John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— I suppose it is, said Voxlauer.

— You are the new gamekeeper.

— That’s right.

— Oskar Voxlauer.

— Yes.

— As a gamekeeper, Herr Voxlauer, you must know very well that spring is bounteous.

Voxlauer looked at him squintingly. — With whom do I have the pleasure?

— Forgive me! Professor Walter Adolf Piedernig. He bowed. — Of the Pirestine Collective.

— The what?

— The Collective, child. The Disciples of Piraeus. Of the Body’s Four Humours as writ by name on the Pirestine parchments and brought westward from Damascus by that most blessed philosopher. He regarded Voxlauer for a moment expectantly. — The colony, he said finally.

— The one down in Pergau?

— Above Pergau. Yes.

— Ah, said Voxlauer. They stood awhile in silence. The older man looked down at the younger man benevolently. Then he turned and looked up the road, shading his eyes. — Were you headed to the pass?

— Only to the beehives.

— Then we can walk together a little while. I’m on my way this morning to the chapel on Birker Heath.

— The chapel? said Voxlauer, raising an eyebrow.

— Well, more to the heath itself, laughed the man. His clay-colored neck and arms glowed even redder where they emerged from his white homespun vestments. His face and jaw were latticed with deep curving furrows, like a sailor’s, and his brow where it sloped down from under its snowy crest was the color of turned soil. He stood surveying the pond bank and the water, smiling on it as if giving a benediction, rocking back and forth on his bare feet with his papery eyelids pulled down low against the sun. He seemed in no particular hurry for Voxlauer’s reply.

— What takes you up to the heath? said Voxlauer after they had been walking for some minutes.

— The same thing that takes anyone up there, said Piedernig. — The view.

— I’d thought maybe the hunting.

— I’m not interested in your game, Herr Voxlauer, said Piedernig without slackening. — Have confidence in that.

— I’d thought of going myself for that purpose, actually.

— You’re no more of a hunter than I am. Piedernig looked at him, then up the road. — Or a gamekeeper either, for that matter.

— I beg your pardon?

— I knew your father at one time. Enjoyed some of his airs.

— Ah.

— What you’re after in that tumbledown hovel of yours is an Egyptian mystery, to tell you plainly.

Voxlauer squinted a moment into the woods. — My father never mentioned you that I can recall.

— We went to gymnasium together. In Graz.

— I don’t recall him mentioning you.

— I said I knew the man, said Piedernig with a wave of his hand. — I didn’t say we cared much for each other.

A brief quiet followed. Voxlauer scuffed his bootheels in the dirt. — What were you before? he said. — Some sort of schoolmaster?

— About as much as you’re a gamekeeper, said Piedernig. He smiled.

They walked on until they came to the opening of the clearing at the top of which the beehouses leaned together like a row of stoved-in boats. — Those cabinets are in sorry shape, said Piedernig. — I don’t think old Bauer ever opened them. Afraid of getting stung, most likely.

— Did you know him well?

Piedernig shrugged. — Well enough, poor devil. His daughter worked under me when I was gamekeeper, in a manner of speaking, to fair Niessen’s pride and hope. He spat cheerily into the dirt. — Well enough to hazard these bees weren’t altogether smothered by his attentions.

Voxlauer smiled. — They don’t seem to have suffered too much for it, anyhow.

— How’s that?

— Well, said Voxlauer. — I was saying—

Piedernig looked at him sharply. — Would you know a happy bee from an unhappy bee, Herr Voxlauer?

— I’m not sure I’d know a live bee from a dead one.

— Pay us a visit at the colony this week. Piedernig stopped and laid a sun-spotted brown hand on Voxlauer’s shoulder. — Our bees are in a perpetual state of bliss.

Voxlauer watched him as he gathered his robes together and stepped carefully over a puddle of runoff and disappeared into the spruce plantation. Not until he’d been gone for some minutes did it occur to Voxlauer to ask about the figure.

Arriving in Czernowitz, the last station on the civilian line, I left my smoking-car acquaintances behind as quickly as I could and made my way to the drab little center of town in search of news of the fighting and, if possible, a ride east to the front. I was told by the postmaster, a sad, dignified-looking Jew from the capital, that the fighting had ended three weeks before as far north as the town of Lemberg on the Polish border, six hours away by train, and the only soldiers left were deserters from the Hungarian Civil Guard. Why I’m still here I have no idea, he murmured, wagging his head side to side, as though to keep from falling asleep. In response to my torrent of questions about the east he exhaled soundlessly time and again and shrugged his shoulders, sliding small heaps of mail from one corner of his massive eagle-emblazoned desk to another. He barely looked up to acknowledge me as I wished him a safe return to Budapest and left.

Already I noticed a change in the Hungarians around me, most of them speaking German grudgingly, as if questioning my right to ask it of them. The Empire was fading quickly now, like a lamp running out of oil, and with it the last of the delusions that had kept everything comprehensible. No one seemed particularly surprised when I asked for transport to the border of the Ukraine. Some assumed I was a deserter, others a spy; nobody seemed to care very much one way or the other. In spite of this, I was taken on more and more reluctantly the closer we came to the border, riding the length of a few fields, then getting down and walking, often for hours, until the next cart passed. No one seemed to know any German now at all; I felt I was forgetting it with them.

At Jzerneska I forded the Dniester on a barge hauled across the water on sagging iron cables and midway across the river it dawned on me that I was free. The heavy gray water was tumbling and folding over on itself along the left side of the boat, sloughing over into the hull, and the sheer weight and stubbornness of it seemed to testify to my escape. The idea that I’d crossed bodily over into Bolshevik territory, territory that to me represented the opposite of everything I’d left, made me light-headed and breathless to get to shore. I allowed myself a few thoughts of Maman and Niessen but the thoughts became too big immediately and I concentrated again on the river. Reaching the bank, I gave the ferry driver near to the last of my money, and seeing this he smiled a guarded little smile. To my surprise he spoke in well-schooled German. Yes; I don’t think you’ll be needing these, he said, holding up the coins. They’re on a new system hereabouts.

What system is that? I asked.

Barter, he answered, holding up a palm. This potato for your wife. He laughed. He was grizzle-haired and tanned the color of marsh water and dressed in a skirt of knotted and sewn-together rags, like the Gypsy in Il Trovatore. I guessed him to be a Slovak. That’s fine, I answered after a moment. All the possible meanings and implications of his joke, if that was what it had been, revolved weakly in my tired brain. Finally I thought back to what Jan had explained to me about the withering away of capital under true communism and decided the Bolsheviks must have done away with money. That’s fine, I said again, more confidently.

The Slovak shrugged at this; not sadly, as the postmaster in Czernowitz had done, or doubtfully, but only blankly. We stood half on the barge and half on the shifting, reed-covered bank, watching the sun sink slowly over the wide planed earth with nothing to hide itself behind. A sudden panic gripped me at the thought of being abandoned there, but the Slovak seemed in no great hurry to push off. With a slow, careless motion of his hand he offered me a wedge of plug tobacco.