She did not explain her absence. She was distracted, said Krajniak. Something clearly had upset her, but she wouldn’t tell them what.
They rang the church bells. Zmudowski straggled back, then Schwarz—you remember, Pan Doctor, with the fossils? All save Lucius. When a few hours passed, Margarete and a group of others set out to look for him. But by then the fog was so thick, they could scarcely find the path. Still they searched. Our good sister wouldn’t quit.
It was only later the next morning that they heard the first sounds of artillery. Again they sent a search party. But still they couldn’t find him, Pan Doctor knew that part. And with the fighting over the hills, they didn’t dare go far. She was frantic then, said Krajniak. She paced the church, the road, went back up the river to look again.
By afternoon, a messenger had appeared from down the valley. Russian cavalry was advancing across the foothills, he told them. Their orders were to evacuate the patients into Poland, on intelligence of a Russian pincer movement to the south.
Krajniak took another swig. “But still she didn’t want to leave.”
How she was stubborn! But by the time the evacuation crews arrived, there were reports that Cossack cavalry were already in Kolomea. Chaos descended on the church. One by one they transferred the men into the lorries. Margarete waited until the very last ambulance was loaded with the sickest patients, then climbed on board. By the time they reached the mouth of the valley, they could see smoke on the plains, and the roads were filled with marching troops. In Nadworna, the soldiers were separated based on their injuries, the frailest men sent on to Sambor; Zmudowski stayed, she went along. It was the last time that Krajniak saw either of them. No sooner had he reached Nadworna than he’d been sent back toward the front. Not as a cook this time, but as a soldier.
“With this.”
He held up his stump.
But Lucius had scarcely heard anything after the word Sambor. Now the railway map, burned into his mind during his time on the ambulances, appeared before him. Sambor. He’d been there shortly after his new commission. Our paths had crossed. He felt his mind yield, buckle in accommodation as this fact was taken in. Summer, August. Yes, he could recall the sweltering wards.
“Do you know which hospital?”
“Which hospital? I told you, we were separated.”
“But perhaps you heard from someone else…”
Now a look of sympathy crossed Krajniak’s face. “No, Doctor. I didn’t hear from anyone. I told you: a week later, I was carrying a gun.”
Lucius nodded slowly, still reluctant to accept that this was all. But alive, he told himself. And last in Sambor. This is what he had hoped for: a glowing pebble left on the forest floor.
Sambor, safely in what was now Polish territory, just west of the Lwów-Dolina line.
The sun was beginning to go down behind the hills, and above them, the sky had turned a coral red. In the yard, a chicken summited a dung heap, a glistening yellow grub twisting in its beak. Nearby, a cat watched it hungrily. In a neighbor’s yard, one of Krajniak’s comrades was cutting wood. Now food came: beet soup, rye bread, and onion dumplings. They grew silent as they ate from old tin army plates, spoons clanging as they had at mealtime during the war.
Then Krajniak spoke. “Pan Doctor? Do you remember Zmudowski’s story, about the stamps?” He took a bite. “You know, it wasn’t true.”
“No?” Slowly, Lucius set down his cup. Wondering what this had to do with Margarete. Why Krajniak was telling him this now.
“Not the way he told you, at least,” Krajniak continued. “That Russian soldier? He couldn’t have cared less for stamps. He wanted something to send his girlfriend. So one day, when Margarete was out, Zmudowski snuck into her room, hoping to find something, a pair of stockings, a chemise, anything he could trade. As you could guess, there wasn’t much other than the habits of the other sisters who had died. But beneath her pillow, he found a handkerchief, a silk one, with the names Małgorzata and Michał, joined at the “M.” The kind a young man might buy for his betrothed. So he took it. That’s what Zmudowski gave the soldier for his stamps.”
Małgorzata, thought Lucius, turning the word over in his mind. Polish for Margarete. So it wasn’t really a new name.
A pair of different children had materialized, chasing a hoop from an old army food barrel across the rutted yard. The summer sun had long set. They moved in shadows.
“And what did she do when she found out?” asked Lucius.
“That’s the strange part,” said Krajniak. “She wasn’t one to keep quiet, but she never said a thing. If it was from a brother or a father, or even a friend, I think she would have asked us if we’d seen it. Or denied the soldiers their morphine until someone gave it back. It made me think that there was a story she was hiding: of a husband maybe, or perhaps she was engaged. But she never mentioned anyone, never received a single letter. She never said anything about home, but I knew, just by the way she spoke, that she was from the mountains. If this man of hers was still alive, she would have gone to see him. But nothing. For two and a half years.”
“And what do you think that means?” asked Lucius. Thinking: Małgorzata. The earthly life I left behind.
“What do I think?” The cook paused and watched the children. “There are many ways for young men to die in the mountains, even before the war. I think she lost him. Maybe before she entered the convent. Or maybe there was no convent; maybe she just came straight to us.”
Lucius looked up toward the steeple, now a shadow against the sky. He nodded slowly. A memory of her came to him, standing at the door to share the news of Rzedzian’s passing. One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor.
Her forest songs of weddings and midsummer festivals.
Her tears, her flight, when he asked for her hand in marriage.
“I understand,” said Lucius slowly, his memory of her shimmering, like a body in the water, threatening to break apart. “I’ve also wondered who she really was.”
Krajniak blew his nose again. “If I may, Doctor? You were rather in love with her, weren’t you?”
The children sprawled over each other; the hoop bounced loose.
“A little,” Lucius said.
By then it was past midnight, but Margarete’s mention had released memories of their time in Lemnowice and neither of them wished to stop. Now, the stories tumbled out of them. Lucius spoke of the food they gathered during the spring scarcity, the hasty winter sunbathing, the games of soccer in the snow. Krajniak reminded him of Margarete’s breeding programs—“Cats everywhere now, Doctor! Don’t eat the goulash!”—and the way everything had seemed covered in powdered lime. Lucius recalled the drunken summer singing, the card games played out beneath the stars. Krajniak waxed poetic about the accidental pickles, the wine pilfered from the summer estates. Together they recalled Rzedzian and the way his tears would gather on his moustache, and Nowak with his fear of handwashing, and Zmudowski’s photo of his daughter, and all the others they could summon up from memory: the chastened Sergeant Czernowitzski, the clarinetist with his instrument of tin and wire, the Viennese tailor, the cobbler with the dented head.
By then, Lucius’s wristwatch read four, and a hint of dawn was in the sky. He felt the fatigue of his journey, but still he didn’t wish to stop. He was starving for this, he realized. It was more than simply recollection; it was as if Krajniak contained a part of him that once he thought was lost. Now he was hungry to reconstruct that person, greedy even, given the knowledge that he would likely never see this man again. Do you remember when I first arrived? he asked. And that first night? The soldiers, with the missing jaw, the belly turning inside out?