They returned to the road. After another hour, the hussar stopped and dismounted slowly, even more stiffly than when he’d stopped before. He fumbled with his trousers as if to urinate, and Lucius turned to give him privacy. But when the man didn’t move for several minutes, Lucius looked back. Now something seemed wrong. Another minute, and Lucius heard him curse, then groan as if straining, before he gave up and climbed back on his horse.
Close to evening, they entered an empty village, stopping to billet in an abandoned house. The walls were bare; the kitchen was empty, the cabinets open, the floor covered with broken plates. An icon of Saint Stanislaus of Poland lay in an open drawer, as if it had been hidden there and then discovered.
Poland, thought Lucius. Galicia. Somewhere, in the woods, they must have crossed the border. On a table, inexplicably, was a beautiful ceramic music box, which played an unfamiliar tune. The bed had been lanced open and emptied of its straw.
They kept the horses inside, in the dining room. Gathering bedstraw, tearing off the last remaining doors from the cabinet, the hussar lit a fire, killed and skinned the rabbits, and boiled them in a pot he carried on his horse. Without his mask, his face looked drawn and hollow now, and Lucius saw he ate only tiny bites. “Are you sick?” he asked at last. The man grunted, but didn’t reply. When they’d finished eating, they lay down, clothed, beneath a single blanket. Lucius remained awake. The anesthetic had begun to wear off, and his wrist was throbbing. Now he regretted his ambition to push on. How far was Lemnowice? He had enough cocaine for one more day. Constantly, he wiggled his numb fingers, worried again about a compression of the nerve. But the room was freezing—he could scarcely feel the fingers of his other hand either.
He was still awake when the hussar stirred, rose, and went to the wall to urinate. As before, he remained like that a long time, perhaps five minutes, more, before he began to groan and then to strike himself, his thighs or lower abdomen or penis—Lucius couldn’t see, only that the man did so with increasing violence.
Lucius sat up. “Corporal?”
The man stopped. His fists were balled. He lifted them high above his head and began to moan.
“Corporal?” Lucius said again. Then, very tentatively, uttering the words for the first time in his life, “I am a doctor.”
There was silence. Cautiously the man appraised him from dark, sunken eyes above unshaven cheeks.
Then tentatively, he said, “It does not come out. It is stuck… It hurts, here…”
It took Lucius only a moment to put the signs together. In the textbooks there might be a dozen different causes for an obstruction, but on the Eastern Front, with its garrison towns lined with whorehouses, there was really only one explanation in an otherwise healthy man. Back in Kraków, the clinics cared for a steady flow of men receiving urethral dilatation for gonorrheal strictures. He had seen massive, stoic soldiers reduced to sobs.
Lucius said, “Tomorrow, at the hospital, they’ll take care of you.”
The man said, “Nothing comes out.”
Lucius said, “I understand. Tomorrow, we will reach the hospital…”
“Nothing!”
“I understand. I…” He took a deep breath. “When did you last go?”
But the hussar didn’t answer. Instead, he turned, holding his penis in his open palm, as if to say to Lucius, Look. Lucius hesitated. Then, lighting a candle from his rucksack, he crouched before the hussar. Think. Remember the lectures on the anatomy of the bladder. Except he’d skipped them to work in Zimmer’s lab.
He told the man to bear down, and a single drop of urine appeared at the tip of his penis. Gently, Lucius palpated the man’s belly. It was tense, his bladder full. Once, chronic venereal disease was the kind of problem he might have joked about with Feuermann, hardly the glorious surgery he’d expected on the front. But now the possible consequences of an untreated obstruction ran through his mind. Did the bladder actually rupture? Or the urethra? Or did the kidneys shut down before anything tore?
“Tomorrow at the hospital…,” Lucius began.
The man shook his head. “I can’t get back on the horse.” He bent over, pushing his fist so hard into his belly that Lucius was now certain something would burst.
Leaving me alone with a dying horseman in an abandoned village, he thought. He didn’t know where he was going, nor how to return to Nagybocskó.
The soldier said, “Every month, I go… they use a little rod…”
“I know,” said Lucius. “It is called a bougie. But I don’t have one.”
The two men looked around the room, eyes passing over the saint’s icon, the music box. Then the hussar said, “For my rifle, there is a rod assembly…”
Lucius felt his stomach turn. “I can’t. They use petroleum jelly… For the rod to advance, we need…”
But the man was rummaging through his saddlebags, returning with a three-piece collapsible brush, with one piece screwing into the other. It looked like a medieval torture implement. But the pieces without bristles were thin and smooth, and even tapered at their threaded ends. From the bag, the man removed a tube of gun oil.
Lucius had two ampoules of morphine left, and he gave the hussar one, using the needle still dirty with his own blood. He told the man to lie down, and waited until the morphine took effect. Then he squeezed rifle oil onto the rod. Again he tried to recall what he’d read in the textbook. If he remembered correctly, the urethral canal took a sharp turn at the urethral sphincter. If he pushed too far, he could pierce through the wall of the canal. But if the stricture were closer, he might stand a chance. He took a deep breath. “Grab here,” he said, and had the hussar pull his penis straight. He placed the rod at the urethral opening and advanced it slowly in. The man tensed. Lucius stopped, now remembering that one of the risks of the procedure was opening a false passage. His left hand was trembling, and he braced it with his right. He found himself recalling how in Kraków, in the mess hall, he’d heard a pair of sappers talking about a certain kind of shaking that beset them as they gently wound the wires of their bombs. He advanced the rod farther, and then it reached resistance. He backed up, slipped it forward, again felt it stop. Then, with a push, past. Then the hussar roared, twisted away, leaving Lucius rod in hand, stumbling back, piss-sprayed as the man shattered a wall plank with his fist.
He’ll kill me, Lucius thought. But then the hussar began to laugh.
The next morning he was in tremendous spirits.
He sang as he urinated in many directions. “Orvos!” he said, embracing Lucius as he half-spoke, half-sang something in Hungarian, none of which Lucius understood. Save orvos. Doctor. It was enough.
They set out. Their trail joined with a rutted, empty road that climbed steeply into the hills. Now the hussar seemed positively garrulous. He sang and whistled and drummed on his thighs. It was good that Lucius was a doctor, he told him. Lots of patients. He made a sawing motion with his hand.
They stopped only for Lucius to inject more anesthetic into his wrist. By then the signs of war were gone, the forest clear. The only person they saw was an old man in the middle of a dark wood, rummaging through the snow. When the hussar slowed, Lucius was afraid that he would rob him just as he had robbed the others, but he only asked the way, and the old man pointed with a turnip as he leaned unsteadily on his stick.
Dusk was falling when they came over a low hill and at last found themselves before a village. It was tucked in a softly sloping valley, with two streets of houses descending from a single wooden church of rough-hewn logs. Above the church, the road kept rising. Below, the valley widened into snow-covered fields that flanked a frozen river. “Lemnowice,” said the hussar. They followed the road down to the fields and then up past the houses. They were low-ceilinged huts, made of wood, straw-thatched, with tiny windows, all covered with wooden shutters so that it was impossible to see inside. There were no chimneys. A pair of drays lay in the road, seemingly abandoned, half-buried in snow. There was a flutter over one of the rooftops, and a huge black crow took off into the sky.