There was not a soul in sight. He saw no garrison, no sign of the army at all, certainly nothing that could be a hospital. Perhaps it lay beyond the hill, he thought. Unless, this, too, had been a mistake. Unless, after such a journey, he would have to turn around.
The hussar stopped before the church, motioning Lucius to descend. He obeyed, approached the door, and knocked. He waited. There was a narrow window in the door that reminded him of a castle arrow slit. The hussar told him to knock harder, and only then did he hear movement, the sound of footsteps. In the window, an eye appeared.
“Krzelewski,” said Lucius. “Medical lieutenant. Fourteenth Regiment, Third Army.”
Then a key in the lock, a clang of the mechanism. The door opened to reveal a nursing sister. She wore a stiff grey habit, and in one hand held a Mannlicher rifle, standard issue of the k.u.k.
“May I speak to the supervising physician?” he asked in German.
When she didn’t answer, he tried Polish.
“The doctor?” she replied, still staying back, in the shadows. “Didn’t you just say you’re him?”
3.
The nurse’s name was Margarete. She gave no surname. It was not the custom of the Sisters of Saint Catherine to do so, she would explain. Even Margarete was a name she had assumed with her vows, abandoning her earthly appellation to the life she led before. Her face floated in the darkness of the narthex, and it was only when Lucius turned to see the hussar kick his horse and ride away (flee, thought Lucius later) that she opened the door more widely, motioning for him to step inside with a sweeping of the gun. Then she threw her shoulder against the door. He stood in total darkness while she secured it, first turning the iron lock, then heaving a crossbar into the cleats. Turning to follow her movement, he heard a key slip into a second door, then the sonorous clanging of the mechanism as it engaged. Then, weapon swinging in her hand, she led him into the dim light of the nave.
As Lucius’s habit upon entering a house of God was to look up at the majesty of the ceiling, his first impression was that the church of Lemnowice was much like any other of the dozens of wooden churches he had visited in the Tatras, farther west, though this, with its heavy dome and tiny windows, suggested more an Eastern rite. A row of six wooden columns supported the ceiling, from which a pair of chains dangled, now empty of their chandeliers. In the distance, the north transept was illuminated by a lantern. The rest of the church was dark.
It was the sounds and smell that made him look down. A low moan from somewhere in the darkness. A cough, a labored breath. An acrid odor, something animal, like spoiled meat. He stared. The pews were gone, and in their place were lumps of blankets, and it was only when he saw one stir that he understood they were men.
Three rows, perhaps fifteen or twenty lumps in each.
By then Sister Margarete had finished locking the second door and appeared at his side. Softly, she said, “If I may speak?”
Lucius nodded, unable to take his eyes off the bodies.
“The doctor, Szőkefalvi, a Hungarian,” she said, “Szőkefalvi, your predecessor, vanished two months ago under circumstances which perhaps Pan Doctor Lieutenant should understand.”
Now Lucius turned, struck by her form of address, a combination of Polish honorific and German military rank. For a moment, he studied her. She was more than a head shorter than him, and her face was framed by the impeccably crisp folds of her wimple, which pressed in upon her cheeks. Her eyes were of indistinct color, glassy, her lips parted with the impatience of one who wished to speak. He guessed she was a year or two older than he was. The giant key hung like a cross from a chain around her neck, and she had yet to set down her gun.
Again, she seemed to await his blessing. “Yes, please, go on,” he said. Then, quietly, drawing him aside so that she could speak without being heard by the soldiers on the floor, she began.
“In the beginning there were seven of us, Pan Doctor Lieutenant: myself and Sisters Maria and Libuše and Elizabeth and Klara, and two doctors—one whose name deserves no utterance and Szőkefalvi, poor Szőkefalvi, whom I’ve come to forgive. We were but a simple casualty clearing station then. Patch up and send along, as they say. It wasn’t until September that the High Command appreciated our sheltered position in the valley and upgraded us to the status of a regimental hospital, receiving the wounded from the battlefield and caring for them until they were ready to be evacuated to the rear. We had an X-ray machine and a bacteriological laboratory, and with daily prayer and sharp knives and carbolic acid for antisepsis of the wound, we performed a great service for the brave young men serving this smaller, terrestrial king. For three months, we attended to them: castigations of mine and sword, of howitzer, ecrasite, and poisonous earth. We resurrected men shot through with every bullet in the Devil’s armory, men struck by high explosives and Cossack swords, men who lost their feet and hands to the winter when they fell asleep. Such was our glory, Pan Doctor, it brings tears of joy to my eyes to contemplate it once again. Even when the X-ray machine was taken off to Tarnów, and our last drop of eosin had illuminated the mysteries of the last bacteriologic slide—even then we prevailed. For two more months we prevailed. But with so many prayers rising to heaven, Doctor, not only here in Galicia, but from the Pripet, and from the Bukovina and Bessarabia, and—now I have heard—far and beyond, from the cities of Flanders and Friuli, from Serbia and Macedonia, and from the great city of Warsaw—yes, with so many lips turned toward our Lord’s ever attentive ears, and His angels laboring without rest, deflecting bullets with their angelic breath and giving heat to frozen bodies in the snow—with so many lips turned to heaven, one could not expect His eternal protection forever. So we forgave Him and took no affront when the fortress of Przemyśl was seized, and He sent His angels on to that city and left us to the mercy of the Louse.”
She paused. For the last word, she had spoken in German—Laus—and with it her face contorted briefly in disgust.
“You are familiar with the Louse, Doctor. I had known Her too well as a child, and indeed from the very first days of the war She was with us. But never have I known Her in such abundance as in this house of prayer. As the war drew on, we found ourselves confronted with ever greater infestations. Never, never dear Doctor have I seen such extraordinary fertility in any beast; indeed, in my moments of least faith I have wondered if it was the Louse that is God’s favored child. For it seemed at times that one could subtract all matter from our worldly domain but the Louse, and still Earth’s contours could be seen. Oh, Doctor, as a child I had imagined the animals of Noah to be tame, clean creatures, with soft, sweet-smelling hair and soft noses. No! Now I realize that they all must have been infested, not only the rat, but the lion and weasel, the vicious giraffe: veritable arks themselves, for worm and tick and louse.
“For you cannot imagine the infestations of our men. Everywhere! On every layer of clothing, in every stitch and seam. In churning clumps, they teemed, they stirred, like embers. They came out upon our combs, grainy, like wet meal. Oh, sir, the Devil has had time to practice since poor Job! For if the Beast truly wished to try that man’s faith, he would have given him a field dressing in Galicia. No, there is nothing that arouses a louse like the moist, warm dressing of a wound, nothing that heightens their incest. A dressing applied one week prior in Lemberg would be teeming with so many rutting creatures that one could hear the soft thumps of the clots as they fell onto the floor.”