by Daniel Mason
Ten days later, a cherubic factotum of the archbishop ran his finger down the column of a volume bound in calf.
“Here,” he said. “A convent of Saint Catherine. In Trieste.”
It was impossible. Lucius had been there as a child, recalled the sun-washed seafront on the Adriatic, the puckered smell of drying fish. A world completely distinct from Margarete.
But he wrote. A simple note at first, in German. To whom it may concern, I am looking for one of your Sisters. If you know where she is, would you please forward the enclosed? The second letter was sealed. He wrote first of how he had been separated, of the attack on Sloboda Rungurska, how he had tried so hard to return. He wrote that he thought often of her, crossed this out, wrote all the time, the truth is, Margarete, I cannot stop.
He posted the letter that night from Kraków, leaving the regimental office as his address.
But by then he had begun to question.
It was more than just the doubt on the face of the little nurse in Rzeszów. Wandering in the wards, watching the other sisters, their silence, their brisk, efficient deference, he began to consider one final possibility: that she had never taken vows at all.
Of all the possibilities, it stunned him now to think he had never really considered this. On the surface, of course, there was the evidence of their lovemaking. But this in itself hardly proved she wasn’t a nun. Vows were broken; indeed, he had inherited a culture keenly aware of all the erotic potentialities of the convent, whether the garden couplings in Boccaccio, or the baser perversities of de Sade. If anything, there was something in the very denial of the flesh that acknowledged the power of flesh’s pleasures. He had not needed to read Freud to know this; they took breaths from the same air.
No, it was something else that held him. And something other than the fact that she carried a rifle, or cursed, or drank before her surgeries. Or that she kept Drill Regulations on her desk and Field Surgery in the Zone of the Advance, but not the Bible. No, it was something subtler, unspoken, something dramatic about her manner when she spoke of God and his angels. Almost as if she were playing at devotion. As she had played at typhus before Horst.
He was in Jarosław when this thought came to him. He was sitting in the office of a mother superior of the Sisters of Mercy, a handsome woman in her early forties with the kind eyes of someone accustomed to being present at the bedside of people who were very scared. He didn’t know what it was about the woman’s sober, steady manner that made him think, This wasn’t her, but once thought, he couldn’t get it out of his head.
But why? Why would a young woman pretend she was someone who she wasn’t, only so that she could spend the next two years surrounded by the horrors of dying soldiers, often sleepless, only hours from the front?
Like me, he thought. He was walking down the steps of the Jarosław hospital. Briefly, he stopped. Pretending to be someone I was not.
Outside the hospital, unexpected sunlight coruscating on the snow-wet rooftops, he followed a road that led down to the San River. Huge ice floes jostled noisily against the bridge columns. Moments from their conversations now drifted back to him. My vows. My holy service. The earthly life I left behind. But what then was she hiding? He wished that he might have doubted this before, in Lemnowice. To know whom he had truly fallen in love with. He felt as if he’d missed so much, not just to get to know her then, but to know how he might find her now.
Back in Kraków, a letter was waiting, postmarked from Trieste. It was from a nun, a Sister Ilaria. She had never known a Margarete, she wrote to him in German. There were no Polish sisters in her order; nor was it their custom to assume a different name. She would have wished him luck had she not had a Polish shopkeeper translate the contents of his second letter for her. I cannot dare imagine what has transpired between you and the unfortunate Margarete, Signore. But it is my duty to remind you that all corporeal delights are strictly forbidden by the vows of any Order. Please, Signore. What is at stake is no less than her salvation. Hot are the fires of hell. I urge you to accept the loss and leave our Sister alone.
That night, for the first time since he had joined the trains, he allowed himself to get drunk at the officers’ club, just beyond the garrison gates. The room was crowded. On the piano in the corner, a lieutenant of the lancers played military marches, which his comrades urged into a rapid tempo with a banging of their cups. He sat alone in a booth, beneath an old painting of a young Franz Josef that had yet to be replaced by one of Karl I. Twice he unfolded Sister Ilaria’s letter, twice he read it, growing angrier each time. It was not just me, he wanted to write back to her. She came to me first. She kissed me. She led me to the river to make love. And now she was not only missing, but had absconded with a part of him he hadn’t even known existed before they met.
He ordered another slivovitz. The spirits ran over the top of the brimming glass, burning a scrape that ran across his knuckles. The heat, the smell, the tingling on his fingers now reminded him of the horilka they drank to warm their bellies before surgery. He leaned back and ran his hands through his hair, moist with sweat from the warmth of the room; he couldn’t even get drunk without being driven back to her. In his left hand he crumpled the letter on its flimsy ration paper, flagged down the waiter with his right. Another slivovitz, burning his lips as it spilled into his beard.
At last he rose, unsteadily. Now his desire for Margarete was so pressing it was almost clinical. He was infested. The room was small, too small for him, the laughter and the regimental marches pitched forward in a frantic pace. As he turned, his saber clattered across the table, sweeping a pair of glasses to the floor. With the songs and laughter no one noticed. The waiter scurried over, apologizing, as if his placement of the glasses had led to such a mess.
Hot are the fires of hell. He had to get outside. Unbuttoning the collar on his tunic, he stumbled, apologizing, pushing through the other officers, none of whom gave any heed. At the entrance, he steadied himself against the wall as the doorman fumbled interminably through the rank of greatcoats. Then he was outside, the air was cold; he paused, breathing deeply, as his breath made spirals through the yellow columns of light. More singing, coming now from a raucous crowd on a wooden sidewalk outside another establishment up the street. Women’s laughter rose from shuttered windows. Now he knew why he had gotten drunk that night, what he was searching for. Ahead the crowd churned as the door opened, and a pair of privates stumbled out to the hurrahs and congratulations of the others. They pulled up short, saluting as they saw Lucius approach, a crimson light over the door casting their flushed, warm faces in a devilish glow. But he was an officer, and the red light specified an establishment for enlisted men. He dismissed them with a nod, and they melted back into the crowd. The world deserved its war, he thought. In Lemnowice, he couldn’t get the anti-tetanus serum he needed, but there were rules on how to divvy up the whores.
He stumbled on, looking now for the green lantern that would signify an establishment for officers. The cold began to seep through his open collar, and he fumbled with the buttons as he walked on. The streets were dark, clotted with soldiers. Somewhere were the dynastic crypts of the Royal Capital City, but the Kraków that unfolded before him now had the air of a frontier town. The smell of burning coal was everywhere, and a dark bird, a shadow, banked above the scattered nimbuses of light.
At last, before a flickering emerald lamp, he stopped and watched a pair of officers enter a doorway, behind which the sound of dancing music could be heard. A doorman beckoned to him; he hurried off. His heart was pounding in his ears. What had seemed necessary minutes before now seemed impossible. He could not stand the thought of sitting in a parlor getting drunk with fellow officers and singing regimental songs until each of them paired off.
A light snow was falling when he reached the Central Market Square.
Ahead he could see them gathered beneath each of the streetlamps. Snow had been falling all evening, and a smooth field of white covered the square. N
ow approaching, he hesitated, then put his head down, keeping his gaze away as they called out. He saw no one else. Just the women, like sentries, retreating in the distance beneath the spotlights of the lamps.
“It’s cold.”
She was tall, almost as tall as him. She wore a black cloak down to the tops of her boots. A strong perfume preceded her as she stepped out of the shadows of the Cloth Hall. She wore a woolen cap, pulled low and decorated with a woolen rose; her cheeks were lightly rouged.
“Yes, cold.” He had stopped. He looked down at his feet, then back along the street, as if there were something of great interest there. “You have…a place to go?”
She named the street.
He nodded, his throat dry, suddenly sober, utterly.
They walked side by side. After a block, she took his arm. For a moment, embarrassed by the intimacy, he resisted. But it seemed less part of seduction than a formality; it would be stranger for them to walk apart. He wondered if he should speak. He felt as if he were already failing, an absurd thought given the nature of the transaction. But the thought was there; it was his duty to entertain. Like a child again. Stone prompts in my pocket. The portrait of Sobieski means I’m to speak of holidays; the bust of Chopin that I’m to inquire about my guests.
But his lips were numb, his tongue tied, and she asked for nothing. Indeed, her whole manner projected a professional’s indifference, the kind of assuring competence one might feel before a doctor or a priest. He felt, briefly, a kind of relief. They passed another woman, who exchanged familiar glances with his partner but didn’t speak. Her gaze, as she took in Lucius, had a strange, almost orchestrated quality, and for a moment, he felt as if there were others watching—his parents, or Margarete. He was relieved when they reached the door. There a price was mentioned, “for the normal.” If he wanted something else, it would be more.
They entered, a pocket of winter air accompanying him like a second traveler.
Inside, a doorman in threadbare livery greeted them and took her coat. Another portrait of the Emperor hung on the wall behind, and a flowery scene of nymphs pinching each other’s nipples was just above his desk. Feuermann would have had a laugh, thought Lucius, as the man briefly disappeared behind what looked to be a hidden panel. Ah, you cultured Poles! A bit of Neoclassicism with your pornography? But the thought was subsumed in a new worry that he had found himself in exactly the kind of establishment he had wanted to avoid. An unmarked doorway! Hidden panels! The doorman in his uniform gave off the sense of a time capsule, the faded decadence of a different age. As if he were about to find himself among a group of masked aristocrats fondling one another in a prelude to an orgy. Or worse, that he would have to dance.
Oh, he was nervous! He shifted, looking furtively at the woman, who was studying the contents of her purse. She wore a plain white blouse, a long, pleated skirt. If not for the rouge, she would have looked like a schoolteacher or governess. Briefly, he had the wild thought that she was not actually a prostitute. That they had met to read, or paint.
The man returned, with a key. She thanked him, then stepped through a doorway to a narrow, unlit caracole of stairs.
On the second floor they stopped, turned left, the boards creaking beneath their feet. The hallway was long and branching, rose up a set of stairs, turned and dropped a flight, then zigzagged before rising and falling again. He realized that the hotel must have been built outward, piercing the neighboring buildings, twisting like a corkscrew. He told himself to pay attention, in case, like Hansel of the folktale, he might need to find his way out. From around them came sounds of footsteps, voices, but they must have come from another hallway that turned helically about their own and never met.
At last they reached their destination. For a moment the key seemed stuck, and he wondered if they would have to go all the way back. But then the mechanism engaged, and the door opened to reveal a room with peeling wallpaper and a mattress on the floor. The woman sniffed; the room smelled sharply of paraffin. He suspected that whoever had last used it had overturned the lamp. When she lit the bedside candle, he half expected, half hoped everything would explode.
She closed the door. From the other side of the walls came a grunted mewling, but she didn’t pay it any heed. Without another word she removed her blouse, then, after a moment’s assessment of his initiative, took off her skirt, and then her button boots, until she stood there in garters and brassiere. He was still in his winter coat.
“Do you need help?” she said, after a while.
He shook his head.
“Take your time,” she said.
But the sight of her body brought his thoughts suddenly to the consequences of the act. Memories: his father inspecting the Croatian girl’s certificate of virginity with his monocle, a madwoman in the General Hospital, staggering from syphilis in her spine. The warnings of von Holzheim, eminent Professor of Dermatology, finger waving maniacally in the air, that nothing, nothing, not antiseptic douches, not leaky prophylactics made of rabbit intestine, nothing—Nothing, my students, nothing!—save blessed coitus abstentia would forestall this plague.
It eats the brain, devours it, my boys—and you, lady-student—until the patient knows nothing but pain and madness. The most excruciating of pains…
Speaking of our patients, of course.
Lucius recalled the woman clinging to him as she had crossed the market square. Had there been a slight shuffle to her gait?
But it already had been decided. Where could he flee to? More dreams of Margarete that left him trembling with longing? More fruitless searching? More humiliating scoldings from far-off nuns who dared to think they understood? No, if Longing were to be extinguished, it must be done so completely. “Walk for me,” he said, and confused, thinking he was asking her to put on a little show, she sauntered toward him. “No, walk normally,” he said, but now saw no evidence of tabetic gait, no sign of blue streaks of mercury injections in her buttocks. He placed his palm on her breast and felt no murmur of aortic insufficiency. He lowered his hand to feel for a chancre on her sex. Misunderstanding, she began to murmur, feigning pleasure, then licked her hand and lowered it to his.
In the room next door, the moans were getting louder. There was a candle-lamp; his last thought was that he should bring it between her legs to complete the examination. But the demon inside him was impatient. Now, it said. Eradicate her, or she will be with you forever. He withdrew his hand. The woman lay back on the mattress, exposed. Her breasts fell loosely back from her brassiere, and her abdomen bore the broad scar of a Caesarean. For a moment, the humanness of this—though less the fact that she had once been someone’s mother than that she’d been someone’s patient—almost scared him off. But he was a persistent person, not used to giving up.
After, he lay with her. He had fallen to her side. She had long black hair, and he breathed in deeply, drawing its perfume over the clipped, carbolic memory of Margarete. He recalled the hundred depot stations, the thousand soldiers gathering one last kiss by which to remember their wives. He felt that this was somehow what he was pursuing, but in inversion—not to remember, but to forget.
“Come from the mountains?” she asked. For a moment, he feared that she would tell him she had a husband or a son there, that he would have to consider the possibility that they were one of his. But she said nothing else.
He had.
“I knew,” she said.
He waited a long time for her to tell him why she asked.
“Hour’s up, soldier,” she said.
Soldier. But she was talking to him, of course. He could stay longer, she added, but it would cost.
It was close to one when he descended to the night.
Wind swirled the snow around the streetlamps as he walked away. It looked like Lemnowice, he thought, in winter, when the snow spun in eddies outside the light of Margarete’s room, when hurrying from the church, he would stop and breathe the air and pines, and look back at the shadow of that house of God in
all its greatness, when sometimes, sometimes, if he listened closely, he could hear her sing. He remembered this, and for the first time in years, he began to cry.
He submitted his petition for leave the following morning.
He was granted two months. So distant did Vienna seem that he could scarcely believe that it was only one long day’s ride away.
It had been two and a half years since he left. As he stepped from the train, he was herded by a line of military police toward a pavilion at the end of the station. He protested, impatient.
“You come from the east,” a policeman said. “Everyone from the field must be deloused.”
Deloused, the word now mystical in all its connections. As we began.
In a cold room, separated from the rest of the station by a dirty hanging canvas, he stripped with the other soldiers. They left their clothes in a steam chamber and then walked on, naked. He looked down at himself, his hands nicked and calloused, his long toes pale as a cadaver’s, his chest narrow and wiry, its coarse hair seeming, in its whiteness, like that of an old man.
In a new line that had formed in front of him was a small man in a wheelchair, an amputee with Horváth’s distant gaze, and for a moment, Lucius felt his heart lurch. But it wasn’t him, of course it wasn’t him; he was gone, and Lemnowice was gone, and Margarete, and it was time to scavenge what was left. Around him, the soldiers were missing hands and feet and they all were gaunt and filthy, but now, trembling in the cold as they filed forward, they forced themselves to laugh about the meals they’d eat and the girls they’d visit, and what the warmth of beds would be like after so many months on straw. Ahead of him, the amputee had risen from his wheelchair, and Lucius followed as he took great whipping leaps to where they sat on a bare bench beside a disinfectant tanker, where a sanitation officer turned on the spray. There, Lucius kept his eyes open for as long as he could, watching the pink bodies disappear into the fine mist. He could taste the cresol, even through pinched lips.