John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

In 1921, in the middle of my third year with Anna, the Ukraine was retaken by the Bolsheviks. Less than a year later, on a September afternoon, the first motorcar I’d seen since crossing the border appeared unannounced and unexpected over the gentle roll of fields between Anna’s house and the town and came to a stop twenty meters from where we stood, not doing much of anything, staring up the Cherkassy road as though waiting for just that motorcar to appear. It was a sand-colored G.A.Z. sedan with a folded-down canvas top and four men were sitting in it, dressed in high-collared brown coats and linen caps pulled down hard against the wind. None of them were wearing the Red Army uniforms still in fashion at that time and it was only by the looks on their faces as they crossed the field toward us and the fact that the driver remained behind the wheel staring blankly ahead of him with his goggles pushed down over his eyes that we knew them to be cadres. The smallest of them, a delicate-looking man in spectacles and a bow tie who reminded me of photographs I’d seen of the old Petersburg intellectuals, informed Anna with a crisp, calm, emotionless precision I couldn’t help admiring that she had been identified by the Cherkassy soviet and the local village Mir as a kulak, a hoarder of grain and an enemy of the people and as such was to be transferred to a labor camp without delay. Alternatively, she could be sent to a newly inaugurated state farm, a sovkhoz, six hours to the north; the choice was hers. Why such an unusual offer was made we never learned, though Anna guessed it might have been in deference to her husband, who’d fallen in defense of the Revolution at the battle of Moscow two years earlier. I was flatly ignored, though it was made clear I could follow her to either destination if I chose. A truck would come for her or the both of us that same evening.

A light rain was falling as Voxlauer crossed the square past the newly uncrated fountain and walked up into the woods, making for the curtain of mist above the ruin. The square had been filling with people all afternoon and as he looked down now policemen were clearing a wide lane through the traffic and laying pylons along its two sides and linking them together with lengths of yellow cord. A canvas-covered truck pulled to a halt alongside the pylons and two men came down from the truck bed and began unloading iron benches. Voxlauer reached into his pack and took out a bar of chocolate he’d meant to give Emelia and ate it slowly, watching the members of the post office band unpack their instruments and tune them under the yellow and white awning of the Amtshaus. A boy walked along a line of Sterno torches, lighting them.

Voxlauer turned and continued up the hillside. He felt very drunk and bewildered from the fight and the speech and swallowed hard every few steps to keep an attack from coming. He counted his breaths aloud to himself from one to seven. His voice rose in front of him into the air. It’s happening now, he said to himself. What we’ve all been waiting on. He remembered hitting the Tyrolean with the glass of beer. He pictured himself swinging the glass. It was a reflex, he thought. Anyone might have done it. But he remembered the silence throughout the room afterward and the look on Emelia’s face, more frightened for what he had done than for anything the Tyrolean had said to her. I can’t go back, he thought suddenly. I’ve done something now. It may not have been so much but I have done it.

He thought for a while about the Tyrolean. If he was a big Nazi he’d have been over at Rindt’s, he thought, trying to calm himself. Still. Everybody saw me hit him. The thought that the fight, in itself, could mean nothing to the others at the bar in their excitement and their drunkenness seemed naïve and childish to him. That quiet afterward, that proves it, he thought. The quiet of recognition. They’d been waiting for me to do something and now I’ve given it to them. Given them cause.

To distract himself he thought about the Tyrolean again. He’ll go back to Innsbruck and say he broke his nose murdering a Bolshevik, thought Voxlauer. He laughed. Or a Yid-lover. — He’ll make chief of police now, said Voxlauer aloud. — Friends and neighbors! he shouted, flinching at the recoil of the silence all around him. — Children of the Reich! I humbly accept this office. . Again his voice rose into the trees, warbling and shrill. The sound was painful to his ears and kept on even after the body of the sound had vanished and silence swept back around him like mud filling the groove where the wheel of a cart has passed. He continued up the slope as quietly as he could but the sound traveled with him now and would not leave him.

The dark ground tipped and swelled beneath him and he stumbled every few steps up to the first fields. At the junction with the valley road he remembered Frau Mayer and the cream and bore right along the edge of the spruce groves past the chapel. When he arrived at the house a light was burning in the kitchen, tremulous and gaslit, but no one answered to his knock. He peered in through the window and saw that the kitchen was empty. He crossed the farmyard to the stalls and slid the door open but saw only the crosswalk between the pens, narrow and straw-battened, and the animals shifting heavily in the dark at the sudden draft. He stood quietly awhile in the open door, listening to their breathing.

Returning across the wet ground to the house he called out and waited what seemed to him a very great length of time. He rapped again loudly on the door. After a few minutes more without an answer he stepped inside. To each side of him in the entryway the work clothes and jackets of the sons hung from pegs and lay crumpled among the boots and the hunting tack strewn loosely about the floor. Above the pegs skulls of deer mounted on birch-bark plaques hung one above the other, receding from great twelve-pointed racks to fluted, teacup-sized scalp bones just under the ceiling, more like the skulls of weasels or house cats than of deer. A black grouse over the kitchen lintel regarded him blankly out of one amber-beaded eye. He opened the door to the kitchen and blinked a moment in the light of the lamp set on the window table, then called out warblingly again into the house.

When his eyes had adjusted to the light he stepped into the kitchen and looked about him. There was the oven, there the stove. A cluster of pots and ladles hung over a wooden counter. An unpainted cherry-wood cupboard faced the counter and the stove front. He crossed over to the cupboard and pulled it open.

Squares of bacon wrapped in butcher’s paper lined the uppermost shelf, ordered in neat, staggered rows like candles in a sacristy. Below the bacon were bundles of smoked sausage and bricks of cheese and below these were sacks of onions and potatoes and small plug-necked bottles of schnapps. Voxlauer took a few parcels of bacon and sausage and a handful of red onions and stuffed them into his pack. He sniffed at the potatoes, chose two of a good size, then uncorked a bottle and tipped it back and took a long, burning draft. — I’m on holiday today, too, said Voxlauer into the quiet. He stood awhile in the middle of the room, drinking. Then he took up the lamp and put away the bottle and went on into the darkened house.

The pantry behind the kitchen was piled to the rafters with jars of all sizes, cans of compote and preserves, fish and salted meat, vegetables and fruits floating gilded in their preservative brine. Voxlauer turned a jar of pickled eggs back and forth under the light, watching the oil swirl and settle. On his way into the parlor he stumbled over a stool and nearly let go of the lamp. He felt nauseous suddenly and stopped to breathe, setting the lamp down on a newly waxed cabinet covered in trinkets and curling brown photographs laid together end on end, like cards in a game of tarok. The room began to reel under his feet and he held tight to the cabinet’s rim, focusing on the white lace dust cover. The faces of the sons smiled up at him from out of dark, patinaed frames. Before the pictures lay a broken-stemmed pipe and a pair of pince-nez and to the right of these, in frames of twisted ironwork, portraits of Georg Schönerer and Adolf Hitler.