The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  Crouching by the moaning soldier with the abdominal wound, Margarete called Lucius over.

  “See?” she said, lifting up the man’s fingers, his nails clotted with skin. “He’s been scratching. This, Pan Doctor, is the Beast.”

  His tunic bore the insignia of a sapper unit. Beneath it someone had packed the wound with a sock, dinner linens, and photos, and as Margarete removed them, Lucius saw the lice, cupfuls of them, sloughing off in grainy clumps. There was a shout from the other side of the room, and Lucius turned to see that the patient with the head wound had risen and was heading toward the door. Margarete leapt for him, leaving Lucius alone. On the body before him, Lucius saw a last layer, a woman’s shawl that had adhered to the soldier’s abdomen by dried blood. He began to pull it off and found his hands full of intestines. Then Margarete was at his side. “What did you do? Oh! Mother of God! Never! Never remove the final layer until you have a new dressing ready. On the abdomen, no!” He tried to keep the intestines off the floor, but they continued to slip out in hot wet rolls. The sapper began to gasp. Lucius felt he was witness to a metamorphosis, a man turning inside out.

  “Move, Doctor!”

  Lucius fell back, sleeves wet with peritoneal fluid. Margarete grabbed a clean dressing and swaddled the man’s guts in one swoop and pushed them back inside, dirty with debris. She unrolled more dressings. With her free hand, she wrapped his belly.

  She faced Lucius. “Wash your hands. Come with me. Now we operate. We’ll start with the head wounds, then amputate this foot, this leg, that elbow, this forearm; that arm we can let be.” She paused. “With Pan Doctor’s permission.”

  “And this soldier?” Lucius asked, still looking at the sapper.

  “Smelling like that?” She shook her head. “He’ll be dead by morning. Don’t worry. You didn’t do it; he was on his way. We keep him warm. If he wakes up we tell him he’s home; if he calls you his father, you call him son. Perhaps it is different in Vienna, but this is how we do it here.”

  To the orderlies, who had whispered something Lucius couldn’t hear, Margarete said, “The doctor broke his hand. Soon it will heal. Until then, we will continue as before. Come, Doctor.”

  But Lucius couldn’t turn his eyes. The soldier expelled something from his mouth and began to cough, his face twisted in pain. All around them the light seemed to have changed. The smells filled his nostrils, his head felt hot and damp…

  “Come, Doctor.”

  Then, to Zmudowski, she said, “Get that soldier morphine, now. See, Doctor, he will feel better. He doesn’t know what’s happening. I know it’s hard, but you’ll get used to it. Come.”

  They burst into a cold blue light. Dawn was breaking. A glittering of snowflakes drifted from the beech. In the church, she grabbed a jug of amber liquid from the foot of the operating table, took a swig and splashed it over her hands, then passed it to Lucius. He sniffed, eyes smarting. “Horilka, Doctor,” she said. “Village specialty. Szőkefalvi called it Surgeon’s Courage. Keeps the hands sterile and the belly warm. Perhaps the only thing that’s not in shortage yet.”

  A crate had been set out so she could reach the body on the table. Once more she washed her hands, this time in carbolic acid, its tarry odor lingering as she slipped on her gloves. She began with the soldiers with head wounds. The first was a young man, unconscious, a crush fracture extending from the top of the ear to the center of the forehead. It had been packed in the field, and when she removed the new dressing, she exposed an abscess extending deep into the brain. She whistled, “Our Mother in heaven. This is days old.” Slowly, she picked away the looser skull fragments, cleaned out the pus, and irrigated the wound, stopping to inspect the grey-pink tissue with a candle. “To think that’s where the thinking is!” she marveled, but she didn’t explore further. Instead she placed a rubber drain and secured it with packing. The orderlies gave him anti-tetanus serum and brought him away. She washed her gloves in carbolic and horilka as the second patient was brought to the table. This one had a simple fracture that did not extend past the dural membrane, and she only cleaned and dressed the scalp. Then she called for the amputations.

  Zmudowski appeared with an ether mask and bottle, positioning himself at the head of the table. By afternoon, she had removed two feet and a hand with Lucius at her side, watching as she tied the limb off with a tourniquet, incised the skin and retracted the muscle, and with a single, fluid motion, sawed off the bone. She threw loose loops into the muscles and drew them together before setting the flap. To a patient with a shrapnel wound to the thigh, she asked, “How long ago did this happen, Private?” The answer was January. When he went under, she began to carve it away, murmuring as she went along, her voice like someone praying, cutting back the dead tissue until only pink, fresh bleeding flesh was left. By then, most of his thigh and hamstring were gone. The soldier stirred. They gave him more ether and cut off his leg.

  By then, darkness had come, and Zmudowski returned with his lantern. Hopeful, Lucius wondered if they might break to eat, but then rounds had begun, as before, at the east end of the nave: the Austrian cavalryman, the Hungarian officer, the Czech sniper, and on. It was swifter now, the need for introductions gone. Halfway along the first row, flies circled above a soldier, an Austrian dragoon. She pointed. “God made flies to tell us where the rot is, Doctor.” She knelt to inspect the stump of his arm. “There,” she said. “It’s beginning. Can’t you see?”

  He nodded.

  “Now smell it,” she said. He hesitated a moment. “Closer, Doctor, with your nose.” And he leaned in, the sharp odor making his stomach turn. They brought the man back to the table, exposed an abscess reaching almost all the way to his axilla, and amputated the rest of his arm. An hour later they were back in the nave. Gruscinski, Redlich. Czernowitzski, docile as a lamb. Then into Fevers and Medical and Heads.

  There she stopped suddenly, walked the length of the church, and returned with a shovel. “Move,” she said to a patient, his head wrapped in gauze. As if in drill, he rolled to the side, and she brought the shovel down hard upon his pillow of straw. She stirred it, and a pair of pink little heads rose up, twisting in the air. She brought the shovel down hard again.

  “Szczur,” she said, as if it needed naming. Rat.

  Zmudowski hurried off to get a pan. There were three more cases to see in Heads, and then the six men in Dying, down from eight the day before.

  That night, Lucius slept again in his greatcoat, too exhausted now to be afraid. When dawn broke, there was a knock at his door, and they began again.

  The next days were the same.

  The ambulances arrived out of the black night, out of snowstorms, out of sun-glittering fields of ice. In his quarters, in the crossing, rounding in the church, he would hear the whistle, or the shout, “Incoming!” and the orderlies would deploy to help the stretcher crews while Margarete, in her two coats, breath steaming, directed them to the quarantine. They came from the mountains or the snow trenches dug into the sloping hills, many already dead from their wounds or from the cold, the others crying or staring out with terrified eyes as they were stripped and disinfected, as clods of frozen dirt and blood were dissolved in water, and tourniquets applied.

  In the beginning, Lucius only watched. But by the end of the month, his hand strong enough to grip a scalpel, he began to assist Margarete with the simplest cases. Yes, a butcher’s work, he thought, this carving out of necrotic flesh, as Zimmer had promised. Yet it was extraordinary to think that he was allowed to do this, that he had been given permission, that there was no one there to ask him questions designed to humiliate him before the others, no famous professor to scold him for greeting the patient, no crowd of other students with whom to compete.

  The first amputation he carried out was on the hand of an Austrian rifleman. A frostbitten purse of crushed bone, a single violet finger remaining, the hand had held together in the field by the simple virtue of having frozen, and once in the church it began to melt apart. />
  “A deep breath, Doctor.”

  Margarete stood close to him as his scalpel pressed the forearm and finally broke the skin. He prepared the flap as she had shown him, dissecting back the muscle from the bone. But as he went to get the saw, she stopped him.

  “Perhaps this is how it is done in Vienna, but in Galicia, you’ll need to cut a larger flap. In Galicia, that flap will never reach across the stump.”

  “Of course. Like this?”

  “More.”

  “This?”

  “No: more. Don’t be so shy.”

  “Like this?”

  “Like that.”

  He looked up, glad his mask now hid a silly grin.

  She handed him the saw. “Now go. Don’t stop. Zmudowski will hold him down if he awakes.”

  But in Galicia, Pan Doctor…

  Perhaps in Vienna they cut their suture knots too close; perhaps in Vienna, they let their dirty sleeves dangle in a wound; perhaps in Vienna they forgot cotton in a wound after they closed it, or left tourniquets on when they were no longer necessary and the patient was writhing.

  But in Galicia, it’s done like this.

  Perhaps in Vienna they took off the whole foot when only a toe was needed.

  Perhaps in Vienna they are stingy with their drains, and make messes out of everything.

  Perhaps in Vienna they didn’t step away to sneeze.

  But in Galicia…

  He learned.

  Good, Pan Doctor.

  Yes, that’s right. Stick your finger in, explore it. If you don’t do it, no one else will. Get the bullet out.

  Good. Now tie off, Pan Doctor. Go.

  Good. Very good.

  Lovely.

  Yes. Good. There.

  Who taught you, Doctor? They should really be honored with a decoration.

  There. Yes.

  Go.

  5.

  February turned to March.

  New storms swept through the mountains. Outside, the fighting slowed. The snow blew steadily across the valley. Inside the church, it grew so dark they fashioned torches from pitch and rope hemp. Above, the murals glistened with frozen condensation from their breath.

  Between rounds and cases, he took his meals with Margarete at a small table that had been set up at the edge of the bomb crater. She had initially brought him his meals in his quarters, as regulations dictated that officers should eat apart from the enlisted men. But Lucius hardly considered himself a real officer—to him, an officer was someone like his father—and, regardless of rank, he didn’t want to be alone.

  The room grew quiet as the men ate, their voices low as if in deference, their spoons clinking against tin. Like the soldiers, Margarete attacked the food, ate hunched so as not to lose anything to the floor, always saved her bread to wipe up her soup, and unapologetically cleaned up any missed drops with her fingers.

  “One must hurry, Doctor—we might be bombed during a meal.”

  At first they spoke mostly of their cases, of who was getting well enough to leave with the next convoy returning over the passes, and who—in lower voices now—would die. They reviewed their supplies obsessively: how much morphine was remaining, how much catgut, how much iodoform, how much lime. As the weeks went on, however, and he came to know the patients and their wounds, he found their conversation shifting. She had opinions about everything, not simply how to prepare antiseptic solutions or apply a dressing. She thought it a great mistake that the army had pushed forward in winter. The generals didn’t understand the snow, she said. One did not defeat the snow; one let it come and waited, like a bear in hibernation, one did not send soldiers where they didn’t belong. And how did they make their decisions to dress men in cotton socks and such absorbent puttees? And, oh, the shoes they gave them! And then to think that they had the nerve to send conscription officers to canvass the wounded! The last had come shortly before Lucius’s arrival, a horrid man who had taken any soldier he thought could march another step. Men with fevers! Missing fingers! Headaches that wouldn’t go away. She cursed him. May his feet be eaten by maggots, May he lose his teeth on stale bread, May his family die of plague!

  In the flickering torchlight, snow hissing against the windows, Lucius let her speak. He realized how she must have been waiting for someone to talk to, and there was something to her breathless stories that lightened his constant fear.

  Other times, her cheeks reddening with the warmth of the soup, she asked him about medicine. For all her practical skills, he was struck by the great gaps in her understanding. She knew almost nothing about the fundamentals that had made up his studies, none of the names of bones or muscles, the rules for memorizing vessels. But her curiosity was endless. Was it true, she asked, that tuberculosis was caused by a tiny animal? And what caused a goiter? How could memory vanish, then reappear?

  “Oh, I have too many questions!” she apologized. Szőkefalvi said it took years to study to be a doctor. She couldn’t expect to learn everything at once.

  He didn’t mind, he told her. What he didn’t add was that unlike most of the conversations he’d endured throughout his life, he looked forward to talking to her, didn’t spend his time wishing for the moment to end. That he had always preferred to speak of medicine. It is like it was with Feuermann, he thought. Urgent and important and free from the byzantine structures of decorum so important to his mother. And silence, when it came, came naturally, because a question had been answered, not because he’d failed.

  From medicine, her questions wandered. She asked him about the university, the lectures and examinations. And what of the city, could he describe the monuments to her? Szőkefalvi had told her about the tramcars—had he ever driven one? Then she spoke for a while about the castles filled with paintings and statues, and it took a moment to realize she was describing a museum.

  It was only when her questions drew closer to his family that he hesitated, uncertain how to explain. He had thought of them often since his arrival. Austria, true to its epistolary traditions, had done its utmost to preserve its mail service, and in early March, a pair of letters had somehow made their way to him. Now that he was gone, his parents’ stance toward him had softened. His mother, enclosing a sky-blue box of hard Polish toffee, wrote that her friend, the “famous Polish doctor Karpiński,” had assured her that many of Europe’s most eminent surgeons had gained their skills in wartime, and his father had enclosed a map showing the battles fought between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the invading Cossack and Tatar hordes. The map was more than two hundred and fifty years old, and the area around Lemnowice was obscured by an image of a screaming Cossack impaled on a stake, but Lucius was oddly touched by his father’s pride that his son was “continuing the tradition.” He had also provided a list of Cossack memorabilia that he would cherish for his collection, with little illustrations of daggers and sable caps and decorated saber sheaths. And they had the sad news of the death of Puszek to report to him, of ripe old Irish wolfhound age.

  Lucius said nothing of this to Margarete, and at first he hid the toffees. He had grown up accustomed to seeing people’s manner change the moment they learned of his bloodline. Instead, he invented a humble apartment on Schumanngasse, not far from the university; his father was a dentist who had moved from Kraków to find more work.

  She thought this curious. Were there not enough toothaches in Poland?

  Digging his hole a little deeper, he gave what sounded like a short lecture on the history of the Polish diaspora in Vienna, and swiftly tried to move along. He regretted lying, regretted the distance it placed between them, even if she didn’t know. At the same time, he was well aware that she told him nothing of herself. In the beginning he had inquired cautiously about her training, her convent, what she had done before the war. She wouldn’t answer. To speak of life before she joined her order would violate her vows, she said, fixing her grey eyes on his. What mattered was her holy service now.

  Still, some clues she couldn’t hide.
She slushed her s’s—sh or zh—nasalized her n’s and m’s, and her vowels often seemed on the verge of song. The languages she spoke—an archaic Polish splintered with Slovak, her Hungarian and market Ruthenian, her mix of Austrian and Polish pronunciations of place-names—all put her origin in the mountains, somewhere to the west. Because she seemed so quick, he was surprised to find her handwriting was that of someone scarcely literate, her spelling abominable. But he had no polite way of asking how far she’d gone in school. And then there was the matter of her faith, the Demons of Spleen and Devils of Liver, her endless invocation of the Louse. The angelic interventions that seemed less a part of the world of the somber Latin prayer Lucius had grown up praying, than some animistic rite.

  So he contented himself with letting her lead, and following. What were dissections like? she wondered, now cracking on a piece of toffee. And could he tell her again about his experiments with radiography? Back before the army had taken away their X-ray machine, she had always wondered how they saw inside. And the amputees: did he understand how the feeling of a hand remained after the hand itself was gone?

  Sometimes, they were joined by Zmudowski and the other orderlies, named Rzedzian and Nowak, and occasionally Krajniak the cook.

  The men had all arrived at different times over the winter. Zmudowski was from a farm just outside Kraków. He had been a postman in his former life, and now sorted through the hospital mail and removed stamps for his collection. The war, he explained, one night in March, during a calm, was an extraordinary time for philately: families who had not written letters for years were digging through their drawers for any postage they could find. Already, he’d found some rarities, a 1908 10 kroner with no perforations and an 1899 10 heller blue. He kept them mounted in a little red book he carried always in his pocket, where he also kept his single photo of his daughter, a studio snapshot of a somber baby sitting alone on a cushion covered with a rug.