The Right Hand of Sleep (7 page)

—There’s a road now, Pauli tells me. Up from Pergau. You could have Irma drive you sometime.

—Werner’s car is in the shop.

—Maman.

—You’re right. She smiled and kissed his cheek. He bent down to receive it and felt the dry press of her lips and the crepe-paper folds of her skin against his face. Then he stepped past her and shouldered his pack and left the house.

After stopping in at the Niessener Hof for breakfast and the key he walked up past the old gymnasium with Ryslavy close beside him. —There’s a snake rifle and shotgun in a locker by the stove, Ryslavy was saying. —They’ll both need some cleaning. There’s oil and forty shells, I think, in one of the cupboards. And a can of loose shot somewhere, if I remember rightly.

—I could use that for fishing, said Voxlauer.

—Please use the rods, Oskar. Please. The green spoons are best for the fast water between the beds. On the slow current use something fatter. Try the orange tags.

—Don’t mother me, Pauli. Anything but that.

—I’ll visit, said Ryslavy. —Next week. He slapped Voxlauer on the back and waved him on where the road wound past the last empty barns. Voxlauer couldn’t help noticing that his expression as he stood in the road looking up and waving was one of relief.

The valley was little more than a saddle of damp earth hung at three-quarters height between the humped Birker hills to the north and a crescent of yellow cliffs to the southwest and west. It began at a wooded pass above a shingle-roofed reliquary on the old Holzer property and sloped down in a lazy bend along the steep muddy feet of the cliffs. The walls of the valley were high and pine-covered, but the banks of the creek that began below the pass turned a brimming green in summer and drew legions of butterflies. As a boy he’d spent hours by the ponds with a whisk and a canning jar, chasing damselflies low along the water only to see them vanish in a sudden spray and flash of copper. He’d fix his eyes firmly on the spot until another flew past him, oil-colored in the slanting light, and the game would begin again.

After an hour’s walk through the pine-bound soil of the woods under Holzer’s Cross he came onto a road of crushed tile leading up to the farm. A little farther on he found the entrance to the valley, bare and blown clear of snow under the dull white sky. The road to the ponds broke away to the left and set its curve in the shelter of a dense spruce plantation. He kept on past the crumbling reliquary and the down-valley fork to a blue-plastered house from which a line of smoke was rising. He left his pack at the gate and swung his legs over the fence and called up a good day to the house.

A woman in a felt jacket came to the door and opened it and called to him to come up. She nodded to him as he climbed the steps and led him without speaking into a water-stained anteroom. Her hair was drawn back in a dark silk babushka and her shoulders were wrapped in a woolen shawl. How like Anna’s mother she looks, thought Voxlauer. Resigned and kindly. I suppose they look the same everywhere, these old farmers’ wives. Maman could never be mistaken for one of them. —I’m sorry to trouble you, he said, bowing slightly.

—Ach! said the woman. She took his coat and ushered him into the kitchen matter-of-factly. —Come in out of the weather, young Herr.

—Oskar Voxlauer, said Voxlauer, bowing again and smiling.

—Elke Mayer, said the woman. —Fine to meet you. Rest your legs a bit, if you’d care to, Herr Voxlauer.

—Thank you. I’m Paul Ryslavy’s new gamekeeper, he said, sitting down at the window table.

—I know. Herr Ryslavy telephoned just this morning.

—You have a telephone here?

—This is not Russia, said the woman, smiling.

—No it isn’t. I was hoping to buy some bacon from you. Or sausage.

—We have bacon and ham. Would you like some fresh cream?

—Thank you kindly.

She brought out the ham and a jar of cream and set it on the table. Then she poured milk from a blue steel pitcher into a crockery mug and measured out a thimbleful of schnapps and poured it into the mug and set the bottle down. The milk was still warm from the udder and a skein of yellow cream clotted at its meniscus. The schnapps gave the milk a warm pink opalescence, like firelight on a snowdrift. She poured a second cup for herself.

—Prost, he said, lifting his glass.

—Prost.

From a scrap of butcher’s paper at the end of the table she unwrapped a small pumpernickel roll and a quarter of twice-smoked bacon. She cut the bacon into long fatty strips just thin enough to let light through and laid two cuts apiece on thick slices of roll. —Mahlzeit, she said. Voxlauer thanked her again. The bacon was wonderfully chewy and well salted and mixed gloriously with the schnapps. They ate awhile in silence, watching the light brightening and dimming over the treetops and roofs of the town far below them.

—Old Ryslavy was clever to buy land when he did, said the woman after a time. —Lumber’s near the only sure money trade nowadays. She refilled his cup.

—There’s the Niessener Hof, besides, said Voxlauer.

—We’ll see where that gets him, said the woman. He looked at her again. She had the look of someone past worrying about other people’s affairs, but only just. He thought again that she reminded him of someone, not Anna’s mother now, but someone else. An aunt possibly. He felt very young sitting there in her kitchen drinking his schnapps in milk. She looked out the window now, smiling a little. —All stripes of people are moving onto the mountain lately. It’s becoming quite a settlement.

—What do you mean?

—Well, the colony, firstly, down at Pergau. Ice baths and nakedness and so forth. She shook her head. —And then there’s all the people come to fish Herr Ryslavy’s ponds.

Voxlauer laughed. —What’s this down in Pergau? A retreat or some such?

The woman rolled her eyes. —The good Lord knows, Herr Voxlauer. We poor fools can only gossip.

—Who else is there?

—Well, the schoolteacher is another. On the Pergauer saddle.

—Pergau is a good few miles off.

—Tell that to the nudists, said the woman. She laughed. —They’re great ones for marches.

They sat awhile longer in the darkening room, talking about the colony and a similar group down in Villach whose members had been arrested that fall for parading in the Stadtpark wearing nothing but fig leaves and winter slippers. They talked about their families and discovered they were distantly related to one another on their fathers’ sides. Voxlauer paid her for the jar of cream and the ham and attempted to give her something for the schnapps but she refused. Outside the window the light was slowly leaving the hillside. She stood after a time and left the room and returned a moment later with a paraffin lamp which she lit and set down on the table. —You’d best be going soon, she said. —My sons will be coming in and they’re sure to be unpleasant. They’re no friends of Ryslavy’s.

—Why not?

The woman hunched herself over and made a hooking gesture with two fingers from the bridge of her nose. She looked at him and shrugged.

—I see, said Voxlauer. He thanked her for her kindness and left.

By the time he came down off the pass it was drizzling and dark and a yellow mist rose from the ditch along the roadside. The road passed between two fenced pastures unused in winter and entered a second grove of close-set spruce trees. At the far end of the grove three beehouses marked the border of Ryslavy’s land.

The beehouses had once been painted red, green and orange respectively, and strips of curled enamel still clung here and there to the buckling wood. Voxlauer opened the door of the first and looked inside. The interior was arranged like a cabinet with four deep-set shelves, the upper two mortared thickly over with honeycomb. Now and then a sluggish brown drone emerged and dragged itself from one chamber to another. Voxlauer followed one in with his thumb and drew out a long gray-brown splinter of honey.

When he arrived at the last turning above the ponds he caught a faint scent of smoke and the scant lights of Pergau came briefly into view. The road dipped all at once into a pine-filled depression and emerged just as quickly along the ice-covered water. A kerchief of new snow floated over the ice, diffusing the dim light of the stars into milk. The noise of his steps was likewise diffused by the snow and he passed through the low trees in silence. At the far end of the pond he found a rowboat frozen to its mooring, nearly invisible in the darkness under its snow-covered wrap. The ice against the boat’s side was black and clear of snow and held pebble-sized globes of air fixed in rows within it like schools of tiny fish. He leaned against the boat, then kicked it, but it refused to move.

The lower pond was separated from the upper by a thin line of rapids. The road cut along the south bank in three quick turnings and crossed on cemented plank pilings to the broad northern lee of the water just above the pond’s mouth. Set against the slope on this wedge of flat ground was a cottage. It glowed bonelike in the dark with the tall trees behind it and its round, porthole-shaped windows set like sockets into the blank white plaster. The door had been barred with two heavy barrels, one of which now lay overturned, spilling food tins and newspaper in a fan-shaped confusion over the snow. Fox tracks and weasel tracks scattered in all directions over the powder and showed clean as picture negatives on the gravel underneath. Voxlauer righted the fallen barrel and moved it to the left of the lintel and took the key from his pocket and turned it in the corroded lock chamber. The hinges of the door complained loudly as he forced it open. A smell of sweat and sour woodsmoke greeted him as he stepped inside and slid the door shut behind him on the blossoming cold.

The room Voxlauer had entered was damp and low-ceilinged and bent at its middle around a crockery stove. A narrow bench ran along the stove and he set his pack on it and fumbled in the dark after matches. He found a kerosene lantern and turned it on its side until he could smell the gas, then struck a match and righted the lantern and surveyed the cottage by its light.

To the left of the stove under a deep, ventlike window a table had been propped against the buckling wall. A chair lay beside it, thrown back onto the floor as though stood up from hurriedly. A hunting locker stood open in a corner. The crick of the room formed an alcove of sorts, hidden from his sight, and crossing to it he found a packed straw pallet bearing the imprint of a small, huddled body, like a thumbmark in tallow. A film of silver hair lined the topmost depression. The heaped woolen blankets reeked cloyingly of urine and he pulled them from the bed and went to the locker and stuffed them inside. The blankets, too, were covered in hair, short and stiff as a terrier’s.

With great effort he managed to pull the mattress from its wooden bedframe and taking a poker from the floor he began to beat the shape out of the canvas in a flurry of straw, hair and dust. The old man looked to have been very slight, from the width of the silhouette, and crook-backed. Voxlauer pictured him there asleep, drawn in under the blankets, the steady rasp of his breathing filling the little room. I’ll be like that soon, he thought. But my hair will be white. Père’s was near to it when I left. He remembered a letter to the front, the last from both of them:
Maman is getting shrewish. She’s frowning at me, but it’s so. We’re both gone senile with
worry. Can it be true things on the lines are as desperate as you
say? This pains me very badly. The feelings you mention are understandable but you must never doubt in the eventual victory of
Franz Josef our Kaiser. To disbelieve this is a terrible thing Oskar
and you must not do it. The Germans started this godawful war in
their pride and their death-mysticism but by Christ we will end it
for them. I wish above all else I could sit with you in your tunnels
but I know you are not a coward and will do your duty come what
may and return to us quickly. I miss you My Heart more than I can
say. Please send only the best news for a time as I don’t think I
can bear the other.
That was all. And, later, in her hand:
Keep your
head low in the trenches. Irma’s Leo was killed last Saturday north
of Udine lighting a cigarette. Père is feeling braver. Je t’aime, mon
petit soldat! Maman.

He went to the door and opened it and stood for a moment, breathing in the cold air, then propped it open and returned to the alcove. He sat for a while on the frame in the half-darkness, muttering to himself.

He felt worn and brittle, far older than his years. Older than Père had ever been. He sat without moving for a while. —Not quite, Oskar, he said aloud, leaning forward into the quiet. —A few years yet, for that. He looked carefully around the room. I won’t make those mistakes, he thought. No children. No wife. I could do it now and not trouble anybody.

Except Maman, he thought suddenly. Except her. He pictured her then as he had when he’d first gotten her hysterical sheet of scribble twenty years before: dressed in unbrushed black silks and veil with the pale sky above her, not listening to the apologetic sparrow-voiced peeping of the priest, all of Niessen crowding in behind, staring down at the long hole cut into the grass. Was that what she was expecting now? He breathed in effortfully and thought of Anna. She had wondered about him, expected it for a time, after he’d told her about Père.

In a way I have done it already, he thought. Not like Père, but worse: I have done it twice. Taken myself away. Again the crumpled and snow-sodden letter appeared before him, and he himself appeared, lying on a damp horsehair blanket the day before the twelfth offensive, reading her letter and feeling the inevitableness of it rising tidelike under him:
He has done the most bastard thing
.
The most hateful. The most selfish. The worst, only thing left my
dear little boy . . .
And on and on in tight blank circles without meaning, not sparing him anything, every detail of that day down to the arrangement of the papers on the writing table, the cane-backed chair thrown down onto the floor, the tipped-over inkwell. And he thinking to himself in that first instant She’s made poetry out of this, out of this thing, too . . . The boy in the upper bunk was leaning out into the crawl space and looking down at him, half smiling, curious.