by John Wray
He went to the door and opened it and stood for a moment, breathing in the cold air, then propped it open and returned to the alcove. He sat for a while on the frame in the half-darkness, muttering to himself.
He felt worn and brittle, far older than his years. Older than Père had ever been. He sat without moving for a while. —Not quite, Oskar, he said aloud, leaning forward into the quiet. —A few years yet, for that. He looked carefully around the room. I won’t make those mistakes, he thought. No children. No wife. I could do it now and not trouble anybody.
Except Maman, he thought suddenly. Except her. He pictured her then as he had when he’d first gotten her hysterical sheet of scribble twenty years before: dressed in unbrushed black silks and veil with the pale sky above her, not listening to the apologetic sparrow-voiced peeping of the priest, all of Niessen crowding in behind, staring down at the long hole cut into the grass. Was that what she was expecting now? He breathed in effortfully and thought of Anna. She had wondered about him, expected it for a time, after he’d told her about Père.
In a way I have done it already, he thought. Not like Père, but worse: I have done it twice. Taken myself away. Again the crumpled and snow-sodden letter appeared before him, and he himself appeared, lying on a damp horsehair blanket the day before the twelfth offensive, reading her letter and feeling the inevitableness of it rising tidelike under him: He has done the most bastard thing. The most hateful. The most selfish. The worst, only thing left my dear little boy . . . And on and on in tight blank circles without meaning, not sparing him anything, every detail of that day down to the arrangement of the papers on the writing table, the cane-backed chair thrown down onto the floor, the tipped-over inkwell. And he thinking to himself in that first instant She’s made poetry out of this, out of this thing, too . . . The boy in the upper bunk was leaning out into the crawl space and looking down at him, half smiling, curious.
—What is it, Voxlauer?
He hadn’t moved or spoken, but gathered in his breath, weakly and raspingly, with a sound like a brush passing over a leather strap: Ahhh. Ahh
—Voxlauer? Hey?
—What?
—You made a noise.
—Yes.
—What is it?
—It’s my father.
—What?
—He’s shot himself. Ahh. He’s shot himself, do you hear
Then a silence, blanketing and deep.
—Oskar?
—Ahhhh, said Voxlauer aloud, listening to the sound give out into the cold.
He rose and worked the mattress with the poker until the smell again made it difficult to breathe. He crossed the room to the door and caught his breath and returned to the mattress. When he had finished he hung the lantern from a hook above the door and went outside to the woodpile and brought in six quartered logs and an armful of kindling. Taking a broom and a dustpan from under the bench, he swept up the loose straw and emptied it into the stove mouth. The stove itself was thick with ash but he had no strength left to clean it. He laid on the kindling and the splints and started a fire and opened the stove vents. Then he spread his coat over the sour-smelling mattress and slept.
That night the hussars gave me a coat and a felt blanket and sat me among them round the fire. The images of my father as I imagined him, and the taps sergeant and the deserter, mixed and separated again until I couldn’t think of any one of them without the other two crowding in behind. There was no difference, finally, between them: all three had died. They had each died badly and I’d had a part in their deaths and I had come away alive. The knowledge of this made me feel ghostlike and transparent and I wondered that no one around the fire seemed to notice. I had been solid and fully in my body before shooting the deserter but he had died very badly, slowly and in great pain, and I hadn’t been able to fire a second time. Once he’d died and I knew that I was safe I’d been able to step away from the fact of myself a little and not think, only follow the hussars back to the tents. But now night had fallen and I was still not back in my body properly and in fact was trapped outside of it as the rest of them drank and cursed their superior officers and gossiped about the war.
They were a young regiment, excepting some of the officers, and a few of them were from Kärnten. One boy in particular, Alban I think his name was, was kind to me and shared a dram of watery schnapps and a little flake of chocolate. I found that in spite of what was happening I could drink and eat and talk to him very amiably. We exchanged addresses and promised we’d meet at the Niessener Hof for a drink sometime after the war, and he found me a bedroll and a coat and space in a tent with three other enlisted men. The captain came round a short time later and promised to have me restored to my company by six-o’clock the following evening. The front’s moved on some eighteen-odd miles, he said. We took Caporetto this morning in less than an hour. He was standing over me at the opening of the tent and speaking evenly and unexcitedly with the clear starry sky behind him. Appreciative murmurs rose up from the others. That’s good, I said after a time, not thinking that it was, particularly, or thinking anything at all but saying it was because that was simplest. There was silence for a moment. I looked up at the captain; he seemed to be waiting for me to say something more.
That’s good, I repeated. I suppose it’s the Germans, sir?
It’s the gas, he said, turning on his heels and leaving.
The next morning as we climbed through a dense belt of firs I broke off from the column and struck down into the trees. The company had thinned into loose clusters of men beating paths through the brush and my leaving went unnoticed. I felt indifferent to this, whether or not I had been seen, feeling that I was dead already. I’d been killed by the gas or the cold or the smell in the air or by the man I had killed; how I’d died made not the slightest difference. Where I was to drop, when eventually I did, made no difference either except that I knew it should not be in the snow in a trench like the taps sergeant, with the smell of gas and burnt powder all around me.
At the lower edge of the firs the slope steepened and the cover spread apart and I half slid, half stumbled downhill over the tamped snow, brushing tips of buried saplings as I went. One hour later I reached the old front and a few hours after that I was standing at the gate of the first farmstead leading down to Laibach. From where I stood I could see the empty plaza and the kapelle and the station behind it where we’d begun our march. It was just past midday, breezy and mild. I followed the fence to the back of the house.
The yard seemed deserted, empty of stock and people, and I approached the house cautiously and rapped on the door. After a while I pushed it open and stepped inside. Standing around the kitchen in various poses of laziness and disinterest were seven men carrying repeating rifles, dressed in tattered blue fatigues. I looked at them for a moment or two, then put up my hands.
The men looked me over for a time. We thought maybe you were the milkmaid with the milk, said one of them. He spoke with a slow, heavy accent I took at first to be Hungarian. He watched me a little while longer, then motioned to me to lower my arms. I let them fall, saying nothing. What are you doing here? asked the man. He was looking at my private’s coat and holster.
Looking for breakfast, I answered.
He snorted. Well, you won’t find any here, little man. Believe me, we should know already. Just an old whore strung up by her garters in the cow shed. One of the men made a sign of the cross behind him. The first man shrugged.
I don’t believe you, I said.
Do we look like we’ve eaten? he said tiredly.
I looked from one to another of them around the little room. One by one each of them returned my gaze out of droop-eyed, jaundiced faces. Not much, I said. The man smiled again and nodded.
There were nine of them in all, deserters from a Czech battery specializing in minelaying. A number of them had kept their wire-stripping and cutting tools and we used these to cut locks and chicken wire in a long chain of farms running north and east into Hungary
. As the Czechs could no better return to Bohemia than I could to Kärnten we decided to continue east over the wide rolling plain to Budapest. We slept during the day in windbreaks or in little wooded depressions and traveled after dark, stealing here and there from farmers as we went. When anybody saw us we chased after them a little, waving our guns and yelling.
We kept due east, more or less, skirting the towns, our only idea to get as far from Austria as we could before the war ended. We were all convinced we would win the war with the new gas from Germany and that afterward deserters would be hunted down and murdered. The man who had first spoken to me, Jan Tobacz, a dentist from Prague, had a wife and child staying with relatives in Budweiss and was terrified they might be shot. This was the first time I’d thought about the Empire as something altogether different in the east than we thought of it at home, something vast and full of strange designs, a thing to keep well clear of. Jan himself came from a wealthy Prague family and had never questioned the architecture of things, as he termed it, until going to the war. He’d been on the Isonzo front for nearly two years and had spent the better part of his second year planning his desertion. We became friends over the following weeks and talked about the war and our decision to leave it until we were both of us free of any doubt. I came to see the restlessness of my last few years as the inevitable response to the smallness of Niessen, to its baubles-and-penance religion, to borrow another of Jan’s phrases, and to the way we’d had of living at a remove from things, discouraging all but a few friendships, keeping my father’s condition hidden as long as we could. Jan was something of a socialist and under his direction I came to view my past life as an haut-bourgeois evil and my father’s filigreed, salon-ready compositions as its most grotesque flowering. I began to blame the music, Niessen, the war, and anything else I could think of for my father’s death. The farther east we traveled the more my disgust grew at all that I had been raised to cherish and admire, from the French we had spoken each night at the dinner table to my mother’s cultivated fondness for Italian sweets.
I had my seventeenth-birthday supper in a field by an open well for oxen, somewhere just southwest of Budapest: two autumn hares in a little brass tureen with a carrot and a spoonful of rancid butter. Welcome to the rest of life, Jan said proudly. I felt old, looking at him, and terrifyingly clear-headed. I knew even then that I’d not see Niessen again as a young man.
Two or three nights later we came to a small farm on the city’s outskirts, a few low plaster buildings with sloping roofs set around a pond on a parcel of steep, muddy ground. We hadn’t eaten for two days and stared across the dull brackish water at the lights of the house. We waited a long time for them to go out, sitting on our rucksacks in the damp grass. There seemed to be a party going on. Finally Jan muttered something in Czech to two of the men and they stood and walked around the pond to the gate. We watched them go. Isn’t it a little dangerous, with everyone awake? I asked.
Jan laughed. I’ve only sent them to beg, Oskar.
We waited in silence. Suddenly there was a shout and the gate clattered open and the two Czechs came galloping full tilt around the pond. What the hell is it? Jan shouted once they’d reached us.
We’re to come right in, they said, half in disbelief. Every one of us.
When we came to the house we found that a huge plank table had already been cleared and pushed into the middle of the kitchen, and long benches dragged out from the pantry. The farmer and his three sons greeted us warmly as we entered and motioned to us to sit down and begin. They told us in cheerful patchwork German that the lady of the house was boiling potatoes and cabbage and had gone to the smokehouse for another yard of sausages. We looked at them in blank confusion, sheepish in our hunger, not daring to ask any further questions or touch any of the food. After a few minutes of painful, friendly silence, broken only by the growling of our stomachs, the farmer’s wife returned with a platter of smoked meats and a thick loaf of bread and set them down in front of us with a pitcher of pond-cooled beer. We must have sat dumbfoundedly for another moment blinking up at her because she laughed and lifted her upturned hands, saying Eat! Eat!
We looked at each other for a few seconds and then set in, all of us grinning now like idiots.
The wife spoke better German than her husband and as we ate she stood watching us proudly. She asked which regiment we’d deserted from and where we were headed. She was particularly curious as to how I’d come into the company. How did you happen east, then, little soldier? she asked me.
By accident, ma’am, I said, buttering a roll and smiling.
I know better, she said coyly.
What do you mean, please? said one of the Czechs. I looked up at the farmer’s wife. Excuse me, ma’am? I said, my mouth full of bread.
She laughed, taking us all in with her sparkling black eyes. Come come, gentlemen! We’re not so far as all that from the city. This country is very flat, she said, winking at her husband. News gets about.
I still don’t understand, I protested.
She shrugged. There’s a big strike tomorrow, in favor of the Seven Points. In Dzizny Square. Surely you knew about this? My husband will be going, and my sons. You may ride with them. To save yourself the marching, she said, breaking again into a grin.
I still sat staring at her blankly. Strike? I said.
The Bolsheviks, the farmer said loudly. The Bolsheviks, good gentlemens.
It was the first time many of us had heard that word.
The whining of the door hinges woke him early the next morning. The room was bright and cold. Bits of straw he’d missed in the night danced in spirals on the knotted clapboard floor and around the little table. The last of the fire had long since burned to ash and he felt small and frozen on the bed. He went to the stove and built another fire, shut the door and put on his coat and took out the provisions he’d bought at the farm and boiled some water and made a pot of coffee. He drank two scalding cups and felt the cold in his hands and legs slowly receding. Then he stood and crossed the room to the open locker.
In the locker were twenty-five rounds of bullets and a large box of shells for the shotgun. The shotgun and the rifle were both filthy with grease and the rifle’s stock was badly pocked with shot holes. The fly rods, by contrast, looked pristine and chaste bundled carefully in cotton sheeting in a separate compartment. The flies were packed in narrow cork boxes, one to each box, and gave no sign of ever having been used. They shone against the mute brown of the cork like specimens from a South Seas expedition, bright and gaudy and mysterious. He lifted a blood-red fly and felt its weightlessness and the curve of its tiny hook. He brought it to the window and marveled at its redness and tickled his nose with its feathers.
Out the window the forest was in sunshine and the surface of the pond sparked and glimmered where the furrowed ice gathered the snow-thaw. The barrel he’d righted lay overturned again and a fresh layer of garbage decorated the turf. A wetness in the air that could have been either the wetness of late fall or early spring gave the world an iridescence and a light in all its corners. But a cold current ran through the air still and quivered along the ground and above the water.
As he sat on the stoop a short while later working a rag through the chambers of the shotgun a figure appeared on the far side of the pond. It was dressed in a dark coat and heavy woolen pants and might have been mistaken for the figure of a man but for the hair which hung down from a gray loden cap and hid her face entirely. She held to the tree line and stepped briefly out into the sun by a stand of young birches before disappearing into the pines.
Voxlauer sat quietly for a moment. Then he picked up the rag and finished cleaning the shotgun, taking care to wipe the grit from around the hammer and pin. He took the hatchet from the woodpile and picked out three quartered stumps and split the stumps into narrower splints and hacked the splints in half across their length and carried the stack inside to the stove bench. A few scraps of bark lay around the stove’s grate and he gathere
d them up absently and heaped them into a little pile for kindling. Then he took up his hat and went outside.
The tracks came down out of the slope above the pond and hatched back and forth as the ground steepened. The boots were heavy enough to leave clear prints in the needle cover and he followed them up to an old logging road running west below the cliffs. He scrambled onto the road and headed east until it joined with another he recognized as leading up to the reliquary, then turned and carefully retraced his steps. Where she had stepped out into the sun a cut showed in the snowbank and beyond it were three deep, sharp-edged prints in the yellow mud. Her boots were new and thick-soled and threw small clots of dirt to the side with each step. A tear in a branch showed where she’d left the cover of the birches. Voxlauer walked back through the loose-flung trees to the bridge and the cottage, looking back every few steps over his shoulder.
That night Voxlauer lay awake and thought about the woman. She’d been coming from Pergau, or from the colony, possibly. She moves like an old man, he thought. Cautiously and tiredly. But she dresses like a member of the Red Guard. He felt his face wrinkle itself into a smile. A vision of Anna came to him then unbidden: Anna in her crepe dress, relic of better years, laughing at his parodies of the Kaiser. Ah, Franz Josef, she would say, nodding soberly. A terrible man, I’m sure. And he, Voxlauer, would say: No, not a terrible man, but a fool, and they’d talk awhile, without much interest or urgency, about the war or some other long-past thing. Anna in her dead husband’s army clothes bent over stiffly behind the house, saluting tiredly as he pulled up in the battered trap. Voxlauer lay a few minutes longer staring upward in the darkness, then stood and felt his way to the table and lit the lantern.