by Daniel Mason
Even poor Wilhelmine, whose reading habits would have killed the archbishop with piety, wore a dress so low that his mother could not restrain herself from muttering to Lucius in Polish that someone needed to notify the girl of the invention of the brassiere. Patriotic medals flanked her décolletage. For ten minutes, as Frau Schmidt sang the praises of her daughter, Wilhelmine thrust out her chest, and Lucius forced himself to stare at the spray of rubies in her tiara. Misreading his inattention, the poor girl scooted even farther out on the sofa until Lucius’s mother, her lips pursed in an expression of supreme annoyance, motioned her back. “That’s quite enough. Your mother has apprised us of your assets, dear.”
“Sorry?”
“Your bosom, child. It is—how do you say in German—threatening us? You’ll fall out of the chair.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. His mother, of course, spoke beautiful German, perfect German, and this was not lost on their hosts. “Well…I…but…I…,” began poor Wilhelmine, her patriotic medals trembling, before her mother shouted, “Apfelstrudel!” as she plucked one from a silver tray of pastries and took an explosive, powdery bite.
He left each failure with a feeling of vindication, a vague sense of loyalty to Margarete’s memory, and just a little disappointment. Which is what he expected, with the announcement of his fifth audience, with one Natasza Borszowska, the youngest daughter of General Borszowski of the Polish Legion, rumored among the circles preparing for Polish independence to be in line for the Polish Southern Command.
They met on the third of May, at a party held by his parents in honor of the Polish constitution of 1791. Lucius was with his father when Natasza entered on the arm of hers, an old man in a plumed helmet and so many decorations that he seemed from a distance to be wearing chain mail. She smiled gratefully to the doorman as he took her stole, and for a moment Lucius felt certain that conversation in the room had stopped. Part of him wished this wasn’t her. She was too beautiful; the vague terror he felt at most social occasions seemed to concentrate itself cruelly in his throat. He thought to leave. But his father had also noticed, turning in almost clockwork coordination with Lucius. And his mother, across the room, had registered both the general’s arrival and her husband and son’s response.
She wasted no time. Gliding swiftly across the parquet floor, she brought them together. Lucius: Natasza Borszowska. Natasza: my son. But old Zbigniew, still charming in his fin de siècle kind of way, had already taken her hand.
“Enchanté.”
Gently, Madame Krzelewska pried her husband off. Perhaps the two youngsters would like to get to know each other? She believed the sunroom was unoccupied. Jadwiga could bring them something to drink.
She wore a silk dress, sky blue and loose and sleeveless, and long silk gloves. A string of pearls dangled low beneath her breasts, knotted at her sternum. He would later learn her hair was long, but that day it rose in a complicated manifold of pleats that bared her neck.
They sat at the corner of a low table decorated with a forest scene of inlaid wood. A nymph fled, pursued by Cupid’s arrows. He was speechless, terrified by that resurgent hint of stammer, trying to decide whether it was ruder to stare or look away. He stared. She inhaled deeply from a cigarette of cloves, taking in the room with its hanging ferns and checkerboard floor, the piano in the corner, the table with its war map.
Then, she turned to him, and smiled. “Hello.”
“Hello!”
It came out a little loud. For a moment, he thought the interview might end there. But she was a quick student of his limitations. She had been hearing about him ever since she had returned from holiday, she said. Her father said that he had been a war hero, survived a Cossack assault in the Carpathians. That he now ran the archduchess’s charity. She was fascinated by medicine, by neurology. Had he read Interpretation of Dreams?
He hadn’t, yet.
“That’s too bad. I’ll give you my copy, if you don’t mind the annotations. Perhaps you could tell me what you think.”
If she saw his ears reddening, she didn’t let on. His mother had told her father that as a student he had made great advances in the studies of X-rays. Did he still do this research? Once, right before the war, she had been radiographed for fun; she still had the image—one could see the outline of her rings, her necklace, everything. She felt that as Poles, they had a patriotic commitment to radiation. As a child she had even met Madame Curie, in Paris, and for years she was certain that if she had a daughter, she would name her Marie. Had Lucius ever met her in the course of his studies? Oh, but how silly of her to think that just because they both studied radiography…
But he had!
Her eyes flashed as he told her the story. A mermaid? He couldn’t take her to the Medical School to see it, could he?
“No, but…wait,” he said.
He took the stairs three steps at a time.
The film was still there, on the highest shelf, in a paper sheaf, tucked among the books. He nearly tumbled as he ran back down.
“How extraordinary!”
She held the image to the light.
“Truly, who would have made such a thing? That is the interesting part of the story. And who was it that they were trying to fool?”
He realized all of a sudden that he had never stopped to wonder.
An ashtray sat at the far end of the long table between them. She could have asked for it. Instead, she held her blouse modestly against her chest as she leaned far forward to tap the ashes off her cigarette, and then, reaching up to brush away a fallen curl, she let it very briefly go.
The courtship would be, as Natasza put it, very eighteenth-century, consisting primarily of negotiations between Lucius’s mother and General Borszowski. They were married in early August 1918, shortly before her twenty-first birthday. The ceremony was modest; both parties felt that a display of ostentation would be tasteless given the political situation. At first Natasza had asked to honeymoon at a family estate near Salzburg, but for Lucius, this meant leaving his patients with Zimmer, who, after his pneumonia, had returned more befuddled than before. So they spent their wedding night at the Hotel Impérial, after a boisterous dinner at which both fathers got drunk and sang songs from the lancers and his mother finally motioned for the newlyweds to go.
Up in their room, Lucius and Natasza fell into silence. She had brought her own glass flask of almond schnapps, and poured them each a tumbler. This helped a little. Throughout the day, he had the image of Margarete appearing in the little church, or at their dinner, or running into him with his new wife as they ascended the stairs. It was almost impossible to imagine: Margarete with her heavy soldier’s boots and greatcoat, Mannlicher over her shoulder, her fingers still muddy from rummaging for roots.
It was Natasza who led him to bed, who first disrobed. She was tanned from sunbathing in the mountains, all angles, smooth-legged, like someone sculpted out of bronze. He stared while above them the fan spun quietly. The feeling came to him that he didn’t deserve this kind of fortune, that he was still the child with the stutter, exiled with Feuermann from the student associations, an accidental son.
“You do not need to be gentle,” she said, after some time.
She was the only person apart from Margarete whom he had ever kissed. At first, he was taken aback by the firmness of her tongue, and his lips resisted in reflex, before he let it in. There was an unfamiliar taste to her mouth, almost metallic beneath the sweetness of the schnapps.
After a few minutes, she rose and took a gummi from her handbag. He didn’t mind, of course? She didn’t want a baby now. She had such plans for skiing that winter; there was so much to do now that the war was coming to an end. He shook his head, scandalized a little by the sheath he had seen only in soldiers’ belongings. But no, he didn’t mind. Of course, he didn’t mind.
What happened next suggested she was vastly more experienced than him.
After, he lay beside her, looking at the gold of her skin as
if he had come across some kind of treasure. Faintly, he could see the evidence of a sleeveless tennis outfit and a swimsuit, and he allowed his fingers to trace the tan lines, feeling almost bold. It was enough even to retain him, for a moment, there, with her, without his thoughts flying back across the mountains.
She was sleeping, and he rose to get the lights. At the bedside, he paused, now struck by the novelty of returning to warm sheets where someone else was waiting. It seemed impossible, this absurd luxury of hours—hours—unmenaced by discovery or interruption. Beyond the fleeting moments Margarete had rested beside him after lovemaking, he had never truly slept beside another person. But now, moonlight drifting over Natasza’s sleeping body, the novelty of it gave way to something else. For weeks he had anticipated his wedding night, but so distracted by the exquisite promises of consummation, he hadn’t really considered the sleeping part that must come next. But sleeping remained an uncertain proposition. The relentless dreams of Horváth had remitted somewhat after his return to medicine, but there were nights, many nights, he lurched awake.
He looked down at her, her warmly glowing shoulder.
Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow he would tell her about his dreams. Not now—this moment couldn’t be ruined. And so he gingerly slipped back into bed and waited, vigilant, watching the window turn to dawn.
It was late in the morning when she woke and kissed him. How had he slept?
“Sweet as a soldier on night watch,” he joked. And closing his eyes, he kissed her back.
They moved into an apartment belonging to her father not far away, on Hohlweggasse. For the first week, he waited for an opportunity to tell Natasza about his nightmares, but there never seemed to be a moment to bring them up. Instead, at night, after their lovemaking, he waited until she fell asleep and then went to the living room, returning to their bed before she woke. To preempt the awkwardness of any discovery, he told her he slipped away to deal with the endless paperwork he brought home from the hospital. It couldn’t last, he knew, but during the war, he’d become an expert at stealing scraps of sleep during the spare hours of the day. And he was used to exhaustion. No, he thought: she was his wife, but still a stranger. He couldn’t burden her so quickly. To speak of dreams meant speaking of Horváth and the beech tree, of what he’d done and what he’d failed to do. With time, they would grow closer, as he had with Margarete.
She spent the days reading and calling on acquaintances and playing tennis at a sports club. In the evenings they went out. The first week, his mother, anticipating that he wouldn’t know what restaurants to go to, had arranged for reservations. A gift, she said, but he knew it was more of a command. She sent French champagne, patriotically relabeled as sparkling Rheingau, and in the booth at Grand-Hôtel, bubbles rising to the backs of his eyes, he felt bold enough to ask Natasza more about her interests, her childhood, her family. To his surprise, she answered at length. The next night, drunk again, emboldened, he asked her more, about her friends, her schooling, her plan to apply to art school in Paris after the war. Then, on the third night Natasza said he sounded like a doctor taking a medical history, and suddenly he felt it all come crashing down.
By the second week, their meals had grown silent. “What do you like to talk about?” Natasza had exploded in frustration, and he stammered, “M-medicine,” before he could keep the word from coming out. Her lip curled, and he thought that she would laugh. Once, he wished to add, defensively, once there was someone else who might have listened. But he feared mentioning Margarete’s name in the presence of this other woman, as if her memory were something fragile and might be harmed.
When they got home, Natasza had a letter from a friend. What luck! she said: she had been invited to the Salzkammergut with Princess Dzieduszycka. And Lucius, irritated, at last finding a way to deploy his mother’s encyclopedic registry of the Polish nobility, told her that there hadn’t been a single princess in “Princess” Dzieduszycka’s family since the death of Sobieski (1696). Then, feeling both relief and an impending, ineluctable loneliness, he bid her go.
He slept easily the next week on the wards. When he stopped at their apartment on the day she was to return, he found a telegram from her saying that the lakes were lovely, he should come. He couldn’t, of course, and he knew she knew this. When he thought of her bronze body moving through the lake water, he felt a stab of pain. She returned the next Monday with a small book of photographs of her friends, all tan, the women in striped swimsuits, the men with smooth hair and cigarettes. The photos were a montage of such perfect human beauty that they seemed staged. Her neck was covered by drops of water, the suit was thin, revealing the outline of her breasts. Now, looking at it he felt himself in the presence of a superior creature who had the power to bestow a final blessing or disapproval. He had spent the day trying to stop the seizures of an eighteen-year-old soldier who’d been asphyxiated by phosgene blowback. At the end of the week she asked to go again.
Once more he returned to the hospital to sleep at night. He had hoped Natasza might be a solution to his loneliness, but now what was happening was even worse. He did not want to think of her, then spent the night imagining where she slept. Five days later, she called the Lamberg Palace to say she had returned early, and with some hope, he hurried home. There he found her with her sister, a long-armed look-alike, and her sister’s husband, a German industrialist’s son named Franz. For four nights Lucius allowed himself to go with them to restaurants, if only to lay claim to Natasza when they got home. He wished that they gossiped or slandered, so as to at least grant him some sense of moral superiority. But Franz was a veteran of the Marne, who’d spent a year in a field hospital with a festering infection after a hip fracture and then founded a home for orphans on his return. He had a pearly, perfectly placed scar across his cheekbone, was as quick and clever as Natasza, and irritatingly aware of his appeal. Yet still he was solicitous of Lucius, which somehow made matters even worse. What kind of patients did he care for? Did they need new rehabilitation equipment? His friend, Dr. Sauer, had written in his textbook that horseback riding was the quickest way back to health after bed rest—what did Lucius think?
Lucius didn’t know. He hadn’t read Dr. Sauer’s textbook, hadn’t even heard of Dr. Sauer, actually. The three others waited for him to say something else. So he added that he thought doctors who made broad generalizations without considering the specifics of each patient often did more harm than good. Natasza studied her food. Her sister smiled thinly. Franz said, “Spoken like a true expert,” and lit a cigarette. Lucius sensed they all had turned against him. Across the dining room, he could see his own reflection, his pink ears, his shock of white hair. How ugly and foreign he seemed among them! Angry then, at them, at himself, at his mother for thinking he could belong, he turned back to Franz.
“But I will consider using horses for our patients, thank you.”
And then he wondered aloud whether Germany would like to donate them for the rehabilitation of the Territorial soldiers they sent in first to battle, without helmets, two men to a single rusty gun.
That night, Natasza asked Lucius why he had been rude when Franz was simply trying to include him, after he’d passed hours saying nothing at all. How annoying! Lucius was a genius, she said, with the faintest tone of mockery. A doctor, an expert on the human soul! Madame Krzelewska had shown her father Lucius’s assessment from back in 1913. An unusual aptitude for things that lie beneath the skin. If he could make conversation with a bunch of stutterers pretending to have shell shock, he could clearly speak to Franz.
With these words Lucius felt his own stutter returning, and something must have crossed his face, for she smiled with a smile that only the very beautiful can manage, wicked and conciliatory at once. He should just not sit so quietly, she said, lest someone mistake him for one of his mutes. Then she asked offhandedly if she might spend the weekend with her sister in Trieste.
This time, Lucius said he wanted to go as well. She laughed it off. He i
nsisted. She said it would be dull for him. He didn’t play tennis, didn’t dance. He insisted again. She said she didn’t want to go to restaurants with him, that she had seen him staring at a waitress once, not because she was beautiful, but because she had a limp. If the waitress had at least been beautiful, that she could understand! But a cripple? She said her sister had mistaken Lucius’s coat for Franz’s, found kielbasa in his pocket, and thought it was part of a patient. She said she didn’t care what he did at the hospital, but that at least he must change coats. She said her sister said Lucius’s smell reminded her of the sanitorium where she had once gone to take a nervous cure, and now she, Natasza, couldn’t get this out of her head.
He asked if there would be another man in Trieste.
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t even hesitate. She added, “And in the Salzkammergut, and in Berlin. Why do you think my father was so insistent I get married? At least they stay in bed with me. They sleep, they eat, like humans.
“What kind of monster are you, anyway?” she asked.
She had used a word in Polish that meant less a creature of evil than a sorry, accidental creation, a word one uses for a defective child, or a goat born with two heads.
If only you knew, he thought, but now he couldn’t speak. Even the very grammar of his language seemed to mock him, for it occurred to him that she was the only person in his life with whom he used the informal, and this was coming quickly to an end.
