Jadwiga appeared in a high black collar and decorative lace apron, pushing a service tray loaded with dinner: cabbage rolls in tomato sauce and sour cream, a plate of blood sausage, potatoes spiced with marjoram and onion, pork sirloin in mushroom gravy. A row of dumplings, stuffed with duck.
“My,” said Lucius, looking up at her. “You must have canvassed half the city.” He knew the risks of the black market. The papers loved to report the arrests of smugglers. Even 14 Cranachgasse hadn’t known beef for months.
Jadwiga curtsied proudly and vanished behind a swinging door. Usually she waited; his mother must have asked to be alone.
“Eat, Lucius,” his mother said.
As he ate, she spoke of politics, the civil war in Russia, the slowly accumulating treaties, the squabbles among the Austrian command. She praised President Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the promise of an independent Poland. A true independent Poland, she said, “her territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access…”
“…to the sea.” Lucius had joined her. “I know.”
It was only a matter of time, she said. The sea! Poland hadn’t dipped her toes since 1795.
But by then he knew this was all a prelude to something else.
She broke off and briefly touched the pearls around her neck. Her gaze drifted across his face, the fireplace, a decorative porcelain clock of Hannibal and his elephants that graced a far credenza, the hanging portrait of Sobieski with his panther cloak and laurels. There she stopped, as if she were conferring. Then her eyes turned back to Lucius. He had the sense of a bird of prey, circling, feathers shivering, before a strike.
“I think that you should take a wife.”
His knife paused, mid-dumpling. A wife. He managed to swallow what he was chewing. “Mother, yes. Go on.”
The House of Habsburg, she told him, was at death’s door, as certainly he knew. The future no longer lay in Title, but in Capital. His brothers’ countess wives, his sisters’ margrave husbands: all bearers of titles to a world that wouldn’t survive the year. She had seen the future; it sat prettily on the plush sofas of the drawing rooms of men with controlling stock in steelworks, oil fields, and mines.
He forced himself to take another bite. “You can’t be serious, Mother.”
“My son knows me as someone who likes to joke?”
She had not touched her plate. He saw that she was waiting. Cautiously, he advanced. “I still have to spend most nights at the hospital. With the POW return, things have only gotten worse. It is hardly what one would expect of a devoted husband…”
“I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “Did someone use the word devoted? My son is one of the few men in Vienna who isn’t a cripple or a shirker. I’d think your wife would be quite happy with whatever she is getting.”
He stared at her, trying to assess the degree of her conviction. She was smiling at him, though it seemed more a baring of her teeth. Now he understood why this needed to await his father’s absence; his father still held to notions like romantic love.
“This is quite sudden,” he said. “Of course, I will need time to think about it.”
“No, Lucius. Actually, there is no time to think about it. Men are already returning home. Marriage is a market like any other. And a very liquid market, I should add. You can imagine the effect that Armistice will have on supply.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms. Above him, the candles flickered on a massive staghorn chandelier. He looked past them, to the window, the square of evening sky.
“Mother isn’t anything if not blunt.”
“My interest is yours,” she said, now utterly still. “You are how old?”
“Please, Mother. You don’t need me to say it. I believe you were present at my birth.”
“I do need you to say it.”
“Mother—”
“How old?”
A sigh as he relented. “Twenty-six.”
“Tell me about the girl you left in Galicia.”
“Sorry?”
Now, for the first time, she picked up a fork and knife, transferred a single pierogi from the warmed platter to her plate, and cut into it, its corner yielding with a tiny burst of steam.
“I am waiting, Lucius. Tell me. It is either that, or I must take you for an invert, though you have none of the panache. There was a girl.”
In the window beyond her, a flock of starlings rose slowly from the shingles of the neighboring rooftop, lifted like a conjurer’s cape. It soared upward, curling upon itself before it burst into a larger, fluttering orb. He said, slowly, “I worked in a field hospital. I’ve told you many times.”
“Yes, yes of course you have.”
“There was no girl.”
“No, of course not. Not a single nurse. Quite a hospital, without a nurse.”
“There was a nursing sister. From the order of Saint Catherine.”
Briefly then, he saw her, laughing, skin cool with water, warm with sunlight, as she rose above him on the riverbank.
“Pretty?”
“Mother. I can’t believe we are discussing this.”
“Polish or Austrian? Do I dare ask about her family? Lucius, your ears have turned bright red.”
“There was no one, I said—”
“No? Then to whom were you writing those letters you tore up so diligently? Why were you constantly checking the post?”
A pause; no answer. He could claim that it was Feuermann or another comrade. But he knew, and knew she knew, when she had won.
“Lucius…” She leaned forward and placed her hand on his. “May I offer some motherly advice? You’ve been home for almost two years. If she had wanted, she would have written to you. Unless she couldn’t read.”
The door behind them opened, as Jadwiga’s head emerged to survey the table. His mother waved her away. Outside, the starlings had returned, a vortex, a lens, a greater bird. Not two years—he wanted to say—just fourteen months. But this didn’t count the time that he had sought her from the trains.
Softer now, his mother said, “You act as if I’m against you. But this…” She pushed down on his hand. “This is me. This is my flesh. You can’t hide in the hospital forever. We are talking about your life.”
She withdrew, sat back, her posture still impeccable. From a silver case, she extracted a long cigarette.
He said, “And I thought we were talking about Capital.”
“I didn’t say marry a laundry girl. I’ll select the menu. You choose the dish.”
Back on the wards, he waited for the messenger to return with another summons. But Agnieszka Krzelewska, he later realized, was cleverer than this. She had said what for the passing months he’d been unable to admit. How long was he to sit in mourning? He’d canvassed half the hospitals in eastern Galicia for Margarete. Short of heading off to Lemnowice himself, which, without permission, essentially meant desertion, he’d reached an end.
And there were other thoughts, at first ignored, now unavoidable. Margarete could, after all, have sought him out. If she couldn’t travel, she knew his name, knew how to write. This would have been easy. A nurse might be lost among the great movements of people, but not a medical lieutenant. If mail could find him at a mountain field hospital, it could find him in Vienna. He’d written to Feuermann with just his name and regiment; by field post, she wouldn’t even need a stamp.