John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

The room of the two sons lay just beyond the parlor and Voxlauer entered it cautiously, holding the dying lamp out in front of him. He was standing between the narrow beds, looking at the banners and slogans covering the four walls, when the attack came. A shuddering noise like the sound of air caught by a train window rushed into the room and doubled him over against the bed. His breath exited his chest in one pauseless sweep as though sucked out by a bellows. He clung to the burled, palm-smoothed bedpost and vomited. The banners and swastikas and placards on the walls combined before his sight into a screen of dancing symbols and he cursed at it voicelessly and clenched his eyes tightly shut. But a horizonless field of shifting forms spread itself in front of his closed eyes, heaving and reeling sickeningly, he was forced to open them again onto the room. And still the vision persisted, containing the room too within it now, yawning endlessly before him, cold and gray and inexhaustible, widening even as he watched. I know what it is now, thought Voxlauer. I have a name for it.

— The future, he said into the room.

For an instant all his drunkenness left him and he looked at the density and profusion of color surrounding him with something approaching awe. Then just as suddenly the vision abandoned him and the drunkenness returned. With it came a screeching, directionless anger, rearing and sickening him and doubling him over again until his face was almost to the floor. He stumbled about the room from one wall to another, clawing at the posters and hangings and throwing them down into a heap between the beds. When the four walls were stripped bare he fell back from them onto one of the beds, leaning against the bedpost, sucking air into his lungs. After a time he stood up shakily and went out of the room.

He found the butter and the cream Frau Holzer had left out for him on the kitchen counter and went back to the cupboard, filling his pack randomly with parcels from the various shelves. Stumbling among the coats in the entryway he cursed and kicked a boot hard against the wainscoting. I’ve done this now, he thought. I’ve done this thing, too. Even though she was kind to me. He felt clear and lucid again and stood a long time in the entryway, swaying very slightly from side to side.

Like hitting the man in Pauli’s bar. I can never come back here, either, he thought, sadly and calmly, as though looking back on himself from a place far removed in time. He began to take the parcels out again, one by one, from his pack, arranging them in a straight white row under the coats. Then he stopped himself, smiling a little. — That won’t do anything now, Oskar, he said aloud, picking the parcels up. A short time later he lurched out into the yard and stood watching his breath rise and spread across the sky, icy and black and without end.

The first weeks on the collective Anna moved and spoke and took in the things around her as though asleep. She knew what had happened, in the same sense that she knew her date of birth or her name or the time of year, and was able to learn, with my help, the things she needed to learn to satisfy the sovkhoz bosses, but something had shifted incontrovertibly in her image of the world and its intentions toward her and from then on it seemed as if our roles had been reversed — she was now the exile from a faraway country and I was both her translator and her guide. Most painfully of all to me, she never seemed indignant or resentful as she went about the various absurd and demeaning chores assigned to her to remove her “kulak sense of privilege”; if anything it was her eagerness to please, her blank-faced willingness to do whatever was asked of her, that confused the other workers in her brigade and kept her in regular disfavor with the Women’s Council. Each night she’d tell me with a strange, apologetic smile the things she’d done that day and I’d return her smile blankly, idiotically, knowing as well as she did that the jobs had been meant to humiliate her and the next day would bring more of the same.

Yet all during that time, incredible as it seems to me now, I held adamantly to my belief in Lenin and participated in the regular discussion groups on Wednesday and Friday evenings, asking countless questions of the cadre instructors, struggling to see the ideal behind the bleak fact of the collective. Anna began for some reason to believe that our time on the sovkhoz would soon be over and I made every effort not to discourage her, convinced as I was that conditions would soon improve. I began to write letters home to Maman, letters full of Leninist rhetoric and self-righteous contempt for my old life, but in spite of her difficulty understanding the change in me, I saw that she had long since forgiven me for deserting; it was clear from her first reply that she held Lenin and his international horde of terrorists and saboteurs to blame. Her regular rants against “Bolshevikism” provided Anna and me with a great many evenings’ entertainment. For a while we recovered something of our former happiness.

Our first three years on the sovkhoz passed more or less in this way. Then slowly, irresistibly, in a succession of lighter and heavier shocks, the last of our belief in things expired. Lenin’s death, when it finally came, seemed like nothing to me so much as a token of my own disillusionment. More and more of the collective’s yield was requisitioned each year to feed the workers in the cities and fund the first of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans; the bosses became more and more irritable and suspicious of everything, fighting openly now among themselves, and our standing in the sovkhoz remained peripheral and suspect in spite of my continuing avowals of enthusiasm and Anna’s unceasing efforts at goodwill.

On our brief furloughs home we found ourselves reviled as soviet lackeys by the same people who’d reported us to the cadres five years before; the regime had lost the last of its support in the countryside, and grain-hoarders and suspected rebels were shot daily in the villages. Many of the richer peasants slaughtered their animals in the public markets and burned their houses to the ground so no more could be taken from them. The roads from one town to another began to fill with families with the stricken, uncomprehending look of people in the initial stages of starvation. A saying from before the Revolution came back into common use, even on the collective: “A bad harvest comes from God; famine comes from the Tsar.” Already some were predicting the coming famine would be the worst that the country had ever seen.

When the Great Famine hit in the winter of ’32 I learned quickly that the hunger I’d known in the time of my desertion had been less than a passing pang. The produce storehouses of the collective were put under round-the-clock watch by an entire company of Red Army infantry and anyone approaching within twenty meters was fired on. The cities were far worse off than the countryside: in Cherkassy the people ate dogs, the bark off trees, even one another. Grain continued to be sent north by train to finance the latest of Stalin’s construction drives. Anna fell ill, as did many others on the collective, and I had nothing at all to give her. When it became clear to everyone that she was dying I was allowed to take her home and she bettered slightly there, enough to move frailly through the house from one window to another, watching women from the village sowing cabbage and beets on the narrow strip of land that had once briefly belonged to her.

This and another three years, Père, I would have to tell you

At first light of day Voxlauer was high on the west ridge, shivering in the shadow of the tree line along a strip of clear-cut turf. The tangle of the ridge spread and fell away beneath him and vanished over Pergau into the mist. He leaned back against a knotted pine, staring down along the ridge out of the wet, red corners of his eyes. An hour earlier he’d passed through the clearing where the bones of the deer lay scattered in all directions through the scrub and the silvered bracken, radiating out spokelike from the gutted ribs. At some point in the night he’d been down to the cottage where he’d emptied his pack and put on his coat and stowed the bottle in one of its pockets. At some point also he had vomited and a clotted pinkish oil clung to his collar and beard and crept slowly in a crescent down his shirtfront. He sat back with the chamber of the shotgun across his knees and waited, wheezing quietly from the cold.