The Right Hand of Sleep (8 page)

—
What is it, Voxlauer?

He hadn’t moved or spoken, but gathered in his breath, weakly and raspingly, with a sound like a brush passing over a leather strap:
Ahhh. Ahh

—
Voxlauer? Hey?

—
What?

—You made a noise.

—Yes.

—What is it?

—It’s my father.

—What?

—He’s shot himself. Ahh. He’s shot himself, do you hear

Then a silence, blanketing and deep.

—
Oskar?

—Ahhhh, said Voxlauer aloud, listening to the sound give out into the cold.

He rose and worked the mattress with the poker until the smell again made it difficult to breathe. He crossed the room to the door and caught his breath and returned to the mattress. When he had finished he hung the lantern from a hook above the door and went outside to the woodpile and brought in six quartered logs and an armful of kindling. Taking a broom and a dustpan from under the bench, he swept up the loose straw and emptied it into the stove mouth. The stove itself was thick with ash but he had no strength left to clean it. He laid on the kindling and the splints and started a fire and opened the stove vents. Then he spread his coat over the sour-smelling mattress and slept.

That night the hussars gave me a coat and a felt blanket and sat me
among them round the fire. The images of my father as I imagined
him, and the taps sergeant and the deserter, mixed and separated
again until I couldn’t think of any one of them without the other
two crowding in behind. There was no difference, finally, between
them: all three had died. They had each died badly and I’d had a
part in their deaths and I had come away alive. The knowledge of
this made me feel ghostlike and transparent and I wondered that
no one around the fire seemed to notice. I had been solid and fully
in my body before shooting the deserter but he had died very badly,
slowly and in great pain, and I hadn’t been able to fire a second
time. Once he’d died and I knew that I was safe I’d been able to step
away from the fact of myself a little and not think, only follow the
hussars back to the tents. But now night had fallen and I was still
not back in my body properly and in fact was trapped outside of it
as the rest of them drank and cursed their superior officers and
gossiped about the war.

They were a young regiment, excepting some of the officers,
and a few of them were from Kärnten. One boy in particular,
Alban I think his name was, was kind to me and shared a dram
of watery schnapps and a little flake of chocolate. I found that in
spite of what was happening I could drink and eat and talk to him
very amiably. We exchanged addresses and promised we’d meet
at the Niessener Hof for a drink sometime after the war, and he
found me a bedroll and a coat and space in a tent with three other
enlisted men. The captain came round a short time later and promised to have me restored to my company by six-o’clock the following evening. The front’s moved on some eighteen-odd miles, he
said. We took Caporetto this morning in less than an hour. He was
standing over me at the opening of the tent and speaking evenly
and unexcitedly with the clear starry sky behind him. Appreciative
murmurs rose up from the others. That’s good, I said after a time,
not thinking that it was, particularly, or thinking anything at all
but saying it was because that was simplest. There was silence for a
moment. I looked up at the captain; he seemed to be waiting for
me to say something more.

That’s good, I repeated. I suppose it’s the Germans, sir?

It’s the gas, he said, turning on his heels and leaving.

The next morning as we climbed through a dense belt of firs I
broke off from the column and struck down into the trees. The
company had thinned into loose clusters of men beating paths
through the brush and my leaving went unnoticed. I felt indifferent
to this, whether or not I had been seen, feeling that I was dead
already. I’d been killed by the gas or the cold or the smell in the air
or by the man I had killed; how I’d died made not the slightest difference. Where I was to drop, when eventually I did, made no difference either except that I knew it should not be in the snow in a
trench like the taps sergeant, with the smell of gas and burnt powder all around me.

At the lower edge of the firs the slope steepened and the
cover spread apart and I half slid, half stumbled downhill over the
tamped snow, brushing tips of buried saplings as I went. One hour
later I reached the old front and a few hours after that I was standing at the gate of the first farmstead leading down to Laibach.
From where I stood I could see the empty plaza and the kapelle and
the station behind it where we’d begun our march. It was just past
midday, breezy and mild. I followed the fence to the back of the
house.

The yard seemed deserted, empty of stock and people, and I
approached the house cautiously and rapped on the door. After a
while I pushed it open and stepped inside. Standing around the
kitchen in various poses of laziness and disinterest were seven men
carrying repeating rifles, dressed in tattered blue fatigues. I looked
at them for a moment or two, then put up my hands.

The men looked me over for a time. We thought maybe you
were the milkmaid with the milk, said one of them. He spoke with
a slow, heavy accent I took at first to be Hungarian. He watched
me a little while longer, then motioned to me to lower my arms. I
let them fall, saying nothing. What are you doing here? asked the
man. He was looking at my private’s coat and holster.

Looking for breakfast, I answered.

He snorted. Well, you won’t find any here, little man. Believe
me, we should know already. Just an old whore strung up by her
garters in the cow shed. One of the men made a sign of the cross
behind him. The first man shrugged.

I don’t believe you, I said.

Do we look like we’ve eaten? he said tiredly.

I looked from one to another of them around the little room.
One by one each of them returned my gaze out of droop-eyed,
jaundiced faces. Not much, I said. The man smiled again and
nodded.

There were nine of them in all, deserters from a Czech battery specializing in minelaying. A number of them had kept their wire-stripping and cutting tools and we used these to cut locks and
chicken wire in a long chain of farms running north and east into
Hungary. As the Czechs could no better return to Bohemia than I
could to Kärnten we decided to continue east over the wide rolling
plain to Budapest. We slept during the day in windbreaks or in little wooded depressions and traveled after dark, stealing here and
there from farmers as we went. When anybody saw us we chased
after them a little, waving our guns and yelling.

We kept due east, more or less, skirting the towns, our only
idea to get as far from Austria as we could before the war ended.
We were all convinced we would win the war with the new gas
from Germany and that afterward deserters would be hunted
down and murdered. The man who had first spoken to me, Jan
Tobacz, a dentist from Prague, had a wife and child staying with
relatives in Budweiss and was terrified they might be shot. This
was the first time I’d thought about the Empire as something altogether different in the east than we thought of it at home, something vast and full of strange designs, a thing to keep well clear of.
Jan himself came from a wealthy Prague family and had never
questioned the architecture of things, as he termed it, until going
to the war. He’d been on the Isonzo front for nearly two years and
had spent the better part of his second year planning his desertion.
We became friends over the following weeks and talked about the
war and our decision to leave it until we were both of us free of
any doubt. I came to see the restlessness of my last few years as the
inevitable response to the smallness of Niessen, to its baubles-and-penance religion, to borrow another of Jan’s phrases, and to the
way we’d had of living at a remove from things, discouraging all
but a few friendships, keeping my father’s condition hidden as long
as we could. Jan was something of a socialist and under his direction I came to view my past life as an haut-bourgeois evil and my
father’s filigreed, salon-ready compositions as its most grotesque
flowering. I began to blame the music, Niessen, the war, and anything else I could think of for my father’s death. The farther east
we traveled the more my disgust grew at all that I had been raised
to cherish and admire, from the French we had spoken each night
at the dinner table to my mother’s cultivated fondness for Italian
sweets.

I had my seventeenth-birthday supper in a field by an open
well for oxen, somewhere just southwest of Budapest: two autumn
hares in a little brass tureen with a carrot and a spoonful of rancid
butter. Welcome to the rest of life, Jan said proudly. I felt old, looking at him, and terrifyingly clear-headed. I knew even then that I’d
not see Niessen again as a young man.

Two or three nights later we came to a small farm on the city’s
outskirts, a few low plaster buildings with sloping roofs set around
a pond on a parcel of steep, muddy ground. We hadn’t eaten for
two days and stared across the dull brackish water at the lights of
the house. We waited a long time for them to go out, sitting on our
rucksacks in the damp grass. There seemed to be a party going on.
Finally Jan muttered something in Czech to two of the men and
they stood and walked around the pond to the gate. We watched
them go. Isn’t it a little dangerous, with everyone awake? I asked.

Jan laughed. I’ve only sent them to beg, Oskar.

We waited in silence. Suddenly there was a shout and the gate
clattered open and the two Czechs came galloping full tilt around
the pond. What the hell is it? Jan shouted once they’d reached us.

We’re to come right in, they said, half in disbelief. Every one
of us.

When we came to the house we found that a huge plank table
had already been cleared and pushed into the middle of the
kitchen, and long benches dragged out from the pantry. The farmer
and his three sons greeted us warmly as we entered and motioned
to us to sit down and begin. They told us in cheerful patchwork
German that the lady of the house was boiling potatoes and
cabbage and had gone to the smokehouse for another yard of
sausages. We looked at them in blank confusion, sheepish in our
hunger, not daring to ask any further questions or touch any of the
food. After a few minutes of painful, friendly silence, broken only
by the growling of our stomachs, the farmer’s wife returned with a
platter of smoked meats and a thick loaf of bread and set them
down in front of us with a pitcher of pond-cooled beer. We must
have sat dumbfoundedly for another moment blinking up at her
because she laughed and lifted her upturned hands, saying Eat!
Eat!

We looked at each other for a few seconds and then set in, all
of us grinning now like idiots.

The wife spoke better German than her husband and as we ate
she stood watching us proudly. She asked which regiment we’d
deserted from and where we were headed. She was particularly
curious as to how I’d come into the company. How did you happen
east, then, little soldier? she asked me.

By accident, ma’am, I said, buttering a roll and smiling.

I know better, she said coyly.

What do you mean, please? said one of the Czechs. I looked up
at the farmer’s wife. Excuse me, ma’am? I said, my mouth full of
bread.

She laughed, taking us all in with her sparkling black eyes.
Come come, gentlemen! We’re not so far as all that from the city.
This country is very flat, she said, winking at her husband. News
gets about.

I still don’t understand, I protested.

She shrugged. There’s a big strike tomorrow, in favor of the
Seven Points. In Dzizny Square. Surely you knew about this? My
husband will be going, and my sons. You may ride with them. To
save yourself the marching, she said, breaking again into a grin.