But he only stared back, eyes dark above the red sheen of his cheeks.
“Doctor, look.” Across the room Zmudowski crouched over the pile of clothing, disinfectant bucket in one hand. He rose as Lucius approached. “Look.” He had extracted a sheaf of papers from the lining of the coat. They were wet and matted, stained with ink, now dusted with clotted lime. Lucius took a stack and gently began to peel them apart. They were sketches, of men, soldiers, trains, mountains, all drawn in the same skilled hand. Then others: children, a woman, naked, then details of her hand, her breasts, her legs.
“You drew these?” asked Zmudowski, looking at the soldier. There was no answer. He waved one of the nudes. “Can I keep it?” he asked, smile flashing within his beard. He lifted the coat and pulled out another clump of papers, then another. Lucius was still amazed by what the men stuffed into their coat linings for insulation. Military circulars, billiard felt, love letters, scavenged newsprint. He could have made a museum by now, he thought. The 1915–16 Lemnowice Exhibition of Material Used for Warmth.
Now he remembered the peasant in his furs, still waiting just inside the door.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to the man, and then to Krajniak: “See what you can find in the kitchen. Some onions maybe, a bottle of schnapps.”
The Russians paid in meat tins for their wounded, said the sheep-man.
“Please,” said Margarete. “You’d be lucky if they let you keep your coat.”
By the time Zmudowski had returned, they had dressed the winter soldier in the same clean clothes that had been worn by several dozen men.
The peasant counted the onions.
“You can stay the night,” said Lucius, but the man only grunted, and with the rank, wet smell of stable, he was off.
Lucius turned back. “I thought I was generous.”
“Very generous,” said Margarete. “There is more belly beneath that cloak than on all of us combined. We should be asking him for food.”
She turned back to the silent soldier. “Now, this one. Shall we bring him to the church?”
“Please, Sister,” said Lucius.
“Diagnosis?”
“No wound? For now, we call it Nervenshock, I guess.”
“Yes, Doctor. This is also what I thought.”
Nervous shock: but what did this even mean? Back in Vienna he had never heard of the condition. No mention by Wagner-Jauregg, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, Great Crown Counselor to the King. No word of it in the textbooks, nor the military manuals distributed by the Medical Service. All he knew came from Brosz and Berman. A new disease, born of the war, they told him. No sense to its symptoms, which seemed to simulate damage to the nerves, without yielding anything on autopsy. No agreement as to cause. The penetration of the skull by microscopic particles of ash or metal? A concussion of air? Or the effect of terror? In the field stations, in the regimental hospitals, they couldn’t even agree on a name.
Granatkontusion. Granatexplosionslähmung. Kriegszitterung. Kriegsneurose.
Shell-contusion. Shell-explosion paralysis. War-trembling. War nerves.
It was even worse in the west, they told him: an epidemic, like some kind of virus first stirred up in Flemish soil, now come east.
And treatments? he had asked them then. There the two had laughed. How do you treat something when you don’t know what it is? But he was earnest and they tried to answer. Many of the men got better just with rest. And the others… In the beginning, the sicker cases were sent back to Budapest and Vienna, for rehabilitation, which might take months. But now there were new cures, electricity applied to the limbs to stimulate movement, to the throat to get mute soldiers to talk. It was not clear if the electricity worked because it caused their frozen muscles to contract or because it also hurt and scared them. Sometimes they attached it to the eyes or testicles. Dr. Muck of Essen had devised a metal ball to drop down the throat of soldiers who had lost their speech, the sensation of suffocation causing them to gag, gags turning to sounds, then sounds to words.
“These men are cured?” asked Lucius, and Brosz raised his finger. “Ah, but since when was our goal to cure them? It’s to return them to the front.”
In Lemnowice, his first case of Nervenshock had been in late February, scarcely two weeks after he’d arrived. An Austrian private, one Georg Lenz of Wiener Neustadt, one of three men to survive when a shell struck his foxhole near Dolina. He had arrived pockmarked with tiny bits of gravel but otherwise unscathed. Except that his legs had ceased to work. His knees buckled when they tried to walk him, and when they asked him to move his toes, he stared at them with a strange indifference, as if his feet belonged to someone else. But his reflexes were normal, as was the function of his bowel and bladder. From an anatomical perspective, the injury was impossible, and yet Lucius couldn’t bring himself to diagnose Lenz as faking. There was something to the soldier’s terror, the way he watched the others, his screams at night, that couldn’t be feigned. They had found bits of the other soldiers in his hair and pockets. He had stayed just three days before he was evacuated to the rear.
The others followed similar patterns. A shell-strike against a foxhole, a trench, a transport vehicle. And then, sometimes after hours, the symptoms. The tremors, the paralysis, the twitching, lurching gaits, the bizarre contortions of their arms.
But there wasn’t always a blast. In May, a young Czech sergeant had been found wandering across the battlefield after he shot a dog for food and found a child’s hand inside its mouth. It had taken days before he said what happened. By Lemnowice, he was hollow-eyed, emaciated, gagging every time he tried to eat.
They kept the men in Heads, on the assumption that the injury was to the nerves, to the brain, but also because the other soldiers, with their missing hands and feet, didn’t take well to men without a wound. As they were often the only soldiers medically stable enough to make the journey back across the pass to a second-level hospital, they usually didn’t stay long. But when they did, and when duties were light, Lucius returned to their bedsides, intrigued, to repeat their exams, to try to wrench from them the story of what had happened. He wrote to Feuermann, then at a regimental hospital in Gorizia, and received similar stories in return. Feuermann subscribed to a psychological explanation for the injury, that the horror of the fighting produced a disruption in the fibers of the brain. But Lucius wasn’t satisfied by this. The horror? he replied. Since when was this a scientific term? And a disruption in the fibers? Brosz and Berman said the autopsies on men who’d later died showed nothing; their brains looked like everybody else’s. What was the mechanism? he asked Feuermann. War and fear had been with them forever. But cases like these had never been described.
It is like the mystery we once searched for beneath the microscope, he wrote, aware that his words were getting lofty, but unable to hold back. Or that I once was seeking with my X-rays and my dogs. Something beneath the skin, imperceptible, waiting to be found.
In the days that followed, the winter soldier didn’t leave his bed.
“What’s your name?” they asked him in the morning. “Where are you from? What happened?”