It was close to one when he descended to the night.
Wind swirled the snow around the streetlamps as he walked away. It looked like Lemnowice, he thought, in winter, when the snow spun in eddies outside the light of Margarete’s room, when hurrying from the church, he would stop and breathe the air and pines, and look back at the shadow of that house of God in all its greatness, when sometimes, sometimes, if he listened closely, he could hear her sing. He remembered this, and for the first time in years, he began to cry.
He submitted his petition for leave the following morning.
He was granted two months. So distant did Vienna seem that he could scarcely believe that it was only one long day’s ride away.
It had been two and a half years since he left. As he stepped from the train, he was herded by a line of military police toward a pavilion at the end of the station. He protested, impatient.
“You come from the east,” a policeman said. “Everyone from the field must be deloused.”
Deloused, the word now mystical in all its connections. As we began.
In a cold room, separated from the rest of the station by a dirty hanging canvas, he stripped with the other soldiers. They left their clothes in a steam chamber and then walked on, naked. He looked down at himself, his hands nicked and calloused, his long toes pale as a cadaver’s, his chest narrow and wiry, its coarse hair seeming, in its whiteness, like that of an old man.
In a new line that had formed in front of him was a small man in a wheelchair, an amputee with Horváth’s distant gaze, and for a moment, Lucius felt his heart lurch. But it wasn’t him, of course it wasn’t him; he was gone, and Lemnowice was gone, and Margarete, and it was time to scavenge what was left. Around him, the soldiers were missing hands and feet and they all were gaunt and filthy, but now, trembling in the cold as they filed forward, they forced themselves to laugh about the meals they’d eat and the girls they’d visit, and what the warmth of beds would be like after so many months on straw. Ahead of him, the amputee had risen from his wheelchair, and Lucius followed as he took great whipping leaps to where they sat on a bare bench beside a disinfectant tanker, where a sanitation officer turned on the spray. There, Lucius kept his eyes open for as long as he could, watching the pink bodies disappear into the fine mist. He could taste the cresol, even through pinched lips.
It was then, in the haze of disinfectant, that his memory of his first night swept up and over him, and through the mist he could see it almost as if he were there again: the disemboweled soldier, the wandering man with his head wound, Margarete running between them, shouting, as he uselessly stood by. He could hear her voice scolding him, see the change in her expression as he saw the understanding settle into her, this rarest understanding of who he was.
“Close your eyes,” said the sanitation officer, and he did.
14.
The Vienna that Lucius returned to that February of 1917 was dark and hungry and tired of war. Gone were the cheering children. Gone the vendors with their barrels of carp and gherkins, the pretty girls in their white dresses from the War Society; gone the bunting and the patriotic orchestras, the glittering piles of the tin drives; gone the blankets laid out with gingerbread in the shape of the Czar or Russian Bear. It looked, he thought, like plague had struck. The planted streets, which in his memory had flitted with constant starlings, were now shorn of all their trees.
Outside the North Station, he paused on the sidewalk and was immediately descended upon by a crowd of grey-eyed children hawking string and buttons. He hurried on. A man in a low hat and high collar approached him, opening his palm to show a murky syringe. “Looking for a foot infection, soldier? Cow boil, self-healing in two weeks. Guaranteed exemption, no permanent effects.” Repulsed, Lucius turned away to see a legless man with rag-bound hands rowing toward him in a cart. Again, he stared, unprepared to see such suffering in the city. Like something out of Bosch, a sinner’s hell. He had no sooner handed the man a fist of kronen than another cart-man paddled up.
Memories came then, unbidden, of his soldiers, the grinding plaint of the amputation saw on bone. He saw the wound sites, flaps cut back and tendons gleaming. The hands set free, the heavy legs unmoored. Toes and fingers black with frostbite, Horváth screaming in the snow.
Horváth. So was this the fate to which he’d sentenced him? To be a cart-man, paddling across the ice with rag-bound hands…
A scream. A truck passed, tires confiscated for their rubber, rims screeching on the icy cobbles.
That’s all, he told himself. No screaming. Just tires, just a truck.
Across the square, a cold wind came tearing over the empty planters.
He walked. His home was south, but now after so many months, he hesitated. The memory of Horváth had unnerved him; he couldn’t face his parents yet. So at Tegetthoff’s column, he turned and walked into the vast park of the Prater. A train was passing over the viaduct as he crossed beneath the arcades. Beyond, as if by some miracle, a few trees had been spared the fate of firewood, the Ferris wheel still towered, and bright colors glittered on the carousel, immobile now. Karuzela, he thought. Father once had told him the word meant “little war.” Only now did this meaning register: the decorated horses, the martial music urging them on.
He had entered the park alongside a group of schoolchildren and their teacher, who officiously bleated a toy bugle when his charges fell out of line. The surprising amusement of the scene—the old man in his loden cape, the little boys struggling to contain their excitement, the stern, maternal scolding of the older girls—served for a moment to distract Lucius from his growing horror at what had happened to the city. He’d seen many children among the crowds of refugees and in the muddy streets outside the hospitals; he’d almost forgotten they could move so lightly, laugh like this.
And so he followed as the teacher trumpeted an out-of-tune cavalry charge and the children burst off running past the snow-covered fairground amusements, and down a branching avenue into a separate section of the park.
In contrast to the promenade, this hidden section had not been spared the axe. How typically Viennese, Lucius thought, to maintain appearances. Indeed, it seemed to be in a state of incomplete construction. There were broken-down vehicles and shovels abandoned in the ground. Piles of dirt snaked above rough ditches, interspersed with what seemed to be ad hoc wooden shelters, all dusted now with snow. But then something strange seemed to be happening. A young couple passed the children, the man jumping into one of the ditches before he offered his hand to his sweetheart, who followed. They appeared to be acting out a play, poking up their heads, then giggling and ducking back inside. They laughed, and Lucius watched them kiss before they ran off behind the children, bent over as if under fire. Farther along, a little boy was playing on one of the shelters. He was shouting something, but strangely no sound came from his mouth, and it took a moment for Lucius to realize that ever since the bugle call, he couldn’t hear a thing. Oddly, for one who had just gone deaf, he wasn’t scared by it, just puzzled, and then far more puzzled by the masquerade that seemed to be unfolding. Two boys began to fight, in pantomime, sharing playful punches, while other children, in two neat ranks of three, crawled along their bellies to the trench edge and lifted their hands as if to shoot. A girl spun, the back of her hand on her forehead, as she fell into her classmates’ waiting arms. They lowered her down, mouthing words at one another, as two boys trotted over on invisible horses, carefully dismounted, and crouched heroically by her side. Another girl approached them, knelt, and put her ear to the chest of the fallen, lifted her hand to feel her pulse, gazed heavenward, and let it limply drop.