But he heard no blame, only compassion.
He wrung his hands, began again. “Please,” he said. “Please, let me see him. I will do anything to…”
Again he stopped. To what? Atone? He knew, and Margarete knew, and Horváth, or what remained of Horváth, knew. Barring a miracle, another miracle, it was too late.
Alone, Margarete amputated both of Horváth’s feet because of frostbite, and then his left leg when a wound infection spread above his knee. As for his mind, after a day Horváth was back to where he’d been before he arrived in the wheelbarrow. He didn’t eat. Margarete had to catheterize his bladder, perform enemas when he retained his stool. Behind the curtain, she spent hours with him, murmuring her soft incantations as she’d done before. Indeed, it seemed as if she rarely left him. One night, sick with remorse, Lucius had returned to the church to find that in exhaustion she had fallen asleep by Horváth’s pallet. Watching her—sitting on the floor, knees to one side, habit pooling, shoulders slumped, her head resting in her hand—he had wished that he could take her place. It wasn’t only his desire for repentance, he realized. He felt as if he were an intruder on a secret, a rite he didn’t understand. He wanted to share what she shared, not only with Horváth, but—and this appeared to him now with such clarity—all their patients. Something that he, with his distance, his learning, his diagnoses and orders, could never know. He had not forgotten that in Horváth’s drawings, somewhere, were the portraits of Margarete, while the sketch of the doctor was a looming, shadowed figure. As if Horváth had already known.
Alone, outside, at dawn, Lucius dug up the snow around the tree. But no matter how deep he dug, he saw the stain, pink and glistening, like the ice of a fishmonger’s stall.
When the next ambulance detail came to Lemnowice, they wrapped Horváth in blankets and carried him out of the church on a stretcher. The detail was heading north, away from Horváth’s home in Hungary, but they couldn’t wait much longer. His pulse had become irregular; they worried that another infection secondary to his wound had spread. Perhaps, at a larger hospital, they could help him, Margarete said, and Lucius nodded. Now, he had little hope that Horváth would survive the journey through the snow, but he would not disagree with her again.
Indifferent to all this came April.
Beams of light burst across the nave as one snowdrift after another slid from the roof. The light, the smell, the melting hills brought back his memories of the Scarcity, the foraging for potherbs in the hills. But by virtue of a supply oversight no one was eager to correct, they found themselves well-stocked with food.
Still, he waited, hopeful that he might resume his excursions with Margarete. If only he could walk with her again, return to the ruins of the watchtower, or sit in the forest’s slanting light and hear her songs. Perhaps then, and there, they could begin to rebuild what he’d destroyed.
But the new soldiers had begun to come.
Like the songbirds, like the snowmelt, like the march of wildflowers, they seemed to follow spring.
The first came in the middle of the month, following a brief skirmish in the valley of the Pruth. A nameless, rail-thin, red-haired man found wandering in a tunic but no trousers, eyes empty, grinding his teeth.
From Uzhok Pass: a cook who left his tent at night to urinate and collided with the bayoneted belly of a village girl hanged for alleged spying. Pásztor was his name: Hungarian, a once-dapper moustache now disappearing beneath an unshaven beard. Incontinent of bowel and bladder, fingers constantly fretting his forehead as if there were still something sticking to his brow.
From Stanislau: an infantryman named Korsak, spine arched, pigeon-toed since being thrown by a land mine, neck twisted despite all efforts to keep it straight.
And on. Ungvár: right leg severed by a derailed train car, now unable to move his left. Gesher, from Turka, who had discovered a group of rotting bodies in a granary, tasting flesh each time he ate. Wechsler, Kolmar, blind and deaf, but not.
He thought of what Berman and Brosz had told him about the Western Front. An epidemic, something driven up from Flemish soil, now come east.
Just weeks before, he thought, and they would have fascinated him, these mysteries. But the specter of Horváth hung over everything. Now he could only think of what Horst would do if he found more of these soldiers without wounds.
He tried Veronal.
He tried Veronal, chloral hydrate, morphine. He tried potassium bromide to calm them and oral cocaine hydrochloride to wake them up. He tried atropine until they were delirious, adrenalin chloride when they were slow. He massaged twisted arms with whale oil, only to watch the loosened muscles seize back up. He tried pleading, tried walking them, moving the jaws of those who didn’t eat. He read to them, whispered, sang. Tried sunshine and cold. Gave them double rations, threatened to withhold their food. Urged them to remember wives and children, sweethearts, parents. Warned them of what would happen if the recruiters came.
But nothing worked. There was no sense to the disease, he thought, no pattern in the damage to their nerves. Now he began to doubt everything. Had he even helped Horváth at all? Had the man’s recovery all been Margarete’s doing? Or did most wounds, whether of the mind or body, just heal up on their own?
Margarete, too, had changed. She moved slowly now, always watching the door. At mealtimes, they tried in starts to speak, but she broke off with the slightest sound. Twice, falsely alerted, they hurried to the door, certain that Horst had returned. But each time, as they peered out through the arrow slit, there was nothing but the empty street.
And then there were others, soldiers who could have fought again but now refused.
Their war was over, they told him with finality. They had once been patriots, but all reasons for their patriotism had long been lost.
Why should I shed blood for Austria? the Czech and Polish and Hungarian and Romanian and Ruthenian soldiers asked him. When Austria sends us into battle in front of her own?
With shoes made of cardboard!
And two men for every gun!
“They will hang you for desertion,” Lucius told them.
Ha! Then let them come!
He stood with Margarete outside the sacristy. Late April. The days now warm.
She had brought him there so that they could be alone. “Zeller, the new boy from the dragoons, said that conscription details have been canvassing the hospitals up and down the line,” she said. “He was in Delatyn, saw them hanging men for desertion. I think it will only be a matter of time.”
She paused. “Have you thought of what you’ll do when they return?”
For the past month, Lucius had thought of nothing else. Now slowly he spoke the words for the first time. “With the nervous cases? I don’t think I have a choice. It’s too warm for Anbinden, but not for hanging. At least with redeployment the soldiers will stand a chance.”
Nearby, a knot of sparrows was bickering over seeds liberated from the spring melt. She watched them, eyes drifting to a shivering of something passing in the grass. “Yes,” she said, at last. “Yes, I understand.”
He searched her face. “You don’t seem convinced.”
She now spoke slowly. “I think that this time you’ve done everything you can, to get them well, or home.” Then she paused. Her eyes were dark with sleeplessness, the slight plumpness of her face now gone. The wimple, which she had always worn so crisply pressed, was rumpled and uneven. Yet all about them, in the courtyard, were birds and bright green leaves and flowers, so much life.