The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  Soon he began to regret his fit of charity. He was hungry, and the water in the rivers was too muddy to drink. Instead, he grabbed clumps of high grass and sucked the rain, as Margarete had taught him. Calamus on the banks—he ate the shoots. See, I still remember. Beyond, the earth was chalky, greedy for his boots.

  In the early afternoon, he passed a pair of villages, both destroyed. The first must have been of some size in 1904, for it was there in the imperial atlas, unnamed but recorded with a little square. In the second, the walls of a synagogue were charred and broken. An old man in a black hat and robe was pushing a plow through a garden behind one of the ruined houses, and a young boy led a frail old woman down a path. Who had done this? Lucius wanted to ask them, but the child panicked when he saw Lucius, disappearing with the woman into the ruins.

  Later, he passed another hamlet, this one completely burnt to the ground. This time there was no one, and by the size of the trees growing up from the remains of the houses, he guessed that it had been that way since the first days of the war.

  After that he stayed away from the villages.

  Sometimes, far off in the trees, he sensed the presence of other people, and once, in a far-off valley, he saw a figure on horseback, with a plumed helmet and lance, uniform glittering. For a moment Lucius blinked, wondering if it was an illusion, but the man remained, seemingly lost and wandering in time.

  Dusk fell. Clouds of midges lifted from the high grass. A flock of black birds appeared above the valley, dove and rose again in teeming ranks, unfolded, colonnaded, burst.

  Now the woods grew denser, pines and spruces appearing among the oaks.

  Her woods. Around him, everywhere: her bracken, thistle, goosefoot. On a ridge, he found a foxhole and machine gun, its barrel bent and rusted, draped with a muddy scarf. A line of grave mounds, now covered with a thin growth of pine trees. A half-torn pickelhaube, a leather glove.

  The ground was thick with old, spent shells, like acorns after a masting.

  Darkness had fallen, and he spent the night inside the foxhole, in a corner worn smooth in the shape of a sleeping man. It was empty, save a discarded canteen, half full of water. How long had it rested there? he wondered, and though he was thirsty, he didn’t drink.

  It was raining when he awoke. Droplets drummed down on the oak leaves. He walked faster now, hungry, not trusting himself with the mushrooms and too impatient to stop and strip the cambium from the bark. For everything told him he was getting closer, memory a landscape with a topology of its own. Something faintly different in the smell of the forest, in the softness of the earth. The rushing streams now lined with horsetails. Stones of familiar shape. He began to walk more swiftly. Yes, he recognized it: here was the ridge where Margarete had once stopped to remove a pebble from her boot. Here was the rocky overhang where once they’d taken shelter. Faster, off the trail, twigs snapping as he hurried toward a light. And then before him, where the land began to drop and the forest opened, he stopped. There, he saw it. The church, the houses, the valley, the thin stream of mist rising through the same trees through which it had risen on the night he’d left.

  He stood for a moment, almost in disbelief. Heart pounding from the exertion, taking in the vision before him, preparing for what he was about to learn.

  In the wind from the valley, the leaves rustled, hiding the sound of the footsteps behind him as three men stepped out from the woods.

  They were very gentle, considering. A dusty sack came down over his head, and the fabric was pushed into his mouth and bound there with a stone. He had no time to speak. Then his rucksack was stripped, his hands tied. Standard Imperial and Royal procedure for moving a POW, he later thought, though the stone in his mouth seemed a local innovation. Images, then, of hooded prisoners, marched off into the snow, prodded with the barrel of a gun.

  He waited. There it was: cold against the bare base of his neck.

  They led him down the hillside and into the valley, one man on each arm, the third behind him, reminding him of his presence with intermittent nudges of the muzzle. The path was muddy, and he stumbled constantly. From time to time he could hear the men speaking in Ruthenian, but what he could understand helped him little: morning, captain, bag. He assumed they were remnants of Ukrainian units, having taken to the mountains after being pushed out of the plains by Polish forces. By then they would have found the gun, the sundry coins, the map, and, if they could understand Polish, they would have read the letter from the general. Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland. His story, that he was a doctor returning to the village, now seemed completely improbable. They would be fools to believe him. If they even let him speak.

  His stomach knotted, and for a moment, he was afraid that he might soil his pants. Like so many of his patients—this sordid fact never mentioned in the manuals. But the heat passed through him, sparing him. He felt his face flush, and in the dusty chamber of the sack, he sneezed.

  The trail began to level out. They left the woods. In the light that filtered through the fabric, he could vaguely make out the shapes of low-slung houses. He could feel the sun’s warmth now, smell the musty odor of a barnyard, hens. Some children’s voices, the sound of more footsteps on the road. This comforted him a little. They wouldn’t shoot him in front of children, would they? They turned from the road and climbed a short path and stopped. A door creaked. They entered a darker room. Smell of stable dust and linseed and manure. He was shoved down onto a stool. The rope was untied from around his head, the stone removed. They left the sack. His lip had been wedged between the stone and his teeth, and now he licked it, salty with blood.

  An old memory, the metal apparatus in his mouth, his bleeding tongue.

  They bound his feet.

  Now the men addressed him directly, but again he didn’t understand. The gun barrel moved from neck to head. He had to speak, he knew. Roughly, he tried what he could remember of Ruthenian. I am a doctor. Worked here, wartime.

  “Polyak?” said the soldier.

  Pole. It depends who you ask, he thought. By name, but not by passport. He took a gamble. “Avstriyets.”

  Austrian. There was silence. Whispers. Then the door opened and someone left.

  Now, he could vaguely make out features of the hut. A guard sat by the door, beneath a rank of farm tools. It occurred to him that they might be useful in an escape, but he knew this was an insane fantasy. The truth was that he probably couldn’t have fought off a single guard, even without a sack around his head. Now his thirst and hunger began to grow acute. Voda, he said to the soldier. Water. But no answer returned to him from across the room.

  Alone, his head bound, sitting uncomfortably on the stool, he found his mind surprisingly empty, slowing, as if somehow preparing to meet death halfway. He was scared, very scared, but very tired, too, and he found the thoughts of what would happen to him now almost too difficult to bear. He wondered if this was what others felt. If so close, death seemed almost welcome, not something to be feared. Perhaps it would be easier, he thought, if his journey ended now. There would be something fitting to this: back at the church, where his new life had begun. Was this what he’d been drawn toward, a kind of ending, a release?

  Then panic surged in him, he felt his eyes tear up, and his stomach seized again. Now, more than fantasies of fleeing, he felt a wish to fall and curl upon himself until someone came to carry him away. Light and elemental, like a shell or husk.

  It was afternoon when at last he heard the sound of horses outside, and then someone dismounting. The door opened again. More steps.

  “So you’re the Austrian?” This, surprisingly, spoken in German.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He hesitated, trying to gauge his answer, but the vastness of the war and its allegiances were too great to outmaneuver. So he decided on the truth. “I once lived here, during the war. There was a field hospital. I was the doctor. I’ve come back to look for a friend.”

  Silence.
Through the sack, he saw the newcomer turn to the guard and say something. Probably asking for papers, for he heard a rustling. He braced himself.

  “Krzelewski.”

  Pronounced correctly, though with a faint Ruthenian hum.

  He answered. “Y…yes?”

  Then, suddenly: the light.

  A one-handed man stood there before him, his good hand holding the sack, while he sniffled and wiped a runny nose with the stump of his other wrist. A colorfully embroidered highlander’s vest covered an old grey Austrian uniform. On his head, despite the heat, a sheepskin cap, with upturned earflaps. A thick moustache overhung his mouth.

  “Doctor!”

  Lucius stared, uncertain how to respond.

  “It is I, Krajniak! Krajniak! By God’s beard, don’t you remember?”

  Ah, yes: the missing hand, the sniffles. The French dine out on foie gras. The Brits beef in a pot. Saluting with his stump that final evening when they went looking for Margarete. The cook.

  But now the face was sunburnt, hardened, and the moustache long.

  “Of course!”

  Krajniak turned to the guard and motioned him to untie the rope that bound Lucius’s hands and feet. Then he approached, cupping Lucius’s cheeks in palm and stump. “Pan Doctor! Oh, my friend, you’re lucky. They were debating whether to hang or shoot you first.”

  Krajniak took him outside to a table that was set up at the back of the house, where a bottle of horilka and two cups of hollowed wood quickly appeared. A village woman emerged from inside, in a smock and patterned kerchief. With one arm, she pinned a long grey piglet to her breast, while the other held a curved, thin knife. A little girl of six or seven followed, carrying a baby, nearly bald with a mottled skin infection of the scalp.

  “My wife,” said Krajniak, placing his hand on the small of the woman’s back. “From the village, perhaps you remember. The little one is ours.”

  He spoke to the woman in Ruthenian, and her face opened in recognition. Vaguely, Lucius recalled her: heavy epicanthic folds, a pale mole in a crease of her nose. She laughed. Then, still holding the pig, she drew back the shirtsleeve of her free arm with her teeth, and presented Lucius with her wrist.

  For a second, he wondered if this was some sort of highland custom he had never learned. Was he supposed to kiss her wrist, perhaps the knife? She waited, shook it at him, and spoke again. Then Krajniak said, “You lanced a boil on her arm, remember? Gone! It never came back.”

  Lucius was fairly certain that he was not the one who lanced the boil, but he saw no reason to dampen his reception. He touched it with his finger.

  “How it’s healed!”

  The woman spoke again, and Krajniak answered. He turned to Lucius. “Tomorrow, you will go, but tonight you are our guest. You’re hungry, I imagine?”

  The pig twisted, as if it understood.

  “Only if you’re cooking,” Lucius answered, as lightly as he could. He watched Krajniak as he poured out the horilka. Now I’ll ask him, thought Lucius. Now I’ll learn. But the fact that the cook had yet to mention Margarete’s name gave him pause. Hastily, Lucius took a gulp, as if to fortify himself for what was coming next. The smell familiar, reminding him of the moments in the surgery when they sterilized their hands. But he had forgotten how hot it was. He coughed.

  Krajniak laughed and pinched the nose of the piebald baby, who broke into a grin. “Ah, the city made the doctor soft.” His single hand dove into his breast pocket, removed a metal cigarette case, and held it out to Lucius, who, still hacking, shook his head. Krajniak flipped it open, extracted a cigarette between his fourth and fifth fingers, closed the case and palmed it, lifted the cigarette to his lips, then exchanged the case for a matchbox in his pocket, bracing it with his pinkie as he struck a flame. A deft, practiced motion, suggesting an unexpected physical confidence. He puffed. A cat leapt onto his lap, and he stroked it with his stump.

  For a moment, Lucius wondered if Krajniak would explain the men, the weapons, the colored vest he wore over his old uniform. By then the absence of livery or any sign of field organization suggested the men were not part of either the Polish or Ukrainian armies. But who? Krajniak, if he remembered, was from a nearby village. The men had the air of a local defense force; with the fall of Austria, even highlanders had begun to proclaim their own republics, Lucius knew. He thought of his father’s words that evening by the war map in the sunroom, of the burning embers splintering into ever smaller flames.

  But Krajniak said nothing, and his gaze seemed to catch on the steeple of the church just up the road.

  “You said you came looking for a friend,” he said, turning his dark eyes on Lucius. “I assume you mean our sister nurse.”

  She had returned late the night the men went looking.

  She did not explain her absence. She was distracted, said Krajniak. Something clearly had upset her, but she wouldn’t tell them what.

  They rang the church bells. Zmudowski straggled back, then Schwarz—you remember, Pan Doctor, with the fossils? All save Lucius. When a few hours passed, Margarete and a group of others set out to look for him. But by then the fog was so thick, they could scarcely find the path. Still they searched. Our good sister wouldn’t quit.

  It was only later the next morning that they heard the first sounds of artillery. Again they sent a search party. But still they couldn’t find him, Pan Doctor knew that part. And with the fighting over the hills, they didn’t dare go far. She was frantic then, said Krajniak. She paced the church, the road, went back up the river to look again.

  By afternoon, a messenger had appeared from down the valley. Russian cavalry was advancing across the foothills, he told them. Their orders were to evacuate the patients into Poland, on intelligence of a Russian pincer movement to the south.

  Krajniak took another swig. “But still she didn’t want to leave.”

  How she was stubborn! But by the time the evacuation crews arrived, there were reports that Cossack cavalry were already in Kolomea. Chaos descended on the church. One by one they transferred the men into the lorries. Margarete waited until the very last ambulance was loaded with the sickest patients, then climbed on board. By the time they reached the mouth of the valley, they could see smoke on the plains, and the roads were filled with marching troops. In Nadworna, the soldiers were separated based on their injuries, the frailest men sent on to Sambor; Zmudowski stayed, she went along. It was the last time that Krajniak saw either of them. No sooner had he reached Nadworna than he’d been sent back toward the front. Not as a cook this time, but as a soldier.

  “With this.”

  He held up his stump.

  But Lucius had scarcely heard anything after the word Sambor. Now the railway map, burned into his mind during his time on the ambulances, appeared before him. Sambor. He’d been there shortly after his new commission. Our paths had crossed. He felt his mind yield, buckle in accommodation as this fact was taken in. Summer, August. Yes, he could recall the sweltering wards.

  “Do you know which hospital?”

  “Which hospital? I told you, we were separated.”

  “But perhaps you heard from someone else…”

  Now a look of sympathy crossed Krajniak’s face. “No, Doctor. I didn’t hear from anyone. I told you: a week later, I was carrying a gun.”

  Lucius nodded slowly, still reluctant to accept that this was all. But alive, he told himself. And last in Sambor. This is what he had hoped for: a glowing pebble left on the forest floor.

  Sambor, safely in what was now Polish territory, just west of the Lwów-Dolina line.

  The sun was beginning to go down behind the hills, and above them, the sky had turned a coral red. In the yard, a chicken summited a dung heap, a glistening yellow grub twisting in its beak. Nearby, a cat watched it hungrily. In a neighbor’s yard, one of Krajniak’s comrades was cutting wood. Now food came: beet soup, rye bread, and onion dumplings. They grew silent as they ate from old tin army plates, spoons clanging as they had at mea
ltime during the war.

  Then Krajniak spoke. “Pan Doctor? Do you remember Zmudowski’s story, about the stamps?” He took a bite. “You know, it wasn’t true.”

  “No?” Slowly, Lucius set down his cup. Wondering what this had to do with Margarete. Why Krajniak was telling him this now.

  “Not the way he told you, at least,” Krajniak continued. “That Russian soldier? He couldn’t have cared less for stamps. He wanted something to send his girlfriend. So one day, when Margarete was out, Zmudowski snuck into her room, hoping to find something, a pair of stockings, a chemise, anything he could trade. As you could guess, there wasn’t much other than the habits of the other sisters who had died. But beneath her pillow, he found a handkerchief, a silk one, with the names Małgorzata and Michał, joined at the “M.” The kind a young man might buy for his betrothed. So he took it. That’s what Zmudowski gave the soldier for his stamps.”

  Małgorzata, thought Lucius, turning the word over in his mind. Polish for Margarete. So it wasn’t really a new name.

  A pair of different children had materialized, chasing a hoop from an old army food barrel across the rutted yard. The summer sun had long set. They moved in shadows.

  “And what did she do when she found out?” asked Lucius.

  “That’s the strange part,” said Krajniak. “She wasn’t one to keep quiet, but she never said a thing. If it was from a brother or a father, or even a friend, I think she would have asked us if we’d seen it. Or denied the soldiers their morphine until someone gave it back. It made me think that there was a story she was hiding: of a husband maybe, or perhaps she was engaged. But she never mentioned anyone, never received a single letter. She never said anything about home, but I knew, just by the way she spoke, that she was from the mountains. If this man of hers was still alive, she would have gone to see him. But nothing. For two and a half years.”

  “And what do you think that means?” asked Lucius. Thinking: Małgorzata. The earthly life I left behind.