The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  On the Ringstrasse he hired a fiacre to take him to the North Station, where, within the crenellated arches, his train was waiting.

  The sun was beginning to rise as they left the city.

  He sat by the window, facing forward. In the compartment: a family of six, four wide-eyed children piled onto two seats, a soldier, a young man, dandied for the voyage, theatrically solicitous of his young, pregnant wife. Outside, a low light fell across the stockyards, where rail workers loaded up a car with rusted pipes. Farther along they passed a row of decommissioned trains, paint peeling now and windows empty, grass tufts growing from the narrow sills like old men’s eyebrows.

  They slowed as they crossed the Danube on a rattling iron bridge.

  They picked up speed. Across from him, the children ate sunflower seeds, neatly spitting out the wads of shells into a tin can they passed back and forth. The light was bright now, warming the window in an amber glow; he had to squint to watch the country pass. Boys played along the railway, miming aim at the passing carriages, then gesticulating dramatically as if they had just been shot. Passing Deutsch-Wagram, he recalled a visit long ago with his father and two older brothers, to see where Napoleon had gone to battle. A memory now, his brothers searching the fields for bones and bullets. Father scanning the horizon with binoculars, while a sunburnt Lucius held out the Orders of Battle like a little aide-de-camp.

  Can you imagine? said his father. The bodies, the horses. This would have been bodies as far as the eye can see. But no, Lucius couldn’t imagine, then.

  At the March River, the railway turned north, leaving the floodplain, and the land began to rise.

  It was noon when they reached the border. At Břeclav, once Lundenburg, the train was boarded by Czechoslovakian police wearing old Habsburg uniforms, the imperial insignias torn from their epaulets. They had an air of make-believe, as if they were imperial officers playing officers of the free nation of Czechoslovakia. They stopped briefly in the compartment and collected passports, though neither the passengers nor the policemen seemed to know what for. Lucius thought briefly of his father’s revolver in his rucksack on the rack above him, the stories of militiamen, the shifting loyalties, now wondering what the police would think.

  They didn’t check.

  Beyond the city, the fields gave way to forests. The Morava appeared, dark blue and beaded with little hamlets. Barges moved in the distance. Across from him, the young man and his pregnant wife began to eat a pungent sandwich of egg and onion. The domesticity of the scene seemed almost impossible against the knowledge that within hours they would be entering territory once wracked by war, but with the warmth, he soon found himself beginning to doze off.

  It was evening when they crossed the Oder, and night when they entered Bohumín.

  In the Bohumín station, he was told the train to Lwów would be leaving in the early morning.

  He left to look for lodging. It was hot, and the air was heavy with smoke from factories flanking the track. An oily film seemed to coat the buildings, the peddlers with their carts of pears and leeks, a pair of skinny horses who fought their bridles at the entrance to a dry goods shop. There were beggars everywhere; only seven months of independence, and already it had the air of a frontier town, the sense that things had been pushed there only to get stuck, like the detritus gathering at the corner of a wall.

  A light rain began to fall, and the streets exhaled a fetid breath. At the station, he had been given the name of a hotel in an imposing imperial building off the main street, with a thick red carpet leading up the stairs to the reception. A heavy woman sat at the desk, dressed in a kind of black nightgown that seemed to have been cut from mourning. Her arms were bare and dewlapped, her face plethoric, her breath labored and wheezy as she passed him a key from the pigeonholes behind her desk.

  He slept fitfully. The walls were covered by peeling, blood-red paper, and the light came from a candle, stuck directly to his nightstand in its wax. The sheets were pilled and dirty, and twice he turned on the light, certain that he would find them full of lice. But there was nothing. Just my imagination, he thought, trying to find some lightness in his panic. Once you feel Her, Pan Doctor, you can’t escape.

  Around midnight, he was aroused from half-slumber by hammering and shouts of authority, and he braced for someone to burst through his door. Later he heard weeping. It rose, gasping, so loud and urgent that he ran into the hall, thinking someone was dying or giving birth. Then it went silent. By then it was four. He did not return to sleep.

  Back at the station, he made his way to the platform for trains heading east. Even in the two hundred paces that separated the eastern and southwestern lines, the difference was palpable. More and more people speaking Polish, more scraps of Galician costume: vests, embroidered blouses, the occasional woman in a highlander cap. It was not hard to imagine Margarete there, among them. He was getting closer. If not to her, to the place where he would begin to search.

  At the platform, he learned that the train to Lwów had been delayed because of problems with the gauge changes on the Breslau line. From a station vendor, he bought a dry piece of cake and a cup of roasted chicory advertised as coffee.

  The train came.

  The compartment sat six and was full when he entered. On the far wall, a pair of old women sat side by side in identical dresses of a coarse brown muslin, buttoned to the chin. There were two old men in stiff green vests, whom he took to be their husbands, one reading a Czech newspaper, the other Polish, each creased neatly along a column. The other two seats were taken by a woman in a light-blue blouse and a sleeping child in a gown.

  Lucius stepped back out of the door to check his ticket against the number of the compartment, but by then the young woman had gathered up the child in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said in Polish. She shifted over to the window, freeing the middle seat.

  Lucius nodded to her in thanks, set his rucksack on the rack above them, and took his seat. Outside there was a long whistle and then the train began to move.

  Through the pipe yards again, the brick factories and smokestacks giving way to smaller workshops. It wasn’t yet nine, and already the day was warm. He removed his coat and folded it on his lap. Outside, the city began to drop away. Fields again. In the distance he could see low hills, and perhaps the hint of mountains through the haze.

  “I noticed your ticket. You are going to Lemberg…I mean, Lwów?”

  He turned. Her hair was honey-colored, loose down her back. Eyes dark brown, skin pale, a little burnt. The child sleeping in her lap.

  “Have you been there before?” she asked.

  He hesitated, uncertain of her intentions. It was a bit brazen, he thought, for a woman traveling alone to solicit conversation. But he was grateful for someone to speak to. “Only during the war,” he said.

  “You were a soldier?”

  “Not quite. A doctor.”

  “Oh. You weren’t in the Fourth Army, were you?”

  He paused, struck by the specificity of the question. “No,” he said, more hesitantly now. “The Third. Later the Seventh.”

  Her face lit up. “But after the Brusilov Offensive, many of the companies from the Fourth Army were integrated into the Seventh. Perhaps you met men of the Fourth?”

  If her voice didn’t seem suddenly plaintive, he would have smiled at the incongruity of this young woman sounding like his father talking army organization. “You seem to know more than me,” he said. “I left the front after Brusilov. I was in the medical corps, on the trains, then at a hospital in Vienna.”

  “I see.” But it didn’t really seem as if she’d heard him. Carefully, so as not to wake the child, she leaned forward to a canvas sack at her feet and extracted a package bound with yellowing twine. With one hand she untied and unfolded the wrapping paper, which clearly had been folded and unfolded many times. She withdrew a photograph, mounted on cardstock.

  She handed it to him. On her hand he saw a wedding band, the nails on her
fingers bitten to the quick.

  “Did you ever see him? His name is Tomasz Bartowski, he was in the Ninth Corps, Tenth Infantry Division.”

  In the photo, she was sitting with a young man in an outdoor café. A decorative cloth was spread over the table, and there was a single, extravagant piece of cake with two forks buried in its flank. His hand rested on hers, and both of them were smiling; he wore a boater, jauntily angled, and her striped white blouse rose all the way to her chin. Behind them stood a waiter with a tray of cigarettes and chocolates, his torso bisected by the frame.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Lucius, now understanding why she knew so much. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “Can you look more closely? If you were a doctor, you must have taken care of many men.”

  Many, many men, thought Lucius.

  But still the face was unfamiliar.

  “I’ve been looking since the war,” she said, as she took the photo back. “I even went to Vienna, to the War Office. He isn’t on their casualty lists. So I have hope. They said he may have been taken prisoner of war, that even though most of the prisoners have returned, the Bolsheviks have kept some of them for labor. Then in Kraków, I met a man from his company who said he was pretty certain Tomasz had been injured at Lutsk, but lightly. That he was likely at the Regimental Hospital in Jarosław. He wasn’t there. But a nurse recognized him, said she was certain she had seen him among the wounded at the Przemyśl hospital. Except he wasn’t there either. Now, I’ve heard the hospitals are being emptied, to make space for the wounded from the Ukrainian war. So I’m going back to Jarosław, to start again.

  “Maybe you just don’t recognize him,” she added, when she saw he didn’t have an answer. “It’s an old photo, from long ago.” Then she handed him another photograph. “I have this one, too.”

  The second was from their wedding, the young woman dressed in a traditional wedding dress from the Galician lowlands. For a moment Lucius let his eyes linger. There was something striking about the image: her face a little flushed, her eyes darker, wilder. Her hair was braided, the braids folded upon her head and bound in a tumble of white damask and flowers. The skin of her neck glistened, and the weight of a breast pushed at the cotton pleats of her blouse. She had been dancing, he realized. Right up until the moment the wedding photographer had taken their portrait, and here she was, a little out of breath.

  He felt as if he had been looking too long, but she didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed proud of her laughing self. “I was fatter then,” she said. She touched the photo affectionately. “The baby, and the worry, made me lean.”

  He shuffled the photographs. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware now of her neck, bare that warm morning, and the fine sprinkling of freckles that ended just above her collar.

  The third photo was a studio portrait, likely taken at the time of Tomasz’s enlistment. In it, he wore a crisp uniform and deeply serious expression, while at his side his young wife smiled as if she had just been teasing when the bulb went off.

  “And this is the card he sent me.” She turned it over and showed Lucius the postmark. Tarnów. He couldn’t help reading, Dearest Adelajda! We are all well. I am still with Hanek; he too is well. I think of you always and carry your photograph next to my heart. Tomorrow we go to—but a blue censor’s pen had cruelly removed the following two lines. She peered at it, as if, after so many tries, the words might suddenly appear. Then she placed it in the stack and folded the paper back up. The child stirred in her lap. “There, there,” she whispered. “Shhh, sleep. We will find Papa. Sleep.”

  She turned back to Lucius. “He’s had a fever for almost five days now. I had thought it would have gone away. But you’re a doctor, maybe you know what’s wrong.”

  He hesitated. I was. Not anymore according to the new Republic. But this mattered less than the fact that lectures and clinics in pediatrics belonged to the seventh semester, which he had planned to start that first autumn of the war.

  He thought of the village children back in Lemnowice, trying to teach them to listen to their hearts.

  “My patients were all soldiers,” he said.

  She didn’t seem to register his answer. “I’ve been giving him this.” She took out a bottle of patent medicine, its miraculous effects prominently advertised on a bright red label. “The pharmacist said three drops whenever he’s crying. But all it does is make him sleep.” She touched his forehead with the back of her hand, then touched her own, then again touched his. “He’s still so hot.”

  For the first time since the start of their journey, Lucius looked closely at the child. He must have been around two years old. He was barefoot, and the gown, likely his nightclothes, was of cotton, stained about the neck and hem. He slept with his arms thrown up above his head, like a pantomime of a person falling. Cheeks pink, fingernails almost translucent, ears like porcelain.

  Lucius felt the attention of the other passengers as he examined the boy, but the child was so flushed it was hard to discern a rash. Were there any other symptoms? he asked Adelajda. Cough? Oh, yes. Diarrhea? Yes, a little. Bumps in his mouth? Not that I have seen. But he’s not eating? He just takes a little milk. He tried to open the boy’s mouth, but the boy resisted. He pressed an ear against his rib cage. A murmur? But with the rumbling of the train, he couldn’t hear. Glands swollen, but not to the degree he might expect in quinsy; though he was thinking of adults.

  “Has he had his smallpox vaccination?”

  She shook her head; there had been shortages, the doses had been reserved for soldiers. But she’d seen smallpox; he didn’t have the blisters.

  Not yet, thought Lucius grimly. The cough made it less likely, but just the thought made Lucius’s ear and cheek feel warmer where they had touched the child’s chest. But I’ve also been vaccinated; he had to remind himself of this.

  Fevers of childhood. Roseola, scarlet fever, measles, rubella, influenza…

  Feuermann, with his internship at the rural clinic, would have known.

  He looked at the tincture, which appeared to be a preparation of laudanum, without any mention of a dose. She said she gave it to him whenever he was crying? She was lucky she hadn’t killed him. So he could help, at least a little. He gave it back. “I would stay away from this.”

  They were passing fields again. Beyond, he thought he could see mountains. They entered Tarnów. Now the signs of war were everywhere. Broken artillery filled the junkyards outside the station, and the grass traced discarded skeletons of trucks. Adelajda had returned the packet to her bag, and after a time he realized that she was crying softly. One of the old women watched her, emotionless, but the other passengers made an effort not to stare. He had the impulse to comfort her, but he didn’t know what to say. That she should stop looking for her husband? Go home, at least until the little boy was well?

  “I am also going to look for someone I lost during the war.”

  The words came unplanned.

  There was silence. She sniffed, then turned, eyes beseeching. “Your wife?”

  Almost. Perhaps one day…

  “No, not my wife.”

  “You loved her, though.”

  She said this with such naturalness, that he answered, “Yes. I did.”

  She brightened almost immediately. “Then you’re like me,” she said. “You know, a customs officer once told me that half the continent was looking for the other half. Now you, too. See?”

  He nodded. There was something in her hopefulness that touched him like a balm. He could almost see her as she had been the moments before her wedding photo, a swirl of color and laughter, her eyes flashing, her flower-embroidered tresses swaying as she danced.

  She said, “And you think she is in Lwów?”

  “Not Lwów. I don’t know where she is. I last saw her at a field hospital, in the mountains. So I was going to return there first.”

  “Oh, and when did you last see her?”

  “June.” He paused. “In ’16.
”

  “’16?” He sensed a sudden slackening of her optimism. “’16. And you haven’t given up.”

  He did not know whether she had meant this in admiration or in pity, and was about to add that he hadn’t been searching this whole time, when the train lurched and, shuddering, began to slow. The luggage rocked above them; the little boy nearly tumbled from his mother’s lap. He began to cry.

  They came to a stop. Outside, a lone road led off through fallow fields, blotched with scattered clumps of wild mustard. The passengers looked at one another. One of the men took out his watch.

  “I didn’t know we were stopping,” Lucius said.

  “We’re not. Not until Rzeszów.” Adelajda leaned against the window to try to see. “Sometimes they have trouble with the rail. We have to wait. Sometimes for quite some time.”

  Outside, a group of horsemen rode past, and Lucius sensed Adelajda tensing. Then the men rode back. There was shouting in Polish farther up the line, something about boarding, but Lucius couldn’t make out everything they said. Behind them there was a clatter as the door to the carriage opened and a voice called out. Then footsteps, banging on compartment doors.

  In Polish: “Everyone in your seats!”

  Adelajda’s son, who had finally quieted in her arms, began to cry again. As she stroked his hair, she leaned toward Lucius, and said, very softly, “Militias, loyal to Poland. The same thing happened last month. They are looking for enemy sympathizers. Because of the wars with Ukraine and Russia.” Then in a much lower voice. “Last time they detained all young men traveling alone. Say that I’m your wife.”

  He thought of the detailed map to the province of Galicia, his father’s revolver, tucked neatly in the bag above his head. His old army papers, from before Natasza. “But my passport says that I’m unmarried.”