The Right Hand of Sleep (15 page)

The crowd noise was clearly crowd noise now and not static as Voxlauer rose and hit the man across the face with his beer glass so the beer itself sprayed in a high wandering arc over the heads of the assembled. In another moment there were people between them and he could hear his own shouts dying away and the drone from the radio rising and eclipsing everything. As the man was being led away he spat at Voxlauer and made to lunge at him. Blood was running from his nose and from a small bright hole above his right eye but he seemed oblivious to it. He was yelling at the top of his lungs and trying to break away from the two men, both strangers to Voxlauer, who were leading him outside. Voxlauer sat back against the bar and watched them go. Emelia was just behind him and he heard her breathing sputteringly, like a child, cursing herself quietly and telling herself to hush. A short time later she went back down the bar.

Across the square at Rindt’s a similar crowd was faintly visible through the frosted-glass panels of the patio and Voxlauer sat and watched it for a while, counting his breaths quietly as he’d taught himself to. After a time he felt Emelia looking at him. He revolved slowly on the barstool to face her.

—Where’s your father? he said.

Emelia made a face. —He’s drunk.

—He has a right, said Voxlauer, looking at her. —Today, at least.

—Yes. I suppose so, Uncle. She was still watching him, solemnly, as though waiting on him for something. —What is it? he said.

She looked back meaningfully along the bar. Aside from the crackle of the radio the room was absolutely still. No one in the crowd was looking at him but no one was talking to anybody, either. The speech seemed to have ended.

Voxlauer stared at Emelia for a time. —Should I leave? he said finally.

—Please, Uncle, she whispered.

—Let’s have another drink first, he said. —Not pilsner.

She brought him a glass of yellow Apfelschnaps and he drank it straight down and called out for another. His voice rang hollowly across the bar. She came back with the pint-sized blue ceramic bottle and put it beside his glass and went down the bar and stood at the far end, near the kitchen door, wiping intently at the top of the bar with a corner of her apron. Gradually the room began to fill again with talk and she went back to the taps and commenced drawing drafts of beer. Voxlauer drank until the little blue bottle was empty, then rose carefully from his barstool and went outside.

In truth, rather than in memory, Anna was nothing like a statue. She was schoolgirlish and talkative and given to sudden fits
of extravagance with what little she still owned, her dresses and
phonograph albums and tins of French tobacco, sensing that even
these few relics of her past life would soon be gone. She was bourgeois in a way I’d never seen before, taking pleasure in things freely
and matter-of-factly but feeling no sense of entitlement to them,
no resentment when they were taken away from her. Her husband
Andrei, a well-to-do country doctor with radical pretensions, had
beaten her almost nightly for her lack of progressive thinking. She
introduced herself as a Bolshevik when we met, which bewildered
me at first; a few weeks passed before I realized it was entirely out
of gratitude to the Revolution for taking her husband away to
St. Petersburg.

My life with her began slowly and tentatively. There was a
great amount of work to be done but we ate in grand style every
evening, sitting at the long, warped, reverently polished dining
table, gorging ourselves on all manner of tinned and potted delicacies. “Dress rehearsal for better days,” Anna would say coyly when
I tried to raise objections. It was hard for me most days to imagine
anything much better, sitting there across from her. For a time I
even forgot my own vague radical delusions. We slept an arm’s
length apart that first night on her wide, rolled-tin marriage bed,
dressed in heavy flannel bedclothes against the chill, and she talked
to me drunkenly, earnestly, in pieced-together German and French
about her plans for the land and her troubles under the various
occupations. She explained things to me patiently, repeating words
and phrases often, questioning me sternly from time to time as a
sister might an idle younger brother she’s decided to improve.

It was as a sister, in fact, that I thought of her for most of that
first year. I’d always felt the lack of one, more intensely, almost,
than all the commoner wants that followed, and in Anna’s company I felt the kind of carelessness and fond indifference I’d imagined brothers and sisters to feel toward one other. To think of
someone so proud and adult as my lover would have scared me
half to death, there at the beginning of our time. Anna, for her
part, had lived so long alone in that narrow, drafty house that my
presence in her bed must have seemed as much a terror as a blessing. Between our paired confusions, then, it was the better part of a
year before we came together finally as man and wife.

When we did it was with a great amount of laughter, of hesitancy and of concern on my part to seem as though I’d done it all
before. I’d come in early to the house from turning hay and found
her standing at the window, staring out to where I’d been working,
her housedress loose about her shoulders and a look on her face as
though she’d just been handed down an order. I had no idea at first
what it was she wanted. After a few seconds she raised an arm
solemnly toward me and suddenly I understood and crossed the
room in my loose mud-clotted boots and kissed her. We went up
the stairs together to the pressed-tin bed and lay down on it. Afterward Anna told me we were married and I saw no reason in the
world not to believe her.

From that day Anna was my sister and my lover both, never
entirely the one thing or the other, not even in bed. She nursed me
through my attacks when they came, which was often in those first
few months, with a patience that made the most terrible of my
visions seem childish. We talked for hours on end about what happened in the war, the killing of the deserter and the death of my
father and everything that had come before and after, until my
memories began to break apart of their own accord and to take on
distinct shapes, separable from one another and from me. At night
she would draw me to her in a state of curious, impersonal desire,
almost of surprise, as though I were some stranger come entirely
by chance or accident into her bed. Often she called me by the
name of a boy she’d known in Kiev while still a girl, but I knew
very well she was calling out in those moments not to him or
to anything but her own memory-cluttered happiness. Afterward
she’d remember all manner of things with a calm, transported
clarity, bright with foresight and melancholy, and she’d talk in
careful detail about her childhood and youth and her luckless marriage as I lay motionless beside her. I never spoke at those times but
lay back in quiet attention, drawing tiredness and contentment
over me like a quilt.

Gradually my attacks grew fewer. We worked hard and brought
in a fair yield in those first years, when we still thought of the land
as ours. Anna taught me Ukrainian stubbornly, almost ruthlessly,
refusing for whole days to speak any French or German at all. I
was steadily amazed at each successive side of her: her fierceness,
her coquettishness, her vanity, her sobriety, her kindness even to
those people in the village, and there were more than a few, who
hated and envied her for the way she walked and spoke and acted
when among them.

Every evening after dinner the phonograph case would be
opened, and I’d be privileged with the duty of revolving the crank
while she chose that night’s opera from her collection of twenty,
cleaning each of the three or four disks devotedly with a spit-dampened kerchief. Often as not, the music would be accompanied
by dancing lessons, waltzes and polonaises and other equally antiquated steps, taught with the same tireless severity as the Ukrainian but with far less success, as only four of her twenty operas
offered music even remotely suitable. Anna favored the works of
the German Romantics:
Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde,
Weber’s
Euryanthe,
Nicolai’s
Merry Wives of Windsor.
The irony in her
love of German opera was not apparent to her. I often teasingly
compared her to
Lohengrin
’s Elsa, taking in a mysterious and
enchanted stranger, though in fact it was Elisabeth in
Tannhäuser
she’d always most admired, pining away unto death for her despised
and banished lover. My arrival in Cherkassy, sickly fugitive that I
was, must have seemed to her like the fulfillment of her most fervent, opera-besotted dreams. Had I been any less pathetic she’d
likely never have desired me.

Anna’s superstitiousness was deeply fixed in her. She kept a silver icon of the trinity over her night table and talked to it whenever she was alone, day or night, kneeling bare-legged on the floor
and speaking in a straightforward, affectless tone of voice about
the most minute details of our daily life. She felt no embarrassment
when I found her there, smiling up at me contentedly from the far
side of the bed, but never tried to get me to kneel beside her, either.
She recovered her French quickly and within a few months we were
holding long and intricate debates in a pidgin of our three languages that would have sounded like cipher to anyone who overheard us. We called it the Tsar’s Dutch, our invented language, and
kept to it even after my cotton-mouthed Ukrainian had bettered.
It seems to me now that even then, during our first few months
together, we were practicing for a time when it would provide us
with our only privacy. Five short years later, living on a collective
farm outside Kiev with two hundred other kulaks and assorted
class enemies and meeting only once a day, in the dining hall at a
massive plank table with the forty-eight other workers in our section who regarded us, even the most petit-bourgeois of them, with
unqualified suspicion and contempt, the Tsar’s Dutch was near to
all that was left us.

In 1921, in the middle of my third year with Anna, the Ukraine
was retaken by the Bolsheviks. Less than a year later, on a September afternoon, the first motorcar I’d seen since crossing the
border appeared unannounced and unexpected over the gentle
roll of fields between Anna’s house and the town and came to a
stop twenty meters from where we stood, not doing much of anything, staring up the Cherkassy road as though waiting for just that
motorcar to appear. It was a sand-colored G.A.Z. sedan with a
folded-down canvas top and four men were sitting in it, dressed
in high-collared brown coats and linen caps pulled down hard
against the wind. None of them were wearing the Red Army uniforms still in fashion at that time and it was only by the looks on
their faces as they crossed the field toward us and the fact that the
driver remained behind the wheel staring blankly ahead of him
with his goggles pushed down over his eyes that we knew them to
be cadres. The smallest of them, a delicate-looking man in spectacles and a bow tie who reminded me of photographs I’d seen of the
old Petersburg intellectuals, informed Anna with a crisp, calm,
emotionless precision I couldn’t help admiring that she had been
identified by the Cherkassy soviet and the local village Mir as a
kulak, a hoarder of grain and an enemy of the people and as such
was to be transferred to a labor camp without delay. Alternatively,
she could be sent to a newly inaugurated state farm, a sovkhoz, six
hours to the north; the choice was hers. Why such an unusual offer
was made we never learned, though Anna guessed it might have
been in deference to her husband, who’d fallen in defense of the
Revolution at the battle of Moscow two years earlier. I was flatly
ignored, though it was made clear I could follow her to either destination if I chose. A truck would come for her or the both of us
that same evening.

A light rain was falling as Voxlauer crossed the square past the newly uncrated fountain and walked up into the woods, making for the curtain of mist above the ruin. The square had been filling with people all afternoon and as he looked down now policemen were clearing a wide lane through the traffic and laying pylons along its two sides and linking them together with lengths of yellow cord. A canvas-covered truck pulled to a halt alongside the pylons and two men came down from the truck bed and began unloading iron benches. Voxlauer reached into his pack and took out a bar of chocolate he’d meant to give Emelia and ate it slowly, watching the members of the post office band unpack their instruments and tune them under the yellow and white awning of the Amtshaus. A boy walked along a line of Sterno torches, lighting them.