Oh, but she couldn’t die! Not her, not like some common soldier… He stood and paced and ran his fingers through his hair, collided into a chair and sent it tumbling. Shaking, he bent over to pick it up. The thought was blasphemy. But he would sacrifice the ward, every last one of them. Let them all fall dead but leave her, please.
“Doctor.”
It was Zmudowski. Lucius hadn’t heard him enter.
“Of course, it’s time for rounds.”
The orderly looked kindly at him. There was nothing urgent, he told him. Two new patients had arrived, but they were stable; for now, the others could manage things alone. “Pan Doctor has been up all night. You need to rest.”
He couldn’t rest. He paced the church, then went outside. But now, he moved as if through poison. The air was rank and brown, everything he saw seemed cursed. He wanted to go into the little huts and ask the villagers for their icons, beg them to sit vigil with him. In the road, an old woman passed; surely she had watched disease take someone she loved? He wanted to ask her how she had done it, if she had blamed herself.
She pulled a horse cart through the mud. He let her pass, huge clods rising on the wheel, then dropping to the earth. The mud… His sole mercy was the mud, the mire in the passes. That there weren’t others to keep him from Margarete. He hurried back.
It was only when it came time for bathing that he left again. He could touch her forehead, auscultate her lungs, he could bear the weight of her breast against his hand as he listened to her heart. But bathe her as she had bathed the soldiers? When he had once touched the rim of his canteen just to feel where she had pressed her lips? No: once in her ravings, her shirt had lifted to reveal her navel, her iliac crest, a little curl of hair above the symphysis, and Lucius had frozen, unable to look away. No, the thoughts of undressing her, the complex mix of fear and yearning, were too much for him to bear.
But she was burning up. Better Zmudowski, uxorious philatelist, responsible paterfamilias. Lucius stood outside the door and watched the sparrows, listening to the slosh of water, the squish of sponge.
Day three: the fever broke. The wound looked better, less purulent, its color less exuberant. He felt himself buoyed, only to touch her head two hours later and sink. The mercury reached the highest notches on the glass. This was worse, he thought—it meant the infection was within, unseen, a witch’s hex.
At night, he dreamed of elixirs, of magical and blessed pills, which when swallowed might clear the bacillus from her blood. She groaned and woke him. She was so hot! He stripped her bed. She was so cold! She shook.
And if she died? he wondered, her body giving up its heat at last? Imagining himself rising, the world now ruined, the spheres shattering as they strayed off course. He now understood why one might die for someone else. It wasn’t mercy; it was torture to remain.
But then she didn’t die. On the morning of the seventh day, the fever broke again. She lay with one eye sparkling, like someone tumbled by a wave. Scalp wet, cheeks red, goose pimples on her skin.
“What day is it?”
The truth was, he didn’t know.
By evening, she was laughing, hungry, eager to get up. Look, the swelling had gone down, her eye was open, just a little. She could see!
Still he didn’t leave her. He owed her this vigilance. But something was different. Something vital had returned.
Before bed, she ate and drank and bathed herself. Then sure enough, that night, he heard her stirring once again. The room was dark, the night moonless. From his bed on the floor, he called her name. She didn’t answer. He waited, then rose. Looking down at her, he hesitated, not wishing to wake her, but terrified her fever had returned. At last, he gently touched his fingers to her forehead, but it was cool. For a moment he stood and let himself look down at the shadow of her sleeping form. He climbed back into bed.
Later, the sound of movement woke him again. Margarete? He sat up on his pallet. More rustling came from the bed, and then her silhouette appeared above him, and before he knew it she had descended to his side. He hesitated; he didn’t understand. Now in the darkness, more rustling. Her hand, his hair, his neck, his face, his mouth, then hers.
“Margarete.”
“Lucius.” Not Pan Doctor. Lucius. Her breath hot against his lips.
She pressed her mouth again to his. Her cheek smelled sharply, wonderfully, of carbolic.
For a moment, they stayed like that. Outside, he could hear the trill of crickets. Then she pressed herself to him more urgently. At first, he found himself resisting, thinking of her vows, afraid that by acquiescing, he would draw her into something she’d regret. But she seemed a different person altogether now.
She must have sensed his pause. “I know what I am doing,” she said. She sat up. Her hand was resting on his chest, as if to keep him from fleeing. Then, quietly, she undid the buttons on her pajamas and let them drop. The blanket was lifted. He felt her shoulders, cool and smooth, her back, her waist. Again, he said her name. She answered. Lucius, hush.
10.
It was late the following morning when he awoke to find her gone.
Without thinking, he reached out to touch the place beside him where she had fallen asleep. Empty, and nothing but the tousled blanket to suggest that anything had happened. Above him, her pajamas were folded neatly by her pillow, her bed shipshape.
A square of light fell on the far wall, the room was already warm. He looked at his watch: nearly ten. He rubbed his face. It had been his first real sleep since she’d been ill.
Missing her already, he found her in the nave, with Zmudowski. By then she had already learned the stories of the handful of patients who’d arrived during her illness, repacked a pair of wounds, and begun to organize the surgery for the amputation of an arm that had grown gangrenous overnight. She was dressed neatly in her habit, indistinguishable from the nurse he’d known, were it not for a slight new gauntness, the scar healing on her cheek.
He had approached them slowly, uncertain how to address her, what to say. She led, of course; he should have known. The doctor had slept well? she hoped. She hadn’t wished to wake him. Was he ready to get started? With due respect, she was a bit surprised by how they’d grown lazy in her absence. So many untucked corners. And Sergeant Lukács had stopped doing his exercises? And why wasn’t Roth’s leg in traction anymore? She’d found a chocolate wrapper mixed in among the dirty laundry. It was beginning to look like a boardinghouse, Pan Doctor, with due respect.
“Of course, Dear Sister.” He watched her with some astonishment, feeling a little thrill at the playacting. “I will remind you I was attending to another patient.”
In her eyes, he sought some flash of acknowledgment. But by then she’d turned.
They began with the amputation. A Hungarian from Munkács, eighteen by his papers, but Lucius suspected this had been an exaggeration so that he could serve. They had removed his hand shortly before Horst’s return. The kid had borne it admirably; only this morning it had begun to turn a dusky green. At the operating table, waiting for Zmudowski to apply the ether, he watched Margarete out of the corner of his eye. Still she revealed nothing, and for a moment he found himself considering, briefly, if the night before had been a trick of his imagination. Or if she had come to him still slightly delirious and now couldn’t recall…