And then, at last, in May, a letter came.
He received it at the hospital. At first he thought it might be a reply to one of his petitions. But this was from an unfamiliar department. The hospital was moving, the letter said, the patients transferring to a government sanitorium in Baden. It had come to their attention that he was not a medical graduate, that the wartime degrees were null and void, and that if he wished to practice medicine, he would have to re-enroll at the medical school that fall. The tone was severe; it was a travesty of the imperial government that he had been given such responsibility. The archduchess would be selling the palace. They would close the wards later that month.
He found Zimmer in his office.
“Herr Professor Doktor has heard the news?”
His old professor nodded as he chewed a toothpick, and for a moment Lucius feared it was more plunder from the archduchess’s wunderkammer, some scrimshawed urchin spine or gilded rodent penis bone, or the exquisite little scepter of a dollhouse king. But it was just a toothpick, and for the first time in recent memory, there were no jarred monstrosities on his desk. Zimmer’s fingers clasped each other as if searching for something that had been taken from him. He reminded Lucius of one of his great-uncles, a baron, who had spent his last years tending the geese in the ponds behind his castle, clapping as simply as a child when they snapped the bread out of his hand. But Zimmer seemed to understand what was at stake.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
Behind Zimmer hung a faded tapestry showing a unicorn sipping from a rushing forest stream. Snowy peaks rose high above it, the sky filled with soaring birds. Strange, thought Lucius, that he had never noticed it before.
He saw her walking, figure swaying in her habit, her fists full of roots and potherbs, saw her lowering herself to him that sun-dappled morning, beneath the willow on the bank.
“To find a friend,” he said. At last.
The army ambulances arrived the following week.
They were the same lorries he had grown familiar with at war, and pairs of porters appeared carrying the same stretchers. One by one the patients left, bowing or saluting, or kissing Lucius’s hand. This is Zoltán Lukács, a hussar thrown from his horse, an epileptic… Maciej Krawiec, Daniel Löw… Now, saying goodbye, there was part of him that doubted his departure, and he had to remind himself that it was not his choice. His expression must have betrayed his emotion, for one of the nurses appeared at his side. “There, there, Herr Doktor,” she whispered. “They’ll be taken care of. The hospital of Baden is lovely, state-of-the-art.” He nodded. He did not say what he was thinking then, that it was the fate he wished he could have given his patients at Lemnowice, a discharge to a sanitorium at Baden, not to more horrors of the war.
The ambulances departed, gravel crunching beneath their wheels; then more returned. When the men were gone, movers came and carried out the beds and the cots, cleared out the supply closet, and disassembled the nursing station in the center of the ballroom.
Zimmer left in a fiacre for his old office at the university. Lucius would visit him, he hoped, and Lucius nodded. They shook hands. Over the past month, the cataracts seemed to have grown even thicker, like inlaid pearls. Then the nurses followed, bowing neatly in sequence to Lucius as they filed out. Soon there were only a few small scattered pieces of furniture, but still Lucius waited. The room was empty then, the light from the high windows illuminating the frescoes of the ersatz sky. Once, in the days before it was the hospital, there would have been grand balls and dinners, but it seemed as if it had been abandoned centuries ago. Scratches and stains covered the parquet floor. Cobwebs on the chandeliers. The painting of Cadmus and the dragon back in its place high upon the wall.
A door at the end of the great hall opened. For a moment he expected a new arrival, a patient who hadn’t heard the news. But beside the race of warriors emerging from the dragon’s teeth, he was alone.
Outside, a cold wind had begun to blow.
The question then was how to return.
His best hope was to go by train to Dolina, by then the closest stop in Polish-controlled territory to Lemnowice. At the North Station, crowded with travelers, he inquired about tickets. Yes, the old Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway to Kraków was fully open, the ticket seller told him; from there one could go as far west as Lemberg, now known by its Polish name, Lwów. But with the Ukrainian insurgency, the railway south of Lwów was under Polish military control. Civilians were forbidden.
“Thank you,” said Lucius, leaving the ticket window, as another traveler pushed into his place. From Lwów, he might hire a motorcar, but from what he’d heard, the roads were in such disrepair as to be almost impassable. And, just that month, his mother, not one to be intimidated, had canceled a trip to Drohobycz after vigilantes had held two of her agents until she paid their ransom.
Thinking of his mother, he wondered if he might approach her, asking for her influence in securing passage from friends in the Polish Army. But he knew she wouldn’t permit such madness. Think what kind of kidnapping target you would make, she’d tell him. And for your pretty little nurse who likely isn’t there at all.
A rowdy flock of pigeons was scuttling in the station rafters above. Around him the crowds continued to press toward the ticket windows. For a moment, he felt his hopes again collapse, before his thoughts circled once more to his mother, to the army, and he knew what he could do.
He found Natasza at her apartment on Hohlweggasse.
It was a hot day. She came to the door in a kimono, a cigarette between her fingers, her hair done up in a chignon.
“Lucius. What a surprise.” By the old laws of the state, she was still his wife, but she waited for an explanation for his visit, as if she could dismiss him without inviting him to come inside.
But this time he was not so easily disposed of. He looked past her. “May I?”
“Of course. Do enter. It’s been some time.”
They sat together in the living room, where he used to pass the hours of the night. If she remembered, she gave no indication. Now, she was coldly civil, asking crisply after his family, his work. He told her about the hospital closing, how he planned to return to medical school that fall.
“You! Back at school!”
He didn’t mind, he said. What he had learned was war medicine; it was time for something else.
In turn, she told him how she had lived the past six months in Italy. Now that the new Austrian government was supposedly planning to reform the imperial marriage laws, she was secretly engaged again, to an Italian, a sculptor. Yes, truly an Italian sculptor; it was so predictable. The wedding would happen as soon as paperwork for the divorce was put in place.
Our divorce, he thought. He said, “I suppose I should offer you congratulations.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Well. I am guessing you’re not here just to pay a social visit.”
Across the room stood a mirror, paints, a canvas. Briefly he wondered as to their purpose. But he, too, was finished with small talk. “I need a favor.”
“Oh?”
“From your father.”
She listened coldly as he explained the situation with the rails. All he needed was a letter, he said. He could get to Lwów alone; but from there he needed permission to travel south on the Polish Army trains.
She lit another cigarette and shook her head. She was sorry. Her father was in Warsaw now, meeting Marshal Piłsudski. There were wars with Russia and Ukraine, hadn’t he heard? And if Russia wasn’t enough to deal with, the general wasn’t happy about her new fiancé, always having wished she might marry another Pole. The last thing she wanted was to remind him of Lucius.