He posted the letter that night from Kraków, leaving the regimental office as his address.
But by then he had begun to question.
It was more than just the doubt on the face of the little nurse in Rzeszów. Wandering in the wards, watching the other sisters, their silence, their brisk, efficient deference, he began to consider one final possibility: that she had never taken vows at all.
Of all the possibilities, it stunned him now to think he had never really considered this. On the surface, of course, there was the evidence of their lovemaking. But this in itself hardly proved she wasn’t a nun. Vows were broken; indeed, he had inherited a culture keenly aware of all the erotic potentialities of the convent, whether the garden couplings in Boccaccio, or the baser perversities of de Sade. If anything, there was something in the very denial of the flesh that acknowledged the power of flesh’s pleasures. He had not needed to read Freud to know this; they took breaths from the same air.
No, it was something else that held him. And something other than the fact that she carried a rifle, or cursed, or drank before her surgeries. Or that she kept Drill Regulations on her desk and Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance, but not the Bible. No, it was something subtler, unspoken, something dramatic about her manner when she spoke of God and his angels. Almost as if she were playing at devotion. As she had played at typhus before Horst.
He was in Jarosław when this thought came to him. He was sitting in the office of a mother superior of the Sisters of Mercy, a handsome woman in her early forties with the kind eyes of someone accustomed to being present at the bedside of people who were very scared. He didn’t know what it was about the woman’s sober, steady manner that made him think, This wasn’t her, but once thought, he couldn’t get it out of his head.
But why? Why would a young woman pretend she was someone who she wasn’t, only so that she could spend the next two years surrounded by the horrors of dying soldiers, often sleepless, only hours from the front?
Like me, he thought. He was walking down the steps of the Jarosław hospital. Briefly, he stopped. Pretending to be someone I was not.
Outside the hospital, unexpected sunlight coruscating on the snow-wet rooftops, he followed a road that led down to the San River. Huge ice floes jostled noisily against the bridge columns. Moments from their conversations now drifted back to him. My vows. My holy service. The earthly life I left behind. But what then was she hiding? He wished that he might have doubted this before, in Lemnowice. To know whom he had truly fallen in love with. He felt as if he’d missed so much, not just to get to know her then, but to know how he might find her now.
Back in Kraków, a letter was waiting, postmarked from Trieste. It was from a nun, a Sister Ilaria. She had never known a Margarete, she wrote to him in German. There were no Polish sisters in her order; nor was it their custom to assume a different name. She would have wished him luck had she not had a Polish shopkeeper translate the contents of his second letter for her. I cannot dare imagine what has transpired between you and the unfortunate Margarete, Signore. But it is my duty to remind you that all corporeal delights are strictly forbidden by the vows of any Order. Please, Signore. What is at stake is no less than her salvation. Hot are the fires of hell. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.
That night, for the first time since he had joined the trains, he allowed himself to get drunk at the officers’ club, just beyond the garrison gates. The room was crowded. On the piano in the corner, a lieutenant of the lancers played military marches, which his comrades urged into a rapid tempo with a banging of their cups. He sat alone in a booth, beneath an old painting of a young Franz Josef that had yet to be replaced by one of Karl I. Twice he unfolded Sister Ilaria’s letter, twice he read it, growing angrier each time. It was not just me, he wanted to write back to her. She came to me first. She kissed me. She led me to the river to make love. And now she was not only missing, but had absconded with a part of him he hadn’t even known existed before they met.
He ordered another slivovitz. The spirits ran over the top of the brimming glass, burning a scrape that ran across his knuckles. The heat, the smell, the tingling on his fingers now reminded him of the horilka they drank to warm their bellies before surgery. He leaned back and ran his hands through his hair, moist with sweat from the warmth of the room; he couldn’t even get drunk without being driven back to her. In his left hand he crumpled the letter on its flimsy ration paper, flagged down the waiter with his right. Another slivovitz, burning his lips as it spilled into his beard.
At last he rose, unsteadily. Now his desire for Margarete was so pressing it was almost clinical. He was infested. The room was small, too small for him, the laughter and the regimental marches pitched forward in a frantic pace. As he turned, his saber clattered across the table, sweeping a pair of glasses to the floor. With the songs and laughter no one noticed. The waiter scurried over, apologizing, as if his placement of the glasses had led to such a mess.
Hot are the fires of hell. He had to get outside. Unbuttoning the collar on his tunic, he stumbled, apologizing, pushing through the other officers, none of whom gave any heed. At the entrance, he steadied himself against the wall as the doorman fumbled interminably through the rank of greatcoats. Then he was outside, the air was cold; he paused, breathing deeply, as his breath made spirals through the yellow columns of light. More singing, coming now from a raucous crowd on a wooden sidewalk outside another establishment up the street. Women’s laughter rose from shuttered windows. Now he knew why he had gotten drunk that night, what he was searching for. Ahead the crowd churned as the door opened, and a pair of privates stumbled out to the hurrahs and congratulations of the others. They pulled up short, saluting as they saw Lucius approach, a crimson light over the door casting their flushed, warm faces in a devilish glow. But he was an officer, and the red light specified an establishment for enlisted men. He dismissed them with a nod, and they melted back into the crowd. The world deserved its war, he thought. In Lemnowice, he couldn’t get the anti-tetanus serum he needed, but there were rules on how to divvy up the whores.
He stumbled on, looking now for the green lantern that would signify an establishment for officers. The cold began to seep through his open collar, and he fumbled with the buttons as he walked on. The streets were dark, clotted with soldiers. Somewhere were the dynastic crypts of the Royal Capital City, but the Kraków that unfolded before him now had the air of a frontier town. The smell of burning coal was everywhere, and a dark bird, a shadow, banked above the scattered nimbuses of light.
At last, before a flickering emerald lamp, he stopped and watched a pair of officers enter a doorway, behind which the sound of dancing music could be heard. A doorman beckoned to him; he hurried off. His heart was pounding in his ears. What had seemed necessary minutes before now seemed impossible. He could not stand the thought of sitting in a parlor getting drunk with fellow officers and singing regimental songs until each of them paired off.
A light snow was falling when he reached the Central Market Square.
Ahead he could see them gathered beneath each of the streetlamps. Snow had been falling all evening, and a smooth field of white covered the square. Now approaching, he hesitated, then put his head down, keeping his gaze away as they called out. He saw no one else. Just the women, like sentries, retreating in the distance beneath the spotlights of the lamps.