Like me, once, he thought, and were he not so terrified of what the young man would do, he might have stopped to marvel at how far he himself had come.
At times, hurrying through the swaying wagons, Lucius caught a glimpse of the mountains to the south. But while moving, there was gratefully little time to lose himself to memories. There was no order; he attended to whoever screamed the loudest or grabbed him as he passed. Many patients had been only minimally stabilized in the field. Bones had not been set, tourniquets left on for days. Back at Lemnowice, Margarete had taught him to be conservative with his amputations—now he removed many fractured joints just to spare the soldiers the agony of the constant jostling. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like medicine. Butchery, again. Carver of flesh, sawyer of bone.
After the amputations, he ordered the nurses to take the limbs to a separate carriage, where—he told the soldiers—they would be incinerated in accordance with a solemn protocol. But there was no protocol, no separate carriage for limbs. There wasn’t even a carriage for the dead. If they were near a station, they handed the bodies over, but if not, they buried them by the track.
This was the first man. The second had realized something only moments after he had been given his assignment: trains meant travel, and travel meant new stations, new churches, new garrisons, new hospitals, where he could look for Margarete.
He had begun at their very first stop, in a garrison hospital outside Przemyśl. Walking through the crowded wards, he had found his way to the head nurse to tell her the story of the evacuation and ask whether she had met anyone of Margarete’s description. A tall woman, with freckled cheeks and wisps of red hair emerging beneath a starched cornette, she looked at him inquisitively, unaccustomed to such a query. Yes, people came and went, she said. But she knew no one with that story, though he was welcome to ask the other nurses. He did. None of them had met her either, nor had the nurses at the No. 113 Garrison Hospital in Tarnów, nor the Sisters of Mercy at the Army Hospital for Officers in Rzeszów, nor the Red Cross Hospital in Jarosław…
Still, he wouldn’t be deterred. In late July, as the Russian offensive under General Brusilov surged through the mountains, he was in Brünn, far behind the lines, searching the vast wards of hospital pavilions set up in the cornfields. By then he had come to look not only for Margarete, but also Zmudowski, Krajniak, even Schwarz with his pockets full of ammonites, or any other of the thirty, forty patients he could remember from his last days at the church. It was madness, he knew; there were hundreds of thousands—millions, some said—of Imperial and Royal troops deployed across the Eastern Front, and he was looking for a common name like Schwarz. But still it didn’t deter him; with Lemnowice behind the lines, he had no choice. He felt at times as if he belonged among the crowds of kerchiefed women who haunted the stations with portraits of their sons and names painted on placards, endlessly imploring anyone who met their eyes if they had seen their Franz, their David. Like the three old peasants in the Nagybocskó station. Oh, how quickly he’d dismissed their vigil then! But now he understood; he lived for each new stop.
The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he made his way up driveways to baroque châteaus where ballrooms had been converted into rehabilitation wards. He visited converted schoolhouses and sawmills in frontier towns with geese wandering across the yards. Autumn rain thrumming on the tin rooftops, he paced through typhus wards in Kovel, peered over the high, coffin-like walls of cholera beds, and stopped the nurses as they recorded fever curves in the malaria pavilions. While once he hadn’t cared for rank, now he wielded it to press lazy clerks to search their books. In September, as the Russian Ninth took Stanislau, he was back in Kraków, on cargo ships converted into floating hospitals on the Vistula. He found Zmudowski’s old address through the post office, only to learn from neighbors that his wife and daughter had gone to live with family far away.
In November, he was at a commandeered cathedral hospital in Zamość, when news came that the Emperor had died. It was a grey winter morning, and Lucius stood in the crowd of patients as they listened to the announcement. It was almost inconceivable; Franz Josef had ruled for seven decades, and not a single person present had been born outside his reign. There was a sense, almost palpable, that this was the end, not only of his reign but also of the monarchy, and, perhaps, the war. But then lunch came, and the nursing sisters swept the patients back into formation. Far off, in Vienna, another man would be ascending to the throne.
Lucius registered almost none of this. By the time the Imperial and Royal body reached its catafalque inside the Capuchin Crypt, delivered by decorated horses in silent rubber shoes, he was searching again.
Still no one knew Margarete. In the registers of nursing sisters, he found Renaldas and Anastasias, Elizabeths and Lieselottes, Paolas, Zenias, Hildegardes, Iannas, Anets and Evas, Kunigundes, Katas, Livias, Magdalenas, Rekas, and Matilds. In Tarnów, he found a Margarete, but she turned out to be a lay sister in her early seventies, who reddened when the “gentleman” was presented by the chief nurse. Another Margarete, in Kraków, impossibly plump in that time of hunger, tapped her large fingers together excitedly and asked if he had a wife. There once had been a Margarete in Jarosław, but she had died of septicemia long before the fall of Kolomea, while Sister Margarete at the Lemberg garrison hospital had just returned to a dying mother in Berlin.
Then, one day, in Rzeszów, in December, at a converted leprosarium, a Sister of Mercy smiled at him in recognition. She had bright blue eyes and a happy little upturned nose. Didn’t he remember her? He’d asked her the same questions at the hospital in Stryj, where she had been working back in August on the infection wards.
He apologized, blushing. But she had since thought of him, she said; she wished that she could help. Perhaps if he knew which Catherine this Sister Margarete was devoted to? There were, after all, several, all worthy of devotion. Perhaps the Italian Catherines of Bologna or Siena? Or Saint Catherine of Sweden? Or, the most magnificent Saint Catherine of Alexandra, the Great Martyr of the Wheel?
He didn’t know. But wait… “The one who ate the scabs of the afflicted,” he said. The words returning to him from that night he first arrived in Lemnowice.
The Rzeszów sister brightened. “That would be Saint Catherine of Siena,” she said piously. “May we all be so devoted.” But she knew of no such convent in Poland. She wasn’t from Friuli or Tyrol? Are you sure, Herr Doktor, she was telling you the truth?
“Perhaps Friuli, or Tyrol,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment, with an expression that might have been curiosity or might have been compassion. “Ask at the diocese in Kraków,” she told him. “Perhaps they can help.”
Ten days later, a cherubic factotum of the archbishop ran his finger down the column of a volume bound in calf.
“Here,” he said. “A convent of Saint Catherine. In Trieste.”
It was impossible. Lucius had been there as a child, recalled the sun-washed seafront on the Adriatic, the puckered smell of drying fish. A world completely distinct from Margarete.
But he wrote. A simple note at first, in German. To whom it may concern, I am looking for one of your Sisters. If you know where she is, would you please forward the enclosed? The second letter was sealed. He wrote first of how he had been separated, of the attack on Sloboda Rungurska, how he had tried so hard to return. He wrote that he thought often of her, crossed this out, wrote all the time, the truth is, Margarete, I cannot stop.