The Winter Soldier

by Daniel Mason

  Instead, he told him of his patient who had lost his right leg to a derailed train car, and then was unable to move his left.

  “Extraordinary,” said his professor. “No wound at all. At least not one that you could see.”

  In April, Lucius was examining a patient with pneumonia named Simmler, when a new patient was carried in by stretcher, a man who looked so much like József Horváth that Lucius felt a darkness lower itself across the world and thought he might be sick.

  “Doctor?”

  Simmler was looking at Lucius’s hand, the bell of the stethoscope now shaking. Hastily, he pressed it to Simmler’s torso and gripped his shoulder. “Breathe,” he said. “There. Deep breaths, just breathe.”

  The new man was an Austrian, his skull broken by a shell. Like Horváth, he remained curled up in his bed, though Veronal did nothing to loosen him. Sometimes, they could get him to straighten out his legs, to take some steps, but mostly he just stared back in confusion. There was little urgent about the case; the soldier had been that way for months. But throughout the day, Lucius constantly returned to him, checked and double-checked his medications, and took the man’s vital signs himself. Sitting at his bedside, he helped him eat, spooning his soup as Margarete had done for Horváth, and walked him, as Margarete had walked Horváth, along the palace halls. At last, the nurses stopped him. His dedication was commendable, they told him, shortly before the soldier was discharged home, unchanged. But feeding, walking, speech therapy: this was their responsibility. He need not involve himself so intimately in the care of any single patient. It was his job just to tell them what to do.

  As the days lengthened, he found himself increasingly at 14 Cranachgasse.

  It did not seem deliberate at first. He went there at times to look at his old textbooks, to eat, or check for mail that never came. But slowly, he felt himself dismantling the ramparts he’d erected.

  He began to join his parents for their meals. Despite the food shortages, they ate well; the food came from the black market, purchased by Jadwiga from girls who lingered in the Naschmarkt with baby carriages filled with beets or braids of garlic. Sometimes there was not enough, and sometimes the rye was spoiled or the milk rancid, but compared to the rest of the city, they were very lucky. He had been hungry enough times to feel guilty that he was eating while in the streets people attacked and overturned the food wagons, and when he could, he brought chocolates and pralines to share with his patients, smuggled all the way from Warsaw. Then, in June, the police turned up to question him about rumors that the Lamberg Palace was getting dessert while the rest of the city was starving. He lied; the gift of a grateful patient, he told them, but they persisted until he realized they wanted some themselves.

  At the table, the nightmares of his first few days were never spoken of, nor did his mother ever mention her interference with his commission. Instead, increasingly busy with new steelworks in southern Poland, she listened with curiosity when he described the derricks at Sloboda Rungurska. It was helpful, she said, to have a “firsthand” observation, and she quizzed him on what he remembered of the bridges and the rails.

  But of all the changes, Lucius sensed the greatest was with his father. Seeking Lucius out alone, Retired Major Zbigniew Krzelewski still spoke of cavalry skirmishes vastly different from the war Lucius had experienced. And still, when Lucius found the courage to ask the hardest questions—Did he dream of the fighting at Custoza? Had he seen things he couldn’t forget?—the retired major mostly answered with enthusiastic tales of heroic comrades who crawled bleeding over the bodies so they could fire one last musket bullet into the Italian charge. Indeed, for months his father had persisted in a seeming unawareness that Lucius had served as a doctor, not a soldier. But as this sank in, something else seemed to be happening, as if talking to his father about uniforms and heraldry could return him, briefly, to the place he’d left behind.

  Was it true that German dragoons wore the same pickelhaube as the infantry? his father asked him. And the Guards Cuirassiers no longer wore a breastplate? Ah, but Lucius was in the east, and the Cuirassiers were mostly in the west. And how did he think the Hungarian cavalry compared to the Austrians and Germans?

  The lancers Lucius described from an early firefight near Lemnowice were of particular interest to him. His lancers. But how appalling that they weren’t wearing their czapkas!

  “It makes them easy targets for the sharpshooters, Father.”

  His hands went up. “You think we didn’t have sharpshooters!”

  And no plastron, either?

  “It was twenty below, Father. They wore greatcoats like everybody else.”

  “You think we didn’t have the cold?”

  But nothing excited him as much as the seven or eight minutes Lucius spent fleeing Cossacks. An uphill charge! Through the woods! And were they carrying sabers or muskets? Both! God in heaven. Did he see their saddles? Did their jackets have the ornamental cartridge loops? He had heard the Russians had abandoned them in the name of saving thread.

  “I couldn’t see. I was being chased.”

  “On a hussar’s horse.”

  “Yes. The rider was killed. I took his horse.”

  His father’s eyes sparkled as he stroked his moustache. “That is extraordinary. You just leapt on. Like that.”

  Still his father was appalled to think of brave hussars on the run. If they still wore wings, surely the Cossacks would have given it second thought.

  “Have I told you the advantages of wings?” he asked.

  “You have.”

  “Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to see a winged horseman charging you with his lance?”

  “It would be really, really terrifying, Father.”

  It was then that Lucius sensed that in his father’s gaze, he was seeing something close to love. And Major Krzelewski did something he had never done in Lucius’s memory: he reached out and gently touched Lucius’s cheek.

  “A hussar’s horse! That means he died, and you survived. My son! A doctor, and even Cossacks couldn’t chase you down.”

  But nothing pleased his father more than huddling over the war map in the sunroom with his friends. Indeed, he had never been so industrious since the beginnings of his unemployment in 1867. But the map, Lucius realized, was more than just the quaint pastime for a group of old nostalgic soldiers who liked to dress up in waxed riding boots and tasseled parade helmets. Many of the old nostalgic soldiers still had positions in the army, and all of them had old nostalgic friends with positions in the army, and during the long hours playing tarock and drinking, they spoke of little else. The maps printed in the newspapers were often wildly inaccurate, and of course subject to censorship, while his father sometimes updated his several times a day.

  As the months passed, Lucius watched the little green, blue, red, yellow, and black cubes murder each other for tiny swaths of cardboard. And while he let his father explain the western trench systems, or the alpine battles in Italy, his eyes kept returning to one spot, to the left of the T in the word KARPATEN, and below the w in Nadworna. There, a tiny hatch mark like a thousand others, marked a change in elevation. There. As if something magical linked this tiny scratch of ink to the mountains far away.

  Thinking, When the fighting retreats, when the rails open, I’ll go back to find her. There, in the one place I have yet to look.

  Through the first six months of 1917, the Russian Seventh Army—a blue piece the size of his finger—sat on Kolomea, its shadow falling ominously over the hatch mark that was Lemnowice. In June, to his dismay, the piece began to advance even farther: another offensive, again led by Brusilov. But then word came that Russian soldiers, sick of fighting, were beginning to desert.

  By July, the Russian cube had inched back east. By August, it no longer even cast late-evening shadows, as the Carpathians once again fell under German black and Austrian green.

  But there was no way for him to get to Lemnowice. Quietly, not wishing to ruffle Zimmer
, he had inquired about a transfer east. At first the clerk in the Medical Office had seemed receptive to the proposal. It should be easy to find a volunteer replacement who wished to serve back in the comfort of Vienna.

  Fearing the interference of his mother, Lucius gave the address of a café. Then, for a month, he waited, only to hear his transfer was “no longer considered a priority”; with the war quieting in Galicia, and the slow shift of soldiers from frontline hospitals, even Vienna was seeing shortages of physicians. This already confirmed what he had suspected with growing dread. Through the summer, he had seen their census grow; by September, new men were coming daily, forcing them to open wards on the second and third floors.

  Then, in November, Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and peace negotiations began between Russia and the Central Powers, culminating in the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March. Neither event should have had much of an impact on the timeless practice of medicine, had there not been by then, according to the rumors (for the official papers gave much lower numbers), nearly two million Imperial and Royal prisoners of war in Russian camps ready to come home.

  The flow of soldiers, already heavy by the New Year, became a flood. They came by the trainload, piling into freezing cattle cars and clinging to the roofs. Platforms in the North Station were soon transformed into ad hoc wards because there weren’t enough hospitals to take them in. By then, the palace, its rooftop glinting with snow, had all but ceased to be a neurological service. It was like working in the field again. In addition to fractures and amputations, the men brought malaria and Volhynian fever, frostbite from the Russian winters, and cholera caught in the camps. Zimmer had come down with pneumonia, and together, Lucius and the nurses dragged away the clanking rehabilitation equipment to make more space for beds. They laid out cots, then blankets on the floor. When the first cases of typhus appeared, they received a mobile delousing and disinfection station, with a tent and rusty boiler, set up beneath the plane trees on the palace lawn.

  Surely, thought Lucius at times, there couldn’t be this many soldiers, but he had seen them in their splendored millions as they’d marched out toward the front. It was as if the war were contracting under some mysterious force of gravity. As the winter drew on, it was almost possible to read events in distant places by the mud on the men’s shoes and trousers: the dark, rancid earth of Belgium, the white clay of the Dolomites, the pine needles embedded in the wool socks of the men from the Carpathians. Overwhelmed, he petitioned the War Office for another doctor, begged the archduchess, and asked his mother to use her influences. But even his mother was no match for typhus. Eventually, the archduchess secured a consultant for relief on every second Sunday, an Austrian from Innsbruck who listened to the tales of Zimmer with scarcely disguised horror. Lucius was given a portable bacteriological laboratory to quantify wound organisms, but no eosin to stain them; an X-ray machine to aid the extraction of foreign bodies, but never enough film. The rubber on the nasogastric tubes was old and cracked, and flies drugged themselves on mixtures of glucose and morphine that leaked down onto the patients’ beds. Every week brought another shortage of the phenobarbital he used for seizures. In March, in the middle of another fuel shortage, and unable to wait for spring, they chopped down the plane trees to heat the stoves.

  In April, exhausted, he received a note from his mother, inviting him to dine.

  It arrived at the hospital by messenger, a little man in livery and a Tyrolean hat, a spray of blackbird feathers in its corded band. This was the first time she had written to him there. There was no explanation. “She said nothing of an emergency?” asked Lucius. In his hands, he held a large syringe to draw off the blood that had slowly gathered around one of his patient’s lungs.

  The man shook his head. “She said you might ask. No, no emergency. She only misses your company, the lady said.”

  This was highly unlikely; and his mother knew he would think so, too. But it left no room to turn the invitation down.

  It had been two weeks since he had stepped outside the hospital. In the streets, the last snow had melted, and little bursts of fireweed and pimpernel had appeared between the cobbles. On the Beltway, a small parade of children from the War Orphan Society was marching behind a stern drum major. The air was cool, cut with the smell of horse dung that plopped unceremoniously in a line of listless fiacres waiting for their fares.

  His mother was alone when he found her, at the long dining room table that the family had brought with them to Vienna. She wore a dress of pleated pale-blue silk. A webbed necklace of pearls spanned her bare throat; her bracelets were of silver filigree. Nothing she would dare wear out, among the crowds in all their threadbare, lest she be set upon as unpatriotic. Posture martial; hair pinned tightly to her head.

  A corner of the table had been set, intimately, for two, near where—his mother liked to boast—a lovesick Jagiellonian prince once carved the initials of his beloved, though everyone in the family knew it had been Lucius’s oldest brother, Władysław.

  He kissed her hand.

  “And Father?”

  “Hunting, with Kasinowski.”

  Duke of Bielsko-Biała and Katowice.

  “The blind one?”

  “Not completely, Lucius.”

  “Mother isn’t worried he may shoot Father accidentally?”

  She smiled with her perfect teeth. There was no way faster to her affections than ridiculing other aristocratic families. “As long as we don’t have to mount his head,” she said. “After the zebus, we’ve hardly any space.” She nodded toward the line of trophies in the neighboring sunroom.

  “Ibexes, Mother. Ibexes.”

  “Of course.” She touched her temple. “My son the scientist.”

  Then she withdrew her hand. “You must be famished, with the slop they feed you at the hospital. Shall we eat?”

  They sat. A satin cushion rested at the small of his back, a detail which did not escape his notice, for she prized the chairs ornamented with rococo roses, which kept her guests from getting too comfortable to dislodge. This will not be brief, he thought. The table was set with white damask and white and yellow tulips. China and crystal had been arranged so that he sat at her right hand, while she sat at the table’s head. Behind him the vast fireplace. Large enough, she liked to say, to cook Franz Josef, figure of speech. A joke, of course, but he was aware that she had replaced the commemorative ceramics from the Emperor’s jubilee that once sat proudly on their mantel. His view gave out onto the window; hers to the expanse of the table, the portraits of her bloodline in their furs and armor, the pillars of yellow marble that marked the entrance to the sunroom.

  Jadwiga appeared in a high black collar and decorative lace apron, pushing a service tray loaded with dinner: cabbage rolls in tomato sauce and sour cream, a plate of blood sausage, potatoes spiced with marjoram and onion, pork sirloin in mushroom gravy. A row of dumplings, stuffed with duck.

  “My,” said Lucius, looking up at her. “You must have canvassed half the city.” He knew the risks of the black market. The papers loved to report the arrests of smugglers. Even 14 Cranachgasse hadn’t known beef for months.

  Jadwiga curtsied proudly and vanished behind a swinging door. Usually she waited; his mother must have asked to be alone.

  “Eat, Lucius,” his mother said.

  As he ate, she spoke of politics, the civil war in Russia, the slowly accumulating treaties, the squabbles among the Austrian command. She praised President Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the promise of an independent Poland. A true independent Poland, she said, “her territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access…”

  “…to the sea.” Lucius had joined her. “I know.”

  It was only a matter of time, she said. The sea! Poland hadn’t dipped her toes since 1795.

  But by then he knew this was all a prelude to something else.

  She broke off and briefly touched the pearls around her
neck. Her gaze drifted across his face, the fireplace, a decorative porcelain clock of Hannibal and his elephants that graced a far credenza, the hanging portrait of Sobieski with his panther cloak and laurels. There she stopped, as if she were conferring. Then her eyes turned back to Lucius. He had the sense of a bird of prey, circling, feathers shivering, before a strike.

  “I think that you should take a wife.”

  His knife paused, mid-dumpling. A wife. He managed to swallow what he was chewing. “Mother, yes. Go on.”

  The House of Habsburg, she told him, was at death’s door, as certainly he knew. The future no longer lay in Title, but in Capital. His brothers’ countess wives, his sisters’ margrave husbands: all bearers of titles to a world that wouldn’t survive the year. She had seen the future; it sat prettily on the plush sofas of the drawing rooms of men with controlling stock in steelworks, oil fields, and mines.

  He forced himself to take another bite. “You can’t be serious, Mother.”

  “My son knows me as someone who likes to joke?”

  She had not touched her plate. He saw that she was waiting. Cautiously, he advanced. “I still have to spend most nights at the hospital. With the POW return, things have only gotten worse. It is hardly what one would expect of a devoted husband…”

  “I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “Did someone use the word devoted? My son is one of the few men in Vienna who isn’t a cripple or a shirker. I’d think your wife would be quite happy with whatever she is getting.”

  He stared at her, trying to assess the degree of her conviction. She was smiling at him, though it seemed more a baring of her teeth. Now he understood why this needed to await his father’s absence; his father still held to notions like romantic love.

  “This is quite sudden,” he said. “Of course, I will need time to think about it.”