The Right Hand of Sleep (9 page)

I still sat staring at her blankly. Strike? I said.

The Bolsheviks, the farmer said loudly. The Bolsheviks, good
gentlemens.

It was the first time many of us had heard that word.

The whining of the door hinges woke him early the next morning. The room was bright and cold. Bits of straw he’d missed in the night danced in spirals on the knotted clapboard floor and around the little table. The last of the fire had long since burned to ash and he felt small and frozen on the bed. He went to the stove and built another fire, shut the door and put on his coat and took out the provisions he’d bought at the farm and boiled some water and made a pot of coffee. He drank two scalding cups and felt the cold in his hands and legs slowly receding. Then he stood and crossed the room to the open locker.

In the locker were twenty-five rounds of bullets and a large box of shells for the shotgun. The shotgun and the rifle were both filthy with grease and the rifle’s stock was badly pocked with shot holes. The fly rods, by contrast, looked pristine and chaste bundled carefully in cotton sheeting in a separate compartment. The flies were packed in narrow cork boxes, one to each box, and gave no sign of ever having been used. They shone against the mute brown of the cork like specimens from a South Seas expedition, bright and gaudy and mysterious. He lifted a blood-red fly and felt its weightlessness and the curve of its tiny hook. He brought it to the window and marveled at its redness and tickled his nose with its feathers.

Out the window the forest was in sunshine and the surface of the pond sparked and glimmered where the furrowed ice gathered the snow-thaw. The barrel he’d righted lay overturned again and a fresh layer of garbage decorated the turf. A wetness in the air that could have been either the wetness of late fall or early spring gave the world an iridescence and a light in all its corners. But a cold current ran through the air still and quivered along the ground and above the water.

As he sat on the stoop a short while later working a rag through the chambers of the shotgun a figure appeared on the far side of the pond. It was dressed in a dark coat and heavy woolen pants and might have been mistaken for the figure of a man but for the hair which hung down from a gray loden cap and hid her face entirely. She held to the tree line and stepped briefly out into the sun by a stand of young birches before disappearing into the pines.

Voxlauer sat quietly for a moment. Then he picked up the rag and finished cleaning the shotgun, taking care to wipe the grit from around the hammer and pin. He took the hatchet from the woodpile and picked out three quartered stumps and split the stumps into narrower splints and hacked the splints in half across their length and carried the stack inside to the stove bench. A few scraps of bark lay around the stove’s grate and he gathered them up absently and heaped them into a little pile for kindling. Then he took up his hat and went outside.

The tracks came down out of the slope above the pond and hatched back and forth as the ground steepened. The boots were heavy enough to leave clear prints in the needle cover and he followed them up to an old logging road running west below the cliffs. He scrambled onto the road and headed east until it joined with another he recognized as leading up to the reliquary, then turned and carefully retraced his steps. Where she had stepped out into the sun a cut showed in the snowbank and beyond it were three deep, sharp-edged prints in the yellow mud. Her boots were new and thick-soled and threw small clots of dirt to the side with each step. A tear in a branch showed where she’d left the cover of the birches. Voxlauer walked back through the loose-flung trees to the bridge and the cottage, looking back every few steps over his shoulder.

That night Voxlauer lay awake and thought about the woman. She’d been coming from Pergau, or from the colony, possibly. She moves like an old man, he thought. Cautiously and tiredly. But she dresses like a member of the Red Guard. He felt his face wrinkle itself into a smile. A vision of Anna came to him then unbidden: Anna in her crepe dress, relic of better years, laughing at his parodies of the Kaiser. Ah, Franz Josef, she would say, nodding soberly. A terrible man, I’m sure. And he, Voxlauer, would say: No, not a terrible man, but a fool, and they’d talk awhile, without much interest or urgency, about the war or some other long-past thing. Anna in her dead husband’s army clothes bent over stiffly behind the house, saluting tiredly as he pulled up in the battered trap. Voxlauer lay a few minutes longer staring upward in the darkness, then stood and felt his way to the table and lit the lantern.

Above the table were two shelves running the length of the wall, cluttered with tins and empty jars and sacks of nails and plaster. The upper shelf was too high to see onto properly and he pulled the chair over to it. It was filled with tins similar to those on the lower shelf, beans and spinach and pickled herring and others whose labels were torn or illegible from watermarks. At the end of the shelf he found a folio much like the one he’d looked through in the parlor a week before. He took it down and brought it to the table.

The folio held three pencil-and-gouache sketches on heavy paper: one still life and two portraits. The still life was drab and uninteresting to him but the portraits, one of a woman and the other of a long-haired child, were spare and delicate and very beautiful. Voxlauer sat at the table for a long time looking at them, holding them close to the lantern. The faces looked back at him starkly and directly, without reproach but also without any tenderness or goodwill. They were carefully drawn and the resemblance of the one face to the other was unmistakable. I’ll ask Pauli about them next time, he thought. The old man, Bauer, must have done them. He sat awhile longer at the table, remembering what few details Pauli had told him, before putting the lantern out finally and going to sleep.

A noise roused him a few hours later and he sat up at once, rigid and stock-still, feeling for the wall with his fingertips. The fire had gone out and he had no idea whose bed he was in or by what force he’d arrived there. All was in blackness and he felt numb and far from things. The sweat ran cold between his shoulder blades and he stripped off his shirt and rose from the bed and listened. The sound came again like the scraping of bootheels over gravel, clear and insistent. He remembered now where he was and looked about him for the rifle, stepping silently toward it in the dark. The steel of the barrel felt cold to the touch and he held it uneasily a moment, shifting from foot to foot. Then he put it down and went to the door.

The door shuddered as it swung open and he heard them scampering away before he saw them, a large fox and two half-grown cubs, pausing a moment at the edge of the turf with their huge eyes reflecting the starlight. They were slender and dark and their ruffed tails stood out straight behind them. They seemed reluctant to leave, out of curiosity or hunger, perhaps, or simply out of weariness from the cold. The nearer of the two cubs held the spine of a trout in its teeth like a diadem. Its tail quivered and beat against the air. It sniffed and bobbed and came nearer to him in slow winding loops. At one point he could have leaned over and blown onto its fur as it let the bones drop and nosed further into the barrel. Voxlauer sat quietly in the snow with his breath twisting upward in little plumes, raveling and curling. Eventually he made to gather in his coat and they bolted as one creature noiselessly into the pines.

The numbness was gone now and he found himself excited and unable to sleep. He lit the lantern and brought it to the table and took the guide to flowers and butterflies from his pack and leafed slowly through it. The illustrations glowed like the flies in Ryslavy’s tacklebox, bright and otherworldly. He sat at the table with his eyes closed, recalling the butterflies of the valley, swallowtails and beys and mourning cloaks, their wings barely heavy enough to cut the air. The colors he remembered were dark and saturated with a muddy fire and the brown of pine resin and standing water. He saw again his arms bare past the elbow reaching deep into the hollow green body of the pond and vanishing among the drab hairlike plants along its bottom. His father or someone else was steering the boat and calling to him not to fall in.

When Voxlauer woke the morning was already showing gray behind the cliffs and a high peeping birdsong limned down to him from the tree line. His bones ached fiercely and he shivered awhile in his coat, keeping his eyes open and listening. The song clattered to its height, broke, then beat its way upward again. He had the feeling of having forgotten a dream and tried for a time to remember it with no success. After a few attempts he stood up from the chair, went to the stove and started a fire. Then he went to the bed and lay down on it and watched the light grow slowly in the little room.

This room hasn’t changed in a hundred years, he thought. Longer. Look at it. Four white walls and a table and a stove. A mattress with a body stretched on it. The only change has been that body. And that’s no change at all, really, one body to another. This room was unchanged all the years I was with Anna and it was unchanged when I was in Italy and it was unchanged before that. The thought of Italy tightened his throat as always and he guided his attention patiently back to the room around him. The wide uneven floorboards, the roof beams, the cracked and scaling plaster. When was this room last whitewashed? he wondered. I’ll see to that in the spring. He closed his eyes. The thought that the room had remained unchanged lulled him into a reluctant calm. I could forget my own name in this room, he thought. Without drink or company. He thought again about the old man. —There’s no life here at all, he said aloud. He smiled. He knew this was a lie but he enjoyed it the way a child enjoys telling lies to itself, secretly and slyly. Sometime after that he opened his eyes and got up from the bed.

We slept that night on bales of hay dragged down from the barn
loft and lined up in neat rows in the courtyard. The next morning
the sons woke us early and brought us coffee from the kitchen. We
went out with our packs and climbed into one of two deep-bedded
carts pulled by mules and tried our best to fall back asleep. As we
pulled out onto the road the wife’s face appeared in the kitchen
window and beamed down at us. She called out something in Hungarian to her husband and laughed, then leaned further out the
window and waved until the curve of the hill rose up and hid the
house.

We rode five to a cart, sitting on stiff, suitcase-sized haybales,
smoking our first cigarettes since leaving the Isonzo. The morning
sky was just beginning to admit the haze of noon around its edges
and I felt easy and content. The flat stubbled fields rose and fell
in low humpbacked ridges as we made our way down the long
escarpment into the capital. Now and again we’d stop at a crossing
or a rail junction where two or three men would be waiting, clutching baskets of bread or cheese or wine with a carefree, festive air,
as though going to a picnic.

No one seemed particularly surprised by our presence; if anything, it seemed to be taken as a proof of something. The greatness
of the city, I supposed. Talking with the youngest son, who spoke a
smattering of German, I gathered people were coming from far
and wide to watch the strike. When I asked him about the Bolsheviks he grinned and slapped me on the shoulder. They stopped the
war, he said.

When?

Just now.

How? I said sleepily. I didn’t believe him about the Bolsheviks
or even that the war was over. Someone was always saying that the
war was over and everyone was always in a hurry to believe it.
How did they stop it? I said again, grinning a little, half in anticipation of a joke.

He shrugged. No tsar, no fighting. He looked proudly over at
his father, who sat in front driving the mules. My father says he
maybe march today. Our uncle is in a factory for rubber. But today
nobody works in it. You see? He laughed again.

I didn’t answer. The close-cropped fields were gradually giving
way to chestnut groves and clusters of clay-roofed houses. That coat
is good, said the son, eyeing my woolen field jacket unabashedly. It
was very cold in Italy?

Very, I said. I looked at his thick sheepskin vest. Would you like
to trade?

Not bad for you, smiled the son. He took off the vest and
passed it over to me. He was smaller than I was and my jacket hung
tentlike from his bony shoulders. That’ll keep you warm in winter,
I said.

Or in prison, said Jan. The others laughed.

When we reached the center of town the streets were already
full to overflowing. Police and Civil Guardsmen were running
around in a panic, trying to coax the massed crowds back against
the houses. Half a mile from the river we were forced to tie up
the carts and continue on foot. Everywhere people were shouting and drinking and acting as if the war really were over, drumming against streetlamps and house doors and passing carriages,
dancing with arms linked on the curbs. I moved forward as if in
a trance, watching the people on all sides laughing, howling, bellowing, jeering openly at policemen and files of soldiers as they
crowded past, writing insults to the Kaiser and the Crown of Hungary in school chalk on the walls and pavements. For the first time,
moving cautious as an ant through the crowds, hidden in them and
a part of them at once, it dawned on me that I might actually get
away. More than that—I began to think for myself again, crushed
and jostled into consciousness by the massing bodies. The idea
came to me then, calmly and quietly at first, of the thing that I was
going to do.