The Right Hand of Sleep

by John Wray

  —Who?

  —Elke Mayer, said Voxlauer, frowning.

  —Yes, yes. Elke Mayer. We went to gymnasium together. She was sitting with her face to the glass. He sat quietly, watching her. After a time she nodded to herself.

  —Maman, he said, leaning toward her. —What’s the matter?

  She looked at him a moment without speaking. Her face was drawn stiffly together.

  —They marched into Vienna on Thursday, Oskar, she said, blinking at him. —They’ve taken our republic.

  He sat with a dozen others along the bar. Some shops were open, some were closed. They sat in a row with their drinks while the girl, Emelia, fidgeted with the quartz-band radio. Its green eye wavered fluidly.

  We’ve only just bought this radio, Emelia said. The voice came through faintly, brightening and fading. It sounded sedate and self-assured, not at all as Voxlauer had imagined it. The crowd noise behind the voice rose in high cresting trills cut by momentary bursts of static. A man next to Voxlauer told Emelia to turn it louder.

  —That won’t make any difference, Herr, she said. She came over to Voxlauer.—Another draft, Uncle?

  —Please.

  —You. Turn it louder, said the man. He smiled out of the side of his mouth at Voxlauer. —I don’t think she wants to turn it louder, he said.

  Voxlauer looked at him. He was heavyset and dressed in a blue work coat and knickers. —Turn it louder, he said again to Emelia. He slurred as he spoke, sloughing over his s’s in the manner of the Tyrolese. Voxlauer shifted a little on his stool and looked at the man steadily until their eyes met. The man’s eyes were green and bloodshot and fixed driftingly on Voxlauer. He raised one eyebrow with a concerted effort. —You in need of something, citizen?

  Voxlauer shrugged his shoulders. —A little quiet. He gestured at the radio. —I’m hearkening to our Führer.

  The man grinned. —That’s fine. He spun on his stool back to the bar.

  The voice came in clearly now, rising steadily in pitch. That’s static now, behind him, thought Voxlauer. But he knew at the same time that the voice itself was clear and the sound behind the voice was that of a huge number of people screaming. He closed his eyes.

  —What’s he saying now? said the man.

  —Vienna is a pearl, said someone behind them.

  —He said that?

  —In the crown of the Reich.

  The man let out a drawn-out, braying laugh. Emelia had returned with Voxlauer’s beer and set it down before him. —You, girl, said the man.

  Voxlauer looked over at him again. Emelia had stopped in mid-step and stood waiting for him to speak.

  —This is a great day for your people, he said after a pause.

  Emelia didn’t answer. She stood midway between Voxlauer and the wall, looking past the man at the others behind him. Voxlauer felt the muscles of his neck knitting together. The man leaned toward her slightly, winking at Voxlauer as he did so. He looked at Emelia and grinned. When he spoke he spoke carefully and slowly.

  —Back in Innsbruck we’d have stacked you straight by now, you dusky bitch.

  The crowd noise was clearly crowd noise now and not static as Voxlauer rose and hit the man across the face with his beer glass so the beer itself sprayed in a high wandering arc over the heads of the assembled. In another moment there were people between them and he could hear his own shouts dying away and the drone from the radio rising and eclipsing everything. As the man was being led away he spat at Voxlauer and made to lunge at him. Blood was running from his nose and from a small bright hole above his right eye but he seemed oblivious to it. He was yelling at the top of his lungs and trying to break away from the two men, both strangers to Voxlauer, who were leading him outside. Voxlauer sat back against the bar and watched them go. Emelia was just behind him and he heard her breathing sputteringly, like a child, cursing herself quietly and telling herself to hush. A short time later she went back down the bar.

  Across the square at Rindt’s a similar crowd was faintly visible through the frosted-glass panels of the patio and Voxlauer sat and watched it for a while, counting his breaths quietly as he’d taught himself to. After a time he felt Emelia looking at him. He revolved slowly on the barstool to face her.

  —Where’s your father? he said.

  Emelia made a face. —He’s drunk.

  —He has a right, said Voxlauer, looking at her. —Today, at least.

  —Yes. I suppose so, Uncle. She was still watching him, solemnly, as though waiting on him for something. —What is it? he said.

  She looked back meaningfully along the bar. Aside from the crackle of the radio the room was absolutely still. No one in the crowd was looking at him but no one was talking to anybody, either. The speech seemed to have ended.

  Voxlauer stared at Emelia for a time. —Should I leave? he said finally.

  —Please, Uncle, she whispered.

  —Let’s have another drink first, he said. —Not pilsner.

  She brought him a glass of yellow Apfelschnaps and he drank it straight down and called out for another. His voice rang hollowly across the bar. She came back with the pint-sized blue ceramic bottle and put it beside his glass and went down the bar and stood at the far end, near the kitchen door, wiping intently at the top of the bar with a corner of her apron. Gradually the room began to fill again with talk and she went back to the taps and commenced drawing drafts of beer. Voxlauer drank until the little blue bottle was empty, then rose carefully from his barstool and went outside.

  In truth, rather than in memory, Anna was nothing like a statue. She was schoolgirlish and talkative and given to sudden fits of extravagance with what little she still owned, her dresses and phonograph albums and tins of French tobacco, sensing that even these few relics of her past life would soon be gone. She was bourgeois in a way I’d never seen before, taking pleasure in things freely and matter-of-factly but feeling no sense of entitlement to them, no resentment when they were taken away from her. Her husband Andrei, a well-to-do country doctor with radical pretensions, had beaten her almost nightly for her lack of progressive thinking. She introduced herself as a Bolshevik when we met, which bewildered me at first; a few weeks passed before I realized it was entirely out of gratitude to the Revolution for taking her husband away to St. Petersburg.

  My life with her began slowly and tentatively. There was a great amount of work to be done but we ate in grand style every evening, sitting at the long, warped, reverently polished dining table, gorging ourselves on all manner of tinned and potted delicacies. “Dress rehearsal for better days,” Anna would say coyly when I tried to raise objections. It was hard for me most days to imagine anything much better, sitting there across from her. For a time I even forgot my own vague radical delusions. We slept an arm’s length apart that first night on her wide, rolled-tin marriage bed, dressed in heavy flannel bedclothes against the chill, and she talked to me drunkenly, earnestly, in pieced-together German and French about her plans for the land and her troubles under the various occupations. She explained things to me patiently, repeating words and phrases often, questioning me sternly from time to time as a sister might an idle younger brother she’s decided to improve.

  It was as a sister, in fact, that I thought of her for most of that first year. I’d always felt the lack of one, more intensely, almost, than all the commoner wants that followed, and in Anna’s company I felt the kind of carelessness and fond indifference I’d imagined brothers and sisters to feel toward one other. To think of someone so proud and adult as my lover would have scared me half to death, there at the beginning of our time. Anna, for her part, had lived so long alone in that narrow, drafty house that my presence in her bed must have seemed as much a terror as a blessing. Between our paired confusions, then, it was the better part of a year before we came together finally as man and wife.

  When we did it was with a great amount of laughter, of hesitancy and of concern on my part to seem as though I’d done it all before. I’d come in ea
rly to the house from turning hay and found her standing at the window, staring out to where I’d been working, her housedress loose about her shoulders and a look on her face as though she’d just been handed down an order. I had no idea at first what it was she wanted. After a few seconds she raised an arm solemnly toward me and suddenly I understood and crossed the room in my loose mud-clotted boots and kissed her. We went up the stairs together to the pressed-tin bed and lay down on it. Afterward Anna told me we were married and I saw no reason in the world not to believe her.

  From that day Anna was my sister and my lover both, never entirely the one thing or the other, not even in bed. She nursed me through my attacks when they came, which was often in those first few months, with a patience that made the most terrible of my visions seem childish. We talked for hours on end about what happened in the war, the killing of the deserter and the death of my father and everything that had come before and after, until my memories began to break apart of their own accord and to take on distinct shapes, separable from one another and from me. At night she would draw me to her in a state of curious, impersonal desire, almost of surprise, as though I were some stranger come entirely by chance or accident into her bed. Often she called me by the name of a boy she’d known in Kiev while still a girl, but I knew very well she was calling out in those moments not to him or to anything but her own memory-cluttered happiness. Afterward she’d remember all manner of things with a calm, transported clarity, bright with foresight and melancholy, and she’d talk in careful detail about her childhood and youth and her luckless marriage as I lay motionless beside her. I never spoke at those times but lay back in quiet attention, drawing tiredness and contentment over me like a quilt.

  Gradually my attacks grew fewer. We worked hard and brought in a fair yield in those first years, when we still thought of the land as ours. Anna taught me Ukrainian stubbornly, almost ruthlessly, refusing for whole days to speak any French or German at all. I was steadily amazed at each successive side of her: her fierceness, her coquettishness, her vanity, her sobriety, her kindness even to those people in the village, and there were more than a few, who hated and envied her for the way she walked and spoke and acted when among them.

  Every evening after dinner the phonograph case would be opened, and I’d be privileged with the duty of revolving the crank while she chose that night’s opera from her collection of twenty, cleaning each of the three or four disks devotedly with a spit-dampened kerchief. Often as not, the music would be accompanied by dancing lessons, waltzes and polonaises and other equally antiquated steps, taught with the same tireless severity as the Ukrainian but with far less success, as only four of her twenty operas offered music even remotely suitable. Anna favored the works of the German Romantics: Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Weber’s Euryanthe, Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor. The irony in her love of German opera was not apparent to her. I often teasingly compared her to Lohengrin’s Elsa, taking in a mysterious and enchanted stranger, though in fact it was Elisabeth in Tannhäuser she’d always most admired, pining away unto death for her despised and banished lover. My arrival in Cherkassy, sickly fugitive that I was, must have seemed to her like the fulfillment of her most fervent, opera-besotted dreams. Had I been any less pathetic she’d likely never have desired me.

  Anna’s superstitiousness was deeply fixed in her. She kept a silver icon of the trinity over her night table and talked to it whenever she was alone, day or night, kneeling bare-legged on the floor and speaking in a straightforward, affectless tone of voice about the most minute details of our daily life. She felt no embarrassment when I found her there, smiling up at me contentedly from the far side of the bed, but never tried to get me to kneel beside her, either. She recovered her French quickly and within a few months we were holding long and intricate debates in a pidgin of our three languages that would have sounded like cipher to anyone who overheard us. We called it the Tsar’s Dutch, our invented language, and kept to it even after my cotton-mouthed Ukrainian had bettered. It seems to me now that even then, during our first few months together, we were practicing for a time when it would provide us with our only privacy. Five short years later, living on a collective farm outside Kiev with two hundred other kulaks and assorted class enemies and meeting only once a day, in the dining hall at a massive plank table with the forty-eight other workers in our section who regarded us, even the most petit-bourgeois of them, with unqualified suspicion and contempt, the Tsar’s Dutch was near to all that was left us.

  In 1921, in the middle of my third year with Anna, the Ukraine was retaken by the Bolsheviks. Less than a year later, on a September afternoon, the first motorcar I’d seen since crossing the border appeared unannounced and unexpected over the gentle roll of fields between Anna’s house and the town and came to a stop twenty meters from where we stood, not doing much of anything, staring up the Cherkassy road as though waiting for just that motorcar to appear. It was a sand-colored G.A.Z. sedan with a folded-down canvas top and four men were sitting in it, dressed in high-collared brown coats and linen caps pulled down hard against the wind. None of them were wearing the Red Army uniforms still in fashion at that time and it was only by the looks on their faces as they crossed the field toward us and the fact that the driver remained behind the wheel staring blankly ahead of him with his goggles pushed down over his eyes that we knew them to be cadres. The smallest of them, a delicate-looking man in spectacles and a bow tie who reminded me of photographs I’d seen of the old Petersburg intellectuals, informed Anna with a crisp, calm, emotionless precision I couldn’t help admiring that she had been identified by the Cherkassy soviet and the local village Mir as a kulak, a hoarder of grain and an enemy of the people and as such was to be transferred to a labor camp without delay. Alternatively, she could be sent to a newly inaugurated state farm, a sovkhoz, six hours to the north; the choice was hers. Why such an unusual offer was made we never learned, though Anna guessed it might have been in deference to her husband, who’d fallen in defense of the Revolution at the battle of Moscow two years earlier. I was flatly ignored, though it was made clear I could follow her to either destination if I chose. A truck would come for her or the both of us that same evening.

  A light rain was falling as Voxlauer crossed the square past the newly uncrated fountain and walked up into the woods, making for the curtain of mist above the ruin. The square had been filling with people all afternoon and as he looked down now policemen were clearing a wide lane through the traffic and laying pylons along its two sides and linking them together with lengths of yellow cord. A canvas-covered truck pulled to a halt alongside the pylons and two men came down from the truck bed and began unloading iron benches. Voxlauer reached into his pack and took out a bar of chocolate he’d meant to give Emelia and ate it slowly, watching the members of the post office band unpack their instruments and tune them under the yellow and white awning of the Amtshaus. A boy walked along a line of Sterno torches, lighting them.

  Voxlauer turned and continued up the hillside. He felt very drunk and bewildered from the fight and the speech and swallowed hard every few steps to keep an attack from coming. He counted his breaths aloud to himself from one to seven. His voice rose in front of him into the air. It’s happening now, he said to himself. What we’ve all been waiting on. He remembered hitting the Tyrolean with the glass of beer. He pictured himself swinging the glass. It was a reflex, he thought. Anyone might have done it. But he remembered the silence throughout the room afterward and the look on Emelia’s face, more frightened for what he had done than for anything the Tyrolean had said to her. I can’t go back, he thought suddenly. I’ve done something now. It may not have been so much but I have done it.

  He thought for a while about the Tyrolean. If he was a big Nazi he’d have been over at Rindt’s, he thought, trying to calm himself. Still. Everybody saw me hit him. The thought that the fight, in itself, could mean nothing to the others at the bar in their excitement and their drunkenness seemed naïve and child
ish to him. That quiet afterward, that proves it, he thought. The quiet of recognition. They’d been waiting for me to do something and now I’ve given it to them. Given them cause.

  To distract himself he thought about the Tyrolean again. He’ll go back to Innsbruck and say he broke his nose murdering a Bolshevik, thought Voxlauer. He laughed. Or a Yid-lover. —He’ll make chief of police now, said Voxlauer aloud. —Friends and neighbors! he shouted, flinching at the recoil of the silence all around him. —Children of the Reich! I humbly accept this office . . . Again his voice rose into the trees, warbling and shrill. The sound was painful to his ears and kept on even after the body of the sound had vanished and silence swept back around him like mud filling the groove where the wheel of a cart has passed. He continued up the slope as quietly as he could but the sound traveled with him now and would not leave him.

  The dark ground tipped and swelled beneath him and he stumbled every few steps up to the first fields. At the junction with the valley road he remembered Frau Mayer and the cream and bore right along the edge of the spruce groves past the chapel. When he arrived at the house a light was burning in the kitchen, tremulous and gaslit, but no one answered to his knock. He peered in through the window and saw that the kitchen was empty. He crossed the farmyard to the stalls and slid the door open but saw only the crosswalk between the pens, narrow and straw-battened, and the animals shifting heavily in the dark at the sudden draft. He stood quietly awhile in the open door, listening to their breathing.

  Returning across the wet ground to the house he called out and waited what seemed to him a very great length of time. He rapped again loudly on the door. After a few minutes more without an answer he stepped inside. To each side of him in the entryway the work clothes and jackets of the sons hung from pegs and lay crumpled among the boots and the hunting tack strewn loosely about the floor. Above the pegs skulls of deer mounted on birch-bark plaques hung one above the other, receding from great twelve-pointed racks to fluted, teacup-sized scalp bones just under the ceiling, more like the skulls of weasels or house cats than of deer. A black grouse over the kitchen lintel regarded him blankly out of one amber-beaded eye. He opened the door to the kitchen and blinked a moment in the light of the lamp set on the window table, then called out warblingly again into the house.