by Daniel Mason
They moved on. “Corporal Sloboda, of a Czech bicycle infantry, another frostbite amputee. Tarnowski: left arm. Oh, dear, careful, Corporal, keep it elevated—that’s why God gave us slings. This one is Sattler, an Austrian, prays constantly, too often really, it is its own disease. Oh, yes: chest wound; he also used to be among the dying, until the Holy Spirit intervened.”
At the end of the aisle, they stopped. “And this one…” She knelt. “Our Sergeant Czernowitzski, another Pole, though of this I’m not so proud. Amputations of the leg and arm. Show the doctor, Sergeant. See how they are healing nicely? But we have helped him not only with his physical wounds, Pan Doctor, but spiritual ones as well. See, Sergeant Czernowitzski had some trouble when he arrived in knowing the proper way that one is to address a nursing sister. But we learned! We learned that a nursing sister is not a tavern girl, with whom one can enjoy insinuations. Isn’t that correct, Sergeant?”
“Indeed, Sister,” said the man, looking down.
“Tell the doctor. ‘Do you need anything, soldier?’ is an innocent question, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“That is correct, Sister. It is a medical question.”
Standing next to her, Zmudowski was doing his best to look severe behind his beard.
“That’s right, a medical question,” said Margarete. “And what do we say when we are asked this medical question, soldier?”
“We are gracious, Sister. We recognize the gift God has given us to be alive, and we honor Him by our decorum and good deeds.”
She turned with a satisfied smile on her face. “See, Doctor, he’s so polite.”
When they were out of earshot, Lucius said, in a low voice, “He seems chastened. If I may ask…”
Her eyes flickered. “As I said earlier, Doctor, God has given his children morphine. But He has also given the discretion to withhold it, too.”
She smiled briskly, and for the first time he saw her little teeth. A memory came to him, of a soldier in Kraków, screaming during a shortage of narcotics.
Then she must have recognized his unease. “I am alone, Pan Doctor. It is either morphine or the Mannlicher.” There was a long pause. Then she looked to Zmudowski and the two began to laugh. “It is a joke, Pan Doctor Lieutenant. I haven’t shot any of them, yet.” Another pause. “Well, at least not in Lemnowice. Oh, Doctor, that was also just a joke. Don’t look so frightened. Ever since we’ve started, you’ve looked like a condemned man waiting to be hanged.”
They pressed on. Up one row, down the second. They were lucky, she told him: often on rounds there were one or two amputations that had begun to sour, but that night it looked as if they had been spared. “Yes,” he answered. They were lucky, he thought, still wondering if now was his moment to confess. They all were lucky, lest he be asked to intercede.
But he didn’t confess. Down the second row and up the third, now into Medical, with its fevers, coughs, and dysenteries, kept behind a small partition in a pathetic effort against contagion. Puschmann, Mlakar, both with pneumonia. Nadler: terrible abscesses of the tonsils. Kulik, Doctor, poor Kulik: chronic diarrhea since his mama deliberately poisoned him at his going-away dinner, hoping to defer his deployment to the front.
And on…Yes, Poor Kulik, thought Lucius. But your mother was trying to keep you from the war.
Now Heads, the chancel. The first two cases were both comatose, with drains leaking pale fluid into bedside pans. At the third, Margarete stopped and turned.
“No name. An Austrian by his uniform,” she said. “But we couldn’t find any papers. He came two days ago, discovered on the road. There were at least three fractures in his skull, though the membrane was intact. Szőkefalvi said there is great disagreement of when one should proceed with decompression. That some say it should be done quickly, at any sign of increased pressure inside the skull, while others believe any surgery only worsens matters. For now, I’ve waited. But since yesterday, he hasn’t woken up. I’m not certain what to do.”
She had turned back to look at the soldier. She wants me to answer, Lucius thought. Again his heart began to beat faster. It was like being back in school, called up before the lecture hall. But he had stood before legendary members of the professoriate and didn’t feel as afraid as he did before this nurse. He recalled the old Italian whom he’d examined long ago as Praktikant. A week later, the man had his skull drilled to remove the pressure on his brain caused by the tumor. Even then, it seemed barbaric. Now he couldn’t bear to think of the kind of tools Margarete was using.
He knelt at the man’s side. The soldier’s face was gaunt, his cheeks covered by a thin beard. His breath soft and shallow. The gauze around his head was yellow, like the yoke of an egg.
For a long time, Lucius just looked at him, frozen, afraid not only that he didn’t know what he was doing, but that he would cause the man more harm.
“You can examine him, Doctor.”
Still he waited.
“Pan Doctor Lieutenant?”
But he was now trying to remember the basic neurological exam. He could recall the pages in his textbook, but the order of the exam had fled. Assess orientation…then cranial nerves, then muscle tone, then…
At his side Margarete spoke again, softly. “Szőkefalvi usually checked his eyes.”
Grateful that the darkness hid his blushing, Lucius leaned closer and asked the man to open his eyes. There was no answer. Again he paused.
“When I said examine, I meant you can touch him, Doctor.” Now something else had crept into her voice, a worry, inlaid with irritation or impatience. “Perhaps back in Vienna, you are more cautious. But out here, if we are going to drill a hole in his skull, we can’t be afraid of touching his eyelids. Unless Pan Doctor Lieutenant is used to doing things differently?”
“No…no…,” said Lucius, flustered. He gently parted the man’s eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Margarete handed him a candle before he could even ask. He wanted to snap at her, to tell her that he knew about pupillary reflexes. Swelling of the brain caused it to push the brainstem down, compressing the third cranial nerve, with its fibers controlling pupillary constriction. He had read this, dissected it in human and pig cadavers. He swung the light back and forth and said, as formally as he could, “The nervus oculomotorius seems intact.”
She didn’t answer.
“The nervus oculomotorius seems intact,” he repeated. “That argues against advanced herniation.”
“Yes, Pan Doctor,” answered Margarete tentatively. “The oc-u-lo-motorius. What a lovely word. Now, would you drill, or wait?”
A cold wind whistled across the patched-up shell-hole in the roof. Glinting snowflakes drifted down.
She leaned toward him and whispered, so the others couldn’t hear: “Szőkefalvi, Doctor, would wait.”
Quietly, he nodded his assent. Below him, the man gasped briefly, before his soft, low breaths returned.
They stood. Margarete said, almost kindly, “Perhaps it is better if I examine the other cases myself? We will finish here, in Heads, and then you’ll rest. We usually do not bother the dying men in the transept this late at night.”
“Yes, Sister,” he said.
She asked him no other questions. There were seven more cases, all recently arrived. Once or twice, he added something he remembered from his texts, but his contributions only seemed to emphasize his ignorance. Soon he stopped speaking at all.
It was close to ten when they finished.
“Thank you,” she said at last to Zmudowski, who saluted Lucius before he left. He too had been privy to the failure, though mercifully he let nothing show.
For a moment Lucius and Margarete were alone, in the crossing, before the operating table, which he now saw was made from a pair of pews. She looked at him directly now, her eyes appraising, weighing her own options, most of which must have seemed quite poor by then.
She was silent for no more than a few seconds, but when she spoke, he sensed that a decision had been made.
“We will make do,” she said.
He waited, realizing how much he was revealing by not asking what she meant.
And then she added, “Perhaps now you can tell me what happened to your wrist.”
4.
Lucius’s quarters were in the former priest’s house, a separate building that sat across a courtyard spanned by a massive beech tree, its upper branches high as the church steeple. The snow of the courtyard was packed down in paths between the two structures and a third, smaller house with two rooms, one for bathing and one for quarantine. Beyond this he could see a gate marking a graveyard, the crosses barely high enough to clear the snow.
There was a separate entrance to Lucius’s room, but it was locked, and Margarete led him around to a second door, which opened onto a kitchen. There two men sat peeling potatoes next to a set of field stoves and pots. One of them was missing a hand.
“This is Krajniak, head cook.”
A poplar-thin man with a red nose sniffled and saluted with his stump. “Humbly report, Herr Doktor! I hope you like pickled cucumbers, sir.”
“Ah. I haven’t told you that,” said Margarete. “In January they accidentally delivered two hundred kilos of cucumbers instead of cleaning lye. It is not to be mentioned to anyone. Agreed?”
At the far end of the room, the skinned corpses of pigs and chickens dangled from the ceiling. A third man sat in the corner, a shotgun across his lap. Margarete greeted them with a nod. “That one is Croatian, speaks some German. I don’t understand a word he says.”
“The gun is also for the rats?”
“Very good, Pan Doctor,” she said. “I would have thought you’d say it’s for the Russians, but my, you’re learning fast.”
On a plate, she placed a hunk of bread and a pair of boiled turnips, then led him into a second room, a laundry with pots for disinfection, strung with rope from which hung a maze of drying uniforms and blankets. Together, they pushed aside the wet, frozen wool until they reached the door to his room.
It was a small space, four long paces across, with a straw mattress and a sheepskin blanket, a desk, a chair, a wood-burning stove. It had been Szőkefalvi’s room, Margarete told him, and they had left it alone after his departure, waiting for the new doctor to take his place. She went and unlocked the bolt on the far door that opened onto the courtyard. “So you don’t have to crawl through potatoes each time you need to get to bed,” she said. There was a small window, already fogged by their breath, glowing with a gold nimbus from the light of the church. She set his food on the desk next to a casebook, and turned back the blanket on the bed, a gesture which at first appeared an act of hospitality, until he realized she was inspecting it for lice. The blankets lay directly on the mattress. No bedsheets: of course, he thought, embarrassed that he had even noticed.
Inspection complete, she turned back to Lucius. For a moment, he thought she would ask him something else, but she pressed her hands together and curtsied slightly. “My quarters are in the sacristy. There is a bell outside the door if you need to call.” She turned, and then turned back.
“Oh, and, Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t take your boots off.”
“No. My boots…”
“To run, Doctor, in case you need to run. And keep your papers on you—the Austrians have a bad habit of thinking everyone without their papers is a spy.” And with that she hurried into the night.
Lucius set his bag down on the floor and walked over to the desk. The food was already cold, but he was starving, and as he chewed, he turned the pages of the casebook. The names and injuries ran well into the hundreds, all recorded in the same careful hand. He tried to conjure up the man who had preceded him. Margarete had said nothing more about Szőkefalvi, no mention of his age or rank or training. Lucius imagined an older man, because to him all doctors were older men, but now thinking back, he realized there was nothing to suggest the Hungarian wasn’t also a student, perhaps an assistant to the other unmentioned doctor whose crime he suspected by then had something to do with Sister Klara’s. Nothing to suggest Szőkefalvi hadn’t been sent off to serve with just six semesters of study. Nothing, except that Szőkefalvi, whoever he was, apparently had known what to do with a skull fracture, while Lucius knew how to take an X-ray of a mermaid’s spine.
He sat. Thoughts of the mermaid now led to Zimmer, and then to Feuermann, now somewhere in Serbia. Had his friend also been so misled? But the hospital described in Feuermann’s letters, though small, was functioning, with other surgeons and sanitary officers and Red Cross personnel, a steam laundry, an X-ray machine and bacteriological laboratory, not some freezing first-aid station with an armed, half-mad nurse and an operating table salvaged from the pews.
He ran his good hand through his hair and lay back on the blanket, still in his coat. Was he supposed to sleep in his clothes, then, too? He imagined himself fleeing a horde of screaming Cossacks in nothing but his boots. But it wasn’t funny. He felt frightened by everything, the bomb-hole in the church ceiling, the rats like something from a nursemaid’s tale. Was this what his parents had tried to protect him from? Was it too late to ask them to help him to transfer? Oh, but this brought its own worries. If his father had his way, Lucius might find himself a lancer, joining a cavalry charge against a line of howitzers and mortar fire, while he tried to steer an unfamiliar horse.
He turned on his side, his wrist throbbed, and his saber poked into his hip. He had almost forgotten the pain; fear made a good anesthetic, he thought. When Margarete had learned of the injury, she had asked to examine it, carefully touching the tips of his fingers to assess for nerve damage and palpating the fracture to see how it had set. She had given him some vials of morphine from the supply closet beneath the altar. But now he was grateful for the injury, which was all that stood between him and total humiliation. He unclipped the saber and hung it from a bedpost. Yes, he thought: he was lucky for the scuttling child, the icy street. If Margarete was truly performing the amputations, then he could watch her, study, and perhaps, by the time he had healed, he could know enough to start. If a nurse had learned, he thought, then he could, too.
With this thought, he pulled himself farther onto the bed. His feet felt massive in the boots. He closed his eyes. Now sleep seemed futile, but he wanted to be absent, if only briefly, from his fear.
And somehow, he must have slept, for he was awakened by a knock at the door.
It was Margarete again. She wore a second greatcoat over the first, her wimple hidden in the hood, dusted now with snow.
“Quick,” she commanded. “Come.”
It was still dark as they crossed the courtyard.
A fire was burning in the quarantine, its light flickering through the swirling snow. Beyond the gate, men carried shrouded litters out of an ambulance. It was a small vehicle, scarcely longer than a man and not quite as tall, but its supply of casualties seemed almost inexhaustible. Lucius turned to Margarete, seeking some instructions, but she had vanished, leaving him alone. From around him came shouting, the crunch of footsteps, the clattering of doors, but all was muted by the falling snow. A pair of search dogs circled, as if someone had forgotten to tell them that their job was done. Polish ogars, hounds familiar from his father’s hunts. They were almost otherworldly, like eels in their constant gliding, smooth coats glistening, noses cutting shallow tracks across the powdery snow.
At last, one of the ambulance men, with a vulgarity that suggested ignorance of Lucius’s rank, shouted for him to help. He hurried into the lorry, nearly slipping from the snowy gangplank, lurched, and struck his head against a lantern hanging over the entrance. Thankfully, no one had seen him. He ducked inside, recoiling instantly at the smell. Two men remained, on litters that were stacked on racks. He hesitated. A face appeared at the entrance, shouting for Lucius to grab his end of the litter. He obeyed, realizing only as it left its bracket that he had forgotten about his wrist. Pain bolted up his arm, and he faltered, the body almost slipping
off.
No one even acknowledged his incompetence. Another man climbed in, pushed him aside and took the body, and then the final litter was brought outside. He descended. Then the ambulance was empty, moving. Snow sloughed off in the vortices of lantern light. He saw his shadow swing against the wall of the church, and they were gone.
Inside the quarantine, Margarete hung her greatcoats by the door. He saw Zmudowski already at work, and two others that he hadn’t met. A pot of broth was steaming on a stove in the corner. The air was heavy, rank and damp. The wounded had been arranged on straw beds around the fire, and Margarete moved swiftly between them, asking questions while checking for a pulse.
Of the fourteen, eight were already dead and rigid. One had frozen in a seated position, his clothes in tatters, his mouth wide open in a scream. Lucius couldn’t tear his eyes away. He had never seen such a scream, teeth glittering in the crimson mouth…
“Oh, my God.”
“Doctor.”
“That man…”
“Please, Doctor, don’t stare, come.” Margarete pulled him on.
“That man, he lost his jaw, it’s—”
“He’s dead. He’s God’s. Not ours. Now, hurry, come.”
By then the living had been separated off. Three gunshot injuries to limbs; two head wounds and an abdominal wound. Almost all had frostbite. Margarete covered them with blankets and ordered soup for those who could drink. “Shouldn’t we bring them to the surgery?” Lucius asked. She shook her head. “Not yet. Not until they are warm and deloused. Unless they are heavily bleeding, Doctor, we clean them first. No one goes into the church until they are deloused. The last patient to bring a louse into the church killed fourteen soldiers and three nurses. I won’t let that ever happen again.”
Zmudowski had begun to strip the soldiers one by one, scrub them from a foamy bucket, and then send them shivering into a smaller, second room, where the others quickly swaddled them in clean clothing, powdery with lime.