At last the trail left the river, and they passed again through the deeper woods. Crushed leaves marked the paths where she had traipsed off for mushrooms. He now regretted that he had let the moment in the sun pass in so much silence. Only minutes remained before they reached the road, the possibility of other people. Before he’d lose his chance to speak…
In the operas, the novels, he had always been somewhat amused, incredulous even, by the manner in which seemingly sane men and women put so much weight into the words he wished to utter. Three in German, two in Polish, one in Hungarian (though everything in Hungarian seemed to be one word). It had always seemed a bit excessive, he had thought, a bit maudlin and sentimental, a failure of imagination by the poets to put that same phrase upon the lips of dying knights, returning soldiers, weeping maidens, as if worshippers of a faith with but one prayer…
Except that now he understood. Three words, or two, or one if he was too self-conscious (for at times self-conscious lovers resort to other tongues). A spell. And like a spell, they’d be transformed…
He had wanted to say it the night her fever broke.
And when Horst had come again.
And when he’d watched her care for József Horváth after the Anbinden.
And the afternoon when they had gone up to the ruins of the castle, and he had dared to ask her where she’d go after the war.
They gained the road. The first houses of the village appeared just beyond the trees. Steam rising from the thatched roofs and the dark wood of the church. A clattering of squirrels above them. She, too, seemed to slow.
“Margarete.” I love you. It would be so easy, just like that.
She stopped. She hadn’t even fully turned, when he found himself speaking, so haltingly, so formally, so unsure…
“Margarete… I… I would like to ask you if you would consider marrying me. Not now, of course. Nothing has to change now, I promise. But if you wish, after the war…” He twisted his hands. “Margarete… I… I… you understand that I…”
But there he stopped because he saw that she was crying. Impulsively he touched her cheek, and she took his hand and kissed it, first his fingers, then his palm. “Oh, Lucius,” she said. And then she was running, down the path and around the bend in the road that led to the village and the church.
11.
Returning to the hospital, trousers wet with dew, his cuffs mud-spattered, he went directly to his quarters to change his clothing, holding on to a faint hope that she might be waiting there, that he could see her again before they joined the others. But no, of course she wasn’t waiting. She had mushrooms to deliver, a habit to change. And he knew that with the soldiers in the courtyard, she was unlikely to risk a visit to his room.
Alone, he took a moment to collect his thoughts. He was uncertain about what had just transpired. By the way that she had taken his hand and kissed it and said his name, by her tears, which seemed, at least in that moment, to be tears of joy—he had assumed at first that her answer had been in the affirmative. But no sooner had she turned, than doubts descended. There had been a sadness in her gaze, and of all the ways she might have responded, he could not expect that she, who rushed headlong into everything, would flee. He didn’t know whether it had been a mistake that he hadn’t told her he was in love with her. Whether he had already gone too far or not far enough.
In his room, alone, he touched the bruise on his shoulder, on which he could see the faintest marks of her teeth. Now this, too, seemed ambivalent; there are bites of longing and bites of warning. But he couldn’t doubt the sun-speckled moment when she had clung to him in the water, or the way she’d said his name.
In new clothes, he headed into the courtyard. The men had begun to gather for supper, and from the kitchen, the smell of cooked potatoes met him as he headed toward the church.
Inside he found Zmudowski.
“You’re back.” The orderly was carrying a bundle of linens on his way across the courtyard to the laundry. “We were beginning to get worried.”
“And Margarete?” asked Lucius, as offhandedly as possible.
Zmudowski stroked his beard. “I thought she was with you?”
“Yes.” But there he halted, his stomach tightening. Could something have happened in the short stretch between the forest and the village? It seemed unlikely; for all the dangers of the woods, the road at least was safe. “She was with me. Though she walks so briskly, she reached the village first…”
This seemed to satisfy the orderly. “Well, she’s probably in the sacristy, or bathing. For a moment I was worried she was on her own.”
By evening rounds, though, Margarete still hadn’t appeared. Now Lucius went and knocked on the door of the sacristy, and when there was no answer, let himself inside. She wasn’t there, nor was there any sign she had returned—no sack of food, no habit specked with mud.
Again, he found Zmudowski.
“Still nothing?”
Lucius shook his head. They were standing in the courtyard, the evening sun slanting across the grass. He wished to tell the orderly about what had happened. That perhaps she wished to be alone, to consider his proposal. That perhaps she simply couldn’t face him yet.
“I think that we should try to find her,” Zmudowski said.
Nodding, Lucius let his gaze drift across the hillsides, the high pass, the road that led to the place where he’d last seen her. Then up again, to the hints of trails that led back into the mountains, to other villages, perhaps even to her home. This last thought came suddenly. No, he told himself. She wouldn’t have left. She wouldn’t have done that, not to him, not to her patients. She wouldn’t leave them all alone.
The sun was just beginning to touch the mountains as they set out, the great underbelly of clouds alight in rose and plum. The kind of sky that presaged something, he thought. Calm or storm. Margarete would know; he wished he had paid more attention to such signs.
Above this, in a clear patch of sky, hung Mars. A flock of crows circled, cawing, as if angry at the presence of something he couldn’t see.
There were four of them. Zmudowski would follow the road down the valley to Bystrytsya, while Schwarz, a geologist in home life who’d arrived two months prior with his hip fractured and his pockets full of Mesozoic ammonites, offered to head upriver. Krajniak, leaving that night’s baking to an underling, would search around in the village.
“And Pan Doctor?” asked Zmudowski.
Lucius thought of the ruins up near the watchtower.
Sometimes I used to come here to seek guidance.
“I’ll take the trail to the pass,” he said. “There was a place she liked to go.”
If the others noticed the suggestion of intimacy, they said nothing. They would sound the church bells if she returned, to alert those who were still out looking. In the hospital, Lucius quickly threw together a rucksack, water, bread, a blanket in case she was cold. Papers, as always, in his pockets. A lantern and matches. A pistol from the collection of belongings of the dead.
With Schwarz, he walked in silence to where the valley steepened and forked. There, they parted. But once alone, the road rising, he hesitated. His instinct had been that she had gone to the ruins. Now, with night falling, in the silence and solitude, he began to have his doubts.
Just then, a figure appeared on the road ahead of him. For a moment his pulse quickened in anticipation. But there wasn’t one figure, there were two, and soon he found himself before a pair of village women in cotton kerchiefs, and then, on a long rope, a cow. He stopped them. D… dobruy vechur. Ruthenian, mangled, but it worked: Good evening. Then, in Polish: had they seen a woman on the road, alone?