Thinking, When the fighting retreats, when the rails open, I’ll go back to find her. There, in the one place I have yet to look.
Through the first six months of 1917, the Russian Seventh Army—a blue piece the size of his finger—sat on Kolomea, its shadow falling ominously over the hatch mark that was Lemnowice. In June, to his dismay, the piece began to advance even farther: another offensive, again led by Brusilov. But then word came that Russian soldiers, sick of fighting, were beginning to desert.
By July, the Russian cube had inched back east. By August, it no longer even cast late-evening shadows, as the Carpathians once again fell under German black and Austrian green.
But there was no way for him to get to Lemnowice. Quietly, not wishing to ruffle Zimmer, he had inquired about a transfer east. At first the clerk in the Medical Office had seemed receptive to the proposal. It should be easy to find a volunteer replacement who wished to serve back in the comfort of Vienna.
Fearing the interference of his mother, Lucius gave the address of a café. Then, for a month, he waited, only to hear his transfer was “no longer considered a priority”; with the war quieting in Galicia, and the slow shift of soldiers from frontline hospitals, even Vienna was seeing shortages of physicians. This already confirmed what he had suspected with growing dread. Through the summer, he had seen their census grow; by September, new men were coming daily, forcing them to open wards on the second and third floors.
Then, in November, Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and peace negotiations began between Russia and the Central Powers, culminating in the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March. Neither event should have had much of an impact on the timeless practice of medicine, had there not been by then, according to the rumors (for the official papers gave much lower numbers), nearly two million Imperial and Royal prisoners of war in Russian camps ready to come home.
The flow of soldiers, already heavy by the New Year, became a flood. They came by the trainload, piling into freezing cattle cars and clinging to the roofs. Platforms in the North Station were soon transformed into ad hoc wards because there weren’t enough hospitals to take them in. By then, the palace, its rooftop glinting with snow, had all but ceased to be a neurological service. It was like working in the field again. In addition to fractures and amputations, the men brought malaria and Volhynian fever, frostbite from the Russian winters, and cholera caught in the camps. Zimmer had come down with pneumonia, and together, Lucius and the nurses dragged away the clanking rehabilitation equipment to make more space for beds. They laid out cots, then blankets on the floor. When the first cases of typhus appeared, they received a mobile delousing and disinfection station, with a tent and rusty boiler, set up beneath the plane trees on the palace lawn.
Surely, thought Lucius at times, there couldn’t be this many soldiers, but he had seen them in their splendored millions as they’d marched out toward the front. It was as if the war were contracting under some mysterious force of gravity. As the winter drew on, it was almost possible to read events in distant places by the mud on the men’s shoes and trousers: the dark, rancid earth of Belgium, the white clay of the Dolomites, the pine needles embedded in the wool socks of the men from the Carpathians. Overwhelmed, he petitioned the War Office for another doctor, begged the archduchess, and asked his mother to use her influences. But even his mother was no match for typhus. Eventually, the archduchess secured a consultant for relief on every second Sunday, an Austrian from Innsbruck who listened to the tales of Zimmer with scarcely disguised horror. Lucius was given a portable bacteriological laboratory to quantify wound organisms, but no eosin to stain them; an X-ray machine to aid the extraction of foreign bodies, but never enough film. The rubber on the nasogastric tubes was old and cracked, and flies drugged themselves on mixtures of glucose and morphine that leaked down onto the patients’ beds. Every week brought another shortage of the phenobarbital he used for seizures. In March, in the middle of another fuel shortage, and unable to wait for spring, they chopped down the plane trees to heat the stoves.
In April, exhausted, he received a note from his mother, inviting him to dine.
It arrived at the hospital by messenger, a little man in livery and a Tyrolean hat, a spray of blackbird feathers in its corded band. This was the first time she had written to him there. There was no explanation. “She said nothing of an emergency?” asked Lucius. In his hands, he held a large syringe to draw off the blood that had slowly gathered around one of his patient’s lungs.
The man shook his head. “She said you might ask. No, no emergency. She only misses your company, the lady said.”
This was highly unlikely; and his mother knew he would think so, too. But it left no room to turn the invitation down.
It had been two weeks since he had stepped outside the hospital. In the streets, the last snow had melted, and little bursts of fireweed and pimpernel had appeared between the cobbles. On the Beltway, a small parade of children from the War Orphan Society was marching behind a stern drum major. The air was cool, cut with the smell of horse dung that plopped unceremoniously in a line of listless fiacres waiting for their fares.
His mother was alone when he found her, at the long dining room table that the family had brought with them to Vienna. She wore a dress of pleated pale-blue silk. A webbed necklace of pearls spanned her bare throat; her bracelets were of silver filigree. Nothing she would dare wear out, among the crowds in all their threadbare, lest she be set upon as unpatriotic. Posture martial; hair pinned tightly to her head.
A corner of the table had been set, intimately, for two, near where—his mother liked to boast—a lovesick Jagiellonian prince once carved the initials of his beloved, though everyone in the family knew it had been Lucius’s oldest brother, Władysław.
He kissed her hand.
“And Father?”
“Hunting, with Kasinowski.”
Duke of Bielsko-Biała and Katowice.
“The blind one?”
“Not completely, Lucius.”
“Mother isn’t worried he may shoot Father accidentally?”
She smiled with her perfect teeth. There was no way faster to her affections than ridiculing other aristocratic families. “As long as we don’t have to mount his head,” she said. “After the zebus, we’ve hardly any space.” She nodded toward the line of trophies in the neighboring sunroom.
“Ibexes, Mother. Ibexes.”
“Of course.” She touched her temple. “My son the scientist.”
Then she withdrew her hand. “You must be famished, with the slop they feed you at the hospital. Shall we eat?”
They sat. A satin cushion rested at the small of his back, a detail which did not escape his notice, for she prized the chairs ornamented with rococo roses, which kept her guests from getting too comfortable to dislodge. This will not be brief, he thought. The table was set with white damask and white and yellow tulips. China and crystal had been arranged so that he sat at her right hand, while she sat at the table’s head. Behind him the vast fireplace. Large enough, she liked to say, to cook Franz Josef, figure of speech. A joke, of course, but he was aware that she had replaced the commemorative ceramics from the Emperor’s jubilee that once sat proudly on their mantel. His view gave out onto the window; hers to the expanse of the table, the portraits of her bloodline in their furs and armor, the pillars of yellow marble that marked the entrance to the sunroom.