The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  In the days that followed, the winter soldier didn’t leave his bed.

  “What’s your name?” they asked him in the morning. “Where are you from? What happened?”

  The questions yielded nothing. Sometimes the man watched them with his wide eyes, his gaze shifting from one person to another, before settling on something hovering in the air beyond. Other times he squeezed his eyes shut and pursed his lips tight beneath his nose, almost cutting off his breath. He didn’t speak, didn’t rise; he soiled his blankets and his clothes, leaving Zmudowski cursing as he shoveled away the rank, wet straw.

  After accepting the broth on the night of his arrival, he began to refuse his meals.

  Margarete sat vigil at his side, gently pressing his lips with the edge of the spoon, wiping his chin and neck as the soup dripped down.

  “You’re safe here,” she said. “Whatever happened to you in the woods, it’s over now.”

  But he never swallowed when she fed him, and the mess of food only attracted the rats, who sniffed about his neck without eliciting a stir. His eyes took on an empty gaze, his eyelids seemed almost translucent, his skin became like crepe paper and tented when Lucius pinched it. His blood pressure began to drop.

  Is this what it looks like to die from losing one’s mind? Lucius wondered.

  He returned to his books, but he found nothing.

  The hospital had a spare nasogastric tube of India rubber, untouched since the last soldier using it had died. They boiled it and slipped it through the new man’s nostril and down his throat. Now three times a day, Second Nowak stood above him, pouring lukewarm broth into a funnel attached to the free end of the hose.

  Outside, the storm grew worse.

  A north wind, howling out of Russia, colder than any Lucius had known. Huge drifts built up against the north transept, and the walls creaked with their weight. Branches snapped from the beech tree, skittering across the roof.

  The transport of the wounded ceased. There were no new cases, no evacuation convoys to take the wounded to the rear. All efforts turned toward warmth. Firewood details put on three layers of greatcoats and forged their way into the cold. Wet logs steamed against the stoves. Ad hoc fireplaces blazed in the corners, yet by morning, the slush in the night pots had frozen solid. The soldiers began to sleep together, three beneath their blankets, the outside men rotating to the middle during the night. At mealtimes, the cooks hurried the food across the courtyard, shattering the ice that formed over the soup pots during the short transit through the cold. Lucius took his notes in pencil, because the ink froze in its well.

  They moved the kitchen to the church. The smell of boiled onions filled the air, and the soldiers gathered around the bubbling vats of soup.

  At times, patrols emerged out of the snow, just seeking warmth. They came on skis, or hand-built snowshoes, their bodies swaddled in blankets, faces wrapped in scarves, even their eyes covered with thin layers of gauze. They told incomprehensible tales of the winter. Trains buried inside snowdrifts. Crows frozen out of the sky like black scythes of ice. There were no wounded, they said. The cold took anyone who couldn’t move.

  Without new patients, Lucius turned to the drawings they found stuffed in the lining of the silent soldier’s coat, hoping they might provide some clue.

  Piece by piece, he peeled them apart. There were dozens, their ink faded with the cycles of freeze and thaw, each page bearing ghostly impressions of the next. The man’s skill was formidable; he must have been an artist once. Briefly Lucius wondered if he had been hired to document the war. There were lonely pastures, village scenes, sketches of city streets. Camp life with its kaleidoscope of infantry and cavalry. Lancers with their plumed shakos, and infantry in puttees and spiked pickelhaubes, leather rucksacks on their backs. Priests offering the Eucharist to ranks of genuflected men. There were trains and stations, crowds of cheering families, field kitchens, a lone horseman galloping down the road.

  Looking through them, it was possible to build a story of deployment, thought Lucius: from town to city, city to camp, camp to plains and on into the forests, to primeval scenes of fallen logs and bracken and filtered sunlight, wild boar and roe deer, sketches of little songbirds, a hare, a winter fox.

  And then among these, he began to turn up others, not so easily explained. Eyes hidden in the bracken and the beech leaves. Skies tiled with airships. A lonely wheel perched high upon a pillar in an empty field.

  A crowd of naked children with carnival heads of wolves and boar. Serpentine dragons, curling in the corners of the pages. Faces in the torn anatomy of fallen soldiers, and shadowed creatures lurking in the darkness of a crumpled coat.

  Sometimes Margarete joined him.

  “Does it tell you anything?” she asked.

  He didn’t know. Save that whatever had happened no longer seemed as simple as the effects of a bomb blast. It went deeper, farther back, it seemed.

  “Dreams?” she asked, picking up the sketch of a tree, upon which bodies hung like fruit.

  A recollection of his journey from Nagybocskó: the open field, the hussar, the carnations blooming from the horses’ heads. And in the darkness of the forest, the frozen, turning body. “Perhaps,” he said.

  She set the image down and slowly ran her fingers over the hanging bodies. “Do you think he will get better?”

  Again, he didn’t know. If this was madness, he had even less of a chance of curing it. He had been to three lectures on insanity, seen a single patient, a man diagnosed with dementia praecox, who believed himself controlled by electric wires emanating from the Emperor. But how were such men treated? Bromides, morphine, cold baths, gardening…and did any of this even work? Then he thought of other madnesses, of the myths he’d pored over as a child, the sudden assaults of screaming Furies, their victims scuttling back in horror from the beating of their tormentors’ wings.

  They both looked down again at the page, to where a line of little dragons curled through a group of portrait sketches, eyeless, with waving manes and cryptic markings on their bellies. The creatures now were strangely familiar, as if Lucius had seen them once before. In some tale of knights and monsters, though he couldn’t remember where.

  After a week, the soldier began to moan.

  It started at night. Eyes wide, back and forth he shook, the nasogastric tube dragging across the blankets rank with piss and broth. The sound was low, less a scream of pain and more a frantic prayer. It rose and fell, a wind of his very own.

  Across the church, the other men began to protest. Quiet! Stop crying, or I’ll come and make you stop. Even the disoriented soldiers in Heads grew agitated, cursing him with stuttering lisps.

  “Shhhh,” said Margarete, crouching by the soldier once again, caressing his hair, hushing him until he calmed.

  They left. An hour later he began again.

  This time they found him sitting up, his hands clenched in his hair. Spittle formed around his mouth; his limbs were tense as pipes. On his wrist, his pulse raced, faster than Lucius could count. Eyes pinched, lids white. The hum horrid, from somewhere deep within his throat.

  Zmudowski looked out over the ward. “You have to give him something, or another patient will kill him before the night is done.”

  Lucius rummaged through the medicine chest, found some hypodermic tablets of morphine sulfate, dissolved one, and drew it into a syringe. He approached, thumb in the plunger ring, ready to inject.

  The humming was constant, louder now. Lucius looked to Margarete, and she turned to the orderlies. “Hold him, tight,” she said.

  But the soldier didn’t even seem to register the needle. Half an hour later, they tried another dose of morphine. Then potassium bromide. Atropine. Chloral hydrate. Morphine again.

  Finally, after an hour, he began at last to nod off. It was close to two.

  At five, Margarete found Lucius in his quarters.

  She was sorry to wake him so soon, she said, but the soldier had begun again.

  The s
now swirled about them as they hurried together across the courtyard. Inside the church the man lay on his back, his chin contracted to his chest. He looked like someone who’d been bound there, raising his head to watch his torturers. His body was as rigid as the night before, his breath sharp and sudden, the veins of his neck and face so distended that, despite all medical knowledge to the contrary, Lucius feared that they could burst. A nostril was dark with clotted blood, and a stream of blood and mucus had dried against his cheek. “He was up at four,” said Margarete. “He tore his nasogastric tube out.” She placed her fingers on his wrist. “And his pulse, again…” Still the man stared past them to his devils in the air.

  Again, Lucius rummaged through the cabinet. The soldier seemed even worse now, his eyes wilder than earlier that night. Was the morphine making him delirious? But what were they to do? The army manuals recommended tranquilizing anguished soldiers into sleep. More chloral? Bromides? Ether? But this felt like veterinary medicine, and this case was different from the common soldier delirious with pain. But what then? Rub his chest with camphorated oil? Feed him more beef tea? Besides the morphine, the bromides and atropine and chloral, the only drug for nervous agitation was some Veronal they hadn’t used for months. He stopped and looked at the vial; half the pills had crumbled into dust. For seizures, but also a sedative, in fashion in Vienna with his mother’s set, though not—of course—his mother, who seemed spared of any nerves to calm. He hadn’t thought to use it for his soldiers, had no need for it, not with the industrial quantities of bromides provided by the Medical Service. He tapped out a pill, then two, and returned to the soldier’s side.

  Unable to open the man’s mouth, he parted his lips and crushed the tablet against his teeth. Fragments dribbled down his chin. Margarete, at his side, wiped them back up with her thumb and pushed them far inside the soldier’s cheek.

  The man remained motionless, his face red, his fists clenched so tightly that they would later find his nails had pierced his palms.

  From the high windows came a cobalt hint of dawn.

  “I think we should make rounds on the other patients, Doctor,” said Margarete. “Before he starts to scream again. If he is not sleeping in an hour, we’ll try something else.”

  Their ritual began again in Limbs. They were halfway down the second aisle, when a whistle from the south transept broke across the church.

  Hurrying, they found the soldier resting on his side, breathing softly. His eyes closed, but lightly now.

  “He spoke,” said Zmudowski.

  They crouched at his side. Again it came, a murmur, low and soft.

  “I can’t understand,” said Lucius.

  “Szomjas vagyok,” said Margarete. “It’s Hungarian: I’m thirsty.”

  They brought him a bowl of soup from the kitchen in the transept.

  The man let Margarete feed him, opening his mouth to meet each spoonful. He didn’t move his arms. He kept his eyes away from her, and from Lucius and Zmudowski, both crouching behind her, more than a little awestruck, as if a soldier eating soup was one of the most amazing sights that they had ever seen.

  The effect lasted until shortly after noon.

  Then: staring again, body rigid, save the slight rocking back and forth. The same incantatory hum. From his greatcoat pocket, Lucius took the bottle of Veronal and tapped out two more pills. This time he pushed them far back into the soldier’s cheek.

  Again, after an hour, they found him sitting, staring at his fingers in his lap.

  “Soldier?” asked Margarete.

  She touched his shoulder. He jumped but she didn’t withdraw her hand, and he didn’t move away. In Hungarian she asked a question Lucius couldn’t understand.

  His answer was whispered.

  She spoke again in halting Hungarian, her eyes darting quickly to Lucius’s, as if unable to contain the miracle of this awakening alone. And again the man answered, his voice slightly louder, occasionally catching on his words.

  At last, after what seemed like a very long time, she looked up. “This is Sergeant József Horváth, Doctor. Hungarian, from Budapest, he says. He thinks it is October, that he’s at his garrison in Hungary. That he is just waiting for his mother to come and get him. That’s all I could get. There is a stammer, as I think you can perceive.”

  A stammer. Lucius felt the old twist in his tongue, the metal of the apparatus.

  He looked back at her. “Did you ask him what happened before he came here?”

  Margarete leaned forward again and spoke.

  They waited a long time, but this time the soldier just stared past them into space.

  They began to schedule the doses twice a day, at the start of morning and evening rounds. They didn’t want to wait for the rocking or the moaning or the tension in his body to return. While once Lucius had worried that the man would die before the evacuation convoys reached them, now he feared the opposite: that they would take him back before he could be cured. Through the winter, to the second-level field hospitals with their prowling conscription officers. Or worse, to Vienna, to Budapest. To the specialists, with their electricity and Muck balls.

  This weeping, stuttering man, an orb of steel pushed down his throat.

  Outside the snow kept falling. The snow: soldier’s curse and soldier’s friend. Now, it only was the snow that gave them time.

  What is happening seems nothing less than a resurrection, he wrote that first night to Feuermann, rhetoric soaring once again, but needing to share his exhilaration. I’ve seen men come out of comas, and others gently thaw to life after being pulled from frozen rivers. But I’ve never seen such a transformation. Someone so unreachable return with just a little pill. Someone in such despair. Woundless, and yet seeming to bear, like some scapegoat, the misery felt by everyone else.

  But how? Looking down at his thumb, he could still feel the wet pills crumbling as he pushed them deep into Horváth’s cheek. He had no explanation for the strange magic he had just discovered. But most advances in medicine involved some serendipity. What was important now was that he watched, and studied, carefully, and learned.

  Like Lazarus, he wrote to Feuermann, then crossed this out, embarrassed by the grandiosity it implied. If Horváth was Lazarus, then who did that make him?

  But now, almost daily, Horváth was changing, awakening, gaining strength.

  He began to sit up on his own, to accept the spoons of broth without much prompting, to use the basin for his needs. Soon he was holding his own utensils. He stood. He stood and fell, but then he stood without falling. He took a step. On the first of March, Lucius watched as Margarete walked him, shuffling, up and down the aisle of the church, her arm in his. It’s like we’re going to be married, Margarete joked, and Lucius laughed, though inside he felt a twinge of jealousy, just a little bit. For Horváth, because of the way that Margarete held his arm, but also for Margarete. It was my pills, my Veronal, he wanted to remind her. He felt almost as if there were an unspoken competition for who could be the one to claim this victory. As if they were both falling a little bit in love with their silent visitor or, more, with the cure that they had wrought.

  And they weren’t alone. The others, who had once cursed Horváth for his screaming, had repented, and in their repentance, now showered him with hope. They filed past to look at his drawings, set him closest to the fire when the men played music, and held out their cigarettes so he could take a puff. When the sun made a miraculous appearance on the fourth, and some of the braver souls took off their shirts to take in the fleeting rays, and others, armless, heads in bandages, played soccer with a bundle of rags, they brought him out with them to serve as a goalpost. He said nothing, only stared up at the great beech tree or watched the playing men. But peaceful now, almost angelic, breath steaming from his chapped, pink lips.

  Yes, it was extraordinary, Lucius thought. The joys of diagnosis, the ecstasies of study: none of it could have prepared him for this. He wished not only Feuermann could see it, but also Zi
mmer, and Grieperkandl, and the rector, even his mother. See, he wished to say. Not your kind of doctor; this is the kind of doctor I will be. And Father, too, would understand the glory of the discovery. Yes, he could feel the presence of the old retired major in his polished boots, standing beside him in the churchyard as they had once stood in the mirrored hallway, the glorious wings of ostrich feathers mounted on their backs.

  And I was once content with being just a barber surgeon, a bone-cutter, a setter of broken limbs.

  They gave him paper, pencil, and asked him to draw. Slowly, with encouragement, and usually with Veronal, he began to sketch out shapes, fragments of landscapes, faces. He squinted, working with great effort; at times he licked his lips in concentration. By then the apple-like swelling in his face had gone away, leaving the finest craquelure of reddened vessels across his nose and cheeks and slightly puffy eyes. He must have been quite handsome, Lucius realized. There was something almost ethereal in the glow of his skin and the faint tint of plum around his eyes, and Lucius couldn’t help but feel another pang of envy as Margarete shaved his beard and combed his wavy hair, and dressed him in a clean pair of salvaged fatigues.

  Slowly, Lemnowice began to fill Horváth’s pages, like a memory album, and as the village had likely never seen a camera, perhaps the only one. The church. The soccer-playing men, the soldier in the bed beside him. A sketch of Margarete in three-quarter profile, then other sketches of her eyes and mouth and hands. A taller, looming figure in a greatcoat: Pan Doctor, said Margarete, though its features were indistinct. And then: more airships, the portraits of mysterious children, the eyeless dragons crawling everywhere across the page.

  “What are these little creatures?” Margarete asked Horváth one day toward the end of his second week of convalescence. But then, all of a sudden, Lucius, peering closer, knew.