“Where’s Karol? I haven’t seen him.”
Taras’s face went dark. “I’m sorry, Magda…”
“Sorry about what?”
He looked around and sighed. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? What are you talking about?” Magda’s voice cracked.
“He deserted.”
“He did not.”
“He did though. I took him with me on a detail, and he disappeared. Just like that. I haven’t seen him. I’m pretty angry with him. That slippery Jew got the best of me—” He narrowed his eyes, then placed his hands on her shoulders and rocked on his feet. “He wasn’t any good for you anyway. Shame though. He was a damned good soldier, but you can never trust the J—”
Magda wrenched free of his touch. “I don’t believe you. Was there violence where you were? A skirmish? Did he get injured? Did you leave him behind?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Taras said acidly. “I mean, I do have some honor, you know?”
Magda clenched her jaw. This could not be true. Karol wouldn’t just disappear. He wouldn’t just desert. Not without telling her. Would he?
Magda tore away and ran to Karol’s dugout. Some soldiers from his squad were already packing their things. She asked them what happened on their detail.
One scratched his head. “Strangest thing. We were heading for that Ukrainian settlement, you know?”
“Yeah,” the other one said, his eyes shifting. “Then Karol and the lieutenant broke off to check out some farm on the way. They sent us on and said they would catch up.”
“We reach that settlement,” another said, “and it’s completely empty. Nobody there. It’s been picked through a few times as well. And the lieutenant shows up. He’s stark-raving mad. He said Karol gave him the slip. Just disappeared.”
“We offered to go look for him, but the lieutenant said if we found him, we’d be forced to execute him for desertion. He gave us the choice. We decided to come back. None of us wanted to shoot him.”
Magda glared at them in disbelief. This smelled suspicious.
They looked at one another guiltily.
“Orders are orders,” one said quietly.
Magda would not cry before these men. She turned and ran all the way back to the hospital. She burst into the tent. Ula looked up from a sack of bandages, took one look at Magda, and threw her arms around her. A moment later, Natalia joined Ula. They walked with Magda out into a field. Magda fell to all fours and pounded the ground with her fists, railing against the world and the war that had taken the last person she was never meant to let go of.
16
April–May 1945
Planes strafed the skies overhead. The horizon was on fire. Whistles, horns, and alarms interrupted all trains of thought until one simply stopped trying to process anything at all. Magda stayed far behind the soldiers. She stopped asking questions. She no longer cared where they were going, how they would get there. She lined up and moved when and where the division moved. She changed bedpans and bandages, spoon-fed anonymous mouths, held the hands of the dying without really feeling them. She did not think. She did not react. She functioned. She was a machine.
The roads were littered with the debris of losses that come with someone else’s victories. Blackened and mummified corpses were scattered outside of bombed vehicles. German prisoners of war, shot once in the head, reclined in their final resting places: in a ditch, in a field, against a tree, across Magda’s way. Sometimes just one, followed by a second. Other times, a group on the ground, like children who’d held hands and spun around until they were so dizzy, they’d fallen backward onto the earth. One soldier—so small he had to be a teenager—was sprawled headfirst in a field, his right knee bent off to the side, his left arm outstretched toward the horizon he’d tried to flee toward. A family had died together in a vehicle, liquified into one molten bronze-like sculpture.
Magda passed all this without comment, without much thought. This was the new normal. Her reality. A long, long time ago—as if she had read it in a book—there had been a figure, a figment of her imagination, who had brushed her teeth each morning, drank tea while reading a newspaper, washed dishes after supper, and hugged her mother and kissed her father good night before going to bed.
When the division arrived in Ústí nad Lebam, thirteen miles north of Litoměřice, Magda was assigned to a nurses’ station in the hospital housed in a Dominican monastery. As more and more injured showed up from the east, Magda felt something within her stir. Her eyes darted over the bodies of men, and she struggled to protect that wall she had built. Each time a dark-haired figure in uniform appeared, she missed a beat, missed a step. This enemy within her—this evil thing that called out to her to stop, to look, to listen—made her lift a bandage on a man’s face to witness the wreckage beneath. But the chin was wrong. And the mouth. The corners turned downward.
Magda was like a flickering candle flame placed before an open window. As the days went by and more men came to the hospital, any hint of Karol Procházka blocked the draft from the window for a millisecond. Not his hands. Not his torso. Not his nose. Not his eyes. Eventually, the candle was extinguished.
So when the doctors announced that Hitler had shot himself in Berlin, that the Soviets had surrounded the capital, that the war was officially over, Magda set her tray of supplies aside, walked out of the overflowing hall of wounded and injured souls, dropped onto a cot, and succumbed to the fever of grief.
For two days and two nights, Magda dreamt of a wrinkled face, kind blue eyes, a steady, calming voice. In the background, someone called a name, Brother Bohdan. Yes. Bohdan. Brother. And Magda’s inner enemy led her into a darkened room featuring an old flickering reel of memories. Laughter. Throwing hay. A boy named Bohdan.
