“Doctor?”
He looked up. Zmudowski speaking. “Your patient has been etherized. Do you want to start?”
Lucius looked to Margarete, who handed him the scalpel. Now, briefly, he thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes. Something insouciant, an awareness of the secret shared. In reflex, face behind his mask, he touched his tongue to the place on his lip where she had lightly bitten him. Then he took a deep breath and turned his gaze down to the work.
But oh, how hard it was to concentrate! By then he’d carried out nearly a hundred amputations, and yet he felt as if he were starting everything anew. Even when he forced himself to keep his eyes from Margarete, he found himself acutely aware of each of her movements, how close her hands came, how long she let them touch.
By late morning, the operation completed, rounds over, he could think of little else.
When the men gathered for their midday meal, he said that he had to complete some old reports, and left for his quarters before they served him food.
Inside, he paced. He was shaken by how easily he’d been unmoored, how his heart had started racing simply when she gazed at him or when her shoulder brushed his arm, how pathetically he had watched her cross the church. He felt like some stupid animal awaiting even the faintest acknowledgment of its master, all while she had seemed so utterly unfazed. Was she trying to tell him something? That what had happened was an error? That the consequences of her breaking her vows were great, too great, and couldn’t happen again?
A knock. Before he could reach the door, she’d stepped inside, closing it behind her.
She pressed her mouth to his.
They stayed like that without moving. He was almost too surprised to hold her. Outside, from the courtyard, he could hear the voices of the men laughing as they ate, the tintinnabulation of their spoons.
She broke away. “They’ll suspect something.” She looked up at him. “My lips, they do not look as if I have been kissing?”
Her skin was flushed.
“A little. Yes.”
Her eyes flashed. She had been there less than a minute. She bowed a little, as she often did when taking leave, and left.
For the next week, they found each other in moments stolen from the day’s responsibilities. In the darkness of the narthex, the shadows behind the church, the edge of the garden, amid the jubilating crickets in the arbor of the pears. Never long: a kiss, a brief caress. And then her whisper, Enough now, Lucius, Let me go, They’ll find us. Lucius, I must…
Let them find us! he wanted to say to her, but he had begun to live for those brief moments, and feared she might deny him even them. The first night apart, he had waited in his room, trying to discern the sound of footsteps in the whispering of the wind. She didn’t come, and he had gone out into the summer night to watch the sacristy window for any sign that she was sleepless, waiting, like him. Staring at her door, he willed it to open; it would be so easy to cross the courtyard and knock! But he knew already she had decided on their terms.
And so it was she who always came to him, and she who always pulled away. There was no discussion of what was happening. No recognition of the vows she’d broken, of what had changed, and how, and where all of this could lead. Her hours alone, once a matter of curiosity for him, now took on the agonizing quality of a mystery from which he’d been excluded. But he didn’t ask. He was terrified of saying something wrong, and that she wouldn’t come again.
In the middle of the week, a trio of new patients arrived after a lorry had turned over in a landslide near the pass, and on the second day of their arrival, one of them had begun to seize. For a moment, the flurry of activity broke his spell. To his horror, he discovered a thin fracture in the man’s skull that he had missed on his initial assessment. They had to drill the bone, evacuate the blood, and wait and watch until two mornings later, when the man awoke and asked for food.
He cursed himself. The truth was that he probably wouldn’t have done anything different had he found the fracture earlier. But what mattered was that he’d missed it. He was letting his own interests, his own affections, go before those of his patients. It was a warning, he thought. What happened once could not again.
But this was easier said than done. The truth was that, if Margarete was late in visiting, he found himself in a state quite close to frenzy. If only he had a companion to confide in! he thought. But whom? Zmudowski? Feuermann? His father? But he could never betray Margarete to Zmudowski. And Feuermann, now days away, would have congratulated him and laughed it all off so lightly, while his father’s chivalry seemed of another age.
Then, just when he doubted he could bear this purgatory any longer, it rained. With the mud, there was a lull in arrivals. When the sun returned two days later, and the wind from the forest brought forth the smell of moss and rotting wood, Margarete, after rounds, said offhandedly to Zmudowski that she would like to go mushrooming, and as always, the doctor would come along.
And so, once again they set out into the woods, as they had done the year before. The rain had softened the earth and swollen the streams that fanned across their trail. In the bright light and the glittering refraction of the dewdrops, the mats of moss seemed almost phosphorescent. Wood wrens dashed between the tree trunks. The crinkling sound of falling water filled the air.
Again, she led, again she brought a rifle, again her pace was swift. He found himself a little disappointed to see that indeed she wished to gather mushrooms, snapping fresh sulphur shelves from the oak trunks or barreling off the path to uncover fairy rings of dew-soaked chanterelles. Stopping her on the trail at times, he kissed her, bolder now, and she let him pull her closer, let his hands seek out her form beneath the habit, before pushing him away. Patience, she told him, now having fun with it. We can’t come back empty-handed. What would the others think?
From the church, she followed a path up the valley, breaking off toward the river when the trail turned toward the pass. The harvest was bountiful, and to the mushrooms they added clutches of sorrel and sprays of currants and early barberries. She led, keeping them close to the rustling of the water, at times pushing through the high grass when there was no trail. He had never been to this part of the river, and unlike the forest, where decades-old paths had been worn through the banks of moss, the route seemed untraveled. Now, alone with her, he felt embarrassed for the fretting he had endured all week, the constant doubts, the fears that she would call off the affair. That evening, they would have to return to their ritual of deception, but now, alone with her at last, it felt like something he could endure.
They had walked for close to an hour, the bags full, their clothes damp and speckled with grass and yellow mustard petals, when at last they passed beneath a willow and she stopped. Outside the shadows of its branches, a bright light swept across a bank of high green grass. Beyond a pair of high boulders, he could hear the babble of the river. He realized that she must have known this spot, known that they could go there undiscovered, and as she set down her gun and bag, and brought out a pair of army blankets, he felt a thrill to think that she had planned it. He hoped then that she would kiss him, but instead she sat on the blanket and began to untie her boots. She said nothing at first, and he watched dumbly as she undid the laces of first one boot and then the other, and then began to roll her stockings down. It had been so dark in her quarters when they’d made love, that the only time he’d seen her skin was during her fits of fever. She had her second stocking halfway down her calf when she stopped.