by John Wray
Voxlauer didn’t answer. The lights in the passageway leapt and flickered as the train clattered over a rail switch. After a sudden lurch leftward the wheels became quiet again, or near to quiet.
—Those godforsaken kits are all mine, said the salesman, pointing at the crates. —Blood of my brow.
—What’s inside them? said Voxlauer.
—Tungsten ingots.
—Ah.
—Yes, said the salesman. He laughed. —Exactly. What’s your trade then, Herr Voxlauer?
Voxlauer sat looking out the window. —My trade? he said. —Nothing.
—There’s a great many folk in that profession nowadays.
—That is to say, farming, Voxlauer said after a few seconds’ pause.
—Nothing or farming? said the salesman, blinking.
—Whichever you’d prefer.
—Well: I think I’d prefer nothing to farming, if it’s all the same, laughed the salesman—and anything to life as a peddler of lighting fixtures. He paused a moment. —Fortunately that’s not my sole vocation. I’m a pianist by training.
Voxlauer rubbed his eyes. —Tough times, I suppose.
The salesman regarded him a moment through the smoke and the gloom of the compartment. —Have you not been home since the war? he said finally.
—No.
—A great deal has changed, Herr Voxlauer. A very great deal.
Voxlauer didn’t answer. The first low steeples and clusters of light heralding the approach of the suburbs of the capital appeared along the south side of the train. To the north was the river and beyond the river identical clusters ever growing in density. Lights signifying buildings and families and German and books and machinery. The numbness he could no longer remember not feeling made itself noticed again, like the whine of a gaslight. He made no effort to take in what Silbermann was saying to him.
—Many of us simply fear for our livelihoods.
—Excuse me?
—Because of events in the north.
—I know nothing at all about that, said Voxlauer.
—I thought maybe you were an illegal. Many of them are coming back now.
—An illegal?
Silbermann nodded. —An illegal. A Black Shirt. He raised his left arm stiffly in salute.
—Ah, said Voxlauer. —I wouldn’t very likely be coming from the Ukraine in that event, would I?
Silbermann shrugged. —I suppose not.
They were very close to the river now and the packed sand under the rails dropped straight into the water. —It’s taken as a bad sign, Silbermann said after a pause. He was passing the tobacco back and forth between his hands and looking the whole while out the window, or at his reflection in the glass. To stop him fidgeting Voxlauer asked for a cigarette.
—With pleasure, said Silbermann distractedly, spreading the newspaper over his lap. Voxlauer closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Silbermann’s fingers on the newsprint and the sound of his own breathing, deliberate and calm. The steady turning-over of the gears. The rattle of the door.
—Here you are, Silbermann said brightly after a minute or so had passed, twisting the paper ends nimbly with his fingertips as he cast about after the matches. They were soon recovered from the floor and the cigarette lit. Voxlauer exhaled and watched his breath snake upward along the glass as Silbermann’s had done.
The cigarette drew evenly and smoothly. Voxlauer stared up at the vent. Silbermann was rolling another, glancing every few moments out the window, measuring their distance from the station. —Twenty minutes, he said, looking up and smiling.
—Twenty for you. I’m continuing south.
—I’d forgotten. You have family waiting?
—Of a sort, said Voxlauer. —A mother.
—Mothers. One wonders how they manage.
—They manage very well.
Silbermann looked up from his paper. The tracks were rising now to the level of the lowest houses and in the middle distance the stolid fin-de-siècle apartment buildings of the inner city came into view, monochrome and bright, with St. Stephen’s spire rising bluely behind them. —How long have you been a farmer, then, Herr Voxlauer?
Voxlauer sat back from the window. —For as long as I can remember.
They marched us into the Isonzo in the early morning, twenty miles up from the station in loose oilskin coats and jackboots brought back from the front and hurriedly reblackened for us. It was October and a wet, heavy snow was falling. When we reached the back lines a few bewildered trench cutters stared at us, then waved us up the hill. No one seemed to have been expecting us. Everywhere men were cursing the snow and dragging crates and canvas sacks up and down the hill on runners. The war was ending, though we didn’t know it yet. My battalion was put together of frightened aging men and homesick boys with hurt looks on their faces; we were the replacement for a battalion that had been utterly routed that September in the hills outside Caporetto. I was the youngest, turned sixteen that past December. I had no ideas of my own yet about anything. I felt no homesickness for my family, or for Niessen. I was happy to be in the war.
They set us to work right away gathering spent mortar casings and firewood. An advance trench was opened a few meters below the tree line and we were moved into it that same day, with eight twenty-millimeter mortars and three or four dozen machine-gun posts. The gunners were all officers between twenty-five and forty and had been on the line for near to a year already; most were months past their leaves. They barely seemed to register our arrival.
The first night was very quiet. A lieutenant came round to our newly dug positions and yelled at us for letting the trench floor fill with water. He was bleary-eyed and stooped and apologized a few minutes later for losing his temper. Later that night I saw him slumped over on a crate outside the officers’ mess, twitching and mumbling in his sleep. In the morning we learned seven men had deserted.
Things had begun unraveling by then, but quietly, without any noticeable change. I stared saucer-eyed at everything around me, as though at any minute I’d be found out and ordered back to school. As the shelling began that second day a cluster of officers crawled from one post to another down the lines, thanking us for not leaving our positions. The Germans were coming, they told us, in two or at most three weeks’ time. We were to hold to our dugouts, return modest fire at intervals, and wait.
In late November six German battalions arrived. We had barely advanced at all, ten or twenty meters at most up a steep snowfield under near-to-constant mortar fire. The excitement I’d felt at first had given way to a steady nervous tiredness, an impatience for something definite to happen. Since I’d been on the lines there had been no true offensive. The trenches we’d abandoned over the last few weeks had filled completely with mud and cast-away food tins and cartridges; to reach us the Germans had to lay a network of planks over them and inch their way forward in their caterpillar-treaded trucks. Things must have looked desperate to them because they stayed in the transports until their officers had finished their tour of the lines, coming out only when given the direct order. Maybe it’s comfortable for them in there, I thought. I watched raptly as the infantry and gunners let themselves down one by one from out of the covered beds, surefooted and serene. That was the first of many times I envied them.
The Germans had new, lightweight artillery and quick-loading mortars and shells filled with chlorine gas; they moved among us like royalty the next few weeks, clean-shaven and imperious, giving lessons in the loading of shells. Everyone was talking about a last big offensive before the snow made it impossible to move. The general opinion among the Germans was that we were an unqualified disgrace and would have stayed where we were for the rest of the war if not for the new artillery. Tullberg, their commanding officer, compared us to a mouthful of rotten teeth, crying whenever the wind blew. Most of the others resented the Gemans but I, for one, was eager to learn everything I could from them, especially about the guns. My father had often explained to me that while our emp
ire was unsurpassed in the sophistication of its arts, he credited his time in Berlin and Leipzig with whatever understanding of the modern world he might possess. “The Germans are our rule-and-compass-toting cousins, Oskar,” he was fond of saying. “Regrettable as it seems to us, we must study them.”
The new shells were black around the seams and flew off soundlessly when you fired. I remember that best, out of everything: the soft, flat report of the firing gun and the faint click just after, muffled and bright at once, like a cup or a spoon falling from a low height onto the carpet. Gas burns were blue and white and began under the skin. The gunners were all German and wore down-quilted anoraks and yellow cowhide gloves to protect their hands.
By the time of the twelfth offensive the snow had begun in earnest and the new trenches we dug were set slantwise into the drifts. We were closer to the Italians now than we’d ever been. Mortars tore into the walls as though they were confetti paper and burst through in great pillars of twisting smoke, scattering us like pigeons up and down the line. The Germans had brought an entirely different war with them from the one we’d been in; even the Italians seemed to have noticed. I tried to imagine them huddled up the hill in their own dugouts, feeling the same fear I was beginning to feel, but I could never manage to picture them as anything other than flat, gray-faced caricatures. Occasionally voices would carry down to us in the pauses between shellings but they always had a smoothed-over, lifeless quality to them because of the snow and the trees and the near-to-constant wind. Sometimes at night we’d hear the sound of singing.
Two days before the offensive the shelling stopped almost completely. It was clear to everyone that the Italians knew what was coming and when, but the Germans were relaxed and confident. On the day of the offensive we sat in a long row against the uphill wall, pounding on our feet through the toes of our boots to bring the feeling back into them, waiting on the order. Finally late at night the word came through.
The bombardment lasted more than seven hours. I was feeder to a German fusilier, a taps sergeant named Wachmann who was patrician and friendly and spat whenever he had to give an order. His sense of humor reminded me of my Uncle Gustl’s, self-serving and full of bluster; he also had Gustl’s same Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches. I found myself wanting very badly to please him. We fired at eight-minute intervals, sowing cover for the infantry, pausing to give them time to reach their next point of shelter, then firing again. After three and a half hours of loading my hands were numb and white with cold and Wachmann sent me down for padded mittens. The walls of the back trenches made the firing seem very far off and the narrow strip of sky overhead was patterned by clouds with streaks of thin, rust-colored smoke across them. I was a long time getting the mittens.
When I came back to the post I saw that the wall had fallen in and an instant or two later I saw Wachmann himself, pressed down backward into the snow with his eyes shut and bleeding and violet scalloped burns over his face and shoulders. He rocked from side to side, arms pushed tightly down against his legs, murmuring something through his blackened teeth I couldn’t decipher. His mustache and eyebrows had been burned away and his face looked to have been lifted up somehow and shifted slightly off its bones. I knew as I looked at him that the noise of the bombardment was all around me and that I myself was saying or shouting something but all I could hear was the noise of Wachmann trying to speak. It was a sickening noise. I stood without moving for a few moments longer listening to it and deciding whether or not to touch him or to take his pistol from its holster and kill him with it before the sound of the shelling and my stuttering voice returned all at once and I ran back through the trench and the columns of infantry that were suddenly filling it, screaming for an officer. The taps sergeant’s been hit, I gasped to the fusilier in the next gunner’s post. He turned round and looked at me as though I’d just asked him whether he could spare a schilling. Get back to your position, you idiot! he yelled, shooing me away with his yellow gloves.
I ran back through the smoke to find the wall fallen further in and the mortar canting over against the pile of shells. Wachmann was still there with his head lolling back and a cord of thickened mucus jutting like a tusk from his mouth into the snow. I watched him for a little while, waiting for him to move, then crossed to the far side of the dugout and vomited. Afterward I sat back against a heap of spent shell casings and did nothing for a long time with the guns booming all around me. I knew my leaving for the mittens had had nothing to do with the rest but it was exactly that, the thought that nothing I did could have made any difference, that made me feel I should have been in the dugout when the shell came down. Wachmann was just on the other side of the casings but I couldn’t look at him anymore. I felt very small and very light. A strange smell hung in the air, a smell like the tips in a box of wooden matches that has gotten wet. The air was clotted thickly in my mouth and it was hard to breathe. I stretched myself out on the ground and tried to lie completely still, looking up at the play of clouds and smoke across the sky. Hours passed. The returning fire grew fainter and fainter, like the clatter of a departing train, then vanished altogether. For the next half hour there was no sound along the line but a wet, muffled buzzing. Then even that ended. Everything was silent, palpable and alive, like the air between pealings of an enormous bell.
Voxlauer awoke late that night as the train entered the last limestone gorge curving down onto the plain. His pulse quickened instantly and he felt a cold weight pressing against his forehead and shoulders. He put his face to the window. The passageway now empty of freight threw its light onto the closing rock walls, leaded over and sheer. They could of course have been any walls but he knew it was the last gorge and memories fought for precedence in his brain and he felt bewildered and childlike in his fear. Why he should be afraid now, so groundlessly, he had no idea, but he was helpless in the face of it. With a great effort he brought the walls into focus. Fifty-odd meters down ran the brook, soon to vanish under the rubble of its bed only to reemerge two kilometers downstream in the pools of the old spa at Brunner’s Cross. His breath clung to the windowpane but he made no effort to clean the glass, looking out instead through the ebbing and gathering fog as the pines flew past. The bloodless white lights of the spa when they came marked the opening of the gorge into fir-shrouded eaves curving off to each side like the pages of an album, falling away and turning. Then came the river and the bend by which the bell towers were visible for the first time, the ruin looming up behind them like the hull of an immense capsized ship. To the left was the toll road to Italy running south between the willow rows; to the right the canal which held the half-moon-shaped town fast against the foothills, laddering up into the pines. He could feel the breath clutching in his throat like a baby’s, close-gutted and strange. But the air, when it came, was a nectar to him.
He chose not to enter by the front gate where Maman was sure to be waiting for him on the verandah, a little smaller than he remembered but otherwise unchanged with the ancient house behind her. At the last bend of the canal he turned down the narrow side lane into the orchard. The trees were still much as he’d pictured them, though they seemed a bit sparer, and the gravel of the lane was near to vanished under scrub. He gathered from this that the old gardener, Greiss, had died or else grown too old finally and moved down to Judenbach, where his son had a small property. Then it occurred to him that Greiss had already been old, very old, twenty years before and that his son had been called to duty three weeks before he, Voxlauer, had been. The son had been five or six years older than Voxlauer with thick orange hair and milk-colored skin and when his sister brought the news to his table at the Niessener Hof he had wept and taken off his shoes and refused to go home. And the old man had come and dragged him back to the garden and had beaten him with a split poplar cane until Maman threw open the shutters and shouted Enough! in that imperious way of hers. And the son had apologized to her and to everyone and had set off for the Isonzo the very next morning.
Coming to
the back gate he found it locked and mortared shut at both its joinings. He kicked his pack under the lichened fence boards and proceeded to haul himself over it, no differently than he had in distant summers when he’d come home from Ryslavy’s after she and Père were already in bed. Coming down he landed on a cart leaning against the wall and his right foot drove clean through the cankered wood. He cursed sharply in the dark, pulled his foot back up through the planks, then crouched and felt around him for the pack. Finding it, he stood up carefully and walked as quietly as he could around the barn.
She had heard him crossing the plank footbridge over the creek and the house lights came on as he passed the old wine trellises. He’d not imagined it this way, when he’d still imagined it at all: arriving furtively in the middle of the night with only the empty house and her to greet him. As if nothing had happened in the world. When he came to the front gate she was waiting for him on the steps. She looked at him a full minute up and down pretending not to recognize him before smiling a little, almost ruefully, and leading him up to the verandah.
—Hello, Maman, he said, trying to find in her the person he remembered. She looked old, terribly old, older than even she had a right to look after all she’d lived through. She must be sick, he thought suddenly. The thought broke slowly over the next few moments, spreading inside him with a coldness that seemed to reach back over decades. I wonder how long she’s been like this, he thought. I wonder when it started. It seemed to him now, in the cold light that shone over everything, that he could remember a change in her letters of three or four years past, a sharper sense of reproach, shriller, more urgent. But I never thought she would look like this, he thought. She’s only just past sixty, for the love of God.
Yes. And Anna was only forty-eight, a few months over, and she died. The coldness washed over him again and he stood speechless, motionless, staring at her.
She was still studying him in silence, making the same frightened concessions, the same adjustments that he was making. Gradually a light began to kindle in her crumpled features and she broke into a smile. She pulled him to her and embraced him and he felt her withered arms and the lightness of her body.
