The Right Hand of Sleep (10 page)

Closer to the square the crowds grew even denser. The march
had already begun and as we crossed Theresien Avenue a huge roar
went up in front of us. The farmer and his sons elbowed their way
forward, calling out the name of the uncle’s factory like a marching
hymn: Sol-ya . . . Sol-ya . . . Sol-ya . . . Another roar went up,
booming back over our heads. Things were happening close by but
we could see next to nothing. People were climbing onto each
other’s backs, but the sway of the crowd threw them down again
just as quickly. The farmer and his eldest son were wide-shouldered
and bullet-headed and they pressed ahead ruthlessly, the rest of us
falling meekly in behind them. All at once we were heaved forward
into the linked arms of a row of terrified policemen. Through
their shoulders I could see the wide empty square with the river
behind it, slow and austere, and on the far bank the city of Buda
curving down on its yellow hill. Across from our street at each corner of the square, identical cordons of police held identical masses
restrained. Without warning a shout would erupt from one street
or another, often a lone man’s voice, and the other five streets
would immediately thunder back in answer. In the middle of the
square a battalion of K&K cavalry sat in orderly, expectant rows.

For a brief moment the crowd behind us fell back a little
and grew still. In those few calm, deliberate seconds it was quiet
enough to hear the horses shifting uneasily and shuddering under
the riders. Then a new sound began on the opposite side of the
square, building and carrying to us over the tops of the trees, and
the crowds there pushed forward to each side in blind confusion.
Gradually they flattened back against the houses to admit the
marchers, who were pouring out now from all of the downtown
avenues onto the square. The roaring to every side grew immeasurably louder. The police on the street hesitated a moment, looking
over their shoulders at the cavalry, then simply broke rank and let
us through.

It was clear from the very first that no one, not even the
marchers, had expected such an awesome show of numbers. I
was later to hear that it was the largest assembly in the history of
the capital. A few minutes after the entrance of the first columns of
workers, the square was so filled by the crush of bodies that it
became impossible to tell the marchers from the spectators who
had broken everywhere through the laughable restraining lines of
the police. The noise was deafening, like no sound I’d yet heard; the
cavalry unit had all but vanished in the tumult. Occasionally single
riders could be seen swaying helplessly over the profusion of heads
and fists, shrieking at their horses. The marchers were moving now
in a ring around the square, droning one workers’ anthem after
another, and a song over and over again that I didn’t yet recognize
as the Internationale. Now and then the whole crowd would join
in, monstrously out of key, most of them simply bellowing along
with the prevailing din. I looked about me at one point and noticed
Jan standing a few paces to my left. Is everyone in this city a Bolshevik? I shouted to him.

Opportunists, Oskar! Opportunists! he called back. He seemed
to be enjoying himself immensely. We laughed for a moment
across the sea of lowing faces at each other.

Somewhere in the maelstrom a man was crashing a pair of
cymbals together. Two isolated shots rang out, one after the other,
but no one paid any attention to them. Suddenly the crowd surged
forward and heaved us flat onto the pavement. I barely had time to
get on my feet before a second surge sent me stumbling out into
the street. Marchers and onlookers milled together on every side,
the wide-eyed policemen pressed too closely into them even to
raise their blackjacks. I looked back over my shoulder and saw
Jan’s face falling away from me. I’m going east! I called to him.
East! He waved once more, shouted something happily and was
gone.

The cavalry were now gathered into a ring and huddled defensively on their mounts at the far edge of the park, firing shots into
the air. The tide and current of the crowd had grown more violent,
falling back from the riders grudgingly at each report and closing
in again after only a few seconds. The entire scene was like nothing
so much as a wide field of mud shifting in a heavy rain. Panic
began to build in earnest now around the square, rocking and funneling the crowds, and in another instant I was thrown back from
the cavalry as inexorably as I’d been carried toward them a few
moments before. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one rider tilt
and fall slowly sideways with his mount into the field of pitching
heads. An instant or two later I was rushing down a narrow sloping street with a thousand others, all of us somehow one body and
one brain, a column of state police and King’s cavalry just behind
us. And you thought you’d left the war behind, I thought, grinning
stupidly to myself as I ran.

That same night I boarded a K&K train east from Luzni station to
Czernowitz and the border. Everything everywhere was in the
same state of witless confusion. There were rumors that the Kaiser
was offering all of Hungary as a sop to the Bolsheviks. No one
asked to see my ticket.

As we crept rattlingly up into the Carpathians I sounded out
the merchants and retired officers in my carriage for news about
the October Revolution and the armistice. All I could gather was
that the Bolsheviks had formed an alliance with the Russian navy
and simply declared the war with Germany to be over. A group of
tsarist generals, Commander in Chief Dukonin among them, had
refused to give up their armies and continued to fight German
forces throughout Poland and Silesia, living in the woods like war-lords. I had no idea how much of this could be believed. One old
man, a retired taps lieutenant from Graz, swore the Tsar was in
northern Hungary. He stuttered as he spoke and twisted the corners of his ash-gray muttonchops excitedly. He was convinced that
I was an emissary of some kind until I confessed that I was in fact a
deserter.

Well . . . he stuttered, adjusting himself in his seat uneasily. Perhaps you could petition the Tsar for some manner of asylum?

I don’t think so, uncle, I answered. It wasn’t his army I deserted
from.

All the same, said a matronly woman in French-cut silks
across the aisle. You can’t very well run to the Bolshevists, can you,
child?

Why not? I asked.

Well, said the ex-lieutenant, glancing up and down the car
with well-intentioned watery eyes. Well . . . he began.

They’ve nothing to live for, really, interrupted a tiny, well-coiffed
lady from across the table, running her plump hands along the
teakwood inlay of the window-banks as if by way of exposition.

I’m going to them just the same. I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I
said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an
international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines
of class.

But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had
made the mistake of telling them about my family.

There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.

Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted
them awhile.

They gave me a number of further reasons between them over
the course of the afternoon and I listened to them all attentively
and cheerfully, as though taking part in an elaborate burlesque.
My desertion was taken as nothing more than a romantic breach
of decorum; the war had long since grown distasteful to these people. The idea of an Austrian boy of fine Biedermeier stock feeling
sympathy for the Revolution, on the other hand, was preposterous
to them—inconceivable, in fact. They were forced, eventually, to
ignore me.

Voxlauer spent the morning in a clearing on the north ridge, looking to scare up deer bedded down in the loose brush among the pines. Just past noon a buck sprang in a high trembling arc from its cushion of scrub and veered toward him and away again, galloping hard between the stumps. Voxlauer’s stiff fingers worked the safety clumsily and the buck was almost out of range when he fired, both barrels discharging in the same instant and ramming the stock into his collarbone so his eyes teared and blurred. The deer stood at the edge of the clearing, quivering and heaving. He unbreeched the shotgun and levered out the smoking cartridges, moving nearer all the while over the uneven ground. The deer remained standing at the edge of the clearing. Its head lolled strangely and from where he now stood he saw the eyes rolling and bulging, witnessing nothing. Fishing two more shells from the pocket of his coat he reloaded the shotgun and raised it to his shoulder again and pulled both the triggers. The buck’s head whipped hard to one side as the spray hit it and it staggered a few paces before falling over. By the time he reached it the breath was coming in rasps through its shot-mangled throat and its mouth was a pillow of pink foam. He cast about in the bracken for a rock to crush its skull with and found one of a fair size, but when he returned with it the buck was already dead.

He skinned it in strips and hung the strips from the branches of a leafless white bush close by and opened the belly and uncoiled the intestines and threw them into a heap. Next he cut out the stomach, which burst as he pulled it, the liver, the kidneys and the thick, bruise-colored heart. The stomach he tossed onto the pile with the intestines but the other innards he wrapped in a swath of deerskin tied tightly together with bailing wire. He spent the rest of the day butchering the venison and packing it into cubes bound in broader, heavier squares of the hide. When he’d finished he left the carcass for the foxes to find and fashioned a sack from a bedsheet he’d brought from the cottage and filled the sack with the bundles of meat, then took hold of the sack by its knotted, sodden corner and started awkwardly down the slope.

The sack was too heavy to lift and Voxlauer was forced to drag it behind him through the brush where it caught every few meters on a root or in branches and resisted his pull like a still-living thing. He cursed it steadily as he went, turning on it finally and threatening it, kicking at it with his boots until self-awareness returned to him suddenly and he began to laugh. It was dark already in the pines and he felt light-headed and discovered when he was halfway down the slope that he had no clear idea where he was going. He sat down in the needles with the smell of resin all around him, staring up through the trees at the pink underpinnings of the clouds. The sky drew itself steadily westward.

That night another memory of Père came to him, softly and persistently, like a moth circling a light. He and Père were together on one of their favorite walks, a gently sloping path that began behind the ruin and ran along an avenue of young birches to a little glade. The light filtered grayly through the trees and he was holding Père’s hand and stepping over the roots and stones, frowning from the effort. Père was walking too quickly for him to follow; he was staring absently, fixedly ahead of him as he often did, mumbling in a low monotone without moving his lips, like a priest or a nun at their private prayers. —Père, he’d said, stopping in the path. —Père? Can we go slower?

Père had stopped as if struck on the back. —What’s that, Oskar?

—You’re going too fast.

—I . . . ? No, no, Oskar. No, no, my little Herr. He had smiled then, squinting slightly as he smiled, the look of an adult trying to explain something delicate and complex to a child. —I’m in a hurry, Oskar. That’s why I walk so fast. I wish I could walk much faster. I would feel better. It’s terrible, Oskar, you know. It’s terrible always to be in such a hurry.

He had smiled then, too, looking up at Père, searching for the joke. Père made jokes very often when they were together, instead of giving the answers he wanted. He knew very well that they couldn’t be in any kind of hurry. They had finished dinner early and Maman had said that tonight, for once, they could take their sweet time. He liked that expression very much, especially when Maman said it, which was not often. That was why he had remembered.

Père had begun walking again now, quicker even than before, and he had stamped his feet in protest, letting out a squeal of frustrated laughter. —Père! he had shouted. —Père! Stop! Don’t walk so fast!

Père had spun about suddenly on his heels and run back to him, gripping him hard by both of his shoulders and shaking him so that his head lolled back and forth like a pocketwatch on a chain. The trees blurred and rocked above him. —I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! Père had screamed, shaking him at every word. —I just told you, Oskar! Good God! Let it—