“Sorry?”
“Your bosom, child. It is—how do you say in German—threatening us? You’ll fall out of the chair.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. His mother, of course, spoke beautiful German, perfect German, and this was not lost on their hosts. “Well… I… but… I…,” began poor Wilhelmine, her patriotic medals trembling, before her mother shouted, “Apfelstrudel!” as she plucked one from a silver tray of pastries and took an explosive, powdery bite.
He left each failure with a feeling of vindication, a vague sense of loyalty to Margarete’s memory, and just a little disappointment. Which is what he expected, with the announcement of his fifth audience, with one Natasza Borszowska, the youngest daughter of General Borszowski of the Polish Legion, rumored among the circles preparing for Polish independence to be in line for the Polish Southern Command.
They met on the third of May, at a party held by his parents in honor of the Polish constitution of 1791. Lucius was with his father when Natasza entered on the arm of hers, an old man in a plumed helmet and so many decorations that he seemed from a distance to be wearing chain mail. She smiled gratefully to the doorman as he took her stole, and for a moment Lucius felt certain that conversation in the room had stopped. Part of him wished this wasn’t her. She was too beautiful; the vague terror he felt at most social occasions seemed to concentrate itself cruelly in his throat. He thought to leave. But his father had also noticed, turning in almost clockwork coordination with Lucius. And his mother, across the room, had registered both the general’s arrival and her husband and son’s response.
She wasted no time. Gliding swiftly across the parquet floor, she brought them together. Lucius: Natasza Borszowska. Natasza: my son. But old Zbigniew, still charming in his fin de siècle kind of way, had already taken her hand.
“Enchanté.”
Gently, Madame Krzelewska pried her husband off. Perhaps the two youngsters would like to get to know each other? She believed the sunroom was unoccupied. Jadwiga could bring them something to drink.
She wore a silk dress, sky blue and loose and sleeveless, and long silk gloves. A string of pearls dangled low beneath her breasts, knotted at her sternum. He would later learn her hair was long, but that day it rose in a complicated manifold of pleats that bared her neck.
They sat at the corner of a low table decorated with a forest scene of inlaid wood. A nymph fled, pursued by Cupid’s arrows. He was speechless, terrified by that resurgent hint of stammer, trying to decide whether it was ruder to stare or look away. He stared. She inhaled deeply from a cigarette of cloves, taking in the room with its hanging ferns and checkerboard floor, the piano in the corner, the table with its war map.
Then, she turned to him, and smiled. “Hello.”
“Hello!”
It came out a little loud. For a moment, he thought the interview might end there. But she was a quick student of his limitations. She had been hearing about him ever since she had returned from holiday, she said. Her father said that he had been a war hero, survived a Cossack assault in the Carpathians. That he now ran the archduchess’s charity. She was fascinated by medicine, by neurology. Had he read Interpretation of Dreams?
He hadn’t, yet.
“That’s too bad. I’ll give you my copy, if you don’t mind the annotations. Perhaps you could tell me what you think.”
If she saw his ears reddening, she didn’t let on. His mother had told her father that as a student he had made great advances in the studies of X-rays. Did he still do this research? Once, right before the war, she had been radiographed for fun; she still had the image—one could see the outline of her rings, her necklace, everything. She felt that as Poles, they had a patriotic commitment to radiation. As a child she had even met Madame Curie, in Paris, and for years she was certain that if she had a daughter, she would name her Marie. Had Lucius ever met her in the course of his studies? Oh, but how silly of her to think that just because they both studied radiography…
But he had!
Her eyes flashed as he told her the story. A mermaid? He couldn’t take her to the Medical School to see it, could he?
“No, but… wait,” he said.
He took the stairs three steps at a time.
The film was still there, on the highest shelf, in a paper sheaf, tucked among the books. He nearly tumbled as he ran back down.
“How extraordinary!”
She held the image to the light.
“Truly, who would have made such a thing? That is the interesting part of the story. And who was it that they were trying to fool?”
He realized all of a sudden that he had never stopped to wonder.
An ashtray sat at the far end of the long table between them. She could have asked for it. Instead, she held her blouse modestly against her chest as she leaned far forward to tap the ashes off her cigarette, and then, reaching up to brush away a fallen curl, she let it very briefly go.
The courtship would be, as Natasza put it, very eighteenth-century, consisting primarily of negotiations between Lucius’s mother and General Borszowski. They were married in early August 1918, shortly before her twenty-first birthday. The ceremony was modest; both parties felt that a display of ostentation would be tasteless given the political situation. At first Natasza had asked to honeymoon at a family estate near Salzburg, but for Lucius, this meant leaving his patients with Zimmer, who, after his pneumonia, had returned more befuddled than before. So they spent their wedding night at the Hotel Impérial, after a boisterous dinner at which both fathers got drunk and sang songs from the lancers and his mother finally motioned for the newlyweds to go.
Up in their room, Lucius and Natasza fell into silence. She had brought her own glass flask of almond schnapps, and poured them each a tumbler. This helped a little. Throughout the day, he had the image of Margarete appearing in the little church, or at their dinner, or running into him with his new wife as they ascended the stairs. It was almost impossible to imagine: Margarete with her heavy soldier’s boots and greatcoat, Mannlicher over her shoulder, her fingers still muddy from rummaging for roots.
It was Natasza who led him to bed, who first disrobed. She was tanned from sunbathing in the mountains, all angles, smooth-legged, like someone sculpted out of bronze. He stared while above them the fan spun quietly. The feeling came to him that he didn’t deserve this kind of fortune, that he was still the child with the stutter, exiled with Feuermann from the student associations, an accidental son.
“You do not need to be gentle,” she said, after some time.
She was the only person apart from Margarete whom he had ever kissed. At first, he was taken aback by the firmness of her tongue, and his lips resisted in reflex, before he let it in. There was an unfamiliar taste to her mouth, almost metallic beneath the sweetness of the schnapps.
After a few minutes, she rose and took a gummi from her handbag. He didn’t mind, of course? She didn’t want a baby now. She had such plans for skiing that winter; there was so much to do now that the war was coming to an end. He shook his head, scandalized a little by the sheath he had seen only in soldiers’ belongings. But no, he didn’t mind. Of course, he didn’t mind.
What happened next suggested she was vastly more experienced than him.
After, he lay beside her, looking at the gold of her skin as if he had come across some kind of treasure. Faintly, he could see the evidence of a sleeveless tennis outfit and a swimsuit, and he allowed his fingers to trace the tan lines, feeling almost bold. It was enough even to retain him, for a moment, there, with her, without his thoughts flying back across the mountains.