An old memory, the metal apparatus in his mouth, his bleeding tongue.
They bound his feet.
Now the men addressed him directly, but again he didn’t understand. The gun barrel moved from neck to head. He had to speak, he knew. Roughly, he tried what he could remember of Ruthenian. I am a doctor. Worked here, wartime.
“Polyak?” said the soldier.
Pole. It depends who you ask, he thought. By name, but not by passport. He took a gamble. “Avstriyets.”
Austrian. There was silence. Whispers. Then the door opened and someone left.
Now, he could vaguely make out features of the hut. A guard sat by the door, beneath a rank of farm tools. It occurred to him that they might be useful in an escape, but he knew this was an insane fantasy. The truth was that he probably couldn’t have fought off a single guard, even without a sack around his head. Now his thirst and hunger began to grow acute. Voda, he said to the soldier. Water. But no answer returned to him from across the room.
Alone, his head bound, sitting uncomfortably on the stool, he found his mind surprisingly empty, slowing, as if somehow preparing to meet death halfway. He was scared, very scared, but very tired, too, and he found the thoughts of what would happen to him now almost too difficult to bear. He wondered if this was what others felt. If so close, death seemed almost welcome, not something to be feared. Perhaps it would be easier, he thought, if his journey ended now. There would be something fitting to this: back at the church, where his new life had begun. Was this what he’d been drawn toward, a kind of ending, a release?
Then panic surged in him, he felt his eyes tear up, and his stomach seized again. Now, more than fantasies of fleeing, he felt a wish to fall and curl upon himself until someone came to carry him away. Light and elemental, like a shell or husk.
It was afternoon when at last he heard the sound of horses outside, and then someone dismounting. The door opened again. More steps.
“So you’re the Austrian?” This, surprisingly, spoken in German.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
He hesitated, trying to gauge his answer, but the vastness of the war and its allegiances were too great to outmaneuver. So he decided on the truth. “I once lived here, during the war. There was a field hospital. I was the doctor. I’ve come back to look for a friend.”
Silence. Through the sack, he saw the newcomer turn to the guard and say something. Probably asking for papers, for he heard a rustling. He braced himself.
“Krzelewski.”
Pronounced correctly, though with a faint Ruthenian hum.
He answered. “Y… yes?”
Then, suddenly: the light.
A one-handed man stood there before him, his good hand holding the sack, while he sniffled and wiped a runny nose with the stump of his other wrist. A colorfully embroidered highlander’s vest covered an old grey Austrian uniform. On his head, despite the heat, a sheepskin cap, with upturned earflaps. A thick moustache overhung his mouth.
“Doctor!”
Lucius stared, uncertain how to respond.
“It is I, Krajniak! Krajniak! By God’s beard, don’t you remember?”
Ah, yes: the missing hand, the sniffles. The French dine out on foie gras. The Brits beef in a pot. Saluting with his stump that final evening when they went looking for Margarete. The cook.
But now the face was sunburnt, hardened, and the moustache long.
“Of course!”
Krajniak turned to the guard and motioned him to untie the rope that bound Lucius’s hands and feet. Then he approached, cupping Lucius’s cheeks in palm and stump. “Pan Doctor! Oh, my friend, you’re lucky. They were debating whether to hang or shoot you first.”
Krajniak took him outside to a table that was set up at the back of the house, where a bottle of horilka and two cups of hollowed wood quickly appeared. A village woman emerged from inside, in a smock and patterned kerchief. With one arm, she pinned a long grey piglet to her breast, while the other held a curved, thin knife. A little girl of six or seven followed, carrying a baby, nearly bald with a mottled skin infection of the scalp.
“My wife,” said Krajniak, placing his hand on the small of the woman’s back. “From the village, perhaps you remember. The little one is ours.”
He spoke to the woman in Ruthenian, and her face opened in recognition. Vaguely, Lucius recalled her: heavy epicanthic folds, a pale mole in a crease of her nose. She laughed. Then, still holding the pig, she drew back the shirtsleeve of her free arm with her teeth, and presented Lucius with her wrist.
For a second, he wondered if this was some sort of highland custom he had never learned. Was he supposed to kiss her wrist, perhaps the knife? She waited, shook it at him, and spoke again. Then Krajniak said, “You lanced a boil on her arm, remember? Gone! It never came back.”
Lucius was fairly certain that he was not the one who lanced the boil, but he saw no reason to dampen his reception. He touched it with his finger.
“How it’s healed!”
The woman spoke again, and Krajniak answered. He turned to Lucius. “Tomorrow, you will go, but tonight you are our guest. You’re hungry, I imagine?”
The pig twisted, as if it understood.
“Only if you’re cooking,” Lucius answered, as lightly as he could. He watched Krajniak as he poured out the horilka. Now I’ll ask him, thought Lucius. Now I’ll learn. But the fact that the cook had yet to mention Margarete’s name gave him pause. Hastily, Lucius took a gulp, as if to fortify himself for what was coming next. The smell familiar, reminding him of the moments in the surgery when they sterilized their hands. But he had forgotten how hot it was. He coughed.
Krajniak laughed and pinched the nose of the piebald baby, who broke into a grin. “Ah, the city made the doctor soft.” His single hand dove into his breast pocket, removed a metal cigarette case, and held it out to Lucius, who, still hacking, shook his head. Krajniak flipped it open, extracted a cigarette between his fourth and fifth fingers, closed the case and palmed it, lifted the cigarette to his lips, then exchanged the case for a matchbox in his pocket, bracing it with his pinkie as he struck a flame. A deft, practiced motion, suggesting an unexpected physical confidence. He puffed. A cat leapt onto his lap, and he stroked it with his stump.
For a moment, Lucius wondered if Krajniak would explain the men, the weapons, the colored vest he wore over his old uniform. By then the absence of livery or any sign of field organization suggested the men were not part of either the Polish or Ukrainian armies. But who? Krajniak, if he remembered, was from a nearby village. The men had the air of a local defense force; with the fall of Austria, even highlanders had begun to proclaim their own republics, Lucius knew. He thought of his father’s words that evening by the war map in the sunroom, of the burning embers splintering into ever smaller flames.
But Krajniak said nothing, and his gaze seemed to catch on the steeple of the church just up the road.
“You said you came looking for a friend,” he said, turning his dark eyes on Lucius. “I assume you mean our sister nurse.”
She had returned late the night the men went looking.