This time, Lucius said he wanted to go as well. She laughed it off. He insisted. She said it would be dull for him. He didn’t play tennis, didn’t dance. He insisted again. She said she didn’t want to go to restaurants with him, that she had seen him staring at a waitress once, not because she was beautiful, but because she had a limp. If the waitress had at least been beautiful, that she could understand! But a cripple? She said her sister had mistaken Lucius’s coat for Franz’s, found kielbasa in his pocket, and thought it was part of a patient. She said she didn’t care what he did at the hospital, but that at least he must change coats. She said her sister said Lucius’s smell reminded her of the sanitorium where she had once gone to take a nervous cure, and now she, Natasza, couldn’t get this out of her head.
He asked if there would be another man in Trieste.
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t even hesitate. She added, “And in the Salzkammergut, and in Berlin. Why do you think my father was so insistent I get married? At least they stay in bed with me. They sleep, they eat, like humans.
“What kind of monster are you, anyway?” she asked.
She had used a word in Polish that meant less a creature of evil than a sorry, accidental creation, a word one uses for a defective child, or a goat born with two heads.
If only you knew, he thought, but now he couldn’t speak. Even the very grammar of his language seemed to mock him, for it occurred to him that she was the only person in his life with whom he used the informal, and this was coming quickly to an end.
She lit a cigarette and held it to her lips, as she often did after their lovemaking. “Don’t look so distraught,” she said. “You married to placate your mother, too.”
But he hadn’t, he wished to tell her. This time it was my decision. Except he couldn’t give her the pleasure of this victory. I’ve lost much more than you, he thought, as she took another draw from her cigarette, and left.
Compared to demobilization, his return home this time was easy.
“My wife has not been loyal,” he told his mother, and of all the explanations, it shamed him least. There was no need to mention the sullen dinners, the impossibility of sleep. To his surprise, he found his mother kind, even apologetic. Briefly, it occurred to him that the scandal of the separation might somehow be more useful to her than the partnership of marriage; now she possessed some very compromising gossip about the daughter of the Polish Southern Command. But he stopped this thought before it went much farther. No, Mother was ruthless, but such machinations were cruel beyond conception, and he knew she maintained allegiances to her blood. Still, she must have known that something like this would happen. She knew her son.
This was late September. His belongings were delivered to his parents’ address; he hadn’t even entirely unpacked. But he had little time to think about Natasza. During the final, failing days of his marriage, the full force of a simmering outbreak of influenza had arrived at the Lamberg Palace Army Rehabilitation Hospital for Neurological Injuries. By November, he’d lost twenty-seven patients and three nurses, and himself spent nearly two weeks in the third-floor quarantine, delirious with fever, listening to the gasps rising from the neighboring beds.
When at last his fever broke, he rose and walked down to the main ward. It was late in the afternoon, and strangely silent. A dim light filtered in through the high windows; with the fuel shortages, they had turned off the chandeliers. At the far end of the ballroom, in the shadows, he could see his nurses, and as he approached them, he found that they were gathered around a ruddy, breathless orderly holding a broadsheet, still in his snow-dusted winter coat.
That night he returned home to Cranachgasse.
“You’ve heard?” his father said as Lucius met him in the sunroom.
Armistice, the abdication of the Royal Family, the Empire’s end.
And they walked slowly to the map table, where the old retired major drew out the saber he had worn at the Battle of Custoza and, with a flourish, swept all the armies to the floor.
17.
He returned to the hospital late that evening, through empty streets.
The night was strangely warm, and he let his coat hang open. The electricity was out, and in the windows, shadows moved in the yellow glow of lamps and candles. Silence everywhere, but inside, he knew, the same word was on everyone’s lips.
Armistice. Like him, they’d all been waiting, each one for something different: the return of a son, a long-promised wedding, the chance to see a baby who was now a little girl. The end of food lines—though with winter coming, this wasn’t certain. The loss of titles, lands. For his mother and his father: a new Poland, or—as they might correct him—the rebirth of an old one. But for Lucius, in the months he had been waiting, the word had come to mean the single place that might yet yield the secret of what had become of Margarete.
Lemnowice. For two long years in Vienna, he had felt as if every obstacle had been placed in front of his return: the Russian army, the flood of POW returns, and now, and this at his own bidding, Natasza. But Natasza was gone, vanished from his life as if she’d never been there, and Brusilov was back in Russia. Now, finally, after the trains, the listless wandering, the days spent dreaming of Margarete, his chance had come.
Yet in many ways the world that met him the Tuesday morning after Armistice was even more complex than that of Monday night. There was the practical issue of the trains, still packed with homecoming soldiers. The sudden appearance of borders within what used to be the Empire. The need for travel papers from the newly declared “German Austria,” which for effective purposes of governance was little but a name. There was also the matter of politics. His father’s clearing of the table had been a dramatic gesture. More accurately, they should have all sat down with little brushes, repainted the Austro-Hungarian forces in eight different colors, and turned them to fight each other. Already the week before, Serbia had attacked Hungary, Czechoslovakia had attacked Hungary, and revolutionaries had stormed the Reichstag in Berlin. There were murmurs that the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia was mutually unacceptable; Russia, of course, was still in civil war. And, most worrisome for Lucius, in Galicia, skirmishes had broken out between Poland and Ukraine.
It was, his father told him, as if someone had stomped on a fire, scattering the burning embers before they put them out.
But all these obstacles seemed surmountable, all, save one. Since his pneumonia, Zimmer’s mind had continued to decline, and for Lucius to leave his patients alone with his old professor as their only doctor was no less than abandonment. Almost immediately after Armistice, he began to petition for a temporary replacement. He would not need long, he wrote in various letters to various ministries. The flu had receded, it had been nearly two years since he had taken any leave. Two, three weeks was all he wanted. That would be enough, he thought, to get to Lemnowice, to find anyone, anything that might lead to Margarete. Now, short of searching all of Galicia again, short of knocking on the door of every hut in every village, only Lemnowice remained.
But he received no reply. And soon, with the Medical Service of the Austro-Hungarian Army no longer even in official existence, and Archduchess Anna, fearing some Jacobin revolt, decamped to Switzerland, he didn’t know whom to ask.