John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

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?