The Right Hand of Sleep (6 page)

The Niessener Hof by comparison still seemed more or less hale, though a few windows on the upper floors had been nailed shut and some tiles looked to have loosened along the gutters. The façade had recently been given a fresh coat of lime and the vestibule as he entered it appeared in good repair. Most of the tables were empty but a fair-sized crowd stood parceled along the bar. He leaned over as unobtrusively as he could and asked the girl drawing drafts where he might find Herr Ryslavy. —In his office, said the girl with a lazy wave behind her.

Ryslavy was in a small windowless room just off the kitchen, slumped deep in an old cowhide chair with his back to the door, shouting into a telephone. The room itself seemed barely an office at all but rather a storeroom for wine crates and bottles of pilsner. Voxlauer watched from the kitchen for a while, then tapped lightly on the doorframe. Ryslavy turned at the sound and looked up at him a moment, then mumbled his excuses and hung up the receiver. He regarded Voxlauer a few seconds further, scratching his round stubbled chin, then rose slowly from the chair. —I’d expected a Cossack, he said, stepping forward.

—You should have seen me yesterday. I looked like Genghis Khan.

—Much better, said Ryslavy. His teeth as he smiled were the color of weathered pinesplints. He shifted restlessly from foot to foot. —The least you might do is look your age, for the love of God.

—You should have seen me yesterday, said Voxlauer.

The floor was carpeted in varicolored receipts, some of them still bearing the blue K&K of the imperial notary. A fly rod of red lacquered bamboo hung in a corner above an oliveskin tackle bag. The air stank of pipe fumes and carbon ink. Ryslavy stood a moment longer, then slipped around the desk. —A cautionary note: I’ve done nothing since you left but get fat. And go fishing.

—Two not unrelated pastimes.

—And breed. I have a daughter now. The fair Emelia.

—Maman told me. I believe I passed her at the bar.

—Yes.

—Or was that the missus?

Ryslavy made a face. —Ecch! The missus. Run off with an American, two years ago this April.

—An American?

—A stinking unwashed bugger.

—I’m sorry to hear that.

Ryslavy kept quiet.

—Sorry to have missed it, actually.

—A Baptist, believe it ot not, said Ryslavy, smiling. —The genuine article. A preacher of some stripe or other. If I wasn’t an atheist beforehand I definitely am one now.

They sat at a table in a hall off the kitchen, sipping pilsner from wide ceramic mugs, looking out across the square. Ryslavy packed his pipe fussily. He looked over at Voxlauer. —You look tired.

—I am. I’m perpetually tired.

—What was her maiden name?

—Rhyukina. Voxlauer turned his mug back and forth. —We were never married.

Ryslavy chewed his pipestem. —Of course I heard all of this from your mother, he said carefully. —I’ve felt like your older brother through this whole affair. I feel that way now.

—I know it.

—It’s a complicated time you’ve chosen. For Emelia and me especially.

—I know. I didn’t choose it.

They sat quietly awhile. Ryslavy lit his pipe. —Do you need money?

—Thank you. No.

—We’d love to take you on here if you did, now that you’ve been shaved and powdered.

—I don’t need any money. I’ve been here half a week and already I’m sick to death of this place.

—I don’t believe you.

—Well, I can’t stay in town.

They sipped at their beer. Ryslavy drew his lips together.

—I don’t understand, Oskar. Your mother—

—I was hoping to hire on somewhere near to here. As a cowsenner, maybe.

—Never come to town?

—Just to see her.

Ryslavy smiled. —And the rest of us can go to hell? Is that it?

Voxlauer looked out the window toward the patio at Rindt’s.

—Your silence has been duly noted, said Ryslavy. He took a swallow of beer. —You’ve not changed as much as one might have hoped. That is very obvious.

Voxlauer shrugged. —I never had much love for this town, Pauli.

—But the people in it, Oskar! said Ryslavy, setting down his mug and frowning. —The people in it.

—Yes. The people in it. My father and my mother. Well, my father is dead and you know that very well and everyone here knows it. And they know one or two other things about me, too, or so I gather. But they couldn’t know less about why I left or why I came back. He paused to breathe, leaning forward in his chair.

—Of course they couldn’t, Oskar. I didn’t mean you owed them anything.

—Or you, either. Or her.

—No.

Voxlauer closed his eyes. The breath was coming hard to him again, as it always did when things began to reel. He was right that he had to leave but he knew at that moment that they might not let him, Maman and Pauli and the rest. Uncle Gustl, Irma Gratzer, Kati Milnistch, all the others he’d not yet seen. He felt unsteady on the chair and lowered one arm carefully along the chairback. He expected to see Ryslavy staring at him when he opened his eyes but Ryslavy was looking quietly out the window, puffing on his pipe. Voxlauer closed his eyes again. After a time Ryslavy cleared his throat.

—I’m sorry about your father, Oskar.

—That’s all right.

—I’d heard you’ve been sick.

—Yes.

—I never found out exactly what it was. Something from the war?

Voxlauer smiled. —Yes. Something from the war.

—What was it, exactly?

—It was attacks. He scratched the back of his neck. —Is attacks, I suppose.

—Attacks?

—Breathing trouble. That sort of business. Sometimes I see things.

Ryslavy raised his eyebrows. —What sort of things? Things from the war?

Voxlauer smiled. —Catholic things. You wouldn’t understand, Pauli.

—The hell I wouldn’t. I’m an honorary Catholic, on account of my firm belief in alcohol. Ask any of your papist brethren.

—I don’t like talking about it much.

—Oh, said Ryslavy. They sat quietly again.

—Has it gotten any better? said Ryslavy after a time.

Voxlauer dug his hands into his pockets and hunched forward, the toes of his boots pressed together under the table. Outside in the square a sparse dry snow was falling. —I thought it had, he said.

In the evening they drank on and played tarok and ate from huge heaping platters of cutlets and tatterbread dumplings. The girl came to clear the table and sat in on a few rounds. —Emelia, this is your old Uncle Oskar, said Ryslavy. —Oskar, Emelia.

—Pleased to meet you, Uncle, said the girl, smiling down at her cards.

After the round was played she stood up from the table and returned a short while later with a tray of prosciutto and melon and smoked sections of trout. They laid the fish on small wedges of oven-crusted bread, spattered the wedges and the fish with butter, then laid them whole onto their tongues.

—Ah. That’s lovely, said Voxlauer, leaning back.

—Fish want swimming, as they say, said Ryslavy, producing a thin yellow wine bottle from under the table. He poured the wine into two tall-stemmed glasses and proceeded to tell Voxlauer about stickle trout and river trout and the subtleties between them, in the water and in the pan, and his lease of spawning rights to the ponds in the valley above Holzer’s Cross. How word of his fish had spread to such a degree that it had grown necessary to install a pensioner in the valley as a warden, and, later, how the old man had become erratic with drink and for the last winter of his life could most often be found across the square at Rindt’s, splayed out cold across the benches. Voxlauer listened to it all patiently and closely.

—In October we caught three boys buckshotting from the poor bugger’s own boat, said Ryslavy with a gesture of absolution. —With his own damned shotgun.

—What happened to him?

—We found him in a snowdrift last January. In his overcoat and drawers. Daughter still collects his pension. She’s a something, said Ryslavy, smiling.

—What does that mean? said Voxlauer.

—A queer one. Used to teach school down at Brunner’s Cross. Looks a bit Yiddish, which is a fine thing, I’ll tell you, because the old drunk was a bastard of a Yid-hater all his days. Hated Papa something fierce. Not enough to refuse a little schnapps money now and then, of course.

—Of course.

Ryslavy grinned. —She’s a something, anyhow.

—I’m sure she is. What about this cottage, then?

—A room with a roof over it. Ryslavy shrugged. —A chimney.

—How far up valley?

—By the farther pond. You remember, Oskar. On that soggy piece of marsh by the runoff.

—I might remember.

—Well, there you have it.

—Well: if I have it already, then I’ll take it, I suppose, said Voxlauer. —You’ve talked me into it.

Ryslavy looked at him uncertainly. —Beg pardon?

—Thank you, Pauli, said Voxlauer. —I’ll take it. He said it again over Ryslavy’s slurred objections and repeated his decision with a violence that startled even the girl who’d returned and stood watching them from the swinging doors, holding aloft a tray of candied pears.

—He refused me the same thing, she said sullenly.

Maman’s face as he told her betrayed little or no surprise. She looked past him as he spoke, over his shoulder toward the gathering dusk over the ruin. —I suppose I couldn’t have hoped for more than one week, she said.

—It’s only up at the ponds, Maman. It’s work.

She smiled. —We’ll never see you anymore down here. Once a week for butter, maybe.

—It’s work, he repeated.

She was already busy with the table for supper. —Gustl’s coming tonight, she said brightly.

Gustl arrived on his bicycle punctually at seven. Voxlauer heard him cursing through the open parlor window and came out onto the verandah. —Hello, Uncle, he called down. Gustl waved up distractedly. He was pulling a grease-blackened length of chain from a tartan satchel, cursing to himself and spitting onto the gravel.

—Hark! the Bolshevik speaks. Wait till I get my hands on
you,
my boy.

—There’s no need for the chain, Uncle, surely, hereabouts?

—Chancy days, Oskar. Chancy days. Gustl snapped closed the little padlock and tucked the key into his hatband and nodded. He squinted up at the verandah. —Where’s that infamous beard?

—Growing in.

—Aha!

—Maman! Gustl’s here.

—I hear him, she said, coming out onto the stairwell. —Tell him to bring some pilsner up from Gottschak’s.

—I have it already, Dora, laughed Gustl.

They sat on three sides of the parlor table over which a white cloth had been spread eating noodles and cabbage and boiled halved potatoes and bitter canned peas in watered butter. Every now and again Maman kicked him hard under the table.

—Ah! I see what you mean, Uncle.

—Do you, Oskar? A damn lot’s come clear these last few years. Not that it helps the poor serf any.

—It hasn’t helped you, then.

—Not a scratch. The flour-jew takes my grain same as always.

—If you’re lucky, Gustl, said Maman.

Gustl rotated his head wearily. —Luck, my dear sister, doesn’t enter into the equation. In thirty-five years of groveling for a fair-set price and getting pulled by the prick every time it never once has.

Voxlauer smiled. —Ouch! How does that feel, Uncle?

—Don’t set him going again, Oskar.

—I’m only saying. Sounds like out-and-out bad luck to me.

Gustl set his fork down carefully. —Was it bad luck the Jew invaded this country, not as an army but by stealth, and connived through ceaseless intrigue to leach the bounty from our German soil? It was not. Gustl stopped to clear his throat, paused briefly for effect, then recommenced. —Was it bad luck he brought Bolshevism—if you’ll pardon me, Oskar—into Europe? Not at all. Rather it was the result of a thousand years’ inveterate scheming. You, I suppose, can be excused your confusion. He raised his fork augustly to his lips.

Maman’s chair back creaked loudly as she straightened in it. —Good Lord, Gustl. You sound just like a hut-country Schönerer. What do we care about German soil, of all things?

Gustl looked back and forth between them, eyes wide open and compassionate. —I don’t know which of you is more in need of a contemporary newsmagazine, he said finally.

The next morning she found him in the linden grove working the hard smooth ground with a loose-handled rake. What scrub there was among the trees had been piled in a clearing and weighted down with stones from the creek bed. —What’s that scrub pile for? she asked.

—I don’t know, said Voxlauer.

—When will you be going?

—I don’t know.

She stood for a few moments beside him without moving or speaking, not looking at him, not looking away. —Don’t you? she said quietly.

—Tomorrow, said Voxlauer.

The sun was just inclining over the verandah wall as he made ready to go. He asked if he might borrow some books from the parlor to read in the evenings and she nodded her head yes. He took an old animal lexicon, a guide to butterflies and moths, and a clothbound
Selections from Goethe,
fraying along the spine and edges. He wrapped the books in waxed paper and took the provisions she’d bought for him and folded his linen and packed everything down with a green oilcloth tarpaulin in the bottom of his pack. He asked if he could take some of the photographs and she stood still a moment, frowning. —I can’t imagine what you’d be needing those for, she said. Instead she brought him two cabled wool sweaters that had once been his father’s and a green pressed wool cap. —Is he letting you fish, at least?

—As much as I like.

—Père’s reel is under the roof.

—I won’t need it.

—Well, she said.

—Well.

—I hope you’ll shave before coming to town.

—I’ll need Père’s razor, then.

She went to the kitchen and returned with the razor and a brush. She looked younger for a brief moment, coming out onto the verandah. He remembered her face the day he’d left for the Isonzo and realized with a start he was nearly older now than she’d been then. She was looking past him. —I don’t know what I was expecting, she said. —Not this, though. That’s for certain.