Engines louder now.
Adelajda’s murmurs growing softer. “Mama Mama Mama Mama.”
They lurched forward, on.
The sun was beginning to set when they reached Jarosław station.
For the rest of the journey they’d been mostly silent. She had retreated into the child, holding him and cooing, chastened, Lucius suspected, by the risk she’d taken, by how perilously close she had come to such extraordinary loss. He sensed, and sensed she sensed, that perhaps they had committed some transgression. For all the gravity of their previous conversation, there had also been something unspoken, not quite a flirtation, but a hint of possibility.
Say that I’m your wife.
This is our son. His name is Paweł Krzelewski.
There was more than one way to understand these words.
My husband met me in Bohumín.
But now, they both had retreated from whatever dream they’d tested. He to his world; she to hers. In Rzeszów, where the train was swarmed by children selling fistfuls of currant sprays, he had purchased some for Paweł, but beyond a whispered Thank you, Adelajda said nothing else.
He looked out the window at the approaching station. The beginning of the journey—with the young couple and their egg-and-onion sandwich, the old men with their stiff vests and crisply folded newspapers—this moment, almost from an older, prewar age, had lured him into a kind of complacent fantasy about what lay ahead. But the encounter with the militia had cast the true recklessness of what he was doing into much sharper relief. Again, he had to remind himself that all reports said that the fighting was concentrated around the rails and cities. That in the mountains, he’d be safer. Or so he hoped.
The train had stopped, and Adelajda began to gather up her belongings. Lucius watched her, waiting for words to be exchanged. But she acted now as if she didn’t know him, and it was only at the door that she looked back. The little boy was sleeping on her shoulder. With a flicker of her fingers she waved goodbye. She left.
A moment later she returned. As she sat, her arm brushed against Lucius.
For a moment, he thought she had decided to travel on with him. Then, very softly, she whispered the name of a street in Rybnik. “Perhaps,” she said, “if you don’t find the person you are looking for, you can come and find me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Again she rose. Across the compartment the old women watched him. He heard Adelajda disappear down the corridor. He turned back to the window as the train began to move. She was there, amid the crowd mingling on the platform, and he wanted her to cast a backward glance, but she seemed resolute now in her decision not to turn.
It was close to midnight when he reached Lwów. Now, everything moved swiftly, without a hitch. He presented the next morning to the garrison, where soldiers took target practice on the same slate-grey dummies he remembered from the years before. By noon, letter in hand, he was on the train to Dolina, in a cattle car with a drunk, deploying Polish rifle battalion heading off to their new war. They reached the station late in the evening. There, a small hotel was advertising vacancies, but he no longer wished to delay his journey, setting out on foot along the overgrown rails.
18.
He passed the night in an abandoned station, on a decommissioned railway south of Dolina. It was of standard imperial construction, and not yet stripped of its Habsburg double eagle. Were it not on the other side of the mountains, it might have been the same building in which he found the hussar waiting with their horses years before. The same board for posting timetables, the same bench that once had sustained the troika of waiting mothers. Roof now caving. Walls already beginning their crumbling return to earth. Otherwise empty, save a tall trapezoid of goldenrod in the light cast by the empty door.
He slept inside on his jacket, on earth wet with summer rain. It was a tentative sleep; in a dream that seemed to cross into his waking moments, he found himself back on the train, running through the corridors, searching compartment after compartment for Margarete. At last, the dream was broken by a pittering reconnaissance about his rucksack, whiskers on his cheek. Nose to his nose: he lurched awake.
Outside, the mountains were beginning to declare themselves against the early summer dawn.
From his bag, he extracted the page torn from the imperial atlas and spread it over the bench. Back in Vienna, he had focused his attention on a highway that skirted the foothills before joining the road that climbed through Bystrytsya to Lemnowice. But after the attack on the train, he wanted to get away from the flatlands as soon as possible. Light dashes through the mountains suggested roads passable by horse. Assuming they were still there fifteen years after the atlas was published, they’d serve well for someone on foot. It was lonelier, but he now worried much more about men than wolves.
From the station, the road south was broad, the mud thick and heavy. In the fields, high grass crowded out the maize and sunflowers. My God, thought Lucius as he stared into the green expanse, he had almost forgotten the land’s fecundity. Great heaps of flax and St. John’s wort rose on the roadside berms, and the road itself, a paisley of mud and tire tracks, was overgrown with brome. Ahead, the mountains rose before him in their grandeur, looming, massive, like the rumpled repose of a stage curtain with its rich, brocaded pleats.
So here he was, in the little hatch marks on his father’s map, the word KARPATEN splayed before him across the land. But a finger’s-breadth to travel yet.
He walked swiftly, his eyes alert for the possibility of other travelers, but he saw no one else. After an hour, at a crossroads, he came across the remains of a field camp, deep in mud, as if half-buried by a deluge. There were dented tins, a bent fork, and an old decaying tarp. A band of sparrows argued in the shadow of a rusting field oven, where a burst of hound’s-tongue had begun to seed. Beyond this: some scraps of uniform, flapping in a morning breeze. A skull and scattered teeth, a rind of scalp, a pair of rib cages, white as stone.
Like Cadmus, he thought, recalling the painting hanging above the chair for minor surgeries, the earth sewn with the dragon’s fangs, from which would grow a fiercer race of men.
It was not yet nine, and already the grass was seething with heat and life. He rolled up his coat, tied it below his rucksack, and pulled up his sleeves, still dirty with their snail’s track of snot. Butterflies had settled on his shirt collar, and he shook them off; then, feeling generous, let them remain there. After another hour, he saw his first people, two farmers in a distant field. They stopped their work and watched him, without greeting. Then two young boys, leading a pair of reluctant, mud-caked sheep.
He walked until dusk, stopping only to eat, staying clear of settlements, wary of how they might treat an unfamiliar visitor at night. At last, alone, exhausted, he turned off the road and, near a narrow stream, lay his coat down within the shelter of a willow.
A frog was croaking. As he rested, memories stirred by the day descended. The crushed-grass smell, the hint of pinesap drifting from the distance. The way the sparrows swayed balletically on the umbels of the wild carrot, snipping at the insects they encountered in their orbits. The way the mud caked on his boots. Yes: wrapped in the rustling of the willow he could almost hear Margarete’s laughter. She seemed so close now that he had to remind himself that he couldn’t expect to find her yet. That he couldn’t lose himself to hopes and expectations. If he was lucky, very lucky, there would be a villager who knew what had happened, or perhaps a clue left in the church. Like a seam running through the great mass of possibilities. And from there he would push on.