The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  Now back in Vienna, adrift and frightened, Lucius regretted this silence, felt it cowardly, and wished to make amends. My field hospital had to be abandoned, he wrote that morning. I lost my nurse, my patients. You will say we all lost patients. That we all lost many, many patients. But I lost someone I should have saved.

  I killed someone I should have saved.

  He tore the letter, wrote it again.

  It was not my intent to let our correspondence falter. There are reasons for my silence, which I can tell you when we meet again.

  He mailed the letter. Then, a week later, before any response, he wrote another. Then two days later another, and then daily, apologizing each time for his silence. Again explaining the evacuation, the trains.

  Still he did not get a response, and for the first time in their friendship, he began to write of something other than medicine: of the darkness of the city, the loneliness, the dreams that had pursued him home.

  Now, with each day that passes, I feel more and more like some of my soldiers, who seemed forever stuck in their eternal winters. I had thought that returning from the front would ease these troubles. That’s what they told us: that battle dreams relent when the risk of battle goes away. But this is not the case. Unless there is a battle that I don’t yet understand.

  He found Feuermann’s childhood home in Leopoldstadt, across the Danube Canal.

  Despite their years of friendship, it was his first time there. An old man came to the door, a tiny, soft-spoken man with the heavy beard of an eastern Jew, though his head was uncovered and he wore a common suit of dove-grey fabric. The single room looked less like the tailor’s shop Lucius had imagined, and more like a ragman’s hovel, and at first he could not believe that it was his friend’s father. But when the man spoke, he closed his eyes as Feuermann had closed his eyes when he spoke, and like Feuermann, he emphasized his words by moving his long, beautiful fingers through the air.

  The old man offered Lucius a chair. It was missing its back, sacrificed—Lucius suspected—for heat. As it was the only chair, Lucius demurred, but the old man insisted. He made tea over a hearth. Then, taking a seat on a pile of sacks, Moses Feuermann said he had last heard from his son in August, after his transfer to a field station of an alpine regiment in the Dolomite campaigns.

  “But he said he was in Gorizia, at a regimental hospital,” Lucius protested.

  “Yes. But he wrote that he was tired of being just an assistant. He said they treated him like a student, gave him the mentally unsound, never let him operate. He was envious of you, I think. Of all the responsibilities you had.” There were tears in his eyes when he opened them, and Lucius thought how impossible it would have been for his parents to have this kind of knowledge of their son.

  Perhaps I could tell Feuermann’s father of Horváth, Lucius wondered.

  But this was only a fleeting thought. Beyond the empty tables, he could see an unlit kerosene lamp, and beyond that, a bed, or a series of planks laid with blankets, and a pair of pillows, and beyond them a stack of books, the old editions of the anatomy and physiology textbooks he’d bought for his friend. Loaned—Feuermann wouldn’t accept the charity, though Lucius never had any intention of getting them back. Above them were stacked the notebooks he remembered Feuermann filling at his side. He felt a sudden desire to see them, but this didn’t seem the kind of thing one did to the belongings of someone who was alive. So he turned his eyes away.

  “He was a tireless writer,” said his father. “He wrote to me almost every day.”

  August, thought Lucius. Before an unrelenting series of battles along the Isonzo had resumed.

  “The lines of communication are poor in the mountains,” he said.

  “Yes,” said his father. “That is what they say.”

  Lucius might have promised to visit the War Office or use his mother’s contacts to try to find his friend. But Feuermann’s father did not ask for this, and when Lucius at last bid him goodbye and stepped out into the crowded, narrow street, he knew what he would learn. It was then that he knew he would return to medicine, if only because he could not survive this news alone.

  He petitioned that afternoon for redeployment.

  In the Medical Division Office for Field Operations in the East, the clerk took down his name and address. It would take some time, he said, his voice high and nasally. They had to communicate with his regiment in Kraków; he would receive his summons in the next few weeks.

  “But I don’t need to return to Kraków,” said Lucius. “I’ll go to any theater. Whatever is available the soonest. If you need a medic…”

  The clerk leaned back in his chair and peered at Lucius over his reading glasses. “A medic? Are you suicidal? Why so urgent? Aren’t the Viennese girls good enough?”

  It was a Monday. On Friday, he returned home from his walks to find a letter waiting. But this wasn’t from the War Office. Instead, on faded university stationery, he found a note in the shaky hand of Zimmer, his old professor. Your mother says you’re home and set for reenlistment. I now direct a rehabilitation hospital for neurological injuries in the old Lamberg Palace, where I think your services are needed. If you will reconsider…

  Mother. So he had received his redeployment letter. And once again, like some deus ex machina, she had intervened. He recalled how back during the heady days of mobilization, after she had done the same, he had defiantly discarded Zimmer’s letter. But this time was different. Your services are needed. He was desperate to return to medicine, any medicine. And perhaps he could tell Zimmer about Horváth and his dreams.

  He found his professor in the palace that evening, in a vast ballroom converted to a ward.

  In nearly three years, Zimmer had scarcely changed. He had the same puff-of-smoke sideburns, the same pebbly smile. Perhaps a little shorter, a little more piratical. His eyes now marbled with a slight sheen of cataract, and on his pate was a waxy scarab of a scab.

  He was making rounds with two nurses and an orderly when Lucius found him. He held a flyswatter with an ivory handle, which he tucked into his belt as a soldier might a saber. He held out his hand and Lucius took it. His fingers were smooth and twisted with an arthritis Lucius didn’t remember being so severe. They shook. “My student,” said Zimmer, and held Lucius’s hand long after they stopped shaking, before he let it go.

  Like the church in Lemnowice and the schoolhouses and châteaus Lucius had visited across Galicia, the Lamberg Palace Army Rehabilitation Hospital for Neurological Injuries was one of countless civilian buildings converted by the Austro-Hungarian Medical Service into wards for the wounded. It had been set up under the personal patronage of an archduchess, Anna, a cousin of Franz Josef. It was a family palace, dating from the reign of Josef II, with a high slate roof, gilded pilasters, and frescoed ceilings with trompe l’oeil crenellations and a trompe l’oeil sky. To this, the archduchess had generously donated personal touches from her family’s collection. The theme was martial—there were statues of Saint Michael, tapestries of the Turkish siege of Vienna, and a great canvas showing the corpse-strewn marshes of Marathon. A painting of Cadmus, sowing the earth with dragon’s teeth, overhung the chair for minor surgeries. Aloud, Lucius wondered if these were wise decorative choices for a room of injured soldiers, but Zimmer said that the archduke, a great believer in the curative power of manliness, had been adamant. After all, hadn’t the dragon’s teeth turned into even fiercer warriors, who eventually founded Thebes?

  Moreover, said Zimmer, to Anna’s credit, she even volunteered. Of course, mostly she read war poetry, and when she tended to the men, it was above the waist only, and not on the face, and she didn’t like any wound with blood or pus.

  “What kind of wound is that?” asked Lucius.

  “So mostly she reads war poetry,” said Zimmer. But still she volunteered.

  It was a testament to the remarkable constancy of medicine that such a setting might be anything like the little church with a crater in its floor. But within hour
s of arriving, he found himself back in the familiar rhythms. There were differences, yes. The wounds here were old, the injuries more stable, more recalcitrant to cure. Fewer dressings, more scars, more contractures. Little blackboards at the foot of each painted metal bed upon which were written names and diagnoses. A bewildering array of metal and leather strengthening devices. A phonograph, of course: this was Austria, land of Haydn, Schubert, Mozart. But so much else the same. Morphine for pain. Phenobarbital for seizures. Camphorated oil for everything. Chloral for sleep.

  The first night he stayed long after Zimmer had gone home. There were close to a hundred and twenty patients, and unlike many of the simple fractures and amputations he’d cared for in Lemnowice, all were cases of great complexity. So when the lights went out, he took a stack of the thick charts and began to read. The summaries were mostly typed up by the transferring hospitals, with annotations in Zimmer’s unsteady hand. Head wounds, all of them, and as he read, he felt briefly, with a pang, that Margarete was there with him, introducing them as she had introduced the soldiers that first night in Lemnowice. This, Pan Lieutenant Doctor, is Gregor Braz of Prague, blind after being shot behind the ear; this is Marcus Kobold, a sapper from Carinthia, tremor following near burial underground. This is Helmut Müller, infantry, an art teacher, burned at the Marne, self-inflicted gunshot wound after being told he’d lost his eyes. Samuel Klein, Pan Doctor, a cobbler’s son from Leopoldstadt, blunt crushing trauma just above the ear. This is Zoltán Lukács, a hussar thrown from his horse, an epileptic. This is Egon Rothman, loss of memory since close-range penetration of a magnesium flare. This is Matthias Schmidt, with penetrating trauma through the left temple. This is Werner Eck, with drop attacks, and this is Natan Béla, paralysis of his left arm and leg after being wrongly hanged for spying and cut down before he died. This is Heinrich Rostov, lance wound, right temple, inability to swallow. This is Friedrich Til, Doctor. This is Hans Benesch. This is Bohomil Molnár. Maciej Krawiec, Daniel Löw…

  “Doctor.”

  He opened his eyes. A nurse, holding a steaming cup of chicory.

  “You fell asleep. There is a cot in the old library.”

  An older woman, perhaps his mother’s age. A stiff cornette shaped like a ship’s keel soared above a face coarse with smallpox scars. She looked at him with worried eyes.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry…”

  “There is no need to apologize, Doctor,” she said softly. “The men here will be grateful to have someone so dedicated. But there are one hundred and eighteen patients. You will confuse them unless you take your time.”

  It was close to four a.m. He followed her to the library, a small wood-paneled room, its ceiling frescoed with the constellations. But the books were gone, and in their place were dozens of half-formed faces, some bare, some painted. Foreheads, noses, cheeks.

  “I hope you don’t mind them,” said the nurse, following his gaze. “They are prosthetics, made of copper and gutta-percha. To cover the deformities. The room serves as a workshop in the day.”

  For a moment, his eyes scanned the shelf. He had the strange feeling that he was meeting the patients they belonged to, Klein and Lukács, Molnár, Eck.

  “No, no I don’t mind. It is good that they have these.”

  “It is good, Doctor. Many of them have wives who can’t bear to look at them. And the little ones scream when they see their fathers. We are very lucky for the masks. When the men leave us, people won’t avoid them in the streets.”

  He waited for her to say more, but she had finished. For a moment, he wished she hadn’t spoken; he was prepared for the patients, not their families. At Lemnowice, it had been possible to care only for his patients, without imagining the worried people waiting for them at home. Now this omission seemed almost inconceivable. What had he thought? That they came from worlds devoid of others? It seemed almost a failure of compassion; the doctor he had been now seemed so young.

  He thanked her, and she left him with a neatly folded blanket, army-issue, the rough texture and sour smell familiar. Like his blanket from Lemnowice, on which he’d lain with Margarete that morning by the river. He buried himself beneath it, still in his shoes. He worried that he wouldn’t sleep, that thoughts of Horváth would come again, but before he knew it, the same nurse had returned to tell him it was six, that Zimmer was ready. It was only then, walking swiftly with her down the marble corridor beneath the ceiling painted with cherubs and clouds of bursting lilac, that he realized that he hadn’t dreamed.

  15.

  In the months that followed, he found shelter in Medicine’s routine.

  Days began at six, with rounds; at ten they took the patients out to the palace grounds for rehabilitation exercises. At noon they ate. Two o’clock brought leisure time for cards or music. There was a marching band for one-armed soldiers, table tennis for the one-legged, and a theater group for those regaining the ability to speak. At four they bathed. At six they ate again. Those able enough helped clean the wards at seven. Lights were out at eight.

  He scarcely left the hospital, choosing to sleep on the cot in the library, at times eating with the patients. They were quiet affairs compared to the Lemnowice meals fueled by song and schnapps, but nonetheless companionable. Other times, he just took surreptitious bites from a hunk of kielbasa he kept in a pocket of his coat.

  He worked mostly alone. Only a week had passed when Zimmer, manifestly more interested in exploring the archduchess’s cabinet of curiosities in the third-floor study of the palace, turned clinical responsibilities over to him.

  This, Lucius had come to understand, was probably for the best. With the physician shortage, the Imperial and Royal Army had not only graduated students early and enlisted dentists and veterinarians for medical duty, but had also brought men like Zimmer out of retirement, pathologists and comparative anatomists who had long ago given up their white coats for postmortem aprons. Despite the well-stocked medicine cabinet, Zimmer seemed to think most problems could be cured with atropine, insisted on patent medications that no one had ever heard of, and still prescribed milk diets for pneumonia, though every respectable textbook since 1900 said that oatmeal was the best. He liked the mantra “Death is part of life.” And there was the matter of his vision, the oily monocle he had a habit of misplacing, the flies he chased with his ivory flyswatter, flies that Lucius soon realized only Zimmer could see.

  At first, alone again, Lucius had the vertiginous feeling that he was back in Lemnowice, far out of his depth. Most of the nurses had been there since the founding of the rehabilitation hospital and carried out their duties with a brisk, if stern, efficiency. Like Margarete, they didn’t hesitate to correct him, though quietly, with fewer interruptions, exhortations, and general bossing-about. But as the days went on, he began to settle in. He created regimens of sleep and exercise and diet, ordered applications of turpentine and eucalyptus oil in cases of bronchitis, and painted infected tonsils with perchloride of iron. For constipation, he prescribed castor oil, and bismuth for diarrhea. He gave strychnine for heart failure, beef tea for skin infections, and morphine for pain and melancholy. For listlessness and nostalgia, he relied on cigarettes, unless the patient had an irritable heart, in which case he gave bromides, almond milk, or brandy, depending on what the nurses could rustle up.

  For the more complicated patients, Lucius sought out his old professor, finding him in his gilded consultation room, smoking tobacco in a pipe scavenged from the wunderkammer, with a bezoar bowl and scrimshawed stem that Zimmer claimed had been hollowed from the coccyx of the favorite servant of Franz II.

  “With due respect, Herr Professor, really, I wouldn’t put that in your mouth.”

  He blew rings as Lucius told him about the patients with mysterious patterns of pain or palsy. At times he drifted into reveries, and at times Lucius worried if he’d had a stroke. But then, when the answer was needed, the old man’s face lit up, and his fingers traced the paths of cranial nerves or the twisting decussation of the p
yramids, as he extracted an explanation of great beauty and precision from the air. It was like being back in the lecture halls again, thought Lucius, watching those old men so gifted in diagnosis, so ignorant of cure.

  Other times, his professor asked him about his cases at the front.

  Then, Zimmer leaned back in his chair, chewed his pipe stem sensuously, and crossed his hands over his belly like a man who has just enjoyed a filling meal and is preparing for dessert. Certainly, Lucius must have seen some extraordinary pathology!

  “Yes…some extraordinary pathology, Herr Professor.”

  “They say there were such magnificent, beautiful cases of war nerves. Our head and spine wounds seem so common in comparison, so dull…”

  Lucius looked down into his hands. “Such cases, Herr Professor, yes…”

  And he told him of the infantryman with his pigeon toes and twisted neck, the Czech sergeant who tasted rotting bodies in his broth, and the cook who had collided with the bayoneted belly of a hanging girl.

  He could not bring himself to speak of Horváth. Zimmer, he knew, would focus on the anguished rocking, the seemingly miraculous response to Veronal. But Lucius wasn’t asking for a scientific explanation, and he had no wish to discuss miracles. His belief in miracles was what had led to Horváth’s Anbinden. What he wanted to know was whether Zimmer had ever committed such an error, if he had lost a patient, how he’d atoned.

  Briefly, he thought: I could tell Zimmer of the case of a young doctor suffering from guilt and dreams and winter visions. How once the doctor had been in love and this had seemed to save him from his crimes, but then he’d lost the woman that he loved. How still he felt her presence with him always, watching, bidding patience with the sickest soldiers, marveling at the healing of a wound. How he missed her. How now he spent his free hours wandering, wondering how life could begin again.