The Right Hand of Sleep (5 page)

The fusilier came by a short time later and looked the sergeant
over. He asked me if I had been wounded and I shook my head. He
looked at me a moment, then told me to put my helmet on. I
searched for it around me in the snow but couldn’t find it. Come
over here, Private, the fusilier said. He motioned to me to take the
sergeant’s legs and, leaning stiffly over, took hold of him by the
sheepskin collar of his coat and pulled. The sergeant came away
from the wall with a noise like tearing crepe and a little ravine of
yellow snow tumbled after him onto our boots. We went with the
body to the back lines, stumbling and slipping on the wet planks
laid in pairs over the trenches. At the halfway point two men
appeared with a stretcher and took the sergeant from us. We were
within shouting distance of the tents of the rear line and I wanted
very badly to keep going. If I remember rightly I started crying
then, a steady breathless shudder that I made no attempt to keep
the fusilier from noticing. The nausea came back and I took a
few steps to one side, watching the men lurch forward with the
stretcher around and between the shell craters toward the tents.
The fusilier gave a light pull on one of my sleeves and we turned
and began to walk back up the slope to the deserted front.

As we reached the line we saw the last column of men scrabble over the ridgetop and disappear. The fusilier’s battalion had
advanced without him and he was suddenly afraid they might
think he’d deserted. It seemed to me the offensive must have been a
great success: only a small part of a battalion had hung back, to
oversee the transport of the remaining guns. We stood on the last
footbridge looking down at the empty trenches. Do you have a
weapon? asked the fusilier.

Yes sir.

Well?

Sir?

Did you slip it down your breeches, Private? Where in God’s
name is it?

It was in the pit, sir, I said.

He cursed. Go and find it, then.

I walked back to the ruins of the turret and cast around in the
drift and rubble for my rifle. The mortar had been taken away. Not
finding anything, I sat down again against the empty casings; at
some point I got to my feet and looked down the line. The fusilier
was gone. Far off down the slope a team of mules was hauling six
or seven coupled mortars up a track. I watched them slowly pass
out of sight and after that stared a long time off into the woods,
not thinking about anything.

I spent that night in a snowed-in supply tent on the former Italian side of the lines. The front had been abandoned hurriedly and
very little looked to have been taken. In among the stacked crates
of flour and beans and salted meat were two piles of winter uniforms, slate-colored and quilted, with the Venetian lion recumbent
over each lapel. I pushed the piles together and fashioned them
into a sort of bed and crawled underneath it and felt the weight of
the coats pressing me down into the floor. I thought of the way the
sergeant had been pressed into the snow and imagined the force of
the explosion something like the weight I felt on top of me, but
vast and on every side and all at once. Then I laughed at myself,
seeing an avalanche of uniforms exploding into the dugout. That’s
not the way it was, I thought. It was a shell that did it. He was
burned all over.

The roof sagged steeply on the uphill side of the tent and
standing on some of the crates I was able to slip my head through a
hole in the fabric and look back down the slope. The sky was high
and clear and as night fell a line of fires sprang up behind the tents
where the sergeant’s body had been taken. Now I will remember
him that way, I thought, picturing his black and running face. The
family and the friends will remember him one way and I’ll remember him the other. I felt giddy thinking this. Wachmann’s face and
the sight of his body as it died suddenly seemed a privileged and
secret knowledge. Only I had seen it. The fusilier had seen something, perhaps, but I had seen the whole of it. Everything but the
explosion. I thought again, more vaguely now, that I should have
been there when the shell hit. I thought very briefly about a letter I’d gotten that morning with news about my father. The firelight looked beautiful thrown back onto the tents but I couldn’t
picture myself going to them. A ringing and shuddering was passing through my body, rattling the crates under my feet, but I felt
nothing unpleasant, only giddiness.

After a time it grew too cold to watch the fires any longer
and I ducked my head inside and buried myself down in the coats
until only my eyes and nose were showing. I lay very still, imagining being discovered by the Italians in the middle of the night. I
thought about Wachmann again and how the snow had clung to
his back like the bristles of a pig when we pulled him away from
the wall. The wind grew louder and snow fluttered down steadily
from the hole in the roof. Eventually I fell asleep.

When I woke my nose and eyelids were coated with drift but
the rest of me was warm for the first time in weeks and I felt forgotten and content. I got up and went outside to piss; it was already
late morning and blindingly bright. Down the hill I saw a ring of
men in what looked to be Turkish uniforms talking quietly and
smoking. When my vision cleared a little I recognized them by their
peaked hats as our own Kaiser’s hussars. I went back into the tent
and took up my rucksack and slid down the steep clear-cut slope
toward the men. The drifts made the going slow and strenuous
between the stumps, and I was a long time getting down; at one
point I stumbled and tore the shoulder of my coat. I came out of a
cluster of pines a few yards farther on and heard a shot at the same
moment but by then it was too late to turn back. I looked up and
saw a man in an open flannel shirt totter a few steps and then fall
face-forward into the snow. A second or two later the man who
had fired noticed me. He called to me to raise my arms and come
slowly down the hill. The others turned round at this and watched
me as I came. When I reached the even ground I laid my rucksack
down, very gingerly, then raised my hands again. I hadn’t seen the
man who had fallen clearly but I knew that he was not an Italian
and that I was not going to make it anymore to the tents.

Two hussars came forward and led me by my elbows into the
circle. They asked me the name of my battalion and my regiment
and I told them. The officer with the pistol, a captain, gestured at
my shoulder. How did that happen, Private? he asked.

Just now, sir. I fell.

How did you lose your battalion?

During the shelling, sir. I was feeder to a mustard-shell battery.
The taps sergeant died.

The captain frowned. What taps-sergeant?

Taps Sergeant Wachmann, sir. A German.

Were you hit?

No sir.

There was silence for a moment. How did you lose your battalion? the captain said, as matter-of-factly as before. A shaking had
begun along my left arm. The others were closer to me now and I
could see the steam of their breath rising up behind the captain’s
head. He was looking at me as a gymnasium teacher might to an
able student and I wanted very much to tell him again about Wachmann and the fusilier and everything that had happened since but I
saw in the same instant that he hadn’t put away his gun and the
look on his face had changed. How did you lose your battalion,
Private? he said again.

I stayed with the taps sergeant. At my position sir.

There was another silence. Someone sniggered.

Shoot this man, the captain said flatly, handing me his pistol.

The circle widened to show another man on his knees in the
snow, stripped to his underclothes. Tears were running down his
cheeks and guttering in his beard and in the folds of his face. I
stood for a few seconds without moving or speaking. Who is he? I
asked.

A deserter, said the captain. Behind me in the circle someone
spat. A voice was screaming now behind my eyes, not my voice or
the voice of any other living thing but a voice just the same, high
and piercing as a steam jet. Things began to swim together. I took a
half step backward to steady myself and felt a hand against the
small of my back. I know you, said the man on the ground, tilting
his head up toward me.

I stared down at the man. I know you, he repeated. He had
stopped sobbing now and was looking up at me or at something just behind me with wide-open unblinking eyes. The thought
entered my head for the smallest part of an instant that he was not
talking to me at all, or to anyone in the circle, but directly to God. I
know you, he said again, breaking into a smile.

Shut your mouth! screamed the officer. The scream was thin
and bright like the noise that was sharpening each second behind
my eyes and I drew back automatically. The man on the ground
was staring at me and swaying from side to side as if in a rapture.
Mucus clotted in his beard and on his lips. He made no motion
either to raise himself or to lie back down onto the snow. He was
raising his left arm to me, open-handed, as if asking me to help
him onto his feet.

Do you know this man? said the captain, turning round to
look at me.

No sir, I said. I raised the pistol and fired.

When he reached the front gate Maman was sitting exactly as she’d been when he had left her. As he came up the steps she sat forward with a start and he realized she’d been asleep. —You haven’t forgotten how to startle a body yet, she muttered.

—I’m sorry.

—Well. That’s all right.

He stood beside her awhile, looking up at the treeline. —Does old Ryslavy still run the Niessener Hof?

—No. Alban died last winter. Pauli runs it now.

—Pauli.

—He’s asked about you.

—How is he?

—Well. Knock on wood, Oskar.

He was quiet for a time. —When did this start happening, these changes? he asked. —How long ago?

She sighed quietly, more a contraction than a sound. —Nothing has really happened yet.

—But you’re worried about Pauli? Truly worried?

She shrugged. —He has a little girl.

He squinted again at the hillside, frowning slightly, remembering Pauli and Old Ryslavy and the Hof and his favorite table there, then all at once remembering his age, every year of it. Even the war seemed long ago.

—I did read your letters, Maman. I didn’t believe about the changes, that’s all. She watched him as he said this. He couldn’t make out her face in the dark but her head had turned toward him. He took a breath.

—There was so much exaggeration everywhere around us. This whole time. He paused. —I can’t explain it. We didn’t get very much news. Not much that was clear. There were rumors. I wanted to believe there had been changes. If there had been changes I could have come back. He paused a moment. —Or I wanted nothing to change, if you prefer. That could be. He laughed.

She looked at him. —How do things seem to you now?

He frowned again. —Well. They seem the same.

—They’re not the same, Oskar.

He stood close beside her, leaning slightly over. —What is it with Pauli? he said. —Trouble with Rindt?

—Mmm.

—Rindt’s thick with the Black Shirts, is he?

She didn’t answer.

—That greasy bastard.

—Yes, Oskar. She sighed.

He laid his hand on her shoulder. There was precious little under the wrap to indicate it held part of a living human being. He felt her breathe in, a slight shifting of the bones. —Having you away did nothing to lighten the years, she said almost in a whisper.

—I was ill, Maman. And then I was married.

—If you choose to call it that.

He took his hand away and laid it against the pane of the door. —Come in off the verandah now, for God’s sake.

—In a minute.

—In a minute, then. He stepped into the parlor and shut the door behind him, leaving her there, swaddled tightly in her blankets, motionless and austere.

Gasthaus Rindt on closer inspection appeared much the worse for wear. Voxlauer recognized in passing some of the drunks of his youth splayed in wicker chairs on the patio and men who might possibly have been their sons equally drunk beside them, basking sleepily in the noonday light. A dry snow wisped around the tables. Many of the window frames were boarded over and paper sacks of cement lay like sandbags in the foyer. A woman in
Trachten
watched him from the entryway. He wished one man he remembered a good morning and crossed the avenue to Ryslavy’s.