In the distance, artillery crackled.
“Thank you, Corporal,” he said, but already the man’s attention had shifted back to the distant battlefields, the pulsing mortars and the rising plumes of smoke.
He found the train depot in chaos. Everywhere, people were running. Soldiers unloaded boxes of shells from the trains and onto motorcars and horse carts. The platform was piled high with bags of foodstuffs, boxes of ammunition, barrels of gunpowder left perilously near the track. Soldiers streamed off a train. There were flies everywhere, circling the food, the piles of horse dung. He pushed his way to the stationmaster, presenting himself as formally as he could. He saw the man take in his bloodied face and sleeve. “It’s not my blood,” said Lucius, as if this somehow made things clearer. Then he rushed through his story, how he needed to return to Kolomea, now.
The man, swatting at the flies, accidentally caught one. Surprised, he looked about for somewhere to wipe the blue smear on his palm. At last he settled on his boot. He looked up.
“You were saying?”
Lucius again repeated his story. His post, his hospital. Kolomea. The next train.
The man nodded toward an engine idling in the station. “That’s it.”
“Where can I get a ticket?”
“A ticket? Are you kidding?” He jabbed his elbow at the air. “Like this.” He laughed. “First class.”
Crowds of evacuees, mostly peasants, were already jostling to get on board. Lucius grabbed the edge of the doorway, then a ladder, climbing onto the roof as the train began to move. There were people covering every inch of the carriages. The train groaned under the weight, and for a moment, with bodies everywhere, it seemed ready to topple. But then they were moving, slowly, out of the depot and through the little town. On the roof beside him, the refugees clung to one another to keep from falling off. A pair of little boys gazed wide-eyed at his bloody face. He had a sense that this moment was being registered, that in their memories of the war, this vision would stand out.
They clutched their bags protectively. He realized he must have lost his rucksack somewhere, though he couldn’t remember if he had set it down or if it had been blown off his shoulder by the shell-strike. In a panic, he patted down his pockets, relieved to find his billfold and his identification papers. An old warning from Margarete now stirred up in his mind: And keep your papers on you—the Austrians have a bad habit of thinking everyone without them is a spy.
They passed more farms, more open country. The sun was hot; around him people took shelter beneath articles of clothing. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. From his position, he could see far across the plain, to a broad river, beyond which the Russian armies marched. If he stared hard enough, he could even see specks of horsemen galloping across the plain. There were enough infantrymen alone to fill at least three or four divisions. And yet so distant, he could fit them in his palm.
He looked back to see the mountains, now retreating behind the rising smoke. It was almost impossible to believe that at the same time yesterday morning, he had just set out with Margarete on their walk to the river. And now? When would she learn of what had happened? News was slow to make it up the valley, but if the winds were right, they might have heard the shelling… How he wished he had a way to let her know he was alive, returning! Again, in his mind, he conjured up the map. If he was lucky, if the trains were running out of Kolomea, perhaps he could get to Nadworna by that evening; from there it was thirty kilometers up the valley. And with the troop movement, perhaps he could hitch a ride. But he would walk if needed, even through the night.
They reached Kolomea shortly after noon. By then his face was burnt, his legs asleep.
There in the station, he asked for the next train to Nadworna.
The agent was a perspiring little man with a flat, broken nose and two missing bottom teeth. There were no trains to Nadworna, he said. All rolling stock had been diverted to supply the army at Sloboda Rungurska. If he needed to get to Nadworna, he would have to first go up to Stanislau, then take a second train south.
“Stanislau?” Lucius felt his heart sink. Stanislau was another seventy kilometers to the north. He felt like someone fighting a retreating tide, carried farther and farther away each time he tried to take a step. “There is nothing direct?” he said. “I’m a doctor, my hospital is there.”
“You could be the Kaiser,” said the man, “and I still couldn’t get you a train.”
He billeted in a flea-infested boardinghouse next to the station, its stairways bustling with arrivals and departures. Alone in his room, he stood before a cracked and darkened mirror that overhung the washbasin. At first, he almost didn’t recognize himself; his face was bruised and dirty, and flecks of dried blood crusted his ear and hair. There was a hole in the shoulder of his shirt where the bullet grazed him. Yes, shot by Cossacks, Father, he thought, mustering whatever humor he could manage. Just above it, he could see the mark of Margarete’s teeth where she had bitten him. He touched it. My two scars, he thought.
He closed his eyes. Even his skin contained the memory of her. He could imagine her touch as she listened to his story. Shot by Cossacks. She, like his father, would be proud.
A fissured bar of soap sat on the wash table, and he washed his face and hair and scrubbed the shirt until the blood had faded to something vague and nondescript.
The next day’s train to Stanislau was in the afternoon, but it was canceled so they could move more soldiers south. He was told to return the following day. Again, he spent the night in the boardinghouse, sleepless now, consumed by worries. When he arrived at the station a second time, he was so desperate that he had decided that he would walk straight to Nadworna along the railroad, and from there to Lemnowice. He could just follow the rails, he told himself; Austria would do anything to keep the rails, though by that same token, the Russians would do anything to take them. But he couldn’t wait any longer. In a dry goods shop he purchased another rucksack, and from a nearly empty bakery, the last pair of crumbling biscuits, at an exorbitant price.
To his surprise, however, the next day at the station, the train to Stanislau was scheduled to depart as planned.
He made the trip standing in a car that had been stripped of all its seats. And in Stanislau, he learned the line south to Nadworna was still open, the next train scheduled to depart the following morning. Now he began to grow hopeful again. In a day, he told himself, he would be with Margarete—a day was all he had to wait. He stayed that night in another boardinghouse near the train station, sleepless, thoughts of her coalescing into a physical longing so acute that he at last abandoned himself to it, closing his eyes and letting the memory of the morning wash over him, her goose-bumped skin, the coolness of her wet breasts against his chest. In the early hours, his room too small for his pacing, he rose early and walked back and forth across the station until the stationmaster arrived. But he wasn’t the only one waiting, and when at last he’d managed to push his way to the front of the crowd, the man asked to see his orders, of which nothing had been said the day before.
Lucius told him this.
“If you don’t have orders, I can’t let you on.” The man picked his nose with a greasy finger. “Space is reserved for deploying soldiers.”