Yes, it was extraordinary, Lucius thought. The joys of diagnosis, the ecstasies of study: none of it could have prepared him for this. He wished not only Feuermann could see it, but also Zimmer, and Grieperkandl, and the rector, even his mother. See, he wished to say. Not your kind of doctor; this is the kind of doctor I will be. And Father, too, would understand the glory of the discovery. Yes, he could feel the presence of the old retired major in his polished boots, standing beside him in the churchyard as they had once stood in the mirrored hallway, the glorious wings of ostrich feathers mounted on their backs.
And I was once content with being just a barber surgeon, a bone-cutter, a setter of broken limbs.
They gave him paper, pencil, and asked him to draw. Slowly, with encouragement, and usually with Veronal, he began to sketch out shapes, fragments of landscapes, faces. He squinted, working with great effort; at times he licked his lips in concentration. By then the apple-like swelling in his face had gone away, leaving the finest craquelure of reddened vessels across his nose and cheeks and slightly puffy eyes. He must have been quite handsome, Lucius realized. There was something almost ethereal in the glow of his skin and the faint tint of plum around his eyes, and Lucius couldn’t help but feel another pang of envy as Margarete shaved his beard and combed his wavy hair, and dressed him in a clean pair of salvaged fatigues.
Slowly, Lemnowice began to fill Horváth’s pages, like a memory album, and as the village had likely never seen a camera, perhaps the only one. The church. The soccer-playing men, the soldier in the bed beside him. A sketch of Margarete in three-quarter profile, then other sketches of her eyes and mouth and hands. A taller, looming figure in a greatcoat: Pan Doctor, said Margarete, though its features were indistinct. And then: more airships, the portraits of mysterious children, the eyeless dragons crawling everywhere across the page.
“What are these little creatures?” Margarete asked Horváth one day toward the end of his second week of convalescence. But then, all of a sudden, Lucius, peering closer, knew.
The long, thin bodies with their manes and eyeless heads. The cryptic markings on their chests. Not manes but gills. Not dragons. Not on their chests, but inside. Their hearts.
“Grottenolm,” said Lucius.
Horváth looked up, and his dark eyes met Lucius’s.
“Sorry, Pan Doctor?” said Margarete.
“Grottenolm,” said Lucius again. “As a boy, I used to visit them in the Imperial Collection. They are little salamanders, with translucent skin.” A memory now, of the frightened girl in the Ludwig II suite on that night of his supposed deflowering. But how strange to find them here, he thought, these rarities from the darkest corners of the aquarium, where lonely little boys pressed up against the tanks and harried governesses wiped their nose marks from the glass.
His eyes hadn’t left Horváth. Had he been there too, in the museum? And what now did it mean that they had reappeared within his anguished drawings? A nightmare? A hallucination? Or like the recurring faces of men and women he suspected to be Horváth’s family, were they something to cling to, an escape? Were they like the shadowed monsters in his sketches, or their antidote?
“You know them, Grottenolm,” said Lucius, and with this third utterance, he saw something else register in Horváth’s gaze. It was almost imperceptible—a sense of recognition, a flickering of memory—but he had seen it. There had been some kind of connection, not only between the two of them but deeper, to something farther back and shared in childhood, suspended in that word.
He turned to Margarete. “Tell him that we’ll get him home,” he said.
The following afternoon, an evacuation detail arrived in Lemnowice, looking for men sturdy enough to make the journey down to Nadworna through the cold.
Slowly, Lucius and Margarete led the ambulance driver past the patients. They chose a Polish private recovering from pneumonia, a Czech infantry officer from Heads who was ready for rehabilitation, and twelve others from Fractures and Amputations.
“I think he’s ready,” said Margarete, when they reached Horváth.
Lucius hesitated, looking down at the soldier, now sleeping peacefully, arm draped across his face. No, he thought. Not before his resurrection was complete. There was little doubt Horváth was strong enough to go. But what would happen then? Nadworna was but a stopping point. From there they would have to take him farther, to another hospital, and Lucius worried that the other hospitals wouldn’t know how to care for him. There, Horváth could lose everything Lucius’s alchemy had wrought.
Margarete listened quietly as he told her this, in more careful, sober words.
“He wants to go,” she said at last.
“Wants to go? He told you?”
“He asked for Mama. Haza. Home.”
Lucius hesitated; he had not expected this kind of opposition. Hadn’t Margarete felt the same thrill at his discovery, the first steps of Horváth’s rehabilitation, the first inklings of the person who was going to emerge? She had been with him the day before, had seen Horváth’s face, the fleeting awakening as Lucius recognized the salamanders in his drawings. Wasn’t she also tiring of amputations? Surely, she wished to see what happened next…
A whistling came from the walls as the wind picked up outside. “I’m not sure he understands,” said Lucius. “It’s freezing. And the ambulance is heading north, deeper into Galicia. Not to Mama. To a hospital in Poland. And if he’s better, back to the front.”
“I know. But that’s true of any patient, Pan Doctor. He’s been here three weeks already. They can give him Veronal just as well as we can, can’t they? We’ll send instructions. We can’t treat him as if he’s different. You know that.”
“But he is different, you’ve seen the progress…,” said Lucius. He felt now that he was arguing not with her, but with a second presence, invisible, but very near. So he added, “You’ve heard what they are doing to such men to get them battle-ready, using electricity, Muck balls… It’s torture…”
“I’ve heard,” she interrupted. “But we’re a field hospital, not a rehabilitation hospital. Patch and send, no? If a man is healthy enough to make the journey, we evacuate him. If I must remind Pan Doctor Lieutenant, there are Cossacks just across the plains.”
“The front is a hundred kilometers away, Sister.”
“Pan Doctor. The front moves fast.”
Outside, the snowdrifts creaked against the roof. They stood facing each other, in the crossing, in the thin light from above. For the first time in memory, he found himself angry with her. He sensed his voice had risen, that he was uneasy that he felt so much at stake.
“I can’t,” he said. “I have an oath. To do no harm.”
“Of course.” Lips pinched, she curtsied, a sign of disagreement he had come to know quite well. She turned to go, then stopped.
“Pan Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“You are keeping him for his sake. Not ours, I hope.”