The footsteps sounded on the gravel as the nurses continued to stream past. He waited for her to take his arm, or ask him to follow her, to someplace quiet, where they could sit or be alone. He hadn’t imagined it like this, amid so many other people, before the open windows of the ward.
“Lucius. How?”
Her lips parted, as if in wonder. She touched the scar. Still he wanted just to stand there in her strange, new presence, not to speak. But she was waiting, and so he stumbled through his story: the Brusilov Offensive, the ambulances, the hospital in Vienna, his trip to Lemnowice. Then: Krajniak, the hospital in Sambor, the photo, the other nurse, the train. Details that now seemed so unimportant. But that was how.
“Lemnowice…” She said the word with some astonishment. As if it had been a long time since she had thought of it. While he had thought of nothing else.
“Yes.”
“And you came for me?” Now in her voice he heard a different timbre, less slushed, less song.
“For you, yes.”
“Oh, Lucius. Oh, Lucius.” For a moment, she just stood there and shook her head. Again she touched the scar, a habit apparently acquired since they last parted. He had the impression of some confusion, then of someone mourning something delicate that had just been broken. “Oh, Lucius. I don’t know what to say.”
Now most of the day shift had moved off. They were almost alone. He recalled their sudden, surreptitious kisses, outside the church, in the darkness of the forest. He stepped closer, ready to take her in his arms.
She closed her eyes. “Please. Please, don’t.”
A line then, from the nun Ilaria’s letter he’d read so many times. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.
But her hair, her shoes…
“I didn’t think… You’ve kept your vows?”
“No. No… Oh, Lucius.” She worried her hands. “There is so much to tell you. So much, but where can we start? There were never any vows.” She took a breath. So there, another question had been answered. “No vows,” she said again. “But… Oh, but I’ll just say it! I have a daughter, Lucius, a little girl.”
The sparrows had fled. Suddenly, he felt very cold.
“A daughter.” He let the word sink in.
That moment by the river now lay before them. Her legs cold from the water; the trundling katydid. Neither able to speak of what he wished to ask.
“And she… is…” But he couldn’t say it. Mine?
“She’s six months old.”
This also answered it. He looked now at her hands, God’s little hands he’d come to know so well. A simple ring, no stone. “You’re… married?”
“A year ago. But yes, we… oh, Lucius!” she exclaimed, her voice now plaintive. “You’ll understand! You were lost… and then…” She paused, closing her eyes. It seemed as if she were trying to prepare him, to do this kindly. “He is someone that you know. He… Oh, the world is very strange and wonderful…” But now, for once, she was at a loss for words; now she had begun to tremble, too.
“Lucius, I tried to find you. I dreamed you were alive. For months, I dreamed I saw you. I knew! I sent a letter, two letters to you, care of the army. I thought of going to Vienna, but the hospital, it needed me. And then… then I found him.”
She stopped. “I should be so happy!” She forced this, her words breaking. “My friend is alive. You are alive. I thought I would never see you again. I am a mother, and my child’s healthy, beautiful…”
But he was having trouble hearing everything she’d said. He repeated, “Someone I know.”
She looked off, now unable to meet his gaze. She took a breath. “I found him, by chance, in Sambor,” she said. “In the hospital. Among the other amputees.”
Still she couldn’t say his name.
“He was so sick,” she said. “For three months, he couldn’t even move. His amputations had healed, but he was like he was that winter day the peasant brought him to us. I knew my duty wasn’t over then. I knew. I asked to be his nurse. It wasn’t hard; the others didn’t want to work with him, moaning like that. I was with him for almost six months in Sambor before he was transferred. I went with him. First to Przemyśl, then Jarosław. I couldn’t leave him, after all that’d happened, I couldn’t let him go. By then, he’d begun to recover. By the time we were transferred here, to Tarnów, he had begun to talk again, and for the first time he could tell me about his life before the war. I helped him write to his family in Hungary. They came to see him. His mother and his brother—he lost his father when he was very little—and a sister from his mother’s second marriage, a beloved little girl he often drew. But when they left, he chose to stay here, with me. By then he was so much stronger. Still there are nights when he wakes screaming. Days of sadness, or when the trees or clouds call out to him in ways that I can’t see. But that will take time, you know. Many soldiers take such time to heal. We have a fine wheelchair for him, and in the day, while I work, he looks after Agata, the baby. He loves the baby. He’s become an illustrator of children’s books, for a publisher in Warsaw, and…”
But there she stopped. It had been said.
She was a little out of breath from the story, as when they first had met those years ago. Now, she looked up at Lucius, eyes full of concern about how this news would land. But something extraordinary was happening. It seemed to him as if the world were changing, as if some great force was gathering about him, in the cobbles and buildings, in the rails, the trains, the clouds and light, the distant mountains in the sky.
A shadow moved; a great winter bird unclenched him from its talons and exploded into flight. And then a drifting, a sparkling silvered drifting down.
And he was there.
“I should like to meet your daughter,” he said.
Margarete looked up at him, with the gaze of patience and understanding he had come to know so well. “I would like that more than anything else in the world,” she said. “But I can’t. For József. He’s come so far. I can’t. If he were to see you… You remember… You understand.”
Then suddenly, she began to cry.
“Margarete.” Lucius took a step toward her. Not Małgorzata. Her old name, her nom de guerre.
She looked at him. Tears were running down her face. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. Then she began to laugh. “Oh, how silly all this is. Look at you, you’re crying, too! Oh, Lucius, he loves our little girl. He laughs, can you imagine? After all that’s happened to him. Oh, what I would give for you to hear him laugh…”
What I would give, thought Lucius. He watched her wipe the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she sniffed and rubbed her nose with her palm, a familiar motion, from the coldest days.
In his pocket, he felt the little stones. I will keep these, he thought. Then, very slowly, he leaned slightly toward her, as if what he was about to say should be a secret, though there was no one else around.
It was still there, he thought, that faint smell of carbolic. I did not forget.
“Thank you,” he said.
In the distance, a train whistled. She looked up one last time at him. Then, for a brief moment, he sensed that she would ask him something else, about his life, or more of what happened since they had parted, or where he’d go from here. For there was so much left to say. But something she saw must have given her his answer. She lowered her gaze. Then quickly, as if she was worried she might change her mind, she hurried off, hesitant at first, then more determined, the stride of someone expected somewhere, someone going home.