John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

Reaching the door first, Kurt glanced over his shoulder before trying the handle. Voxlauer held the keys up and jangled them. Kurt shook his head good-naturedly.

— It’s a strange sort of floating peace you’ve made for yourself up here, Voxlauer. You must feel very satisfied, holed up in your little patch of woods.

Voxlauer came slowly up the steps. — It’s not my patch of woods. You know that very well.

— Come now, cousin-in-law! Confess! All alone up here, uncomplicated by politics, no one to watch over you; you must feel wonderfully free!

— I have someone to watch over me, Obersturmführer. Have you forgotten?

Kurt only shrugged his shoulders. — Are you a Red, Oskar? he said almost wistfully.

— Does that word have a meaning up here, outside of history? Voxlauer brought his shoulder against the door and pushed it open.

— Ah! You’re a wily bastard, aren’t you! Kurt said appreciatively. He leaned forward to peer past Voxlauer into the gloom. — What did you leave behind with the Bolsheviks, you wily bastard? A girl? A wife? Family?

— A wife, said Voxlauer, stepping away from the door to let Kurt pass. — No family.

— And I have a family without a wife! We make quite a pair, don’t we.

— You have the future, said Voxlauer, smiling. — You have the Reich.

Kurt paused in mid-stride, looking back at him thoughtfully. — When I was in Berlin, Voxlauer, during the term of my exile, I watched our cause gaining momentum hour by hour. A beautiful thing, beautiful, to have a cause, especially when you are lonely. We nursed it together like midwives, the best of us, and the people who scorned it or hindered it gradually fell away. Some tried, when it was far too late, to recast themselves as our comrades. He pursed his lips. — That’s not your idea, is it?

— Would it work? said Voxlauer.

— We’ll see, Kurt said, ducking under the lintel. — May I enter?

When he’d searched the cottage to his satisfaction Kurt sat down at the table and flipped idly through the sketches. — These are by the old man, these two, he said, holding up the portraits. — I remember when he did them.

— The one on the left’s of Resi, said Voxlauer, leaning against the doorframe.

— Yes. I recognize her mother in it.

— Not her father?

Kurt frowned. — No, not her father so much.

— Where is he now?

— He left.

— A friend of yours?

— He was. Yes. We went away together.

— I see.

— She still thinks of me as a deserter, doesn’t she, Kurt said quietly.

Voxlauer didn’t answer.

— What do you think, Oskar? You’re no stranger to it, after all.

— To what?

Kurt grinned. — Desertion, of course.

— I don’t actually cherish an opinion on the subject, Voxlauer said tightly.

— No? Tell me something, Herr Voxlauer, said Kurt, looking around the room. — What was it drove you to hide away up here in this filthy hole? He let the sketches flutter one by one onto the table. — What was it, Voxlauer? He paused a moment. — Shame?

Voxlauer went to the door and held it open. — I suppose it was, he said. — But not the sort you’d understand, Obersturmführer.

The morning of the day we shot Chancellor Dollfuss a rally was announced over the radio. The usual selection of bureaucrats would speak, followed by assorted Home Front mannequins, and finally Dollfuss himself, on the thirteen-inch brass platform he brought with him to all his speeches, sometime in the early evening. The Brown Shirts were planning to attend with their smoke bombs and their broom handles and we said nothing to discourage them. “Let’s just keep them in the dark for the time being,” said our operations chief, Glass, grinning at no one in particular from his couch by the teletype. “It’s their natural condition.” One of the younger boys guffawed. Glass leaned back and continued to wait for word from Berlin with absolute serenity, hands folded neatly in his lap. As I watched him I reminded myself again how much I admired his carefree air. The rest of us stood awkwardly about the office, glancing skittishly at one another, waiting for Glass to nod off as he always did after breakfast so we could stop holding in our excitement. I walked with measured slowness to the window. In the courtyard the boys were filing in lazily in twos and threes.

We spent the rest of the morning strangely bored, playing tarok, watching Glass twitch and mumble in his sleep and dreaming up titles for ourselves in the postputsch government. I was elected minister of cultural sanitation or some such silliness. The putsch was still nothing more than fantasy to us. Street brawls and so on were for the Brown Shirts; we fancied ourselves an elite. A few of us had been hunting with our fathers and knew how to handle, load and fire a rifle. One or two of us had even shot a deer.

Glass was the fat sly old uncle we were all desperate to impress. I had impressed him most thus far, largely through flattery, and thus was allowed to eavesdrop from time to time on his affairs, to spy on the other boys and to order them about when Glass himself was occupied or napping. At present there was nothing to be done but wait. Rain came down from the north shortly after ten, darkening the pavements. I played cards for a while, grew distracted, lost a little money. At noon the wire came from Berlin giving us our mandate.

Glass cabled the Brown Shirts straightaway with select details: a full and total putsch, signed into being by the Chancellor himself, whose abduction that afternoon he, Glass, was personally overseeing; seizure of rail and tramway lines, and radio; immediate opening of the border to Bavaria with the assistance of the Republic’s own Home Guard, already secretly sworn in allegiance to the Führer. In short, the complete incorporation, within thirty-six hours, of the Austrian Republic into the Greater German Reich. The Brown Shirts were furious, of course — it all came as a complete surprise to them. The telephone rang in seconds. I could hear the local SA brass screaming like Gypsies one after the other in Glass’s ear, refusing to back us. There was talk of double-dealings, provocateurship, even treason. They wanted a line straight to Himmler. Glass, needless to say, was tickled.

“There’s no such thing as a direct line to the SS Führer,” Glass cooed, rolling his eyes at me. “If you’d like to protest to the Home Council, comrades. .” He was still on the line when the first trucks arrived. Hearing them rolling in, he excused himself blithely and hung up the receiver. At that point we still had confidence the army would back us, and the Brown Shirts must have, too, or else figured us done for. Not that they would have warned us in any event. The Brown Shirts had their own plans for Dollfuss; execution by broom handle, most likely. We should have expected them to auction us off to the highest bidder. As it was, they sold us to the first one they could find.

One of Glass’s more recent protégés knocked shyly on the office door, holding our disguises. We got into them quickly, no longer trying to choke back our excitement, giggling at our reflections in the hallway mirror like toddlers in a Nativity play. I was dressed as a lieutenant in the State Police, in creased, pleated grays and blacks; Glass had selected a Civil Guard’s uniform for himself, although he was not actually coming with us. “The spirit of the thing and so on, Bauer,” he said, struggling to wedge his calves into the knickerbockers. “They wouldn’t take me in the Guards, you know, back in ’23.”

“With all due respect, Hauptsturmführer, I’d not have taken you either,” I heard myself answer. I should have recognized it right away as an omen. Glass wrinkled his brow for the briefest of moments, then broke without warning into his infamous titter, poking me merrily in the ribs. Eventually he got himself into his uniform and we went down to look the rest of the boys over. We found them lounging along the cars, suited up and waiting — thirty in police blacks, sixty-five more dressed as foot soldiers in the Civil Guard. Glass glanced quickly down the line and turned back to me, his face flushed with pleasure. “There you are, Bauer,” he said, taking me by the shoulder. “Bastard sons of the Republic, to a man.” I spat demonstratively on the ground.