by John Wray
She brought supper to him as he lay half awake with his head against the bedboard: tinned tomatoes in an omelette with leeks and gray, rye-seed-speckled cheese. He called to her when he was done and she came down from the kitchen with a mug of sweet brown beer. While he drank she took the dishes and returned with a lamp and a pile of battered books, spines cracked and stained to illegibility. She put the lamp down by the bed on a night table and lit it and sat down with an earnest and businesslike air on the stool. —I’ve not had an audience in a while, she said, seeing him watching her. —What shall we read?
—You’re a schoolteacher, said Voxlauer, putting down his mug. —I’d forgotten.
—Answer the question, Herr Voxlauer, or we’ll send you to the corner without your beer. You’d not like that much, I fancy. She smiled.
Voxlauer sighed. —Give us the choices please, Fräulein.
—Max and Moritz, Else said reverently. —Hatschi-Bratschi. King Farú. Robert Walser—
—Those are all children’s reads.
She frowned. —Walser isn’t.
—No?
—He’s Swiss.
—All right. Let’s have the Walser then, said Voxlauer, lying back. Years later her voice would remain clearest in his memory, low-riven and solemn, secretive and measured, the texture and the color of crushed wool. The close, half-drawn breaths, the unspooling sadness of that voice. It’s resignedness. She read evenly and slowly, stopping now and again for a sip of his beer, and kept steadily on as his eyes fell closed. The lamp sputtered and smoked behind her.
Once there was a town. The people in it were merely puppets. But they spoke and walked, had grace and sensitivity and were very polite. Not only did they say “Good morning!” or “Good night!” they meant it quite sincerely. These people possessed sincerity.
In spite of this, they were very much city people. Smoothly, if reluctantly, they’d shed all things coarse-grained and countryish. The cut of their clothes and of their manners were the finest that anyone, tailor or socialite, could possibly imagine. Old worn-out unraveling outfits were worn by nobody. Good taste was universal. The so-called rabble was unheard-of; everyone was completely alike in demeanor and erudition without resembling one another, which would of course have grown tiresome. On the street one met no one but attractive, elegant persons of noble mien. Freedom was a thing one knew well to guide, to have in hand, to rein in and to cherish. For this reason controversies over questions of public decency never occurred. Insults to the common morality were equally undreamt-of.
The women especially were wonderful. Their fashions were as charming as they were practical, as seductive as they were well designed, as titillating as they were proper. Morality seduced! Young men loped after it in the evenings, slowly, dreamily, without falling into greedier, hastier rhythms. The women went about in a sort of trousers, usually of white or pale blue lace, which rose and then wound tightly around their waists. Their shoes were tall, colorful and of the finest leather. The way these shoes clambered up the legs, and the legs felt themselves enclosed by something precious, and the men, in turn, imagined what those legs were feeling, was glorious! This wearing of pants had the further advantage that the women brought a spirit and eloquence into their gait, which, hidden under skirts, had felt itself less noticed and appraised.
On the whole, quite simply everything became “Emotion.” The most miniscule things were a part of it. The businesses ran brilliantly, as the merchants were vigorous, industrious and honest. They were honest out of conviction and tact. They had no desire to make life, beautiful and airy as it was, any harder for one another. There was more than enough money, plenty for everyone, since everyone was so responsible, looking first to the fundamentals; there was no such thing as Sunday, nor any religion either, over whose dictates one might fall into disagreement. The houses of entertainment took the place of churches and the people gathered there devotedly. Pleasure for these people was a deep and holy matter. That one remained pure even in pleasure was obvious, since everybody felt a need for it.
There were no poets. Poets would have found nothing new or high-minded to write about. There were no professional artists of any kind, as a natural aptitude for the arts was commonplace. A fine thing, when people have no need anymore of artists to be artistic. They had learned to view their senses as precious and to make full use of them. There was no cause to look up fine sayings in ancient texts because one had one’s own fine-grained and particular perception. One spoke well when one had cause to speak, one had a mastery of the tongue without knowing whence it came . . .
The men were beautiful. Their carriage bespoke their erudition. They delighted in many things, they were busy at many tasks, but everything that happened did so in connection with the love of beautiful women. All of life was drawn into this fine, dreamlike relation. One spoke and thought of everything with deep emotion. Business matters were conducted more simply, more discreetly and more nobly than is now the case. There were no so-called higher things. The very idea would have been an intolerable suffering for these people, who found beauty in everything.
Are you asleep?
Voxlauer woke to dull pains in his legs and Else’s still form beside him wrapped in a patterned sheet. He rose and limped to the kitchen in search of a chamber pot and, finding none, stepped out into the early-morning dampness, a bright mist hemming in the pines. The bleeding seemed to have lessened. He hobbled back past the house and leaned over behind a solitary birch, pissing against the white trunk and down onto a skirt of mud-colored drift. Three days now I’ve been here, he thought, leaning against the tree. Or is it four . . . ? He felt unbearably old suddenly, watching his piss trickle into the snow. And her inside sleeping. Suddenly the past day and evening and above all the fact of her there in the bed asleep served as nothing to him but proof of his own harmlessness, his nonexistence, a photograph projected onto a paper screen. To his own surprise he laughed at this, a rasping, hollow laugh that traveled dully and gracelessly off into the woods. Watch yourself, Oskar, he said. Button up your pants. He shook his head a few times violently from side to side, still smiling at himself without the least affection, then limped back to the villa through the snow. When he came into the bedroom he saw she now lay with half of her body out of the covers, sighing and whispering in her sleep. He sat down on the stool and pressed the heels of his palms against his knees.
An hour later she stirred. —Is it morning?
—It looks to be. Voxlauer smiled. —I had best be going.
—Yes, she said sleepily. —Have you had any breakfast?
—Thank you. How did you sleep?
—Very well . . . You’ve had breakfast? she said again. She seemed to be making an effort to see him clearly, or perhaps to place him in her memory.
—Yes. There’s coffee in the kitchen, if you’d like any.
She sat up all at once, awake now, squinting at him. —You’ve been walking.
He nodded. —An undeserved miracle. I’ll go back to my hut now, if you’ll excuse me, and fall over.
She smiled. —Why not fall over here, Herr Voxlauer, and spare yourself the trouble?
—Thank you, Fräulein. You’re very kind. I’m ashamed to say that my dignity won’t allow it.
—Your dignity? said Else, squinting again. —What does your dignity have to do with anything here, Herr Voxlauer?
—Nothing, I’m sure, Fräulein. I’d rather not incommode you further.
She blinked a few times at this in mock surprise. —Have I been incommoded, sir?
—Well. You’ve been put out, at least, said Voxlauer, feeling the blood rushing to his face at her joke. He felt adolescent and intensely spinsterish both, sitting there a few feet from the bed looking down at her, unable to laugh or reply or even to force his mouth into a grin. An innocent enough joke, a simple joke, he told himself, not meeting her eyes now but looking down absurdly at the floor. He thought suddenly then, quite naturally, of Anna, not with any sense of shame but with a
sharp pang of longing for their effortless way together.
—I’ll be going then, Fräulein, he managed after an extended silence.
—You’re sure you can manage? Else said, looking at him doubtfully.
—I think so. Yes.
—Well. I’ll stay where I am, then. She fell back and drew the blanket ends closer around her, turning over into the sheets.
—I’ll bring those sketches down sometime soon, if you like, said Voxlauer, rising cautiously from the stool.
She made a small flapping gesture with her fingers. —Yes. The sketches, she said, drawing herself farther into the blankets.
—Good morning then, Fräulein, said Voxlauer quietly. He took the smoke-blackened kettle off the stove as he went out.
By the time he arrived at the cottage new pains had begun and his frayed pants were stiff and sodden to the ankles. Wine-dark tracings of blood rose upward along the seams and his socks had sloughed off inside his boots. He undressed in the cool of the little alcove and rebandaged his legs carefully, brushing flakes of dried blood and Mercurochrome onto the floor, then lay back on the pallet and watched the light gather into a porthole-shaped mass and travel down the wall toward a hand-shaped smudge above the bed. Through the window came the high, twiglike clatter of a rail.
click click click
A shape spun down from somewhere overhead, throwing sparks onto his eyes. —Père? whispered Voxlauer. His eyelids fluttered and the balls of his eyes moved sluggishly back and forth under their weight. As he turned his head the shape spun off to the left, humming quietly, like a mortar shell arcing into a drift. A soft, dull ping! followed, like a spoon dropped from a low height onto the floor. Then the click. Voxlauer sat up, suddenly wide awake again. —She asked me how I managed it, he said. Ping! came the answer from above the bed. He ignored the noise and focused his attention on remembering. Else turning onto her side, face into the sheets, right arm twisted back behind her. Sitting up in bed to see him better, frowning slightly as she spoke. The fluttering of her fingers as he’d turned to go.
It grew warmer in the room and the column of light trembled and began to bend. Voxlauer turned his head and looked through the porthole at the sheet of wind-harried water and the brightening pines, tapping his thumb softly against the glass. He stretched an arm to the handprint on the wall and covered it with his palm. The handprint of a child or of a very young girl, plump-fingered and careless. He got up and went to the table.
Bringing the lexicon down from the shelf he took out the sketches and laid them in a row with the portraits on either end and the little still life between them. It was crudely and effortfully made, six thick-traced curves drawn together into thorned stems ending in bunched-together, exaggerated blossoms. Voxlauer bent over the paper, bringing his face slowly toward it until his vision blurred. Tiny flakelets of charcoal spun and danced under his breath. He moved away. A pain stirred in his legs and he brought them stiffly together under the table, sliding the two portraits nearer to him. After a short time it subsided and he bent his head again over the sketches.
The portraits, for their part, were virtually invisible, as though the hand which had figured them had scarcely come in contact with the paper but had hovered instead in close ribboning circles just above it, bobbing and circling like a horsefly. Both seemed drawn from a single quivering thread curving forward and back again, gently spinning a likeness. The face in the first he recognized now as Else’s and in the second the same face perhaps fifteen years younger smiled out at him from an open window, the long straight hair twisted into braids and the brow pulled back sharply as if in pride or doubt. The lines of the portrait thinned and gathered at the paper’s edge into smoky, cobweb-figured nets, lightening and drifting leftward off the page. All three sketches were dated the preceding summer. He put them back into the lexicon and lay down on the pallet with his face against the cool plaster, picturing her. —How did I manage it? he said aloud.
One week later as Voxlauer was gathering wood in a stand of dead firs he saw Else walking on a logging track not fifty meters below him. A girl ran ahead of her on the wet spring turf, stopping now and again to look back and call something out with a laugh and a toss of her loose, coal-black hair. A few meters further on Else called the girl to her and they bent down together over a budding elderberry bush. He watched them a few moments longer, keeping back among the firs, then called out a hello and slid awkwardly down the slope. The girl’s face as he drew near had the same frowning, half-friendly look he’d seen in the second portrait. —Ach! It’s you, Herr Voxlauer, Else said, curtsying. —Back to average, I hope?
—They tell me I’ll live to the play pump organ again, Fräulein, in the idiots’ choir. The girl laughed at this. She stood a few steps past them up the road, toying with a knotted kerchief, watching him closely.
—You should meet Theresa, Oskar, Else said. —Resi, come here. This is Oskar. He lives in Opa’s cottage now, and minds the ponds.
The girl smiled up at him. —You shot yourself in the knees, she said.
Voxlauer looked at Else.
—A funny business, Oskar, she said. —I had to tell somebody.
—I have brand-new knees now, said Voxlauer to the girl. —Fresh off the presses. He flexed his knees and cut a caper. —No need to worry. See?
—I wasn’t worrying, said the girl. She extended a hand and he shook it solemnly.
The girl ran ahead of Else and Voxlauer as they walked, gathering pine needles from the track into her kerchief, mumbling to herself. They walked together measuredly and slowly, almost shyly now in the presence of the girl, and it seemed to Voxlauer for the second time that something had changed between them. He held his bag of kindling by its strap, whistling tonelessly and glancing at her every few moments. —You should have come by for those sketches, he said. —It’s remarkable, the likeness. He looked again at the girl.
—I don’t go into that cottage anymore, Herr Voxlauer. I’ve told you that already.
—Yes. You have.
—If you want me to have those drawings, you’ll have to courier them down to me, I’m afraid. She smiled. —Something like the postman.
—I’ve been crippled till today, Fräulein. A tragic case study. Dragging myself around the cottage by my gums.
—With a bottle in each hand you don’t leave yourself much option, Herr Voxlauer. She sighed. —I’ve seen enough to know.
He put out a hand and stopped her. —Is that all you’ve seen, Fräulein?
She smiled a little, raising her eyebrows at him. —I beg your pardon? What else should I have seen?
—All sorts of things, he said, still holding her by the arm. —I don’t understand how you could have missed them. What’s happening in town, for instance. What’s happening to everybody. Don’t you ever go to town?
The smile disappeared from her face and she looked at him as if he’d insulted her. After a moment she laughed. —You can’t imagine what all I’ve seen. I don’t like to go to town, it’s true. In spite of this, I am not a hermit, Herr Voxlauer. Not by any stretch.
—Then maybe you’d explain things to me. I am one, as I’m sure Herr Piedernig has told you. He hesitated, glancing up the road to where the girl was standing, watching them. —I’ve been away so long, because of this. What’s happening. He paused again. —This and other things like it. I’m afraid to go anywhere. I can’t go anywhere. He laughed. —I don’t expect you to understand, Fräulein. Don’t look so worried.
Else waited a long time to answer him, looking off into the trees. —What’s happening now has never happened before, she said finally.
—There was a feeling I got from the war, he said—that I get now in town. It came to the Ukraine, too, a few years after I went there. But it began in the war. He stopped and took a breath.
—That was one reason I stayed away. I was afraid to come back and find it here. I couldn’t bear to come back and find that everything had changed. He waited until she turned again, frown
ing, to look at him, before he continued. —And it has. It has changed. You must see that.
—I don’t know that anything has changed, in the way that you mean.
—Of course it has, Fräulein Bauer. Everything’s changed. You know that very well. Why else would you be up here, for the love of Christ? Do you enjoy it so much up here in the woods? Are you perhaps taking the alpine cure?
As if in answer to his question, Else said:—What were your other reasons? She was looking not at him now, but at the girl. —For leaving, she added, when he didn’t seem to understand her. —You must have had others.
A wind was coming up through the tops of the trees. The girl was standing with her head far back, looking at the sky.
—I did certain things that can’t be undone, Voxlauer said, letting his eyes rest on Else. She was still watching the girl. —Have you ever done a thing like that?
Slowly she loosened her arm from his grip. —Yes, I have. I’ve done some things, and I know some others. I know what you did at the Holzer farm last Friday. She waited a moment for him to respond, then said:—Do you think so little of yourself, Herr Voxlauer?
Voxlauer opened his mouth to speak, made a little sound, then let it fall closed again. The girl had come closer and stood throwing pebbles at his ankles. —Those aren’t my knees, he said, bending stiffly down to her. She turned to Else and silently handed her the handkerchief. —We’ll be going soon, Resi, Else said. The girl cursed and ran off up the track. They began walking again with an arm’s length between them.