Before Lucius knew what was happening, there seemed all of a sudden to be an empty space in his mind. He was aware of where he was, of the circumstances of his arrival, his own name—yes, he needed to reassure himself of this—but as he looked out over the playground, he felt he was looking over a blank spot on a map. It was as if simple facts of everyday life—sound, the meaning of the children’s pantomime, the laws governing their shadows—all of this seemed suddenly to elude him. Even a sign above the earthworks, which somehow he had looked straight through upon arrival, seemed to be made of words without any meaning.
They are stone, he thought, looking at the man, the children. Just ice and stone, and nothing beneath, and for a very brief moment, he had the certainty that the world before him was nothing but a void of shapes and silver light.
The bugle blew.
“Enough!”
Sound poured into him: the rattling of the viaduct, the wail of a steam whistle, the peals of laughter and wind. Footsteps as the children swarmed from the ersatz trenches and climbed down from the ersatz ramparts and the dead girl stood and dusted snow from her dark grey coat.
Now shaken, he could only think of getting home as fast as possible. If only so he wouldn’t have to see another legless soldier, another child playing dead.
Ice floes creaked beneath him in the canal as he entered the Inner City, weaving through the alleyways off the Fleischmarkt, where he and Feuermann once bought halvah from the Greek merchants, the narrow streets all empty now. At the end of the lane, a woman stepped from the shadows, opening a heavy soldier’s coat to reveal a threadbare slip. He ducked his head and hurried to the broad street and the crowds. In the dusk, lone figures scurried past the shuttered storefronts. He saw a queue of people snaking along the street before it turned down an alleyway, and then in the shadow of St. Stephen’s, another queue, this one wrapping nearly halfway around the square.
Everyone was very still. For a moment, he thought that he was having a new attack. He did not know what they were doing, but feared that asking would mark him as an outsider, so he kept walking. Nor did he look up at the cathedral, which now seemed, like the city, threatening simply in its immensity, its steeple large enough to fit the entire church of Lemnowice inside.
It was dark when he reached 14 Cranachgasse. When he rang at the door, a maid appeared, an unfamiliar woman in a high, starched collar, brown curls topped by a small white cap. She looked at him inquisitively.
“I am Lucius,” he said.
“The son.”
The word a single breath, spoken in awe. For a moment she hesitated. She had not been trained for such a moment; he was, in a way, both master and guest.
“If you wish to tell my parents I am here, I’ll wait,” he said.
“No, no, Pan Lucius. No. Please. Come.”
The base of the stairs was still flanked by the pair of winged hussars. The carpet the same, but its color somehow a deeper violet than he recalled.
He found his parents taking coffee with an elderly couple, the man dressed, like his father, in military regalia. They all rose, taking in the pale apparition still reeking of disinfectant. For the first time in his life, he believed he saw his mother unprepared.
“Dear Mother, dear Father, I am sorry to interrupt. Good evening to you, Colonel, Madame.” He kissed them on the hands. They stared, his mother still with her hand partially outstretched. His father wordless. No Puszek—so, the last one had yet to be replaced.
“If it pleases you, I shall go to my room?”
But he was gone before they could respond. Out of the dining room, past the old familiar statues, past Klimt’s portrait of his mother, little Lucius forever interred beneath the glittering shower of gold. A memory now, of Zmudowski, hidden beneath the rug, holding his little girl. But this was the reverse.
Then up another staircase to his door.
“The bed is prepared, Pan Lucius,” said the maid, still at his side. “They have kept it that way since you left.”
He thanked her. Her name?
“Jadwiga, Pan Lucius.”
“Thank you, Jadwiga. And Bozenka, is she still here?”
“Oh! They didn’t tell you? Bozenka’s with child, sir. She’s been dismissed.” There was a slight sauciness with which she said it, a brief flicker in her eyes. Naughty Bozenka, that’s what you get.
With a curtsy, she left him alone.
It took a moment to recalibrate his memory to the geometry of his room, the height of the ceiling, the position of his desk and bed. It had become much smaller in his mind, the light more muted. Now, like the hallway carpet, the colors of his room seemed almost gaudy. The eggshell-blue sky in a pair of painted warscapes gifted by his father. The peach of the bedspread. The scarlet rug.
On the wall hung his old portrait, his ears lopsided, his neck drowning in his collar. In a mirror beside it, he touched his scraggly beard, stared at the sunburnt cheeks beneath the tired eyes. His shock of hair, forever pale, had whitened further. In comparison to the adolescent in the portrait, this other person in the mirror seemed like some winter apparition, a memento mori painted to remind one of the proximity of death. When had this happened? He recalled the evening at the boardinghouse in Kolomea after his separation, washing the dried blood from his hair and face. Cheeks burnt and dirty, but still with life.
He went to his desk. Old atlases of anatomy, lessons scrawled out by hand. Muscles of the shoulder. Subclavius. Levator scapulae. Serratus anterior. Rhomboid major and rhomboid minor, arising from thoracic vertebrae 1 through 5.
A ceramic phrenology skulclass="underline" a gift from Feuermann for his twenty-first birthday.
More lessons. Bones of the skull. Structure and function of the heart.
As once he’d taught her, in exchange for learning how to tie a knot.
The paper slightly yellowed, beginning to curl.
Teeth marks in the colored pencil on his desk. Mine.
And did he understand, she asked, how the feeling of a hand remained after the hand itself was gone?
He did not bathe. His bed was so soft that he felt for a moment he would suffocate inside it, and after some time he rose and put his boots back on, curling up on top of the sheets, against the wall. When sleep came, it wasn’t sleep as he had ever known it, but something shuddering, as if he were back sleeping on the trains. Awaking, he found József Horváth sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, pine needles sticking to his skin. His head was shaved, his cheeks pink, his thin, snapping tongue the hue of liver. He licked his mouth frenetically, as if trying to lap up every last drop of something sweet. Lucius stared. Look, said Horváth, and taking a finger between his teeth as one might the finger of a glove, pulled off his hand.
Lucius must have screamed. Sitting up in bed, catching his breath, he saw a figure in the doorway. Another dream? But it was his mother, still in her evening dress. He had the feeling of being very small again, of waking in a world populated only by adults. For a moment he had the thought that she would come and comfort him, but this had been the duty of his governess when he was young.
Instead, she was very still, resting her fingers on the wainscoting, watching, as if trying to decide what she should do.
“Thank you, Mother. I’m okay.” He closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. “I’ll be okay. I just need some rest.”