“Doctor.”
He opened his eyes. A nurse, holding a steaming cup of chicory.
“You fell asleep. There is a cot in the old library.”
An older woman, perhaps his mother’s age. A stiff cornette shaped like a ship’s keel soared above a face coarse with smallpox scars. She looked at him with worried eyes.
“Thank you. I’m sorry…”
“There is no need to apologize, Doctor,” she said softly. “The men here will be grateful to have someone so dedicated. But there are one hundred and eighteen patients. You will confuse them unless you take your time.”
It was close to four a.m. He followed her to the library, a small wood-paneled room, its ceiling frescoed with the constellations. But the books were gone, and in their place were dozens of half-formed faces, some bare, some painted. Foreheads, noses, cheeks.
“I hope you don’t mind them,” said the nurse, following his gaze. “They are prosthetics, made of copper and gutta-percha. To cover the deformities. The room serves as a workshop in the day.”
For a moment, his eyes scanned the shelf. He had the strange feeling that he was meeting the patients they belonged to, Klein and Lukács, Molnár, Eck.
“No, no I don’t mind. It is good that they have these.”
“It is good, Doctor. Many of them have wives who can’t bear to look at them. And the little ones scream when they see their fathers. We are very lucky for the masks. When the men leave us, people won’t avoid them in the streets.”
He waited for her to say more, but she had finished. For a moment, he wished she hadn’t spoken; he was prepared for the patients, not their families. At Lemnowice, it had been possible to care only for his patients, without imagining the worried people waiting for them at home. Now this omission seemed almost inconceivable. What had he thought? That they came from worlds devoid of others? It seemed almost a failure of compassion; the doctor he had been now seemed so young.
He thanked her, and she left him with a neatly folded blanket, army-issue, the rough texture and sour smell familiar. Like his blanket from Lemnowice, on which he’d lain with Margarete that morning by the river. He buried himself beneath it, still in his shoes. He worried that he wouldn’t sleep, that thoughts of Horváth would come again, but before he knew it, the same nurse had returned to tell him it was six, that Zimmer was ready. It was only then, walking swiftly with her down the marble corridor beneath the ceiling painted with cherubs and clouds of bursting lilac, that he realized that he hadn’t dreamed.
15.
In the months that followed, he found shelter in Medicine’s routine.
Days began at six, with rounds; at ten they took the patients out to the palace grounds for rehabilitation exercises. At noon they ate. Two o’clock brought leisure time for cards or music. There was a marching band for one-armed soldiers, table tennis for the one-legged, and a theater group for those regaining the ability to speak. At four they bathed. At six they ate again. Those able enough helped clean the wards at seven. Lights were out at eight.
He scarcely left the hospital, choosing to sleep on the cot in the library, at times eating with the patients. They were quiet affairs compared to the Lemnowice meals fueled by song and schnapps, but nonetheless companionable. Other times, he just took surreptitious bites from a hunk of kielbasa he kept in a pocket of his coat.
He worked mostly alone. Only a week had passed when Zimmer, manifestly more interested in exploring the archduchess’s cabinet of curiosities in the third-floor study of the palace, turned clinical responsibilities over to him.
This, Lucius had come to understand, was probably for the best. With the physician shortage, the Imperial and Royal Army had not only graduated students early and enlisted dentists and veterinarians for medical duty, but had also brought men like Zimmer out of retirement, pathologists and comparative anatomists who had long ago given up their white coats for postmortem aprons. Despite the well-stocked medicine cabinet, Zimmer seemed to think most problems could be cured with atropine, insisted on patent medications that no one had ever heard of, and still prescribed milk diets for pneumonia, though every respectable textbook since 1900 said that oatmeal was the best. He liked the mantra “Death is part of life.” And there was the matter of his vision, the oily monocle he had a habit of misplacing, the flies he chased with his ivory flyswatter, flies that Lucius soon realized only Zimmer could see.
At first, alone again, Lucius had the vertiginous feeling that he was back in Lemnowice, far out of his depth. Most of the nurses had been there since the founding of the rehabilitation hospital and carried out their duties with a brisk, if stern, efficiency. Like Margarete, they didn’t hesitate to correct him, though quietly, with fewer interruptions, exhortations, and general bossing-about. But as the days went on, he began to settle in. He created regimens of sleep and exercise and diet, ordered applications of turpentine and eucalyptus oil in cases of bronchitis, and painted infected tonsils with perchloride of iron. For constipation, he prescribed castor oil, and bismuth for diarrhea. He gave strychnine for heart failure, beef tea for skin infections, and morphine for pain and melancholy. For listlessness and nostalgia, he relied on cigarettes, unless the patient had an irritable heart, in which case he gave bromides, almond milk, or brandy, depending on what the nurses could rustle up.
For the more complicated patients, Lucius sought out his old professor, finding him in his gilded consultation room, smoking tobacco in a pipe scavenged from the wunderkammer, with a bezoar bowl and scrimshawed stem that Zimmer claimed had been hollowed from the coccyx of the favorite servant of Franz II.
“With due respect, Herr Professor, really, I wouldn’t put that in your mouth.”
He blew rings as Lucius told him about the patients with mysterious patterns of pain or palsy. At times he drifted into reveries, and at times Lucius worried if he’d had a stroke. But then, when the answer was needed, the old man’s face lit up, and his fingers traced the paths of cranial nerves or the twisting decussation of the pyramids, as he extracted an explanation of great beauty and precision from the air. It was like being back in the lecture halls again, thought Lucius, watching those old men so gifted in diagnosis, so ignorant of cure.
Other times, his professor asked him about his cases at the front.
Then, Zimmer leaned back in his chair, chewed his pipe stem sensuously, and crossed his hands over his belly like a man who has just enjoyed a filling meal and is preparing for dessert. Certainly, Lucius must have seen some extraordinary pathology!
“Yes… some extraordinary pathology, Herr Professor.”
“They say there were such magnificent, beautiful cases of war nerves. Our head and spine wounds seem so common in comparison, so dull…”
Lucius looked down into his hands. “Such cases, Herr Professor, yes…”
And he told him of the infantryman with his pigeon toes and twisted neck, the Czech sergeant who tasted rotting bodies in his broth, and the cook who had collided with the bayoneted belly of a hanging girl.
He could not bring himself to speak of Horváth. Zimmer, he knew, would focus on the anguished rocking, the seemingly miraculous response to Veronal. But Lucius wasn’t asking for a scientific explanation, and he had no wish to discuss miracles. His belief in miracles was what had led to Horváth’s Anbinden. What he wanted to know was whether Zimmer had ever committed such an error, if he had lost a patient, how he’d atoned.