John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— Where’s your father? he said.

Emelia made a face. — He’s drunk.

— He has a right, said Voxlauer, looking at her. — Today, at least.

— Yes. I suppose so, Uncle. She was still watching him, solemnly, as though waiting on him for something. — What is it? he said.

She looked back meaningfully along the bar. Aside from the crackle of the radio the room was absolutely still. No one in the crowd was looking at him but no one was talking to anybody, either. The speech seemed to have ended.

Voxlauer stared at Emelia for a time. — Should I leave? he said finally.

— Please, Uncle, she whispered.

— Let’s have another drink first, he said. — Not pilsner.

She brought him a glass of yellow Apfelschnaps and he drank it straight down and called out for another. His voice rang hollowly across the bar. She came back with the pint-sized blue ceramic bottle and put it beside his glass and went down the bar and stood at the far end, near the kitchen door, wiping intently at the top of the bar with a corner of her apron. Gradually the room began to fill again with talk and she went back to the taps and commenced drawing drafts of beer. Voxlauer drank until the little blue bottle was empty, then rose carefully from his barstool and went outside.

In truth, rather than in memory, Anna was nothing like a statue. She was schoolgirlish and talkative and given to sudden fits of extravagance with what little she still owned, her dresses and phonograph albums and tins of French tobacco, sensing that even these few relics of her past life would soon be gone. She was bourgeois in a way I’d never seen before, taking pleasure in things freely and matter-of-factly but feeling no sense of entitlement to them, no resentment when they were taken away from her. Her husband Andrei, a well-to-do country doctor with radical pretensions, had beaten her almost nightly for her lack of progressive thinking. She introduced herself as a Bolshevik when we met, which bewildered me at first; a few weeks passed before I realized it was entirely out of gratitude to the Revolution for taking her husband away to St. Petersburg.

My life with her began slowly and tentatively. There was a great amount of work to be done but we ate in grand style every evening, sitting at the long, warped, reverently polished dining table, gorging ourselves on all manner of tinned and potted delicacies. “Dress rehearsal for better days,” Anna would say coyly when I tried to raise objections. It was hard for me most days to imagine anything much better, sitting there across from her. For a time I even forgot my own vague radical delusions. We slept an arm’s length apart that first night on her wide, rolled-tin marriage bed, dressed in heavy flannel bedclothes against the chill, and she talked to me drunkenly, earnestly, in pieced-together German and French about her plans for the land and her troubles under the various occupations. She explained things to me patiently, repeating words and phrases often, questioning me sternly from time to time as a sister might an idle younger brother she’s decided to improve.

It was as a sister, in fact, that I thought of her for most of that first year. I’d always felt the lack of one, more intensely, almost, than all the commoner wants that followed, and in Anna’s company I felt the kind of carelessness and fond indifference I’d imagined brothers and sisters to feel toward one other. To think of someone so proud and adult as my lover would have scared me half to death, there at the beginning of our time. Anna, for her part, had lived so long alone in that narrow, drafty house that my presence in her bed must have seemed as much a terror as a blessing. Between our paired confusions, then, it was the better part of a year before we came together finally as man and wife.

When we did it was with a great amount of laughter, of hesitancy and of concern on my part to seem as though I’d done it all before. I’d come in early to the house from turning hay and found her standing at the window, staring out to where I’d been working, her housedress loose about her shoulders and a look on her face as though she’d just been handed down an order. I had no idea at first what it was she wanted. After a few seconds she raised an arm solemnly toward me and suddenly I understood and crossed the room in my loose mud-clotted boots and kissed her. We went up the stairs together to the pressed-tin bed and lay down on it. Afterward Anna told me we were married and I saw no reason in the world not to believe her.

From that day Anna was my sister and my lover both, never entirely the one thing or the other, not even in bed. She nursed me through my attacks when they came, which was often in those first few months, with a patience that made the most terrible of my visions seem childish. We talked for hours on end about what happened in the war, the killing of the deserter and the death of my father and everything that had come before and after, until my memories began to break apart of their own accord and to take on distinct shapes, separable from one another and from me. At night she would draw me to her in a state of curious, impersonal desire, almost of surprise, as though I were some stranger come entirely by chance or accident into her bed. Often she called me by the name of a boy she’d known in Kiev while still a girl, but I knew very well she was calling out in those moments not to him or to anything but her own memory-cluttered happiness. Afterward she’d remember all manner of things with a calm, transported clarity, bright with foresight and melancholy, and she’d talk in careful detail about her childhood and youth and her luckless marriage as I lay motionless beside her. I never spoke at those times but lay back in quiet attention, drawing tiredness and contentment over me like a quilt.

Gradually my attacks grew fewer. We worked hard and brought in a fair yield in those first years, when we still thought of the land as ours. Anna taught me Ukrainian stubbornly, almost ruthlessly, refusing for whole days to speak any French or German at all. I was steadily amazed at each successive side of her: her fierceness, her coquettishness, her vanity, her sobriety, her kindness even to those people in the village, and there were more than a few, who hated and envied her for the way she walked and spoke and acted when among them.

Every evening after dinner the phonograph case would be opened, and I’d be privileged with the duty of revolving the crank while she chose that night’s opera from her collection of twenty, cleaning each of the three or four disks devotedly with a spit-dampened kerchief. Often as not, the music would be accompanied by dancing lessons, waltzes and polonaises and other equally antiquated steps, taught with the same tireless severity as the Ukrainian but with far less success, as only four of her twenty operas offered music even remotely suitable. Anna favored the works of the German Romantics: Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Weber’s Euryanthe, Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor. The irony in her love of German opera was not apparent to her. I often teasingly compared her to Lohengrin ’s Elsa, taking in a mysterious and enchanted stranger, though in fact it was Elisabeth in Tannhäuser she’d always most admired, pining away unto death for her despised and banished lover. My arrival in Cherkassy, sickly fugitive that I was, must have seemed to her like the fulfillment of her most fervent, opera-besotted dreams. Had I been any less pathetic she’d likely never have desired me.

Anna’s superstitiousness was deeply fixed in her. She kept a silver icon of the trinity over her night table and talked to it whenever she was alone, day or night, kneeling bare-legged on the floor and speaking in a straightforward, affectless tone of voice about the most minute details of our daily life. She felt no embarrassment when I found her there, smiling up at me contentedly from the far side of the bed, but never tried to get me to kneel beside her, either. She recovered her French quickly and within a few months we were holding long and intricate debates in a pidgin of our three languages that would have sounded like cipher to anyone who overheard us. We called it the Tsar’s Dutch, our invented language, and kept to it even after my cotton-mouthed Ukrainian had bettered. It seems to me now that even then, during our first few months together, we were practicing for a time when it would provide us with our only privacy. Five short years later, living on a collective farm outside Kiev with two hundred other kulaks and assorted class enemies and meeting only once a day, in the dining hall at a massive plank table with the forty-eight other workers in our section who regarded us, even the most petit-bourgeois of them, with unqualified suspicion and contempt, the Tsar’s Dutch was near to all that was left us.