by Daniel Mason
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Mason
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photographs: mountains © Jongcheol Park / EyeEm / Getty Images; man © De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Images
Author photograph by Sara Houghteling
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Map by Jeffrey Ward. Frontispiece: Detail, Entry of the Wedding Procession of Constance of Austria and Sigismund III into Cracow, author unknown.
ISBN 978-0-316-47758-1
E3-20180725-DANF
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Dedication
Epigraph
Frontispiece
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Read More Novels by Daniel Mason
Newsletters
For Sara
Certain affections have an unfortunate destiny.
—André Léri, 1918, Commotions et émotions de guerre
1.
Northern Hungary,
February 1915
They were five hours east of Debrecen when the train came to a halt before the station on the empty plain.
There was no announcement, not even a whistle. Were it not for the snow-draped placard, he wouldn’t have known they had arrived. Hastening, afraid he would miss the stop, he gathered his bag, his coat, his saber, pushing his way out through the men who filled the corridor of the train. He was the only passenger to descend. Farther down the line, porters unloaded a pair of crates onto the snow before jumping back on board, slapping warmth into their hands. Then the carriages began to move, chains clanking, stirring his greatcoat and swirling snow around his knees.
He found the hussar in the station house, with the horses brought in from the cold. Their ears flicked against the low ceiling, their long faces overhanging a bench where three peasant women sat, hands clasped over their swaddled bellies like fat men content after a meal. Feet dangling just above the floor. Woman, horse, woman, horse, woman. The hussar stood without speaking. Back in Vienna, Lucius had seen regiments on parade with their plumes and colored sashes, but this man was dressed in a thick grey coat, with a cap of worn, patched fur. He motioned Lucius forward and handed him the reins of one of the horses before he led the other outside, its tail whisking across the women as it passed beneath the Habsburg double-headed eagle on the door.
Lucius tugged on the reins, but his horse resisted. He stroked her neck with the back of one hand—the broken one—while he pulled with the other. “Come,” he whispered, first in German, then in Polish, as her back hooves broke from the ice and frozen dung. To the hussar at the door, he said, “You’ve been waiting long.”
It was the last thing he said. Outside, the hussar lowered a leather mask, cut with slits for eyes and nostrils, and heaved himself onto his horse. Lucius followed, rucksack on his shoulders, struggling to wrap his scarf over his face. From inside the station house, the three old women watched them until the hussar wheeled his horse around and kicked the door shut. Your sons aren’t coming, Lucius wanted to tell them. Not in any state you’d wish to see. There was scarcely a man with two legs who wasn’t trying to lift the Russian siege of Przemyśl now.
Without a word the hussar began to ride north at a trot, his long rifle across his saddle, his saber on his waist. Lucius looked back to the railway, but the train had vanished. Snowflakes had begun to cover the track.
He followed. His horse’s hooves clattered on the frozen earth. The sky was grey, and in the distance, he could see the mountains rising up into the storm. Somewhere, there, was Lemnowice, and the regimental hospital of the Third Army where he was to serve.
* * *
He was twenty-two years old, restless, resentful of hierarchy, impatient for his training to come to an end. For three years he had studied alone in the libraries, devoted to medicine with a monastic severity. Onion paper feathered the margins of his textbooks, licked and pasted in by hand. In the great halls, on gleaming lantern slides, he’d seen the ravages of typhus, scarlatina, lupus, pest. He had memorized the signs of cocainism and hysteria, knew that the breath of cyanide poisoning smelled of almonds, and the murmur of a narrowed aortic valve could be heard in the neck. In tie and jacket, freshly ironed for the day, he’d spent hours staring down from the dizzying heights of the surgery theater, straining his neck for a line-of-sight through the restless coveys of his classmates, over the neatly combed heads of senior students, over the junior professors, the surgeon’s assistants, across the surgical drape, and down into the cut. By the time war was declared, he was dreaming nightly of the theater: long, demanding dreams in which he extracted impossible organs, half-man, half-pig. (It was on butcher’s scraps he practiced.) One night, dreaming of an extraction of the gallbladder, he had such a distinct impression of the wet, leaden warmth of the liver, that he woke certain he could carry out the surgery alone.
If his devotion was total, its origin remained a mystery. As a child, he had gazed with wonder at the wax cadavers at the Anatomical Museum, but so had his three brothers, and not one of them had turned to Hippocrates’s art. There were no doctors in his line, not among the Krzelewskis of southern Poland, and certainly not among his mother’s people. At times, cornered by some peahen at one of her unbearable receptions, he endured a condescending speech on how medicine was a noble calling, that one day he would be rewarded for his kindness. But kindness was not interesting to him. His best answer to what drove his endless hours of study was the joy of study itself. He was not a person drawn to religious devotion, but it was in religion that he found the words: revelation, epiphany, the miracle of God’s creations, and by extension, the miracle of how God’s creations failed.
Study itself: this was, at least, the answer that he gave in his moments of greatest exultation. But there was another reason he had turned to medicine, one he only considered later in the hours of his doubt. Of the two other students he could call his friends, Feuermann was
the son of a tailor, while Kaminski, who wore empty spectacles just to look older, was on a scholarship from the Sisters of Mercy. Although they never spoke of it, Lucius knew they all had come to medicine for its promise of social mobility. For Feuermann and Kaminski this meant up: from the slums of Leopoldstadt and the charity school. For Lucius, whose father came from an ancient Polish family that claimed descent from Japheth, son of Noah (yes, that Noah), and in whose mother’s veins coursed the same cerulean blood as that Great Liberator of Vienna and Savior of Western Civilization, Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Masovia, Samogitia, Livonia, Smolensk, Kiev, Volhynia, etc., etc.—for Lucius, such mobility meant not up, but out.
No, from the beginning he hadn’t belonged among them, an accidental sixth child born years after the doctor told his mother she couldn’t conceive again. Were he not the spitting image of his father—tall and big-pawed, with skin pale as alabaster, a shock of blond hair fit for an Icelander, and old man’s ducktail eyebrows even as a little boy—he might have wondered if he was another’s child. But the flushes of ruddiness that gave his father the hale glow of a knight who has just removed his jouster’s helmet, in Lucius looked more like blotches of an embarrassed blush. Watching his brothers and sisters glide through his mother’s receptions, he could never understand their ease, their grace, their force. No matter what he tried—holding a stone in his pocket as a reminder to smile, writing lists of “Chatting Topics”—spontaneity eluded him. Before the parties, he would slink through the salon, attaching to each piece of artwork an idea for conversation: when he saw the portrait of Sobieski he was to speak of holidays; the bust of Chopin should spur him to ask about his guest. Yet, no matter how he prepared, it happened: there would be a moment, a pause—just a second—just a catch—before he—spoke. He could move easily through the shifting choreography of soft gowns and pressed field marshal trousers. But the moment that he approached a cluster of other children, their laughter stopped.
He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place—among a different, silent people—his discomfort would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.
In the beginning, he had been accused of feigning. Stutters appear in childhood, his mother told him, not in a boy his age. He didn’t stutter when he was alone, nor when he spoke of his science magazines or the bird’s nest outside his window. Nor did it afflict him at the aquarium in the Imperial Zoological Collections, where he went to stare for hours at the Grottenolm, blind, translucent salamanders from the Southern Empire, in whom one could watch the magical pulsing of their blood.
But at last, conceding that something might be wrong, she hired a speech expert from Munich, famous for his Textbook of the Disorders of Speech and Language and a metal device called the Zungenapparat, which isolated the labial, palatal, and glottal movements from one another and so promised the repair of sound and speech.
The doctor arrived on a warm summer’s morning, gnawing a hangnail. Humming, he appraised the child, palpating his neck and peering into his ears. There were measurements, sour fingers probed his gums; his mother grew bored and left. At last, the apparatus was applied, and the boy was told to sing “The Happy Hiker.”
He tried. The clamp pinched his lips. The tongue prongs cut, and he spat blood. “Louder!” cried the doctor. “It is working!” His mother returned to find her son baying like a dog, mouth foaming red. Lucius looked between them—Mother—Doctor—Mother—Doctor—as his mother seemed to grow bigger and pinker and the doctor smaller and paler. Oh, you have no idea what you have gotten yourself into, thought the boy, watching the man. And he began to giggle—not an easy task with a Zungenapparat—as the doctor gathered up his tools and fled.
A second doctor tried to hypnotize him, failed, and prescribed herring for oral lubrication. A third, cupping his testicles, declared them sufficient, but finding no movement when the boy was shown the fleshy gymnastics in an illustrated edition of True Secrets of the Convent, he removed his notebook and scrawled “Insufficiency of the Gland.” Then he whispered to Lucius’s mother.
A week later, she had his father take him to a house specializing in virgins, certificated free of syphilis, where he was locked in the plush Ludwig II suite with a country girl from Croatia attired like a singer of the opera buffa. As she was from the south, Lucius asked her if she had heard of the Grottenolm. Yes, she said, her frightened face brightening. Her father had once collected the little salamanders to sell to aquaria across the Empire. Then the two of them marveled at this coincidence of their lives, for, just that week, one of Lucius’s favorites in the Zoological Collection had spawned.
Afterward, when his father asked, “And did you do it?” Lucius answered, “Yes, Father.” And his father, “I don’t believe you. What did you do?” And Lucius, “I did what was to be done.” And his father, “Which is what?” And Lucius, “What I have learned.” And his father, “What have you learned, boy?” And Lucius, remembering a novel of his sister’s, answered, “I have done it in a fiery way.”
“That’s my son,” his father said.
In silence, he endured his parents’ receptions until they allowed him to escape. He would have skipped them altogether, but his mother said the guests would think she was like Walentyna Rozorovska, who hid her crippled daughter in a crate. So Lucius followed as she made her rounds. She was distinctly proud of her narrow waist, and he thought she sometimes kept him near because nothing pleased her more than to have another woman say: “Agnieszka, after six children—so sportive! How can it be?”
Whalebone! Lucius wished to shout. The conversation horrified him. He thought such comments about his birth were vulgar, as if they were complimenting her on her genitalia. He was relieved when she spoke instead of music and architecture, and showed particular interest in the industrialists’ wives and where their husbands had been traveling, and it was only when he was older that he realized how strategic, and ultimately ruthless, such questioning had been.
The King is always hunting, and the Queen is always pregnant, ran the joke about his family, paraphrasing Goethe. But he thought, In many ways, this Queen is both. His sweet-toothed father, a major in the lancers, had been shot in the hip by the Italians at the Battle of Custoza, and had intended to spend the rest of his life happily lounging about his garrison in Kraków, drinking slivovitz and perfecting hand shadows to scare his children. For the first decade of his marriage, fearing disruption to his idyll, the war hero tried to hide the sleepy family mines from Lucius’s mother. Iron? There? Nothing but bat droppings. Copper? Oh, my dear, that’s just a silly rumor. What, they told you there was zinc?
He had known his wife too well. No sooner did she have her hands on the balance sheets than a great rumbling was heard over southern Poland. Within three years, the Krzelewski mines had gone from providing buttons for the army’s tunics and brass for its trumpets to steel and iron for the new railway to Zakopane. Soon she had moved them to Vienna so as to better grip the heart of Empire. It was only fitting, she liked to say. Vienna owed her family, ever since Sobieski liberated Austria from the Turks.
This of course was mentioned only in private. In public, she had no hesitation acquiring the necessary imperial trappings. Commemorative ceramics from Franz Josef’s jubilees soon graced their mantelpieces. She had Klimt paint her portrait, first with Lucius at her side, and then, because she was enthralled by the patterns of gold on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, she had Lucius painted over. Their dynasty of Irish wolfhounds—Puszek I (1873–81), Puszek II (1880–87), Puszek III (1886–96), Puszek IV (18
95–1902), etc.—all descended from none other than Empress Sisi’s beloved Shadow.
Each of her children, save the eldest, had been born in Vienna. Władysław, Kazimierz, and Bolesław, Sylwia and Regelinda: names like a procession of Polish saints. By his second decade, they had all moved on. Later Lucius would learn that there were divisions among them, deep divisions, but for most of his childhood, their unity seemed impenetrable. The men drank and the women played piano very well. The men, disappearing with his father on predawn hunts from their estates in Poland and Hungary, drank a lot.
He was not surprised, therefore, that when he had first announced his intention to study medicine, his mother told him it was a field for arrivistes.
He responded that many sons of nobility became doctors. But he knew the answer before it was uttered from her thin, drawn lips.
“Yes. But our kind of doctor is not the kind of doctor you will be.”
She relented in the end. Better than anyone, she knew his limitations. Alone in the beginning, unwelcome in the German medical student associations, he had found Feuermann and Kaminski similarly excluded, trying to hide their discomfort as the other students laughed among themselves.
From the first day, Lucius had thrown himself into his studies. As opposed to his two companions, who had studied at the trade-oriented Realschule, and so had already completed much of the basic sciences, Lucius’s education at the hands of his governesses had consisted mostly of Greek and Latin. To his gang he said that his zoological and botanical studies had stopped at Pliny. When they laughed with him, he was amazed, as he hadn’t meant it as a joke. After that, he pretended he had never heard of Darwin, and liked to say, “This whole gravity business is quite a craze.” But he didn’t mind the remedial courses; there was magic in the choral recitations of Linnaean classification, in the luminous Crookes tubes brought out for physics demonstrations, the lesser alchemy that bubbled in the lines of Erlenmeyer flasks.