by John Wray
—Just the same. I don’t begrudge you it.
—That’s very kind. Piedernig smiled. —But it’s true, just the same, that your bees are dying. He turned and, waving once more over his shoulder, strode back through the new grass toward the huts. Voxlauer watched until he disappeared among them. He remained standing some minutes more, watching the afternoon advance across the field and the shadows creep even as he watched them across the open ground from right to left. As he went down the hill the last edgings of light caught here and there among the trunks of the pines on clumps of drab, dirt-encrusted snow. When he arrived at the junction he stopped again and stood for a time staring blankly into the woods. Then he turned and went back up the hill to the colony.
She was just crossing the field as he came out from the trees and he stepped hurriedly back into their shadow so as not to meet her on the open ground. A few moments later she came down to where he was waiting, showing no surprise at seeing him standing at the edge of the road shifting nervously from foot to foot. She nodded to him without smiling and they began walking. When they were not quite halfway to the junction she asked why he had been waiting for her.
—I have some sketches of yours, I believe, said Voxlauer.
She smiled. —I see. I won’t ask you your opinion of them, Herr Voxlauer, if that’s your worry.
—Two portraits. And a pastel of some Enzians.
—The pastel is mine. I’m not sure that I want it. As to the portraits, you’re welcome to them, I’m sure. I can’t recall them.
Voxlauer looked down the road a moment. —Thank you. I’d appreciate it if you would take them, all the same.
She laughed a muted, low-strung laugh, her dull eyes regarding him evenly.
—Are they so awful?
—No. No, they’re very fine.
—Are the portraits of me?
—Yes.
—Then they’re the property of my father. You can do what you want with them. Hang them up. Throw them in the dustbin. Whatever you like.
—What I’d like, Fräulein, is for you to take them. I’d take it as a kindness.
The smile went altogether from her face and she looked at him now with something approaching anger. —I want nothing more to do with that shack you live in, Herr Voxlauer, and I, for my part, would take it as a very great kindness if you didn’t force me to. The years I spent in it were the worst of my life and I don’t care to relive them. She looked over at him again more closely, as though studying his face for the precise nature and number of words needed to suit his type. —The family you work for, she said carefully—took my father’s self-respect and health as sure as if they’d put each individual bottle into his mouth and wiped his chin for him afterward. I imagine they’ve told you something different, but I was present while it happened. I sat and watched. If you’ve passed any time at all in that dank hole you ought to know how he lived out his last year. It pained me then, Herr Voxlauer, to think about it, and pains me worse now. She paused a moment for breath. —So please don’t trouble me any more about it, for the love of Christ.
—I’m sorry, Fräulein, said Voxlauer, drawing even with her. —I didn’t know any of that. I meant no harm about the sketches.
—You knew well enough about my father.
—I knew he drank. Yes.
—Yes, she said, taking in a breath. —And I know about yours.
—I’d think that might make us even.
—Not altogether. Your father was a famous man. Esteemed and successful.
—My father spent the last fifteen years of his life trying to get his music played, said Voxlauer.
—Your father was a king to everyone in town. Everyone! Even I remember him.
—He died as wretchedly as yours did, all the same. And about as many people mourned him.
—Oh yes. We were talking about my father’s death, weren’t we, Herr Voxlauer. And about the Ryslavys. Your—she paused a moment, searching again for the most fitting word—your bosses.
—Old Ryslavy’s dead, too. It was Pauli who hired me up here.
—Does it matter? she said quietly, still looking down the road. —Can he be any different?
Voxlauer looked at her until she turned. There was no anger in her expression now, only dullness. —Why did you say that, Fräulein? Because he’s a Jew? Is that why?
—Because he’s his father’s son. For no other reason. She paused a moment.
—He is that, isn’t he?
—I beg your pardon?
She looked at him kindly for the first time since they’d begun walking. —His father’s son.
Voxlauer nodded gravely. —I’ve never had any cause to doubt it, Fräulein. They walked for some distance in silence. —I feel the same way you do, about town, he said after a time. —I suppose that’s obvious.
—It’s obvious to me that you don’t like it. Whether you feel the same about it as I do is something else altogether.
—Well. I don’t feel the same way about our neighbors to the north, that’s certain.
Her eyes opened wide. —Oh? How do you feel about them?
—I’ve never cared too much for Germans. I’d rather not have them putting me in their parades. He drew himself to attention and raised a fist.
Else laughed. —I think you might benefit from a few marching lessons, Herr Voxlauer. Besides, it’s not the Germans who make the fist. It’s the Italians.
—Maybe so, said Voxlauer. —Maybe so, Fräulein. But the Italians also make gelato, and tiramisù. I can forgive them a bit of silliness.
She laughed again, less harshly now. —All right, Herr Voxlauer. They had come to the junction. —I’ll relieve you of the sketches, if they’re really such a burden. You can leave them with Herr Piedernig, on your next visit. Will there be anything else?
Voxlauer straightened. —No. Nothing else. Thank you kindly, Fräulein.
—Good evening, then.
—Good evening.
She took a few steps, then half turned toward him, looking over her shoulder. —Were you shooting a few days ago? she said. —Up on the ridge?
—Three days ago. Yes.
She nodded to herself and walked slowly into the woods. Voxlauer turned uphill and began his measured walk up to Ryslavy’s land, stopping now and again to look through the treetops at the dwindling sun.
Over the next seven weeks, drifting eastward through the occupied Ukraine across the nothingness of the steppes, broken every so often by a huddle of mud-colored, windowless huts or a well and a ring of clay-walled pens, usually empty, I came to know true hunger for the first time. It woke me in the morning and pushed me forward irresistibly, long after I’d lost all desire or hope of reaching the Bolshevik territory, and sat me down at night in a state of half-consciousness until the time came to get up and drift listlessly forward again. I ate whatever I could catch, steal, or beg for in pantomime, and most of the people I came across were too curious or frightened to refuse me. I learned a few very helpful words of Ukrainian, enough to make it clear I was not a soldier, though not enough to prevent me from getting beaten regularly for stealing. The beatings were mild, however, little more than symbolic, as the men who beat me were as weak and vague-minded with hunger as I was. They struck me a few times halfheartedly, went through my pockets, then shuffled back into their houses. I was worthless to them.
As I came farther east, the steppes gave way to more sheltered, fertile country, thin tilled fields and squares of rich dark ground along rows of whitewashed cottages, manor farms and trees and teams of mules or horses on the roads. I traveled in constant fear of being caught by the Germans or mistaken for one of them by partisans, but discovered to my great relief that the occupation of the Ukraine was little more than a diplomatic and tactical invention. In a few of the towns, I found the old imperial officials still going about their business, stricken and bewildered as the Jew in Czernowitz had been, and was able to talk to them in French about the Bolsheviks and the occupying army and the
war; for the first time I was grateful for my twice-weekly lessons as a child. I learned that the German-Soviet lines, only a few days’ travel east, were little more than a ghost front, but that there was no love for the Bolsheviks or any other kind of Russian-imposed revolution anywhere in that country.
In some of the larger towns the Bolsheviks, the White Russians and the German army maintained fully parallel governments; each person I spoke to on the street had a different opinion as to which of the three regimes was in fact in power. The war between the Whites and Reds was already beginning, though the territory fought over was still technically German. I continued east with a vague idea of reaching Kiev, which I’d heard had been liberated a few weeks before. I learned a few more Ukrainian expressions, the commonest questions and insults and turns of phrase, and gradually began to have better luck getting myself fed.
A few weeks after this I found Anna. She was newly a widow, or believed herself one, at least, and had a small estate, or what she blithely referred to as an estate, to live off as best she could. I met her at the market in Cherkassy the morning I arrived, feverish and weak again from hunger. She was standing, tall and out of place in a flowered muslin housedress, in a corner of the market, selling dried radishes at the head of a cart filled with half-empty bags of seed. By some miracle she spoke a few words of German.
I’m starving, I said to her.
I need a worker, she answered, in French. Can you work? Arbeiten?
Yes. Arbeiten, I said. She nodded gravely. Later I found out she was ecstatic to have found me. Most able-bodied Ukrainian men were drunk or far away and those who weren’t couldn’t have cared less about her seven leached-out hectares. I laughed myself when I first saw her drafty plank house leaning over into the mud. But she brought me inside and put water on the stove for me to wash and cooked a meal over the next few hours the like of which I hadn’t seen since leaving Niessen: braised carrots in honey and sliced buttered potatoes and mushrooms preserved in vinegar and four or five precious slices of dried goose breast from the smokehouse covered in pickled cranberry preserves. She watched me closely as I ate, wondering, she told me later, who in heaven’s name I was and how I came to be in the town of Cherkassy speaking no more than twenty words of Ukrainian and awkward, gymnasium student’s French. She sat picking at her plate of carrots and potatoes absently, her small gray eyes never straying from me. At any moment I expected her to come to her senses; I ate as quickly as I could, barely tasting the food in my hurry. Eventually she spoke.
You’ve come from the war? she asked, in Ukrainian.
I stared at her dumbly. After a moment or two I set down my fork and shrugged.
She frowned. The war, she repeated. For some reason she was set on speaking Ukrainian to me, though she must have known I hadn’t a chance of understanding her. She’d learned her French and her smattering of German at gymnasium in Kiev, had in fact won a prize, she told me proudly, but her schooling had ended on her sixteenth birthday and now she was well past her twenty-ninth. She looked older to me than that, with her hair pulled straight back and a few streaks of white already showing at the temples; no longer young at all. But I thought she was beautiful, like an angel on a veteran’s monument—smooth-polished and sexless, proud and severe, indifferent to one’s gaze and at the same time utterly naked under it. I was seventeen then, not much better than a child, and I suppose all women had that quality to me. But I see her even now in that cool glow of permanence that statues have, sitting across from me at the long dining table, waiting patiently for me to answer. Nothing I learned afterward could dispel that first idea of her.
Seeing that I still didn’t understand, she stood up from the table and crouched down behind it, peering solemnly at me over the white linen tablecloth, making rattling noises deep in her throat and gesturing at me violently with both her arms. I stared at her a moment or two longer in flat stupidity. Oh! The war, I said finally. Krieg. I smiled uncertainly.
Yes. The Krieg. You come from it? Yes?
Yes, I said.
I ran, I added after a silence.
She nodded, looking at me carefully.
My husband, yes? Andrei. At Krieg, she said.
Yes?
Mmm, she murmured. I sat forward uneasily in my chair, expecting the inevitable, but Anna only smiled. He is dead. They’ve all decided.
I nodded cautiously. I understand, I said. I’m sorry. I’d begun to feel very ill at ease.
I thought at first she’d misunderstood because she stayed on her feet, shaking a finger at me excitedly, then made a face and disappeared again behind the table. Confused, I stood and leaned forward until I could see her stretched out like a cadaver on the floor, smiling mischievously up at me. No, no, she was saying. No, no. I am happy, she said slowly, in her effortful, deliberate French. Do you understand? I am happy. Ich bin froh.
A few days later Voxlauer took up his pack and the jar now empty of milk and set out in his shirtsleeves in the mist of early morning up the road to Holzer’s Cross. By the time he had come out of the spruce grove under the reliquary the mist had largely burned away and the town spires sparkled wetly on the plain. He went with the jar to the door of the farmhouse and knocked. After a short time Frau Holzer came to the door.
—May I come in? said Voxlauer.
—Why not? My sons are on holiday today. They’ve gone down to Niessen.
He stepped inside. —I’m headed there myself.
Frau Holzer didn’t answer. She’d taken the jar from him and was filling it from a large copper pitcher by the stall-side door. —We have fresh-butchered kid today if you want it.
—Is it chamois?
—Of course. She smiled. —But not from Ryslavy’s woods. I’d swear an oath.
—I brought down some game myself, a few days back.
—How fine.
—I’d very much like some butter, if you can spare any.
—Of course we can. She stepped into the next room and returned with two small grayish bricks wrapped in waxed paper.
—Could I look by on my way back from town, and get these from you? I won’t be long. Three or four hours.
—That will be fine, said the woman. She looked at him kindly. —Why are you going to town?
Voxlauer glanced at her. —To visit my mother.
—I see. She was quiet a moment. —Well. She may not recall me, but please say best wishes to her from Elke. Elke Mayer. It was Mayer when she knew me.
—I will, said Voxlauer. —Thank you kindly. He stepped out the kitchen door into the entryway. —I’ll be back by two. Three at the very latest.
—No hurry, said the woman. She looked at him a moment longer, then went in to the pantry and began rattling in a tall chipboard cupboard there. He waited a few seconds to see if she was coming back into the kitchen, but she did not. He pulled the house door shut behind him.
As he came out of the woods above the square a light rain began to fall and the ruin as he passed it paled gradually into the mist. The square was empty save for three olive-colored sedans and behind the square the hillside rose steeply and then vanished in a hard, straight line, as though planed flat by the passage of heavy ships. Rarely had he seen mist so bright and so opaque and he stood for a while at the edge of the square looking back up the slope. As he passed the sedans two men in gray oilskin capes came out of the Amtshaus and walked briskly toward him. They passed him and climbed into a sedan and drove around the shuttered fountain and out the toll road, heading south. As he passed Ryslavy’s he caught sight of Emelia through the open doors, drawing a draft behind the long teakwood bar, and called in to her. She held up a hand.
At the grocer’s he recognized Frau Mayer’s two sons standing with their backs to him, talking to an elderly man he remembered from before the war, the three of them dressed up in loden capes, as if for a state holiday.
—What day is it? Voxlauer asked the grocer’s boy. The boy looked at him a moment, then smiled as if acknowledging a private joke.
—A March Saturday like any other if you ask me, Herr, he said.
It was too cold and wet on the verandah, it seemed, even for Maman; creeping stealthily upstairs he found her in the kitchen, pounding dough for candied dumplings. She gave a little start as he rapped on the doorframe, then came over and embraced him, holding her flour-covered hands away from him like a boxer. He let go of her and she went back to the table and dipped her hands again into the flour tin. He watched as she ran her hands once up and down the rolling pin and began passing it vigorously over each of the narrow strips, which contracted and curled angrily after each stroke so that the effort of rolling seemed wasted. But as always at some unknowable point she was satisfied and reached for the jar of black plums and laid one pitted halved section in the middle of each strip.
—You’re growing your beard again, she said, balling up the strips into dumplings and pinching off the corners between her thumbs.
Voxlauer didn’t answer. A kettle began whistling on the stovetop. —Shall I pour you some tea?
—Let’s have coffee today, she said, wiping her hands on her apron. He watched as she ranged the dumplings into neat rows on a square of wet linen and folded the cloth over.
—Were you expecting me? he said.
She smiled a little. —Tomorrow is Sunday, Oskar, after all.
They sat with their coffee in the parlor at a low table and he spoke to her about the valley and how it had changed. —The creek is deeper but narrower across the middle, he said. —And though Pauli stocks it in the grand Ryslavy style, there seem to be less fish than I remember. The ice has broken under the bridge and the upper pond is open. The cottage pond will be, too, in a few days. The old green piers are gone. There’s a boat for me to use, and two beautiful rods. Next week I’ll bring some venison, Maman, if you’d like.
—That would be pretty, she said. She had been listening attentively in the beginning but now she sat back in her chair and looked out at the street as though waiting for the commencement of some grave state procession. Voxlauer thought again of the sons’ loden capes. —The woman up at Holzer’s Cross sends her best wishes, he said. —Elke Mayer.