There were other possibilities, of course, he realized. He could find the village ransacked, destroyed like so many others. The church in ruins. Corpses left behind to decompose across the Cadmean earth.
He stared up at the night sky and fought very hard to keep this from his mind.
He began again before dawn.
The land grew hilly, and he checked the map and compass, following a narrow, rocky road. His stomach growled. His feet, in his old army boots, began to ache, and when he stopped to readjust his socks, he found blisters on both his heels. Inside his shirt, a spray of bug bites had appeared after his night sleeping in the grass. His face was burnt; his head throbbed. He’d forgotten a hat. He, with his Icelander’s complexion, had brought a half-century-old revolver and forgotten a hat.
He passed a man leading a donkey and a wagon, piled with belongings and a pair of children. Its wheels were spokeless, cut from solid blocks of wood, like something out of a children’s encyclopedia entry on the ancient history of transportation. He recalled the family he had encountered with the hussar, the pilfered rabbits. As if they had been wandering ever since. But now there was no mother, and the children’s summer clothing was ragged, sustained by fraying knots of string.
He had been taking small bites from a loaf of bread purchased two days before in Bohumín. Seeing them, he felt ashamed in front of their hunger, so he offered it. They looked to their father, who nodded, and then they scrambled down from the wagon to seize it, retreating to the safety of their bags.
“Where are you going?” their father asked, in something halfway between Polish and Slovakian, after trying out two other tongues.
“Lemnowice.”
“Ah.”
“You know it?”
“Yes.”
“Far?”
“Not as far as where you’ve come from.”
The children gnawed at the bread, watching him.
“And you’re alone?” the father asked.
“Yes.”
A long pause.
“You have your reasons,” the father said.
The road wound on, through meadows and scattered copses of trees. He finished his water and the last of his food. The land was steeper now; the earth shimmered with runoff. Rain clouds came, opened, and left.
Soon he began to regret his fit of charity. He was hungry, and the water in the rivers was too muddy to drink. Instead, he grabbed clumps of high grass and sucked the rain, as Margarete had taught him. Calamus on the banks—he ate the shoots. See, I still remember. Beyond, the earth was chalky, greedy for his boots.
In the early afternoon, he passed a pair of villages, both destroyed. The first must have been of some size in 1904, for it was there in the imperial atlas, unnamed but recorded with a little square. In the second, the walls of a synagogue were charred and broken. An old man in a black hat and robe was pushing a plow through a garden behind one of the ruined houses, and a young boy led a frail old woman down a path. Who had done this? Lucius wanted to ask them, but the child panicked when he saw Lucius, disappearing with the woman into the ruins.
Later, he passed another hamlet, this one completely burnt to the ground. This time there was no one, and by the size of the trees growing up from the remains of the houses, he guessed that it had been that way since the first days of the war.
After that he stayed away from the villages.
Sometimes, far off in the trees, he sensed the presence of other people, and once, in a far-off valley, he saw a figure on horseback, with a plumed helmet and lance, uniform glittering. For a moment Lucius blinked, wondering if it was an illusion, but the man remained, seemingly lost and wandering in time.
Dusk fell. Clouds of midges lifted from the high grass. A flock of black birds appeared above the valley, dove and rose again in teeming ranks, unfolded, colonnaded, burst.
Now the woods grew denser, pines and spruces appearing among the oaks.
Her woods. Around him, everywhere: her bracken, thistle, goosefoot. On a ridge, he found a foxhole and machine gun, its barrel bent and rusted, draped with a muddy scarf. A line of grave mounds, now covered with a thin growth of pine trees. A half-torn pickelhaube, a leather glove.
The ground was thick with old, spent shells, like acorns after a masting.
Darkness had fallen, and he spent the night inside the foxhole, in a corner worn smooth in the shape of a sleeping man. It was empty, save a discarded canteen, half full of water. How long had it rested there? he wondered, and though he was thirsty, he didn’t drink.
It was raining when he awoke. Droplets drummed down on the oak leaves. He walked faster now, hungry, not trusting himself with the mushrooms and too impatient to stop and strip the cambium from the bark. For everything told him he was getting closer, memory a landscape with a topology of its own. Something faintly different in the smell of the forest, in the softness of the earth. The rushing streams now lined with horsetails. Stones of familiar shape. He began to walk more swiftly. Yes, he recognized it: here was the ridge where Margarete had once stopped to remove a pebble from her boot. Here was the rocky overhang where once they’d taken shelter. Faster, off the trail, twigs snapping as he hurried toward a light. And then before him, where the land began to drop and the forest opened, he stopped. There, he saw it. The church, the houses, the valley, the thin stream of mist rising through the same trees through which it had risen on the night he’d left.
He stood for a moment, almost in disbelief. Heart pounding from the exertion, taking in the vision before him, preparing for what he was about to learn.
In the wind from the valley, the leaves rustled, hiding the sound of the footsteps behind him as three men stepped out from the woods.
They were very gentle, considering. A dusty sack came down over his head, and the fabric was pushed into his mouth and bound there with a stone. He had no time to speak. Then his rucksack was stripped, his hands tied. Standard Imperial and Royal procedure for moving a POW, he later thought, though the stone in his mouth seemed a local innovation. Images, then, of hooded prisoners, marched off into the snow, prodded with the barrel of a gun.
He waited. There it was: cold against the bare base of his neck.
They led him down the hillside and into the valley, one man on each arm, the third behind him, reminding him of his presence with intermittent nudges of the muzzle. The path was muddy, and he stumbled constantly. From time to time he could hear the men speaking in Ruthenian, but what he could understand helped him little: morning, captain, bag. He assumed they were remnants of Ukrainian units, having taken to the mountains after being pushed out of the plains by Polish forces. By then they would have found the gun, the sundry coins, the map, and, if they could understand Polish, they would have read the letter from the general. Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland. His story, that he was a doctor returning to the village, now seemed completely improbable. They would be fools to believe him. If they even let him speak.
His stomach knotted, and for a moment, he was afraid that he might soil his pants. Like so many of his patients—this sordid fact never mentioned in the manuals. But the heat passed through him, sparing him. He felt his face flush, and in the dusty chamber of the sack, he sneezed.
The trail began to level out. They left the woods. In the light that filtered through the fabric, he could vaguely make out the shapes of low-slung houses. He could feel the sun’s warmth now, smell the musty odor of a barnyard, hens. Some children’s voices, the sound of more footsteps on the road. This comforted him a little. They wouldn’t shoot him in front of children, would they? They turned from the road and climbed a short path and stopped. A door creaked. They entered a darker room. Smell of stable dust and linseed and manure. He was shoved down onto a stool. The rope was untied from around his head, the stone removed. They left the sack. His lip had been wedged between the stone and his teeth, and now he licked it, salty with blood.