John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

The salesman nodded. — Are you from the Steyrmark?

— Near enough. Kärnten.

— I thought either Kärnten or the Steyrmark. Elias Silbermann, from Vienna.

— Oskar Voxlauer. He shook the hand offered him.

— Any relation to Karl?

— Who?

— Come now, Herr Voxlauer! The composer.

Voxlauer looked at him. — Karl the composer, he repeated.

— Operettas. Sentimental airs. All the rage when we were little. Surely you must remember! The salesman began to hum a waltz.

— Yes, I remember now. I’ve been away for some time. No relation, I’m afraid.

— What sort of name is that, “Voxlauer”? I’d always wondered. Is that Bavarian?

— Austrian, I think, said Voxlauer.

— Oh. I’m not sure of that, the salesman said.

— What did you say your name was, Herr. .? Voxlauer said tonelessly.

The salesman didn’t answer. They rode awhile in silence. — I served, myself, he said after a few minutes, almost apologetically. — In the Tyrol. He leaned forward and raised a trouser leg to disclose a mottled blue scar. — The last great time. He smiled.

Voxlauer didn’t answer. The lights in the passageway leapt and flickered as the train clattered over a rail switch. After a sudden lurch leftward the wheels became quiet again, or near to quiet.

— Those godforsaken kits are all mine, said the salesman, pointing at the crates. — Blood of my brow.

— What’s inside them? said Voxlauer.

— Tungsten ingots.

— Ah.

— Yes, said the salesman. He laughed. — Exactly. What’s your trade then, Herr Voxlauer?

Voxlauer sat looking out the window. — My trade? he said. — Nothing.

— There’s a great many folk in that profession nowadays.

— That is to say, farming, Voxlauer said after a few seconds’ pause.

— Nothing or farming? said the salesman, blinking.

— Whichever you’d prefer.

— Well: I think I’d prefer nothing to farming, if it’s all the same, laughed the salesman — and anything to life as a peddler of lighting fixtures. He paused a moment. — Fortunately that’s not my sole vocation. I’m a pianist by training.

Voxlauer rubbed his eyes. — Tough times, I suppose.

The salesman regarded him a moment through the smoke and the gloom of the compartment. — Have you not been home since the war? he said finally.

— No.

— A great deal has changed, Herr Voxlauer. A very great deal.

Voxlauer didn’t answer. The first low steeples and clusters of light heralding the approach of the suburbs of the capital appeared along the south side of the train. To the north was the river and beyond the river identical clusters ever growing in density. Lights signifying buildings and families and German and books and machinery. The numbness he could no longer remember not feeling made itself noticed again, like the whine of a gaslight. He made no effort to take in what Silbermann was saying to him.

— Many of us simply fear for our livelihoods.

— Excuse me?

— Because of events in the north.

— I know nothing at all about that, said Voxlauer.

— I thought maybe you were an illegal. Many of them are coming back now.

— An illegal?

Silbermann nodded. — An illegal. A Black Shirt. He raised his left arm stiffly in salute.

— Ah, said Voxlauer. — I wouldn’t very likely be coming from the Ukraine in that event, would I?

Silbermann shrugged. — I suppose not.

They were very close to the river now and the packed sand under the rails dropped straight into the water. — It’s taken as a bad sign, Silbermann said after a pause. He was passing the tobacco back and forth between his hands and looking the whole while out the window, or at his reflection in the glass. To stop him fidgeting Voxlauer asked for a cigarette.

— With pleasure, said Silbermann distractedly, spreading the newspaper over his lap. Voxlauer closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Silbermann’s fingers on the newsprint and the sound of his own breathing, deliberate and calm. The steady turning-over of the gears. The rattle of the door.

— Here you are, Silbermann said brightly after a minute or so had passed, twisting the paper ends nimbly with his fingertips as he cast about after the matches. They were soon recovered from the floor and the cigarette lit. Voxlauer exhaled and watched his breath snake upward along the glass as Silbermann’s had done.

The cigarette drew evenly and smoothly. Voxlauer stared up at the vent. Silbermann was rolling another, glancing every few moments out the window, measuring their distance from the station. — Twenty minutes, he said, looking up and smiling.

— Twenty for you. I’m continuing south.

— I’d forgotten. You have family waiting?

— Of a sort, said Voxlauer. — A mother.

— Mothers. One wonders how they manage.

— They manage very well.

Silbermann looked up from his paper. The tracks were rising now to the level of the lowest houses and in the middle distance the stolid fin-de-siècle apartment buildings of the inner city came into view, monochrome and bright, with St. Stephen’s spire rising bluely behind them. — How long have you been a farmer, then, Herr Voxlauer?

Voxlauer sat back from the window. — For as long as I can remember.

They marched us into the Isonzo in the early morning, twenty miles up from the station in loose oilskin coats and jackboots brought back from the front and hurriedly reblackened for us. It was October and a wet, heavy snow was falling. When we reached the back lines a few bewildered trench cutters stared at us, then waved us up the hill. No one seemed to have been expecting us. Everywhere men were cursing the snow and dragging crates and canvas sacks up and down the hill on runners. The war was ending, though we didn’t know it yet. My battalion was put together of frightened aging men and homesick boys with hurt looks on their faces; we were the replacement for a battalion that had been utterly routed that September in the hills outside Caporetto. I was the youngest, turned sixteen that past December. I had no ideas of my own yet about anything. I felt no homesickness for my family, or for Niessen. I was happy to be in the war.

They set us to work right away gathering spent mortar casings and firewood. An advance trench was opened a few meters below the tree line and we were moved into it that same day, with eight twenty-millimeter mortars and three or four dozen machine-gun posts. The gunners were all officers between twenty-five and forty and had been on the line for near to a year already; most were months past their leaves. They barely seemed to register our arrival.

The first night was very quiet. A lieutenant came round to our newly dug positions and yelled at us for letting the trench floor fill with water. He was bleary-eyed and stooped and apologized a few minutes later for losing his temper. Later that night I saw him slumped over on a crate outside the officers’ mess, twitching and mumbling in his sleep. In the morning we learned seven men had deserted.

Things had begun unraveling by then, but quietly, without any noticeable change. I stared saucer-eyed at everything around me, as though at any minute I’d be found out and ordered back to school. As the shelling began that second day a cluster of officers crawled from one post to another down the lines, thanking us for not leaving our positions. The Germans were coming, they told us, in two or at most three weeks’ time. We were to hold to our dugouts, return modest fire at intervals, and wait.

In late November six German battalions arrived. We had barely advanced at all, ten or twenty meters at most up a steep snowfield under near-to-constant mortar fire. The excitement I’d felt at first had given way to a steady nervous tiredness, an impatience for something definite to happen. Since I’d been on the lines there had been no true offensive. The trenches we’d abandoned over the last few weeks had filled completely with mud and cast-away food tins and cartridges; to reach us the Germans had to lay a network of planks over them and inch their way forward in their caterpillar-treaded trucks. Things must have looked desperate to them because they stayed in the transports until their officers had finished their tour of the lines, coming out only when given the direct order. Maybe it’s comfortable for them in there, I thought. I watched raptly as the infantry and gunners let themselves down one by one from out of the covered beds, surefooted and serene. That was the first of many times I envied them.