The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

“Drawings,” Lucius said, miserably.

  “Drawings. He’s not well enough to fight, but he’s well enough to draw.”

  Lucius said, “It’s treatment…it…distracts him. Otherwise I waste morphine on him. I let him draw because it distracts him. It keeps him from disturbing the other men.”

  “He must not be very disturbing if you’ve kept him for a month,” said Horst. Now he let the papers fall. “You understand there are punishments for desertion.”

  “This man is not a deserter, sir.”

  The lieutenant released his boot, and Horváth broke into a spasm of gasping. Horst turned to his guards. “Anbinden.”

  Lucius looked to Margarete, but she was still as stone. “Lieutenant,” he said, taking a step closer. “I take full responsibility for this patient. I…I understand the principles of medicine in war. Were there a coward among these men I would happily punish him myself. But this man is sick. He has no visible wound, I know, but he is very sick. He sees…spirits. Hears them speaking to him.”

  “Then his spirits can tell him how to hold a rifle, how to behave.”

  The batman yanked Horváth to his feet. He began to moan, that same cry as when he had first arrived. There was a foul smell, and looking down at Horváth’s trousers, Lucius realized to his horror that Horváth had defecated. Horst had also noticed, and his lip curled with disdain.

  “Lieutenant,” Lucius begged. “He’s terrified. Please. It is twenty below zero. It’s too cold.”

  Horst turned back to the batmen. “The doctor, who spends his days in this nice warm church, worries it’s too cold!”

  Lucius was frantic now. “I take full responsibility. Send him before a medical review board. If I am wrong, I will take whatever disciplinary measures…”

  But Horst wasn’t listening. He turned and walked toward the courtyard exit. His guards followed, Horváth struggling in their hands, the moans growing louder. Throughout the church, many of the patients were watching. “Back to your beds,” said Lucius, weakly, but bereft of any authority now.

  Outside, in the courtyard, the men stopped at the beech tree. They stripped Horváth of his clothing, first his shirt, pulling it over his head without unbuttoning it, then yanking down his soiled trousers. Shit streaked his trembling legs. The soldiers made a sound of disgust and tried to pull the trousers off, but the cuffs got stuck over his ankles, and Horváth tumbled facedown into the snow. They roughly yanked each pant leg off, then threw the trousers into a heap and heaved him up. They tied his hands behind his back and bound him to the tree. Now the moans became words. “Kalt!” he shouted, in heavily accented German. “Cold. Cold! Oh! It’s so cold!” He struggled against the rope. Lucius looked back at the church. Patients were gathering at the door. Lucius started toward the struggling man, then turned. Then back again. There are forty of us, three of them, he thought. The church is full of weapons. We could overwhelm them.

  But no one moved.

  “Close the door,” he told Margarete in Polish. “They don’t need to see.”

  She started across the yard, but Horst motioned for one of the guards to stop her. “Let them watch,” he said. “Let them see what the punishment for desertion is.”

  “Close the door, Sister!” Lucius said, his voice beginning to crack.

  “If you touch the door, Sister,” said Horst, “I will need to take another soldier, until the lesson’s learned.” She didn’t seem to understand the German, but the guard now stood between her and the door. Lucius turned. Five paces away Horváth was struggling. Deep bruises in the shape of a boot could be seen on his belly, a shoe tread on his neck.

  As he struggled against the ropes, violet lines appeared on his shoulders. He began to bleed. The blood turned pink as it froze, but he seemed oblivious of it. “Cold! So cold!” he shouted. He yelled at Lucius now. There was something particularly horrible in how he had chosen German, as if, despite his illness, he was making some final attempt to be understood. “Kalt! Kalt! Oh! Oh, oh! My feet!”

  “He doesn’t sound so crazy now,” said Horst, and one of his guards laughed.

  Lucius looked wildly between Horváth and his patients in the doorway. He knew what they were thinking. You chose to keep him here. This is your fault, your arrogance, your greed…He lunged forward. The guards restrained him. Again he tried to break loose. He knew they were stronger, but it didn’t matter. He wanted to have Horváth see him struggling, to have all his patients see. To prove to them that he had done what he thought best.

  To turn back time.

  But as the guards fought Lucius, hooking elbows, dragging him down, Horváth wouldn’t drop his eyes. He tried to speak but now his lips were trembling too violently to form the words. He made a strange twisting motion as if he were attempting to free his feet from where they had frozen to the ground. The skin began to tear, but he didn’t seem to feel it. Spit froze to his lips, his muscles shook, and his penis had shrunken into his pubic hair. His pale skin turned yellow, then blotched with white and pink, and then the pink began to retreat to pallor once again. The entire scene seemed leached of any color, the church walls clad in ice, the courtyard bare, even the tree trunk dusted white with snow, as Horváth vanished into it, leaving only a pale pink froth at his feet.

  His voice grew quieter, just a hum. Still, he wouldn’t drop his eyes.

  You did this.

  The eyes: Lucius had the horrible thought that the eyes would freeze in place. Again, he begged Horst to cut the ropes. He didn’t know how long Horst wished to punish him, but already they were passing the point at which corporal punishment became an execution. A final anesthesia would be setting in. The pain was gone, the damage by now was probably irreversible. The sounds that came from his patient were nothing Lucius had ever heard, thrown up by some monster of physiology, the winter air on vocal cords, a spasm of a palate, he didn’t know.

  She told you that I asked to leave.

  The gaze. Mama, Haza. Home.

  At last Horváth closed his eyes, very slowly, as if even his eyelids had grown stiff. Across his body, his shivering muscles slowed and knotted up. He was still alive—steam lolled from his mouth. But his head hung down, and his skin gave an unearthly alabaster sheen. He looked impossibly peaceful. Horst told his men to untie him. The rope had frozen to his skin, and as they pulled it off, it tore long red strips. Horváth fell, his feet still in place, frozen to the ground. One of the soldiers struggled to detach them, and when he couldn’t, he kicked them free with a sickening crunch.

  Horst motioned to Zmudowski that he could bring Horváth inside. To Lucius, loudly, so that all could hear, he said, “Doktor, there are thousands of courageous soldiers risking their lives for you and your family. We will not tolerate our medical staff abetting deserters. The next time we come to the hospital, we will execute all malingerers, all of them. You will be court-martialed and your nurse forever banned.”

  Inside, Virág was still waiting silently by the door, blanket draped over his shoulders. Lucius had almost forgotten him. Now, he followed him out to the wagon before the church doors, as if making one final, ineffective attempt to protect this other man. What would they do to him? Lucius wanted to ask, but now he feared that any word he uttered would only worsen Virág’s fate.

  The driver removed the heavy blankets and the leather pads used to keep the horses’ eyes from freezing. Then Horst mounted his horse, and the batmen climbed aboard the wagon, and Lucius was left alone.

  9.

  He remained out in the cold for a very long time.

  In the distance, he watched the convoy descend the road, disappearing behind the houses before it reappeared again, a tiny black shape that vanished at last within the drifts.

  A southern wind was beginning to stir, whipping the tops of the pine trees. Still he waited. He waited until his hands ached and the tears were frozen in the corners of his eyes, and the burning cold had risen up his feet and into the bones of his legs, and he began to wonder if, by sheer will, he too
could wait beneath the beech until it all went numb.

  Inside, the warmth of the church drew blood so swiftly to his head that he had to brace himself against the door.

  Margarete was crouching by Horváth’s pallet. She must have sensed Lucius approach. She turned.

  “I don’t think you should come closer, Doctor,” she said.

  He took another step, but she rose to block him, her voice firmer. “Pan Doctor, you should rest. You must protect yourself.”

  Then he tried to force past her, but she lifted up her arms to stop him. “Doctor, I don’t think that you should see.”

  József Horváth remained in Lemnowice for another week.

  Margarete moved him to the chancel and hung a sheet around him. Lucius wanted to go to him, to apologize, to explain that he’d been powerless to stop Horst and his men. But Margarete prevented him. Now she was blunt. It was no longer for Lucius’s sake, she said. Horváth thought Lucius had done this to him. “That you wouldn’t let him leave. That you kept him. That you brought Horst.”

  “That I brought Horst?” Lucius protested. But it was the other accusations he couldn’t repeat. That you kept him. That you wouldn’t let him leave. He looked again at her, her face now drawn and tired. But the reasons! he wished to say. The cold evacuation lorry, the Muck balls, the fact that they had come so close to cure. Oh, but who was he arguing with? “I thought…” He tried again. “I didn’t know that this would happen. I thought that it was best…”

  “I know, Pan Doctor. I know you thought that it was best.”

  He waited, trying to decipher the intent behind her words. He expected that she would remind him of what she had said just days before. You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope. That she would tell him what was now so clear to him, that in his hubris, in some fantasy about shared childhood memories of silly little salamanders, he had committed one of the great sins of medicine, choosing to work a miracle over the mundane duty not to harm.

  But he heard no blame, only compassion.

  He wrung his hands, began again. “Please,” he said. “Please, let me see him. I will do anything to…”

  Again he stopped. To what? Atone? He knew, and Margarete knew, and Horváth, or what remained of Horváth, knew. Barring a miracle, another miracle, it was too late.

  Alone, Margarete amputated both of Horváth’s feet because of frostbite, and then his left leg when a wound infection spread above his knee. As for his mind, after a day Horváth was back to where he’d been before he arrived in the wheelbarrow. He didn’t eat. Margarete had to catheterize his bladder, perform enemas when he retained his stool. Behind the curtain, she spent hours with him, murmuring her soft incantations as she’d done before. Indeed, it seemed as if she rarely left him. One night, sick with remorse, Lucius had returned to the church to find that in exhaustion she had fallen asleep by Horváth’s pallet. Watching her—sitting on the floor, knees to one side, habit pooling, shoulders slumped, her head resting in her hand—he had wished that he could take her place. It wasn’t only his desire for repentance, he realized. He felt as if he were an intruder on a secret, a rite he didn’t understand. He wanted to share what she shared, not only with Horváth, but—and this appeared to him now with such clarity—all their patients. Something that he, with his distance, his learning, his diagnoses and orders, could never know. He had not forgotten that in Horváth’s drawings, somewhere, were the portraits of Margarete, while the sketch of the doctor was a looming, shadowed figure. As if Horváth had already known.

  Alone, outside, at dawn, Lucius dug up the snow around the tree. But no matter how deep he dug, he saw the stain, pink and glistening, like the ice of a fishmonger’s stall.

  When the next ambulance detail came to Lemnowice, they wrapped Horváth in blankets and carried him out of the church on a stretcher. The detail was heading north, away from Horváth’s home in Hungary, but they couldn’t wait much longer. His pulse had become irregular; they worried that another infection secondary to his wound had spread. Perhaps, at a larger hospital, they could help him, Margarete said, and Lucius nodded. Now, he had little hope that Horváth would survive the journey through the snow, but he would not disagree with her again.

  Indifferent to all this came April.

  Beams of light burst across the nave as one snowdrift after another slid from the roof. The light, the smell, the melting hills brought back his memories of the Scarcity, the foraging for potherbs in the hills. But by virtue of a supply oversight no one was eager to correct, they found themselves well-stocked with food.

  Still, he waited, hopeful that he might resume his excursions with Margarete. If only he could walk with her again, return to the ruins of the watchtower, or sit in the forest’s slanting light and hear her songs. Perhaps then, and there, they could begin to rebuild what he’d destroyed.

  But the new soldiers had begun to come.

  Like the songbirds, like the snowmelt, like the march of wildflowers, they seemed to follow spring.

  The first came in the middle of the month, following a brief skirmish in the valley of the Pruth. A nameless, rail-thin, red-haired man found wandering in a tunic but no trousers, eyes empty, grinding his teeth.

  From Uzhok Pass: a cook who left his tent at night to urinate and collided with the bayoneted belly of a village girl hanged for alleged spying. Pásztor was his name: Hungarian, a once-dapper moustache now disappearing beneath an unshaven beard. Incontinent of bowel and bladder, fingers constantly fretting his forehead as if there were still something sticking to his brow.

  From Stanislau: an infantryman named Korsak, spine arched, pigeon-toed since being thrown by a land mine, neck twisted despite all efforts to keep it straight.

  And on. Ungvár: right leg severed by a derailed train car, now unable to move his left. Gesher, from Turka, who had discovered a group of rotting bodies in a granary, tasting flesh each time he ate. Wechsler, Kolmar, blind and deaf, but not.

  He thought of what Berman and Brosz had told him about the Western Front. An epidemic, something driven up from Flemish soil, now come east.

  Just weeks before, he thought, and they would have fascinated him, these mysteries. But the specter of Horváth hung over everything. Now he could only think of what Horst would do if he found more of these soldiers without wounds.

  He tried Veronal.

  He tried Veronal, chloral hydrate, morphine. He tried potassium bromide to calm them and oral cocaine hydrochloride to wake them up. He tried atropine until they were delirious, adrenalin chloride when they were slow. He massaged twisted arms with whale oil, only to watch the loosened muscles seize back up. He tried pleading, tried walking them, moving the jaws of those who didn’t eat. He read to them, whispered, sang. Tried sunshine and cold. Gave them double rations, threatened to withhold their food. Urged them to remember wives and children, sweethearts, parents. Warned them of what would happen if the recruiters came.

  But nothing worked. There was no sense to the disease, he thought, no pattern in the damage to their nerves. Now he began to doubt everything. Had he even helped Horváth at all? Had the man’s recovery all been Margarete’s doing? Or did most wounds, whether of the mind or body, just heal up on their own?

  Margarete, too, had changed. She moved slowly now, always watching the door. At mealtimes, they tried in starts to speak, but she broke off with the slightest sound. Twice, falsely alerted, they hurried to the door, certain that Horst had returned. But each time, as they peered out through the arrow slit, there was nothing but the empty street.

  And then there were others, soldiers who could have fought again but now refused.

  Their war was over, they told him with finality. They had once been patriots, but all reasons for their patriotism had long been lost.

  Why should I shed blood for Austria? the Czech and Polish and Hungarian and Romanian and Ruthenian soldiers asked him. When Austria sends us into battle in front of her own?

  With shoes made of cardboard!

&nb
sp; And two men for every gun!

  “They will hang you for desertion,” Lucius told them.

  Ha! Then let them come!

  He stood with Margarete outside the sacristy. Late April. The days now warm.

  She had brought him there so that they could be alone. “Zeller, the new boy from the dragoons, said that conscription details have been canvassing the hospitals up and down the line,” she said. “He was in Delatyn, saw them hanging men for desertion. I think it will only be a matter of time.”

  She paused. “Have you thought of what you’ll do when they return?”

  For the past month, Lucius had thought of nothing else. Now slowly he spoke the words for the first time. “With the nervous cases? I don’t think I have a choice. It’s too warm for Anbinden, but not for hanging. At least with redeployment the soldiers will stand a chance.”

  Nearby, a knot of sparrows was bickering over seeds liberated from the spring melt. She watched them, eyes drifting to a shivering of something passing in the grass. “Yes,” she said, at last. “Yes, I understand.”

  He searched her face. “You don’t seem convinced.”

  She now spoke slowly. “I think that this time you’ve done everything you can, to get them well, or home.” Then she paused. Her eyes were dark with sleeplessness, the slight plumpness of her face now gone. The wimple, which she had always worn so crisply pressed, was rumpled and uneven. Yet all about them, in the courtyard, were birds and bright green leaves and flowers, so much life.

  When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It was softer now, almost as if offering a valediction. “Doctor, you know that your duty is to return men to the front. That is your oath. Patch and send. Know that I understand this.”

  He turned to face her. “And what does that mean?”

  “Just that. Because I think, for the first time, our oaths are different. That is all.”