The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  “What do I think?” The cook paused and watched the children. “There are many ways for young men to die in the mountains, even before the war. I think she lost him. Maybe before she entered the convent. Or maybe there was no convent; maybe she just came straight to us.”

  Lucius looked up toward the steeple, now a shadow against the sky. He nodded slowly. A memory of her came to him, standing at the door to share the news of Rzedzian’s passing. One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor.

  Her forest songs of weddings and midsummer festivals.

  Her tears, her flight, when he asked for her hand in marriage.

  “I understand,” said Lucius slowly, his memory of her shimmering, like a body in the water, threatening to break apart. “I’ve also wondered who she really was.”

  Krajniak blew his nose again. “If I may, Doctor? You were rather in love with her, weren’t you?”

  The children sprawled over each other; the hoop bounced loose.

  “A little,” Lucius said.

  By then it was past midnight, but Margarete’s mention had released memories of their time in Lemnowice and neither of them wished to stop. Now, the stories tumbled out of them. Lucius spoke of the food they gathered during the spring scarcity, the hasty winter sunbathing, the games of soccer in the snow. Krajniak reminded him of Margarete’s breeding programs—“Cats everywhere now, Doctor! Don’t eat the goulash!”—and the way everything had seemed covered in powdered lime. Lucius recalled the drunken summer singing, the card games played out beneath the stars. Krajniak waxed poetic about the accidental pickles, the wine pilfered from the summer estates. Together they recalled Rzedzian and the way his tears would gather on his moustache, and Nowak with his fear of handwashing, and Zmudowski’s photo of his daughter, and all the others they could summon up from memory: the chastened Sergeant Czernowitzski, the clarinetist with his instrument of tin and wire, the Viennese tailor, the cobbler with the dented head.

  By then, Lucius’s wristwatch read four, and a hint of dawn was in the sky. He felt the fatigue of his journey, but still he didn’t wish to stop. He was starving for this, he realized. It was more than simply recollection; it was as if Krajniak contained a part of him that once he thought was lost. Now he was hungry to reconstruct that person, greedy even, given the knowledge that he would likely never see this man again. Do you remember when I first arrived? he asked. And that first night? The soldiers, with the missing jaw, the belly turning inside out?

  Krajniak remembered.

  And those first surgeries?

  Yes, Pan Doctor. Truth was there were some of us who didn’t think you knew what you were doing.

  And the doctors Brosz and Berman?

  He remembered.

  The first shell-shock cases?

  Yes.

  “Do you remember József Horváth?”

  The words came out almost without his knowing.

  There was a long pause. Even the name sounded impossible; it had been two years since he had uttered it aloud.

  And Lucius said, though it wasn’t necessary, “The Hungarian that peasant brought in by wheelbarrow that first winter, who’d been found up by the pass.”

  Whether Krajniak’s eyes were watery from the horilka or the memories, Lucius didn’t know. He was sitting sideways with one arm on the table as he gazed off to the lightening sky. Now he nodded slowly. “I remember. Of course, I remember, Pan Doctor. I can’t forget.”

  There was a long silence. Then slowly, without premeditation, Lucius began to speak. He told Krajniak about the nightmares that had begun upon his return home, the blame he placed on himself for not letting Horváth leave, thinking that he could cure the man himself. He spoke of the many times he thought that he’d seen Horváth among his patients and on the Viennese streets, the impossibility of finding any peace with memory, or any absolution or release. He feared, he told Krajniak, that he would be stuck forever in that winter. That even if he found Margarete, he would not be able to escape the fact that Horváth had been sacrificed for any joy he might attain.

  Strangely, for thoughts that had possessed him for years, it took no more than a few minutes for the story to come out.

  He was silent. He waited for Krajniak to answer.

  But Krajniak did not say anything at first. Lucius felt suddenly ashamed that he had burdened him, had let their stories stray from memories of cats and pickle barrels. Or did Krajniak blame him for Horváth? Was that why he’d said nothing until Lucius brought it up? In the half-light, a pair of bats flitted in and out of the shadows. Krajniak poured another cup of horilka.

  Lucius was about to speak again when Krajniak lifted up his stump.

  “I can still feel it, Pan Doctor.”

  It took a moment for Lucius to realize that Krajniak was referring to his hand. “Yes…,” said Lucius, wondering now whether this was a way of changing the subject, or whether Krajniak’s thoughts had drifted off. Perhaps they both were lost in their own worlds. “Some of my patients say the same…”

  Krajniak’s voice was strained now. “Sometimes it feels as if it’s burning, and other times I feel as if it’s touching something, my fingers moving over something on their own. The fur of an animal, a coin, a piece of meat. For a long time, I couldn’t stand it. I’d close my eyes and squeeze at the place where I felt my hand to be. I’d punch and stab it, and once I tried to remove it with a knife. Not the stump, Pan Doctor: the hand, my missing hand.”

  He stopped and finished off his cup. Lucius waited for Krajniak to say something more, to offer some kind of redemptive wisdom, to share how he’d gone on.

  The bats returned, now visible in all their flitting detail in the morning twilight.

  But Krajniak just poured the last of the horilka. Now when he spoke, his voice was steadier. Lucius would have to leave soon. He could escort him down to the mouth of the valley, though unfortunately no farther. But the territory north of them was well secured by Polish forces. You’ll be safe there. And on the plains, with the letter, Lucius would find frequent Polish convoys that could take him to the Sambor rail.

  So that was all.

  “I would offer you to stay, Doctor, but there are many reasons we should go our separate ways.”

  “Of course.”

  Krajniak stood. He’d get the horses. It would take an hour to get everything together. Lucius must be tired. If he would like to get a little bit of sleep…

  But Lucius’s thoughts were elsewhere. A light breeze had arisen, and in the distance he thought that he heard branches rustling. In his mind, he saw the beech tree, the courtyard crowded with patients, the winter soldier vanishing into the white expanse. Krajniak was right; there were some wounds that couldn’t be amputated. But he had respects to pay.

  He walked the last hundred paces alone.

  The sun had just begun to peek above the hills. Around him, from the yards, came snorts and clucking. Faces of old women turned to watch him pass. Smells of cooking oil and onions rose from the huts, and smoke seeped through the thatch. He recalled the days that he had gone with Margarete to visit the soldiers distributed among the rooms musty with feathers and tallow, the children bearing silent witness. He wondered how they remembered him, friend or invader. He heard a clattering, and a pair of jays alighted on a fallen fencepost. Then the road opened before him and he was there.

  It had changed little from the outside. The wooden facade still dark and faded; the base of the walls now a little overgrown. A pair of black storks were nesting in the belfry, and tufts of wallflower had begun to creep up around the doorframe. But everything else was otherwise unchanged. In the arrow slit, a haunted darkness hovered, as it had hovered four years before.

  The doctor? she replied, still staying back, deep in the shadows of the world that awaited him. Didn’t you just say you’re him?

  This time it was unlocked.

  It was, in many ways, how it had remained in his memory, only smaller now, and this time light spilled in from a southe
rn breach, not from the north. And empty. Gone were the soldiers, of course. But also the blankets, the pallets, the operating table built from pews.

  All used as firewood, he assumed. Fitting, even. He begrudged no one; hopefully it had kept somebody warm.

  The air was cold, also empty of that old familiar smell: the lime, the iodoform and carbolic, the straw beds, the spoiled wounds.

  He walked slowly up the center of the nave, following the path he had grown used to taking through the patients, and turning at a right angle when he reached the crossing, he entered the old ward for the dying. The floor was bare; he could have walked there directly at a slant, but the daily circuit was entrenched in him, and it felt wrong to step where men once lay.

  This is Brauer, Pan Doctor Lieutenant, frostbite; this is Czerny of the Fourteenth Fusiliers. Moscowitz, Gruscinski, Kirschmeyer. Redlich, professor of Vienna, shot by Cossacks near his tail…

  He could see the outline of the crater in the floor. The roof they had repaired still held, though in the south wall a new shell had burst a hole.

  Nature had followed, ferns and grass sprouting from the shattered wood. The floor was littered with dung and leaves, and a pair of stunted saplings stretched up toward the light. Streaks of bird droppings painted a scene of the Crucifixion, and following it upward he saw movement in the rafters, a face, an owl, looking down. As he took a step closer, the bird, perturbed, awoke and, with its great wings out, fell toward him, banking skyward in a silent puff of down.

  He walked on. Water had crept in behind the Annunciation in the chancel. The paint was blistered, cracked, bursting around Gabriel, as if Mary had fallen in ecstasy not at the visitation of the angel, but the rift in her gilded world.

  He stopped at the cabinets that once had held the medicine. Empty, now, save a handful of ampoules of atropine and chloral hydrate amid the rat droppings. No Veronal. He found a package of old bandages, gnawed open. Cats aside, the rats had likely wasted little time once Margarete was gone.

  He paused before the door to the sacristy as if he might yet find her inside. But it was empty, completely empty, stripped just like the rest of the church. On the floor, he could see the indentations where once her bed had stood. Now it, too, had been taken. Even Horváth’s country sketch was missing. In the chaos of the evacuation had she thought to bring it with her? That was one great difference between them. That for Margarete, József Horváth was a patient she might remember with affection, even love, as one can love a person one has cared for, even if they couldn’t be saved.

  For a moment, he stopped and looked out the window, the square of sky he had beseeched so many times when she was ill. Through branches he could see the outline of his old quarters, which now seemed so close to hers. How often had she sat there, looking toward his door? Then he touched the sill and froze.

  There someone had placed two small, white, almost perfectly round stones.

  It could have been anyone, he thought, his world contracting to these points. Any soldier, any village child.

  They were cool in his hand and left bare circles in the dust.

  Then he had one place left to go. The door to the courtyard from her room creaked as he pulled it open, through a scrim of gritty soil that had been washed beneath the molding. Outside, the yard was thick with uncut grass. The air hummed with mayflies and little moths, gnats and butterflies. The beech tree was in leaf, its towering branches garlanded with catkins. His oracle, his monument of memory, the bark grey and smooth and utterly unscarred. No soldier. No disfigured revenant. No screams, no tinted snow. Nothing at its base but high green grass, now swaying in the wind. Just the old, indifferent monument to what was lost.

  He thought of the city’s war memorials, and the way the mourning knelt before them, laying wreaths and candles and praying for a son’s return. But what he was seeking was forgiveness and atonement, and he couldn’t think of any worthy offering to give.

  Another shiver passed through the beech’s branches. High above, a squirrel chattered.

  Yes. I know. It’s time.

  They rode out on a pair of Carpathian ponies, small, mouse-colored creatures who ambled amiably through the mud. The forest was damp and warm. Billows of midges hummed in the light shafts that descended through the canopy. Krajniak ahead, rifle across his saddle, watching, silent now. By then it was clear he would not tell Lucius who his men were, or what they were fighting for. But Lucius didn’t press him. The little band seemed so vulnerable against the armies of the plains. Perhaps they all were safer if he didn’t know.

  Once, in a clearing, Krajniak whistled, low, and an answer came from somewhere in the woods. But they saw no one else, and the forest was so still that at times Lucius nodded off to sleep.

  It was evening when the land opened and Lucius dismounted. Krajniak followed. Standing at the edge of the forest, Lucius searched for the right words to thank the cook. But what to say? That somehow in their drunken chatter about pickles and games of winter soccer and a soldier who carried fossils in his pockets, Lucius felt as if something had been returned to him? That Krajniak was the only one of all of them to whom he had truly bid farewell?

  “Goodbye!” said Krajniak. He kissed him once, twice, on the cheeks, and a third time on the head.

  “Goodbye!”

  And taking the reins of Lucius’s pony, the cook wiped his nose and disappeared back into the woods.

  It was midnight when Lucius reached the empty highway to Dolina.

  He slept off the road, a deep sleep in the shelter of an overturned wagon. In the morning, a Polish convoy passed him heading west. When he presented Borszowski’s letter, they hoisted him on board, without even bothering with the elaborate story he had prepared.

  Two days later, he was in Sambor.

  He spent the night at a Hotel Kopernikus, near the center of town.

  It had been over a week since he had bathed, and his shoes and clothes betrayed the journey. He found a shave just down the street from the hotel, from a squinting man with raw, pink hands and a suspicious absence of customers, who berated him with a conspiracy theory about the shortage of badger hair as he drew a dull blade across his throat. Freed, he found a clothing shop across the square. The racks were mostly empty; the longest trousers still fell short. Pale khaki, like some tropical explorer. But they would have to do.

  He found the district hospital in the same building as the old army regimental hospital, which itself had occupied the site of an even older cholera hospital, behind centuries-old ramparts that gave the impression it was under siege. He had been there once before, during his service on the ambulance trains. But inside the walls, the grounds were nothing like the place of constant movement he had remembered from the war. A tall statue of a man with an unfamiliar name stood along the entrance path, presumably the cholera-fighter of old. Some goats wandered over the grass. A family was picnicking.

  He stopped. Beyond them, a nurse sat by a young man in a wheelchair and gently fed him from a bowl. In his throat Lucius felt that same familiar quiver that he felt each time the amputees back in Vienna reminded him of Horváth. It wasn’t him, of course, or her, but there was something to the nurse’s gentle manner that reminded him of Margarete with their soldier, so long ago. This man was missing both hands, both feet. Frostbite, most likely, Lucius thought, finding shelter in clinical considerations. Though by his stillness, by his vacant stare, Lucius suspected frostbite wasn’t all.

  Near the entrance to the building, a group of old men played tarock, and didn’t seem to notice when he passed.

  He walked up a short flight of stairs and went inside. During the war, he recalled that even the foyer had been filled with patients, but it was empty now. There was an unmanned desk and chair, and a small sign that indicated visiting hours. On the far wall was a low display case, flanked on either side by the annual staff photos that hung on every wall of every hospital he had been to in his life. Over the doors that led into the wards were the words Oddział 1, and Od
dział 2. Ward 1 and 2.

  Through the small windows in the doors, he saw movement. But now he hesitated, as he had hesitated back with Krajniak. It was less the chance of finding that the trail was cold again; it was the other possibilities he might learn. All he knew was that in 1916 she had been alive in Sambor. Before the full brunt of the Russian assault, before the typhus outbreaks in the crowded hospitals, before the flu.

  He walked over to the display case, as if somehow what it held could help prepare him for what came next. Inside were photographs related to the history of the hospital, an old brick used in the first foundation, a medieval-looking tooth extractor, and a pair of stuffed birds without a label, one of which had fallen on its side. He looked above, at the pictures on the wall. The first showed a pair of somber doctors, standing on the same steps he had just climbed, flanked on either side by nurses. And on the frame, the year, 1904…

  Quickly, he began to scan the dates, 1905, 1906…He followed them to the other side of the door. They stopped in 1913, resumed in 1916. By now the people had changed: gaunter, the intricate wimples replaced by the simpler habits of the Red Cross.

  1917. And there he stopped.

  She was standing in the first row, second from the right. Even in the poor light of the foyer, even with the dark long hair that hung down beneath her simple nursing cap, she was unmistakable. The same wonder-filled eyes, lips parted, ready for laughter, her gaze off and to the sky. She wore the costume of a lay nurse. No more habit. But he was no longer surprised.

  He looked to the neighboring photo. 1918. Gone. There were many explanations, Lucius thought, but only one he couldn’t shake from his mind. The full force of influenza had begun to build that autumn. 1918.

  In the photo, there was snow upon the ground; but was this January or December?

  He stopped himself. There were so many other explanations! But he recalled the fury with which the flu had swept through the ward, the soldiers and nurses who had succumbed.