When Horváth returned the next night, and then the next night after that, Lucius began to walk.
He put on long underwear, two sweaters, his greatcoat and his scarf, pulled his regimental cap low over his head, and hurried down the stairs into the street.
He had no destination. What seemed most important was to move, to exhaust himself in the hope that he might also exhaust the dreams. The processes of his mind now seemed a mystery to him; he did not understand why this was happening to him now. In the army circulars, they wrote that battle dreams often relented away from combat. Sometimes all that is needed to restore the soldier to peaceful sleep are a few days behind the lines. But he was away from combat. Was it that these ghosts had found him once he was no longer moving? Had the dreams been there all along, just hidden? Had his search for Margarete somehow kept them at bay?
From his home, he turned out into the dark street and up toward the Inner City. Past the sepulchral palaces of the Landstrasse, the barracks off the Karlsplatz, the prostitutes stirring along the treeless stretches of the Ring. Past the shuttered Opera House and the snow-covered statue of Goethe in the Imperial and Royal Garden, where Feuermann had kissed a girl during the heady days of enlistment. Past the Natural History Museum with the famous Uzhok meteorite that had foretold his father’s wounding. Uzhok, he thought, the once-empty word now filled with so much meaning: so close to Lemnowice, of all the places for a meteor to land.
He walked. On other nights, he wandered up the Universitätstrasse and out to the hospital, where he entered the courtyard to watch the orderlies hurrying between the buildings, the pleated headdresses of the nurses moving in the yellow light of the windows. They, too, weren’t sleeping, he thought. My city of nightwalkers and nurses.
By then he knew that returning home was a mistake. There was nothing for him in Vienna. For the past months he had been sick with thoughts of Margarete, but on the trains at least he hadn’t been alone. Now he had no one. If he saw his parents, it was only in passing. He could sense their worry, and there were times he found them together, silent, and suspected he had been discussed. If necessary, he greeted them, kissed hands, inquired after their day. But these were formalities only, bulwarks against other questions, and to their credit they seemed to understand where the line was drawn. His mother didn’t invite anyone to meet her conquering hero. She made no mention of his arrival to his brothers, comfortably positioned behind desks in Graz and Kraków, nor to his sisters, off with their own families. The servants kept their distance, save Jadwiga, always with a cup of chicory, a piece of cake.
It occurred to him that of all of them, he might seek comfort from his father, who followed the war with a great map unfurled over the sunroom table, each army’s position laid out in ranks of painted wooden pieces. He, too, must have had a homecoming after being shot by that Italian musket at Custoza, thought Lucius. He, too, came from a world now lost. But there was a difference, immediately apparent and impossible to overcome. Major Krzelewski had returned with a bullet lodged like an encrusted jewel in his greater trochanter, a decoration to be flaunted among his medals, while the younger medical lieutenant had nothing but the memory of how he’d failed in his duty to protect someone from harm.
More dreams. Horváth screaming. Horváth holding up his amputated feet. Horváth chewing, openmouthed, a mass of salamanders on his tongue. Horváth placing a pistol barrel between his teeth and laughing, as Lucius struggled toward him on heavy legs of lead.
Should I go and look for him? he wondered.
But how? He didn’t know the name of Horváth’s regiment, only that he was an infantryman from Budapest. The name was common; there would be hundreds in the army. But even if he knew the address, he couldn’t bear the thought of what he’d find. An image came to him: the trembling soldier in a garret in his city, with marbled, ulcerated amputation sites, bundled on a sunken bed. Mute still? Or had they cured him with their electricity, their Muck balls? Did he still suffer from his dreams? Or now from nightmares of Lucius, just like Lucius dreamed of him? As if some kind of monstrous twinning had bound them across the winter night.
Traveling now, on the invisible currents that coursed between the two imperial cities, Lucius found himself inside the room reeking of dirty bandages and bedpans, saw a mother, kerchiefed, shivering, rise to greet their visitor. A friend, József, someone here to visit from the war. And Horváth’s eyes widening, mouth twisting, as his doctor, cap in hand, approached his bed.
He tried writing to Feuermann in Gorizia.
Their correspondence had ceased after Horst’s visit. Feuermann had been the last to write, with three letters after Lucius had stopped responding, each time sounding more and more concerned. I hope you aren’t ill, he’d written in his final communication, or that nothing I have written in the past might have caused offense. But after Horváth, Lucius couldn’t bear corresponding about his cases anymore. And in his angrier moments, angry at everyone, he blamed Feuermann, for encouraging him to enlist.
Now back in Vienna, adrift and frightened, Lucius regretted this silence, felt it cowardly, and wished to make amends. My field hospital had to be abandoned, he wrote that morning. I lost my nurse, my patients. You will say we all lost patients. That we all lost many, many patients. But I lost someone I should have saved.
I killed someone I should have saved.
He tore the letter, wrote it again.
It was not my intent to let our correspondence falter. There are reasons for my silence, which I can tell you when we meet again.
He mailed the letter. Then, a week later, before any response, he wrote another. Then two days later another, and then daily, apologizing each time for his silence. Again explaining the evacuation, the trains.
Still he did not get a response, and for the first time in their friendship, he began to write of something other than medicine: of the darkness of the city, the loneliness, the dreams that had pursued him home.
Now, with each day that passes, I feel more and more like some of my soldiers, who seemed forever stuck in their eternal winters. I had thought that returning from the front would ease these troubles. That’s what they told us: that battle dreams relent when the risk of battle goes away. But this is not the case. Unless there is a battle that I don’t yet understand.
He found Feuermann’s childhood home in Leopoldstadt, across the Danube Canal.
Despite their years of friendship, it was his first time there. An old man came to the door, a tiny, soft-spoken man with the heavy beard of an eastern Jew, though his head was uncovered and he wore a common suit of dove-grey fabric. The single room looked less like the tailor’s shop Lucius had imagined, and more like a ragman’s hovel, and at first he could not believe that it was his friend’s father. But when the man spoke, he closed his eyes as Feuermann had closed his eyes when he spoke, and like Feuermann, he emphasized his words by moving his long, beautiful fingers through the air.
The old man offered Lucius a chair. It was missing its back, sacrificed—Lucius suspected—for heat. As it was the only chair, Lucius demurred, but the old man insisted. He made tea over a hearth. Then, taking a seat on a pile of sacks, Moses Feuermann said he had last heard from his son in August, after his transfer to a field station of an alpine regiment in the Dolomite campaigns.