John Wray: The Right Hand of Sleep

— Kati Milnitsch. I haven’t thought of her in ages.

— Well, neither have I, Oskar. She looked lovely in a habit. You’d be surprised.

— No I wouldn’t.

— All right then. All right. She poured the dishwater slowly from the tin basin into the drain. — You missed something there, though, Oskar! she said.

Voxlauer set the plates down and made a face. — Maman. I was sixteen years old.

— I was barely eighteen when your Père and I were married.

Voxlauer didn’t answer.

— Oskar?

— I don’t want to talk about Père.

She was quiet awhile then, staring down at the plates. — You’re so old, now, Oskar, she said finally. — Who would have you? She paused again. — You were beautiful once. Beautiful. I don’t mind saying so.

— I’ve already had a wife.

She took the plates from the counter in front of him and stacked them and took them over to the cupboard and put them in carefully, one after the other. The plates squeaked loudly as she stacked them.

— I won’t hear a word about her, Maman. He paused a moment, looking at her. — Not a word. I’m warning you now.

— What can we talk about, then, Oskar? She was quiet for a time. — I haven’t said anything, she said, still facing the cupboard door. — I haven’t said anything yet.

— That’s a lie, Voxlauer said simply.

After dinner he shaved off his beard with his father’s straight razor and let her cut his hair in front of a full-length mirror she’d saved from her opera days. Then he went out into the twilight, still dressed in his traveling clothes, and walked down through the garden.

When he came to the bridge he turned and followed the creek for a minute or so till he reached the southern boundary stone. Then he went left, stepping over the creek, and made his way through the tight-woven bracken till he’d traced the property line east to the orchard. In places he barely recognized the garden and full-grown trees appeared suddenly before him where none existed in his memory. The birchwood pavilion at the northwest corner of the orchard was badly decayed and the floorboards felt spongelike and slippery beneath his feet. The house where Greiss and his son had lived was now locked and shuttered. The open barn next to it was empty except for the cart he’d fallen onto the night before. He wondered who had moved it. Had she? No, she was too old to do such things. Not too old, he reminded himself. Still.

— Still, she looks old, said Voxlauer aloud.

The vegetable garden lay under a thin shirt of ice where the slate wall shadowed it and skeletons of the last year’s wine hung in curls from the trellises and rattled with an angry tenacity as he brushed past them. When he rounded the house Maman was waiting for him on the verandah. — Don’t be too late, she called down. He said nothing in reply but went out through the gate and shutting it behind him made a small gesture, more an acknowledgment than a wave, and set off up the snow-guttered road to the ruin.

Past the canal the road curved sharply uphill to the hump of pocked granite the ruin rose from, black and crumbling, like scaffolding for a vanished building. Three quarters around the outcrop the houses fell away and a trail wound through snarls of winter bracken to the summit. From there the ruin was like an immense stage set, gothic and fragile, behind which the entire plain lay shuttered against the cold. A ladder led up through the remains of the sacristy and he climbed to the roof and looked across the hillside.

St. Michael’s and the square lay bare and unpeopled except for a few sedans and delivery cars spaced evenly in the snow and a pack of dogs circling the fountain, dry and crated over for the winter. The Niessener Hof and Gasthaus Rindt faced each other sullenly across the square, the Bahnhofstrasse lolling out between them. The avenue itself was largely unlit and he noticed that many of the shops he remembered toward the station had disappeared. A train was just pulling out and beyond it the alleys and lanes of town gave way to a belt of newer, more landed properties and beyond those the first modest farms. He cast about for the creek and found it where it forked at the canal and followed it with his eyes down into the garden and past the house where a light was still burning and further out still along the toll-road through the willows southward. The train passed silently between them, its twin taillights fluttering. He turned and clambered back down the ladder. The sky overhead was clear and cold.

The fusilier came by a short time later and looked the sergeant over. He asked me if I had been wounded and I shook my head. He looked at me a moment, then told me to put my helmet on. I searched for it around me in the snow but couldn’t find it. Come over here, Private, the fusilier said. He motioned to me to take the sergeant’s legs and, leaning stiffly over, took hold of him by the sheepskin collar of his coat and pulled. The sergeant came away from the wall with a noise like tearing crepe and a little ravine of yellow snow tumbled after him onto our boots. We went with the body to the back lines, stumbling and slipping on the wet planks laid in pairs over the trenches. At the halfway point two men appeared with a stretcher and took the sergeant from us. We were within shouting distance of the tents of the rear line and I wanted very badly to keep going. If I remember rightly I started crying then, a steady breathless shudder that I made no attempt to keep the fusilier from noticing. The nausea came back and I took a few steps to one side, watching the men lurch forward with the stretcher around and between the shell craters toward the tents. The fusilier gave a light pull on one of my sleeves and we turned and began to walk back up the slope to the deserted front.

As we reached the line we saw the last column of men scrabble over the ridgetop and disappear. The fusilier’s battalion had advanced without him and he was suddenly afraid they might think he’d deserted. It seemed to me the offensive must have been a great success: only a small part of a battalion had hung back, to oversee the transport of the remaining guns. We stood on the last footbridge looking down at the empty trenches. Do you have a weapon? asked the fusilier.

Yes sir.

Well?

Sir?

Did you slip it down your breeches, Private? Where in God’s name is it?

It was in the pit, sir, I said.

He cursed. Go and find it, then.

I walked back to the ruins of the turret and cast around in the drift and rubble for my rifle. The mortar had been taken away. Not finding anything, I sat down again against the empty casings; at some point I got to my feet and looked down the line. The fusilier was gone. Far off down the slope a team of mules was hauling six or seven coupled mortars up a track. I watched them slowly pass out of sight and after that stared a long time off into the woods, not thinking about anything.

I spent that night in a snowed-in supply tent on the former Italian side of the lines. The front had been abandoned hurriedly and very little looked to have been taken. In among the stacked crates of flour and beans and salted meat were two piles of winter uniforms, slate-colored and quilted, with the Venetian lion recumbent over each lapel. I pushed the piles together and fashioned them into a sort of bed and crawled underneath it and felt the weight of the coats pressing me down into the floor. I thought of the way the sergeant had been pressed into the snow and imagined the force of the explosion something like the weight I felt on top of me, but vast and on every side and all at once. Then I laughed at myself, seeing an avalanche of uniforms exploding into the dugout. That’s not the way it was, I thought. It was a shell that did it. He was burned all over.