by John Wray
Above the table were two shelves running the length of the wall, cluttered with tins and empty jars and sacks of nails and plaster. The upper shelf was too high to see onto properly and he pulled the chair over to it. It was filled with tins similar to those on the lower shelf, beans and spinach and pickled herring and others whose labels were torn or illegible from watermarks. At the end of the shelf he found a folio much like the one he’d looked through in the parlor a week before. He took it down and brought it to the table.
The folio held three pencil-and-gouache sketches on heavy paper: one still life and two portraits. The still life was drab and uninteresting to him but the portraits, one of a woman and the other of a long-haired child, were spare and delicate and very beautiful. Voxlauer sat at the table for a long time looking at them, holding them close to the lantern. The faces looked back at him starkly and directly, without reproach but also without any tenderness or goodwill. They were carefully drawn and the resemblance of the one face to the other was unmistakable. I’ll ask Pauli about them next time, he thought. The old man, Bauer, must have done them. He sat awhile longer at the table, remembering what few details Pauli had told him, before putting the lantern out finally and going to sleep.
A noise roused him a few hours later and he sat up at once, rigid and stock-still, feeling for the wall with his fingertips. The fire had gone out and he had no idea whose bed he was in or by what force he’d arrived there. All was in blackness and he felt numb and far from things. The sweat ran cold between his shoulder blades and he stripped off his shirt and rose from the bed and listened. The sound came again like the scraping of bootheels over gravel, clear and insistent. He remembered now where he was and looked about him for the rifle, stepping silently toward it in the dark. The steel of the barrel felt cold to the touch and he held it uneasily a moment, shifting from foot to foot. Then he put it down and went to the door.
The door shuddered as it swung open and he heard them scampering away before he saw them, a large fox and two half-grown cubs, pausing a moment at the edge of the turf with their huge eyes reflecting the starlight. They were slender and dark and their ruffed tails stood out straight behind them. They seemed reluctant to leave, out of curiosity or hunger, perhaps, or simply out of weariness from the cold. The nearer of the two cubs held the spine of a trout in its teeth like a diadem. Its tail quivered and beat against the air. It sniffed and bobbed and came nearer to him in slow winding loops. At one point he could have leaned over and blown onto its fur as it let the bones drop and nosed further into the barrel. Voxlauer sat quietly in the snow with his breath twisting upward in little plumes, raveling and curling. Eventually he made to gather in his coat and they bolted as one creature noiselessly into the pines.
The numbness was gone now and he found himself excited and unable to sleep. He lit the lantern and brought it to the table and took the guide to flowers and butterflies from his pack and leafed slowly through it. The illustrations glowed like the flies in Ryslavy’s tacklebox, bright and otherworldly. He sat at the table with his eyes closed, recalling the butterflies of the valley, swallowtails and beys and mourning cloaks, their wings barely heavy enough to cut the air. The colors he remembered were dark and saturated with a muddy fire and the brown of pine resin and standing water. He saw again his arms bare past the elbow reaching deep into the hollow green body of the pond and vanishing among the drab hairlike plants along its bottom. His father or someone else was steering the boat and calling to him not to fall in.
When Voxlauer woke the morning was already showing gray behind the cliffs and a high peeping birdsong limned down to him from the tree line. His bones ached fiercely and he shivered awhile in his coat, keeping his eyes open and listening. The song clattered to its height, broke, then beat its way upward again. He had the feeling of having forgotten a dream and tried for a time to remember it with no success. After a few attempts he stood up from the chair, went to the stove and started a fire. Then he went to the bed and lay down on it and watched the light grow slowly in the little room.
This room hasn’t changed in a hundred years, he thought. Longer. Look at it. Four white walls and a table and a stove. A mattress with a body stretched on it. The only change has been that body. And that’s no change at all, really, one body to another. This room was unchanged all the years I was with Anna and it was unchanged when I was in Italy and it was unchanged before that. The thought of Italy tightened his throat as always and he guided his attention patiently back to the room around him. The wide uneven floorboards, the roof beams, the cracked and scaling plaster. When was this room last whitewashed? he wondered. I’ll see to that in the spring. He closed his eyes. The thought that the room had remained unchanged lulled him into a reluctant calm. I could forget my own name in this room, he thought. Without drink or company. He thought again about the old man. —There’s no life here at all, he said aloud. He smiled. He knew this was a lie but he enjoyed it the way a child enjoys telling lies to itself, secretly and slyly. Sometime after that he opened his eyes and got up from the bed.
We slept that night on bales of hay dragged down from the barn loft and lined up in neat rows in the courtyard. The next morning the sons woke us early and brought us coffee from the kitchen. We went out with our packs and climbed into one of two deep-bedded carts pulled by mules and tried our best to fall back asleep. As we pulled out onto the road the wife’s face appeared in the kitchen window and beamed down at us. She called out something in Hungarian to her husband and laughed, then leaned further out the window and waved until the curve of the hill rose up and hid the house.
We rode five to a cart, sitting on stiff, suitcase-sized haybales, smoking our first cigarettes since leaving the Isonzo. The morning sky was just beginning to admit the haze of noon around its edges and I felt easy and content. The flat stubbled fields rose and fell in low humpbacked ridges as we made our way down the long escarpment into the capital. Now and again we’d stop at a crossing or a rail junction where two or three men would be waiting, clutching baskets of bread or cheese or wine with a carefree, festive air, as though going to a picnic.
No one seemed particularly surprised by our presence; if anything, it seemed to be taken as a proof of something. The greatness of the city, I supposed. Talking with the youngest son, who spoke a smattering of German, I gathered people were coming from far and wide to watch the strike. When I asked him about the Bolsheviks he grinned and slapped me on the shoulder. They stopped the war, he said.
When?
Just now.
How? I said sleepily. I didn’t believe him about the Bolsheviks or even that the war was over. Someone was always saying that the war was over and everyone was always in a hurry to believe it. How did they stop it? I said again, grinning a little, half in anticipation of a joke.
He shrugged. No tsar, no fighting. He looked proudly over at his father, who sat in front driving the mules. My father says he maybe march today. Our uncle is in a factory for rubber. But today nobody works in it. You see? He laughed again.
I didn’t answer. The close-cropped fields were gradually giving way to chestnut groves and clusters of clay-roofed houses. That coat is good, said the son, eyeing my woolen field jacket unabashedly. It was very cold in Italy?
Very, I said. I looked at his thick sheepskin vest. Would you like to trade?
Not bad for you, smiled the son. He took off the vest and passed it over to me. He was smaller than I was and my jacket hung tentlike from his bony shoulders. That’ll keep you warm in winter, I said.
Or in prison, said Jan. The others laughed.
When we reached the center of town the streets were already full to overflowing. Police and Civil Guardsmen were running around in a panic, trying to coax the massed crowds back against the houses. Half a mile from the river we were forced to tie up the carts and continue on foot. Everywhere people were shouting and drinking and acting as if the war really were over, drumming against streetlamps and house doors and passing carriages, dancing
with arms linked on the curbs. I moved forward as if in a trance, watching the people on all sides laughing, howling, bellowing, jeering openly at policemen and files of soldiers as they crowded past, writing insults to the Kaiser and the Crown of Hungary in school chalk on the walls and pavements. For the first time, moving cautious as an ant through the crowds, hidden in them and a part of them at once, it dawned on me that I might actually get away. More than that—I began to think for myself again, crushed and jostled into consciousness by the massing bodies. The idea came to me then, calmly and quietly at first, of the thing that I was going to do.
Closer to the square the crowds grew even denser. The march had already begun and as we crossed Theresien Avenue a huge roar went up in front of us. The farmer and his sons elbowed their way forward, calling out the name of the uncle’s factory like a marching hymn: Sol-ya . . . Sol-ya . . . Sol-ya . . . Another roar went up, booming back over our heads. Things were happening close by but we could see next to nothing. People were climbing onto each other’s backs, but the sway of the crowd threw them down again just as quickly. The farmer and his eldest son were wide-shouldered and bullet-headed and they pressed ahead ruthlessly, the rest of us falling meekly in behind them. All at once we were heaved forward into the linked arms of a row of terrified policemen. Through their shoulders I could see the wide empty square with the river behind it, slow and austere, and on the far bank the city of Buda curving down on its yellow hill. Across from our street at each corner of the square, identical cordons of police held identical masses restrained. Without warning a shout would erupt from one street or another, often a lone man’s voice, and the other five streets would immediately thunder back in answer. In the middle of the square a battalion of K&K cavalry sat in orderly, expectant rows.
For a brief moment the crowd behind us fell back a little and grew still. In those few calm, deliberate seconds it was quiet enough to hear the horses shifting uneasily and shuddering under the riders. Then a new sound began on the opposite side of the square, building and carrying to us over the tops of the trees, and the crowds there pushed forward to each side in blind confusion. Gradually they flattened back against the houses to admit the marchers, who were pouring out now from all of the downtown avenues onto the square. The roaring to every side grew immeasurably louder. The police on the street hesitated a moment, looking over their shoulders at the cavalry, then simply broke rank and let us through.
It was clear from the very first that no one, not even the marchers, had expected such an awesome show of numbers. I was later to hear that it was the largest assembly in the history of the capital. A few minutes after the entrance of the first columns of workers, the square was so filled by the crush of bodies that it became impossible to tell the marchers from the spectators who had broken everywhere through the laughable restraining lines of the police. The noise was deafening, like no sound I’d yet heard; the cavalry unit had all but vanished in the tumult. Occasionally single riders could be seen swaying helplessly over the profusion of heads and fists, shrieking at their horses. The marchers were moving now in a ring around the square, droning one workers’ anthem after another, and a song over and over again that I didn’t yet recognize as the Internationale. Now and then the whole crowd would join in, monstrously out of key, most of them simply bellowing along with the prevailing din. I looked about me at one point and noticed Jan standing a few paces to my left. Is everyone in this city a Bolshevik? I shouted to him.
Opportunists, Oskar! Opportunists! he called back. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. We laughed for a moment across the sea of lowing faces at each other.
Somewhere in the maelstrom a man was crashing a pair of cymbals together. Two isolated shots rang out, one after the other, but no one paid any attention to them. Suddenly the crowd surged forward and heaved us flat onto the pavement. I barely had time to get on my feet before a second surge sent me stumbling out into the street. Marchers and onlookers milled together on every side, the wide-eyed policemen pressed too closely into them even to raise their blackjacks. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Jan’s face falling away from me. I’m going east! I called to him. East! He waved once more, shouted something happily and was gone.
The cavalry were now gathered into a ring and huddled defensively on their mounts at the far edge of the park, firing shots into the air. The tide and current of the crowd had grown more violent, falling back from the riders grudgingly at each report and closing in again after only a few seconds. The entire scene was like nothing so much as a wide field of mud shifting in a heavy rain. Panic began to build in earnest now around the square, rocking and funneling the crowds, and in another instant I was thrown back from the cavalry as inexorably as I’d been carried toward them a few moments before. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one rider tilt and fall slowly sideways with his mount into the field of pitching heads. An instant or two later I was rushing down a narrow sloping street with a thousand others, all of us somehow one body and one brain, a column of state police and King’s cavalry just behind us. And you thought you’d left the war behind, I thought, grinning stupidly to myself as I ran.
That same night I boarded a K&K train east from Luzni station to Czernowitz and the border. Everything everywhere was in the same state of witless confusion. There were rumors that the Kaiser was offering all of Hungary as a sop to the Bolsheviks. No one asked to see my ticket.
As we crept rattlingly up into the Carpathians I sounded out the merchants and retired officers in my carriage for news about the October Revolution and the armistice. All I could gather was that the Bolsheviks had formed an alliance with the Russian navy and simply declared the war with Germany to be over. A group of tsarist generals, Commander in Chief Dukonin among them, had refused to give up their armies and continued to fight German forces throughout Poland and Silesia, living in the woods like war-lords. I had no idea how much of this could be believed. One old man, a retired taps lieutenant from Graz, swore the Tsar was in northern Hungary. He stuttered as he spoke and twisted the corners of his ash-gray muttonchops excitedly. He was convinced that I was an emissary of some kind until I confessed that I was in fact a deserter.
Well . . . he stuttered, adjusting himself in his seat uneasily. Perhaps you could petition the Tsar for some manner of asylum?
I don’t think so, uncle, I answered. It wasn’t his army I deserted from.
All the same, said a matronly woman in French-cut silks across the aisle. You can’t very well run to the Bolshevists, can you, child?
Why not? I asked.
Well, said the ex-lieutenant, glancing up and down the car with well-intentioned watery eyes. Well . . . he began.
They’ve nothing to live for, really, interrupted a tiny, well-coiffed lady from across the table, running her plump hands along the teakwood inlay of the window-banks as if by way of exposition.
I’m going to them just the same. I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
They gave me a number of further reasons between them over the course of the afternoon and I listened to them all attentively and cheerfully, as though taking part in an elaborate burlesque. My desertion was taken as nothing more than a romantic breach of decorum; the war had long since grown distasteful to these people. The idea of an Austrian boy of fine Biedermeier stock feeling sympathy for the Revolution, on the other hand, was preposterous to them—inconceivable, in fact. They were forced, eventually, to ignore me.
Voxlauer spent the morning in a clearing on the no
rth ridge, looking to scare up deer bedded down in the loose brush among the pines. Just past noon a buck sprang in a high trembling arc from its cushion of scrub and veered toward him and away again, galloping hard between the stumps. Voxlauer’s stiff fingers worked the safety clumsily and the buck was almost out of range when he fired, both barrels discharging in the same instant and ramming the stock into his collarbone so his eyes teared and blurred. The deer stood at the edge of the clearing, quivering and heaving. He unbreeched the shotgun and levered out the smoking cartridges, moving nearer all the while over the uneven ground. The deer remained standing at the edge of the clearing. Its head lolled strangely and from where he now stood he saw the eyes rolling and bulging, witnessing nothing. Fishing two more shells from the pocket of his coat he reloaded the shotgun and raised it to his shoulder again and pulled both the triggers. The buck’s head whipped hard to one side as the spray hit it and it staggered a few paces before falling over. By the time he reached it the breath was coming in rasps through its shot-mangled throat and its mouth was a pillow of pink foam. He cast about in the bracken for a rock to crush its skull with and found one of a fair size, but when he returned with it the buck was already dead.
He skinned it in strips and hung the strips from the branches of a leafless white bush close by and opened the belly and uncoiled the intestines and threw them into a heap. Next he cut out the stomach, which burst as he pulled it, the liver, the kidneys and the thick, bruise-colored heart. The stomach he tossed onto the pile with the intestines but the other innards he wrapped in a swath of deerskin tied tightly together with bailing wire. He spent the rest of the day butchering the venison and packing it into cubes bound in broader, heavier squares of the hide. When he’d finished he left the carcass for the foxes to find and fashioned a sack from a bedsheet he’d brought from the cottage and filled the sack with the bundles of meat, then took hold of the sack by its knotted, sodden corner and started awkwardly down the slope.