“Can you see?” he asked.
She could.
He irrigated her eye again, applied drops of atropine to prevent adhesion of the iris, and let it close. Again, the wound was bleeding, but more slowly now. He placed another dressing and pressed it gently, then held it there. For the first time since the whistle had risen across the nave, he allowed himself a deep, slow breath. Her good eye followed him. He looked again at Horváth’s drawing. Then back at Margarete. She looked so much smaller now that she wasn’t storming across the ward. Above, in the close crop of auburn, he could see the paleness of her scalp. “You planned this,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your hair. Shorn.” He felt self-conscious even noticing.
She smiled a little and then winced.
“May he feel Her crawling in his stockings back to Stanislau,” she said.
“Amen,” Zmudowski said.
Lucius removed the dressing to check the bleed. It had stopped.
“Hypertonic dressing,” he said to Zmudowski.
“No,” said Margarete. “Close the wound.”
He turned back to her, a dripping square of cotton in his hand. “The wound is dirty. You know procedure. You rest and let the wound close itself. Unless you have invented a way of curing an infection. We can attempt secondary closure once the granulation tissue forms.”
“With respect, Doctor Lieutenant. I’ll be bed-bound for days.”
“And if you’re walking about, the wound won’t heal. We’ll manage. It will be good for you to rest.”
“But I don’t want to rest. I want you to stitch it up. It won’t get infected. I promise.”
“You promise!”
“Then I can do it in a mirror if you’d like.”
Lucius looked off, clenching his jaw as if to let her know his disapproval, then turned back and touched the wound again. He considered it… Already it looked pinker, cleaner, now that it was clear of all the dirt and blood. He lifted his hands up in surrender. Okay: you win.
He turned to Zmudowski. “Silkworm.”
Margarete slapped the bed. “Silkworm! God in heaven, Doctor! Can’t you spare something a little finer? This is my face. I am not going to need to march on it.”
Lucius pinched his lips to hide a smile. “Okay. Zmudowski: horsehair suture. Please.” He looked at Margarete again, trying to capture some of her levity. “Horsehair. From a Lipizzaner stallion in the service of His Royal Highness. Only the best.”
Zmudowski handed over the thread. “How about this one, Doctor Lieutenant? From the backside of His Majesty himself.”
Lucius laughed, thrilled at the irreverence, grateful, so grateful now. Margarete glowered. “I will remind Sergeant Zmudowski that bad jokes are a privilege of rank. If the doctor wishes to try to be funny, we must endure it. We need not join in.”
“Of course not, Dear Sister,” said Zmudowski. He looked to Lucius and, smiling, touched his temple. Still crazy, if just a little bit.
Lucius leaned closer. There were three main lacerations, one coursing through her eyebrow, and a longer, deeper cut from the bridge of her nose to the crest of her cheek. As he placed his first stitch, the flesh tented a little, then the needle appeared beyond. He pulled through, and tied and held as Zmudowski cut. Another and then a third. She was very still now, and he realized how close their faces were. He touched her chin to turn her gently, so as to check the symmetry of his work. He placed a fourth.
This time she grimaced.
“Cocaine,” said Lucius.
“No.” She lifted her hand to stop him. “You just went a little deep.” She paused, then smiled with the good half of her face. “Someone should talk to you someday about your technique.”
The fever began sometime in the early-morning hours.
He found her in the sacristy, coherent just enough to tell him what had happened. She had awakened sweating, shortly before dawn, wandered into the church and found a thermometer herself. She hadn’t told anyone, didn’t want to scare them. But back in her room, she’d fallen when she tried to stand.
She wore soldiers’ pajamas, damp with sweat. Her skin glazed, her forehead hot.
He cursed himself for listening to her when she’d asked him to close the wound. A fever could mean that an infection was spreading through the fascia, or worse, was already in the blood. If so, he would be powerless to stop it. Now he worried about more than just her eye.
“I should take the sutures out,” he said.
But she only grimaced and asked him for another blanket, for she had soaked through hers.
For the next week, he scarcely left her side.
He cut the sutures, saw the wound now weeping pus. Her fever rose, then fell, then rose again. She shook, cried out. Her head lolled; they had to take away her pillow, tie her arms, to keep her from rubbing her face against the bed. She rambled, calling out to soldiers long lost to them—Horváth, Rzedzian. Let me go! she told him. She had to care for them. They were so sick!
“Doctor!” she cried, when he was next to her. “Water! Water!” Then she spat it out. It was so hot there! She’d seen the child. Hurry, it would drown! So hot! So hot!
He sat and touched her hand, her forehead, praying for the fever to relent. Where did it come from, this fire? He’d cared for hundreds of febrile soldiers, but they had seemed so quiet; never had he known that it could be such misery as this. Indeed, disease itself now appeared to him as something different, unrelenting, deliberately cruel. Was this what they all went through? he wondered. All of my patients? But what a question! It felt like the petulant protest of a child, not someone who’d seen so much death. How could he have such a poor understanding of illness? But for all his time in medicine, he realized, suddenly, he had worked, somehow, impossibly, under the magical assumption that when he stepped away, the misery abated. When the patient was led out of the amphitheater, or the crowd of students moved along, or the soldiers were carried off into the darkness of their corner of the church, the misery abated. It must abate. The world couldn’t bear it. There must be some relief.
She shook. Cracks opened on her lips; for a reason unclear to him, she began to scratch herself with such intensity that it seemed as if the itching were a torment greater than the thickly weeping wound. Her breath grew short. When he couldn’t bear to watch her but couldn’t leave her either, he let his gaze shift from her body to her convulsing shadow on the wall. But there his gaze would settle on the little sketch by Horváth, the idyll now so horrible in the way it conjured up the soldier’s memory. For it was not too hard to see that Margarete’s illness was also of Lucius’s doing. If he had allowed Horváth to leave, there would have been no Anbinden, if no Anbinden, then Margarete would not have risked her life to drive off Horst.
He set up a makeshift bed on her floor. He couldn’t sleep. Her breath grew labored; her pulse was almost too swift to follow. Again he checked it against the ticking of his watch, keeping his fingers for a long time on her wrist. Now his mind teemed with possibilities. Could the spots on her mouth be signs of meningitis? Could tetanus explain the spasms? He had given her the serum; had it been spoiled? Gas gangrene of the face was almost unheard-of—and he wouldn’t expect it with such pus… but then again he’d seen a crackling jaw wound invade a soldier’s neck until he choked to death.
He gripped his hair, as if he could extirpate his thoughts. It was a curse to be a doctor, to know anything! In this at least his patients were lucky, oblivious to the horrors that could happen. Now the possibilities seemed endless. He hesitated over her, wanted to touch her swollen face, palpate it to assess how far the infection extended. But the pain this would cause! And what then would he do? A leg, yes. A leg one could amputate. A face… and now he saw the others rise before him, men whose wounds had rotted into their sinuses, their mouths. All dead.