The Winter Soldier

15.

In the months that followed, he found shelter in Medicine’s routine.

Days began at six, with rounds; at ten they took the patients out to the palace grounds for rehabilitation exercises. At noon they ate. Two o’clock brought leisure time for cards or music. There was a marching band for one-armed soldiers, table tennis for the one-legged, and a theater group for those regaining the ability to speak. At four they bathed. At six they ate again. Those able enough helped clean the wards at seven. Lights were out at eight.

He scarcely left the hospital, choosing to sleep on the cot in the library, at times eating with the patients. They were quiet affairs compared to the Lemnowice meals fueled by song and schnapps, but nonetheless companionable. Other times, he just took surreptitious bites from a hunk of kielbasa he kept in a pocket of his coat.

He worked mostly alone. Only a week had passed when Zimmer, manifestly more interested in exploring the archduchess’s cabinet of curiosities in the third-floor study of the palace, turned clinical responsibilities over to him.

This, Lucius had come to understand, was probably for the best. With the physician shortage, the Imperial and Royal Army had not only graduated students early and enlisted dentists and veterinarians for medical duty, but had also brought men like Zimmer out of retirement, pathologists and comparative anatomists who had long ago given up their white coats for postmortem aprons. Despite the well-stocked medicine cabinet, Zimmer seemed to think most problems could be cured with atropine, insisted on patent medications that no one had ever heard of, and still prescribed milk diets for pneumonia, though every respectable textbook since 1900 said that oatmeal was the best. He liked the mantra “Death is part of life.” And there was the matter of his vision, the oily monocle he had a habit of misplacing, the flies he chased with his ivory flyswatter, flies that Lucius soon realized only Zimmer could see.

At first, alone again, Lucius had the vertiginous feeling that he was back in Lemnowice, far out of his depth. Most of the nurses had been there since the founding of the rehabilitation hospital and carried out their duties with a brisk, if stern, efficiency. Like Margarete, they didn’t hesitate to correct him, though quietly, with fewer interruptions, exhortations, and general bossing-about. But as the days went on, he began to settle in. He created regimens of sleep and exercise and diet, ordered applications of turpentine and eucalyptus oil in cases of bronchitis, and painted infected tonsils with perchloride of iron. For constipation, he prescribed castor oil, and bismuth for diarrhea. He gave strychnine for heart failure, beef tea for skin infections, and morphine for pain and melancholy. For listlessness and nostalgia, he relied on cigarettes, unless the patient had an irritable heart, in which case he gave bromides, almond milk, or brandy, depending on what the nurses could rustle up.

For the more complicated patients, Lucius sought out his old professor, finding him in his gilded consultation room, smoking tobacco in a pipe scavenged from the wunderkammer, with a bezoar bowl and scrimshawed stem that Zimmer claimed had been hollowed from the coccyx of the favorite servant of Franz II.

“With due respect, Herr Professor, really, I wouldn’t put that in your mouth.”

He blew rings as Lucius told him about the patients with mysterious patterns of pain or palsy. At times he drifted into reveries, and at times Lucius worried if he’d had a stroke. But then, when the answer was needed, the old man’s face lit up, and his fingers traced the paths of cranial nerves or the twisting decussation of the pyramids, as he extracted an explanation of great beauty and precision from the air. It was like being back in the lecture halls again, thought Lucius, watching those old men so gifted in diagnosis, so ignorant of cure.

Other times, his professor asked him about his cases at the front.

Then, Zimmer leaned back in his chair, chewed his pipe stem sensuously, and crossed his hands over his belly like a man who has just enjoyed a filling meal and is preparing for dessert. Certainly, Lucius must have seen some extraordinary pathology!

“Yes… some extraordinary pathology, Herr Professor.”

“They say there were such magnificent, beautiful cases of war nerves. Our head and spine wounds seem so common in comparison, so dull…”

Lucius looked down into his hands. “Such cases, Herr Professor, yes…”

And he told him of the infantryman with his pigeon toes and twisted neck, the Czech sergeant who tasted rotting bodies in his broth, and the cook who had collided with the bayoneted belly of a hanging girl.

He could not bring himself to speak of Horváth. Zimmer, he knew, would focus on the anguished rocking, the seemingly miraculous response to Veronal. But Lucius wasn’t asking for a scientific explanation, and he had no wish to discuss miracles. His belief in miracles was what had led to Horváth’s Anbinden. What he wanted to know was whether Zimmer had ever committed such an error, if he had lost a patient, how he’d atoned.

Briefly, he thought: I could tell Zimmer of the case of a young doctor suffering from guilt and dreams and winter visions. How once the doctor had been in love and this had seemed to save him from his crimes, but then he’d lost the woman that he loved. How still he felt her presence with him always, watching, bidding patience with the sickest soldiers, marveling at the healing of a wound. How he missed her. How now he spent his free hours wandering, wondering how life could begin again.

Instead, he told him of his patient who had lost his right leg to a derailed train car, and then was unable to move his left.

“Extraordinary,” said his professor. “No wound at all. At least not one that you could see.”

In April, Lucius was examining a patient with pneumonia named Simmler, when a new patient was carried in by stretcher, a man who looked so much like József Horváth that Lucius felt a darkness lower itself across the world and thought he might be sick.

“Doctor?”

Simmler was looking at Lucius’s hand, the bell of the stethoscope now shaking. Hastily, he pressed it to Simmler’s torso and gripped his shoulder. “Breathe,” he said. “There. Deep breaths, just breathe.”

The new man was an Austrian, his skull broken by a shell. Like Horváth, he remained curled up in his bed, though Veronal did nothing to loosen him. Sometimes, they could get him to straighten out his legs, to take some steps, but mostly he just stared back in confusion. There was little urgent about the case; the soldier had been that way for months. But throughout the day, Lucius constantly returned to him, checked and double-checked his medications, and took the man’s vital signs himself. Sitting at his bedside, he helped him eat, spooning his soup as Margarete had done for Horváth, and walked him, as Margarete had walked Horváth, along the palace halls. At last, the nurses stopped him. His dedication was commendable, they told him, shortly before the soldier was discharged home, unchanged. But feeding, walking, speech therapy: this was their responsibility. He need not involve himself so intimately in the care of any single patient. It was his job just to tell them what to do.

As the days lengthened, he found himself increasingly at 14 Cranachgasse.

It did not seem deliberate at first. He went there at times to look at his old textbooks, to eat, or check for mail that never came. But slowly, he felt himself dismantling the ramparts he’d erected.

He began to join his parents for their meals. Despite the food shortages, they ate well; the food came from the black market, purchased by Jadwiga from girls who lingered in the Naschmarkt with baby carriages filled with beets or braids of garlic. Sometimes there was not enough, and sometimes the rye was spoiled or the milk rancid, but compared to the rest of the city, they were very lucky. He had been hungry enough times to feel guilty that he was eating while in the streets people attacked and overturned the food wagons, and when he could, he brought chocolates and pralines to share with his patients, smuggled all the way from Warsaw. Then, in June, the police turned up to question him about rumors that the Lamberg Palace was getting dessert while the rest of the city was starving. He lied; the gift of a grateful patient, he told them, but they persisted until he realized they wanted some themselves.

At the table, the nightmares of his first few days were never spoken of, nor did his mother ever mention her interference with his commission. Instead, increasingly busy with new steelworks in southern Poland, she listened with curiosity when he described the derricks at Sloboda Rungurska. It was helpful, she said, to have a “firsthand” observation, and she quizzed him on what he remembered of the bridges and the rails.

But of all the changes, Lucius sensed the greatest was with his father. Seeking Lucius out alone, Retired Major Zbigniew Krzelewski still spoke of cavalry skirmishes vastly different from the war Lucius had experienced. And still, when Lucius found the courage to ask the hardest questions—Did he dream of the fighting at Custoza? Had he seen things he couldn’t forget?—the retired major mostly answered with enthusiastic tales of heroic comrades who crawled bleeding over the bodies so they could fire one last musket bullet into the Italian charge. Indeed, for months his father had persisted in a seeming unawareness that Lucius had served as a doctor, not a soldier. But as this sank in, something else seemed to be happening, as if talking to his father about uniforms and heraldry could return him, briefly, to the place he’d left behind.

Was it true that German dragoons wore the same pickelhaube as the infantry? his father asked him. And the Guards Cuirassiers no longer wore a breastplate? Ah, but Lucius was in the east, and the Cuirassiers were mostly in the west. And how did he think the Hungarian cavalry compared to the Austrians and Germans?

The lancers Lucius described from an early firefight near Lemnowice were of particular interest to him. His lancers. But how appalling that they weren’t wearing their czapkas!

“It makes them easy targets for the sharpshooters, Father.”

His hands went up. “You think we didn’t have sharpshooters!”

And no plastron, either?

“It was twenty below, Father. They wore greatcoats like everybody else.”

“You think we didn’t have the cold?”

But nothing excited him as much as the seven or eight minutes Lucius spent fleeing Cossacks. An uphill charge! Through the woods! And were they carrying sabers or muskets? Both! God in heaven. Did he see their saddles? Did their jackets have the ornamental cartridge loops? He had heard the Russians had abandoned them in the name of saving thread.

“I couldn’t see. I was being chased.”

“On a hussar’s horse.”

“Yes. The rider was killed. I took his horse.”

His father’s eyes sparkled as he stroked his moustache. “That is extraordinary. You just leapt on. Like that.”

Still his father was appalled to think of brave hussars on the run. If they still wore wings, surely the Cossacks would have given it second thought.

“Have I told you the advantages of wings?” he asked.

“You have.”

“Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to see a winged horseman charging you with his lance?”

“It would be really, really terrifying, Father.”

It was then that Lucius sensed that in his father’s gaze, he was seeing something close to love. And Major Krzelewski did something he had never done in Lucius’s memory: he reached out and gently touched Lucius’s cheek.

“A hussar’s horse! That means he died, and you survived. My son! A doctor, and even Cossacks couldn’t chase you down.”

But nothing pleased his father more than huddling over the war map in the sunroom with his friends. Indeed, he had never been so industrious since the beginnings of his unemployment in 1867. But the map, Lucius realized, was more than just the quaint pastime for a group of old nostalgic soldiers who liked to dress up in waxed riding boots and tasseled parade helmets. Many of the old nostalgic soldiers still had positions in the army, and all of them had old nostalgic friends with positions in the army, and during the long hours playing tarock and drinking, they spoke of little else. The maps printed in the newspapers were often wildly inaccurate, and of course subject to censorship, while his father sometimes updated his several times a day.

As the months passed, Lucius watched the little green, blue, red, yellow, and black cubes murder each other for tiny swaths of cardboard. And while he let his father explain the western trench systems, or the alpine battles in Italy, his eyes kept returning to one spot, to the left of the T in the word KARPATEN, and below the w in Nadworna. There, a tiny hatch mark like a thousand others, marked a change in elevation. There. As if something magical linked this tiny scratch of ink to the mountains far away.

Thinking, When the fighting retreats, when the rails open, I’ll go back to find her. There, in the one place I have yet to look.

Through the first six months of 1917, the Russian Seventh Army—a blue piece the size of his finger—sat on Kolomea, its shadow falling ominously over the hatch mark that was Lemnowice. In June, to his dismay, the piece began to advance even farther: another offensive, again led by Brusilov. But then word came that Russian soldiers, sick of fighting, were beginning to desert.

By July, the Russian cube had inched back east. By August, it no longer even cast late-evening shadows, as the Carpathians once again fell under German black and Austrian green.

But there was no way for him to get to Lemnowice. Quietly, not wishing to ruffle Zimmer, he had inquired about a transfer east. At first the clerk in the Medical Office had seemed receptive to the proposal. It should be easy to find a volunteer replacement who wished to serve back in the comfort of Vienna.

Fearing the interference of his mother, Lucius gave the address of a café. Then, for a month, he waited, only to hear his transfer was “no longer considered a priority”; with the war quieting in Galicia, and the slow shift of soldiers from frontline hospitals, even Vienna was seeing shortages of physicians. This already confirmed what he had suspected with growing dread. Through the summer, he had seen their census grow; by September, new men were coming daily, forcing them to open wards on the second and third floors.

Then, in November, Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and peace negotiations began between Russia and the Central Powers, culminating in the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March. Neither event should have had much of an impact on the timeless practice of medicine, had there not been by then, according to the rumors (for the official papers gave much lower numbers), nearly two million Imperial and Royal prisoners of war in Russian camps ready to come home.

The flow of soldiers, already heavy by the New Year, became a flood. They came by the trainload, piling into freezing cattle cars and clinging to the roofs. Platforms in the North Station were soon transformed into ad hoc wards because there weren’t enough hospitals to take them in. By then, the palace, its rooftop glinting with snow, had all but ceased to be a neurological service. It was like working in the field again. In addition to fractures and amputations, the men brought malaria and Volhynian fever, frostbite from the Russian winters, and cholera caught in the camps. Zimmer had come down with pneumonia, and together, Lucius and the nurses dragged away the clanking rehabilitation equipment to make more space for beds. They laid out cots, then blankets on the floor. When the first cases of typhus appeared, they received a mobile delousing and disinfection station, with a tent and rusty boiler, set up beneath the plane trees on the palace lawn.

Surely, thought Lucius at times, there couldn’t be this many soldiers, but he had seen them in their splendored millions as they’d marched out toward the front. It was as if the war were contracting under some mysterious force of gravity. As the winter drew on, it was almost possible to read events in distant places by the mud on the men’s shoes and trousers: the dark, rancid earth of Belgium, the white clay of the Dolomites, the pine needles embedded in the wool socks of the men from the Carpathians. Overwhelmed, he petitioned the War Office for another doctor, begged the archduchess, and asked his mother to use her influences. But even his mother was no match for typhus. Eventually, the archduchess secured a consultant for relief on every second Sunday, an Austrian from Innsbruck who listened to the tales of Zimmer with scarcely disguised horror. Lucius was given a portable bacteriological laboratory to quantify wound organisms, but no eosin to stain them; an X-ray machine to aid the extraction of foreign bodies, but never enough film. The rubber on the nasogastric tubes was old and cracked, and flies drugged themselves on mixtures of glucose and morphine that leaked down onto the patients’ beds. Every week brought another shortage of the phenobarbital he used for seizures. In March, in the middle of another fuel shortage, and unable to wait for spring, they chopped down the plane trees to heat the stoves.

In April, exhausted, he received a note from his mother, inviting him to dine.

It arrived at the hospital by messenger, a little man in livery and a Tyrolean hat, a spray of blackbird feathers in its corded band. This was the first time she had written to him there. There was no explanation. “She said nothing of an emergency?” asked Lucius. In his hands, he held a large syringe to draw off the blood that had slowly gathered around one of his patient’s lungs.

The man shook his head. “She said you might ask. No, no emergency. She only misses your company, the lady said.”

This was highly unlikely; and his mother knew he would think so, too. But it left no room to turn the invitation down.

It had been two weeks since he had stepped outside the hospital. In the streets, the last snow had melted, and little bursts of fireweed and pimpernel had appeared between the cobbles. On the Beltway, a small parade of children from the War Orphan Society was marching behind a stern drum major. The air was cool, cut with the smell of horse dung that plopped unceremoniously in a line of listless fiacres waiting for their fares.

His mother was alone when he found her, at the long dining room table that the family had brought with them to Vienna. She wore a dress of pleated pale-blue silk. A webbed necklace of pearls spanned her bare throat; her bracelets were of silver filigree. Nothing she would dare wear out, among the crowds in all their threadbare, lest she be set upon as unpatriotic. Posture martial; hair pinned tightly to her head.

A corner of the table had been set, intimately, for two, near where—his mother liked to boast—a lovesick Jagiellonian prince once carved the initials of his beloved, though everyone in the family knew it had been Lucius’s oldest brother, Władysław.

He kissed her hand.

“And Father?”

“Hunting, with Kasinowski.”

Duke of Bielsko-Biała and Katowice.

“The blind one?”

“Not completely, Lucius.”

“Mother isn’t worried he may shoot Father accidentally?”

She smiled with her perfect teeth. There was no way faster to her affections than ridiculing other aristocratic families. “As long as we don’t have to mount his head,” she said. “After the zebus, we’ve hardly any space.” She nodded toward the line of trophies in the neighboring sunroom.

“Ibexes, Mother. Ibexes.”

“Of course.” She touched her temple. “My son the scientist.”

Then she withdrew her hand. “You must be famished, with the slop they feed you at the hospital. Shall we eat?”

They sat. A satin cushion rested at the small of his back, a detail which did not escape his notice, for she prized the chairs ornamented with rococo roses, which kept her guests from getting too comfortable to dislodge. This will not be brief, he thought. The table was set with white damask and white and yellow tulips. China and crystal had been arranged so that he sat at her right hand, while she sat at the table’s head. Behind him the vast fireplace. Large enough, she liked to say, to cook Franz Josef, figure of speech. A joke, of course, but he was aware that she had replaced the commemorative ceramics from the Emperor’s jubilee that once sat proudly on their mantel. His view gave out onto the window; hers to the expanse of the table, the portraits of her bloodline in their furs and armor, the pillars of yellow marble that marked the entrance to the sunroom.

Jadwiga appeared in a high black collar and decorative lace apron, pushing a service tray loaded with dinner: cabbage rolls in tomato sauce and sour cream, a plate of blood sausage, potatoes spiced with marjoram and onion, pork sirloin in mushroom gravy. A row of dumplings, stuffed with duck.

“My,” said Lucius, looking up at her. “You must have canvassed half the city.” He knew the risks of the black market. The papers loved to report the arrests of smugglers. Even 14 Cranachgasse hadn’t known beef for months.

Jadwiga curtsied proudly and vanished behind a swinging door. Usually she waited; his mother must have asked to be alone.

“Eat, Lucius,” his mother said.

As he ate, she spoke of politics, the civil war in Russia, the slowly accumulating treaties, the squabbles among the Austrian command. She praised President Wilson, his Fourteen Points, and the promise of an independent Poland. A true independent Poland, she said, “her territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access…”

“…to the sea.” Lucius had joined her. “I know.”

It was only a matter of time, she said. The sea! Poland hadn’t dipped her toes since 1795.

But by then he knew this was all a prelude to something else.

She broke off and briefly touched the pearls around her neck. Her gaze drifted across his face, the fireplace, a decorative porcelain clock of Hannibal and his elephants that graced a far credenza, the hanging portrait of Sobieski with his panther cloak and laurels. There she stopped, as if she were conferring. Then her eyes turned back to Lucius. He had the sense of a bird of prey, circling, feathers shivering, before a strike.

“I think that you should take a wife.”

His knife paused, mid-dumpling. A wife. He managed to swallow what he was chewing. “Mother, yes. Go on.”

The House of Habsburg, she told him, was at death’s door, as certainly he knew. The future no longer lay in Title, but in Capital. His brothers’ countess wives, his sisters’ margrave husbands: all bearers of titles to a world that wouldn’t survive the year. She had seen the future; it sat prettily on the plush sofas of the drawing rooms of men with controlling stock in steelworks, oil fields, and mines.

He forced himself to take another bite. “You can’t be serious, Mother.”

“My son knows me as someone who likes to joke?”

She had not touched her plate. He saw that she was waiting. Cautiously, he advanced. “I still have to spend most nights at the hospital. With the POW return, things have only gotten worse. It is hardly what one would expect of a devoted husband…”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “Did someone use the word devoted? My son is one of the few men in Vienna who isn’t a cripple or a shirker. I’d think your wife would be quite happy with whatever she is getting.”

He stared at her, trying to assess the degree of her conviction. She was smiling at him, though it seemed more a baring of her teeth. Now he understood why this needed to await his father’s absence; his father still held to notions like romantic love.

“This is quite sudden,” he said. “Of course, I will need time to think about it.”

“No, Lucius. Actually, there is no time to think about it. Men are already returning home. Marriage is a market like any other. And a very liquid market, I should add. You can imagine the effect that Armistice will have on supply.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. Above him, the candles flickered on a massive staghorn chandelier. He looked past them, to the window, the square of evening sky.

“Mother isn’t anything if not blunt.”

“My interest is yours,” she said, now utterly still. “You are how old?”

“Please, Mother. You don’t need me to say it. I believe you were present at my birth.”

“I do need you to say it.”

“Mother—”

“How old?”

A sigh as he relented. “Twenty-six.”

“Tell me about the girl you left in Galicia.”

“Sorry?”

Now, for the first time, she picked up a fork and knife, transferred a single pierogi from the warmed platter to her plate, and cut into it, its corner yielding with a tiny burst of steam.

“I am waiting, Lucius. Tell me. It is either that, or I must take you for an invert, though you have none of the panache. There was a girl.”

In the window beyond her, a flock of starlings rose slowly from the shingles of the neighboring rooftop, lifted like a conjurer’s cape. It soared upward, curling upon itself before it burst into a larger, fluttering orb. He said, slowly, “I worked in a field hospital. I’ve told you many times.”

“Yes, yes of course you have.”

“There was no girl.”

“No, of course not. Not a single nurse. Quite a hospital, without a nurse.”

“There was a nursing sister. From the order of Saint Catherine.”

Briefly then, he saw her, laughing, skin cool with water, warm with sunlight, as she rose above him on the riverbank.

“Pretty?”

“Mother. I can’t believe we are discussing this.”

“Polish or Austrian? Do I dare ask about her family? Lucius, your ears have turned bright red.”

“There was no one, I said—”

“No? Then to whom were you writing those letters you tore up so diligently? Why were you constantly checking the post?”

A pause; no answer. He could claim that it was Feuermann or another comrade. But he knew, and knew she knew, when she had won.

“Lucius…” She leaned forward and placed her hand on his. “May I offer some motherly advice? You’ve been home for almost two years. If she had wanted, she would have written to you. Unless she couldn’t read.”

The door behind them opened, as Jadwiga’s head emerged to survey the table. His mother waved her away. Outside, the starlings had returned, a vortex, a lens, a greater bird. Not two years—he wanted to say—just fourteen months. But this didn’t count the time that he had sought her from the trains.

Softer now, his mother said, “You act as if I’m against you. But this…” She pushed down on his hand. “This is me. This is my flesh. You can’t hide in the hospital forever. We are talking about your life.”

She withdrew, sat back, her posture still impeccable. From a silver case, she extracted a long cigarette.

He said, “And I thought we were talking about Capital.”

“I didn’t say marry a laundry girl. I’ll select the menu. You choose the dish.”

Back on the wards, he waited for the messenger to return with another summons. But Agnieszka Krzelewska, he later realized, was cleverer than this. She had said what for the passing months he’d been unable to admit. How long was he to sit in mourning? He’d canvassed half the hospitals in eastern Galicia for Margarete. Short of heading off to Lemnowice himself, which, without permission, essentially meant desertion, he’d reached an end.

And there were other thoughts, at first ignored, now unavoidable. Margarete could, after all, have sought him out. If she couldn’t travel, she knew his name, knew how to write. This would have been easy. A nurse might be lost among the great movements of people, but not a medical lieutenant. If mail could find him at a mountain field hospital, it could find him in Vienna. He’d written to Feuermann with just his name and regiment; by field post, she wouldn’t even need a stamp.

For another week, he waited for his mother’s messenger, but nothing. This wasn’t, he knew, an oversight. His mother did not commit oversights. The seed had been planted; she was just giving it time to grow.

And it was spring. Around the city, on the boulevards, in the public gardens, he saw soldiers reunited with their sweethearts. Hemlines had risen, just a little. Whether it was the cloth rations, or the weather, or a kind of recklessness unleashed by so much deprivation, he didn’t know. But ankles were everywhere, and necks. Because all jewelry had ostensibly been donated to the war effort, the girls began to decorate themselves with little wildflowers, plucked from untended gardens and tucked into a collar button or a hat. Now, when his patients’ families came to visit them in the hospital, he found himself looking at the young wives doting on their injured husbands and felt a twinge of longing. It seemed like madness to feel envy for a soldier paralyzed below his neck, or a man forced to wear a tin-face prosthetic so as not to scare his children. But the wives always made themselves so pretty when they went to see their husbands, and the accents of the Czechs and Slovenians were really lovely, and sometimes when they thanked him, they even offered him their hands. Just for a moment, and only for him to grasp their fingers lightly while accepting their gratitude, and not to raise them to his lips, as if meeting among friends.

Other times, he spied the rustling of bedsheets in a corner. A blush, skirts shifting, a button opened on a blouse. It didn’t matter, he tried to tell himself; he should be happy that the soldiers could find even some fleeting pleasure. But by then it was undeniable, the longing, right here, in his chest.

With spring, the crowding, his mother’s offer, the arrival of the soldiers’ pretty wives, he began again to walk. Past the palaces of the Landstrasse, the barracks off the Karlsplatz, the prostitutes stirring along the treeless stretches of the Ring. Past the shuttered Opera House, the statue of Goethe in the Imperial and Royal Garden, daisies bursting about his feet. To the canal, to St. Stephen’s, to the North Station to watch the trains come in.

One afternoon, in late April, relieved for several hours by the visiting consultant, he found himself in the Maria-Josefa Park, near the Arsenal and South Station. It had rained much of the week, and with the respite, the park was filled with families and strolling couples and small crowds of furloughed soldiers who flirted with the governesses and trinket-selling girls. He had brought with him a pair of volumes from the Army Medical Journal, and settled on a bench in the middle of the park, not far from an empty fountain, where Neptune, whitewashed with pigeon droppings, rose upon a school of dolphins bursting from marble waves. It was humid; the sky was low, the color of burnished steel. He tried to read, but his mind was constantly returning to Margarete and his mother’s offer, when the sound of laughter rose from a crowd gathered in the broad walk just beyond the laburnums, near the entrance to the park.

He ignored it at first. The streets were full of buskers: violinists and accordionists, practitioners of sleight of hand. They were often veterans, and he usually approached them with caution, worried about the memories they stirred. But the people in the distance seemed to be enjoying the performance far more than he was enjoying his article on starvation psychosis, so he rose and joined the crowd, which had gathered around an organ-grinder and his bear.

The organ sat on what looked like a converted pram, with large, black stagecoach wheels, a lacquered chassis, and a push-handle of iron filigree. The organist had left the blanket over the top of the organ, and the box itself was decorated with glossy green tendrils and little painted strawberries, and a name, illegible at this distance, in gilded baroque script.

The bear was in fact a man of small stature, dressed entirely in a real bear’s skin, save that the paws had been removed to make space for the man’s hands and feet. There was something quite primitive and horrid about it. Much of the skull had been removed, and the bear’s skin had contracted unevenly: the nose was twisted, and one ear sat higher than the other, reminding Lucius uneasily of the twisted grimaces of his patients with facial wounds. In place of the eyes were white shells with painted crimson irises.

The dancer looked out of the mouth, which had been propped open, the bear’s lips pinned up to make a snarl. The organ played a tarantella. The bear tumbled, cartwheeled, and had just danced off with a busty girl in frilled pink calico, when the light sprinkle turned to rain.

There was a groan; at first the organist just adjusted the blanket on the organ, and the bear kept dancing. Here and there umbrellas burst open, couples pressed together, and women pulled their shawls forward on their heads. Lucius tucked the Journal inside his coat. Then the sky grew darker, as if something great had passed in front of the sun—a Zeppelin or a giant bird. A heavier rain began to fall. The tarantella halted, the grinder hurriedly tucked the blanket around the organ, the bear decapitated itself, and the empty head made rounds for tips.

Lucius, who prided himself on a sense of the weather not particularly borne out by experience, hadn’t brought an umbrella. There was a gazebo at the end of the walk, and he was hurrying toward it in a giddy crowd of factory women, when his eyes caught on a figure walking past a rank of drooping lilacs, in the direction of the South Station.

He froze.

White blouse. Skirt of rough blue flannel. Dark blue shawl, and gold remembrance ribbon around her wrist.

No habit anymore, he thought; but this was the least of the mysteries that needed to be explained.

The crowd broke around him.

“Margarete!”

But she was too far away, the shouts and laughter of the crowd too loud. He began to walk faster, skipped, and broke into a run, colliding into a young couple scurrying off beneath a newspaper glistening with rain. Another collision, this time with a man carrying his dog. The crowd seemed to converge: a policeman in black oilcloth, a trio of young men in bowlers, a woman heaving a kicking child. He pushed through them, now not bothering to apologize, as little eddies of outrage exploded in his wake.

She had entered a wide river of humanity hurrying from the park and toward the shelter of the train station. He followed, the Army Medical Journal now sheltering his eyes, desperate to keep her in his sight. Crossing the street, he was nearly disemboweled by the decorative metal fender of a fiacre, whose caped driver cursed and snapped his whip inches from Lucius’s face. Another horse, another fiacre, creaking wheels spitting up water, another shout. Then a wagon, a motorcar, it seemed at once as if all the conveyances of the Imperial City had contrived to block his path. He ducked at last beneath a whinny and the flicking of a mane. The station now before him, an opulence of grey and white, columns rising to the ranks of marble knights and griffons, Victory high and hazy in the falling rain. About its base, the crowds. His eyes scanned the headscarves, the ranks of multicolored skirts and blouses. Umbrellas collapsing as their owners gained the arcades. He’d lost her. Now a second time.

Journal still raised, he made his way slowly forward, his body still and quiet, but inside frantic, alert to everything, his eyes trying to take them in. And everywhere the people! How many people in this cursed city! How many shades of blouse, how many prints of calico! How many flannel skirts, how many ribbons, shawls, and how many faces floating beneath them, pink faces and grey faces and dun faces, faces lined with age, jowled faces, faces long in tooth and short in neck, long in neck and low in brow, dolichocephalic and leptorrhine, harried faces, imperious, voluptuous, insouciant faces, heat-flushed, and pale and glistening from rain…

And: nowhere. He broke from the masses and trotted partway down the length of the arcades, staring into them, searching for the shawl, the ribbon. The rain fell harder. Someone pushed him from behind. A bell—a tram had disgorged its passengers, making quickly for the dry.

He followed them inside, through the main lobby, with its tall gas lamps flickering in their amber globes. Fluted pillars rose to the high ceiling; crowds streamed up and down the grand staircase that led up to the tracks. He was being carried toward the platforms and had to fight his way out of the current, turning, eyes trying to take in all the people moving past. The questions now unavoidable: why here and how, and why the remembrance ribbon, worn for someone dead or missing, unless she wore it for him?

A powdery odor drifted from the baskets of a pair of dried flower peddlers, who had taken defiant seats in their ample petticoats on the corner of the staircase steps.

Back through the crowds, and now out again to watch the shivering arrival of another tramcar, silvery in the rain.

And then again he saw her: blouse, gold ribbon, passing out of the arcades and hurrying along the path that flanked the train tracks, toward the underpass. Skirts swaying as she hurried, a familiar shift. High grass, dark wooded trails. Like that day she fled him, crying. He ran.

Past the ranks of sidewalk gardens, empty but for tree stumps. Weaving between the painted bollards, the travelers descending from another tram. The tunnel dark, a feathered shifting in its beams, the air heavy with the smell of wool and human breath. Back in the light he saw her on the far side of a traffic circle, still out of earshot, heading into an alley off the boulevard. His face was hot; he felt the weight of the months, the years, upon him, saw all that would be returned. She was tangible now, just a block away from him, and already he could feel what it would be like to hold her, to comfort and be comforted, to kiss her lips now wet with water, as once along the river’s bank.

He called, but his voice was lost beneath the whistle of a train. He hit a puddle, turned an ankle, stumbled, then was back upon his feet. He called for her again. But she was speaking to a man who leaned against an open doorway, and then she disappeared inside. Around him, Lucius had only a second to take in the flanking street crowded with crates and horse carts, the torn awnings of the shops and terraced balconies strung with dripping clothes. And then the man pushed off from the doorway and stepped out to meet his path.

White shirt, patched elbows, maroon vest frayed about the collar and the arms. Long, well-tended moustache, smooth dome of head. One eye frozen, the outlines of the iris melting in a milky blur. Accent unfamiliar. “What do you want?”

But Lucius was already looking past him to the figure inside.

In the safety of the doorway, she stood on the third step of a stairway, beneath a sconce that cast her shadow against the opposite wall. She had dropped her shawl, and now her hair hung wet about her neck in tangles. Faint steam came off her blouse; her chest was heaving.

It was easy to see how he’d made the mistake, with the high cheeks, that angle of gaze, that mouth.

The rain had relented; around him, the small street had begun to stir. From a window came the smell of cooking oil. A voice in an unfamiliar language was calling down. He looked back to the young woman, who had advanced to stand between the pair of twisting caryatids that flanked the doorway. She reached up to brush her hair back, ribbon sliding down her wrist.

A memory now, of the night he’d left Margarete, chasing the grey figure through the mist, the young peasant with her rifle in the glen. The shouts, the way she gripped the stock and aimed. A warning, he thought. Which he hadn’t heeded, now chasing ghosts again.

His hair was plastered to his face, and his coat was soaked; he could feel the rain running off his nape and down between his shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, embarrassed now at how hopeful he had been. Again he looked at the girl, and as a man of science, he understood how it had happened—the rain, the ghost, the chemistries of memory, the magic way that crystals appeared out of solution, before dissolving once more into its haze.

He gave a little bow, as if in deference, as he had been taught once as a child to greet new acquaintances. It was absurd, given the circumstances. But it was the custom of his station, and he remained his mother’s son.