by Daniel Mason
There in the station, he asked for the next train to Nadworna.
The agent was a perspiring little man with a flat, broken nose and two missing bottom teeth. There were no trains to Nadworna, he said. All rolling stock had been diverted to supply the army at Sloboda Rungurska. If he needed to get to Nadworna, he would have to first go up to Stanislau, then take a second train south.
“Stanislau?” Lucius felt his heart sink. Stanislau was another seventy kilometers to the north. He felt like someone fighting a retreating tide, carried farther and farther away each time he tried to take a step. “There is nothing direct?” he said. “I’m a doctor, my hospital is there.”
“You could be the Kaiser,” said the man, “and I still couldn’t get you a train.”
He billeted in a flea-infested boardinghouse next to the station, its stairways bustling with arrivals and departures. Alone in his room, he stood before a cracked and darkened mirror that overhung the washbasin. At first, he almost didn’t recognize himself; his face was bruised and dirty, and flecks of dried blood crusted his ear and hair. There was a hole in the shoulder of his shirt where the bullet grazed him. Yes, shot by Cossacks, Father, he thought, mustering whatever humor he could manage. Just above it, he could see the mark of Margarete’s teeth where she had bitten him. He touched it. My two scars, he thought.
He closed his eyes. Even his skin contained the memory of her. He could imagine her touch as she listened to his story. Shot by Cossacks. She, like his father, would be proud.
A fissured bar of soap sat on the wash table, and he washed his face and hair and scrubbed the shirt until the blood had faded to something vague and nondescript.
The next day’s train to Stanislau was in the afternoon, but it was canceled so they could move more soldiers south. He was told to return the following day. Again, he spent the night in the boardinghouse, sleepless now, consumed by worries. When he arrived at the station a second time, he was so desperate that he had decided that he would walk straight to Nadworna along the railroad, and from there to Lemnowice. He could just follow the rails, he told himself; Austria would do anything to keep the rails, though by that same token, the Russians would do anything to take them. But he couldn’t wait any longer. In a dry goods shop he purchased another rucksack, and from a nearly empty bakery, the last pair of crumbling biscuits, at an exorbitant price.
To his surprise, however, the next day at the station, the train to Stanislau was scheduled to depart as planned.
He made the trip standing in a car that had been stripped of all its seats. And in Stanislau, he learned the line south to Nadworna was still open, the next train scheduled to depart the following morning. Now he began to grow hopeful again. In a day, he told himself, he would be with Margarete—a day was all he had to wait. He stayed that night in another boardinghouse near the train station, sleepless, thoughts of her coalescing into a physical longing so acute that he at last abandoned himself to it, closing his eyes and letting the memory of the morning wash over him, her goose-bumped skin, the coolness of her wet breasts against his chest. In the early hours, his room too small for his pacing, he rose early and walked back and forth across the station until the stationmaster arrived. But he wasn’t the only one waiting, and when at last he’d managed to push his way to the front of the crowd, the man asked to see his orders, of which nothing had been said the day before.
Lucius told him this.
“If you don’t have orders, I can’t let you on.” The man picked his nose with a greasy finger. “Space is reserved for deploying soldiers.”
“I am deploying,” Lucius said.
“Then show me your orders.”
“But I don’t have specific orders. I told them yesterday, they said nothing. I’m a doctor. I have to get back to my hospital.”
“And I told you that you need orders. You’re a doctor? Medical Office. Kazimierzowska Street, across town. The train is delayed anyway; if you hurry, you’ll catch it when it leaves this afternoon.” And he turned back to the crowd.
Outside the station, Lucius looked futilely for a fiacre. Of course: all horses were on the front. So he walked through the old town, breaking at times into a trot, asking for directions along the way. Stanislau was the first city of any size that he had been in since deployment, and alongside his growing crescendo of panic, he found himself disoriented by its mass, the solidity of the apartments, the great paved square.
He, child of the Imperial City: what had the mountains done?
Kazimierzowska was a long street that led out of town. He had walked nearly twenty minutes before he began to doubt his directions. He stopped a Jewish grocer in a kaftan who was pushing his cart. The man nodded with recognition when Lucius asked for the district medical office. But it wasn’t on Kazimierzowska Street, it was on Gołuchowskiego Street. He sent his son to lead Lucius, a little boy with long payess who discharged his duty with great solemnity, saluting Lucius when they reached the door.
The building was at the edge of a barracks stretching for several blocks. He was sent to three different offices until he finally found himself before the right man, a surgeon major named Karłowicz with a long forehead and eyeglasses scarcely larger than his eyes. He listened thoughtfully as Lucius told him how he had been separated from his hospital, how he needed to get back. To Lucius’s relief, the man agreed this was “important.” If he could just have a minute…Then he rose and left Lucius alone.
On the wall was a map, with the locations of field hospitals and a schematic for evacuation that must have been planned by someone extraordinarily optimistic about the constraints of geography: the road from Lemnowice to the Hungarian interior ran straight over the massif, as if there weren’t any mountains there at all. He thought how the soldiers, with their dark humor, would have laughed at this. But the map also clearly showed the advancing Russian salient, and none of it seemed so funny now.
Outside it had begun to rain.
The door creaked behind him. Karłowicz. Again, he sat.
“Lebowice has been evacuated,” he said.
“Lemnowice,” said Lucius.
“Yes, of course, the same. We received the updates yesterday. With the fall of Kolomea, they have evacuated all hospitals in the sector. They’ve been completely overrun.”
Lucius felt his thoughts spin out, unable to absorb the news. He looked back at the map as if in supplication. The fall of Kolomea? It couldn’t be—he’d been there two days before.
“Evacuated,” he repeated, his voice breaking, but trying to sound calm. Visions now: the evacuees, the distant fires, the shouts and flashing sabers of the Cossack advance. “You’re certain? But you would know if the hospital had been captured before they got the personnel out, right?”
“I can’t speak to every little field station,” said Karlowicz. “The district was evacuated. That’s all they tell me.”
“But do you know where they were taken?”
“The patients?” Karłowicz looked through his papers. He shook his head. Perhaps south, he said, truly trying to sound helpful. Back over the passes. Or north, to Stryj or Lemberg. Or west, to Munkács. “Not east, I’d think.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant this in jest.
“And what about the personnel? The nurses.”
The man looked up, a quizzical expression on his face. “Do I know where the nurses are?” He laughed. “The High Command can’t find the Fourth Army.”
“Please,” said Lucius, not acknowledging the joke, just desperate now.
Karłowicz threw up his hands. “Look, if anyone knows about individual medical personnel, it would be the office of the regional commander of your Army Group. In your case, Kolomea.”
“But I thought Kolomea fell,” said Lucius.
Karłowicz paused, seeing the error. “We’ve been through this. I’ve told you what I know…” But now Lucius must have looked so miserable that Karłowicz stopped. “Listen,” he said. “Do you know at least which regiment she was assigned to?”
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Lucius paused. Until then he had spoken in generalities. Personnel. The nurses. But Karłowicz must have understood.
He saw no use to hide now. “She is a volunteer, with a religious order.”
“A religious order? Oh!” Karłowicz smiled briefly at the smell of scandal. He removed his glasses and rubbed his palm over his face before replacing them. “Then no one knows, my friend. Check with the Pope.”
He pushed a document forward.
Lucius didn’t touch it. “What’s that?” he said.
“Your redeployment.”
Lucius shook his head. “I’m sorry…I can’t. Not yet. I must get back there.” His voice had risen. “I must find them. I said I would return.”
Now Karłowicz replaced his glasses. “She must be quite pretty, Lieutenant. But I said the hospital is gone. Kaputt. You’ve been redeployed. Your transport to Przemyśl leaves this evening. There you will be assigned to an evacuation train. Be grateful—we could have sent you to the front.”
13.
He became, then, two men.
In Przemyśl, given his months of service, he was promoted to Oberarzt, Chief Physician, of a ten-car ambulance train. He was given a new uniform and saber, a raise in salary, and the same copy of the drill book he had been given in Graz, two years before. Under his command were two assistant physicians, three orderlies, and ten lay nurses.
According to the papers he had been ceremoniously provided, the train was a state-of-the-art evacuation hospital converted to care for soldiers with advanced injuries. He had seen enough of the war to be skeptical, but even skepticism didn’t prepare him for the moment, on the day of his departure, when the district medical officer led him across the railyards. There were no windows; half the doors were missing. Were it not for the giant red crosses painted on the siding, he would have thought she was destined for scrap. In the hollowed-out carriages, the “wards” consisted of rows of double-bunked litters hanging on springs from the ceiling. The supplies, in dented metal cabinets, were as scant as in Lemnowice; rat droppings littered the floors of the latrine. His bunk, behind the engine, consisted of a horsehair mattress that had begun to spill its stuffing. There was a ceramic basin, no mirror, and an abandoned shaving razor that the district medical officer pocketed with embarrassment. The closet opened only with a kick.
In the beginning, they were based out of Kraków, leaving weekly for distant cities, where they picked up patients who had been collected from casualty clearing stations along the Galician front. Slowly, screeching, the train moved through southern Poland, past abandoned fields and sprawling army camps. The light sockets were all empty, and when night came, the train was lit by kerosene lamps, until a jolt sent one crashing into a stack of bedsheets. From then they rode in darkness, the ceiling flickering with the light of distant fires. There was no oil for the wheels, which screeched so loudly they could hardly hear each other talk. His assistants were a Moravian village dentist and an overeager medical student from Vienna who had just finished his fifth semester and had so little understanding of practical medicine that Lucius couldn’t let him out of his sight.
Like me, once, he thought, and were he not so terrified of what the young man would do, he might have stopped to marvel at how far he himself had come.
At times, hurrying through the swaying wagons, Lucius caught a glimpse of the mountains to the south. But while moving, there was gratefully little time to lose himself to memories. There was no order; he attended to whoever screamed the loudest or grabbed him as he passed. Many patients had been only minimally stabilized in the field. Bones had not been set, tourniquets left on for days. Back at Lemnowice, Margarete had taught him to be conservative with his amputations—now he removed many fractured joints just to spare the soldiers the agony of the constant jostling. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like medicine. Butchery, again. Carver of flesh, sawyer of bone.
After the amputations, he ordered the nurses to take the limbs to a separate carriage, where—he told the soldiers—they would be incinerated in accordance with a solemn protocol. But there was no protocol, no separate carriage for limbs. There wasn’t even a carriage for the dead. If they were near a station, they handed the bodies over, but if not, they buried them by the track.
This was the first man. The second had realized something only moments after he had been given his assignment: trains meant travel, and travel meant new stations, new churches, new garrisons, new hospitals, where he could look for Margarete.
He had begun at their very first stop, in a garrison hospital outside Przemyśl. Walking through the crowded wards, he had found his way to the head nurse to tell her the story of the evacuation and ask whether she had met anyone of Margarete’s description. A tall woman, with freckled cheeks and wisps of red hair emerging beneath a starched cornette, she looked at him inquisitively, unaccustomed to such a query. Yes, people came and went, she said. But she knew no one with that story, though he was welcome to ask the other nurses. He did. None of them had met her either, nor had the nurses at the No. 113 Garrison Hospital in Tarnów, nor the Sisters of Mercy at the Army Hospital for Officers in Rzeszów, nor the Red Cross Hospital in Jarosław…
Still, he wouldn’t be deterred. In late July, as the Russian offensive under General Brusilov surged through the mountains, he was in Brünn, far behind the lines, searching the vast wards of hospital pavilions set up in the cornfields. By then he had come to look not only for Margarete, but also Zmudowski, Krajniak, even Schwarz with his pockets full of ammonites, or any other of the thirty, forty patients he could remember from his last days at the church. It was madness, he knew; there were hundreds of thousands—millions, some said—of Imperial and Royal troops deployed across the Eastern Front, and he was looking for a common name like Schwarz. But still it didn’t deter him; with Lemnowice behind the lines, he had no choice. He felt at times as if he belonged among the crowds of kerchiefed women who haunted the stations with portraits of their sons and names painted on placards, endlessly imploring anyone who met their eyes if they had seen their Franz, their David. Like the three old peasants in the Nagybocskó station. Oh, how quickly he’d dismissed their vigil then! But now he understood; he lived for each new stop.
The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he made his way up driveways to baroque châteaus where ballrooms had been converted into rehabilitation wards. He visited converted schoolhouses and sawmills in frontier towns with geese wandering across the yards. Autumn rain thrumming on the tin rooftops, he paced through typhus wards in Kovel, peered over the high, coffin-like walls of cholera beds, and stopped the nurses as they recorded fever curves in the malaria pavilions. While once he hadn’t cared for rank, now he wielded it to press lazy clerks to search their books. In September, as the Russian Ninth took Stanislau, he was back in Kraków, on cargo ships converted into floating hospitals on the Vistula. He found Zmudowski’s old address through the post office, only to learn from neighbors that his wife and daughter had gone to live with family far away.
In November, he was at a commandeered cathedral hospital in Zamość, when news came that the Emperor had died. It was a grey winter morning, and Lucius stood in the crowd of patients as they listened to the announcement. It was almost inconceivable; Franz Josef had ruled for seven decades, and not a single person present had been born outside his reign. There was a sense, almost palpable, that this was the end, not only of his reign but also of the monarchy, and, perhaps, the war. But then lunch came, and the nursing sisters swept the patients back into formation. Far off, in Vienna, another man would be ascending to the throne.
Lucius registered almost none of this. By the time the Imperial and Royal body reached its catafalque inside the Capuchin Crypt, delivered by decorated horses in silent rubber shoes, he was searching again.
Still no one knew Margarete. In the registers of nursing sisters, he found Renaldas and Anastasias, Elizabeths and Lieselottes, Paolas, Zenias, Hildegardes, Iannas, Anets and Evas, Kunigundes, Katas, Livias, Magda
lenas, Rekas, and Matilds. In Tarnów, he found a Margarete, but she turned out to be a lay sister in her early seventies, who reddened when the “gentleman” was presented by the chief nurse. Another Margarete, in Kraków, impossibly plump in that time of hunger, tapped her large fingers together excitedly and asked if he had a wife. There once had been a Margarete in Jarosław, but she had died of septicemia long before the fall of Kolomea, while Sister Margarete at the Lemberg garrison hospital had just returned to a dying mother in Berlin.
Then, one day, in Rzeszów, in December, at a converted leprosarium, a Sister of Mercy smiled at him in recognition. She had bright blue eyes and a happy little upturned nose. Didn’t he remember her? He’d asked her the same questions at the hospital in Stryj, where she had been working back in August on the infection wards.
He apologized, blushing. But she had since thought of him, she said; she wished that she could help. Perhaps if he knew which Catherine this Sister Margarete was devoted to? There were, after all, several, all worthy of devotion. Perhaps the Italian Catherines of Bologna or Siena? Or Saint Catherine of Sweden? Or, the most magnificent Saint Catherine of Alexandra, the Great Martyr of the Wheel?
He didn’t know. But wait…“The one who ate the scabs of the afflicted,” he said. The words returning to him from that night he first arrived in Lemnowice.
The Rzeszów sister brightened. “That would be Saint Catherine of Siena,” she said piously. “May we all be so devoted.” But she knew of no such convent in Poland. She wasn’t from Friuli or Tyrol? Are you sure, Herr Doktor, she was telling you the truth?
“Perhaps Friuli, or Tyrol,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment, with an expression that might have been curiosity or might have been compassion. “Ask at the diocese in Kraków,” she told him. “Perhaps they can help.”