by Daniel Mason
May.
Hills redolent of peat and mint and wild anise; the clouds cirrus, mosquitoes swarming around the courtyard doors. A mound of fresh soil behind the church. Were anyone to look, drops of candle wax still lay on the earth; the name in the ledger with the rest.
It was afternoon when the whistle rose above the nave. She: south transept, dirty bandage in her hands. He in the chancel. They both stood. Then the words, Horst. He’s back.
He felt a cold wind, heard a man screaming, saw the eyes.
She ran.
The rest happened so quickly that it was only afterward that Lucius could piece it all together. The rush of her robes as she leapt over the pallets. The soldiers’ turning faces. His own swift steps, his hand on her shoulder, her gaze flashing with warning as she tore herself away. Then out from the narthex, door slamming behind her as she burst into the light, leaving but the narrow arrow slit of day.
The lieutenant was in his saddle, finishing a cigarette, when he heard the wailing, caught the grey flash of her robes. A single batman at his side, also smoking. Wagon farther down the road. She was upon him before he could react. “Save us!” she screamed. She seized his leg, kissed him, his horse. “Save us! Save us! All dead!” In German, her accent slushed and strange.
“What is it?” said Horst. Horse snorting. Two steps, ears erect, flies lifting from its flanks.
But she didn’t answer. She wailed, clung to him, as if trying to pull him from his mount. Head now bare, wimple around her neck, her hair cropped short.
Her hair: even in the terror of the moment, behind the door, watching, Lucius noticed. Her hair, auburn, the whiteness of her neck.
Screaming. “Come, come! The Beast! The Pest! Oh, it has taken them, oh, God, oh, God in heaven, She has taken all.”
By then Horst had begun to look about uneasily. The empty courtyard, the silence, the wailing nurse with her shorn head.
“The Louse! The Louse!”
“Speak sense! I don’t understand.”
“Her! Her!”
“Calm yourself! What do you mean? Typhus?”
An inhuman sound rose from her throat. She clawed her face with fingers muddy from the horse’s flank. Now Horst stared down at her with unadorned revulsion. A flash of recognition, of other abandoned outposts, other maddened survivors of a plague.
She surged, grabbed him by his riding boots, clawed at his leg. Head teeming with lice, waving her robes rank with pestilence. For a moment it seemed as if she would drag him down, but Horst lifted his crop and struck.
Again she was upon him. “Don’t leave! Save us! Please! She’ll kill us all!”
Again the crop. Again she came, now he was ready with his boot. Twice. The crack loud, seeming to echo off the hills.
And that was it. Spray of red, shimmer of horse flank, and he was gone.
She was on her knees when Lucius reached her.
She held her face in both hands, rocked, tried to rise, but fell, then tried again to stand. Blood ran down her hands and into the sleeves of her habit. She didn’t see Lucius coming and fought him off at first.
“Margarete. It’s me.”
“Go, hide!”
For a second, Lucius froze, aware now of his incaution. He turned back. The road was empty. Clothes flapped on a clothesline. A pair of chickens had resumed their survey of the mud.
“He’s gone.” He looked at her. Blood was running freely. He pressed the wimple to the wound. “Inside, quickly. The bleed looks arterial.”
By then Zmudowski had arrived. “My God.”
“Hurry, go and get supplies,” said Lucius.
“Not in the church,” said Margarete. “Take me to the sacristy. I don’t want the pity of the men.”
Zmudowski looked to Lucius.
“Go,” said Lucius, “Hurry. Please.”
He led her, stumbling, through the gate and into the courtyard, and on into her room.
It was his first time inside, and he was struck by a sense of having suddenly entered into a private world, and one quite different from what he had imagined. It seemed almost too empty, too small, too sad even, to think that she passed so many hours there alone. Too human, he thought. As if he had stumbled upon her diary only to discover that she thought the same simple, common thoughts as everybody else. Bunches of dried wildflowers decorated the bare walls, her greatcoat hung from a peg, and a single shelf of rough-hewn pine held a blanket and a pile of folded garments. A stool sat at the priest’s desk, where several medical handbooks had been neatly stacked. Wounds and Dressings. Drill Regulations for Sanitary Officers. Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance. Her bed sat beneath the single window, and a piece of paper had been pinned to the wall under the sill. As he approached he saw it was one of Horváth’s sketches. Movement stopped; the world emptied of air. But it was just a country scene, a little Carpathian village nestled on a mountain slope. Valley of trees and pasture. On a road, a little girl was walking, a bundle of hay upon her back.
If Margarete sensed the tremor that passed through him, she said nothing. By then Zmudowski had arrived, and together they lay her down beneath the window light, placed a towel beneath her head. Lucius leaned over to examine her, slowly peeling off the wimple from where he had pressed it to her face. Slowly, he palpated her head, her neck, then, gently, her face, conscious of the intimacy of it all, how close she was. His first fear, that Horst had fractured her skull, was now replaced by a worry that she’d suffered damage to her eye. In this case, the manuals were firm. A globe which has been damaged should be trimmed off and the orbital vessels ligated. He had done this twice before, could do this, but he didn’t know if he could do it to her.
He looked. Her lids were now swollen shut. Lacerations circumscribed her eye, now black with dirt and blood. “Tetanus antitoxin,” he said to Zmudowski, who already had the needle prepared. Then, “Saline.”
Zmudowski handed him the bottle.
“Dressing.”
He cleaned her gently. Beneath her eye, a small artery was oozing swiftly, blood welling with each pass of the rinse.
“Sutures,” he said. Then to Margarete, “There is a laceration of a branch of the facial artery.” As if she were operating by his side.
“Yes, Doctor. That would explain the quantity of blood.” Her voice calmer than his.
He removed the dressing, placing the little finger of his left hand on the bleeding vessel, while he irrigated the wound again. Then with his right hand, he looped the suture around the vessel and tied it off. Again, he washed the wound. Dirt and dried blood ran over her cheeks and into her ears and hair. Again he irrigated, this time with antiseptic. Gently then, he began to palpate the area for fractures. He saw her wince.
“Cocaine.”
Zmudowski handed him the syringe.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“The bone seems stable, thank God. I am going to check the globe.”
Slowly he parted her lids. He had never seen her eyes so close. A burst vessel on the cornea had flooded the white with a vivid scarlet fan. Against this, the grey iris seemed rimmed in green, gold-flecked. He saw her pupil accommodating to take him in.
“Can you see?” he asked.
She could.
He irrigated her eye again, applied drops of atropine to prevent adhesion of the iris, and let it close. Again, the wound was bleeding, but more slowly now. He placed another dressing and pressed it gently, then held it there. For the first time since the whistle had risen across the nave, he allowed himself a deep, slow breath. Her good eye followed him. He looked again at Horváth’s drawing. Then back at Margarete. She looked so much smaller now that she wasn’t storming across the ward. Above, in the close crop of auburn, he could see the paleness of her scalp. “You planned this,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your hair. Shorn.” He felt self-conscious even noticing.
She smiled a little and then winced.
“May he feel Her crawling in
his stockings back to Stanislau,” she said.
“Amen,” Zmudowski said.
Lucius removed the dressing to check the bleed. It had stopped.
“Hypertonic dressing,” he said to Zmudowski.
“No,” said Margarete. “Close the wound.”
He turned back to her, a dripping square of cotton in his hand. “The wound is dirty. You know procedure. You rest and let the wound close itself. Unless you have invented a way of curing an infection. We can attempt secondary closure once the granulation tissue forms.”
“With respect, Doctor Lieutenant. I’ll be bed-bound for days.”
“And if you’re walking about, the wound won’t heal. We’ll manage. It will be good for you to rest.”
“But I don’t want to rest. I want you to stitch it up. It won’t get infected. I promise.”
“You promise!”
“Then I can do it in a mirror if you’d like.”
Lucius looked off, clenching his jaw as if to let her know his disapproval, then turned back and touched the wound again. He considered it…Already it looked pinker, cleaner, now that it was clear of all the dirt and blood. He lifted his hands up in surrender. Okay: you win.
He turned to Zmudowski. “Silkworm.”
Margarete slapped the bed. “Silkworm! God in heaven, Doctor! Can’t you spare something a little finer? This is my face. I am not going to need to march on it.”
Lucius pinched his lips to hide a smile. “Okay. Zmudowski: horsehair suture. Please.” He looked at Margarete again, trying to capture some of her levity. “Horsehair. From a Lipizzaner stallion in the service of His Royal Highness. Only the best.”
Zmudowski handed over the thread. “How about this one, Doctor Lieutenant? From the backside of His Majesty himself.”
Lucius laughed, thrilled at the irreverence, grateful, so grateful now. Margarete glowered. “I will remind Sergeant Zmudowski that bad jokes are a privilege of rank. If the doctor wishes to try to be funny, we must endure it. We need not join in.”
“Of course not, Dear Sister,” said Zmudowski. He looked to Lucius and, smiling, touched his temple. Still crazy, if just a little bit.
Lucius leaned closer. There were three main lacerations, one coursing through her eyebrow, and a longer, deeper cut from the bridge of her nose to the crest of her cheek. As he placed his first stitch, the flesh tented a little, then the needle appeared beyond. He pulled through, and tied and held as Zmudowski cut. Another and then a third. She was very still now, and he realized how close their faces were. He touched her chin to turn her gently, so as to check the symmetry of his work. He placed a fourth.
This time she grimaced.
“Cocaine,” said Lucius.
“No.” She lifted her hand to stop him. “You just went a little deep.” She paused, then smiled with the good half of her face. “Someone should talk to you someday about your technique.”
The fever began sometime in the early-morning hours.
He found her in the sacristy, coherent just enough to tell him what had happened. She had awakened sweating, shortly before dawn, wandered into the church and found a thermometer herself. She hadn’t told anyone, didn’t want to scare them. But back in her room, she’d fallen when she tried to stand.
She wore soldiers’ pajamas, damp with sweat. Her skin glazed, her forehead hot.
He cursed himself for listening to her when she’d asked him to close the wound. A fever could mean that an infection was spreading through the fascia, or worse, was already in the blood. If so, he would be powerless to stop it. Now he worried about more than just her eye.
“I should take the sutures out,” he said.
But she only grimaced and asked him for another blanket, for she had soaked through hers.
For the next week, he scarcely left her side.
He cut the sutures, saw the wound now weeping pus. Her fever rose, then fell, then rose again. She shook, cried out. Her head lolled; they had to take away her pillow, tie her arms, to keep her from rubbing her face against the bed. She rambled, calling out to soldiers long lost to them—Horváth, Rzedzian. Let me go! she told him. She had to care for them. They were so sick!
“Doctor!” she cried, when he was next to her. “Water! Water!” Then she spat it out. It was so hot there! She’d seen the child. Hurry, it would drown! So hot! So hot!
He sat and touched her hand, her forehead, praying for the fever to relent. Where did it come from, this fire? He’d cared for hundreds of febrile soldiers, but they had seemed so quiet; never had he known that it could be such misery as this. Indeed, disease itself now appeared to him as something different, unrelenting, deliberately cruel. Was this what they all went through? he wondered. All of my patients? But what a question! It felt like the petulant protest of a child, not someone who’d seen so much death. How could he have such a poor understanding of illness? But for all his time in medicine, he realized, suddenly, he had worked, somehow, impossibly, under the magical assumption that when he stepped away, the misery abated. When the patient was led out of the amphitheater, or the crowd of students moved along, or the soldiers were carried off into the darkness of their corner of the church, the misery abated. It must abate. The world couldn’t bear it. There must be some relief.
She shook. Cracks opened on her lips; for a reason unclear to him, she began to scratch herself with such intensity that it seemed as if the itching were a torment greater than the thickly weeping wound. Her breath grew short. When he couldn’t bear to watch her but couldn’t leave her either, he let his gaze shift from her body to her convulsing shadow on the wall. But there his gaze would settle on the little sketch by Horváth, the idyll now so horrible in the way it conjured up the soldier’s memory. For it was not too hard to see that Margarete’s illness was also of Lucius’s doing. If he had allowed Horváth to leave, there would have been no Anbinden, if no Anbinden, then Margarete would not have risked her life to drive off Horst.
He set up a makeshift bed on her floor. He couldn’t sleep. Her breath grew labored; her pulse was almost too swift to follow. Again he checked it against the ticking of his watch, keeping his fingers for a long time on her wrist. Now his mind teemed with possibilities. Could the spots on her mouth be signs of meningitis? Could tetanus explain the spasms? He had given her the serum; had it been spoiled? Gas gangrene of the face was almost unheard-of—and he wouldn’t expect it with such pus…but then again he’d seen a crackling jaw wound invade a soldier’s neck until he choked to death.
He gripped his hair, as if he could extirpate his thoughts. It was a curse to be a doctor, to know anything! In this at least his patients were lucky, oblivious to the horrors that could happen. Now the possibilities seemed endless. He hesitated over her, wanted to touch her swollen face, palpate it to assess how far the infection extended. But the pain this would cause! And what then would he do? A leg, yes. A leg one could amputate. A face…and now he saw the others rise before him, men whose wounds had rotted into their sinuses, their mouths. All dead.
Oh, but she couldn’t die! Not her, not like some common soldier…He stood and paced and ran his fingers through his hair, collided into a chair and sent it tumbling. Shaking, he bent over to pick it up. The thought was blasphemy. But he would sacrifice the ward, every last one of them. Let them all fall dead but leave her, please.
“Doctor.”
It was Zmudowski. Lucius hadn’t heard him enter.
“Of course, it’s time for rounds.”
The orderly looked kindly at him. There was nothing urgent, he told him. Two new patients had arrived, but they were stable; for now, the others could manage things alone. “Pan Doctor has been up all night. You need to rest.”
He couldn’t rest. He paced the church, then went outside. But now, he moved as if through poison. The air was rank and brown, everything he saw seemed cursed. He wanted to go into the little huts and ask the villagers for their icons, beg them to sit vigil with him. In the road, an old woman passed; surely she had w
atched disease take someone she loved? He wanted to ask her how she had done it, if she had blamed herself.
She pulled a horse cart through the mud. He let her pass, huge clods rising on the wheel, then dropping to the earth. The mud…His sole mercy was the mud, the mire in the passes. That there weren’t others to keep him from Margarete. He hurried back.
It was only when it came time for bathing that he left again. He could touch her forehead, auscultate her lungs, he could bear the weight of her breast against his hand as he listened to her heart. But bathe her as she had bathed the soldiers? When he had once touched the rim of his canteen just to feel where she had pressed her lips? No: once in her ravings, her shirt had lifted to reveal her navel, her iliac crest, a little curl of hair above the symphysis, and Lucius had frozen, unable to look away. No, the thoughts of undressing her, the complex mix of fear and yearning, were too much for him to bear.
But she was burning up. Better Zmudowski, uxorious philatelist, responsible paterfamilias. Lucius stood outside the door and watched the sparrows, listening to the slosh of water, the squish of sponge.
Day three: the fever broke. The wound looked better, less purulent, its color less exuberant. He felt himself buoyed, only to touch her head two hours later and sink. The mercury reached the highest notches on the glass. This was worse, he thought—it meant the infection was within, unseen, a witch’s hex.
At night, he dreamed of elixirs, of magical and blessed pills, which when swallowed might clear the bacillus from her blood. She groaned and woke him. She was so hot! He stripped her bed. She was so cold! She shook.
And if she died? he wondered, her body giving up its heat at last? Imagining himself rising, the world now ruined, the spheres shattering as they strayed off course. He now understood why one might die for someone else. It wasn’t mercy; it was torture to remain.
But then she didn’t die. On the morning of the seventh day, the fever broke again. She lay with one eye sparkling, like someone tumbled by a wave. Scalp wet, cheeks red, goose pimples on her skin.