The Winter Soldier Read online

  “I see a tree,” said Lucius.

  “The knot is on the tree,” his father said. “Now shoot.”

  His hand wavered. He squinted, pulled. In his mind, bits of marble burst from the busts of his parents, chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling, vases imploded. Again he fired, and again, the tapestries in threads, glass shattering from the chandeliers.

  The revolver clicked, the chamber empty. His father laughed and handed him a bullet. “Excellent. This time open your eyes.”

  His mother turned the end of the hallway and entered his range, Puszek trotting imperiously at her side.

  Lucius partially relaxed his arm.

  “Zbigniew, not again, please,” she said to his father when she reached him, lowering the muzzle fully with two fingers while her free hand stroked the dog.

  She motioned behind her to a little man who had taken shelter behind the marble bust of Chopin. “Come,” she said. “They’re harmless.” He scurried forward, easel beneath his arm. The portraitist: Lucius had almost forgotten. A servant followed with one of his father’s old uniforms, which the painter had to pin so it didn’t hang so loosely about Lucius’s neck.

  The portrait took three days. When the painter was finished, his mother took it into the light. “More color to the cheeks,” she said. “And his neck is thin, but not this thin. And truly are these the shape of his ears? Amazing! How extraordinary the things a mother overlooks because of love! But do even them out—his head looks like it’s flying away. And this expression…” She led the painter into the dining hall where the old portrait of Sobieski hung. “Can you make him more…martial?” she asked. “Like this?”

  When the first portrait was finished, she sat with Lucius for another, for three more days. “Mother and son,” she said. “It will hang in your room.” And he almost heard her say, When you are gone.

  By then Zimmer had also heard.

  Lucius was in the library when his professor found him. “Come with me,” he said.

  Outside, Zimmer made no effort to hide his anger. He understood Lucius’s patriotic impulse. Were he not so old, if he didn’t have this rheumatism, he would also serve! But to go to the front? If it was a military appointment Lucius wanted, this could be arranged. He could be given an assistant position at the University Hospital here in Vienna. With the expected influx of cases he was sure to find many new responsibilities. He would be wasted on the front lines. That wasn’t medicine anyway—it was butchery. War medicine was for nurses. A mind like his would not be content assisting amputations.

  Lucius listened impatiently. It wasn’t patriotism, he thought. Morphine sulfate, mouse-toothed forceps, chisel—that was why he was going. Feuermann, on the front already, had written about a giant magnet for extracting embedded shrapnel. In Vienna, the senior surgeons would take all the best patients for themselves—they, too, were awaiting the complex wounds that war would bring. At best, he would be given abscesses or dilation of urethral strictures secondary to gonorrhea. More likely he would be assigned to examining recruits. No: Lucius, first in his Rigorosum, would not spend the war telling eager volunteers to turn their heads and cough.

  Zimmer called upon the rector, and the rector offered Lucius a position as Second-Level Assistant at the Empress Elisabeth Hospital for the Rehabilitation of the Very Injured.

  Second-Level Assistant! Lucius didn’t bother to respond.

  He took the train a half day south to Graz, where his family wasn’t known. There he presented himself again at the recruiting office, giving the address of his boardinghouse. In the previous weeks, the Russian army had advanced into Galicia, the strip of Polish-speaking Austrian territory that descended the northern flank of the Carpathians. With Germany tied up in the west and north, Austria was forced to divert the Second Army from Serbia. To his great fortune, the Graz garrison was being transferred soon. For the entire Second Army of seventy-five thousand men, they had scarcely ninety doctors, forty of whom were medical students from the university in Graz.

  He did the mathematics in his head.

  His application was accepted instantly. The recruiter spent more time asking Lucius about how well he spoke Polish than questioning his medical training. Waving his hand vaguely toward the north, he said, “No one can understand each other out there. They give our officers Territorials to command, and the men don’t understand a word. How can you fight a war like this?”

  Then he caught himself, and shouted, “God bless the Emperor!” but this seemed to make his blasphemy only worse.

  The knob of the seal was burnished down to the red wood, and the stamp was barely legible. Thump, it went, on seven papers, seven times. In his life, Lucius had touched four living patients in addition to the old man he had liberated from earwax: three men and one blind old woman, the last who, truth be told, had clawed desperately at anyone nearby.

  In Kraków, in his first communication home, he asked his mother to send his books.

  Little did he know, but it would be nearly six months before he reached the front.

  In Kraków, he was assigned to a field hospital near Rawa Ruska, but the day he was to leave, he was told that Rawa Ruska had fallen, and instead he was to go to Stanislau. Then Stanislau fell, and he was assigned to the Lemberg garrison. But Lemberg fell, too, as did Turka and Tarnów. The Austrian line was disintegrating, pushed back against the foothills; it appeared as if Kraków itself might soon be taken. From the train stations, on the wide roads that led out of the city, regiment after regiment departed for the east. Despite the losses, it was impossible not to feel awe at the immensity of the Empire: its spangled cavalry and multitudes on foot, its balloons and motorcars, its bicyclists, their chains clanking as they pedaled out over the rutted roads, rims flashing in the sun.

  To think how these men need us, he wrote to Feuermann, hopefully, that they cannot live without our hands!

  Still he waited for his assignment, pacing the city, his officer’s saber slapping impatiently against his boots. The boulevard chestnuts turned gold, then red. Day after day he went to the hospital, trying to assist in surgeries. But medical responsibilities in a regiment other than one’s own required a Document M-32, he learned quickly, and the train carrying the paymaster’s batch of Document M-32s supposedly had vanished somewhere between Vienna and Kraków. Fortunately, explained an irritated clerk the fourth time Lucius visited, they had received an extra delivery of N-32s, Regulations Regarding Marching Bands. Would Lucius want one of those?

  He would have laughed were he not so frustrated. In the hospital tents, shuffling priests hurried past the orderlies to administer extreme unction, and little women slipped inside to deliver icons to the dying. It seemed as if he were the only one without a purpose. Then, in late October, following yet another reorganization, he was assigned to Boroević’s Third Army, which had just lifted the siege of Przemyśl, by then the sole Austrian holdout on the Galician plain. Again he prepared to leave. He had his tunic pressed, his boots polished, and he neatly folded his woolens to keep his textbooks from getting bumped. But Boroević pulled back into the mountains, and Lucius’s deployment was canceled yet again.

  By his fourth reassignment, he’d begun to give up hope. In his billet at the Kraków Natural History Museum, in the Room of Large Mammals, amid skeletons of whales and sea cows, he tried to study. But the surgical textbooks seemed to mock him with their discussions of cancers in the elderly, while the medical texts devoted pages to rest cures for pneumonia, hardly useful for an army on the move.

  The army-issued medical manuals were not much help, either. They consisted of:

  –five pages on applying whale oil to the inside of boots to prevent abrasions

  –ten pages on latrine building

  –a chapter on “moral instruction for the soldier who misses the comforts of the wife”

  –a glossary for Austrian medical officers attending to the needs of Hungarian soldiers ignorant of German, with such phrases as:

  Hazafias magyar
ok! Mindebben mindannyian együtt vagyunk!

  Patriotic Magyars, we are all in this together!

  Nem beteg, a baj az a bátorság hiánya!

  He is not sick, his disease is no bravery.

  Persze hogy viszket Somogyi őrmester, nem kellett volna olyan szoknyapecérnek lenni!

  Of course it itches, Sergeant Somogyi, you were out of control.

  –a page on abdominal surgery, which concluded, after consideration of the opinions of various world-famous experts and some statistical discussion—abdominal wounds generally exceed 60 percent mortality despite intervention—that abdominal surgery should not be done.

  He wrote to his mother again, this time asking her to send textbooks on wound care and basic first-aid techniques.

  Briefly, he was appointed to a delousing detail, to prevent outbreaks of typhus among eastern refugees, mostly Jewish families fleeing attacks on their villages. The camp was set up in a cattle market, south of the city. It was miserable. A deep antagonism had developed between the medical personnel and the refugees, the most religious of whom resisted shaving their hair. The camp director was a former headmaster of a primary school, a viperous man, angry that the army was wasting Austrians to defend Poles and Jews. To Lucius, he said he was happy to have the company of another man of science, and in the evenings he liked to lecture him on his theories of heredity and the natural uncleanliness of certain races. Not once did Lucius see the camp director try to explain to his wards why they were rounded up and shorn, their ritual clothes taken from them for steaming. When at last Lucius grew sick with watching sanitary personnel tear off the hats and kaftans, he went alone to one of the rabbis and tried to explain to him why the measures needed to be taken. But the old man wouldn’t listen. He kept repeating how his people were being treated like animals. There had been no cases of typhus yet; why were they the only ones being harassed? Lucius tried to explain the transmission cycle of typhus to him, that it took time for the disease to develop, that rats and fleas were present, and already they had outbreaks in other camps. “What is it caused by?” the man asked, and Lucius had to answer, “We…I mean science…doesn’t know. Something unseen, a bacillus, a virus.”

  “So you are burning our clothes for something unseen,” said the rabbi, shaking his head. “For a disease which has not been found.”

  In January, he received news of his fifth redeployment, to a small village in the Galician Carpathians called Lemnowice. On the map it sat in a narrow valley, on the northern slope of the mountains, a finger’s-breadth from Uzhok Pass on the Hungarian border.

  Uzhok, thought Lucius, a memory stirring. Uzhok: of course. For it was there a famous meteor had lit the sky two weeks before his father was shot in battle, an augury that had become part of family lore.

  The Uzhok meteorite had been collected and brought back to the Natural History Museum in Vienna; a painting on the wall illustrated the event. Yes, he remembered this…he used to go there with his father. It was perhaps his only memory of sharing anything that didn’t have to do with the lancers, although, in a roundabout way (meteor-bullet-hip), it did.

  But he couldn’t get there from Kraków—the war was in the way. He would have to travel to Budapest, they told him, and from there on to Debrecen, where he would board yet another train.

  Given his disappointments, he didn’t believe it. He heard nothing for the next four days. But then, back in Vienna, in the Trains Division of the Headquarters of the Imperial and Royal Army, a Second-Level Clerk rose from his desk and, carrying a ledger, made his way to the corresponding Second-Level Clerk in the Medical Division, two flights down, returning with an order bearing a double-headed eagle stamp, which he presented to the First-Level Clerk in Trains for another stamp, then walked down four flights of stairs and out the building and through the snow to the Ad Hoc Office for the Eastern Theatre, where the order with both stamps was delivered to a corresponding Second-Level Clerk in the Transportation Division, who entered the name into a ledger, applied his own stamp, returned the order, wrote out a second order, and sent it down to the Head Clerk for Trains, in the Medical Division, Eastern Theatre, who, after a lunch of stale rye and egg sprinkled so heavily with paprika that it would stain the oily fingerprints he left in the margins of the page, rose, and with the ledger tucked inside his coat, went outside, stopping briefly to appreciate the beauty of the falling snow on a pensive putto above a doorway and on the glistening rooftops, before he crossed the boulevard to the military post office.

  The route to Budapest passed back through Vienna. There, just across the Inner City from his home, Lucius only had time to buy a pickle from a station vendor before he had to board again. Three days later he was in the barracks in Debrecen, when he received the orders that he would take a final train to a place he had never heard of, called Nagybocskó, beyond another place he’d never heard of, called Máramarossziget, where he would be met by an escort from the hussars.

  An escort from the hussars. An image then, of standing with his father in their ballroom, the great wings fluttering above their heads. Near Máramarossziget. He said the word slowly, like a child pronouncing the secret name of a fabled land.

  To Feuermann, he wrote, At last.

  The night before his departure, distracted by anticipation, Lucius was crossing the market square when a child dashed from a carriage and with a squeal ran straight into his legs. The street was slick with ice. He took a step forward to steady himself, caught his saber between his legs, and tripped, hearing his wrist snap when he reached out to break his fall.

  For a moment he lay on the ice, clutching his arm. He waited for help, but the street was empty. Like a ghost, the child was gone, likely swept up by a mother afraid of the punishment for knocking down an Austrian officer.

  Back in his quarters, he removed his greatcoat and undid the buttons of the cuff. The standard procedure would have been to get an X-ray, but he was already certain what had happened: a Colles’ fracture of the carpal extremity of the radius, the bone displaced dorsally, the sharp edge now palpable. Already it was so swollen that he had trouble opening the cuff. He cursed, furious at the child and his own incaution. He still had feeling in his fingers—at least there’d been no injury to the nerve. But the fracture would need to be reduced.

  It would be safest just to report to the hospital, he knew. But he also knew that if he did so, there was no way he would be sent on to the front.

  It could have been a joke. What does the Imperial and Royal Army call a one-handed medical student with no clinical experience?

  Doctor.

  He pulled lightly on his wrist, thinking that if he could bear it, he might reduce the fracture himself. But the pain was too great, and the muscle was in spasm. His will failed him. He needed help from someone strong.

  He left the barracks and wandered toward town. He hoped to find a local doctor; even a veterinarian might do. But most of the signs were in Hungarian, and he couldn’t understand them. At last he saw the word Kovács, above a painted anvil—Blacksmith. Knocking on the door, he was met by a woman with a coat thrown over a nightgown. She stared at him suspiciously. In German she said, “We are full. No more billets. Already sleeping on the floor.”

  “I don’t need a billet.” He lifted his arm to show his swollen wrist.

  She disappeared inside and returned with a man of such shoulders and such a big, black beard that Lucius wondered if he had not stumbled upon Vulcan himself. Lucius showed him his arm, and the man whistled through his teeth. But he seemed completely unsurprised that an unknown soldier had appeared at his door in the middle of the night with a broken wrist. One of their boarders was a medic, he said, should he get him? Lucius shook his head—the medic would tell him to go to the hospital, he knew. He just needed a strong pair of hands.

  The blacksmith led him to his worktable and lit the lamp. A pair of soldiers were sleeping on the floor. Speaking in a whisper, Lucius instructed him to grab the hand and forearm and draw them apart.
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  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” said Lucius, though really he had no idea. His old textbook had an illustration that made it seem as if the bone simply popped back into place.

  The man left, returning with a greasy cup of spirits. Lucius thanked him and downed it in a gulp. His eyes teared up; he presented his arm. The blacksmith was tentative at first, and because the muscles in the forearm were in spasm, Lucius had to instruct him to pull harder, then harder still. He could feel the edges of the bone scraping. He bore the pain until he couldn’t any longer, pushing away with a cry.

  His head spun; he was afraid he would pass out. Mumbling gratitude to the blacksmith, he stumbled outside and into the cold air. He needed some kind of narcotic, not only to relieve him now, but also to endure the coming journey by horse.

  The hospital was across the street from the barracks. The hall was dark, the soldiers sleeping. He passed a pair of nurses at the nursing station, but he acted as if he knew where he was going. Somewhere there would be a supply closet. He passed through another ward. At the far end, he found it, slipped inside, and rummaged until he found ampoules of cocaine and morphine, a syringe. He slipped them into the pocket of his coat.

  The train was scheduled to depart at dawn. Back in his room, he broke the cover from a histology textbook, lined it with a shirt, and fashioned a rough splint. With his good hand, he set about packing his bags. He didn’t sleep—he was too worried that the swelling might cause compression of the nerve. Then he would have no choice but to report the injury, for they would have to open his wrist. He told himself that if he could still feel his fingers by morning, he’d press on. In any case, his destination was a hospital, where he’d get care if needed. There he could claim that the fracture had happened en route. And there, he decided, they wouldn’t send him back. He’d learn while it healed. When it was ready, he would work.