She was sleeping, and he rose to get the lights. At the bedside, he paused, now struck by the novelty of returning to warm sheets where someone else was waiting. It seemed impossible, this absurd luxury of hours—hours—unmenaced by discovery or interruption. Beyond the fleeting moments Margarete had rested beside him after lovemaking, he had never truly slept beside another person. But now, moonlight drifting over Natasza’s sleeping body, the novelty of it gave way to something else. For weeks he had anticipated his wedding night, but so distracted by the exquisite promises of consummation, he hadn’t really considered the sleeping part that must come next. But sleeping remained an uncertain proposition. The relentless dreams of Horváth had remitted somewhat after his return to medicine, but there were nights, many nights, he lurched awake.
He looked down at her, her warmly glowing shoulder.
Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow he would tell her about his dreams. Not now—this moment couldn’t be ruined. And so he gingerly slipped back into bed and waited, vigilant, watching the window turn to dawn.
It was late in the morning when she woke and kissed him. How had he slept?
“Sweet as a soldier on night watch,” he joked. And closing his eyes, he kissed her back.
They moved into an apartment belonging to her father not far away, on Hohlweggasse. For the first week, he waited for an opportunity to tell Natasza about his nightmares, but there never seemed to be a moment to bring them up. Instead, at night, after their lovemaking, he waited until she fell asleep and then went to the living room, returning to their bed before she woke. To preempt the awkwardness of any discovery, he told her he slipped away to deal with the endless paperwork he brought home from the hospital. It couldn’t last, he knew, but during the war, he’d become an expert at stealing scraps of sleep during the spare hours of the day. And he was used to exhaustion. No, he thought: she was his wife, but still a stranger. He couldn’t burden her so quickly. To speak of dreams meant speaking of Horváth and the beech tree, of what he’d done and what he’d failed to do. With time, they would grow closer, as he had with Margarete.
She spent the days reading and calling on acquaintances and playing tennis at a sports club. In the evenings they went out. The first week, his mother, anticipating that he wouldn’t know what restaurants to go to, had arranged for reservations. A gift, she said, but he knew it was more of a command. She sent French champagne, patriotically relabeled as sparkling Rheingau, and in the booth at Grand-Hôtel, bubbles rising to the backs of his eyes, he felt bold enough to ask Natasza more about her interests, her childhood, her family. To his surprise, she answered at length. The next night, drunk again, emboldened, he asked her more, about her friends, her schooling, her plan to apply to art school in Paris after the war. Then, on the third night Natasza said he sounded like a doctor taking a medical history, and suddenly he felt it all come crashing down.
By the second week, their meals had grown silent. “What do you like to talk about?” Natasza had exploded in frustration, and he stammered, “M-medicine,” before he could keep the word from coming out. Her lip curled, and he thought that she would laugh. Once, he wished to add, defensively, once there was someone else who might have listened. But he feared mentioning Margarete’s name in the presence of this other woman, as if her memory were something fragile and might be harmed.
When they got home, Natasza had a letter from a friend. What luck! she said: she had been invited to the Salzkammergut with Princess Dzieduszycka. And Lucius, irritated, at last finding a way to deploy his mother’s encyclopedic registry of the Polish nobility, told her that there hadn’t been a single princess in “Princess” Dzieduszycka’s family since the death of Sobieski (1696). Then, feeling both relief and an impending, ineluctable loneliness, he bid her go.
He slept easily the next week on the wards. When he stopped at their apartment on the day she was to return, he found a telegram from her saying that the lakes were lovely, he should come. He couldn’t, of course, and he knew she knew this. When he thought of her bronze body moving through the lake water, he felt a stab of pain. She returned the next Monday with a small book of photographs of her friends, all tan, the women in striped swimsuits, the men with smooth hair and cigarettes. The photos were a montage of such perfect human beauty that they seemed staged. Her neck was covered by drops of water, the suit was thin, revealing the outline of her breasts. Now, looking at it he felt himself in the presence of a superior creature who had the power to bestow a final blessing or disapproval. He had spent the day trying to stop the seizures of an eighteen-year-old soldier who’d been asphyxiated by phosgene blowback. At the end of the week she asked to go again.
Once more he returned to the hospital to sleep at night. He had hoped Natasza might be a solution to his loneliness, but now what was happening was even worse. He did not want to think of her, then spent the night imagining where she slept. Five days later, she called the Lamberg Palace to say she had returned early, and with some hope, he hurried home. There he found her with her sister, a long-armed look-alike, and her sister’s husband, a German industrialist’s son named Franz. For four nights Lucius allowed himself to go with them to restaurants, if only to lay claim to Natasza when they got home. He wished that they gossiped or slandered, so as to at least grant him some sense of moral superiority. But Franz was a veteran of the Marne, who’d spent a year in a field hospital with a festering infection after a hip fracture and then founded a home for orphans on his return. He had a pearly, perfectly placed scar across his cheekbone, was as quick and clever as Natasza, and irritatingly aware of his appeal. Yet still he was solicitous of Lucius, which somehow made matters even worse. What kind of patients did he care for? Did they need new rehabilitation equipment? His friend, Dr. Sauer, had written in his textbook that horseback riding was the quickest way back to health after bed rest—what did Lucius think?
Lucius didn’t know. He hadn’t read Dr. Sauer’s textbook, hadn’t even heard of Dr. Sauer, actually. The three others waited for him to say something else. So he added that he thought doctors who made broad generalizations without considering the specifics of each patient often did more harm than good. Natasza studied her food. Her sister smiled thinly. Franz said, “Spoken like a true expert,” and lit a cigarette. Lucius sensed they all had turned against him. Across the dining room, he could see his own reflection, his pink ears, his shock of white hair. How ugly and foreign he seemed among them! Angry then, at them, at himself, at his mother for thinking he could belong, he turned back to Franz.
“But I will consider using horses for our patients, thank you.”
And then he wondered aloud whether Germany would like to donate them for the rehabilitation of the Territorial soldiers they sent in first to battle, without helmets, two men to a single rusty gun.
That night, Natasza asked Lucius why he had been rude when Franz was simply trying to include him, after he’d passed hours saying nothing at all. How annoying! Lucius was a genius, she said, with the faintest tone of mockery. A doctor, an expert on the human soul! Madame Krzelewska had shown her father Lucius’s assessment from back in 1913. An unusual aptitude for things that lie beneath the skin. If he could make conversation with a bunch of stutterers pretending to have shell shock, he could clearly speak to Franz.
With these words Lucius felt his own stutter returning, and something must have crossed his face, for she smiled with a smile that only the very beautiful can manage, wicked and conciliatory at once. He should just not sit so quietly, she said, lest someone mistake him for one of his mutes. Then she asked offhandedly if she might spend the weekend with her sister in Trieste.