John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

As I came farther east, the steppes gave way to more sheltered, fertile country, thin tilled fields and squares of rich dark ground along rows of whitewashed cottages, manor farms and trees and teams of mules or horses on the roads. I traveled in constant fear of being caught by the Germans or mistaken for one of them by partisans, but discovered to my great relief that the occupation of the Ukraine was little more than a diplomatic and tactical invention. In a few of the towns, I found the old imperial officials still going about their business, stricken and bewildered as the Jew in Czernowitz had been, and was able to talk to them in French about the Bolsheviks and the occupying army and the war; for the first time I was grateful for my twice-weekly lessons as a child. I learned that the German-Soviet lines, only a few days’ travel east, were little more than a ghost front, but that there was no love for the Bolsheviks or any other kind of Russian-imposed revolution anywhere in that country.

In some of the larger towns the Bolsheviks, the White Russians and the German army maintained fully parallel governments; each person I spoke to on the street had a different opinion as to which of the three regimes was in fact in power. The war between the Whites and Reds was already beginning, though the territory fought over was still technically German. I continued east with a vague idea of reaching Kiev, which I’d heard had been liberated a few weeks before. I learned a few more Ukrainian expressions, the commonest questions and insults and turns of phrase, and gradually began to have better luck getting myself fed.

A few weeks after this I found Anna. She was newly a widow, or believed herself one, at least, and had a small estate, or what she blithely referred to as an estate, to live off as best she could. I met her at the market in Cherkassy the morning I arrived, feverish and weak again from hunger. She was standing, tall and out of place in a flowered muslin housedress, in a corner of the market, selling dried radishes at the head of a cart filled with half-empty bags of seed. By some miracle she spoke a few words of German.

I’m starving, I said to her.

I need a worker, she answered, in French. Can you work? Arbeiten?

Yes. Arbeiten, I said. She nodded gravely. Later I found out she was ecstatic to have found me. Most able-bodied Ukrainian men were drunk or far away and those who weren’t couldn’t have cared less about her seven leached-out hectares. I laughed myself when I first saw her drafty plank house leaning over into the mud. But she brought me inside and put water on the stove for me to wash and cooked a meal over the next few hours the like of which I hadn’t seen since leaving Niessen: braised carrots in honey and sliced buttered potatoes and mushrooms preserved in vinegar and four or five precious slices of dried goose breast from the smokehouse covered in pickled cranberry preserves. She watched me closely as I ate, wondering, she told me later, who in heaven’s name I was and how I came to be in the town of Cherkassy speaking no more than twenty words of Ukrainian and awkward, gymnasium student’s French. She sat picking at her plate of carrots and potatoes absently, her small gray eyes never straying from me. At any moment I expected her to come to her senses; I ate as quickly as I could, barely tasting the food in my hurry. Eventually she spoke.

You’ve come from the war? she asked, in Ukrainian.

I stared at her dumbly. After a moment or two I set down my fork and shrugged.

She frowned. The war, she repeated. For some reason she was set on speaking Ukrainian to me, though she must have known I hadn’t a chance of understanding her. She’d learned her French and her smattering of German at gymnasium in Kiev, had in fact won a prize, she told me proudly, but her schooling had ended on her sixteenth birthday and now she was well past her twenty-ninth. She looked older to me than that, with her hair pulled straight back and a few streaks of white already showing at the temples; no longer young at all. But I thought she was beautiful, like an angel on a veteran’s monument — smooth-polished and sexless, proud and severe, indifferent to one’s gaze and at the same time utterly naked under it. I was seventeen then, not much better than a child, and I suppose all women had that quality to me. But I see her even now in that cool glow of permanence that statues have, sitting across from me at the long dining table, waiting patiently for me to answer. Nothing I learned afterward could dispel that first idea of her.

Seeing that I still didn’t understand, she stood up from the table and crouched down behind it, peering solemnly at me over the white linen tablecloth, making rattling noises deep in her throat and gesturing at me violently with both her arms. I stared at her a moment or two longer in flat stupidity. Oh! The war, I said finally. Krieg. I smiled uncertainly.

Yes. The Krieg. You come from it? Yes?

Yes, I said.

I ran, I added after a silence.

She nodded, looking at me carefully.

My husband, yes? Andrei. At Krieg, she said.

Yes?

Mmm, she murmured. I sat forward uneasily in my chair, expecting the inevitable, but Anna only smiled. He is dead. They’ve all decided.

I nodded cautiously. I understand, I said. I’m sorry. I’d begun to feel very ill at ease.

I thought at first she’d misunderstood because she stayed on her feet, shaking a finger at me excitedly, then made a face and disappeared again behind the table. Confused, I stood and leaned forward until I could see her stretched out like a cadaver on the floor, smiling mischievously up at me. No, no, she was saying. No, no. I am happy, she said slowly, in her effortful, deliberate French. Do you understand? I am happy. Ich bin froh.

A few days later Voxlauer took up his pack and the jar now empty of milk and set out in his shirtsleeves in the mist of early morning up the road to Holzer’s Cross. By the time he had come out of the spruce grove under the reliquary the mist had largely burned away and the town spires sparkled wetly on the plain. He went with the jar to the door of the farmhouse and knocked. After a short time Frau Holzer came to the door.

— May I come in? said Voxlauer.

— Why not? My sons are on holiday today. They’ve gone down to Niessen.

He stepped inside. — I’m headed there myself.

Frau Holzer didn’t answer. She’d taken the jar from him and was filling it from a large copper pitcher by the stall-side door. — We have fresh-butchered kid today if you want it.

— Is it chamois?

— Of course. She smiled. — But not from Ryslavy’s woods. I’d swear an oath.

— I brought down some game myself, a few days back.

— How fine.

— I’d very much like some butter, if you can spare any.

— Of course we can. She stepped into the next room and returned with two small grayish bricks wrapped in waxed paper.

— Could I look by on my way back from town, and get these from you? I won’t be long. Three or four hours.

— That will be fine, said the woman. She looked at him kindly. — Why are you going to town?

Voxlauer glanced at her. — To visit my mother.

— I see. She was quiet a moment. — Well. She may not recall me, but please say best wishes to her from Elke. Elke Mayer. It was Mayer when she knew me.

— I will, said Voxlauer. — Thank you kindly. He stepped out the kitchen door into the entryway. — I’ll be back by two. Three at the very latest.

— No hurry, said the woman. She looked at him a moment longer, then went in to the pantry and began rattling in a tall chipboard cupboard there. He waited a few seconds to see if she was coming back into the kitchen, but she did not. He pulled the house door shut behind him.