The Winter Soldier

1.

They were five hours east of Debrecen when the train came to a halt before the station on the empty plain.

There was no announcement, not even a whistle. Were it not for the snow-draped placard, he wouldn’t have known they had arrived. Hastening, afraid he would miss the stop, he gathered his bag, his coat, his saber, pushing his way out through the men who filled the corridor of the train. He was the only passenger to descend. Farther down the line, porters unloaded a pair of crates onto the snow before jumping back on board, slapping warmth into their hands. Then the carriages began to move, chains clanking, stirring his greatcoat and swirling snow around his knees.

He found the hussar in the station house, with the horses brought in from the cold. Their ears flicked against the low ceiling, their long faces overhanging a bench where three peasant women sat, hands clasped over their swaddled bellies like fat men content after a meal. Feet dangling just above the floor. Woman, horse, woman, horse, woman. The hussar stood without speaking. Back in Vienna, Lucius had seen regiments on parade with their plumes and colored sashes, but this man was dressed in a thick grey coat, with a cap of worn, patched fur. He motioned Lucius forward and handed him the reins of one of the horses before he led the other outside, its tail whisking across the women as it passed beneath the Habsburg double-headed eagle on the door.

Lucius tugged on the reins, but his horse resisted. He stroked her neck with the back of one hand—the broken one—while he pulled with the other. “Come,” he whispered, first in German, then in Polish, as her back hooves broke from the ice and frozen dung. To the hussar at the door, he said, “You’ve been waiting long.”

It was the last thing he said. Outside, the hussar lowered a leather mask, cut with slits for eyes and nostrils, and heaved himself onto his horse. Lucius followed, rucksack on his shoulders, struggling to wrap his scarf over his face. From inside the station house, the three old women watched them until the hussar wheeled his horse around and kicked the door shut. Your sons aren’t coming, Lucius wanted to tell them. Not in any state you’d wish to see. There was scarcely a man with two legs who wasn’t trying to lift the Russian siege of Przemyśl now.

Without a word the hussar began to ride north at a trot, his long rifle across his saddle, his saber on his waist. Lucius looked back to the railway, but the train had vanished. Snowflakes had begun to cover the track.

He followed. His horse’s hooves clattered on the frozen earth. The sky was grey, and in the distance, he could see the mountains rising up into the storm. Somewhere, there, was Lemnowice, and the regimental hospital of the Third Army where he was to serve.

He was twenty-two years old, restless, resentful of hierarchy, impatient for his training to come to an end. For three years he had studied alone in the libraries, devoted to medicine with a monastic severity. Onion paper feathered the margins of his textbooks, licked and pasted in by hand. In the great halls, on gleaming lantern slides, he’d seen the ravages of typhus, scarlatina, lupus, pest. He had memorized the signs of cocainism and hysteria, knew that the breath of cyanide poisoning smelled of almonds, and the murmur of a narrowed aortic valve could be heard in the neck. In tie and jacket, freshly ironed for the day, he’d spent hours staring down from the dizzying heights of the surgery theater, straining his neck for a line-of-sight through the restless coveys of his classmates, over the neatly combed heads of senior students, over the junior professors, the surgeon’s assistants, across the surgical drape, and down into the cut. By the time war was declared, he was dreaming nightly of the theater: long, demanding dreams in which he extracted impossible organs, half-man, half-pig. (It was on butcher’s scraps he practiced.) One night, dreaming of an extraction of the gallbladder, he had such a distinct impression of the wet, leaden warmth of the liver, that he woke certain he could carry out the surgery alone.

If his devotion was total, its origin remained a mystery. As a child, he had gazed with wonder at the wax cadavers at the Anatomical Museum, but so had his three brothers, and not one of them had turned to Hippocrates’s art. There were no doctors in his line, not among the Krzelewskis of southern Poland, and certainly not among his mother’s people. At times, cornered by some peahen at one of her unbearable receptions, he endured a condescending speech on how medicine was a noble calling, that one day he would be rewarded for his kindness. But kindness was not interesting to him. His best answer to what drove his endless hours of study was the joy of study itself. He was not a person drawn to religious devotion, but it was in religion that he found the words: revelation, epiphany, the miracle of God’s creations, and by extension, the miracle of how God’s creations failed.

Study itself: this was, at least, the answer that he gave in his moments of greatest exultation. But there was another reason he had turned to medicine, one he only considered later in the hours of his doubt. Of the two other students he could call his friends, Feuermann was the son of a tailor, while Kaminski, who wore empty spectacles just to look older, was on a scholarship from the Sisters of Mercy. Although they never spoke of it, Lucius knew they all had come to medicine for its promise of social mobility. For Feuermann and Kaminski this meant up: from the slums of Leopoldstadt and the charity school. For Lucius, whose father came from an ancient Polish family that claimed descent from Japheth, son of Noah (yes, that Noah), and in whose mother’s veins coursed the same cerulean blood as that Great Liberator of Vienna and Savior of Western Civilization, Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Masovia, Samogitia, Livonia, Smolensk, Kiev, Volhynia, etc., etc.—for Lucius, such mobility meant not up, but out.

No, from the beginning he hadn’t belonged among them, an accidental sixth child born years after the doctor told his mother she couldn’t conceive again. Were he not the spitting image of his father—tall and big-pawed, with skin pale as alabaster, a shock of blond hair fit for an Icelander, and old man’s ducktail eyebrows even as a little boy—he might have wondered if he was another’s child. But the flushes of ruddiness that gave his father the hale glow of a knight who has just removed his jouster’s helmet, in Lucius looked more like blotches of an embarrassed blush. Watching his brothers and sisters glide through his mother’s receptions, he could never understand their ease, their grace, their force. No matter what he tried—holding a stone in his pocket as a reminder to smile, writing lists of “Chatting Topics”—spontaneity eluded him. Before the parties, he would slink through the salon, attaching to each piece of artwork an idea for conversation: when he saw the portrait of Sobieski he was to speak of holidays; the bust of Chopin should spur him to ask about his guest. Yet, no matter how he prepared, it happened: there would be a moment, a pause—just a second—just a catch—before he—spoke. He could move easily through the shifting choreography of soft gowns and pressed field marshal trousers. But the moment that he approached a cluster of other children, their laughter stopped.

He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place—among a different, silent people—his discomfort would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.

In the beginning, he had been accused of feigning. Stutters appear in childhood, his mother told him, not in a boy his age. He didn’t stutter when he was alone, nor when he spoke of his science magazines or the bird’s nest outside his window. Nor did it afflict him at the aquarium in the Imperial Zoological Collections, where he went to stare for hours at the Grottenolm, blind, translucent salamanders from the Southern Empire, in whom one could watch the magical pulsing of their blood.

But at last, conceding that something might be wrong, she hired a speech expert from Munich, famous for his Textbook of the Disorders of Speech and Language and a metal device called the Zungenapparat, which isolated the labial, palatal, and glottal movements from one another and so promised the repair of sound and speech.

The doctor arrived on a warm summer’s morning, gnawing a hangnail. Humming, he appraised the child, palpating his neck and peering into his ears. There were measurements, sour fingers probed his gums; his mother grew bored and left. At last, the apparatus was applied, and the boy was told to sing “The Happy Hiker.”

He tried. The clamp pinched his lips. The tongue prongs cut, and he spat blood. “Louder!” cried the doctor. “It is working!” His mother returned to find her son baying like a dog, mouth foaming red. Lucius looked between them—Mother—Doctor—Mother—Doctor—as his mother seemed to grow bigger and pinker and the doctor smaller and paler. Oh, you have no idea what you have gotten yourself into, thought the boy, watching the man. And he began to giggle—not an easy task with a Zungenapparat—as the doctor gathered up his tools and fled.

A second doctor tried to hypnotize him, failed, and prescribed herring for oral lubrication. A third, cupping his testicles, declared them sufficient, but finding no movement when the boy was shown the fleshy gymnastics in an illustrated edition of True Secrets of the Convent, he removed his notebook and scrawled “Insufficiency of the Gland.” Then he whispered to Lucius’s mother.

A week later, she had his father take him to a house specializing in virgins, certificated free of syphilis, where he was locked in the plush Ludwig II suite with a country girl from Croatia attired like a singer of the opera buffa. As she was from the south, Lucius asked her if she had heard of the Grottenolm. Yes, she said, her frightened face brightening. Her father had once collected the little salamanders to sell to aquaria across the Empire. Then the two of them marveled at this coincidence of their lives, for, just that week, one of Lucius’s favorites in the Zoological Collection had spawned.

Afterward, when his father asked, “And did you do it?” Lucius answered, “Yes, Father.” And his father, “I don’t believe you. What did you do?” And Lucius, “I did what was to be done.” And his father, “Which is what?” And Lucius, “What I have learned.” And his father, “What have you learned, boy?” And Lucius, remembering a novel of his sister’s, answered, “I have done it in a fiery way.”

“That’s my son,” his father said.

In silence, he endured his parents’ receptions until they allowed him to escape. He would have skipped them altogether, but his mother said the guests would think she was like Walentyna Rozorovska, who hid her crippled daughter in a crate. So Lucius followed as she made her rounds. She was distinctly proud of her narrow waist, and he thought she sometimes kept him near because nothing pleased her more than to have another woman say: “Agnieszka, after six children—so sportive! How can it be?”

Whalebone! Lucius wished to shout. The conversation horrified him. He thought such comments about his birth were vulgar, as if they were complimenting her on her genitalia. He was relieved when she spoke instead of music and architecture, and showed particular interest in the industrialists’ wives and where their husbands had been traveling, and it was only when he was older that he realized how strategic, and ultimately ruthless, such questioning had been.

The King is always hunting, and the Queen is always pregnant, ran the joke about his family, paraphrasing Goethe. But he thought, In many ways, this Queen is both. His sweet-toothed father, a major in the lancers, had been shot in the hip by the Italians at the Battle of Custoza, and had intended to spend the rest of his life happily lounging about his garrison in Kraków, drinking slivovitz and perfecting hand shadows to scare his children. For the first decade of his marriage, fearing disruption to his idyll, the war hero tried to hide the sleepy family mines from Lucius’s mother. Iron? There? Nothing but bat droppings. Copper? Oh, my dear, that’s just a silly rumor. What, they told you there was zinc?

He had known his wife too well. No sooner did she have her hands on the balance sheets than a great rumbling was heard over southern Poland. Within three years, the Krzelewski mines had gone from providing buttons for the army’s tunics and brass for its trumpets to steel and iron for the new railway to Zakopane. Soon she had moved them to Vienna so as to better grip the heart of Empire. It was only fitting, she liked to say. Vienna owed her family, ever since Sobieski liberated Austria from the Turks.

This of course was mentioned only in private. In public, she had no hesitation acquiring the necessary imperial trappings. Commemorative ceramics from Franz Josef’s jubilees soon graced their mantelpieces. She had Klimt paint her portrait, first with Lucius at her side, and then, because she was enthralled by the patterns of gold on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, she had Lucius painted over. Their dynasty of Irish wolfhounds—Puszek I (1873–81), Puszek II (1880–87), Puszek III (1886–96), Puszek IV (1895–1902), etc.—all descended from none other than Empress Sisi’s beloved Shadow.

Each of her children, save the eldest, had been born in Vienna. Władysław, Kazimierz, and Bolesław, Sylwia and Regelinda: names like a procession of Polish saints. By his second decade, they had all moved on. Later Lucius would learn that there were divisions among them, deep divisions, but for most of his childhood, their unity seemed impenetrable. The men drank and the women played piano very well. The men, disappearing with his father on predawn hunts from their estates in Poland and Hungary, drank a lot.

He was not surprised, therefore, that when he had first announced his intention to study medicine, his mother told him it was a field for arrivistes.

He responded that many sons of nobility became doctors. But he knew the answer before it was uttered from her thin, drawn lips.

“Yes. But our kind of doctor is not the kind of doctor you will be.”

She relented in the end. Better than anyone, she knew his limitations. Alone in the beginning, unwelcome in the German medical student associations, he had found Feuermann and Kaminski similarly excluded, trying to hide their discomfort as the other students laughed among themselves.

From the first day, Lucius had thrown himself into his studies. As opposed to his two companions, who had studied at the trade-oriented Realschule, and so had already completed much of the basic sciences, Lucius’s education at the hands of his governesses had consisted mostly of Greek and Latin. To his gang he said that his zoological and botanical studies had stopped at Pliny. When they laughed with him, he was amazed, as he hadn’t meant it as a joke. After that, he pretended he had never heard of Darwin, and liked to say, “This whole gravity business is quite a craze.” But he didn’t mind the remedial courses; there was magic in the choral recitations of Linnaean classification, in the luminous Crookes tubes brought out for physics demonstrations, the lesser alchemy that bubbled in the lines of Erlenmeyer flasks.

If he loved Medicine—yes, this was the word, this giddiness, this jealous guarding against fellow suitors, this pursuit of increasingly delicate secrets to be indulged—if he loved Medicine, what he had not expected was for Her to return his affections. In the beginning, he noticed only this: when he spoke of Her, his stutter vanished. There were no exams until the end of his second year, and so it was only one cold day in December, during his third semester, that there came the first hint that he possessed, in the words of that year’s assessment, “an unusual aptitude for the perception of things that lie beneath the skin.”

The lecturer that day, Grieperkandl, the great anatomist, was of that species of emeriti who believed that most modern medical innovations (such as handwashing) were emasculating. It was in a state of general terror that the students attended his classes, for each week Grieperkandl would call a Praktikant before him, take down his name in a little notebook (always a his; there were but seven women in the class, and Grieperkandl treated them all as nurses), and proceed to submit him to an inquisition of such clinically irreverent arcana that most of their professors would have failed.

It was during a lecture of the anatomy of the hand that Lucius was called to the front of the class. Grieperkandl asked if he had studied for that day—he had—and whether he knew the name of the bones—he did—and whether he would like to recite them. The old professor was standing so close that Lucius could smell the naphthalene on his coat. Grieperkandl rattled his pocket. Inside he had some bones. Would Lucius like to select one and name it? Lucius hesitated; there was nervous laughter in the tiers. Then cautiously, he slid his hand in, his fingers settling on the longest and thinnest of the bones. As he went to remove it, the professor grabbed his wrist. “Any fool can look,” he said. And Lucius, closing his eyes, said scaphoid, and withdrew it, and Grieperkandl said, “Another,” and Lucius said capitate and withdrew it, and Grieperkandl said, “Those are the two largest—that is easy,” and Lucius said lunate, and Grieperkandl, “Another,” and Lucius said hamate, triquetrum, metacarpal, removing each in turn until at last a tiny bone remained, peculiar, too stubby to be a distal phalange, even that of the thumb.

“Toe,” said Lucius, realizing he had sweated through his shirt. “It’s the pinkie toe.”

A hush had come over the class.

And Grieperkandl, unable to prevent a yellow smile from spreading across his face (for, he would say later, he had been waiting twenty-seven years to make the joke), said, “Very good, my son. But whose?”

An unusual aptitude for the perception of things that lie beneath the skin. He copied out these words into his journal, in Polish, German, and Latin, as if he’d found his epitaph. It was a bracing thought for a boy who had grown up mystified by the simplest manners of other people. What if his mother’s pronouncements were false? What if all along he had been simply seeing deeper? When the first Rigorosum came after two years, he scored the highest in the class on all his subjects but physics, where Feuermann edged him out. It seemed impossible. With his governess, he had nearly given up on Greek, cared nothing for the causes of the War of the Austrian Succession, confused Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm with Kaiser Wilhelm and Kaiser Friedrich, and thought philosophy stirred up problems where there were no problems before.

He entered his fifth semester with great anticipation. He had enrolled in Pathology, Bacteriology, and Clinical Diagnosis, and the summer would bring the first lectures in Surgery. But his hopes to leave his books and treat a real, living patient were premature. Instead, in the same vast halls where he had once attended lectures on organic chemistry, he watched his professors from the same great distance. If a patient was brought before them—and even this was rare in the introductory classes—Lucius could scarcely see them, let alone learn how to percuss the liver or palpate swollen nodes.

Sometimes he was called forth as Praktikant. In Neurology, he stood next to the day’s patient, a seventy-two-year-old locksmith from the Italian Tyrol, with such severe aphasia that he could only mutter “Da.” His daughter translated the doctor’s questions into Italian. As the man tried to answer, his mouth opened and closed like a baby bird. “Da. Da!” he said, face red with frustration, as murmurs of fascination and approval filled the hall. Driven on by the lecturer’s aggressive questioning, Lucius diagnosed a tumor of the temporal lobe, trying to keep his thoughts on the science and away from how miserable he was making the old man’s daughter. She had begun to cry, and she kept reaching for her father’s hand. “You will stop that!” his professor shouted at her, slapping her fingers. “You will disturb the learning!” Lucius’s face was burning. He hated the doctor for asking such questions before the daughter, and he hated himself for answering. But he also did not like feeling that he was on the side of the patient, who was inarticulate and weak. So he answered forcefully, with no compassion. His diagnosis of early brainstem herniation and the relentless destruction of the breathing centers and death, was met by rising, even thunderous, applause.

Following his performance, some of the other students approached him and asked him to join their groups. But he had no time for their inadequacies. He couldn’t understand the laziness of those who hired artists to help them remember the anatomy of their cadavers. He was ready to move on, to touch his patients, to cut them open and take out their disease. Even the clinics frustrated him—crowds of eighty would follow their renowned instructor, and merely ten or twenty of them would be allowed to probe a hernia or examine a tumor in a breast. Once, and only once, he was left alone with a patient, a wispy-haired Dalmatian from whose ear canals he extracted enough wax to make a small but working votive candle. The man, who had been diagnosed as deaf for fifteen years, stared at Lucius as if Christ himself had just returned. But the praise, the blessings, the lachrymose kissing of Lucius’s hand embarrassed him. This was what he had trained for? Mining? That his esteemed professor had attributed the deafness to dementia only left him more depressed.

He returned to his books.

By then, only Feuermann could keep up with him. Soon they left the others and studied alone, pushing each other to ever finer diagnostic feats. They memorized poisoning syndromes, the manifestations of obscure tropical parasites, and mischievously applied defunct physical classification systems (phrenology, humoralism) to the other members of their class. When Feuermann said that he could diagnose a dozen conditions by watching a patient’s gait, Lucius countered that he could do so by listening to the gait, and so the two sought out an empty corridor, and Lucius turned to face the wall. Feuermann walked back and forth behind him. Slap went his feet, and slap slap and slide-thump and slide-slide and plop plop. The answers were: sensory ataxia, spastic hemiplegia, Parkinson’s, and fallen arches.

“And this?” asked Feuermann, and his feet went pitter-pitter plop.

But that was easy.

“Dancing, wretched type, chronic, most likely terminal.”

“I have been defeated!” roared Feuermann, as Lucius, utterly pleased with himself, began to tap as well.

He felt at times that Feuermann was the only person who could understand him, and around Feuermann alone, he felt at ease. It was his friend, handsome, already with a bit of a reputation for flirtation among the lay nurses, who persuaded him to go to the brothel on Alserstrasse by arguing that it had once been frequented by the legendary doctors Billroth and Rokitansky; Feuermann, who taught him, with reference to Structure and Function of the Genitalia of the Female (Leipzig, 1824), the principle of titillatio clitoridis. And yet never in the past two years had they spoken of anything that wasn’t at least partially related to medicine. Not once had Feuermann accepted an invitation to Lucius’s palatial home on Cranachgasse. And Lucius never asked what had happened to Feuermann’s parents that led them to flee their village near the Russian border when his friend was still a baby, or why he had no mother. He knew only that his father was a tailor, outfitting his son with suits assembled impeccably from scrap.

Billroth, said Feuermann, would dine on gherkins after coitus; Rokitansky never took his lab coat off. Titillatio had once been prescribed by the great van Swieten to treat the frigidity of Empress Maria Theresa; it was what saved the Empire. Once, from nowhere, Feuermann said, “Perhaps one day we might marry sisters.” Lucius said he thought this was a fine idea and asked if he had read Klamm’s paper on bromides for palpitations of unknown cause.

But of all the cases he studied, it was the neurological ones that fascinated him the most. How extraordinary was the mind! To sense a limb years after amputation! To see ghosts at one’s bedside! To create all the symptoms of pregnancy (swollen abdomen, amenorrhea) by wish alone! The thrill he felt when he solved the most difficult cases was almost sexual. There was a beautiful clarity in the patterns, the possibility of locating a tumor simply by whether it destroyed language or vision, the opportunity to reduce the complexity of other people to the architecture of their cells.

At the university was a professor called Zimmer, famous for his dissections of the thalamus done back in the ’70s, who had later published a book called Radiological Diagnosis of Diseases of the Head. It was Feuermann who found it, Lucius who couldn’t put it away. Soon he was spending so many hours with the library’s copy that he purchased one himself.

Page after page showed radiographs of the head and face. Little arrows illustrated the growths of cancers and subtle hairline fractures. He learned to make out the thin, twisting courses of the sutures, the “Turkish saddle” that held the pituitary, and the darker swirlings of the skull base. But his eyes kept traveling to the smooth dome of the calvarium. There, the light was hazy, like puffs of smoke blown into the skull. Nothing to see… just cloudy shades of grey and lighter grey, tricks of shadow that played upon the eye and yielded nothing. And yet! Thought was there, he told himself, astounded. In that grey haze lay Fear and Love and Memory, the countenances of loved ones, the smell of the wet cellulose, even the vision of the technician the moment the film was shot. Doctor Macewen of Glasgow, one of his gods, had called the brain the dark continent. Before the radiograph, one could only see the living brain in the tiny pearl of optic nerve inside the eye.

He approached Zimmer unannounced in the Department of Neurology.

What was lacking in his book, said Lucius, seated before the old professor, in a room piled high with specimens and slide boxes, What was lacking, with all due respect, Herr Professor Doktor, were images of the vessels. If one could invent an elixir that could be picked up by the radiograph, if one could inject it into arteries and veins and show the twisting tributaries… if one could just resolve this haze…

Zimmer, with the stringy hair and overgrown muttonchops of a professor long sent to pasture, licked something off his monocle before polishing it and placing it before his eye. He squinted as if in disbelief at the student’s impudence. On the wall behind him were portraits of Zimmer’s professor, and his professor’s professor, and his professor’s professor’s professor, as much a royal line as any in medicine, thought Lucius, who prepared himself to be dismissed. But something in the boy’s gangly tactlessness must have intrigued the old man. “We inject mercury to show the vessels in cadavers,” he said at last. “But with live patients, it can’t be done.”

“What of calcium?” asked Lucius a bit vertiginously, but pressing on, “Iodine, bromine… I’ve been reading… If you could see the vessels, you could watch blood flow, you could see the outlines of tumors, strokes, the narrowing of arteries—”

“I know what you could see,” said Zimmer sharply.

“Thoughts,” said Lucius as the old man marked the end of the visit with an arch of his eyebrow, releasing the monocle and catching it in his hand.

But two weeks later Zimmer called him back.

“We will begin in dogs. We can prepare the solution here and inject it at the X-ray machine in the School of Radiology.”

“Dogs?”

Zimmer must have read the unease on the student’s face. “Well, we can’t just use Professor Grieperkandl, can we?”

“Professor Grieperkandl? Well, no, Herr Professor.”

“Our findings would not be generalizable, would they?”

Lucius hesitated. The possibility that a professor of Zimmer’s stature was making a joke about a professor of Grieperkandl’s stature was so far beyond contemplation that Lucius took the question literally at first. But what to answer? Yes, and he would be agreeing to vivisect his old instructor. No, and he would imply that the great anatomist was so abnormal…

“We are not going to experiment on Professor Grieperkandl,” said Zimmer.

“Of course not, Herr Professor!”

His hands twisted. Then Zimmer, clearly amused, opened a tin on his desk and popped a candy inside his mouth. He held another out across the desk.

“Caramel?”

His fingers were dark with tobacco and smelled of chloroform; now Lucius noticed an open jar containing what appeared to be a brainstem on his desk.

For a moment Lucius hesitated, eyes darting to the jar and back.

“Of course, Professor. Thank you, Herr Professor Doktor, sir.”

The main hospital was nearly a kilometer from Zimmer’s lab. For two weeks Lucius brought the dogs there. As none of the fiacres would stop to take the animals, he had to push them in a cart. In the streets, the dogs—those that had survived the procedure—were prone to seizures. On the crowded sidewalks, people turned to watch the pale young man in his loose-fitting suit, wheeling the twitching animals along. He steered far away from children.

The X-ray machine was often broken, and the lines to use it were long. One day he had to wait five hours while the Royal Family had themselves radiographed with their decorations.

He returned to his professor. “How much is an X-ray machine?” he asked.

“To purchase? Ha! Far beyond the budget of this laboratory.”

“I understand, Herr Professor Doktor,” said Lucius, his eyes cast down. “What if it were purchased with a donation, from a family of means?”

For the following weeks, he returned home only to sleep, taking the grand staircase three steps at a time. Past the bust of Chopin and portrait of Sobieski, down the grand hall, with the medieval tapestries and the gilded, Lucius-less Klimt.

He rose before dawn. He injected mercury salts and solutions of calcium, but the images were poor. Oil suspensions provided brilliant images of the veins, but they formed emboli. Iodine and bromine showed more promise, but too much killed the animal, while lesser quantities didn’t show up on the films. His increasing frustration was equaled only by the enthusiasm of his advisor. Zimmer’s elixir, the old man took to calling the substance that was yet to be, and he began to speculate whether minute increases of blood flow could be detected in areas of greatest activity. Ask them to move an arm, said Zimmer, and we might see a corresponding flood of light within the motor cortex, while speech would illuminate the temporal lobe. One day, with men.

And Lucius thought, I said that the very first day we met.

The dream of being able to see another person’s thinking was all that retained him.

Soon it was clear that they were far from any discovery. The few images they had were too blurry to be of much use, and Zimmer refused to publish them out of fear that another professor would steal his research. Now Lucius regretted having ever proposed the idea. He was sick of killing the poor dogs—eight by spring. At home, Puszek (VII) fled him, as if he knew. He had wasted time. Now Feuermann teased Lucius that it reminded him of the days when, slipping brain sections into their microscopes, the two of them pretended to see the snakelike curl of envy, or desire’s glimmering curve.

“A lovely idea, Krzelewski. But you must know when to stop.”

Still, Lucius would not relent.

Most classmates made up for limited clinical training by spending their vacations volunteering in provincial hospitals. Lancing milkmaids’ boils, his mother called it, so Feuermann went alone, set broken legs, repaired a pitchfork wound, pronounced a man dead from rabies, and delivered nine babies to fertile country girls so robust they sometimes walked in from the fields in labor. Three weeks later, back at their table at Café Landtmann, Lucius listened as his friend described each case in detail, his tan, child-birthing forearms waving his confident, child-birthing fingers in the air. He didn’t know what made him more jealous: the meals the peasants prepared in gratitude or the sunburnt girls who kissed Feuermann’s palm. Or the chance to deliver a baby using procedures he had only practiced on the satin vagina of a manikin. He had spent the month chasing a mix of iodine and bromine, only to find that Zimmer had switched the labels on the flasks.

“I can’t describe it, truly, words can’t do it justice,” said Feuermann, flipping a coin onto the silver platter of the waiter. “Next summer, we’ll go together. You haven’t lived until you’ve held one in your arms.”

“A milkmaid?” Lucius joked weakly.

“A baby, a real live baby. Pink and lusty. Screaming with life.”

The last straw came in May 1914.

That afternoon, Zimmer called him conspiratorially to his office. He needed Lucius’s help, he said. He had a very peculiar case.

For a moment, Lucius felt that old excitement. “What sort of case, Herr Professor?”

“A perplexing condition.”

“Indeed.”

“Very mysterious.”

“Herr Professor is being youthfully playful.”

“A case of severe coccygeal ichthyoidization.”

“Sorry, Herr Professor?”

Now Zimmer could not control his giggling. “Mermaids, Krzelewski. In the Medical Museum.”

Since beginning medical school, Lucius had heard the rumor. The museum, with objects from the famous Cabinet of Wonders of Rudolf II, was said to contain, among its centuries of priceless artifacts, a pair of dwarfs, three formalin-preserved angels, and several mermaids gifted to the Emperor after washing up on foreign shores. But no student had ever been inside.

“Herr Professor has a key?”

His answer was a smile, mischievous, revealing gums and pebbly teeth.

They went down that night, after the curator had left.

The hall was dark. They passed tables of torture implements, jars of fetal malformations, a collection of dodo beaks and pickled terrapins, and a shrunken Amazonian head. At last they arrived at a distant shelf. There they were. Not some lovely young girls floating in a tank, as Lucius had always imagined, but two shriveled corpses the size of babies, the dried skin of their faces pulled back over the teeth, the torsos narrowing before they merged into scaly tails.

Zimmer had brought a rucksack. He opened it and motioned for Lucius to set one of the bodies inside. They would take it up to the X-ray machine, to see if the lumbar spine articulated with the vertebrae of the tail.

“With all due respect, Herr Professor,” said Lucius, feeling a faint despondency sneak into his voice. “I really doubt it does.”

“Look at the surface—one sees no glue, no thread.”

“It is a very good hoax, Herr Professor.”

But Zimmer had his monocle on and was peering into the first one’s mouth.

“Herr Professor. Do you really think it is wise to take them? They look… crispy. What if one breaks?”

Zimmer rapped it gavel-like against the shelf. “Very strong,” he said.

Lucius took it, gently. It was light, the skin like dry leather. It seemed to be pinching its eyes shut. It looked outraged.

“Come,” Zimmer said, slipping it inside the bag.

The Medical Museum sat in the basement. They climbed the stairs and walked down the main hall, lined with statues of Vienna’s great physicians. Only a distant light was on. Lucius was thankful that it was evening and his classmates had gone home. The sound of the mermaid rubbing against the canvas of the bag seemed even louder than his footsteps.

They were about to exit, when they heard a voice. “Herr Professor Zimmer!” They stopped, and Lucius turned to see the rector, with a small, dark-haired woman at his side.

The rector approached Zimmer with a broad smile, lifting his arms in greeting.

Zimmer scarcely noticed him. Instead he took the woman’s hand.

“Ah, Madame Professor. What brings you to Vienna?”

“A lecture, Herr Professor,” she answered in accented German. “It’s all lectures these days.”

The rector now had noticed Lucius. To the woman, he said, “This is one of Vienna’s finer students. Kerzelowski… ahem… Kurslawski…”

“K-she-lev-ski,” said Lucius, despite his better instincts. “In Polish, the Krze is pronounced…”

“Of course!” The rector turned. “You’ve heard of Madame Professor Curie?”

Lucius froze. Madame Marie Skłodowska Curie. He dropped his head. “A great honor,” he murmured reverentially. Two Nobel Prizes: in the Polish community of Vienna she was a saint.

Madame Curie smiled. In Polish, she said, “Krzelewski—a Pole?”

“Yes, Madame Professor.”

She leaned in conspiratorially. “What a relief! My God, how sick I am of speaking German.”

Lucius looked uncomfortably at the men, who seemed pleased to see that Madame Curie had found a conversation mate. Not knowing what to say, he replied, “Polish is a beautiful language.”

But the great chemist seemed not to have registered how awkward this sounded. In German, she said to the rector, “Might we bring them to supper? I am happy to meet a fellow countryman.” Then in Polish, to Lucius, “These old men are so boring! I am ready to die.”

Lucius looked to Zimmer, hoping his professor might intervene and suggest they drop the rucksack off at his office, but he seemed to have forgotten that Lucius was still carrying it beneath his arm.

They dined that night at Meissl und Schadn. Madame Curie asked to stretch her legs, and so they walked. Along the Ringstrasse, they were followed at a short distance by a pair of mangy dogs, who whined hungrily at the rucksack. At the door, the maître d’ offered to take the bag, but Lucius said politely that it wasn’t necessary, and as deftly as possible, he slipped it beneath his chair. At the beginning of the meal, Zimmer spoke at some length about his radiological work, and Madame Curie asked sharp questions about contrast agents, most of which Zimmer asked Lucius to field. They had just begun dessert, when the great chemist asked the two professors permission to speak in Polish.

“Of course!”

To Lucius she said, “What’s in the bag?”

“The bag, Madame Professor?”

“Don’t play stupid, young man. Who brings a rucksack into Meissl und Schadn and tries to hide it under the table? It must be something really precious.” She winked. “I have spent the last half hour palpating it with my foot.”

“It is a mermaid, Madame Professor,” said Lucius, who did not know what else to say.

Her eyebrows rose. “Indeed! A dried one?”

“Yes… a dried one, Madame Professor. How did you know?”

“Well, she’s not preserved or we would smell the chloroform. And she’s not alive, as I’d imagine she’d be struggling. I’d be struggling. It is a she, isn’t it? Our exotic things are always female.”

Lucius looked anxiously about. “I have not been able to confirm, Madame Professor. I am unfamiliar with the anatomy.” Then in horror, he realized the unfortunate way this could be misunderstood. Thankful for the dark light of the restaurant, he added, quickly, “I have never seen a mermaid before.”

She lowered her voice. “May I see?”

“Now, Madame Professor?” asked Lucius.

“After,” she said.

When the meal ended, she said, “Can the student walk me home?”

The rector, who seemed to want this honor for himself, reluctantly agreed. Zimmer, by then completely drunk, waved Lucius off.

She was staying at the Metropole. Inside the lobby, as they waited for the lift, Lucius could sense the eyes of the bellhop appraise the rendezvous. Oh, but it is not what you are thinking, thought Lucius, though a little flattered by the suggestion. Just looking at a mermaid, that is all…

Upstairs, she led him into the bathroom, with a tall four-legged tub. Lucius opened the rucksack, and she lifted the creature out.

“Oh, dear,” she said. She held it close to the light. In the mirror, Lucius could see all three of them. “How very ugly!” she said. She turned it. “The face looks very much like the old American president Theodore Roosevelt, don’t you think? If she had a little moustache and glasses…”

“Yes, Madame Professor. If the American president were desiccated and had a tail, I think they would look very much the same.”

Lucius, who had the student’s habit of answering in complete sentences that recapitulated the question and expanded it slightly, had actually not meant this to be a joke, but Madame Curie began to laugh. Then she shook her head. “Why in the world are you carrying this?”

“Professor Zimmer… wanted to radiograph it… It is from the collection of Rudolf II. A gift from the Sultan. He thought he might see if the vertebrae of the tail and thorax articulated…”

“Articulated? He actually believes it’s real?”

“It is a possibility he—we—have considered.” In the mirror, Lucius could see his face turning bright red. “The radiograph has allowed the investigation of phenomena…”

She interrupted sharply, “And what does the student think?”

“I think it is a hoax, Madame Professor. I believe it is a monkey and a sarcopterygian fish.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I can see the thread, Madame Professor. See, if you look closely, under this scale.”

He showed her.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “You’re trapped, aren’t you?” She handed the mermaid back. Then, “The rector speaks of you with admiration. If you don’t mind some personal advice, between countrymen. Save yourself. Genius favors the young. You are running out of time.”

But leaving his professor was not that easy.

Against his better judgment, he could not help but feel a filial affection. By then, he had begun to dream the two of them addressed each other with the informal du. So when Zimmer declared the radiographs “inconclusive,” Lucius told the old man that he needed to spend more time back in the library, in order to find a compound that could better serve their needs.

He began to attend class again.

Pathological Anatomy, with lab and lectures.

Pathological Histology, with lab and lectures.

Pathological Anatomy, with autopsy work (Feuermann: “At last, a patient!”).

General Pharmacology, with its long lists of drugs to memorize, but no one to prescribe them to.

Back in the amphitheaters, peering down onto the stage.

And on. Until the summer of his third year, when, with two years of studies remaining and his impatience again almost unbearable, fortune intervened, this time bursting from the pistol of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and into the bodies of the archduke and his wife.