds that came from his patient were nothing Lucius had ever heard, thrown up by some monster of physiology, the winter air on vocal cords, a spasm of a palate, he didn’t know.
She told you that I asked to leave.
The gaze. Mama, Haza. Home.
At last Horváth closed his eyes, very slowly, as if even his eyelids had grown stiff. Across his body, his shivering muscles slowed and knotted up. He was still alive—steam lolled from his mouth. But his head hung down, and his skin gave an unearthly alabaster sheen. He looked impossibly peaceful. Horst told his men to untie him. The rope had frozen to his skin, and as they pulled it off, it tore long red strips. Horváth fell, his feet still in place, frozen to the ground. One of the soldiers struggled to detach them, and when he couldn’t, he kicked them free with a sickening crunch.
Horst motioned to Zmudowski that he could bring Horváth inside. To Lucius, loudly, so that all could hear, he said, “Doktor, there are thousands of courageous soldiers risking their lives for you and your family. We will not tolerate our medical staff abetting deserters. The next time we come to the hospital, we will execute all malingerers, all of them. You will be court-martialed and your nurse forever banned.”
Inside, Virág was still waiting silently by the door, blanket draped over his shoulders. Lucius had almost forgotten him. Now, he followed him out to the wagon before the church doors, as if making one final, ineffective attempt to protect this other man. What would they do to him? Lucius wanted to ask, but now he feared that any word he uttered would only worsen Virág’s fate.
The driver removed the heavy blankets and the leather pads used to keep the horses’ eyes from freezing. Then Horst mounted his horse, and the batmen climbed aboard the wagon, and Lucius was left alone.
9.
He remained out in the cold for a very long time.
In the distance, he watched the convoy descend the road, disappearing behind the houses before it reappeared again, a tiny black shape that vanished at last within the drifts.
A southern wind was beginning to stir, whipping the tops of the pine trees. Still he waited. He waited until his hands ached and the tears were frozen in the corners of his eyes, and the burning cold had risen up his feet and into the bones of his legs, and he began to wonder if, by sheer will, he too could wait beneath the beech until it all went numb.
Inside, the warmth of the church drew blood so swiftly to his head that he had to brace himself against the door.
Margarete was crouching by Horváth’s pallet. She must have sensed Lucius approach. She turned.
“I don’t think you should come closer, Doctor,” she said.
He took another step, but she rose to block him, her voice firmer. “Pan Doctor, you should rest. You must protect yourself.”
Then he tried to force past her, but she lifted up her arms to stop him. “Doctor, I don’t think that you should see.”
József Horváth remained in Lemnowice for another week.
Margarete moved him to the chancel and hung a sheet around him. Lucius wanted to go to him, to apologize, to explain that he’d been powerless to stop Horst and his men. But Margarete prevented him. Now she was blunt. It was no longer for Lucius’s sake, she said. Horváth thought Lucius had done this to him. “That you wouldn’t let him leave. That you kept him. That you brought Horst.”
“That I brought Horst?” Lucius protested. But it was the other accusations he couldn’t repeat. That you kept him. That you wouldn’t let him leave. He looked again at her, her face now drawn and tired. But the reasons! he wished to say. The cold evacuation lorry, the Muck balls, the fact that they had come so close to cure. Oh, but who was he arguing with? “I thought…” He tried again. “I didn’t know that this would happen. I thought that it was best…”
“I know, Pan Doctor. I know you thought that it was best.”
He waited, trying to decipher the intent behind her words. He expected that she would remind him of what she had said just days before. You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope. That she would tell him what was now so clear to him, that in his hubris, in some fantasy about shared childhood memories of silly little salamanders, he had committed one of the great sins of medicine, choosing to work a miracle over the mundane duty not to harm.