by Daniel Mason
“No, Lucius. Actually, there is no time to think about it. Men are already returning home. Marriage is a market like any other. And a very liquid market, I should add. You can imagine the effect that Armistice will have on supply.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms. Above him, the candles flickered on a massive staghorn chandelier. He looked past them, to the window, the square of evening sky.
“Mother isn’t anything if not blunt.”
“My interest is yours,” she said, now utterly still. “You are how old?”
“Please, Mother. You don’t need me to say it. I believe you were present at my birth.”
“I do need you to say it.”
“Mother—”
“How old?”
A sigh as he relented. “Twenty-six.”
“Tell me about the girl you left in Galicia.”
“Sorry?”
Now, for the first time, she picked up a fork and knife, transferred a single pierogi from the warmed platter to her plate, and cut into it, its corner yielding with a tiny burst of steam.
“I am waiting, Lucius. Tell me. It is either that, or I must take you for an invert, though you have none of the panache. There was a girl.”
In the window beyond her, a flock of starlings rose slowly from the shingles of the neighboring rooftop, lifted like a conjurer’s cape. It soared upward, curling upon itself before it burst into a larger, fluttering orb. He said, slowly, “I worked in a field hospital. I’ve told you many times.”
“Yes, yes of course you have.”
“There was no girl.”
“No, of course not. Not a single nurse. Quite a hospital, without a nurse.”
“There was a nursing sister. From the order of Saint Catherine.”
Briefly then, he saw her, laughing, skin cool with water, warm with sunlight, as she rose above him on the riverbank.
“Pretty?”
“Mother. I can’t believe we are discussing this.”
“Polish or Austrian? Do I dare ask about her family? Lucius, your ears have turned bright red.”
“There was no one, I said—”
“No? Then to whom were you writing those letters you tore up so diligently? Why were you constantly checking the post?”
A pause; no answer. He could claim that it was Feuermann or another comrade. But he knew, and knew she knew, when she had won.
“Lucius…” She leaned forward and placed her hand on his. “May I offer some motherly advice? You’ve been home for almost two years. If she had wanted, she would have written to you. Unless she couldn’t read.”
The door behind them opened, as Jadwiga’s head emerged to survey the table. His mother waved her away. Outside, the starlings had returned, a vortex, a lens, a greater bird. Not two years—he wanted to say—just fourteen months. But this didn’t count the time that he had sought her from the trains.
Softer now, his mother said, “You act as if I’m against you. But this…” She pushed down on his hand. “This is me. This is my flesh. You can’t hide in the hospital forever. We are talking about your life.”
She withdrew, sat back, her posture still impeccable. From a silver case, she extracted a long cigarette.
He said, “And I thought we were talking about Capital.”
“I didn’t say marry a laundry girl. I’ll select the menu. You choose the dish.”
Back on the wards, he waited for the messenger to return with another summons. But Agnieszka Krzelewska, he later realized, was cleverer than this. She had said what for the passing months he’d been unable to admit. How long was he to sit in mourning? He’d canvassed half the hospitals in eastern Galicia for Margarete. Short of heading off to Lemnowice himself, which, without permission, essentially meant desertion, he’d reached an end.
And there were other thoughts, at first ignored, now unavoidable. Margarete could, after all, have sought him out. If she couldn’t travel, she knew his name, knew how to write. This would have been easy. A nurse might be lost among the great movements of people, but not a medical lieutenant. If mail could find him at a mountain field hospital, it could find him in Vienna. He’d written to Feuermann with just his name and regiment; by field post, she wouldn’t even need a stamp.
For another week, he waited for his mother’s messenger, but nothing. This wasn’t, he knew, an oversight. His mother did not commit oversights. The seed had been planted; she was just giving it time to grow.
And it was spring. Around the city, on the boulevards, in the public gardens, he saw soldiers reunited with their sweethearts. Hemlines had risen, just a little. Whether it was the cloth rations, or the weather, or a kind of recklessness unleashed by so much deprivation, he didn’t know. But ankles were everywhere, and necks. Because all jewelry had ostensibly been donated to the war effort, the girls began to decorate themselves with little wildflowers, plucked from untended gardens and tucked into a collar button or a hat. Now, when his patients’ families came to visit them in the hospital, he found himself looking at the young wives doting on their injured husbands and felt a twinge of longing. It seemed like madness to feel envy for a soldier paralyzed below his neck, or a man forced to wear a tin-face prosthetic so as not to scare his children. But the wives always made themselves so pretty when they went to see their husbands, and the accents of the Czechs and Slovenians were really lovely, and sometimes when they thanked him, they even offered him their hands. Just for a moment, and only for him to grasp their fingers lightly while accepting their gratitude, and not to raise them to his lips, as if meeting among friends.
Other times, he spied the rustling of bedsheets in a corner. A blush, skirts shifting, a button opened on a blouse. It didn’t matter, he tried to tell himself; he should be happy that the soldiers could find even some fleeting pleasure. But by then it was undeniable, the longing, right here, in his chest.
With spring, the crowding, his mother’s offer, the arrival of the soldiers’ pretty wives, he began again to walk. Past the palaces of the Landstrasse, the barracks off the Karlsplatz, the prostitutes stirring along the treeless stretches of the Ring. Past the shuttered Opera House, the statue of Goethe in the Imperial and Royal Garden, daisies bursting about his feet. To the canal, to St. Stephen’s, to the North Station to watch the trains come in.
One afternoon, in late April, relieved for several hours by the visiting consultant, he found himself in the Maria-Josefa Park, near the Arsenal and South Station. It had rained much of the week, and with the respite, the park was filled with families and strolling couples and small crowds of furloughed soldiers who flirted with the governesses and trinket-selling girls. He had brought with him a pair of volumes from the Army Medical Journal, and settled on a bench in the middle of the park, not far from an empty fountain, where Neptune, whitewashed with pigeon droppings, rose upon a school of dolphins bursting from marble waves. It was humid; the sky was low, the color of burnished steel. He tried to read, but his mind was constantly returning to Margarete and his mother’s offer, when the sound of laughter rose from a crowd gathered in the broad walk just beyond the laburnums, near the entrance to the park.
He ignored it at first. The streets were full of buskers: violinists and accordionists, practitioners of sleight of hand. They were often veterans, and he usually approached them with caution, worried about the memories they stirred. But the people in the distance seemed to be enjoying the performance far more than he was enjoying his article on starvation psychosis, so he rose and joined the crowd, which had gathered around an organ-grinder and his bear.
The organ sat on what looked like a converted pram, with large, black stagecoach wheels, a lacquered chassis, and a push-handle of iron filigree. The organist had left the blanket over the top of the organ, and the box itself was decorated with glossy green tendrils and little painted strawberries, and a name, illegible at this distance, in gilded baroque script.
The bear was in fact a man of small stature, dressed entirely in a real bear’s skin, save that the paws had been remov
ed to make space for the man’s hands and feet. There was something quite primitive and horrid about it. Much of the skull had been removed, and the bear’s skin had contracted unevenly: the nose was twisted, and one ear sat higher than the other, reminding Lucius uneasily of the twisted grimaces of his patients with facial wounds. In place of the eyes were white shells with painted crimson irises.
The dancer looked out of the mouth, which had been propped open, the bear’s lips pinned up to make a snarl. The organ played a tarantella. The bear tumbled, cartwheeled, and had just danced off with a busty girl in frilled pink calico, when the light sprinkle turned to rain.
There was a groan; at first the organist just adjusted the blanket on the organ, and the bear kept dancing. Here and there umbrellas burst open, couples pressed together, and women pulled their shawls forward on their heads. Lucius tucked the Journal inside his coat. Then the sky grew darker, as if something great had passed in front of the sun—a Zeppelin or a giant bird. A heavier rain began to fall. The tarantella halted, the grinder hurriedly tucked the blanket around the organ, the bear decapitated itself, and the empty head made rounds for tips.
Lucius, who prided himself on a sense of the weather not particularly borne out by experience, hadn’t brought an umbrella. There was a gazebo at the end of the walk, and he was hurrying toward it in a giddy crowd of factory women, when his eyes caught on a figure walking past a rank of drooping lilacs, in the direction of the South Station.
He froze.
White blouse. Skirt of rough blue flannel. Dark blue shawl, and gold remembrance ribbon around her wrist.
No habit anymore, he thought; but this was the least of the mysteries that needed to be explained.
The crowd broke around him.
“Margarete!”
But she was too far away, the shouts and laughter of the crowd too loud. He began to walk faster, skipped, and broke into a run, colliding into a young couple scurrying off beneath a newspaper glistening with rain. Another collision, this time with a man carrying his dog. The crowd seemed to converge: a policeman in black oilcloth, a trio of young men in bowlers, a woman heaving a kicking child. He pushed through them, now not bothering to apologize, as little eddies of outrage exploded in his wake.
She had entered a wide river of humanity hurrying from the park and toward the shelter of the train station. He followed, the Army Medical Journal now sheltering his eyes, desperate to keep her in his sight. Crossing the street, he was nearly disemboweled by the decorative metal fender of a fiacre, whose caped driver cursed and snapped his whip inches from Lucius’s face. Another horse, another fiacre, creaking wheels spitting up water, another shout. Then a wagon, a motorcar, it seemed at once as if all the conveyances of the Imperial City had contrived to block his path. He ducked at last beneath a whinny and the flicking of a mane. The station now before him, an opulence of grey and white, columns rising to the ranks of marble knights and griffons, Victory high and hazy in the falling rain. About its base, the crowds. His eyes scanned the headscarves, the ranks of multicolored skirts and blouses. Umbrellas collapsing as their owners gained the arcades. He’d lost her. Now a second time.
Journal still raised, he made his way slowly forward, his body still and quiet, but inside frantic, alert to everything, his eyes trying to take them in. And everywhere the people! How many people in this cursed city! How many shades of blouse, how many prints of calico! How many flannel skirts, how many ribbons, shawls, and how many faces floating beneath them, pink faces and grey faces and dun faces, faces lined with age, jowled faces, faces long in tooth and short in neck, long in neck and low in brow, dolichocephalic and leptorrhine, harried faces, imperious, voluptuous, insouciant faces, heat-flushed, and pale and glistening from rain…
And: nowhere. He broke from the masses and trotted partway down the length of the arcades, staring into them, searching for the shawl, the ribbon. The rain fell harder. Someone pushed him from behind. A bell—a tram had disgorged its passengers, making quickly for the dry.
He followed them inside, through the main lobby, with its tall gas lamps flickering in their amber globes. Fluted pillars rose to the high ceiling; crowds streamed up and down the grand staircase that led up to the tracks. He was being carried toward the platforms and had to fight his way out of the current, turning, eyes trying to take in all the people moving past. The questions now unavoidable: why here and how, and why the remembrance ribbon, worn for someone dead or missing, unless she wore it for him?
A powdery odor drifted from the baskets of a pair of dried flower peddlers, who had taken defiant seats in their ample petticoats on the corner of the staircase steps.
Back through the crowds, and now out again to watch the shivering arrival of another tramcar, silvery in the rain.
And then again he saw her: blouse, gold ribbon, passing out of the arcades and hurrying along the path that flanked the train tracks, toward the underpass. Skirts swaying as she hurried, a familiar shift. High grass, dark wooded trails. Like that day she fled him, crying. He ran.
Past the ranks of sidewalk gardens, empty but for tree stumps. Weaving between the painted bollards, the travelers descending from another tram. The tunnel dark, a feathered shifting in its beams, the air heavy with the smell of wool and human breath. Back in the light he saw her on the far side of a traffic circle, still out of earshot, heading into an alley off the boulevard. His face was hot; he felt the weight of the months, the years, upon him, saw all that would be returned. She was tangible now, just a block away from him, and already he could feel what it would be like to hold her, to comfort and be comforted, to kiss her lips now wet with water, as once along the river’s bank.
He called, but his voice was lost beneath the whistle of a train. He hit a puddle, turned an ankle, stumbled, then was back upon his feet. He called for her again. But she was speaking to a man who leaned against an open doorway, and then she disappeared inside. Around him, Lucius had only a second to take in the flanking street crowded with crates and horse carts, the torn awnings of the shops and terraced balconies strung with dripping clothes. And then the man pushed off from the doorway and stepped out to meet his path.
White shirt, patched elbows, maroon vest frayed about the collar and the arms. Long, well-tended moustache, smooth dome of head. One eye frozen, the outlines of the iris melting in a milky blur. Accent unfamiliar. “What do you want?”
But Lucius was already looking past him to the figure inside.
In the safety of the doorway, she stood on the third step of a stairway, beneath a sconce that cast her shadow against the opposite wall. She had dropped her shawl, and now her hair hung wet about her neck in tangles. Faint steam came off her blouse; her chest was heaving.
It was easy to see how he’d made the mistake, with the high cheeks, that angle of gaze, that mouth.
The rain had relented; around him, the small street had begun to stir. From a window came the smell of cooking oil. A voice in an unfamiliar language was calling down. He looked back to the young woman, who had advanced to stand between the pair of twisting caryatids that flanked the doorway. She reached up to brush her hair back, ribbon sliding down her wrist.
A memory now, of the night he’d left Margarete, chasing the grey figure through the mist, the young peasant with her rifle in the glen. The shouts, the way she gripped the stock and aimed. A warning, he thought. Which he hadn’t heeded, now chasing ghosts again.
His hair was plastered to his face, and his coat was soaked; he could feel the rain running off his nape and down between his shoulder blades.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, embarrassed now at how hopeful he had been. Again he looked at the girl, and as a man of science, he understood how it had happened—the rain, the ghost, the chemistries of memory, the magic way that crystals appeared out of solution, before dissolving once more into its haze.
He gave a little bow, as if in deference, as he had been taught once as a child to greet new acquaintances. It was absurd, given the circum
stances. But it was the custom of his station, and he remained his mother’s son.
16.
This time it was Lucius who sought out his mother. Grimly, now determined to complete what she’d begun.
He found her in their sunroom, reading from a trade journal of the Mining Association, which she folded neatly before setting it down. She seemed genuinely pleased to see him. And how delightful that he had made his decision, she said, almost offhandedly, as if they both had known it was but a matter of time before he came around.
Within a day, she had set the dates and hours of the appointments. There would be a visit to the tailor first, of course, then to the barber, to take care of—she tapped her head to mirror his cowlick—this. Then they would start with four, so that he might compare his options; were he still unsatisfied, she would consider adjustments to accommodate his taste.
“Smile,” she told him. “You’re going to a matchmaking, not an exorcism.”
And he smiled thinly, inwardly marveling at her choice of words.
As expected, she joined him, and together they made their rounds.
Four meetings, on four Saturday afternoons, in four parlors brimming with gleaming marble statues, overstuffed sofas, and gaudy, tasteless family portraits that elicited such a haughty twitch of his mother’s nostrils, that he thought she might call off each meeting before it even began. They were daughters of industry all. Katherina Slovoda, Maria Rostoklovsky, Wilhelmine Schmidt, Krisztina Szűcs. Solitary daughters of a Czech smelt works owner, a Polish railcar manufacturer, a German-Austrian weapons concern, and the largest producer of Hungarian lignite. And pretty, all of them. Of course, said Madame Krzelewska: they all had pretty mothers who had married wealth.
They were also, as his mother had predicted, terrified of spinsterhood, and knew they faced a competitive field. But neither she nor Lucius had anticipated the degree of desperation. Katherina, perched between her mother and her father, was so nervous that her nose began to bleed, and Lucius was soon attending to her in a reclining chair, pinching her nostrils with a handkerchief. Maria, in a hat decorated with the feathered carnage of a dove, squeezed her lapdog so hard that it tried to bite her and fled beneath the Biedermeier chair. Krisztina asked their parents to leave them, exchanging a knowing glance with her mother as she left the room. When the door was closed, she leaned forward and told Lucius that he wouldn’t have to wait until their wedding night. For a moment, he didn’t understand. Her eyebrows rose up and down in insinuation. A nervous tic? But bilateral? Of the occipitofrontalis muscle? No…but…oh, he understood!