John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— 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.

— 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.