John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

By midmorning he had caught three fish. He brought them in and laid them on the table where they stared up at him with blanching eyes. They were small but very beautiful and the skin which had looked gravel-colored under the water sparkled now in its mucus like a curtain of cut jewels. He gutted and washed them and set one to fry in butter and flour on the stovetop. The other two he wrapped in newspaper with a few sprigs of new grass and set aside. The smell of the butter and the fish perfumed the dank air and settled on his skin and his clothes until nothing could be smelled but the sweet frying meat and his whole body was tense and restless with hunger. He ate the fish directly off the stove and scraped together the burnt flakes from the bottom of the pan and put a forkful into his mouth, savoring its bitterness. It was hot now in the little room. He went out and made a slow, ambling circuit of the pond.

That afternoon he took the remaining two fish and put them into his pack and walked down toward Pergau. The sun was half hidden behind checkered fields of cloud and the woods as he walked were aglow with great hatchings of light brightening and vanishing on either side. When he came to the junction he turned left and walked uphill to the edge of a muddy field. On its far side stood the houses of the colony, loose clapboard huts with damp dirt tracks between them. Broad white sheets hung from clothes-lines and four muddy-faced children playing hoptoad stopped their game when he approached them. A woman in a brown sackcloth dress taking in wash asked his name and what he wanted.

— Oskar Voxlauer. I’ve come to see Herr Piedernig, if I might.

— You needn’t be so formal here, laughed the woman. — My name is Ruth.

— Oskar Voxlauer, he said again, nodding to her.

— Walter’s in the big house with the others at supper. She turned and pointed past the children to the tallest of the huts. — Tell them I’ll be along soon.

— Thank you, Fräulein, said Voxlauer. — I will.

As he came to the house steps a fragment of music came to him, a low clicking of keys that had no referent in his memory. He waited a moment on the doorstep, trying to place it among pieces of his father’s, or among Anna’s collection of phonograph albums, but it faded from one moment to the next without giving him time to remember. He came to himself again and pushed open the door.

The room he passed into was bright and high-ceilinged and ran the full length of the house. Ten or twelve women and men of assorted ages, all but a few with identically cropped heads and sunburnt faces, sat cross-legged on the floor around a blanket laden with wooden bowls of walnuts and preserved fruit and trays of cheese and pumpernickel bread. Piedernig stood above the group making rounds with a steaming pewter teakettle. He looked up as Voxlauer entered, put the kettle aside and strode over to him with his arms wide in greeting. — How’s this! he said, looking at Voxlauer’s hands. — Do you come bearing gifts?

— Spring is bounteous, said Voxlauer, handing over the parcel.

— Amen to that. Piedernig undid the paper and sniffed at the contents. — Damned well met. Children! he said, turning toward the circle. — We have another visitor today from the world. Oskar Voxlauer, gamekeeper. He smiled and looked over at Voxlauer. — Make room for the man. You, Seppl — see what you can do with these. He extended the parcel to a member of the circle, a slight, balding man who rose ceremoniously and withdrew with the fish to an adjoining room.

— Oskar and I met on the road this past Sunday, praise be to spring, announced Piedernig. He motioned to Voxlauer to be seated on the blanket. — He was having a spot of trouble with his bees.

— What sort of trouble? asked a small, redheaded woman to Voxlauer’s right.

— Well. They don’t seem too lively, said Voxlauer, reaching for a bowl of winter pears.

— You wouldn’t either, living in those mausoleums, said a voice from across the blanket. The voice was low and burled, like the rasping together of woolen sleeves. The woman who had spoken was round-faced and dark and looked at him without smiling. Her hair was long, unlike the others’, and hung loosely down over her shoulders to the pair of hunter’s coveralls she wore over a moth-eaten canvas shirt. Piedernig said something to her amid the general laughter and her eyes shifted tiredly, returning his smile.

— Exactly! Not to mention you woke them from a very fine sleep, the redheaded woman said.

Grudgingly Voxlauer turned his head and looked at her. — I don’t know much about bees, he said.

— Oskar’s a sort of gentleman’s gamekeeper, said Piedernig, winking.

Before long the man called Seppl returned with the trout, fried in butter on a bed of leeks and boiled potatoes. Many around the circle declined their portions but Piedernig devoured his with obvious relish, sighing elaborately and sucking on his fingertips. The red-haired woman and a bearded man next to her seemed to have taken their shares largely out of politeness and sat with the steaming fish in front of them, watching Voxlauer uncomfortably. A sallow, Jesuit-faced man with a startled expression stared fiercely at him from across the blanket.

— We don’t eat fish here, as a rule, offered Piedernig between mouthfuls. — Brethren of the stream and so forth. And you, Fräulein Bauer: aren’t you having any?

— I’ll take a holiday from fish today, I think, said the long-haired woman, not looking at Voxlauer.

— Excellent. Donated to the cause. Oskar, may I present Fräulein Else Bauer, another of our neighbors. Fräulein Bauer inhabits the villa just across from us in these godless foothills.

— That’s quite an overstatement, a villa, said the woman, smiling at Piedernig with that same sleepy look. Voxlauer watched her a moment or two without speaking.

— Pleased to meet you, he said after a moment.

One by one, some amicably, some grudgingly, the members of the circle introduced themselves to him. With the exception of Piedernig, who was dressed in the same light-colored robes he’d worn three days previous, they were clothed in identical genderless shirts of brown homespun and fraying sackcloth pants. The man with the startled expression surprised Voxlauer by breaking into a wide yellow grin and shaking hands with him vigorously across the blanket. Piedernig presided over it all like the Gautama Buddha, nodding and smiling fatuously. — And now for the wine, he said, holding up a finger.

Seppl stepped briskly into the kitchen and returned a moment later with two bottles of gooseberry wine stopped with rolled birch-bark corks. The bottles were circulated and each one of the assembled sniffed the stoppers before decanting the wine into crockery mugs. Piedernig rose to his feet.

— Dearest children, he began, holding a wine bottle just below his chin — children and disciples in Christ and his quartered Host, steeped and rebaptized in its four cleansing humours—

The names of the seasons rose up now around the circle in counterpoint to Piedernig’s singsong, closely followed by the words fire, water, fundament, and air . Voxlauer sat quietly, looking down into his mug.

— and the water, and the fundament, and the cleansing fire; amen, said Piedernig. He sighed happily. — Heil be to spring.

— Heil spring, answered the others in chorus. Piedernig sat down with his legs folded under him and raised his mug to Voxlauer. — Prost, Oskar!

— Amen to that, said Voxlauer, much relieved. He raised the wine to his lips and drank deeply. It was powerfully fermented and left a paraffin-like glaze on the back of the throat and a tickling along the gums. Voxlauer smiled and nodded and complimented the wine. He hadn’t had a drink in more than two weeks and the liquor quieted him immediately and caused his eyes half to close, as a beam of light might on a summer evening. For a moment he sat contentedly holding the mug, letting the talk go around and over him.