John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— I did manage to collect some honeycomb yesterday, he said after the warmth had risen between his shoulder blades. No one seemed to be listening. The woman named Ruth had come in and now sat a few places to his left, arguing with Piedernig. It seemed to be about the Nazis. Voxlauer put down his mug reluctantly and tried to pay attention.

— When they come, Walter, why shouldn’t they come everywhere at once, in equal measure? Both in the towns and in the hills? Why should it be any different here than it was in the north, or in Bavaria itself, for that matter? Are we so much cleverer here?

Piedernig grunted. — Hardly that, child. But it’s always been a rooming-house phenomenon, this “Aryan Socialism”; a disease bred and fostered in the city, like every other idiocy. He took a slow, comfortable glance around the circle. A number of the assembled murmured their assent. He let out a sigh. — Bank clerk’s mysticism. The assistant lecturer’s ideal of Germanism. To the left of Voxlauer someone laughed.

— They’ve never been too well received in villages, Piederning continued. — Let alone in the hills, in their starched shirts and fancy collars. We’ve had enough fanatics and lunatics without them, thank you kindly. Country people have too much sense for that sort of opera. We’ll see that, or rather not see any of it, I’ll wager, when they arrive. They’ll not last long, children. He sat back contentedly and raised his cup to his mouth.

— They seem to be doing all right in these hills, said a round-faced boy to Voxlauer’s right.

— If by that remark, Kasperl, you mean those two sot-brained Hirams up there on the Holzer property, spending their days looking for anything warm-blooded to bugger with those pork-tin muskets of theirs, we’ll proceed to the next witness. What’s your opinion, Herr Gamekeeper?

— Are you so sure they’ll come, then? Voxlauer said.

— They’ll come, and soon, said the woman named Else who had spoken earlier. Voxlauer looked at her again and felt the same astonishment, not at her beauty but at the sadness which seemed to hover over her like a canopy, enclosing everything else within its quiet. She looked at him steadily from under heavy lids, not unkindly but from a great distance, as though relinquishing him and the knowledge of him in her unhurried relinquishing of everything. Looking at her now he felt the beginnings of something like fear stirring inside him, a vague premonition that might also have been a memory, like the music he’d heard on the steps. He steered his eyes away from her and brought them to focus again on the boy, Kasperl, who was speaking again in low, defiant tones.

— They’ll run us out, that’s sure. First thing. They’ll come and run us out.

— Tsk, Kasperl, said Piedernig. — Steer clear of soothsaying awhile, for all our sakes.

— Maybe they won’t, said Else, looking not at Voxlauer now but from one face to another around the circle. — Maybe they’ll simply let us alone. They have no plan that we know of that should trouble us. What could they possibly want up here? Let’s not judge them entirely just yet, Walter. Let’s wait and see what they actually do when they come. She raised her wine mug to her lips and drank, looking around the circle. — Change might actually do us good.

No one spoke for a moment. — Change, Fräulein, is for the chattel in town, said Piedernig. — The steady regression in progress’s name we’ve discussed so often. It’s why we’re all here. Remember?

— I’m talking about genuine change, Walter. Genuine progress. If that had ever been for Niessen I’d likely still be living there.

— Fräulein Bauer is a retired gymnasium-school instructor, said Piedernig fondly. — Though you certainly wouldn’t guess it by her politics. Look at her glowering now! I’ve embarrassed her. He laughed and turned back to Voxlauer. — What about you, Oskar? What was it you retired from?

Voxlauer didn’t answer. — I believe I saw you walking by the ponds a week ago, he said to Else after a moment.

— I can’t help it if your ponds happen to lie between my house and town, Herr Gamekeeper, she answered. She was looking not at him but at Piedernig, who sat leaning back with his legs crossed beneath him and his eyes drooping like a house cat’s, humming quietly to himself. To Voxlauer’s surprise she closed her eyes also, as did the others, solemnly, one by one around the circle. A disembodied humming rose among them, quavering and deep. He looked back at her and saw her mouth’s corners curling up as though for his benefit but always with that sadness he’d recognized immediately and which ran through her all features like thread through a raveling dress. Nature is bounteous, spring is bright. Work is chastening. Food is blessed. A half-eaten pear browning in a wooden bowl. A dark purple stain on the blanket near her hand.

— You see, Oskar: our bees are as slothful as your bees. But ours sleep the sleep of the just.

Voxlauer peered in through the blue-painted door of the cabinet. — They do seem more prepossessing, he said.

Piedernig nodded. — Bees were created to make honey as man was created to make excrement. But they’ll do as we do in a shithouse.

— And yet they stay in those same houses, year after year, said Voxlauer.

— You’ll do as you think best, of course, said Piedernig. — They can do without their honey, can they, at the Niessener Hof?

— For all I care, said Voxlauer. Piedernig chuckled.

Bars of light slanted down among the whitewashed house frames and the lines of wash onto the straw-battened dirt tracks below them. Piedernig began walking and Voxlauer followed him dazedly, nursing a slow, gathering happiness.

Rounding a row of haylofts they came to a small square of flattened ground hidden among the huts with a pen on one side of it and a garden on the other. The children he’d passed before were harrying an ancient goat around the pen and a woman in a homespun dress the same color as the goat sat watching them from the wall of a terraced garden. The children were shiftless and barefoot in spite of the damp and their bones stretched and tautened under their pale dirty skin as they moved. The woman stared sullenly at them as they passed but Piedernig seemed to take no notice of her. He walked bobbingly a half step ahead of Voxlauer and led him out along the perimeter of the huts and across the field to the crown of the road, then stopped short as though penned in by the field. Voxlauer stopped also, waiting for him to speak.

Piedernig turned and raised an arm toward the fractured base of the cliffs. — How sharp are your eyes, Oskar? Do you see that gap in the rock, just at bottom? Where that sulfur-colored band comes down and meets the muddier color?

Voxlauer looked upward. — What about it?

— A man used to live there. We fed him from time to time.

— Fancy that.

— He tried to live as you live. Piedernig looked over at him. — He thought the way you think, give or take.

Voxlauer lowered his eyes from the cliffs and looked at Piedernig. — What would you know about the way I think, Professor?

Piedernig smiled. — Calm yourself, Oskar. Please. I haven’t spent these nine years removed from man’s and woman’s folly without learning more about it than I’d care to dwell on. I’ve made a study of you in my idle hours, and feel I’ve come to an understanding of your nature and ambitions. He tapped Voxlauer on the shoulder. — You yourself, of course, believe that you have no ambitions any longer.

Voxlauer smiled. — And that’s a delusion, is it?

— The caveman, also, thought he could take off the world as one might a pair of breeches. And we fed him. Partially out of respect, I suppose, for his convictions. But largely out of sympathy.