When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It was softer now, almost as if offering a valediction. “Doctor, you know that your duty is to return men to the front. That is your oath. Patch and send. Know that I understand this.”
He turned to face her. “And what does that mean?”
“Just that. Because I think, for the first time, our oaths are different. That is all.”
May.
Hills redolent of peat and mint and wild anise; the clouds cirrus, mosquitoes swarming around the courtyard doors. A mound of fresh soil behind the church. Were anyone to look, drops of candle wax still lay on the earth; the name in the ledger with the rest.
It was afternoon when the whistle rose above the nave. She: south transept, dirty bandage in her hands. He in the chancel. They both stood. Then the words, Horst. He’s back.
He felt a cold wind, heard a man screaming, saw the eyes.
She ran.
The rest happened so quickly that it was only afterward that Lucius could piece it all together. The rush of her robes as she leapt over the pallets. The soldiers’ turning faces. His own swift steps, his hand on her shoulder, her gaze flashing with warning as she tore herself away. Then out from the narthex, door slamming behind her as she burst into the light, leaving but the narrow arrow slit of day.
The lieutenant was in his saddle, finishing a cigarette, when he heard the wailing, caught the grey flash of her robes. A single batman at his side, also smoking. Wagon farther down the road. She was upon him before he could react. “Save us!” she screamed. She seized his leg, kissed him, his horse. “Save us! Save us! All dead!” In German, her accent slushed and strange.
“What is it?” said Horst. Horse snorting. Two steps, ears erect, flies lifting from its flanks.
But she didn’t answer. She wailed, clung to him, as if trying to pull him from his mount. Head now bare, wimple around her neck, her hair cropped short.
Her hair: even in the terror of the moment, behind the door, watching, Lucius noticed. Her hair, auburn, the whiteness of her neck.
Screaming. “Come, come! The Beast! The Pest! Oh, it has taken them, oh, God, oh, God in heaven, She has taken all.”
By then Horst had begun to look about uneasily. The empty courtyard, the silence, the wailing nurse with her shorn head.
“The Louse! The Louse!”
“Speak sense! I don’t understand.”
“Her! Her!”
“Calm yourself! What do you mean? Typhus?”
An inhuman sound rose from her throat. She clawed her face with fingers muddy from the horse’s flank. Now Horst stared down at her with unadorned revulsion. A flash of recognition, of other abandoned outposts, other maddened survivors of a plague.
She surged, grabbed him by his riding boots, clawed at his leg. Head teeming with lice, waving her robes rank with pestilence. For a moment it seemed as if she would drag him down, but Horst lifted his crop and struck.
Again she was upon him. “Don’t leave! Save us! Please! She’ll kill us all!”
Again the crop. Again she came, now he was ready with his boot. Twice. The crack loud, seeming to echo off the hills.
And that was it. Spray of red, shimmer of horse flank, and he was gone.
She was on her knees when Lucius reached her.
She held her face in both hands, rocked, tried to rise, but fell, then tried again to stand. Blood ran down her hands and into the sleeves of her habit. She didn’t see Lucius coming and fought him off at first.
“Margarete. It’s me.”
“Go, hide!”
For a second, Lucius froze, aware now of his incaution. He turned back. The road was empty. Clothes flapped on a clothesline. A pair of chickens had resumed their survey of the mud.
“He’s gone.” He looked at her. Blood was running freely. He pressed the wimple to the wound. “Inside, quickly. The bleed looks arterial.”
By then Zmudowski had arrived. “My God.”
“Hurry, go and get supplies,” said Lucius.
“Not in the church,” said Margarete. “Take me to the sacristy. I don’t want the pity of the men.”
Zmudowski looked to Lucius.
“Go,” said Lucius, “Hurry. Please.”
He led her, stumbling, through the gate and into the courtyard, and on into her room.
It was his first time inside, and he was struck by a sense of having suddenly entered into a private world, and one quite different from what he had imagined. It seemed almost too empty, too small, too sad even, to think that she passed so many hours there alone. Too human, he thought. As if he had stumbled upon her diary only to discover that she thought the same simple, common thoughts as everybody else. Bunches of dried wildflowers decorated the bare walls, her greatcoat hung from a peg, and a single shelf of rough-hewn pine held a blanket and a pile of folded garments. A stool sat at the priest’s desk, where several medical handbooks had been neatly stacked. Wounds and Dressings. Drill Regulations for Sanitary Officers. Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance. Her bed sat beneath the single window, and a piece of paper had been pinned to the wall under the sill. As he approached he saw it was one of Horváth’s sketches. Movement stopped; the world emptied of air. But it was just a country scene, a little Carpathian village nestled on a mountain slope. Valley of trees and pasture. On a road, a little girl was walking, a bundle of hay upon her back.
If Margarete sensed the tremor that passed through him, she said nothing. By then Zmudowski had arrived, and together they lay her down beneath the window light, placed a towel beneath her head. Lucius leaned over to examine her, slowly peeling off the wimple from where he had pressed it to her face. Slowly, he palpated her head, her neck, then, gently, her face, conscious of the intimacy of it all, how close she was. His first fear, that Horst had fractured her skull, was now replaced by a worry that she’d suffered damage to her eye. In this case, the manuals were firm. A globe which has been damaged should be trimmed off and the orbital vessels ligated. He had done this twice before, could do this, but he didn’t know if he could do it to her.
He looked. Her lids were now swollen shut. Lacerations circumscribed her eye, now black with dirt and blood. “Tetanus antitoxin,” he said to Zmudowski, who already had the needle prepared. Then, “Saline.”
Zmudowski handed him the bottle.
“Dressing.”
He cleaned her gently. Beneath her eye, a small artery was oozing swiftly, blood welling with each pass of the rinse.
“Sutures,” he said. Then to Margarete, “There is a laceration of a branch of the facial artery.” As if she were operating by his side.
“Yes, Doctor. That would explain the quantity of blood.” Her voice calmer than his.
He removed the dressing, placing the little finger of his left hand on the bleeding vessel, while he irrigated the wound again. Then with his right hand, he looped the suture around the vessel and tied it off. Again, he washed the wound. Dirt and dried blood ran over her cheeks and into her ears and hair. Again he irrigated, this time with antiseptic. Gently then, he began to palpate the area for fractures. He saw her wince.
“Cocaine.”
Zmudowski handed him the syringe.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“The bone seems stable, thank God. I am going to check the globe.”
Slowly he parted her lids. He had never seen her eyes so close. A burst vessel on the cornea had flooded the white with a vivid scarlet fan. Against this, the grey iris seemed rimmed in green, gold-flecked. He saw her pupil accommodating to take him in.