John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

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.