by Daniel Mason
“Herr Professor has a key?”
His answer was a smile, mischievous, revealing gums and pebbly teeth.
They went down that night, after the curator had left.
The hall was dark. They passed tables of torture implements, jars of fetal malformations, a collection of dodo beaks and pickled terrapins, and a shrunken Amazonian head. At last they arrived at a distant shelf. There they were. Not some lovely young girls floating in a tank, as Lucius had always imagined, but two shriveled corpses the size of babies, the dried skin of their faces pulled back over the teeth, the torsos narrowing before they merged into scaly tails.
Zimmer had brought a rucksack. He opened it and motioned for Lucius to set one of the bodies inside. They would take it up to the X-ray machine, to see if the lumbar spine articulated with the vertebrae of the tail.
“With all due respect, Herr Professor,” said Lucius, feeling a faint despondency sneak into his voice. “I really doubt it does.”
“Look at the surface—one sees no glue, no thread.”
“It is a very good hoax, Herr Professor.”
But Zimmer had his monocle on and was peering into the first one’s mouth.
“Herr Professor. Do you really think it is wise to take them? They look…crispy. What if one breaks?”
Zimmer rapped it gavel-like against the shelf. “Very strong,” he said.
Lucius took it, gently. It was light, the skin like dry leather. It seemed to be pinching its eyes shut. It looked outraged.
“Come,” Zimmer said, slipping it inside the bag.
The Medical Museum sat in the basement. They climbed the stairs and walked down the main hall, lined with statues of Vienna’s great physicians. Only a distant light was on. Lucius was thankful that it was evening and his classmates had gone home. The sound of the mermaid rubbing against the canvas of the bag seemed even louder than his footsteps.
They were about to exit, when they heard a voice. “Herr Professor Zimmer!” They stopped, and Lucius turned to see the rector, with a small, dark-haired woman at his side.
The rector approached Zimmer with a broad smile, lifting his arms in greeting.
Zimmer scarcely noticed him. Instead he took the woman’s hand.
“Ah, Madame Professor. What brings you to Vienna?”
“A lecture, Herr Professor,” she answered in accented German. “It’s all lectures these days.”
The rector now had noticed Lucius. To the woman, he said, “This is one of Vienna’s finer students. Kerzelowski…ahem…Kurslawski…”
“K-she-lev-ski,” said Lucius, despite his better instincts. “In Polish, the Krze is pronounced…”
“Of course!” The rector turned. “You’ve heard of Madame Professor Curie?”
Lucius froze. Madame Marie Skłodowska Curie. He dropped his head. “A great honor,” he murmured reverentially. Two Nobel Prizes: in the Polish community of Vienna she was a saint.
Madame Curie smiled. In Polish, she said, “Krzelewski—a Pole?”
“Yes, Madame Professor.”
She leaned in conspiratorially. “What a relief! My God, how sick I am of speaking German.”
Lucius looked uncomfortably at the men, who seemed pleased to see that Madame Curie had found a conversation mate. Not knowing what to say, he replied, “Polish is a beautiful language.”
But the great chemist seemed not to have registered how awkward this sounded. In German, she said to the rector, “Might we bring them to supper? I am happy to meet a fellow countryman.” Then in Polish, to Lucius, “These old men are so boring! I am ready to die.”
Lucius looked to Zimmer, hoping his professor might intervene and suggest they drop the rucksack off at his office, but he seemed to have forgotten that Lucius was still carrying it beneath his arm.
They dined that night at Meissl und Schadn. Madame Curie asked to stretch her legs, and so they walked. Along the Ringstrasse, they were followed at a short distance by a pair of mangy dogs, who whined hungrily at the rucksack. At the door, the maître d’ offered to take the bag, but Lucius said politely that it wasn’t necessary, and as deftly as possible, he slipped it beneath his chair. At the beginning of the meal, Zimmer spoke at some length about his radiological work, and Madame Curie asked sharp questions about contrast agents, most of which Zimmer asked Lucius to field. They had just begun dessert, when the great chemist asked the two professors permission to speak in Polish.
“Of course!”
To Lucius she said, “What’s in the bag?”
“The bag, Madame Professor?”
“Don’t play stupid, young man. Who brings a rucksack into Meissl und Schadn and tries to hide it under the table? It must be something really precious.” She winked. “I have spent the last half hour palpating it with my foot.”
“It is a mermaid, Madame Professor,” said Lucius, who did not know what else to say.
Her eyebrows rose. “Indeed! A dried one?”
“Yes…a dried one, Madame Professor. How did you know?”
“Well, she’s not preserved or we would smell the chloroform. And she’s not alive, as I’d imagine she’d be struggling. I’d be struggling. It is a she, isn’t it? Our exotic things are always female.”
Lucius looked anxiously about. “I have not been able to confirm, Madame Professor. I am unfamiliar with the anatomy.” Then in horror, he realized the unfortunate way this could be misunderstood. Thankful for the dark light of the restaurant, he added, quickly, “I have never seen a mermaid before.”
She lowered her voice. “May I see?”
“Now, Madame Professor?” asked Lucius.
“After,” she said.
When the meal ended, she said, “Can the student walk me home?”
The rector, who seemed to want this honor for himself, reluctantly agreed. Zimmer, by then completely drunk, waved Lucius off.
She was staying at the Metropole. Inside the lobby, as they waited for the lift, Lucius could sense the eyes of the bellhop appraise the rendezvous. Oh, but it is not what you are thinking, thought Lucius, though a little flattered by the suggestion. Just looking at a mermaid, that is all…
Upstairs, she led him into the bathroom, with a tall four-legged tub. Lucius opened the rucksack, and she lifted the creature out.
“Oh, dear,” she said. She held it close to the light. In the mirror, Lucius could see all three of them. “How very ugly!” she said. She turned it. “The face looks very much like the old American president Theodore Roosevelt, don’t you think? If she had a little moustache and glasses…”
“Yes, Madame Professor. If the American president were desiccated and had a tail, I think they would look very much the same.”
Lucius, who had the student’s habit of answering in complete sentences that recapitulated the question and expanded it slightly, had actually not meant this to be a joke, but Madame Curie began to laugh. Then she shook her head. “Why in the world are you carrying this?”
“Professor Zimmer…wanted to radiograph it…It is from the collection of Rudolf II. A gift from the Sultan. He thought he might see if the vertebrae of the tail and thorax articulated…”
“Articulated? He actually believes it’s real?”
“It is a possibility he—we—have considered.” In the mirror, Lucius could see his face turning bright red. “The radiograph has allowed the investigation of phenomena…”
She interrupted sharply, “And what does the student think?”
“I think it is a hoax, Madame Professor. I believe it is a monkey and a sarcopterygian fish.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I can see the thread, Madame Professor. See, if you look closely, under this scale.”
He showed her.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “You’re trapped, aren’t you?” She handed the mermaid back. Then, “The rector speaks of you with admiration. If you don’t mind some personal advice, between countrymen. Save yourself. Genius favors the young. You are running out of time.”
But leaving his professor was not that easy.
Against his better judgment, he could not help but feel a filial affection. By then, he had begun to dream the two of them addressed each other with the informal du. So when Zimmer declared the radiographs “inconclusive,” Lucius told the old man that he needed to spend more time back in the library, in order to find a compound that could better serve their needs.
He began to attend class again.
Pathological Anatomy, with lab and lectures.
Pathological Histology, with lab and lectures.
Pathological Anatomy, with autopsy work (Feuermann: “At last, a patient!”).
General Pharmacology, with its long lists of drugs to memorize, but no one to prescribe them to.
Back in the amphitheaters, peering down onto the stage.
And on. Until the summer of his third year, when, with two years of studies remaining and his impatience again almost unbearable, fortune intervened, this time bursting from the pistol of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and into the bodies of the archduke and his wife.
2.
At first Lucius did not appreciate the opportunity of war, declared that July. He saw the efforts of mobilization as disruptive to his studies and feared the rumors that classes would be suspended. He did not understand the patriotism of his classmates, so drunk with a sense of destiny, vacating the libraries so that they might attend the marches, lining up together to enlist. He did not join them when they gathered around maps showing the advance of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army into Serbia, or the German march through Belgium, or the engagement with Russian forces at the Masurian Lakes. He had no interest in the editorials exalting “the escape from world stagnation” and “the rejuvenation of the German soul.” When his cousin Witold, two years his junior and recently arrived from Kraków, told him with tearful eyes that he had enlisted as a foot soldier because, for the first time in his life, the war had made him feel like he was Austrian, Lucius answered in Polish that the war had also apparently made him an idiot, and he would do nothing but get himself killed.
But the celebrations were hard to ignore. It seemed as if the entire city reeked of rotting flowers. In the city parks, errant streamers tangled themselves in the rosebushes, and everywhere, Lucius saw garlanded soldiers walking with beaming girlfriends on their arms. Cinemas offered wartime specials with short clips like “Our Factories at Work” and “He Stops to Bandage a Friend.” In the hospital, the nurses debated the problems of gauge coordination for Austrian trains advancing over Russian rails. Portraits of the enemy appeared in the papers to illustrate their brutelike physiognomies. At home his nephews sang,
Pretty Crista,
At the Dniester.
How she cried!
Cossack bride.
He ignored them.
Zeppelins flew past, dipping their noses above the Hofburg palace in deference to the Emperor.
Then, a few weeks in, rumors of physician shortages began to come.
They were only rumors at first—the army would not publicly admit to such poor planning. But quietly changes were announced at the medical school. Early graduation was offered to those who would enlist. Students with but four semesters of medical studies were made medical lieutenants, and those with six, like Lucius, offered positions on staffs of four or five doctors, in garrison hospitals serving entire regiments of three thousand men. By late August, Kaminski was at a regimental hospital in southern Hungary, and Feuermann assigned to the Serbian front.
Two days before his friend’s departure, Lucius met Feuermann at Café Landtmann. It was covered with bunting and overflowed with families on one last outing with their sons. Since his enlistment, Feuermann seemed to be whistling constantly. His hair was trimmed; he wore a little moustache of which he seemed unduly proud. On his uniform he had pinned an Austrian flag next to his Star of David badge from the Hakoah sports club where he swam. Lucius should reconsider, he said, sipping from a beer decorated with a black and yellow ribbon. If not out of loyalty to the Emperor, then loyalty to Medicine. Didn’t he understand how many years he would have to wait before he saw such cases? Galen learned on gladiators! Within days Feuermann would be operating, while Lucius, if he stayed in Vienna, would be lucky to be the twentieth to listen to a patient’s heart.
In the street, a band led a festooned ambulance from a Rescue Society, followed by a rank of wasp-waisted women in white summer dresses and fluttering hats. Little boys weaved through them, waving streamers of colored crepe.
Lucius shook his head. More than any of his classmates, he deserved such a posting. But in two years they would graduate. And then on to academic posts, real medicine, to something worthy of their capabilities. Anyone could learn first aid…
Feuermann removed his glasses and held them to the light. “A girl kissed me, Krzelewski. Such a pretty girl, and on the lips. Just last night, in the Hofgarten, during the celebration after the parade.” He put his glasses back on. “Kaminski said one actually threw him her knickers at the train station. Frilled and all. A girl he’d never even met.”
“You don’t think that she was throwing them to someone else and Kaminski intercepted?” asked Lucius.
“Ah ha!” laughed Feuermann. “But to the victor go the spoils, right?” And he kissed his fingers like a satisfied gourmand.
Then he brought out a surgical manual, and they read through the standard hospital kit.
Morphine sulfate, mouse-toothed forceps, chisel, horsehair sutures…
On and on, like two children poring over a catalogue of toys.
“Well?” asked Feuermann at last.
But Lucius hadn’t really needed to read past chisel.
At the recruitment office, he waited on a long line before a single clerk. He left as a medical lieutenant, with a drill handbook detailing bugle calls and the hierarchy of the salute. After, with Feuermann, at a wine tavern out in Hietzing hung with garlic braids, he got drunk with a group of Hungarian recruits. They were rough, heavy country boys, who spoke scarcely any German, and yet they all drank together until they could scarcely stand. They seemed completely unaware of the whispers that it was Austria’s war, that the so-called Territorials—the Poles and Czechs and Romanians, etc., that made up the rest of the Empire—were being asked to sacrifice themselves in Austria’s name. By the end of the evening, they were singing that they would die for Lucius, and Lucius was singing that he would die for them. None of it seemed real. Hours later, stumbling home through the hot night, he turned a corner to find himself facing a shirtless, gap-toothed child, ribbon tied around its head. For a moment, they paused, staring each other down. Then the child grinned, raised his fist and cocked a finger, whispered, Bang.
Back at home, his mother was thrilled by his enlistment, but felt that medical duties, out of the line of fire, would seem like cowardice. So she bought him a horse and called upon a friend in the War Ministry to cancel his commission and speed his entry into the lancers, like his father, even though he’d last ridden when he was twelve.
Lucius received this news with quiet fury. The calculus was clear. Krzelewski Metals and Mining was about to be made even richer by the war. Every sabotaged railway would have to be rebuilt, only to be destroyed again; again rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt again. But in the end there would be a reckoning. She needed at least one patriot to prove they weren’t profiteers.
His father, overjoyed by the prospect, now filled with affection, spent hours versing Lucius on the history of the Polish cavalry, lavishing especial praise on the lancers. He had often dressed in some version of his old uniform, but now the outfit that emerged was something of an altogether different register of splendor: scarlet jodhpurs, bright blue tunic with a double rank of buttons, boots polished until one could see the far-off reflection of the plumed czapka on his head.
In his library, he brought down volume after volume of military history. His eyes grew teary, then he sang some very dirty cavalry songs. With the lights o
ff, he showed Lucius hand shadows he had last performed a decade prior: The War Horse, Death Comes for the Cossack, and The Decapitated Venetian. For a moment, Lucius wondered if he had been drinking, but his father’s eyes were clear as he gazed into his great regimental past. No, God had made no greater warrior than the Polish lancer! No one! Unless, of course, one counted the Polish winged hussars, who rode with great, clattering frames of ostrich feathers on their backs.
“Of course, Father,” Lucius answered. The winged regiments had been disbanded in the eighteenth century; this remained a sore point with Retired Major Krzelewski. Since childhood, Lucius had heard this many, many times.
His father smiled contentedly and stroked the czapka strap, which bifurcated his smooth white beard. Then his pale blue eyes lit up. He had a thought!
Two full coats of winged armor flanked their entrance stairs. Together they hauled them, creaking, back up into the ballroom and strapped them on. The wings were so heavy that Lucius almost tumbled over.
“Can you imagine!” said his father, amazingly upright, looking like a wizened knight. Lucius wheezed; the breastplate had ridden up his thin chest and was choking off his breath. He wondered how long he could stand there without collapsing. But his father was lost in fantasy. “Can you imagine!” he said again, when, for a moment—finding his balance, the light glinting off the armor, a breeze from an open window fluttering the feathers, the image of the two winged men reflected in the ballroom mirror—for a moment, Lucius could.
“We should wear them out to supper with your mother,” his father said, and drummed his knuckles on the armor of his chest.
Later he realized Lucius didn’t know how to shoot.
“Father, I’m enlisting as a doctor,” Lucius repeated, but his father didn’t seem to hear. He opened all the doors along the grand hallway and the window that looked out onto a tall oak outside. From his study, he withdrew his old service revolver. He led Lucius to the far end of the hall and handed it to him. “See the knot?” he said, and Lucius squinted, his gaze coursing the corridor with its portraits and statues.