by Daniel Mason
It was then, in the haze of disinfectant, that his memory of his first night swept up and over him, and through the mist he could see it almost as if he were there again: the disemboweled soldier, the wandering man with his head wound, Margarete running between them, shouting, as he uselessly stood by. He could hear her voice scolding him, see the change in her expression as he saw the understanding settle into her, this rarest understanding of who he was.
“Close your eyes,” said the sanitation officer, and he did.
14.
The Vienna that Lucius returned to that February of 1917 was dark and hungry and tired of war. Gone were the cheering children. Gone the vendors with their barrels of carp and gherkins, the pretty girls in their white dresses from the War Society; gone the bunting and the patriotic orchestras, the glittering piles of the tin drives; gone the blankets laid out with gingerbread in the shape of the Czar or Russian Bear. It looked, he thought, like plague had struck. The planted streets, which in his memory had flitted with constant starlings, were now shorn of all their trees.
Outside the North Station, he paused on the sidewalk and was immediately descended upon by a crowd of grey-eyed children hawking string and buttons. He hurried on. A man in a low hat and high collar approached him, opening his palm to show a murky syringe. “Looking for a foot infection, soldier? Cow boil, self-healing in two weeks. Guaranteed exemption, no permanent effects.” Repulsed, Lucius turned away to see a legless man with rag-bound hands rowing toward him in a cart. Again, he stared, unprepared to see such suffering in the city. Like something out of Bosch, a sinner’s hell. He had no sooner handed the man a fist of kronen than another cart-man paddled up.
Memories came then, unbidden, of his soldiers, the grinding plaint of the amputation saw on bone. He saw the wound sites, flaps cut back and tendons gleaming. The hands set free, the heavy legs unmoored. Toes and fingers black with frostbite, Horváth screaming in the snow.
Horváth. So was this the fate to which he’d sentenced him? To be a cart-man, paddling across the ice with rag-bound hands…
A scream. A truck passed, tires confiscated for their rubber, rims screeching on the icy cobbles.
That’s all, he told himself. No screaming. Just tires, just a truck.
Across the square, a cold wind came tearing over the empty planters.
He walked. His home was south, but now after so many months, he hesitated. The memory of Horváth had unnerved him; he couldn’t face his parents yet. So at Tegetthoff’s column, he turned and walked into the vast park of the Prater. A train was passing over the viaduct as he crossed beneath the arcades. Beyond, as if by some miracle, a few trees had been spared the fate of firewood, the Ferris wheel still towered, and bright colors glittered on the carousel, immobile now. Karuzela, he thought. Father once had told him the word meant “little war.” Only now did this meaning register: the decorated horses, the martial music urging them on.
He had entered the park alongside a group of schoolchildren and their teacher, who officiously bleated a toy bugle when his charges fell out of line. The surprising amusement of the scene—the old man in his loden cape, the little boys struggling to contain their excitement, the stern, maternal scolding of the older girls—served for a moment to distract Lucius from his growing horror at what had happened to the city. He’d seen many children among the crowds of refugees and in the muddy streets outside the hospitals; he’d almost forgotten they could move so lightly, laugh like this.
And so he followed as the teacher trumpeted an out-of-tune cavalry charge and the children burst off running past the snow-covered fairground amusements, and down a branching avenue into a separate section of the park.
In contrast to the promenade, this hidden section had not been spared the axe. How typically Viennese, Lucius thought, to maintain appearances. Indeed, it seemed to be in a state of incomplete construction. There were broken-down vehicles and shovels abandoned in the ground. Piles of dirt snaked above rough ditches, interspersed with what seemed to be ad hoc wooden shelters, all dusted now with snow. But then something strange seemed to be happening. A young couple passed the children, the man jumping into one of the ditches before he offered his hand to his sweetheart, who followed. They appeared to be acting out a play, poking up their heads, then giggling and ducking back inside. They laughed, and Lucius watched them kiss before they ran off behind the children, bent over as if under fire. Farther along, a little boy was playing on one of the shelters. He was shouting something, but strangely no sound came from his mouth, and it took a moment for Lucius to realize that ever since the bugle call, he couldn’t hear a thing. Oddly, for one who had just gone deaf, he wasn’t scared by it, just puzzled, and then far more puzzled by the masquerade that seemed to be unfolding. Two boys began to fight, in pantomime, sharing playful punches, while other children, in two neat ranks of three, crawled along their bellies to the trench edge and lifted their hands as if to shoot. A girl spun, the back of her hand on her forehead, as she fell into her classmates’ waiting arms. They lowered her down, mouthing words at one another, as two boys trotted over on invisible horses, carefully dismounted, and crouched heroically by her side. Another girl approached them, knelt, and put her ear to the chest of the fallen, lifted her hand to feel her pulse, gazed heavenward, and let it limply drop.
Before Lucius knew what was happening, there seemed all of a sudden to be an empty space in his mind. He was aware of where he was, of the circumstances of his arrival, his own name—yes, he needed to reassure himself of this—but as he looked out over the playground, he felt he was looking over a blank spot on a map. It was as if simple facts of everyday life—sound, the meaning of the children’s pantomime, the laws governing their shadows—all of this seemed suddenly to elude him. Even a sign above the earthworks, which somehow he had looked straight through upon arrival, seemed to be made of words without any meaning.
THE “FRONT” IN VIENNA:
VISIT THE LIFE-SIZE MODEL OF THE TRENCHES!
BRAVERY, HONOR, SACRIFICE!
They are stone, he thought, looking at the man, the children. Just ice and stone, and nothing beneath, and for a very brief moment, he had the certainty that the world before him was nothing but a void of shapes and silver light.
The bugle blew.
“Enough!”
Sound poured into him: the rattling of the viaduct, the wail of a steam whistle, the peals of laughter and wind. Footsteps as the children swarmed from the ersatz trenches and climbed down from the ersatz ramparts and the dead girl stood and dusted snow from her dark grey coat.
Now shaken, he could only think of getting home as fast as possible. If only so he wouldn’t have to see another legless soldier, another child playing dead.
Ice floes creaked beneath him in the canal as he entered the Inner City, weaving through the alleyways off the Fleischmarkt, where he and Feuermann once bought halvah from the Greek merchants, the narrow streets all empty now. At the end of the lane, a woman stepped from the shadows, opening a heavy soldier’s coat to reveal a threadbare slip. He ducked his head and hurried to the broad street and the crowds. In the dusk, lone figures scurried past the shuttered storefronts. He saw a queue of people snaking along the street before it turned down an alleyway, and then in the shadow of St. Stephen’s, another queue, this one wrapping nearly halfway around the square.
Everyone was very still. For a moment, he thought that he was having a new attack. He did not know what they were doing, but feared that asking would mark him as an outsider, so he kept walking. Nor did he look up at the cathedral, which now seemed, like the city, threatening simply in its immensity, its steeple large enough to fit the entire church of Lemnowice inside.
It was dark when he reached 14 Cranachgasse. When he rang at the door, a maid appeared, an unfamiliar woman in a high, starched collar, brown curls topped by a small white cap. She looked at him inquisitively.
“I am Lucius,” he said.
“The son.”
The word
a single breath, spoken in awe. For a moment she hesitated. She had not been trained for such a moment; he was, in a way, both master and guest.
“If you wish to tell my parents I am here, I’ll wait,” he said.
“No, no, Pan Lucius. No. Please. Come.”
The base of the stairs was still flanked by the pair of winged hussars. The carpet the same, but its color somehow a deeper violet than he recalled.
He found his parents taking coffee with an elderly couple, the man dressed, like his father, in military regalia. They all rose, taking in the pale apparition still reeking of disinfectant. For the first time in his life, he believed he saw his mother unprepared.
“Dear Mother, dear Father, I am sorry to interrupt. Good evening to you, Colonel, Madame.” He kissed them on the hands. They stared, his mother still with her hand partially outstretched. His father wordless. No Puszek—so, the last one had yet to be replaced.
“If it pleases you, I shall go to my room?”
But he was gone before they could respond. Out of the dining room, past the old familiar statues, past Klimt’s portrait of his mother, little Lucius forever interred beneath the glittering shower of gold. A memory now, of Zmudowski, hidden beneath the rug, holding his little girl. But this was the reverse.
Then up another staircase to his door.
“The bed is prepared, Pan Lucius,” said the maid, still at his side. “They have kept it that way since you left.”
He thanked her. Her name?
“Jadwiga, Pan Lucius.”
“Thank you, Jadwiga. And Bozenka, is she still here?”
“Oh! They didn’t tell you? Bozenka’s with child, sir. She’s been dismissed.” There was a slight sauciness with which she said it, a brief flicker in her eyes. Naughty Bozenka, that’s what you get.
With a curtsy, she left him alone.
It took a moment to recalibrate his memory to the geometry of his room, the height of the ceiling, the position of his desk and bed. It had become much smaller in his mind, the light more muted. Now, like the hallway carpet, the colors of his room seemed almost gaudy. The eggshell-blue sky in a pair of painted warscapes gifted by his father. The peach of the bedspread. The scarlet rug.
On the wall hung his old portrait, his ears lopsided, his neck drowning in his collar. In a mirror beside it, he touched his scraggly beard, stared at the sunburnt cheeks beneath the tired eyes. His shock of hair, forever pale, had whitened further. In comparison to the adolescent in the portrait, this other person in the mirror seemed like some winter apparition, a memento mori painted to remind one of the proximity of death. When had this happened? He recalled the evening at the boardinghouse in Kolomea after his separation, washing the dried blood from his hair and face. Cheeks burnt and dirty, but still with life.
He went to his desk. Old atlases of anatomy, lessons scrawled out by hand. Muscles of the shoulder. Subclavius. Levator scapulae. Serratus anterior. Rhomboid major and rhomboid minor, arising from thoracic vertebrae 1 through 5.
A ceramic phrenology skull: a gift from Feuermann for his twenty-first birthday.
More lessons. Bones of the skull. Structure and function of the heart.
As once he’d taught her, in exchange for learning how to tie a knot.
The paper slightly yellowed, beginning to curl.
Teeth marks in the colored pencil on his desk. Mine.
And did he understand, she asked, how the feeling of a hand remained after the hand itself was gone?
He did not bathe. His bed was so soft that he felt for a moment he would suffocate inside it, and after some time he rose and put his boots back on, curling up on top of the sheets, against the wall. When sleep came, it wasn’t sleep as he had ever known it, but something shuddering, as if he were back sleeping on the trains. Awaking, he found József Horváth sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, pine needles sticking to his skin. His head was shaved, his cheeks pink, his thin, snapping tongue the hue of liver. He licked his mouth frenetically, as if trying to lap up every last drop of something sweet. Lucius stared. Look, said Horváth, and taking a finger between his teeth as one might the finger of a glove, pulled off his hand.
Lucius must have screamed. Sitting up in bed, catching his breath, he saw a figure in the doorway. Another dream? But it was his mother, still in her evening dress. He had the feeling of being very small again, of waking in a world populated only by adults. For a moment he had the thought that she would come and comfort him, but this had been the duty of his governess when he was young.
Instead, she was very still, resting her fingers on the wainscoting, watching, as if trying to decide what she should do.
“Thank you, Mother. I’m okay.” He closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. “I’ll be okay. I just need some rest.”
When Horváth returned the next night, and then the next night after that, Lucius began to walk.
He put on long underwear, two sweaters, his greatcoat and his scarf, pulled his regimental cap low over his head, and hurried down the stairs into the street.
He had no destination. What seemed most important was to move, to exhaust himself in the hope that he might also exhaust the dreams. The processes of his mind now seemed a mystery to him; he did not understand why this was happening to him now. In the army circulars, they wrote that battle dreams often relented away from combat. Sometimes all that is needed to restore the soldier to peaceful sleep are a few days behind the lines. But he was away from combat. Was it that these ghosts had found him once he was no longer moving? Had the dreams been there all along, just hidden? Had his search for Margarete somehow kept them at bay?
From his home, he turned out into the dark street and up toward the Inner City. Past the sepulchral palaces of the Landstrasse, the barracks off the Karlsplatz, the prostitutes stirring along the treeless stretches of the Ring. Past the shuttered Opera House and the snow-covered statue of Goethe in the Imperial and Royal Garden, where Feuermann had kissed a girl during the heady days of enlistment. Past the Natural History Museum with the famous Uzhok meteorite that had foretold his father’s wounding. Uzhok, he thought, the once-empty word now filled with so much meaning: so close to Lemnowice, of all the places for a meteor to land.
He walked. On other nights, he wandered up the Universitätstrasse and out to the hospital, where he entered the courtyard to watch the orderlies hurrying between the buildings, the pleated headdresses of the nurses moving in the yellow light of the windows. They, too, weren’t sleeping, he thought. My city of nightwalkers and nurses.
By then he knew that returning home was a mistake. There was nothing for him in Vienna. For the past months he had been sick with thoughts of Margarete, but on the trains at least he hadn’t been alone. Now he had no one. If he saw his parents, it was only in passing. He could sense their worry, and there were times he found them together, silent, and suspected he had been discussed. If necessary, he greeted them, kissed hands, inquired after their day. But these were formalities only, bulwarks against other questions, and to their credit they seemed to understand where the line was drawn. His mother didn’t invite anyone to meet her conquering hero. She made no mention of his arrival to his brothers, comfortably positioned behind desks in Graz and Kraków, nor to his sisters, off with their own families. The servants kept their distance, save Jadwiga, always with a cup of chicory, a piece of cake.
It occurred to him that of all of them, he might seek comfort from his father, who followed the war with a great map unfurled over the sunroom table, each army’s position laid out in ranks of painted wooden pieces. He, too, must have had a homecoming after being shot by that Italian musket at Custoza, thought Lucius. He, too, came from a world now lost. But there was a difference, immediately apparent and impossible to overcome. Major Krzelewski had returned with a bullet lodged like an encrusted jewel in his greater trochanter, a decoration to be flaunted among his medals, while the younger medical lieutenant had nothing but the memory of how he’d failed in his duty to protect someo
ne from harm.
More dreams. Horváth screaming. Horváth holding up his amputated feet. Horváth chewing, openmouthed, a mass of salamanders on his tongue. Horváth placing a pistol barrel between his teeth and laughing, as Lucius struggled toward him on heavy legs of lead.
Should I go and look for him? he wondered.
But how? He didn’t know the name of Horváth’s regiment, only that he was an infantryman from Budapest. The name was common; there would be hundreds in the army. But even if he knew the address, he couldn’t bear the thought of what he’d find. An image came to him: the trembling soldier in a garret in his city, with marbled, ulcerated amputation sites, bundled on a sunken bed. Mute still? Or had they cured him with their electricity, their Muck balls? Did he still suffer from his dreams? Or now from nightmares of Lucius, just like Lucius dreamed of him? As if some kind of monstrous twinning had bound them across the winter night.
Traveling now, on the invisible currents that coursed between the two imperial cities, Lucius found himself inside the room reeking of dirty bandages and bedpans, saw a mother, kerchiefed, shivering, rise to greet their visitor. A friend, József, someone here to visit from the war. And Horváth’s eyes widening, mouth twisting, as his doctor, cap in hand, approached his bed.
He tried writing to Feuermann in Gorizia.
Their correspondence had ceased after Horst’s visit. Feuermann had been the last to write, with three letters after Lucius had stopped responding, each time sounding more and more concerned. I hope you aren’t ill, he’d written in his final communication, or that nothing I have written in the past might have caused offense. But after Horváth, Lucius couldn’t bear corresponding about his cases anymore. And in his angrier moments, angry at everyone, he blamed Feuermann, for encouraging him to enlist.
