Krajniak remembered.
And those first surgeries?
Yes, Pan Doctor. Truth was there were some of us who didn’t think you knew what you were doing.
And the doctors Brosz and Berman?
He remembered.
The first shell-shock cases?
Yes.
“Do you remember József Horváth?”
The words came out almost without his knowing.
There was a long pause. Even the name sounded impossible; it had been two years since he had uttered it aloud.
And Lucius said, though it wasn’t necessary, “The Hungarian that peasant brought in by wheelbarrow that first winter, who’d been found up by the pass.”
Whether Krajniak’s eyes were watery from the horilka or the memories, Lucius didn’t know. He was sitting sideways with one arm on the table as he gazed off to the lightening sky. Now he nodded slowly. “I remember. Of course, I remember, Pan Doctor. I can’t forget.”
There was a long silence. Then slowly, without premeditation, Lucius began to speak. He told Krajniak about the nightmares that had begun upon his return home, the blame he placed on himself for not letting Horváth leave, thinking that he could cure the man himself. He spoke of the many times he thought that he’d seen Horváth among his patients and on the Viennese streets, the impossibility of finding any peace with memory, or any absolution or release. He feared, he told Krajniak, that he would be stuck forever in that winter. That even if he found Margarete, he would not be able to escape the fact that Horváth had been sacrificed for any joy he might attain.
Strangely, for thoughts that had possessed him for years, it took no more than a few minutes for the story to come out.
He was silent. He waited for Krajniak to answer.
But Krajniak did not say anything at first. Lucius felt suddenly ashamed that he had burdened him, had let their stories stray from memories of cats and pickle barrels. Or did Krajniak blame him for Horváth? Was that why he’d said nothing until Lucius brought it up? In the half-light, a pair of bats flitted in and out of the shadows. Krajniak poured another cup of horilka.
Lucius was about to speak again when Krajniak lifted up his stump.
“I can still feel it, Pan Doctor.”
It took a moment for Lucius to realize that Krajniak was referring to his hand. “Yes…,” said Lucius, wondering now whether this was a way of changing the subject, or whether Krajniak’s thoughts had drifted off. Perhaps they both were lost in their own worlds. “Some of my patients say the same…”
Krajniak’s voice was strained now. “Sometimes it feels as if it’s burning, and other times I feel as if it’s touching something, my fingers moving over something on their own. The fur of an animal, a coin, a piece of meat. For a long time, I couldn’t stand it. I’d close my eyes and squeeze at the place where I felt my hand to be. I’d punch and stab it, and once I tried to remove it with a knife. Not the stump, Pan Doctor: the hand, my missing hand.”
He stopped and finished off his cup. Lucius waited for Krajniak to say something more, to offer some kind of redemptive wisdom, to share how he’d gone on.
The bats returned, now visible in all their flitting detail in the morning twilight.
But Krajniak just poured the last of the horilka. Now when he spoke, his voice was steadier. Lucius would have to leave soon. He could escort him down to the mouth of the valley, though unfortunately no farther. But the territory north of them was well secured by Polish forces. You’ll be safe there. And on the plains, with the letter, Lucius would find frequent Polish convoys that could take him to the Sambor rail.
So that was all.
“I would offer you to stay, Doctor, but there are many reasons we should go our separate ways.”
“Of course.”
Krajniak stood. He’d get the horses. It would take an hour to get everything together. Lucius must be tired. If he would like to get a little bit of sleep…
But Lucius’s thoughts were elsewhere. A light breeze had arisen, and in the distance he thought that he heard branches rustling. In his mind, he saw the beech tree, the courtyard crowded with patients, the winter soldier vanishing into the white expanse. Krajniak was right; there were some wounds that couldn’t be amputated. But he had respects to pay.
He walked the last hundred paces alone.
The sun had just begun to peek above the hills. Around him, from the yards, came snorts and clucking. Faces of old women turned to watch him pass. Smells of cooking oil and onions rose from the huts, and smoke seeped through the thatch. He recalled the days that he had gone with Margarete to visit the soldiers distributed among the rooms musty with feathers and tallow, the children bearing silent witness. He wondered how they remembered him, friend or invader. He heard a clattering, and a pair of jays alighted on a fallen fencepost. Then the road opened before him and he was there.
It had changed little from the outside. The wooden facade still dark and faded; the base of the walls now a little overgrown. A pair of black storks were nesting in the belfry, and tufts of wallflower had begun to creep up around the doorframe. But everything else was otherwise unchanged. In the arrow slit, a haunted darkness hovered, as it had hovered four years before.
The doctor? she replied, still staying back, deep in the shadows of the world that awaited him. Didn’t you just say you’re him?
This time it was unlocked.
It was, in many ways, how it had remained in his memory, only smaller now, and this time light spilled in from a southern breach, not from the north. And empty. Gone were the soldiers, of course. But also the blankets, the pallets, the operating table built from pews.
All used as firewood, he assumed. Fitting, even. He begrudged no one; hopefully it had kept somebody warm.
The air was cold, also empty of that old familiar smelclass="underline" the lime, the iodoform and carbolic, the straw beds, the spoiled wounds.
He walked slowly up the center of the nave, following the path he had grown used to taking through the patients, and turning at a right angle when he reached the crossing, he entered the old ward for the dying. The floor was bare; he could have walked there directly at a slant, but the daily circuit was entrenched in him, and it felt wrong to step where men once lay.
This is Brauer, Pan Doctor Lieutenant, frostbite; this is Czerny of the Fourteenth Fusiliers. Moscowitz, Gruscinski, Kirschmeyer. Redlich, professor of Vienna, shot by Cossacks near his tail…
He could see the outline of the crater in the floor. The roof they had repaired still held, though in the south wall a new shell had burst a hole.
Nature had followed, ferns and grass sprouting from the shattered wood. The floor was littered with dung and leaves, and a pair of stunted saplings stretched up toward the light. Streaks of bird droppings painted a scene of the Crucifixion, and following it upward he saw movement in the rafters, a face, an owl, looking down. As he took a step closer, the bird, perturbed, awoke and, with its great wings out, fell toward him, banking skyward in a silent puff of down.
He walked on. Water had crept in behind the Annunciation in the chancel. The paint was blistered, cracked, bursting around Gabriel, as if Mary had fallen in ecstasy not at the visitation of the angel, but the rift in her gilded world.
He stopped at the cabinets that once had held the medicine. Empty, now, save a handful of ampoules of atropine and chloral hydrate amid the rat droppings. No Veronal. He found a package of old bandages, gnawed open. Cats aside, the rats had likely wasted little time once Margarete was gone.