A light rain began to fall, and the streets exhaled a fetid breath. At the station, he had been given the name of a hotel in an imposing imperial building off the main street, with a thick red carpet leading up the stairs to the reception. A heavy woman sat at the desk, dressed in a kind of black nightgown that seemed to have been cut from mourning. Her arms were bare and dewlapped, her face plethoric, her breath labored and wheezy as she passed him a key from the pigeonholes behind her desk.
He slept fitfully. The walls were covered by peeling, blood-red paper, and the light came from a candle, stuck directly to his nightstand in its wax. The sheets were pilled and dirty, and twice he turned on the light, certain that he would find them full of lice. But there was nothing. Just my imagination, he thought, trying to find some lightness in his panic. Once you feel Her, Pan Doctor, you can’t escape.
Around midnight, he was aroused from half-slumber by hammering and shouts of authority, and he braced for someone to burst through his door. Later he heard weeping. It rose, gasping, so loud and urgent that he ran into the hall, thinking someone was dying or giving birth. Then it went silent. By then it was four. He did not return to sleep.
Back at the station, he made his way to the platform for trains heading east. Even in the two hundred paces that separated the eastern and southwestern lines, the difference was palpable. More and more people speaking Polish, more scraps of Galician costume: vests, embroidered blouses, the occasional woman in a highlander cap. It was not hard to imagine Margarete there, among them. He was getting closer. If not to her, to the place where he would begin to search.
At the platform, he learned that the train to Lwów had been delayed because of problems with the gauge changes on the Breslau line. From a station vendor, he bought a dry piece of cake and a cup of roasted chicory advertised as coffee.
The train came.
The compartment sat six and was full when he entered. On the far wall, a pair of old women sat side by side in identical dresses of a coarse brown muslin, buttoned to the chin. There were two old men in stiff green vests, whom he took to be their husbands, one reading a Czech newspaper, the other Polish, each creased neatly along a column. The other two seats were taken by a woman in a light-blue blouse and a sleeping child in a gown.
Lucius stepped back out of the door to check his ticket against the number of the compartment, but by then the young woman had gathered up the child in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said in Polish. She shifted over to the window, freeing the middle seat.
Lucius nodded to her in thanks, set his rucksack on the rack above them, and took his seat. Outside there was a long whistle and then the train began to move.
Through the pipe yards again, the brick factories and smokestacks giving way to smaller workshops. It wasn’t yet nine, and already the day was warm. He removed his coat and folded it on his lap. Outside, the city began to drop away. Fields again. In the distance he could see low hills, and perhaps the hint of mountains through the haze.
“I noticed your ticket. You are going to Lemberg… I mean, Lwów?”
He turned. Her hair was honey-colored, loose down her back. Eyes dark brown, skin pale, a little burnt. The child sleeping in her lap.
“Have you been there before?” she asked.
He hesitated, uncertain of her intentions. It was a bit brazen, he thought, for a woman traveling alone to solicit conversation. But he was grateful for someone to speak to. “Only during the war,” he said.
“You were a soldier?”
“Not quite. A doctor.”
“Oh. You weren’t in the Fourth Army, were you?”
He paused, struck by the specificity of the question. “No,” he said, more hesitantly now. “The Third. Later the Seventh.”
Her face lit up. “But after the Brusilov Offensive, many of the companies from the Fourth Army were integrated into the Seventh. Perhaps you met men of the Fourth?”
If her voice didn’t seem suddenly plaintive, he would have smiled at the incongruity of this young woman sounding like his father talking army organization. “You seem to know more than me,” he said. “I left the front after Brusilov. I was in the medical corps, on the trains, then at a hospital in Vienna.”
“I see.” But it didn’t really seem as if she’d heard him. Carefully, so as not to wake the child, she leaned forward to a canvas sack at her feet and extracted a package bound with yellowing twine. With one hand she untied and unfolded the wrapping paper, which clearly had been folded and unfolded many times. She withdrew a photograph, mounted on cardstock.
She handed it to him. On her hand he saw a wedding band, the nails on her fingers bitten to the quick.
“Did you ever see him? His name is Tomasz Bartowski, he was in the Ninth Corps, Tenth Infantry Division.”
In the photo, she was sitting with a young man in an outdoor café. A decorative cloth was spread over the table, and there was a single, extravagant piece of cake with two forks buried in its flank. His hand rested on hers, and both of them were smiling; he wore a boater, jauntily angled, and her striped white blouse rose all the way to her chin. Behind them stood a waiter with a tray of cigarettes and chocolates, his torso bisected by the frame.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lucius, now understanding why she knew so much. “I don’t recognize him.”
“Can you look more closely? If you were a doctor, you must have taken care of many men.”
Many, many men, thought Lucius.
But still the face was unfamiliar.
“I’ve been looking since the war,” she said, as she took the photo back. “I even went to Vienna, to the War Office. He isn’t on their casualty lists. So I have hope. They said he may have been taken prisoner of war, that even though most of the prisoners have returned, the Bolsheviks have kept some of them for labor. Then in Kraków, I met a man from his company who said he was pretty certain Tomasz had been injured at Lutsk, but lightly. That he was likely at the Regimental Hospital in Jarosław. He wasn’t there. But a nurse recognized him, said she was certain she had seen him among the wounded at the Przemyśl hospital. Except he wasn’t there either. Now, I’ve heard the hospitals are being emptied, to make space for the wounded from the Ukrainian war. So I’m going back to Jarosław, to start again.
“Maybe you just don’t recognize him,” she added, when she saw he didn’t have an answer. “It’s an old photo, from long ago.” Then she handed him another photograph. “I have this one, too.”
The second was from their wedding, the young woman dressed in a traditional wedding dress from the Galician lowlands. For a moment Lucius let his eyes linger. There was something striking about the image: her face a little flushed, her eyes darker, wilder. Her hair was braided, the braids folded upon her head and bound in a tumble of white damask and flowers. The skin of her neck glistened, and the weight of a breast pushed at the cotton pleats of her blouse. She had been dancing, he realized. Right up until the moment the wedding photographer had taken their portrait, and here she was, a little out of breath.
He felt as if he had been looking too long, but she didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed proud of her laughing self. “I was fatter then,” she said. She touched the photo affectionately. “The baby, and the worry, made me lean.”