The Other Einstein(53)
Weaving through the throngs of new passengers boarding my train, I hobbled down the aisle and steps and over to the nearest kiosk. I grabbed a sepia postcard of Schloss Leopoldskron, a castle near Salzburg, and two five-heller stamps. Four minutes until the train departed. What should I write? I contemplated several approaches but couldn’t decide.
I finally settled on a greeting—a familiar nickname to signal that I was no longer fuming, but I wouldn’t lead with an actual apology—when the whistle sounded. Glancing up, I realized that I had only one minute to board the train before it left the station. I’d spent too long on the postcard. With my limp, the distance stretched out long before me, and I panicked. Could I make it? I tried to race toward my train car—toward my daughter—but a surge of passengers disembarking from another train blocked my way. As I tried to dodge through them, my lame foot caught on the hem of my skirts, and I fell to the ground. A kindly older couple reached down to help me up, but it was too late. My train had left the station.
Hysterically crying, I shrugged off the couples’ hands and rushed over to the ticket master’s office. When would the next train for Novi Sad, Serbia—where Papa would pick me up and take me by carriage to Ka?—depart? The first one left in fifteen minutes, and it would require that I take two additional connections to make it back anywhere close to my original arrival time. I bought the ticket.
I raced to send a telegram to Papa about my change in arrival and the whereabouts of my luggage and then hastened to board the train. Even though it had factored into my delay, I decided to take the postcard with me back on board and send it from our next stop, Budapest. But this time, I wouldn’t deliver it to the post for mailing myself; I would enlist a train agent to do it for me. I wouldn’t take the chance of leaving the train again.
As the train bumped along—my stomach along with it—I scrawled a note to “Johnnie,” inquiring after him and updating him on my journey. I needed to know that Albert and I were settled as I went to go fight for Lieserl’s life.
The train arrived in Novi Sad the next afternoon, a whole half day later than I’d planned. Papa, who’d already secured my trunk from the earlier train, was waiting with a carriage to take me the twenty kilometers to Ka?. He greeted me with a grave smile and warm embrace, and he confirmed that, as far as he knew, since he’d been at the train station for nearly a day awaiting me, Lieserl’s condition was unchanged. Then we slipped into an uncomfortable silence. The controversial topics of my marriage and my failure to visit the baby since the wedding loomed large between us, preventing any of our historical intimacy.
When the carriage pulled into Ka?, red crosses outlined in black were painted on nearly every door in town. The symbol of scarlet fever was everywhere. I had never seen so many red crosses, not in any of the scarlet fever epidemics I’d experienced before. No wonder Lieserl was ill. I felt sick at the thought and instinctively clutched my stomach. How would I protect this new baby from infection should I catch it?
“Is it so bad?” I asked Papa.
“It’s the worst outbreak I’ve ever seen,” Papa answered. “With the worst symptoms.”
The Spire’s towers grew closer, and instead of being elated at reuniting with my daughter, I grew more afraid. What would be the state of my poor Lieserl? What if I’d arrived too late?
Before Papa could even stop the horses entirely, I jumped from the carriage and ran into the house. I passed the local doctor’s carriage parked out front. Had Lieserl taken a turn for the worse?
“Mama!” I called out, dropping my traveling bag at the foot of the steps.
Climbing the curved stairs as quickly as I could, I heard her call back, “In the nursery, Mitza.”
I pushed open the door to the nursery and gasped at the state of my daughter. Her face and throat were a deep crimson, as, undoubtedly, was her trunk. Her eyes were rolled halfway back in her head, an undeniable sign of high fever. Mama was dipping a cloth into a bowl of ice water and rubbing it on Lieserl’s body, while the doctor sat at her side. I smelled rose water and wintergreen in the air and spotted a row of jars along the dresser. Mama was using her arsenal of home remedies: quinine; dressings of rose water and glycerin mixed with oil for the skin; wintergreen for fever; mint for the itching; monkshood, belladonna, and woodbine combined with jasmine to calm the system. Would any of them help my poor baby?
Mama and the doctor looked up at me, their eyes full of worry. “She took a turn for the worse this morning, Mitza,” Mama said. “The fever took her in its grasp.”
I kneeled beside Lieserl’s bed. I had arrived too late. Stroking her blond hair, damp from sweat or Mama’s ministrations, I whispered in her ear, “Mama is here, Lieserl. Mama loves you.” And I wept.
The days passed in a haze as I kept vigil by Lieserl’s side. The doctor was right; there was little we could do for her besides make her comfortable and pray, which Mama and I did constantly. I gave up worrying about my own health and scarlet fever’s potential effect on my unborn baby and focused instead on the very sick but still living child who lay before me. Lieserl hadn’t opened her eyes fully since I returned home—the fever never lifted—so I had no idea if she realized I was there. Or indeed, if she even remembered who I was. She had grown so much in the year since I had last seen her; I’d left behind a six-month-old infant, and I now stared down at a year-and-a-half-old child.