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was impossible to see if his eyes were open, and yet his chest swelled when the orderlies lifted him down.
    The deep breath seemed to say I made it . Frank’s eyelids hurt.
    By the time the last patients reached the door to the hospital, he heard a quick patter in the hall and someone calling his name.
    He shook his fingers hard, the knuckles knocking together until they straightened. Ignoring the pain, he stood.
    The rucksack slapped the floor, the leather sighing as it fell against itself. He pushed it under his mattress.

 

    On the way from his barracks to the hospital’s main building, Frank passed into the freezing night. A cloudy night, safe from raids. Into the bluing air he walked, feeling its color and sharpness grip him. His lashes hardened and stuck. He passed in sight of the guard station and the hospital’s incinerator, both in the distance, on opposite sides of the field outside Weimar where the military encampment rose. He passed the humps of summer grass, buried under trampled snow, and the ribbons of moonlight that showed the wheel ruts. He passed the old Frank, who would not have noticed such things, the man before Susi’s death, who had not felt beaten by time. He passed the darkness of the pines beyond the fields, and the thought of Liesl, clutching him like a life preserver in her sleep the night before he’d left Hannesburg. He passed the end of the war and kept walking back to the war’s beginning, when the job at the spa was just a stopping place on the way to his surgical career, just a temporary title so he could spend time with his young sons and give his wife the luxuries she longed for. He passed his father’s death of a sudden stroke, and the move into his father’s villa so that his sons could run and sleep in the same childhood rooms, and bounce a ball against the same garden wall. He passed the beginning of the war and walked back to the day he assisted in his first surgery, fixing the cleft palate of a teenage girl, and heard the chief surgeon’s approving silence at his incisions, hiscapacity to focus. The names of great medical men had still burned in his mind then: Antonio Branca, Heinrich von Pfolsprundt, Sir Harold Delf Gillies. They rose like flares into the sky of his future and faded slowly, year by year, first as he realized that he would never be a great man and, later, that he might never be anyone at all. But the weight of a scalpel in his hand had never changed. And his hands were stronger and surer than ever, as if they had been waiting to do this work.
    He passed the sunken spot in the snow where Frau Reiner, his scrub nurse, had thrown up after their first solo surgery—on nineteen-year-old Helmut Alliner—extending a local flap over the boy’s shattered cheek. He passed his own sleepless nights before Alliner’s surgery, and every surgery after, knowing he was finally learning his craft, but on live men, while his sons grieved alone with their new mother. He passed the day he married Liesl, and the weeks after their wedding, when he’d slept on a separate bed, afraid to make her pregnant, afraid she would want to be. He passed the night they’d first made love. Liesl had shuddered at first, then clung to him, wrapping her legs around him and biting his shoulder so her moans wouldn’t wake the baby.
    He passed a stick poking up from the snow, where a German shepherd used to be tied. It had been a hospital mascot until one night in November when an ambulance had run it over. Garren Linden had loved the dog, and he begged Frank to try to save it, so they tried, gassing the beast’s muzzle until it calmed, and stitching up the great big wound in its head. It died anyway, and they got drunk together and took the dog to Bundt, the Pole who ran the incinerator, and watched its fur catch fire.
    Clutching his coat close around him, Frank went the long way, around the back of the main ward. He entered a side door by the storage room, where supplies were running out.