As soon as the pain brought him back to consciousness on his sickbed, he asked someone to look for his talisman: the stone that his wife had pressed into his hand on one of the days of their long-drawn-out farewell. At first she probably hoped that the talisman would change his mind and get him to stay, but later, when he was polishing his sword, she had told him to think of it as something to keep him safe. It was sewn into the inside pocket of his uniform and was shaped like a heart. His wife, claiming to have recognized it as a linden leaf, ascribed curative powers to it and told him to lay it on any wound to heal it. The wound below his torso seemed to him too large for that, and for the first few weeks after his injury he shrank from looking down at it at all, let alone touching the sore flesh in any way, so he placed the stone on his eye socket. It felt heavy and pleasantly cooling there.
While the stone lay on his eye socket, Ernst Ludwig Würsich murmured words of comfort to himself, words reminding him of what his wife had said, good words — oh, my dear, she had called him — encouraging words saying that it would be all right again. Later he took the stone in his hand and held it tight, and he felt as if not only his pain, that keen and now familiar companion which kept appearing, white and shining, to deprive him of sight and hearing, but also the last of his strength were being pressed out into the stone, breathing life into it. At least just a little, so little and yet so much that the stone soon felt to him hotter than his hand. Only when it had been lying on the sheet beside him for some time could he use it to cool his eye socket again. So he spent days occupied with this simplest of actions. Those days appeared to him at first anything but dull, for the pain kept him awake, kept his wound alive, nagged until he would have liked to run away from it on both legs, and he knew just where he would go. Never before had he thought so passionately of his wife, never before had his love seemed so clear and pure to him, manifest as it was without any kind of distraction, without the faintest doubt, as in these days when all he did was to pick up her stone and put it down again.
But the pain went on and on, exhausting his nerves, and fine cracks appeared in his clarity of mind of those first few days; his insight into his pure love crumbled and collapsed. One night the pain woke him and he could turn neither to left nor to right, the pain was not white and shining any more but fluid, black, lightless lava, and he heard the whimpering and whining under the other sheets on the beds close to him. He felt as if all his love, all his understanding of his existence, had been merely a courageous but vain rebellion against the pain. Nothing seemed pure and clear any more; there was only pain. He didn’t want to groan, but there was no time or space for what he wanted now. The auxiliary nurse was tending another wounded man who wouldn’t last much longer, he was sure of that, the man’s wailing at the far end of the hut must stop soon, before his own. He longed for peace. He cried out, he wanted to blame someone, he had no memory of God or faith in him. He begged. The auxiliary nurse came, gave him an injection, and the injection had no effect whatsoever. Only after dawn did he manage to sleep. At midday he asked for a sheet of paper and a pencil. His arm felt heavy, there seemed to be no strength in his hand, he could hardly hold the pencil. He wrote to Selma. He wrote to keep the bond between them from breaking, so faint now did the memory of his love seem, so arbitrary the object of his desire. He devoted the next few days to his stone out of mere loyalty. A chivalrous feeling ran through him when he touched it. He wanted to cry. Cautiously, his thoughts circled around ideas like honour and conscience. Ernst Ludwig Würsich felt ashamed of his own existence. What use was a one-legged, wounded man, after all? He hadn’t so much as set eyes on a Russian, he hadn’t looked an enemy in the face. Still less had he risked his life in some honourable action in this war. The loss of his leg was a pitiful accident and could not be considered any kind of tribute to the enemy. He knew he would go on picking up the stone and putting it down again until the next infection of his wound or his guts struck, setting his body on fire, burning it out, and he sank into fever and the twilight of pain.
Although the winter battle had been won, that success was to remain as remote from Ernst Ludwig Würsich as the question of there being any point in the war. When the field hospital closed down one day just after the end of hostilities, he and the other wounded men were to be taken home. But transport turned out difficult and tedious. Halfway through the journey some of them deteriorated; typhoid spread among them, many died and the survivors were temporarily accommodated in a small colony of huts near Warsaw. From there they went on to Greifswald in a larger convoy of the injured. Week after week now he was told that they were only waiting for his health to improve before sending him back to Bautzen. But however much it improved, there were still stumbling blocks: he needed the financial means to get back and someone to help him physically, and those he did not have. He wrote two or three letters home a month, addressing them to his wife, although he had no way of knowing whether she was even still alive. No answer came. He wrote telling Selma that the stump of his leg refused to heal, although the injuries to his face near the socket of his right eye had healed nicely and the skin around the scars was smoothing out more every day. Or at least, so his sense of touch told him; he couldn’t know for certain because he had no mirror. He hoped she’d recognize him. Of all his features, his nose was almost the same, he said. Yes, his face had healed up extremely well, he assured her, very likely it was only on close inspection, and by drawing conclusions from the rest of his physiognomy, that anyone could see where the right eye had once been. In future, when they went to the theatre, he’d be glad to borrow the gilded opera-glasses he had given her for their first wedding anniversary, and then at last he’d offer her his monocle in exchange. He knew she’d always thought the monocle suited her better than him, he added.
That, he thought, might at least make his wife smile her enchanting smile if she were still alive, if she read his letter, if she learned about his injuries from it. Merely imagining the sparkle of her eyes, their colour changing between green and brown and yellow, sent a shiver of desire and a sense of well-being down his spine. Even the pain, so far unidentified, that sprang from a sore place on his coccyx, throbbing and spreading up his back as if the upper layers of skin were being sliced into very thin strips, even that he could ignore for minutes at a time.
How was he to guess that his wife Selma handed the letters to her housekeeper Mariechen for safe keeping, unread and still sealed?
With abhorrence, Selma Würsich told Mariechen that she felt more and more disgusted to be receiving wartime letters from That Man — as she now referred to him — a man who, allegedly for love of her but against her express wish, had wanted to go off and be a hero. She thought that in these signs of life from him she detected a kind of mockery, something of which she had suspected her husband for no real reason ever since they had known each other. Inwardly, she was waiting for the day of his return and her chance to say, with a shrug of her shoulders expressing utter indifference, the following words of welcome: Oh, so you’re still with us, are you?