He looked to the neighboring photo. 1918. Gone. There were many explanations, Lucius thought, but only one he couldn’t shake from his mind. The full force of influenza had begun to build that autumn. 1918.
In the photo, there was snow upon the ground; but was this January or December?
He stopped himself. There were so many other explanations! But he recalled the fury with which the flu had swept through the ward, the soldiers and nurses who had succumbed.
He took down the photo and removed the print, part of him now wishing that it wasn’t her at all. On the back, he hoped to find a name as if to prove it, but there was nothing other than the address of the studio, stamped in decorative lettering.
“Is that someone you know?” From behind him. Polish.
Lucius turned to see a small man in a white coat. Balding, tiny circular eyeglasses neatly repaired with wire. A thin moustache over his lip. He motioned to the photo in Lucius’s hands.
“Yes,” said Lucius. He realized he owed an explanation. “So sorry not to have introduced myself. I entered, and I saw this and…”
He took a breath, stepped forward, and held out his hand. “Doctor Lucius Krzelewski of Vienna.” Doctor. No need to mention he was a medical student again, and technically, given classes had yet to start, not even that. His only hope rested on professional courtesy. “I served at a hospital in the Carpathians during the war. I’ve come to look for my nurse. I was told that she was here.”
For a moment, the doctor considered this apparition, the too-short trousers, the bruised lip, the sunburnt skin flushed now by the barber’s blade. The bare photo in his hand, its empty frame behind him on the cabinet.
He came and looked.
“Here.” Lucius pointed. “This is her.” The doctor leaned forward, wrinkling up his nose to keep his glasses from sliding off. A healthy bramble of grey hair filled his ear. He straightened. “I don’t recognize her. But I’ve been here only for a year.” He paused, then pointed to another nurse in the photograph. “But this nurse is here. Perhaps she knows.”
The doctor led him through Ward 2. It was a men’s ward, crowded, but clean and tidy. Patients’ names and diagnoses were written on little chalkboards at the foot of every bed. There were many families, sitting with the patients, playing cards or reading newspapers, or holding squirming children as they talked. The nurse was at the far end of the hall, carrying a stack of bedpans. When she saw them approach, she stopped.
The honorable Polish doctor from Vienna was presented, the story told.
The nurse studied the photo for a moment before beginning to nod. “Yes. Yes. Małgorzata, yes. Last name Małysz, I think. She came with the evacuees in ’16, right? She was good. A little bossy, acted like she knew more than the doctors. But good, especially with the shell-shock cases. If I remember correctly, there was a group that went that winter to a rehabilitation hospital in Tarnów.”
“That winter?”
“March, I think. I remember only because it was around the time the army began to use the gas, when we began to see all the men with phosgene blowback and needed to make space.”
“’17, you mean?”
“Yes, Doctor.” On her face there was a question of why it mattered. But it mattered. Tarnów, 1917. Flu and typhus still lay between them, but he knew that he’d drawn closer. To where, and when, and who.
Małgorzata Małysz. A stranger’s name.
Downstairs, the doctor handed the photograph to Lucius. “Take it. I think you need this more than I.”
Again he was moving, back on the train. Chyrów, Jarosław, Rzeszów: these towns now part of him, the familiar stations from his ambulance days. Again the crowds, the children with their sprays of currants. He felt as if he were on some pilgrim’s route, only this time not stopping. This time only one place mattered: Tarnów.
But would he find her there? In Jarosław, waiting for what seemed like hours for some unexplained problem on the line, he took the photo from his rucksack and looked at it again as if to reassure himself that it was her. No phantom, no fleeing peasant, no South Station apparition. How astounding that it had preserved that gaze familiar from the moments she had looked up at him across the surgery, a gaze that now suggested astonishment at the great game that she’d been playing. In the seat next to him, his neighbor, an older woman in a winter coat despite the summer, made no attempt to hide her curiosity about the image that commanded such absorption. Should I ask her? he wondered. Like Adelajda, interrogating everyone she met? For who was to say that his search would end in Tarnów? That it would not be just another stop, another hospital? Yes, Doctor, we remember her. She went to Kraków. No, she went to Jarosław. No, to Sambor. No, to Stryj. She was from the mountains, Doctor, wasn’t she? She was going home, she said.
Perhaps if you go there, they will know.
And on. And he would continue, a ghost searching for its flesh.
“Let me see,” said the clerk in the Tarnów District Hospital, running an efficient finger down a staff register. “Yes, here’s her name, just as you said. Rehabilitation pavilion, up the street.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She’s here. Unless it is someone else by that name. But if you want to catch her, then I’d suggest you hurry. She’s on the day shift. They are about to come off work.”
A narrow street led between the complex of hospitals, signs pointing to Maternity, Pediatrics, Surgery, Tuberculosis. It took him a moment to find the path, flanked by box hedge that led to the Rehabilitation ward. Dusk was beginning to fall. Now, from the building, far up the path, the nurses began to file out. He stopped as they broke around him, hurrying in twos and threes, some still in nursing caps, others having loosened their hair. They laughed or chatted, passing without paying any heed.
He stood there, eyes jumping from one nurse to another. Uncertain of what he would do when he found her, what he would say, how to begin.
“Lucius.”
She’d seen him first. Not Pan Doctor. Lucius. Like the night she had descended to him in the dark.
They stood in the path, between the hedges, facing each other a few paces apart. Behind her, others were still coming, parting around the two of them like water around stones. On either side of the path, brick buildings rose to their slate roofs, to the late evening sky of midsummer, now salmon, mauve.
Over his shoulder, were he to look: a scoop of moon. The air gilded with the pollen from a line of pines beyond the buildings. A fringed white curtain fluttering in an open window. A pair of sparrows, garrulous, as if urging their terrestrial counterparts to speak.
“Lucius.”
She was asking for an explanation. But once again she was more prepared than he. He needed just to stand there a moment and take her in. He hadn’t anticipated that she had changed, that life, of course, had carried her along as well. It was her, Margarete, yes… And yet! Her face was fuller now, the worried circles gone from beneath her eyes. She still wore a nurse’s uniform, now white, different from the familiar grey from Lemnowice. She had thrown a light-blue blouse over it, buttoned over her chest. In place of her old sturdy winter boots, she now wore laced white patent shoes, with heels.
And her hair! Long and smooth, and russet-colored, now clearly styled, though he couldn’t name the fashion. It was combed back over her ears, where it tumbled in smooth waves to her shoulders. She must have combed it just before she left the hospital. For someone else: this should have been his clue.
Across her cheekbone, he saw the scar from Horst’s boot, bone-colored against a blush. She clasped a handbag—no Mannlicher!—and squinted slightly, as if she too were trying to take him in. Should he embrace her? There? Before the others? Memories rising now of soldiers descending from the trains with arms outstretched to meet their wives.