In the flickering torchlight, snow hissing against the windows, Lucius let her speak. He realized how she must have been waiting for someone to talk to, and there was something to her breathless stories that lightened his constant fear.
Other times, her cheeks reddening with the warmth of the soup, she asked him about medicine. For all her practical skills, he was struck by the great gaps in her understanding. She knew almost nothing about the fundamentals that had made up his studies, none of the names of bones or muscles, the rules for memorizing vessels. But her curiosity was endless. Was it true, she asked, that tuberculosis was caused by a tiny animal? And what caused a goiter? How could memory vanish, then reappear?
“Oh, I have too many questions!” she apologized. Szőkefalvi said it took years to study to be a doctor. She couldn’t expect to learn everything at once.
He didn’t mind, he told her. What he didn’t add was that unlike most of the conversations he’d endured throughout his life, he looked forward to talking to her, didn’t spend his time wishing for the moment to end. That he had always preferred to speak of medicine. It is like it was with Feuermann, he thought. Urgent and important and free from the byzantine structures of decorum so important to his mother. And silence, when it came, came naturally, because a question had been answered, not because he’d failed.
From medicine, her questions wandered. She asked him about the university, the lectures and examinations. And what of the city, could he describe the monuments to her? Szőkefalvi had told her about the tramcars—had he ever driven one? Then she spoke for a while about the castles filled with paintings and statues, and it took a moment to realize she was describing a museum.
It was only when her questions drew closer to his family that he hesitated, uncertain how to explain. He had thought of them often since his arrival. Austria, true to its epistolary traditions, had done its utmost to preserve its mail service, and in early March, a pair of letters had somehow made their way to him. Now that he was gone, his parents’ stance toward him had softened. His mother, enclosing a sky-blue box of hard Polish toffee, wrote that her friend, the “famous Polish doctor Karpiński,” had assured her that many of Europe’s most eminent surgeons had gained their skills in wartime, and his father had enclosed a map showing the battles fought between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the invading Cossack and Tatar hordes. The map was more than two hundred and fifty years old, and the area around Lemnowice was obscured by an image of a screaming Cossack impaled on a stake, but Lucius was oddly touched by his father’s pride that his son was “continuing the tradition.” He had also provided a list of Cossack memorabilia that he would cherish for his collection, with little illustrations of daggers and sable caps and decorated saber sheaths. And they had the sad news of the death of Puszek to report to him, of ripe old Irish wolfhound age.
Lucius said nothing of this to Margarete, and at first he hid the toffees. He had grown up accustomed to seeing people’s manner change the moment they learned of his bloodline. Instead, he invented a humble apartment on Schumanngasse, not far from the university; his father was a dentist who had moved from Kraków to find more work.
She thought this curious. Were there not enough toothaches in Poland?
Digging his hole a little deeper, he gave what sounded like a short lecture on the history of the Polish diaspora in Vienna, and swiftly tried to move along. He regretted lying, regretted the distance it placed between them, even if she didn’t know. At the same time, he was well aware that she told him nothing of herself. In the beginning he had inquired cautiously about her training, her convent, what she had done before the war. She wouldn’t answer. To speak of life before she joined her order would violate her vows, she said, fixing her grey eyes on his. What mattered was her holy service now.
Still, some clues she couldn’t hide. She slushed her s’s—sh or zh—nasalized her n’s and m’s, and her vowels often seemed on the verge of song. The languages she spoke—an archaic Polish splintered with Slovak, her Hungarian and market Ruthenian, her mix of Austrian and Polish pronunciations of place-names—all put her origin in the mountains, somewhere to the west. Because she seemed so quick, he was surprised to find her handwriting was that of someone scarcely literate, her spelling abominable. But he had no polite way of asking how far she’d gone in school. And then there was the matter of her faith, the Demons of Spleen and Devils of Liver, her endless invocation of the Louse. The angelic interventions that seemed less a part of the world of the somber Latin prayer Lucius had grown up praying, than some animistic rite.
So he contented himself with letting her lead, and following. What were dissections like? she wondered, now cracking on a piece of toffee. And could he tell her again about his experiments with radiography? Back before the army had taken away their X-ray machine, she had always wondered how they saw inside. And the amputees: did he understand how the feeling of a hand remained after the hand itself was gone?
Sometimes, they were joined by Zmudowski and the other orderlies, named Rzedzian and Nowak, and occasionally Krajniak the cook.
The men had all arrived at different times over the winter. Zmudowski was from a farm just outside Kraków. He had been a postman in his former life, and now sorted through the hospital mail and removed stamps for his collection. The war, he explained, one night in March, during a calm, was an extraordinary time for philately: families who had not written letters for years were digging through their drawers for any postage they could find. Already, he’d found some rarities, a 1908 10 kroner with no perforations and an 1899 10 heller blue. He kept them mounted in a little red book he carried always in his pocket, where he also kept his single photo of his daughter, a studio snapshot of a somber baby sitting alone on a cushion covered with a rug.
He showed it to Lucius.
Only it wasn’t a cushion: it was Zmudowski.
“Look, Doctor: there, you can see my hand.”
And sure enough, emerging from the dark rug were two pale fingers holding the baby by the wrist.
The others apparently had also fallen for the trick.
He had loved to take the little girl on postal rounds. She was crazy for it, he said. He hoped one day she would be the world’s first Polish postwoman. In addition to the great orange beard, dense enough to store a thermometer when he needed both hands free, he had ruddy skin and coarse orange eyebrows that overhung a pair of close-set eyes. The eyes, the sunburnt skin, a pair of missing teeth, a nose broken twice during his youth: all gave the impression of a certain oafishness, as if Nature had cast him more for the role of a stable hand than an agent of His Majesty’s Post. But he had a postman’s meticulousness and a postman’s spatial memory, and more than once, when Lucius was lost among the dozens of blanketed bodies, Zmudowski remembered which wound was where.
The second orderly, Rzedzian, was originally from Drohobycz, some two hundred kilometers to the north, where he had worked in the oil fields before the war. Rzedzian’s great claim in life was that he had the same name as a character in the epic novel With Fire and Sword, save that the Rzędzian in the novel was spelled with an “e with a little tail,” while Rzedzian of Drohobycz was spelled with just an e. How the famous author had decided on this name for his character was a great mystery to Rzedzian. No, he, Rzedzian, had never met him, though he heard he lived in Kielce, not that far away. And no one in Rzedzian’s family had ever heard of any relative named Rzędzian. But since his discovery of this fact, at the age of nine, it had become one of the defining features of his life. The book was so famous, that often, when he met someone he didn’t know and said his name, they would ask, “Like Rzędzian who rescued Helena Kurcewiczówna?” and he would get to tell the story of the e. This happened almost every time they had a new Polish patient.