The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  He took down the photo and removed the print, part of him now wishing that it wasn’t her at all. On the back, he hoped to find a name as if to prove it, but there was nothing other than the address of the studio, stamped in decorative lettering.

  “Is that someone you know?” From behind him. Polish.

  Lucius turned to see a small man in a white coat. Balding, tiny circular eyeglasses neatly repaired with wire. A thin moustache over his lip. He motioned to the photo in Lucius’s hands.

  “Yes,” said Lucius. He realized he owed an explanation. “So sorry not to have introduced myself. I entered, and I saw this and…”

  He took a breath, stepped forward, and held out his hand. “Doctor Lucius Krzelewski of Vienna.” Doctor. No need to mention he was a medical student again, and technically, given classes had yet to start, not even that. His only hope rested on professional courtesy. “I served at a hospital in the Carpathians during the war. I’ve come to look for my nurse. I was told that she was here.”

  For a moment, the doctor considered this apparition, the too-short trousers, the bruised lip, the sunburnt skin flushed now by the barber’s blade. The bare photo in his hand, its empty frame behind him on the cabinet.

  He came and looked.

  “Here.” Lucius pointed. “This is her.” The doctor leaned forward, wrinkling up his nose to keep his glasses from sliding off. A healthy bramble of grey hair filled his ear. He straightened. “I don’t recognize her. But I’ve been here only for a year.” He paused, then pointed to another nurse in the photograph. “But this nurse is here. Perhaps she knows.”

  The doctor led him through Ward 2. It was a men’s ward, crowded, but clean and tidy. Patients’ names and diagnoses were written on little chalkboards at the foot of every bed. There were many families, sitting with the patients, playing cards or reading newspapers, or holding squirming children as they talked. The nurse was at the far end of the hall, carrying a stack of bedpans. When she saw them approach, she stopped.

  The honorable Polish doctor from Vienna was presented, the story told.

  The nurse studied the photo for a moment before beginning to nod. “Yes. Yes. Małgorzata, yes. Last name Małysz, I think. She came with the evacuees in ’16, right? She was good. A little bossy, acted like she knew more than the doctors. But good, especially with the shell-shock cases. If I remember correctly, there was a group that went that winter to a rehabilitation hospital in Tarnów.”

  “That winter?”

  “March, I think. I remember only because it was around the time the army began to use the gas, when we began to see all the men with phosgene blowback and needed to make space.”

  “’17, you mean?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” On her face there was a question of why it mattered. But it mattered. Tarnów, 1917. Flu and typhus still lay between them, but he knew that he’d drawn closer. To where, and when, and who.

  Małgorzata Małysz. A stranger’s name.

  Downstairs, the doctor handed the photograph to Lucius. “Take it. I think you need this more than I.”

  Again he was moving, back on the train. Chyrów, Jarosław, Rzeszów: these towns now part of him, the familiar stations from his ambulance days. Again the crowds, the children with their sprays of currants. He felt as if he were on some pilgrim’s route, only this time not stopping. This time only one place mattered: Tarnów.

  But would he find her there? In Jarosław, waiting for what seemed like hours for some unexplained problem on the line, he took the photo from his rucksack and looked at it again as if to reassure himself that it was her. No phantom, no fleeing peasant, no South Station apparition. How astounding that it had preserved that gaze familiar from the moments she had looked up at him across the surgery, a gaze that now suggested astonishment at the great game that she’d been playing. In the seat next to him, his neighbor, an older woman in a winter coat despite the summer, made no attempt to hide her curiosity about the image that commanded such absorption. Should I ask her? he wondered. Like Adelajda, interrogating everyone she met? For who was to say that his search would end in Tarnów? That it would not be just another stop, another hospital? Yes, Doctor, we remember her. She went to Kraków. No, she went to Jarosław. No, to Sambor. No, to Stryj. She was from the mountains, Doctor, wasn’t she? She was going home, she said.

  Perhaps if you go there, they will know.

  And on. And he would continue, a ghost searching for its flesh.

  “Let me see,” said the clerk in the Tarnów District Hospital, running an efficient finger down a staff register. “Yes, here’s her name, just as you said. Rehabilitation pavilion, up the street.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She’s here. Unless it is someone else by that name. But if you want to catch her, then I’d suggest you hurry. She’s on the day shift. They are about to come off work.”

  A narrow street led between the complex of hospitals, signs pointing to Maternity, Pediatrics, Surgery, Tuberculosis. It took him a moment to find the path, flanked by box hedge that led to the Rehabilitation ward. Dusk was beginning to fall. Now, from the building, far up the path, the nurses began to file out. He stopped as they broke around him, hurrying in twos and threes, some still in nursing caps, others having loosened their hair. They laughed or chatted, passing without paying any heed.

  He stood there, eyes jumping from one nurse to another. Uncertain of what he would do when he found her, what he would say, how to begin.

  “Lucius.”

  She’d seen him first. Not Pan Doctor. Lucius. Like the night she had descended to him in the dark.

  They stood in the path, between the hedges, facing each other a few paces apart. Behind her, others were still coming, parting around the two of them like water around stones. On either side of the path, brick buildings rose to their slate roofs, to the late evening sky of midsummer, now salmon, mauve.

  Over his shoulder, were he to look: a scoop of moon. The air gilded with the pollen from a line of pines beyond the buildings. A fringed white curtain fluttering in an open window. A pair of sparrows, garrulous, as if urging their terrestrial counterparts to speak.

  “Lucius.”

  She was asking for an explanation. But once again she was more prepared than he. He needed just to stand there a moment and take her in. He hadn’t anticipated that she had changed, that life, of course, had carried her along as well. It was her, Margarete, yes…And yet! Her face was fuller now, the worried circles gone from beneath her eyes. She still wore a nurse’s uniform, now white, different from the familiar grey from Lemnowice. She had thrown a light-blue blouse over it, buttoned over her chest. In place of her old sturdy winter boots, she now wore laced white patent shoes, with heels.

  And her hair! Long and smooth, and russet-colored, now clearly styled, though he couldn’t name the fashion. It was combed back over her ears, where it tumbled in smooth waves to her shoulders. She must have combed it just before she left the hospital. For someone else: this should have been his clue.

  Across her cheekbone, he saw the scar from Horst’s boot, bone-colored against a blush. She clasped a handbag—no Mannlicher!—and squinted slightly, as if she too were trying to take him in. Should he embrace her? There? Before the others? Memories rising now of soldiers descending from the trains with arms outstretched to meet their wives.

  The footsteps sounded on the gravel as the nurses continued to stream past. He waited for her to take his arm, or ask him to follow her, to someplace quiet, where they could sit or be alone. He hadn’t imagined it like this, amid so many other people, before the open windows of the ward.

  “Lucius. How?”

  Her lips parted, as if in wonder. She touched the scar. Still he wanted just to stand there in her strange, new presence, not to speak. But she was waiting, and so he stumbled through his story: the Brusilov Offensive, the ambulances, the hospital in Vienna, his trip to Lemnowice. Then: Krajniak, the hospital in Sambor, the photo, the other nurse, the train. Details that now seemed s
o unimportant. But that was how.

  “Lemnowice…” She said the word with some astonishment. As if it had been a long time since she had thought of it. While he had thought of nothing else.

  “Yes.”

  “And you came for me?” Now in her voice he heard a different timbre, less slushed, less song.

  “For you, yes.”

  “Oh, Lucius. Oh, Lucius.” For a moment, she just stood there and shook her head. Again she touched the scar, a habit apparently acquired since they last parted. He had the impression of some confusion, then of someone mourning something delicate that had just been broken. “Oh, Lucius. I don’t know what to say.”

  Now most of the day shift had moved off. They were almost alone. He recalled their sudden, surreptitious kisses, outside the church, in the darkness of the forest. He stepped closer, ready to take her in his arms.

  She closed her eyes. “Please. Please, don’t.”

  A line then, from the nun Ilaria’s letter he’d read so many times. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.

  But her hair, her shoes…

  “I didn’t think…You’ve kept your vows?”

  “No. No…Oh, Lucius.” She worried her hands. “There is so much to tell you. So much, but where can we start? There were never any vows.” She took a breath. So there, another question had been answered. “No vows,” she said again. “But…Oh, but I’ll just say it! I have a daughter, Lucius, a little girl.”

  The sparrows had fled. Suddenly, he felt very cold.

  “A daughter.” He let the word sink in.

  That moment by the river now lay before them. Her legs cold from the water; the trundling katydid. Neither able to speak of what he wished to ask.

  “And she…is…” But he couldn’t say it. Mine?

  “She’s six months old.”

  This also answered it. He looked now at her hands, God’s little hands he’d come to know so well. A simple ring, no stone. “You’re…married?”

  “A year ago. But yes, we…oh, Lucius!” she exclaimed, her voice now plaintive. “You’ll understand! You were lost…and then…” She paused, closing her eyes. It seemed as if she were trying to prepare him, to do this kindly. “He is someone that you know. He…Oh, the world is very strange and wonderful…” But now, for once, she was at a loss for words; now she had begun to tremble, too.

  “Lucius, I tried to find you. I dreamed you were alive. For months, I dreamed I saw you. I knew! I sent a letter, two letters to you, care of the army. I thought of going to Vienna, but the hospital, it needed me. And then…then I found him.”

  She stopped. “I should be so happy!” She forced this, her words breaking. “My friend is alive. You are alive. I thought I would never see you again. I am a mother, and my child’s healthy, beautiful…”

  But he was having trouble hearing everything she’d said. He repeated, “Someone I know.”

  She looked off, now unable to meet his gaze. She took a breath. “I found him, by chance, in Sambor,” she said. “In the hospital. Among the other amputees.”

  Still she couldn’t say his name.

  “He was so sick,” she said. “For three months, he couldn’t even move. His amputations had healed, but he was like he was that winter day the peasant brought him to us. I knew my duty wasn’t over then. I knew. I asked to be his nurse. It wasn’t hard; the others didn’t want to work with him, moaning like that. I was with him for almost six months in Sambor before he was transferred. I went with him. First to Przemyśl, then Jarosław. I couldn’t leave him, after all that’d happened, I couldn’t let him go. By then, he’d begun to recover. By the time we were transferred here, to Tarnów, he had begun to talk again, and for the first time he could tell me about his life before the war. I helped him write to his family in Hungary. They came to see him. His mother and his brother—he lost his father when he was very little—and a sister from his mother’s second marriage, a beloved little girl he often drew. But when they left, he chose to stay here, with me. By then he was so much stronger. Still there are nights when he wakes screaming. Days of sadness, or when the trees or clouds call out to him in ways that I can’t see. But that will take time, you know. Many soldiers take such time to heal. We have a fine wheelchair for him, and in the day, while I work, he looks after Agata, the baby. He loves the baby. He’s become an illustrator of children’s books, for a publisher in Warsaw, and…”

  But there she stopped. It had been said.

  She was a little out of breath from the story, as when they first had met those years ago. Now, she looked up at Lucius, eyes full of concern about how this news would land. But something extraordinary was happening. It seemed to him as if the world were changing, as if some great force was gathering about him, in the cobbles and buildings, in the rails, the trains, the clouds and light, the distant mountains in the sky.

  A shadow moved; a great winter bird unclenched him from its talons and exploded into flight. And then a drifting, a sparkling silvered drifting down.

  And he was there.

  “I should like to meet your daughter,” he said.

  Margarete looked up at him, with the gaze of patience and understanding he had come to know so well. “I would like that more than anything else in the world,” she said. “But I can’t. For József. He’s come so far. I can’t. If he were to see you…You remember…You understand.”

  Then suddenly, she began to cry.

  “Margarete.” Lucius took a step toward her. Not Małgorzata. Her old name, her nom de guerre.

  She looked at him. Tears were running down her face. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. Then she began to laugh. “Oh, how silly all this is. Look at you, you’re crying, too! Oh, Lucius, he loves our little girl. He laughs, can you imagine? After all that’s happened to him. Oh, what I would give for you to hear him laugh…”

  What I would give, thought Lucius. He watched her wipe the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she sniffed and rubbed her nose with her palm, a familiar motion, from the coldest days.

  In his pocket, he felt the little stones. I will keep these, he thought. Then, very slowly, he leaned slightly toward her, as if what he was about to say should be a secret, though there was no one else around.

  It was still there, he thought, that faint smell of carbolic. I did not forget.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  In the distance, a train whistled. She looked up one last time at him. Then, for a brief moment, he sensed that she would ask him something else, about his life, or more of what happened since they had parted, or where he’d go from here. For there was so much left to say. But something she saw must have given her his answer. She lowered her gaze. Then quickly, as if she was worried she might change her mind, she hurried off, hesitant at first, then more determined, the stride of someone expected somewhere, someone going home.

  He watched her as she walked down the street and turned the corner. In the sky, the clouds continued on their march. A cold wind passed. At his side, the curtain snapped and billowed. The sparrows returned now, chattering. He took a step. The world received him.

  Acknowledgments

  For their support during the long writing of this book, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Beatrice Monti von Rezzori of the Santa Maddalena Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  I have benefited from the advice and kindness of Robert Mailer Anderson, Reagan Arthur, Nadeem Aslam, John Barry, Chris Bennett, Justin Birnbaum, Katy Black, Zuzanna Brzezinska, Daniela Cammack, Adam Chanzit, Melissa Chinchillo, Sallie de Golia, Robin Desser, Grainne Fox, David Grewal, Chris Hayward, Rona Hu, Anna Jarota, Jovana Knežević, Karen Landry, Shannon Langone, Tanya Luhrmann, Gitte Marx, Jed Purdy, Laura Roberts, Tim Roytman, Katherine Sanborn, Anna Spielvogel, Hans Steiner, Éva Soós Szőke, and Thomas Weiser. Ellis McKenzie and Peter Houghteling believed in this book when it was in its earliest pages, and I deeply feel their abse
nce upon its completion.

  Over the past twenty years, I have been fortunate to have Tinker Green, Kevin McGrath, and Josh Mooney as not only friends but also the most thoughtful of readers.

  For the wisest counsel, I am deeply grateful to my agents, Christy Fletcher and Donald Lamm, and to my editors, Lee Boudreaux and Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown and Company and Maria Rejt at Mantle and Picador in the U.K.

  Finally, thank you to Debbie, Emma, Fiora, Susan, Charlotte, Sylvia, Pearl, Ed, Aaron, Cotton, Bob, and Elizabeth; to my sister, Ariana, and niece, Selah; and to my parents, Robert and Naomi, for welcoming this book into your lives. Thank you, Raphael and Peter, for reminding me always of the power of stories, and for lifting me in winged ways I hope you one day understand. And above all, thank you, Sara, to whom I owe each one of these words.

  About the Author

  Daniel Mason is a physician and author of the novels The Piano Tuner and A Far Country. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for opera and theater. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in the humanities and medicine. He lives in the Bay Area with his family.

  danielmasonbooks.com

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