John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

Very kind of you, I said. I looked at him again. Could you spare anything further?

He blinked a few times, his face flat and colorless in the weak sun. Meaning?

Food. Meaning food, I answered, more quickly than I’d intended.

His eyes slid back to me and he grinned again. That’ll cost you, little Kaiser.

I thought I might barter.

He nodded to himself and reached down into the hull of the barge and passed me a sodden loaf of bread and some marmalade in a damp brown fold of paper. Four kronens, Your Eminence, he said, touching his cap.

I laughed. I don’t have four kronens. I have two. My empire’s gone a bit to seed, as you might have noticed.

He was quiet awhile, looking past me, studying the horizon intently as though trying to decipher a tiny line of print. Two kronens, then.

I handed him the last of my money. He tucked it into his shirt with the same slow, untroubled movement he’d made offering me the tobacco and stepped off the bank. The sun was still sliding sluggishly downward. The feeling of momentousness I’d had while crossing the river had disappeared without my noticing and I felt my solitariness very keenly. A narrow puddle-dotted path ran down from the levee in three short turns and off into the boundaryless sweep of grass without the slightest dip or bend. I looked back a second time at the Slovak, who was watching me for the first time with something approaching curiosity, as though the incongruousness of my being there had only just occurred to him. Will this take me to the Bolsheviks? I half whispered, gesturing sheepishly at the path.

The look of casual curiosity on the Slovak’s face changed all at once into one of surprise and delight, as if he’d just been given a small but very charming present. Eventually, little Kaiser. Eventually it will. You’ll have to do a bit of walking on it first, though, I’m afraid.

I turned slowly back to face him. Why is that?

This territory belongs to the Holy German Empire, he answered, curtsying.

The cabinets when Voxlauer opened them seemed husked out and deserted. Dry, brittle shells littered the trays. Here and there a live bee crawled among them, confused by the sudden glare. The hives in the yellow house were the least decrepit and he cut into one at its bottom edge and pried off a dark wedge of honeycomb. Going back to the road he paused a moment, looking out toward Pergau in its nest of graphite fields. The snow line had lifted that past week to the bald tops of the hills and a dull green showed ahead of him in the spruce grove. The young trees looked stunted and unnatural in their geometric rows with the older growth behind them, regal and dark, and the shadow of the cliffs spread down over them as though covering a flaw. When Voxlauer came to the pastures he found a cow grazing at the roadside behind a new fence of barbed wire. It lowed at him, raised its head and took a few cautious steps toward the fence. When he made no sign of stopping it turned and lowered its face to the grass again.

He came to the Holzer farm just as the bell to supper was ringing and two men approached the house slowly over the freshly spaded ground. He hung back along the edge of the road and watched them. They were wide rangy men with long legs and large strides and they joked with one another as they passed through the little orchard and scraped together what little snow was left among the trees and threw it at each other and cursed. The older of the two looked to be near Voxlauer in age and wore his long hair tucked loosely into a woolen cap. The younger one was bearded, with wide-spaced, simple eyes, and cocked his felt hat sideways on his head like a beret. A dog loped between them but it appeared not to notice Voxlauer and neither did its masters. When they had almost reached the gate Frau Holzer came out onto the steps and called to them to bring kindling from the woodshed. She remained there with her arms crossed in the manner of a benevolent regent, waiting until they returned a few minutes later with arms full of fresh-cut pine quarters. Then she turned and stepped ahead of them into the house.

Instead of going back by the valley road Voxlauer climbed to the top of Birker ridge and followed it west. To his right a more broken arm ran up to the heath and the higher hills northward, and the valley, now completely in shadow, curved away to his left. After an hour’s walk through chest-high brush that clawed at his coat front and his sleeves he came out onto the clearing where the deer he’d killed lay scattered in all directions through the brush. Small black ants spread netlike over the carcass and welled up from the sockets and the heap of the bowels. The coil of the intestines had been bitten through and strung like tinsel over the bracken and it hung now in loose ribbons, yellowing in the sun. The smell was near to overpowering. Voxlauer stepped away and climbed back to the ridge.

In Italy he had seen bodies equally open and picked apart but the cold had always kept them from smelling. The wetness of everything around and the smell made him dizzy now and he fixed his eyes on the ground and walked stiffly onward through the trees. One infantryman he remembered, a Czech, had broken his leg crossing a foxhole and gangrene had set in within hours. He’d reeked so badly under the saltpeter compresses that the stretcher carriers, when they finally came, wound wet rags over their faces and turned their heads away from him as they walked. The deer had had that same smell, or close enough. He shut his eyes and tried to remember it more clearly: the damp of the foxholes, the bright rolling noise, the sulfurous taste of the air during shellings. The trench on the Parese front had had a particular smell, lived in so long that the stench of shell gas and piss sank down into the snow and froze there, seeping out in the slightest thaw. — That much I remember, he said aloud.

He followed the ridge down in the growing dusk, passing the ponds far below, and walked farther out still until by the last light he came to a furrowed spine of rock bare and exposed to all cardinals. Looking out, he could see around the valley’s bend and over the Pergauer saddle to the broad plain beyond. The steeple at Pergau was just visible over a pine bank and above it in a bowl of tilled land a cluster of white shacks huddled. — Herr Piedernig, I presume, said Voxlauer, smiling crookedly to himself. A short while later he slipped quietly across the flagged square at Pergau.

He passed a few field hands on the road above the town but no one spoke to him beyond wishing him a good evening. The fields surrounding Pergau were shallow and steep and he was quickly back in the woods. After a quarter of an hour he passed a junction in a small saddle of even ground and came to the border of Ryslavy’s land soon after.

In the morning Voxlauer remembered the honeycomb in his coat pocket and ate it for breakfast in a bowl with milk and bread crumbs. Then he took two purple flies from the tackle box and unwrapped the lighter of the two rods from its sheeting and went out and climbed along the rapids till he came to a pool where the current bent itself into ellipses and the surface was clear and untroubled. Trout were hovering there in pockets of weaker current and darting without warning into new configurations only to hover dark and motionless again above the creek bed. Despite the clarity of the water their skins shone a mute copper color against the gravel. Nets of sunlight played over the bed and quivered in time to the surface’s rippling. He stepped back from the bank and began casting in high cautious arcs into the whitewater above the pool, letting the fly drift down and into the current and spiral there awhile before drawing back and casting again.