For another week, he waited for his mother’s messenger, but nothing. This wasn’t, he knew, an oversight. His mother did not commit oversights. The seed had been planted; she was just giving it time to grow.
And it was spring. Around the city, on the boulevards, in the public gardens, he saw soldiers reunited with their sweethearts. Hemlines had risen, just a little. Whether it was the cloth rations, or the weather, or a kind of recklessness unleashed by so much deprivation, he didn’t know. But ankles were everywhere, and necks. Because all jewelry had ostensibly been donated to the war effort, the girls began to decorate themselves with little wildflowers, plucked from untended gardens and tucked into a collar button or a hat. Now, when his patients’ families came to visit them in the hospital, he found himself looking at the young wives doting on their injured husbands and felt a twinge of longing. It seemed like madness to feel envy for a soldier paralyzed below his neck, or a man forced to wear a tin-face prosthetic so as not to scare his children. But the wives always made themselves so pretty when they went to see their husbands, and the accents of the Czechs and Slovenians were really lovely, and sometimes when they thanked him, they even offered him their hands. Just for a moment, and only for him to grasp their fingers lightly while accepting their gratitude, and not to raise them to his lips, as if meeting among friends.
Other times, he spied the rustling of bedsheets in a corner. A blush, skirts shifting, a button opened on a blouse. It didn’t matter, he tried to tell himself; he should be happy that the soldiers could find even some fleeting pleasure. But by then it was undeniable, the longing, right here, in his chest.
With spring, the crowding, his mother’s offer, the arrival of the soldiers’ pretty wives, he began again to walk. Past the palaces of the Landstrasse, the barracks off the Karlsplatz, the prostitutes stirring along the treeless stretches of the Ring. Past the shuttered Opera House, the statue of Goethe in the Imperial and Royal Garden, daisies bursting about his feet. To the canal, to St. Stephen’s, to the North Station to watch the trains come in.
One afternoon, in late April, relieved for several hours by the visiting consultant, he found himself in the Maria-Josefa Park, near the Arsenal and South Station. It had rained much of the week, and with the respite, the park was filled with families and strolling couples and small crowds of furloughed soldiers who flirted with the governesses and trinket-selling girls. He had brought with him a pair of volumes from the Army Medical Journal, and settled on a bench in the middle of the park, not far from an empty fountain, where Neptune, whitewashed with pigeon droppings, rose upon a school of dolphins bursting from marble waves. It was humid; the sky was low, the color of burnished steel. He tried to read, but his mind was constantly returning to Margarete and his mother’s offer, when the sound of laughter rose from a crowd gathered in the broad walk just beyond the laburnums, near the entrance to the park.
He ignored it at first. The streets were full of buskers: violinists and accordionists, practitioners of sleight of hand. They were often veterans, and he usually approached them with caution, worried about the memories they stirred. But the people in the distance seemed to be enjoying the performance far more than he was enjoying his article on starvation psychosis, so he rose and joined the crowd, which had gathered around an organ-grinder and his bear.
The organ sat on what looked like a converted pram, with large, black stagecoach wheels, a lacquered chassis, and a push-handle of iron filigree. The organist had left the blanket over the top of the organ, and the box itself was decorated with glossy green tendrils and little painted strawberries, and a name, illegible at this distance, in gilded baroque script.
The bear was in fact a man of small stature, dressed entirely in a real bear’s skin, save that the paws had been removed to make space for the man’s hands and feet. There was something quite primitive and horrid about it. Much of the skull had been removed, and the bear’s skin had contracted unevenly: the nose was twisted, and one ear sat higher than the other, reminding Lucius uneasily of the twisted grimaces of his patients with facial wounds. In place of the eyes were white shells with painted crimson irises.
The dancer looked out of the mouth, which had been propped open, the bear’s lips pinned up to make a snarl. The organ played a tarantella. The bear tumbled, cartwheeled, and had just danced off with a busty girl in frilled pink calico, when the light sprinkle turned to rain.
There was a groan; at first the organist just adjusted the blanket on the organ, and the bear kept dancing. Here and there umbrellas burst open, couples pressed together, and women pulled their shawls forward on their heads. Lucius tucked the Journal inside his coat. Then the sky grew darker, as if something great had passed in front of the sun—a Zeppelin or a giant bird. A heavier rain began to fall. The tarantella halted, the grinder hurriedly tucked the blanket around the organ, the bear decapitated itself, and the empty head made rounds for tips.
Lucius, who prided himself on a sense of the weather not particularly borne out by experience, hadn’t brought an umbrella. There was a gazebo at the end of the walk, and he was hurrying toward it in a giddy crowd of factory women, when his eyes caught on a figure walking past a rank of drooping lilacs, in the direction of the South Station.
He froze.
White blouse. Skirt of rough blue flannel. Dark blue shawl, and gold remembrance ribbon around her wrist.
No habit anymore, he thought; but this was the least of the mysteries that needed to be explained.
The crowd broke around him.
“Margarete!”
But she was too far away, the shouts and laughter of the crowd too loud. He began to walk faster, skipped, and broke into a run, colliding into a young couple scurrying off beneath a newspaper glistening with rain. Another collision, this time with a man carrying his dog. The crowd seemed to converge: a policeman in black oilcloth, a trio of young men in bowlers, a woman heaving a kicking child. He pushed through them, now not bothering to apologize, as little eddies of outrage exploded in his wake.
She had entered a wide river of humanity hurrying from the park and toward the shelter of the train station. He followed, the Army Medical Journal now sheltering his eyes, desperate to keep her in his sight. Crossing the street, he was nearly disemboweled by the decorative metal fender of a fiacre, whose caped driver cursed and snapped his whip inches from Lucius’s face. Another horse, another fiacre, creaking wheels spitting up water, another shout. Then a wagon, a motorcar, it seemed at once as if all the conveyances of the Imperial City had contrived to block his path. He ducked at last beneath a whinny and the flicking of a mane. The station now before him, an opulence of grey and white, columns rising to the ranks of marble knights and griffons, Victory high and hazy in the falling rain. About its base, the crowds. His eyes scanned the headscarves, the ranks of multicolored skirts and blouses. Umbrellas collapsing as their owners gained the arcades. He’d lost her. Now a second time.
Journal still raised, he made his way slowly forward, his body still and quiet, but inside frantic, alert to everything, his eyes trying to take them in. And everywhere the people! How many people in this cursed city! How many shades of blouse, how many prints of calico! How many flannel skirts, how many ribbons, shawls, and how many faces floating beneath them, pink faces and grey faces and dun faces, faces lined with age, jowled faces, faces long in tooth and short in neck, long in neck and low in brow, dolichocephalic and leptorrhine, harried faces, imperious, voluptuous, insouciant faces, heat-flushed, and pale and glistening from rain…