The Right Hand of Sleep (16 page)

Voxlauer turned and continued up the hillside. He felt very drunk and bewildered from the fight and the speech and swallowed hard every few steps to keep an attack from coming. He counted his breaths aloud to himself from one to seven. His voice rose in front of him into the air. It’s happening now, he said to himself. What we’ve all been waiting on. He remembered hitting the Tyrolean with the glass of beer. He pictured himself swinging the glass. It was a reflex, he thought. Anyone might have done it. But he remembered the silence throughout the room afterward and the look on Emelia’s face, more frightened for what he had done than for anything the Tyrolean had said to her. I can’t go back, he thought suddenly. I’ve done something now. It may not have been so much but I have done it.

He thought for a while about the Tyrolean. If he was a big Nazi he’d have been over at Rindt’s, he thought, trying to calm himself. Still. Everybody saw me hit him. The thought that the fight, in itself, could mean nothing to the others at the bar in their excitement and their drunkenness seemed naïve and childish to him. That quiet afterward, that proves it, he thought. The quiet of recognition. They’d been waiting for me to do something and now I’ve given it to them. Given them cause.

To distract himself he thought about the Tyrolean again. He’ll go back to Innsbruck and say he broke his nose murdering a Bolshevik, thought Voxlauer. He laughed. Or a Yid-lover. —He’ll make chief of police now, said Voxlauer aloud. —Friends and neighbors! he shouted, flinching at the recoil of the silence all around him. —Children of the Reich! I humbly accept this office . . . Again his voice rose into the trees, warbling and shrill. The sound was painful to his ears and kept on even after the body of the sound had vanished and silence swept back around him like mud filling the groove where the wheel of a cart has passed. He continued up the slope as quietly as he could but the sound traveled with him now and would not leave him.

The dark ground tipped and swelled beneath him and he stumbled every few steps up to the first fields. At the junction with the valley road he remembered Frau Mayer and the cream and bore right along the edge of the spruce groves past the chapel. When he arrived at the house a light was burning in the kitchen, tremulous and gaslit, but no one answered to his knock. He peered in through the window and saw that the kitchen was empty. He crossed the farmyard to the stalls and slid the door open but saw only the crosswalk between the pens, narrow and straw-battened, and the animals shifting heavily in the dark at the sudden draft. He stood quietly awhile in the open door, listening to their breathing.

Returning across the wet ground to the house he called out and waited what seemed to him a very great length of time. He rapped again loudly on the door. After a few minutes more without an answer he stepped inside. To each side of him in the entryway the work clothes and jackets of the sons hung from pegs and lay crumpled among the boots and the hunting tack strewn loosely about the floor. Above the pegs skulls of deer mounted on birch-bark plaques hung one above the other, receding from great twelve-pointed racks to fluted, teacup-sized scalp bones just under the ceiling, more like the skulls of weasels or house cats than of deer. A black grouse over the kitchen lintel regarded him blankly out of one amber-beaded eye. He opened the door to the kitchen and blinked a moment in the light of the lamp set on the window table, then called out warblingly again into the house.

When his eyes had adjusted to the light he stepped into the kitchen and looked about him. There was the oven, there the stove. A cluster of pots and ladles hung over a wooden counter. An unpainted cherry-wood cupboard faced the counter and the stove front. He crossed over to the cupboard and pulled it open.

Squares of bacon wrapped in butcher’s paper lined the uppermost shelf, ordered in neat, staggered rows like candles in a sacristy. Below the bacon were bundles of smoked sausage and bricks of cheese and below these were sacks of onions and potatoes and small plug-necked bottles of schnapps. Voxlauer took a few parcels of bacon and sausage and a handful of red onions and stuffed them into his pack. He sniffed at the potatoes, chose two of a good size, then uncorked a bottle and tipped it back and took a long, burning draft. —I’m on holiday today, too, said Voxlauer into the quiet. He stood awhile in the middle of the room, drinking. Then he took up the lamp and put away the bottle and went on into the darkened house.

The pantry behind the kitchen was piled to the rafters with jars of all sizes, cans of compote and preserves, fish and salted meat, vegetables and fruits floating gilded in their preservative brine. Voxlauer turned a jar of pickled eggs back and forth under the light, watching the oil swirl and settle. On his way into the parlor he stumbled over a stool and nearly let go of the lamp. He felt nauseous suddenly and stopped to breathe, setting the lamp down on a newly waxed cabinet covered in trinkets and curling brown photographs laid together end on end, like cards in a game of tarok. The room began to reel under his feet and he held tight to the cabinet’s rim, focusing on the white lace dust cover. The faces of the sons smiled up at him from out of dark, patinaed frames. Before the pictures lay a broken-stemmed pipe and a pair of pince-nez and to the right of these, in frames of twisted ironwork, portraits of Georg Schönerer and Adolf Hitler.

The room of the two sons lay just beyond the parlor and Voxlauer entered it cautiously, holding the dying lamp out in front of him. He was standing between the narrow beds, looking at the banners and slogans covering the four walls, when the attack came. A shuddering noise like the sound of air caught by a train window rushed into the room and doubled him over against the bed. His breath exited his chest in one pauseless sweep as though sucked out by a bellows. He clung to the burled, palm-smoothed bedpost and vomited. The banners and swastikas and placards on the walls combined before his sight into a screen of dancing symbols and he cursed at it voicelessly and clenched his eyes tightly shut. But a horizonless field of shifting forms spread itself in front of his closed eyes, heaving and reeling sickeningly, he was forced to open them again onto the room. And still the vision persisted, containing the room too within it now, yawning endlessly before him, cold and gray and inexhaustible, widening even as he watched. I know what it is now, thought Voxlauer. I have a name for it.

—The future, he said into the room.

For an instant all his drunkenness left him and he looked at the density and profusion of color surrounding him with something approaching awe. Then just as suddenly the vision abandoned him and the drunkenness returned. With it came a screeching, directionless anger, rearing and sickening him and doubling him over again until his face was almost to the floor. He stumbled about the room from one wall to another, clawing at the posters and hangings and throwing them down into a heap between the beds. When the four walls were stripped bare he fell back from them onto one of the beds, leaning against the bedpost, sucking air into his lungs. After a time he stood up shakily and went out of the room.

He found the butter and the cream Frau Holzer had left out for him on the kitchen counter and went back to the cupboard, filling his pack randomly with parcels from the various shelves. Stumbling among the coats in the entryway he cursed and kicked a boot hard against the wainscoting. I’ve done this now, he thought. I’ve done this thing, too. Even though she was kind to me. He felt clear and lucid again and stood a long time in the entryway, swaying very slightly from side to side.

Like hitting the man in Pauli’s bar. I can never come back here, either, he thought, sadly and calmly, as though looking back on himself from a place far removed in time. He began to take the parcels out again, one by one, from his pack, arranging them in a straight white row under the coats. Then he stopped himself, smiling a little. —That won’t do anything now, Oskar, he said aloud, picking the parcels up. A short time later he lurched out into the yard and stood watching his breath rise and spread across the sky, icy and black and without end.

The first weeks on the collective Anna moved and spoke and took
in the things around her as though asleep. She knew what had happened, in the same sense that she knew her date of birth or her
name or the time of year, and was able to learn, with my help, the
things she needed to learn to satisfy the sovkhoz bosses, but something had shifted incontrovertibly in her image of the world and its
intentions toward her and from then on it seemed as if our roles
had been reversed—she was now the exile from a faraway country
and I was both her translator and her guide. Most painfully of all
to me, she never seemed indignant or resentful as she went about
the various absurd and demeaning chores assigned to her to
remove her “kulak sense of privilege”; if anything it was her eagerness to please, her blank-faced willingness to do whatever was
asked of her, that confused the other workers in her brigade and
kept her in regular disfavor with the Women’s Council. Each night
she’d tell me with a strange, apologetic smile the things she’d done
that day and I’d return her smile blankly, idiotically, knowing as
well as she did that the jobs had been meant to humiliate her and
the next day would bring more of the same.

Yet all during that time, incredible as it seems to me now, I held
adamantly to my belief in Lenin and participated in the regular discussion groups on Wednesday and Friday evenings, asking
countless questions of the cadre instructors, struggling to see the
ideal behind the bleak fact of the collective. Anna began for some
reason to believe that our time on the sovkhoz would soon be over
and I made every effort not to discourage her, convinced as I was
that conditions would soon improve. I began to write letters home
to Maman, letters full of Leninist rhetoric and self-righteous contempt for my old life, but in spite of her difficulty understanding
the change in me, I saw that she had long since forgiven me for
deserting; it was clear from her first reply that she held Lenin and
his international horde of terrorists and saboteurs to blame. Her
regular rants against “Bolshevikism” provided Anna and me with a
great many evenings’ entertainment. For a while we recovered
something of our former happiness.

Our first three years on the sovkhoz passed more or less in this
way. Then slowly, irresistibly, in a succession of lighter and heavier
shocks, the last of our belief in things expired. Lenin’s death, when
it finally came, seemed like nothing to me so much as a token
of my own disillusionment. More and more of the collective’s
yield was requisitioned each year to feed the workers in the cities
and fund the first of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans; the bosses became
more and more irritable and suspicious of everything, fighting
openly now among themselves, and our standing in the sovkhoz
remained peripheral and suspect in spite of my continuing avowals
of enthusiasm and Anna’s unceasing efforts at goodwill.

On our brief furloughs home we found ourselves reviled as
soviet lackeys by the same people who’d reported us to the cadres
five years before; the regime had lost the last of its support in the
countryside, and grain-hoarders and suspected rebels were shot
daily in the villages. Many of the richer peasants slaughtered their
animals in the public markets and burned their houses to the
ground so no more could be taken from them. The roads from one
town to another began to fill with families with the stricken,
uncomprehending look of people in the initial stages of starvation. A saying from before the Revolution came back into common
use, even on the collective: “A bad harvest comes from God; famine
comes from the Tsar.” Already some were predicting the coming
famine would be the worst that the country had ever seen.

When the Great Famine hit in the winter of ’32 I learned
quickly that the hunger I’d known in the time of my desertion had
been less than a passing pang. The produce storehouses of the
collective were put under round-the-clock watch by an entire
company of Red Army infantry and anyone approaching within
twenty meters was fired on. The cities were far worse off than the
countryside: in Cherkassy the people ate dogs, the bark off trees,
even one another. Grain continued to be sent north by train to
finance the latest of Stalin’s construction drives. Anna fell ill, as
did many others on the collective, and I had nothing at all to give
her. When it became clear to everyone that she was dying I was
allowed to take her home and she bettered slightly there, enough
to move frailly through the house from one window to another,
watching women from the village sowing cabbage and beets on the
narrow strip of land that had once briefly belonged to her.

This and another three years, Père, I would have to tell you

At first light of day Voxlauer was high on the west ridge, shivering in the shadow of the tree line along a strip of clear-cut turf. The tangle of the ridge spread and fell away beneath him and vanished over Pergau into the mist. He leaned back against a knotted pine, staring down along the ridge out of the wet, red corners of his eyes. An hour earlier he’d passed through the clearing where the bones of the deer lay scattered in all directions through the scrub and the silvered bracken, radiating out spokelike from the gutted ribs. At some point in the night he’d been down to the cottage where he’d emptied his pack and put on his coat and stowed the bottle in one of its pockets. At some point also he had vomited and a clotted pinkish oil clung to his collar and beard and crept slowly in a crescent down his shirtfront. He sat back with the chamber of the shotgun across his knees and waited, wheezing quietly from the cold.