John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— 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.

— 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