by Daniel Mason
She lit a cigarette and held it to her lips, as she often did after their lovemaking. “Don’t look so distraught,” she said. “You married to placate your mother, too.”
But he hadn’t, he wished to tell her. This time it was my decision. Except he couldn’t give her the pleasure of this victory. I’ve lost much more than you, he thought, as she took another draw from her cigarette, and left.
Compared to demobilization, his return home this time was easy.
“My wife has not been loyal,” he told his mother, and of all the explanations, it shamed him least. There was no need to mention the sullen dinners, the impossibility of sleep. To his surprise, he found his mother kind, even apologetic. Briefly, it occurred to him that the scandal of the separation might somehow be more useful to her than the partnership of marriage; now she possessed some very compromising gossip about the daughter of the Polish Southern Command. But he stopped this thought before it went much farther. No, Mother was ruthless, but such machinations were cruel beyond conception, and he knew she maintained allegiances to her blood. Still, she must have known that something like this would happen. She knew her son.
This was late September. His belongings were delivered to his parents’ address; he hadn’t even entirely unpacked. But he had little time to think about Natasza. During the final, failing days of his marriage, the full force of a simmering outbreak of influenza had arrived at the Lamberg Palace Army Rehabilitation Hospital for Neurological Injuries. By November, he’d lost twenty-seven patients and three nurses, and himself spent nearly two weeks in the third-floor quarantine, delirious with fever, listening to the gasps rising from the neighboring beds.
When at last his fever broke, he rose and walked down to the main ward. It was late in the afternoon, and strangely silent. A dim light filtered in through the high windows; with the fuel shortages, they had turned off the chandeliers. At the far end of the ballroom, in the shadows, he could see his nurses, and as he approached them, he found that they were gathered around a ruddy, breathless orderly holding a broadsheet, still in his snow-dusted winter coat.
That night he returned home to Cranachgasse.
“You’ve heard?” his father said as Lucius met him in the sunroom.
Armistice, the abdication of the Royal Family, the Empire’s end.
And they walked slowly to the map table, where the old retired major drew out the saber he had worn at the Battle of Custoza and, with a flourish, swept all the armies to the floor.
17.
He returned to the hospital late that evening, through empty streets.
The night was strangely warm, and he let his coat hang open. The electricity was out, and in the windows, shadows moved in the yellow glow of lamps and candles. Silence everywhere, but inside, he knew, the same word was on everyone’s lips.
Armistice. Like him, they’d all been waiting, each one for something different: the return of a son, a long-promised wedding, the chance to see a baby who was now a little girl. The end of food lines—though with winter coming, this wasn’t certain. The loss of titles, lands. For his mother and his father: a new Poland, or—as they might correct him—the rebirth of an old one. But for Lucius, in the months he had been waiting, the word had come to mean the single place that might yet yield the secret of what had become of Margarete.
Lemnowice. For two long years in Vienna, he had felt as if every obstacle had been placed in front of his return: the Russian army, the flood of POW returns, and now, and this at his own bidding, Natasza. But Natasza was gone, vanished from his life as if she’d never been there, and Brusilov was back in Russia. Now, finally, after the trains, the listless wandering, the days spent dreaming of Margarete, his chance had come.
Yet in many ways the world that met him the Tuesday morning after Armistice was even more complex than that of Monday night. There was the practical issue of the trains, still packed with homecoming soldiers. The sudden appearance of borders within what used to be the Empire. The need for travel papers from the newly declared “German Austria,” which for effective purposes of governance was little but a name. There was also the matter of politics. His father’s clearing of the table had been a dramatic gesture. More accurately, they should have all sat down with little brushes, repainted the Austro-Hungarian forces in eight different colors, and turned them to fight each other. Already the week before, Serbia had attacked Hungary, Czechoslovakia had attacked Hungary, and revolutionaries had stormed the Reichstag in Berlin. There were murmurs that the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia was mutually unacceptable; Russia, of course, was still in civil war. And, most worrisome for Lucius, in Galicia, skirmishes had broken out between Poland and Ukraine.
It was, his father told him, as if someone had stomped on a fire, scattering the burning embers before they put them out.
But all these obstacles seemed surmountable, all, save one. Since his pneumonia, Zimmer’s mind had continued to decline, and for Lucius to leave his patients alone with his old professor as their only doctor was no less than abandonment. Almost immediately after Armistice, he began to petition for a temporary replacement. He would not need long, he wrote in various letters to various ministries. The flu had receded, it had been nearly two years since he had taken any leave. Two, three weeks was all he wanted. That would be enough, he thought, to get to Lemnowice, to find anyone, anything that might lead to Margarete. Now, short of searching all of Galicia again, short of knocking on the door of every hut in every village, only Lemnowice remained.
But he received no reply. And soon, with the Medical Service of the Austro-Hungarian Army no longer even in official existence, and Archduchess Anna, fearing some Jacobin revolt, decamped to Switzerland, he didn’t know whom to ask.
And then, at last, in May, a letter came.
He received it at the hospital. At first he thought it might be a reply to one of his petitions. But this was from an unfamiliar department. The hospital was moving, the letter said, the patients transferring to a government sanitorium in Baden. It had come to their attention that he was not a medical graduate, that the wartime degrees were null and void, and that if he wished to practice medicine, he would have to re-enroll at the medical school that fall. The tone was severe; it was a travesty of the imperial government that he had been given such responsibility. The archduchess would be selling the palace. They would close the wards later that month.
He found Zimmer in his office.
“Herr Professor Doktor has heard the news?”
His old professor nodded as he chewed a toothpick, and for a moment Lucius feared it was more plunder from the archduchess’s wunderkammer, some scrimshawed urchin spine or gilded rodent penis bone, or the exquisite little scepter of a dollhouse king. But it was just a toothpick, and for the first time in recent memory, there were no jarred monstrosities on his desk. Zimmer’s fingers clasped each other as if searching for something that had been taken from him. He reminded Lucius of one of his great-uncles, a baron, who had spent his last years tending the geese in the ponds behind his castle, clapping as simply as a child when they snapped the bread out of his hand. But Zimmer seemed to understand what was at stake.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
Behind Zimmer hung a faded tapestry showing a unicorn sipping from a rushing forest stream. Snowy peaks rose high above it, the sky filled with soaring birds. Strange, thought Lucius, that he had never noticed it before.
He saw her walking, figure swaying in her habit, her fists full of roots and potherbs, saw her lowering herself to him that sun-dappled morning, beneath the willow on the bank.
“To find a friend,” he said. At last.
The army ambulances arrived the following week.
They were the same lorries he had grown familiar with at war, and pairs of porters appeared carrying the same stretchers. One by one the patients left, bowing or saluting, or kissing Lucius’s hand. This is Zoltán Lukács, a hussar thrown from his horse, an epileptic…Maciej Krawiec, Daniel Löw…
Now, saying goodbye, there was part of him that doubted his departure, and he had to remind himself that it was not his choice. His expression must have betrayed his emotion, for one of the nurses appeared at his side. “There, there, Herr Doktor,” she whispered. “They’ll be taken care of. The hospital of Baden is lovely, state-of-the-art.” He nodded. He did not say what he was thinking then, that it was the fate he wished he could have given his patients at Lemnowice, a discharge to a sanitorium at Baden, not to more horrors of the war.
The ambulances departed, gravel crunching beneath their wheels; then more returned. When the men were gone, movers came and carried out the beds and the cots, cleared out the supply closet, and disassembled the nursing station in the center of the ballroom.
Zimmer left in a fiacre for his old office at the university. Lucius would visit him, he hoped, and Lucius nodded. They shook hands. Over the past month, the cataracts seemed to have grown even thicker, like inlaid pearls. Then the nurses followed, bowing neatly in sequence to Lucius as they filed out. Soon there were only a few small scattered pieces of furniture, but still Lucius waited. The room was empty then, the light from the high windows illuminating the frescoes of the ersatz sky. Once, in the days before it was the hospital, there would have been grand balls and dinners, but it seemed as if it had been abandoned centuries ago. Scratches and stains covered the parquet floor. Cobwebs on the chandeliers. The painting of Cadmus and the dragon back in its place high upon the wall.
A door at the end of the great hall opened. For a moment he expected a new arrival, a patient who hadn’t heard the news. But beside the race of warriors emerging from the dragon’s teeth, he was alone.
Outside, a cold wind had begun to blow.
The question then was how to return.
His best hope was to go by train to Dolina, by then the closest stop in Polish-controlled territory to Lemnowice. At the North Station, crowded with travelers, he inquired about tickets. Yes, the old Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway to Kraków was fully open, the ticket seller told him; from there one could go as far west as Lemberg, now known by its Polish name, Lwów. But with the Ukrainian insurgency, the railway south of Lwów was under Polish military control. Civilians were forbidden.
“Thank you,” said Lucius, leaving the ticket window, as another traveler pushed into his place. From Lwów, he might hire a motorcar, but from what he’d heard, the roads were in such disrepair as to be almost impassable. And, just that month, his mother, not one to be intimidated, had canceled a trip to Drohobycz after vigilantes had held two of her agents until she paid their ransom.
Thinking of his mother, he wondered if he might approach her, asking for her influence in securing passage from friends in the Polish Army. But he knew she wouldn’t permit such madness. Think what kind of kidnapping target you would make, she’d tell him. And for your pretty little nurse who likely isn’t there at all.
A rowdy flock of pigeons was scuttling in the station rafters above. Around him the crowds continued to press toward the ticket windows. For a moment, he felt his hopes again collapse, before his thoughts circled once more to his mother, to the army, and he knew what he could do.
He found Natasza at her apartment on Hohlweggasse.
It was a hot day. She came to the door in a kimono, a cigarette between her fingers, her hair done up in a chignon.
“Lucius. What a surprise.” By the old laws of the state, she was still his wife, but she waited for an explanation for his visit, as if she could dismiss him without inviting him to come inside.
But this time he was not so easily disposed of. He looked past her. “May I?”
“Of course. Do enter. It’s been some time.”
They sat together in the living room, where he used to pass the hours of the night. If she remembered, she gave no indication. Now, she was coldly civil, asking crisply after his family, his work. He told her about the hospital closing, how he planned to return to medical school that fall.
“You! Back at school!”
He didn’t mind, he said. What he had learned was war medicine; it was time for something else.
In turn, she told him how she had lived the past six months in Italy. Now that the new Austrian government was supposedly planning to reform the imperial marriage laws, she was secretly engaged again, to an Italian, a sculptor. Yes, truly an Italian sculptor; it was so predictable. The wedding would happen as soon as paperwork for the divorce was put in place.
Our divorce, he thought. He said, “I suppose I should offer you congratulations.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Well. I am guessing you’re not here just to pay a social visit.”
Across the room stood a mirror, paints, a canvas. Briefly he wondered as to their purpose. But he, too, was finished with small talk. “I need a favor.”
“Oh?”
“From your father.”
She listened coldly as he explained the situation with the rails. All he needed was a letter, he said. He could get to Lwów alone; but from there he needed permission to travel south on the Polish Army trains.
She lit another cigarette and shook her head. She was sorry. Her father was in Warsaw now, meeting Marshal Piłsudski. There were wars with Russia and Ukraine, hadn’t he heard? And if Russia wasn’t enough to deal with, the general wasn’t happy about her new fiancé, always having wished she might marry another Pole. The last thing she wanted was to remind him of Lucius.
As she spoke, Lucius could feel his temper rising. “It would take nothing but a telegram,” he protested. “All he would have to do is dictate a letter to an aide.”
“And I told you, he can’t be bothered. Maybe in a couple of months, when I see him in Kraków.”
“Just a letter. A single sentence. Eight words, maybe ten. He dictates hundreds a day.”
“And I said not now. Why do you need to go there anyway?”
Lucius leaned back, fighting the urge to raise his voice. After everything, he thought, at least you owe me this.
She had grown silent, her way of saying she was done. But he didn’t move.
“Is there anything else?” she asked at last.
Lucius looked down at his hands, then back at her. “My mother says the general’s reputation is impeccable. Especially in a time of so much graft.”
Natasza eyed him cautiously. “And what does that mean?”
“Just that I was always surprised to hear your story about his buying champagne from the enemy, or how you and your sister were escorted by soldiers of the Third Brigade to Zakopane to go skiing during the war. Soldiers diverted from the front.”
She froze. The tiniest movement, almost imperceptible. But he saw, and she knew that he had seen.
She drew on her cigarette. “Blackmailing us won’t work, Lucius.”
“Oh, I have no interest in blackmailing you,” he said. “Not me.” He paused, realizing that for a brief moment, he was actually savoring the revenge. “But then, it’s the kind of story that my mother loves.”
Across the room, he noticed the image on the canvas for the first time, a self-portrait, a nude. He waited briefly for the pang, but there was none.
It took a week for the letter to arrive.
A single sentence, guaranteeing Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland, passage from Lwów to Dolina, and return.
The return was a nice touch, he thought. Generous of her. He hadn’t asked for that.
He went directly to the train station, buying a ticket departing the following morning for Lwów, through Oderberg, now called Bohumín, in the nation of Czechoslovakia, just eight months old.
That night he slipped into his father’s study. Both of his parents were out at a reception somewhere in the city, and Jadwiga had been given the week off to visit her family. A menagerie of lances, arquebuses, and bayonets covered one of the walls above a case of handguns. There, among the antique duck’s foot pistols, three-barrel volley guns, and Italian hand cannons was the old service revolver his father had tried to teach
him to use when war broke out.
The case creaked as he opened it.
On the shelves built into the walnut paneling, he found an imperial atlas, thumbing through the pages until he found a map of the Carpathians. 1904. But the mountains hadn’t changed. He tore it out. From his father’s hunting kit he took a compass. He’d been lost once. This time he couldn’t take the chance.
Deep in his closet, he found the rucksack and old canteen he’d been reissued on the trains. He ran his fingers over the buckles; despite the months that had passed since he had worn it, he could still recall its weight, the way that snow collected in the seams, the creak when it was loaded. He slipped it over his shoulder. He had almost forgotten this other part of him, unbound from the house on Cranachgasse. This other person, who had spent two years with only what he could carry on his back.
From the kitchen: a round of heavy rye, a jar of pralines, and a piece of cheese. From his desk drawer: a stash of kronen, and then, uncertain if he could use Austrian currency in Czechoslovakia or Poland, his boyhood collection of silver coins.
Back in his room, he pored over the map, tracing the knuckles of the hills. Lemnowice was unmarked, but he found Bystrytsya and, following the valley up, the bend in the river where the village perched. From there the thin blue line wound through the green swath of forest. A willow, somewhere there. Two boulders by a riverbank.
With one of his old medical school pencils, he marked the village with a little x.
His parents returned late that night while he pretended to be sleeping. He slipped out early, before they woke. On the table in the dining room, where his mother had proposed he find a wife, he left a simple note. He was going to Galicia to see an acquaintance from his army days. Don’t worry about the ransom, he thought of adding, but the letter alone felt spectacularly defiant. She would know exactly what it meant.