He paused before the door to the sacristy as if he might yet find her inside. But it was empty, completely empty, stripped just like the rest of the church. On the floor, he could see the indentations where once her bed had stood. Now it, too, had been taken. Even Horváth’s country sketch was missing. In the chaos of the evacuation had she thought to bring it with her? That was one great difference between them. That for Margarete, József Horváth was a patient she might remember with affection, even love, as one can love a person one has cared for, even if they couldn’t be saved.
For a moment, he stopped and looked out the window, the square of sky he had beseeched so many times when she was ill. Through branches he could see the outline of his old quarters, which now seemed so close to hers. How often had she sat there, looking toward his door? Then he touched the sill and froze.
There someone had placed two small, white, almost perfectly round stones.
It could have been anyone, he thought, his world contracting to these points. Any soldier, any village child.
They were cool in his hand and left bare circles in the dust.
Then he had one place left to go. The door to the courtyard from her room creaked as he pulled it open, through a scrim of gritty soil that had been washed beneath the molding. Outside, the yard was thick with uncut grass. The air hummed with mayflies and little moths, gnats and butterflies. The beech tree was in leaf, its towering branches garlanded with catkins. His oracle, his monument of memory, the bark grey and smooth and utterly unscarred. No soldier. No disfigured revenant. No screams, no tinted snow. Nothing at its base but high green grass, now swaying in the wind. Just the old, indifferent monument to what was lost.
He thought of the city’s war memorials, and the way the mourning knelt before them, laying wreaths and candles and praying for a son’s return. But what he was seeking was forgiveness and atonement, and he couldn’t think of any worthy offering to give.
Another shiver passed through the beech’s branches. High above, a squirrel chattered.
Yes. I know. It’s time.
They rode out on a pair of Carpathian ponies, small, mouse-colored creatures who ambled amiably through the mud. The forest was damp and warm. Billows of midges hummed in the light shafts that descended through the canopy. Krajniak ahead, rifle across his saddle, watching, silent now. By then it was clear he would not tell Lucius who his men were, or what they were fighting for. But Lucius didn’t press him. The little band seemed so vulnerable against the armies of the plains. Perhaps they all were safer if he didn’t know.
Once, in a clearing, Krajniak whistled, low, and an answer came from somewhere in the woods. But they saw no one else, and the forest was so still that at times Lucius nodded off to sleep.
It was evening when the land opened and Lucius dismounted. Krajniak followed. Standing at the edge of the forest, Lucius searched for the right words to thank the cook. But what to say? That somehow in their drunken chatter about pickles and games of winter soccer and a soldier who carried fossils in his pockets, Lucius felt as if something had been returned to him? That Krajniak was the only one of all of them to whom he had truly bid farewell?
“Goodbye!” said Krajniak. He kissed him once, twice, on the cheeks, and a third time on the head.
“Goodbye!”
And taking the reins of Lucius’s pony, the cook wiped his nose and disappeared back into the woods.
It was midnight when Lucius reached the empty highway to Dolina.
He slept off the road, a deep sleep in the shelter of an overturned wagon. In the morning, a Polish convoy passed him heading west. When he presented Borszowski’s letter, they hoisted him on board, without even bothering with the elaborate story he had prepared.
Two days later, he was in Sambor.
He spent the night at a Hotel Kopernikus, near the center of town.
It had been over a week since he had bathed, and his shoes and clothes betrayed the journey. He found a shave just down the street from the hotel, from a squinting man with raw, pink hands and a suspicious absence of customers, who berated him with a conspiracy theory about the shortage of badger hair as he drew a dull blade across his throat. Freed, he found a clothing shop across the square. The racks were mostly empty; the longest trousers still fell short. Pale khaki, like some tropical explorer. But they would have to do.
He found the district hospital in the same building as the old army regimental hospital, which itself had occupied the site of an even older cholera hospital, behind centuries-old ramparts that gave the impression it was under siege. He had been there once before, during his service on the ambulance trains. But inside the walls, the grounds were nothing like the place of constant movement he had remembered from the war. A tall statue of a man with an unfamiliar name stood along the entrance path, presumably the cholera-fighter of old. Some goats wandered over the grass. A family was picnicking.
He stopped. Beyond them, a nurse sat by a young man in a wheelchair and gently fed him from a bowl. In his throat Lucius felt that same familiar quiver that he felt each time the amputees back in Vienna reminded him of Horváth. It wasn’t him, of course, or her, but there was something to the nurse’s gentle manner that reminded him of Margarete with their soldier, so long ago. This man was missing both hands, both feet. Frostbite, most likely, Lucius thought, finding shelter in clinical considerations. Though by his stillness, by his vacant stare, Lucius suspected frostbite wasn’t all.
Near the entrance to the building, a group of old men played tarock, and didn’t seem to notice when he passed.
He walked up a short flight of stairs and went inside. During the war, he recalled that even the foyer had been filled with patients, but it was empty now. There was an unmanned desk and chair, and a small sign that indicated visiting hours. On the far wall was a low display case, flanked on either side by the annual staff photos that hung on every wall of every hospital he had been to in his life. Over the doors that led into the wards were the words Oddział 1, and Oddział 2. Ward 1 and 2.
Through the small windows in the doors, he saw movement. But now he hesitated, as he had hesitated back with Krajniak. It was less the chance of finding that the trail was cold again; it was the other possibilities he might learn. All he knew was that in 1916 she had been alive in Sambor. Before the full brunt of the Russian assault, before the typhus outbreaks in the crowded hospitals, before the flu.
He walked over to the display case, as if somehow what it held could help prepare him for what came next. Inside were photographs related to the history of the hospital, an old brick used in the first foundation, a medieval-looking tooth extractor, and a pair of stuffed birds without a label, one of which had fallen on its side. He looked above, at the pictures on the wall. The first showed a pair of somber doctors, standing on the same steps he had just climbed, flanked on either side by nurses. And on the frame, the year, 1904…
Quickly, he began to scan the dates, 1905, 1906… He followed them to the other side of the door. They stopped in 1913, resumed in 1916. By now the people had changed: gaunter, the intricate wimples replaced by the simpler habits of the Red Cross.
1917. And there he stopped.
She was standing in the first row, second from the right. Even in the poor light of the foyer, even with the dark long hair that hung down beneath her simple nursing cap, she was unmistakable. The same wonder-filled eyes, lips parted, ready for laughter, her gaze off and to the sky. She wore the costume of a lay nurse. No more habit. But he was no longer surprised.