by Daniel Mason
The long, thin bodies with their manes and eyeless heads. The cryptic markings on their chests. Not manes but gills. Not dragons. Not on their chests, but inside. Their hearts.
“Grottenolm,” said Lucius.
Horváth looked up, and his dark eyes met Lucius’s.
“Sorry, Pan Doctor?” said Margarete.
“Grottenolm,” said Lucius again. “As a boy, I used to visit them in the Imperial Collection. They are little salamanders, with translucent skin.” A memory now, of the frightened girl in the Ludwig II suite on that night of his supposed deflowering. But how strange to find them here, he thought, these rarities from the darkest corners of the aquarium, where lonely little boys pressed up against the tanks and harried governesses wiped their nose marks from the glass.
His eyes hadn’t left Horváth. Had he been there too, in the museum? And what now did it mean that they had reappeared within his anguished drawings? A nightmare? A hallucination? Or like the recurring faces of men and women he suspected to be Horváth’s family, were they something to cling to, an escape? Were they like the shadowed monsters in his sketches, or their antidote?
“You know them, Grottenolm,” said Lucius, and with this third utterance, he saw something else register in Horváth’s gaze. It was almost imperceptible—a sense of recognition, a flickering of memory—but he had seen it. There had been some kind of connection, not only between the two of them but deeper, to something farther back and shared in childhood, suspended in that word.
He turned to Margarete. “Tell him that we’ll get him home,” he said.
The following afternoon, an evacuation detail arrived in Lemnowice, looking for men sturdy enough to make the journey down to Nadworna through the cold.
Slowly, Lucius and Margarete led the ambulance driver past the patients. They chose a Polish private recovering from pneumonia, a Czech infantry officer from Heads who was ready for rehabilitation, and twelve others from Fractures and Amputations.
“I think he’s ready,” said Margarete, when they reached Horváth.
Lucius hesitated, looking down at the soldier, now sleeping peacefully, arm draped across his face. No, he thought. Not before his resurrection was complete. There was little doubt Horváth was strong enough to go. But what would happen then? Nadworna was but a stopping point. From there they would have to take him farther, to another hospital, and Lucius worried that the other hospitals wouldn’t know how to care for him. There, Horváth could lose everything Lucius’s alchemy had wrought.
Margarete listened quietly as he told her this, in more careful, sober words.
“He wants to go,” she said at last.
“Wants to go? He told you?”
“He asked for Mama. Haza. Home.”
Lucius hesitated; he had not expected this kind of opposition. Hadn’t Margarete felt the same thrill at his discovery, the first steps of Horváth’s rehabilitation, the first inklings of the person who was going to emerge? She had been with him the day before, had seen Horváth’s face, the fleeting awakening as Lucius recognized the salamanders in his drawings. Wasn’t she also tiring of amputations? Surely, she wished to see what happened next…
A whistling came from the walls as the wind picked up outside. “I’m not sure he understands,” said Lucius. “It’s freezing. And the ambulance is heading north, deeper into Galicia. Not to Mama. To a hospital in Poland. And if he’s better, back to the front.”
“I know. But that’s true of any patient, Pan Doctor. He’s been here three weeks already. They can give him Veronal just as well as we can, can’t they? We’ll send instructions. We can’t treat him as if he’s different. You know that.”
“But he is different, you’ve seen the progress…,” said Lucius. He felt now that he was arguing not with her, but with a second presence, invisible, but very near. So he added, “You’ve heard what they are doing to such men to get them battle-ready, using electricity, Muck balls…It’s torture…”
“I’ve heard,” she interrupted. “But we’re a field hospital, not a rehabilitation hospital. Patch and send, no? If a man is healthy enough to make the journey, we evacuate him. If I must remind Pan Doctor Lieutenant, there are Cossacks just across the plains.”
“The front is a hundred kilometers away, Sister.”
“Pan Doctor. The front moves fast.”
Outside, the snowdrifts creaked against the roof. They stood facing each other, in the crossing, in the thin light from above. For the first time in memory, he found himself angry with her. He sensed his voice had risen, that he was uneasy that he felt so much at stake.
“I can’t,” he said. “I have an oath. To do no harm.”
“Of course.” Lips pinched, she curtsied, a sign of disagreement he had come to know quite well. She turned to go, then stopped.
“Pan Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope.”
The lorry was waiting outside the church.
Snow dusted the hood and canvas shelter. A pair of village children, carrying firewood, had stopped to watch them. Lucius followed the evacuees outside, where they saluted him, one after the other, and climbed into the back. The canvas door was buttoned shut. Were it not for the faint coughing of the Polish private, there would have been no sign of any life inside.
The driver knelt before the engine and turned the crank. The engine wheezed, then failed to catch. Again the driver tried. This time it didn’t make any sound at all.
He rose, cursing. “The hoses have frozen. I’ll need hot water.”
He went back into the church, leaving the patients behind. Lucius remained outside, uneasy that the men had just been left out in the cold. And this driver seemed careless, he thought, and he didn’t like how small and vulnerable the lorry looked. Inside the canvas shelter, the benches were bare; the men would have nothing but their blankets, and one another, to stay warm. What if the Polish private’s pneumonia worsened again? Was this why he was coughing? And the Czech officer—he still grew confused at times. And now the sun was setting. What if they had to stop at night?
At least Horváth wasn’t among them, he thought. Yes, he tried to reassure himself: he was relieved he’d kept Horváth behind.
But the others…He had half a mind to unfurl the canvas door and get his patients, when the driver returned, lugging a pot of steaming water that heaved and splattered on the earth.
That night, paces away from József Horváth, Lucius poured the remaining Veronal out onto a piece of paper.
Sixteen tablets. Eight days before they began to lose him again; nine, ten if one counted the pills that had turned to dust.
8.
And he was right. The front was far away. In Latvia and Byelorussia, Italy and Mesopotamia and Verdun. Throughout the winter, fighting had continued in Galicia and the Bukovina, but these were smaller skirmishes, a seemingly endless back-and-forth for snowy country, downed bridges and open craters, pastures. Little lost, and very little gained.
One day in the middle of March, they thought they heard shelling, and slipped cautiously outside the church. But it was just a village woman, her face red with exertion, replacing a fencepost with the booming flat of her axe.
Occasionally, evacuation lorries stopped to drop off soldiers injured on the plains. They were mostly from Hungarian regiments, trying to transport the wounded back across the mountains to hospitals in Munkács and Máramarossziget, only to be held up by the snow. There were more cases of war nerves among them, soldiers beset by shakes and twisted postures, who tumbled when they tried to walk. Like Horváth, they had no wounds that he could see, and like Horváth the palsy followed no known pattern. But they were different, more like the cases described by Brosz and Berman. They ate, and spoke, and wept, and their movements were purposeful; some scurried beneath their blankets with the slightest sound.
Lucius was tempted to try to give them Veronal, which had been resupplied the week before. But Horváth now needed
ever larger doses just to keep him from tensing up, and again Lucius feared running out of pills. Now, with Horváth’s stay approaching a month, he found himself increasingly pessimistic, even angry, though he didn’t know toward whom.
At the end of the month, a conscription detail appeared on horseback.
The commanding officer was a lieutenant called Horst. A tall man, accent from Upper Austria, with pale, almost lashless eyelids, a dark-brown moustache trimmed neatly above unusually white teeth, and a scar on his forehead in the distinctive shape of a third, tiny eye. He wore a black cape trimmed with red ribbon over his broad shoulders, and grey trousers tucked into a pair of steel-tipped boots. From Margarete’s look of disgust, Lucius sensed this was the same man who had appeared last winter, whom she had cursed so viciously. But Horst gazed right through her. He was accompanied by a pair of Hungarian batmen, granitic specimens, each a good hand taller than Lucius and likely twice his weight.
Inside the church, the batmen sat sullenly at the table and drank from bowls of soup while Horst explained. A year and a half of war had taken a heavy toll on the armies, he said. In Vienna, the draft was expanding. Now they were canvassing the hospitals for men well enough to fight.
“No one here is well enough to fight,” said Lucius, looking past the lieutenant into the dim light of the nave. “An evacuation convoy just passed through two weeks ago. They took fourteen patients to the rear. The rest are still too sick to leave, let alone return to battle.”
“There are new orders about what constitutes battle-readiness,” said Horst, taking another spoonful of soup. “Certain doctors do not understand the needs of a fighting army. What constitutes illness in war is not the same as peace.”
A hush had descended over the hospital, and Lucius could sense Margarete watching him. He knew that further protest would only raise Horst’s suspicions. “Whatever Herr Lieutenant thinks,” he said.
Horst downed the last drops of his soup and rose, saber clattering against his chair. From his pocket, he removed a leather case and extracted a cigarette, which he handed to one of the batmen to light.
They began in Limbs, in the nave, beneath the gilded image of Saint Michael.
One by one the men lifted their stumps for him. Horst moved quickly, stopping only to inspect a wound. He seemed impatient, Lucius thought, even annoyed to find so many amputees. Halfway down the second aisle, Horst stopped. “Where are the neurological diseases?”
“Over there,” said Lucius, pointing toward the south transept. “We haven’t many. But they’re all quite ill.”
Horst drew on the cigarette and tapped the ash free. “And I told you I’ll decide.”
The first two patients both had head wounds; both were comatose and didn’t stir when Horst shook them with his foot. In the third bed was an Austrian private named Berg, a former sapper who’d been buried in his tunnel. His sight had failed him, though Lucius could find no sign of injury to his eyes or brain. At night he woke up screaming, and when they sat him up to eat his meals, he couldn’t keep his head from drooping down. He had been there two months, having missed the last evacuation due to a passing bout of dysentery.
But Lucius knew that none of this was likely to protect him from the conscription officer. “He’s blind,” he said.
“Blind?” Horst crouched, and tilted the man’s head back. “His eyes look fine.”
“Of course, but on proper ophthalmic exam…”
“Stand,” said Horst.
The soldier didn’t seem to hear him.
“I thought you said he was blind,” said Horst. “Not deaf.” He nodded to a batman, who hauled Berg up to his feet.
Berg stood trembling, in half-genuflection, as if he didn’t know whether to sit or stand. His chin hung to his chest.
“What’s wrong with his neck?” asked Horst.
For a moment, Lucius paused, trying to gauge how best to respond. “Shell-blast kyphosis,” he said at last. He reached out and turned Berg roughly by the shoulder, as if to show that he, too, was no sentimental fool. He ran his thumb over the soldier’s spine. “Probable compression of the vertebrae secondary to the explosion. For a time, we suspected a subdural hematoma. I thought I would have to open his skull.”
This was all, of course, a lie. But the medical language seemed to give Horst pause. As he walked on, Margarete helped Berg back into his bed.
The next patient was one of the new Hungarians, named Virág. According to the story, he had been talking to his commanding officer when an errant bullet from a soldier cleaning his gun burst through the C.O.’s eye. Two days later, out of the blue, Virág had dropped to the ground, screaming, clawing at his own face, saying it was burning. For his first few days in Lemnowice, he kept trying to flee into the cold.
Horst told him to stand, turned him, told him to walk.
Virág obeyed.
“Get dressed,” said Horst.
Lucius stepped forward. “Please. You can’t take him, Lieutenant. Even yesterday, he thought we were under attack. He’s still sick. He doesn’t even know where he is.”
Horst ignored him. “Dress,” he said.
Again Lucius interrupted. “Lieutenant. These are my patients. I have my duties.”
Now Horst turned to look at him again. He said, “Your patients? These men belong to the Emperor.” He paused. For a moment he looked at Lucius as if seeing something he hadn’t seen before. “How old are you anyway? Nineteen? Eighteen?”
Lucius didn’t answer. “You can’t send him back into battle. He’s as sick as any of my amputees.”
“Then I will take your amputees, too. I’ll take you and your nurse; I’ll put you in an ambulance team in a real zone of battle. So you can see real bravery. Then you can tell me what constitutes health.”
They had reached Horváth.
“And what is wrong with this man?”
If only I knew. But the lesson from the first two men was clear. He didn’t hesitate.
“Dementia praecox, Lieutenant. Catatonic type, most likely a primary presentation. Quite classic per the descriptions set forth by Professor Kraepelin of Munich. Highly unstable vital signs with hypertension and tachycardia, which you might know forebodes progression to the fatal form.”
“He’s been here a month,” said Horst, studying the manifest.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Lucius.
“That’s a long time,” said Horst. “If he is so sick, why wasn’t he evacuated?”
“There is always a question of priority. There were other men…”
But Horst had turned from him. “Stand,” he said.
There was silence. Horváth stared up at them. He said nothing.
Again, Horst said, “Stand.”
Again nothing. Lucius said, “He speaks Hungarian…”
“All soldiers understand basic orders in German,” Horst answered, looking at the patient on the ground. “Are you showing disrespect for a senior officer, Private?”
In answer, József Horváth squeezed his eyes shut very, very tight.
Outside, a cloud must have passed before the sun, for the room grew dark.
Horst looked to his batmen and then turned away from Horváth. For a moment, Lucius thought he had decided to leave the soldier alone. Then, with a swiftness that seemed impossible for such a massive person, Horst turned back and brought the heel of his boot down into Horváth’s belly.
Horváth doubled over, heaving pale green soup onto the floor. He began to cough.
“I said stand, you piece of shit.”
Again Horst kicked him. Horváth writhed, burying his face in the straw. The lieutenant put his steel-toed boot to Horvath’s neck. He pressed. A low groan came from Horváth’s mouth.
Beneath his head, beneath the coat Horváth used as a pillow, Lucius could see some of his drawings.
Lucius said, “Lieutenant, you are going to break his windpipe. I assure you the man means no disrespect. This is classical negativism…catatonic symptoms…common, Lieute
nant, you can find it in every textbook.”
“Insubordination is what it is called. I said stand, soldier.”
“Lieutenant,” said Lucius. “He is not resisting you. It is a symptom of his condition.”
Horst pushed harder. “It is a symptom of disrespect,” he said. He drew on his cigarette.
A horrific wheezing rose from Horváth. Lucius looked to Margarete, trying to find some mooring, now afraid that she would try to intervene. “I said…,” he began again, turning back to the lieutenant. “I said he has dementia praecox. This is classic catatonic stupor. It is not purposeful. It—”
“And I said I’ve never heard those words,” said Horst. “I think you are making this up. If it is a disease, then why haven’t I heard of it?”
Now a taunting smile flickered across Horst’s lips.
“Because you’re ignorant and never went to school.”
The two guards exchanged glances. Margarete took a step forward. “Herr Lieutenant,” she began in hesitant German.
Horst turned, his face suddenly red with anger. “A nurse dares speak to me!” He met her eyes and pressed his foot harder into Horváth’s neck until she backed away. The soldier gasped and twisted. Horst turned to Lucius. “Who else are you hiding, Doktor?”
“No one.”
Again Horst pushed down harder. Horváth was clawing at the officer’s riding boots. The lower part of his body flopped like a fish. “Who else?” Horst shouted.
“I said, no one,” said Lucius, and against all wishes, he felt tears begin to well behind his eyes. “Take your foot off him.” But then Horváth had writhed off his mat, and the papers were in full view.
Horst motioned toward a guard, who picked them up.
“And what are these?” On the piece of paper, a wreath of little Grottenolm circled a sun.
