The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  Now Adelajda didn’t drop her gaze from him. “No. We were married in Vienna in 1916, but the new Austrian Republic asked us to resubmit our marriage license prior to traveling. But they bungled it; Poles love stories about how the Austrians bungle things. This is our son. His name is Paweł Krzelewski: that is your family name, right? I saw it on your ticket. And my maiden name was Bartowska, like it says on mine. We are going to Jarosław to visit my aunt, Vanda Cenek. She is a war widow; her husband died fighting for Polish independence in the Pripet, a great patriot. We plan to spend a month with her at a small farm belonging to my cousin. It is too hot in the city for our child, who, we must remind them, is very sick.”

  “My ticket says my destination is Lwów.”

  “Your ticket says your destination is Lwów because the ticket office in the Nordbahnhof bungled it. You will disembark at Jarosław with me, to visit my aunt.”

  “But…,” Lucius began, as the carriage door slid open.

  “Papers,” said a young man in an unmarked uniform.

  Adelajda put her free hand on Lucius’s arm.

  Lucius removed his passport and ticket, and passed them over with those of the older couples. “Yours,” the young man said to Adelajda.

  “They’re in my bag,” she said. She leaned over and leafed through it with her free hand, struggling with little Paweł, who had begun to cry again.

  “Hurry,” the guard said. At last she handed them over. The soldier studied the papers of the older couples before handing them back. His cheeks were pink, covered with peach fuzz, his eyes bright blue. He looked perhaps sixteen. A rifle was slung around his chest, and a pistol sat in a holster on his belt.

  He looked at Lucius.

  “You two are traveling together?”

  Adelajda didn’t give him time to answer. “My husband met me in Bohumín. I was in Rybnik with my family. We’re going to Jarosław, to see my aunt.”

  “Your ticket says Lwów.” He was staring at Lucius. “And your papers say you’re single. But this is your wife.”

  Again Adelajda was faster. “We filed papers in January.”

  “Really?” The young man smiled as if he’d unearthed a dirty secret. “The baby must be what, two years old? Three?”

  Her face hardened. “That’s none of your business.”

  “I’d say it is; your story doesn’t hang together.”

  “And I’d say that not everyone had the leisure to file papers during the war.” She paused. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t know? My husband didn’t even meet his son until demobilization. You look like a baby. Were you playing with your dolls while your brothers served?”

  Lucius looked at her. He had thought at first that her taking offense was calculated. But now he worried that something else was boiling over, that she was no longer in control.

  He interrupted. “My wife means no disrespect,” he said. “I…I…it has been hard for all of us, you see…”

  But the young man had retained their papers. “Come with me,” he said.

  Lucius’s heart pounded; he began to rise.

  “Not you. This one.” The young man pointed at her with his chin.

  Adelajda shook her head. “On whose authority?”

  The young man took a step toward them. Now Lucius thought of General Borszowski’s letter in his bag. Friend of Poland. Surely this would mean something, as would the signature of the general. But the letter made no mention of a wife.

  “I can explain.”

  But the young man ignored him entirely. “I’m waiting, Pani…”

  She looked off in defiance. “I will not put up with this. I was born a Pole. I lost a brother for Poland, nearly gave my husband. My baby has drunk my love of Poland in his milk…”

  “Good. You can explain that to my captain.” He paused. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ll come,” said Lucius louder.

  “Not you,” said the young man, angrier now. “You can stay with the baby while this patriot comes with me.”

  Adelajda looked at him. He knew, just as she knew, that not to pass him Paweł would risk betraying them entirely. She leaned over and whispered something Lucius couldn’t hear. Then, “Stay with Papa. I’ll be back.”

  But the moment she moved, Paweł began to grab wildly at her, her arm, her hair, her blouse. She had to pry him off. He grabbed a finger, then again her hair. A wail rose from him. “Please,” she said to Lucius, who reached over to help. But the boy, despite his illness, was fierce in his resistance, and it took a few more tries to pry him out of Adelajda’s arms. “Shhh…,” Lucius whispered, but the wailing only grew louder. He struggled to contain the child, at last enfolding him in his arms. It occurred to him that he had never truly held—not just touched, but truly held—a child in his life. It seemed impossible. There must have been a younger cousin, a nephew, sometime in the past, but the force of the little limbs was something he had never anticipated. And the fever was nothing like he had felt in his patients, a dry, searing heat that radiated through the light gown. Still Paweł twisted for his mother. “Shhh…,” Lucius whispered again.

  He could feel every eye in the compartment upon him. What would a father do?

  Roseola, scarlet fever, measles, rubella, influenza…

  “Shhh…,” he said, lips touching the hot skin of Paweł’s head.

  “Let’s go,” the soldier said.

  Again, Adelajda looked to Lucius, her eyes betraying desperation. He had a sense suddenly of a new realm of loss that he had never really known existed. He looked up. “In my bag…I have a letter…”

  But the soldier put his hand on his holster. “Do you want your son to see me make him an orphan, Pani?”

  She rose.

  “Now!”

  She made it to the door. Life had left her; her skin was almost green, and for a moment Lucius thought she would collapse. She turned again. “Paweł,” she said. “This is Papa. Stay with him. He’ll care for you until I’m back. He’ll care for you…”

  Her voice broke. The boy was screaming, his face scarlet, twisting with such a force that Lucius could scarcely hold him. He could see his little teeth, the trembling vibrato of his tongue.

  But Adelajda couldn’t go any further. She turned and lunged for him. The soldier grabbed her by the shoulder and hurled her against the far wall of the corridor.

  A shot.

  Then voices, footsteps pounding through the train. More soldiers, pushing past them. Lucius saw Adelajda’s hands go up, covering her head. More shouts. Hurry! The soldier grabbed Adelajda and threw her back into the compartment, tickets and passports scattering on the floor. Paweł broke free and tumbled into her arms. Lucius looked back to the door, but the men were all gone, storming out into the fields, where a figure now was running. Another shot. He saw the figure go down in the grass, then come back up again, now at a slant, then fall again. Then three men were on him.

  They lifted him, carried him back struggling toward the front of the train and out of view. Then from the rear came more shouts, then two more men were marched forward, hands on their heads. A horseman rode past, his open greatcoat waving in the wind.

  Then silence.

  In the distance, a hawk circled above the fields.

  At Lucius’s side, Adelajda held Paweł tightly to her, pressed her face against his cheek, his forehead, his hands. She let her hair fall around him, willowing them together in its shelter. Around the little boy’s wrist was a rosary bracelet, and at times she stopped and kissed it, murmuring, “Mother Maria, Mama, Mama, Mama…”

  Across the compartment, the old twin sisters watched them impassively. They would have heard much of the earlier conversation, Lucius knew. They could have betrayed them. He wanted to thank them for their silence, but to do so seemed to implicate them, to put them all at risk.

  Another of the horsemen rode past. “Lower your window shades,” he shouted. “All passengers! Shades down! What are you staring at? Countrymen, lower your shades, there is nothing here to
see!” Lucius rose and pulled the cord. His shirt was soaked with Paweł’s tears, and a strand of mucus spanned his arm.

  Engines louder now.

  Adelajda’s murmurs growing softer. “Mama Mama Mama Mama.”

  They lurched forward, on.

  The sun was beginning to set when they reached Jarosław station.

  For the rest of the journey they’d been mostly silent. She had retreated into the child, holding him and cooing, chastened, Lucius suspected, by the risk she’d taken, by how perilously close she had come to such extraordinary loss. He sensed, and sensed she sensed, that perhaps they had committed some transgression. For all the gravity of their previous conversation, there had also been something unspoken, not quite a flirtation, but a hint of possibility.

  Say that I’m your wife.

  This is our son. His name is Paweł Krzelewski.

  There was more than one way to understand these words.

  My husband met me in Bohumín.

  But now, they both had retreated from whatever dream they’d tested. He to his world; she to hers. In Rzeszów, where the train was swarmed by children selling fistfuls of currant sprays, he had purchased some for Paweł, but beyond a whispered Thank you, Adelajda said nothing else.

  He looked out the window at the approaching station. The beginning of the journey—with the young couple and their egg-and-onion sandwich, the old men with their stiff vests and crisply folded newspapers—this moment, almost from an older, prewar age, had lured him into a kind of complacent fantasy about what lay ahead. But the encounter with the militia had cast the true recklessness of what he was doing into much sharper relief. Again, he had to remind himself that all reports said that the fighting was concentrated around the rails and cities. That in the mountains, he’d be safer. Or so he hoped.

  The train had stopped, and Adelajda began to gather up her belongings. Lucius watched her, waiting for words to be exchanged. But she acted now as if she didn’t know him, and it was only at the door that she looked back. The little boy was sleeping on her shoulder. With a flicker of her fingers she waved goodbye. She left.

  A moment later she returned. As she sat, her arm brushed against Lucius.

  For a moment, he thought she had decided to travel on with him. Then, very softly, she whispered the name of a street in Rybnik. “Perhaps,” she said, “if you don’t find the person you are looking for, you can come and find me.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Again she rose. Across the compartment the old women watched him. He heard Adelajda disappear down the corridor. He turned back to the window as the train began to move. She was there, amid the crowd mingling on the platform, and he wanted her to cast a backward glance, but she seemed resolute now in her decision not to turn.

  It was close to midnight when he reached Lwów. Now, everything moved swiftly, without a hitch. He presented the next morning to the garrison, where soldiers took target practice on the same slate-grey dummies he remembered from the years before. By noon, letter in hand, he was on the train to Dolina, in a cattle car with a drunk, deploying Polish rifle battalion heading off to their new war. They reached the station late in the evening. There, a small hotel was advertising vacancies, but he no longer wished to delay his journey, setting out on foot along the overgrown rails.

  18.

  He passed the night in an abandoned station, on a decommissioned railway south of Dolina. It was of standard imperial construction, and not yet stripped of its Habsburg double eagle. Were it not on the other side of the mountains, it might have been the same building in which he found the hussar waiting with their horses years before. The same board for posting timetables, the same bench that once had sustained the troika of waiting mothers. Roof now caving. Walls already beginning their crumbling return to earth. Otherwise empty, save a tall trapezoid of goldenrod in the light cast by the empty door.

  He slept inside on his jacket, on earth wet with summer rain. It was a tentative sleep; in a dream that seemed to cross into his waking moments, he found himself back on the train, running through the corridors, searching compartment after compartment for Margarete. At last, the dream was broken by a pittering reconnaissance about his rucksack, whiskers on his cheek. Nose to his nose: he lurched awake.

  Outside, the mountains were beginning to declare themselves against the early summer dawn.

  From his bag, he extracted the page torn from the imperial atlas and spread it over the bench. Back in Vienna, he had focused his attention on a highway that skirted the foothills before joining the road that climbed through Bystrytsya to Lemnowice. But after the attack on the train, he wanted to get away from the flatlands as soon as possible. Light dashes through the mountains suggested roads passable by horse. Assuming they were still there fifteen years after the atlas was published, they’d serve well for someone on foot. It was lonelier, but he now worried much more about men than wolves.

  From the station, the road south was broad, the mud thick and heavy. In the fields, high grass crowded out the maize and sunflowers. My God, thought Lucius as he stared into the green expanse, he had almost forgotten the land’s fecundity. Great heaps of flax and St. John’s wort rose on the roadside berms, and the road itself, a paisley of mud and tire tracks, was overgrown with brome. Ahead, the mountains rose before him in their grandeur, looming, massive, like the rumpled repose of a stage curtain with its rich, brocaded pleats.

  So here he was, in the little hatch marks on his father’s map, the word KARPATEN splayed before him across the land. But a finger’s-breadth to travel yet.

  He walked swiftly, his eyes alert for the possibility of other travelers, but he saw no one else. After an hour, at a crossroads, he came across the remains of a field camp, deep in mud, as if half-buried by a deluge. There were dented tins, a bent fork, and an old decaying tarp. A band of sparrows argued in the shadow of a rusting field oven, where a burst of hound’s-tongue had begun to seed. Beyond this: some scraps of uniform, flapping in a morning breeze. A skull and scattered teeth, a rind of scalp, a pair of rib cages, white as stone.

  Like Cadmus, he thought, recalling the painting hanging above the chair for minor surgeries, the earth sewn with the dragon’s fangs, from which would grow a fiercer race of men.

  It was not yet nine, and already the grass was seething with heat and life. He rolled up his coat, tied it below his rucksack, and pulled up his sleeves, still dirty with their snail’s track of snot. Butterflies had settled on his shirt collar, and he shook them off; then, feeling generous, let them remain there. After another hour, he saw his first people, two farmers in a distant field. They stopped their work and watched him, without greeting. Then two young boys, leading a pair of reluctant, mud-caked sheep.

  He walked until dusk, stopping only to eat, staying clear of settlements, wary of how they might treat an unfamiliar visitor at night. At last, alone, exhausted, he turned off the road and, near a narrow stream, lay his coat down within the shelter of a willow.

  A frog was croaking. As he rested, memories stirred by the day descended. The crushed-grass smell, the hint of pinesap drifting from the distance. The way the sparrows swayed balletically on the umbels of the wild carrot, snipping at the insects they encountered in their orbits. The way the mud caked on his boots. Yes: wrapped in the rustling of the willow he could almost hear Margarete’s laughter. She seemed so close now that he had to remind himself that he couldn’t expect to find her yet. That he couldn’t lose himself to hopes and expectations. If he was lucky, very lucky, there would be a villager who knew what had happened, or perhaps a clue left in the church. Like a seam running through the great mass of possibilities. And from there he would push on.

  There were other possibilities, of course, he realized. He could find the village ransacked, destroyed like so many others. The church in ruins. Corpses left behind to decompose across the Cadmean earth.

  He stared up at the night sky and fought very hard to keep this from his mind.

  He began again before dawn
.

  The land grew hilly, and he checked the map and compass, following a narrow, rocky road. His stomach growled. His feet, in his old army boots, began to ache, and when he stopped to readjust his socks, he found blisters on both his heels. Inside his shirt, a spray of bug bites had appeared after his night sleeping in the grass. His face was burnt; his head throbbed. He’d forgotten a hat. He, with his Icelander’s complexion, had brought a half-century-old revolver and forgotten a hat.

  He passed a man leading a donkey and a wagon, piled with belongings and a pair of children. Its wheels were spokeless, cut from solid blocks of wood, like something out of a children’s encyclopedia entry on the ancient history of transportation. He recalled the family he had encountered with the hussar, the pilfered rabbits. As if they had been wandering ever since. But now there was no mother, and the children’s summer clothing was ragged, sustained by fraying knots of string.

  He had been taking small bites from a loaf of bread purchased two days before in Bohumín. Seeing them, he felt ashamed in front of their hunger, so he offered it. They looked to their father, who nodded, and then they scrambled down from the wagon to seize it, retreating to the safety of their bags.

  “Where are you going?” their father asked, in something halfway between Polish and Slovakian, after trying out two other tongues.

  “Lemnowice.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Far?”

  “Not as far as where you’ve come from.”

  The children gnawed at the bread, watching him.

  “And you’re alone?” the father asked.

  “Yes.”

  A long pause.

  “You have your reasons,” the father said.

  The road wound on, through meadows and scattered copses of trees. He finished his water and the last of his food. The land was steeper now; the earth shimmered with runoff. Rain clouds came, opened, and left.