Дэниел Мейсон - The Winter Soldier

“You don’t think that she was throwing them to someone else and Kaminski intercepted?” asked Lucius.

“Ah ha!” laughed Feuermann. “But to the victor go the spoils, right?” And he kissed his fingers like a satisfied gourmand.

Then he brought out a surgical manual, and they read through the standard hospital kit.

Morphine sulfate, mouse-toothed forceps, chisel, horsehair sutures…

On and on, like two children poring over a catalogue of toys.

“Well?” asked Feuermann at last.

But Lucius hadn’t really needed to read past chisel.

At the recruitment office, he waited on a long line before a single clerk. He left as a medical lieutenant, with a drill handbook detailing bugle calls and the hierarchy of the salute. After, with Feuermann, at a wine tavern out in Hietzing hung with garlic braids, he got drunk with a group of Hungarian recruits. They were rough, heavy country boys, who spoke scarcely any German, and yet they all drank together until they could scarcely stand. They seemed completely unaware of the whispers that it was Austria’s war, that the so-called Territorials—the Poles and Czechs and Romanians, etc., that made up the rest of the Empire—were being asked to sacrifice themselves in Austria’s name. By the end of the evening, they were singing that they would die for Lucius, and Lucius was singing that he would die for them. None of it seemed real. Hours later, stumbling home through the hot night, he turned a corner to find himself facing a shirtless, gap-toothed child, ribbon tied around its head. For a moment, they paused, staring each other down. Then the child grinned, raised his fist and cocked a finger, whispered, Bang.

Back at home, his mother was thrilled by his enlistment, but felt that medical duties, out of the line of fire, would seem like cowardice. So she bought him a horse and called upon a friend in the War Ministry to cancel his commission and speed his entry into the lancers, like his father, even though he’d last ridden when he was twelve.

Lucius received this news with quiet fury. The calculus was clear. Krzelewski Metals and Mining was about to be made even richer by the war. Every sabotaged railway would have to be rebuilt, only to be destroyed again; again rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt again. But in the end there would be a reckoning. She needed at least one patriot to prove they weren’t profiteers.

His father, overjoyed by the prospect, now filled with affection, spent hours versing Lucius on the history of the Polish cavalry, lavishing especial praise on the lancers. He had often dressed in some version of his old uniform, but now the outfit that emerged was something of an altogether different register of splendor: scarlet jodhpurs, bright blue tunic with a double rank of buttons, boots polished until one could see the far-off reflection of the plumed czapka on his head.

In his library, he brought down volume after volume of military history. His eyes grew teary, then he sang some very dirty cavalry songs. With the lights off, he showed Lucius hand shadows he had last performed a decade prior: The War Horse, Death Comes for the Cossack, and The Decapitated Venetian. For a moment, Lucius wondered if he had been drinking, but his father’s eyes were clear as he gazed into his great regimental past. No, God had made no greater warrior than the Polish lancer! No one! Unless, of course, one counted the Polish winged hussars, who rode with great, clattering frames of ostrich feathers on their backs.

“Of course, Father,” Lucius answered. The winged regiments had been disbanded in the eighteenth century; this remained a sore point with Retired Major Krzelewski. Since childhood, Lucius had heard this many, many times.

His father smiled contentedly and stroked the czapka strap, which bifurcated his smooth white beard. Then his pale blue eyes lit up. He had a thought!

Two full coats of winged armor flanked their entrance stairs. Together they hauled them, creaking, back up into the ballroom and strapped them on. The wings were so heavy that Lucius almost tumbled over.

“Can you imagine!” said his father, amazingly upright, looking like a wizened knight. Lucius wheezed; the breastplate had ridden up his thin chest and was choking off his breath. He wondered how long he could stand there without collapsing. But his father was lost in fantasy. “ Can you imagine!” he said again, when, for a moment—finding his balance, the light glinting off the armor, a breeze from an open window fluttering the feathers, the image of the two winged men reflected in the ballroom mirror—for a moment, Lucius could.

“We should wear them out to supper with your mother,” his father said, and drummed his knuckles on the armor of his chest.

Later he realized Lucius didn’t know how to shoot.

“Father, I’m enlisting as a doctor, ” Lucius repeated, but his father didn’t seem to hear. He opened all the doors along the grand hallway and the window that looked out onto a tall oak outside. From his study, he withdrew his old service revolver. He led Lucius to the far end of the hall and handed it to him. “See the knot?” he said, and Lucius squinted, his gaze coursing the corridor with its portraits and statues.

“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.