Briefly, he thought: I could tell Zimmer of the case of a young doctor suffering from guilt and dreams and winter visions. How once the doctor had been in love and this had seemed to save him from his crimes, but then he’d lost the woman that he loved. How still he felt her presence with him always, watching, bidding patience with the sickest soldiers, marveling at the healing of a wound. How he missed her. How now he spent his free hours wandering, wondering how life could begin again.
Instead, he told him of his patient who had lost his right leg to a derailed train car, and then was unable to move his left.
“Extraordinary,” said his professor. “No wound at all. At least not one that you could see.”
In April, Lucius was examining a patient with pneumonia named Simmler, when a new patient was carried in by stretcher, a man who looked so much like József Horváth that Lucius felt a darkness lower itself across the world and thought he might be sick.
“Doctor?”
Simmler was looking at Lucius’s hand, the bell of the stethoscope now shaking. Hastily, he pressed it to Simmler’s torso and gripped his shoulder. “Breathe,” he said. “There. Deep breaths, just breathe.”
The new man was an Austrian, his skull broken by a shell. Like Horváth, he remained curled up in his bed, though Veronal did nothing to loosen him. Sometimes, they could get him to straighten out his legs, to take some steps, but mostly he just stared back in confusion. There was little urgent about the case; the soldier had been that way for months. But throughout the day, Lucius constantly returned to him, checked and double-checked his medications, and took the man’s vital signs himself. Sitting at his bedside, he helped him eat, spooning his soup as Margarete had done for Horváth, and walked him, as Margarete had walked Horváth, along the palace halls. At last, the nurses stopped him. His dedication was commendable, they told him, shortly before the soldier was discharged home, unchanged. But feeding, walking, speech therapy: this was their responsibility. He need not involve himself so intimately in the care of any single patient. It was his job just to tell them what to do.
As the days lengthened, he found himself increasingly at 14 Cranachgasse.
It did not seem deliberate at first. He went there at times to look at his old textbooks, to eat, or check for mail that never came. But slowly, he felt himself dismantling the ramparts he’d erected.
He began to join his parents for their meals. Despite the food shortages, they ate well; the food came from the black market, purchased by Jadwiga from girls who lingered in the Naschmarkt with baby carriages filled with beets or braids of garlic. Sometimes there was not enough, and sometimes the rye was spoiled or the milk rancid, but compared to the rest of the city, they were very lucky. He had been hungry enough times to feel guilty that he was eating while in the streets people attacked and overturned the food wagons, and when he could, he brought chocolates and pralines to share with his patients, smuggled all the way from Warsaw. Then, in June, the police turned up to question him about rumors that the Lamberg Palace was getting dessert while the rest of the city was starving. He lied; the gift of a grateful patient, he told them, but they persisted until he realized they wanted some themselves.
At the table, the nightmares of his first few days were never spoken of, nor did his mother ever mention her interference with his commission. Instead, increasingly busy with new steelworks in southern Poland, she listened with curiosity when he described the derricks at Sloboda Rungurska. It was helpful, she said, to have a “firsthand” observation, and she quizzed him on what he remembered of the bridges and the rails.
But of all the changes, Lucius sensed the greatest was with his father. Seeking Lucius out alone, Retired Major Zbigniew Krzelewski still spoke of cavalry skirmishes vastly different from the war Lucius had experienced. And still, when Lucius found the courage to ask the hardest questions—Did he dream of the fighting at Custoza? Had he seen things he couldn’t forget?—the retired major mostly answered with enthusiastic tales of heroic comrades who crawled bleeding over the bodies so they could fire one last musket bullet into the Italian charge. Indeed, for months his father had persisted in a seeming unawareness that Lucius had served as a doctor, not a soldier. But as this sank in, something else seemed to be happening, as if talking to his father about uniforms and heraldry could return him, briefly, to the place he’d left behind.
Was it true that German dragoons wore the same pickelhaube as the infantry? his father asked him. And the Guards Cuirassiers no longer wore a breastplate? Ah, but Lucius was in the east, and the Cuirassiers were mostly in the west. And how did he think the Hungarian cavalry compared to the Austrians and Germans?
The lancers Lucius described from an early firefight near Lemnowice were of particular interest to him. His lancers. But how appalling that they weren’t wearing their czapkas!
“It makes them easy targets for the sharpshooters, Father.”
His hands went up. “You think we didn’t have sharpshooters!”
And no plastron, either?
“It was twenty below, Father. They wore greatcoats like everybody else.”
“You think we didn’t have the cold?”
But nothing excited him as much as the seven or eight minutes Lucius spent fleeing Cossacks. An uphill charge! Through the woods! And were they carrying sabers or muskets? Both! God in heaven. Did he see their saddles? Did their jackets have the ornamental cartridge loops? He had heard the Russians had abandoned them in the name of saving thread.
“I couldn’t see. I was being chased.”
“On a hussar’s horse.”
“Yes. The rider was killed. I took his horse.”
His father’s eyes sparkled as he stroked his moustache. “That is extraordinary. You just leapt on. Like that.”
Still his father was appalled to think of brave hussars on the run. If they still wore wings, surely the Cossacks would have given it second thought.
“Have I told you the advantages of wings?” he asked.
“You have.”
“Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to see a winged horseman charging you with his lance?”
“It would be really, really terrifying, Father.”
It was then that Lucius sensed that in his father’s gaze, he was seeing something close to love. And Major Krzelewski did something he had never done in Lucius’s memory: he reached out and gently touched Lucius’s cheek.
“A hussar’s horse! That means he died, and you survived. My son! A doctor, and even Cossacks couldn’t chase you down.”
But nothing pleased his father more than huddling over the war map in the sunroom with his friends. Indeed, he had never been so industrious since the beginnings of his unemployment in 1867. But the map, Lucius realized, was more than just the quaint pastime for a group of old nostalgic soldiers who liked to dress up in waxed riding boots and tasseled parade helmets. Many of the old nostalgic soldiers still had positions in the army, and all of them had old nostalgic friends with positions in the army, and during the long hours playing tarock and drinking, they spoke of little else. The maps printed in the newspapers were often wildly inaccurate, and of course subject to censorship, while his father sometimes updated his several times a day.
As the months passed, Lucius watched the little green, blue, red, yellow, and black cubes murder each other for tiny swaths of cardboard. And while he let his father explain the western trench systems, or the alpine battles in Italy, his eyes kept returning to one spot, to the left of the T in the word KARPATEN, and below the w in Nadworna. There, a tiny hatch mark like a thousand others, marked a change in elevation. There. As if something magical linked this tiny scratch of ink to the mountains far away.