by John Wray
Sir?
Did you slip it down your breeches, Private? Where in God’s name is it?
It was in the pit, sir, I said.
He cursed. Go and find it, then.
I walked back to the ruins of the turret and cast around in the drift and rubble for my rifle. The mortar had been taken away. Not finding anything, I sat down again against the empty casings; at some point I got to my feet and looked down the line. The fusilier was gone. Far off down the slope a team of mules was hauling six or seven coupled mortars up a track. I watched them slowly pass out of sight and after that stared a long time off into the woods, not thinking about anything.
I spent that night in a snowed-in supply tent on the former Italian side of the lines. The front had been abandoned hurriedly and very little looked to have been taken. In among the stacked crates of flour and beans and salted meat were two piles of winter uniforms, slate-colored and quilted, with the Venetian lion recumbent over each lapel. I pushed the piles together and fashioned them into a sort of bed and crawled underneath it and felt the weight of the coats pressing me down into the floor. I thought of the way the sergeant had been pressed into the snow and imagined the force of the explosion something like the weight I felt on top of me, but vast and on every side and all at once. Then I laughed at myself, seeing an avalanche of uniforms exploding into the dugout. That’s not the way it was, I thought. It was a shell that did it. He was burned all over.
The roof sagged steeply on the uphill side of the tent and standing on some of the crates I was able to slip my head through a hole in the fabric and look back down the slope. The sky was high and clear and as night fell a line of fires sprang up behind the tents where the sergeant’s body had been taken. Now I will remember him that way, I thought, picturing his black and running face. The family and the friends will remember him one way and I’ll remember him the other. I felt giddy thinking this. Wachmann’s face and the sight of his body as it died suddenly seemed a privileged and secret knowledge. Only I had seen it. The fusilier had seen something, perhaps, but I had seen the whole of it. Everything but the explosion. I thought again, more vaguely now, that I should have been there when the shell hit. I thought very briefly about a letter I’d gotten that morning with news about my father. The firelight looked beautiful thrown back onto the tents but I couldn’t picture myself going to them. A ringing and shuddering was passing through my body, rattling the crates under my feet, but I felt nothing unpleasant, only giddiness.
After a time it grew too cold to watch the fires any longer and I ducked my head inside and buried myself down in the coats until only my eyes and nose were showing. I lay very still, imagining being discovered by the Italians in the middle of the night. I thought about Wachmann again and how the snow had clung to his back like the bristles of a pig when we pulled him away from the wall. The wind grew louder and snow fluttered down steadily from the hole in the roof. Eventually I fell asleep.
When I woke my nose and eyelids were coated with drift but the rest of me was warm for the first time in weeks and I felt forgotten and content. I got up and went outside to piss; it was already late morning and blindingly bright. Down the hill I saw a ring of men in what looked to be Turkish uniforms talking quietly and smoking. When my vision cleared a little I recognized them by their peaked hats as our own Kaiser’s hussars. I went back into the tent and took up my rucksack and slid down the steep clear-cut slope toward the men. The drifts made the going slow and strenuous between the stumps, and I was a long time getting down; at one point I stumbled and tore the shoulder of my coat. I came out of a cluster of pines a few yards farther on and heard a shot at the same moment but by then it was too late to turn back. I looked up and saw a man in an open flannel shirt totter a few steps and then fall face-forward into the snow. A second or two later the man who had fired noticed me. He called to me to raise my arms and come slowly down the hill. The others turned round at this and watched me as I came. When I reached the even ground I laid my rucksack down, very gingerly, then raised my hands again. I hadn’t seen the man who had fallen clearly but I knew that he was not an Italian and that I was not going to make it anymore to the tents.
Two hussars came forward and led me by my elbows into the circle. They asked me the name of my battalion and my regiment and I told them. The officer with the pistol, a captain, gestured at my shoulder. How did that happen, Private? he asked.
Just now, sir. I fell.
How did you lose your battalion?
During the shelling, sir. I was feeder to a mustard-shell battery. The taps sergeant died.
The captain frowned. What taps-sergeant?
Taps Sergeant Wachmann, sir. A German.
Were you hit?
No sir.
There was silence for a moment. How did you lose your battalion? the captain said, as matter-of-factly as before. A shaking had begun along my left arm. The others were closer to me now and I could see the steam of their breath rising up behind the captain’s head. He was looking at me as a gymnasium teacher might to an able student and I wanted very much to tell him again about Wachmann and the fusilier and everything that had happened since but I saw in the same instant that he hadn’t put away his gun and the look on his face had changed. How did you lose your battalion, Private? he said again.
I stayed with the taps sergeant. At my position sir.
There was another silence. Someone sniggered.
Shoot this man, the captain said flatly, handing me his pistol.
The circle widened to show another man on his knees in the snow, stripped to his underclothes. Tears were running down his cheeks and guttering in his beard and in the folds of his face. I stood for a few seconds without moving or speaking. Who is he? I asked.
A deserter, said the captain. Behind me in the circle someone spat. A voice was screaming now behind my eyes, not my voice or the voice of any other living thing but a voice just the same, high and piercing as a steam jet. Things began to swim together. I took a half step backward to steady myself and felt a hand against the small of my back. I know you, said the man on the ground, tilting his head up toward me.
I stared down at the man. I know you, he repeated. He had stopped sobbing now and was looking up at me or at something just behind me with wide-open unblinking eyes. The thought entered my head for the smallest part of an instant that he was not talking to me at all, or to anyone in the circle, but directly to God. I know you, he said again, breaking into a smile.
Shut your mouth! screamed the officer. The scream was thin and bright like the noise that was sharpening each second behind my eyes and I drew back automatically. The man on the ground was staring at me and swaying from side to side as if in a rapture. Mucus clotted in his beard and on his lips. He made no motion either to raise himself or to lie back down onto the snow. He was raising his left arm to me, open-handed, as if asking me to help him onto his feet.
Do you know this man? said the captain, turning round to look at me.
No sir, I said. I raised the pistol and fired.
When he reached the front gate Maman was sitting exactly as she’d been when he had left her. As he came up the steps she sat forward with a start and he realized she’d been asleep. —You haven’t forgotten how to startle a body yet, she muttered.
—I’m sorry.
—Well. That’s all right.
He stood beside her awhile, looking up at the treeline. —Does old Ryslavy still run the Niessener Hof?
—No. Alban died last winter. Pauli runs it now.
—Pauli.
—He’s asked about you.
—How is he?
—Well. Knock on wood, Oskar.
He was quiet for a time. —When did this start happening, these changes? he asked. —How long ago?
She sighed quietly, more a contraction than a sound. —Nothing has really happened yet.
—But you’re worried about Pauli? Truly worried?
She shrugged. —He has a little girl.
He squinted again at the hillside, frowning slightly, remembering Pauli and Old Ryslavy and the Hof and his favorite table there, then all at once remembering his age, every year of it. Even the war seemed long ago.
—I did read your letters, Maman. I didn’t believe about the changes, that’s all. She watched him as he said this. He couldn’t make out her face in the dark but her head had turned toward him. He took a breath.
—There was so much exaggeration everywhere around us. This whole time. He paused. —I can’t explain it. We didn’t get very much news. Not much that was clear. There were rumors. I wanted to believe there had been changes. If there had been changes I could have come back. He paused a moment. —Or I wanted nothing to change, if you prefer. That could be. He laughed.
She looked at him. —How do things seem to you now?
He frowned again. —Well. They seem the same.
—They’re not the same, Oskar.
He stood close beside her, leaning slightly over. —What is it with Pauli? he said. —Trouble with Rindt?
—Mmm.
—Rindt’s thick with the Black Shirts, is he?
She didn’t answer.
—That greasy bastard.
—Yes, Oskar. She sighed.
He laid his hand on her shoulder. There was precious little under the wrap to indicate it held part of a living human being. He felt her breathe in, a slight shifting of the bones. —Having you away did nothing to lighten the years, she said almost in a whisper.
—I was ill, Maman. And then I was married.
—If you choose to call it that.
He took his hand away and laid it against the pane of the door. —Come in off the verandah now, for God’s sake.
—In a minute.
—In a minute, then. He stepped into the parlor and shut the door behind him, leaving her there, swaddled tightly in her blankets, motionless and austere.
Gasthaus Rindt on closer inspection appeared much the worse for wear. Voxlauer recognized in passing some of the drunks of his youth splayed in wicker chairs on the patio and men who might possibly have been their sons equally drunk beside them, basking sleepily in the noonday light. A dry snow wisped around the tables. Many of the window frames were boarded over and paper sacks of cement lay like sandbags in the foyer. A woman in Trachten watched him from the entryway. He wished one man he remembered a good morning and crossed the avenue to Ryslavy’s.
The Niessener Hof by comparison still seemed more or less hale, though a few windows on the upper floors had been nailed shut and some tiles looked to have loosened along the gutters. The façade had recently been given a fresh coat of lime and the vestibule as he entered it appeared in good repair. Most of the tables were empty but a fair-sized crowd stood parceled along the bar. He leaned over as unobtrusively as he could and asked the girl drawing drafts where he might find Herr Ryslavy. —In his office, said the girl with a lazy wave behind her.
Ryslavy was in a small windowless room just off the kitchen, slumped deep in an old cowhide chair with his back to the door, shouting into a telephone. The room itself seemed barely an office at all but rather a storeroom for wine crates and bottles of pilsner. Voxlauer watched from the kitchen for a while, then tapped lightly on the doorframe. Ryslavy turned at the sound and looked up at him a moment, then mumbled his excuses and hung up the receiver. He regarded Voxlauer a few seconds further, scratching his round stubbled chin, then rose slowly from the chair. —I’d expected a Cossack, he said, stepping forward.
—You should have seen me yesterday. I looked like Genghis Khan.
—Much better, said Ryslavy. His teeth as he smiled were the color of weathered pinesplints. He shifted restlessly from foot to foot. —The least you might do is look your age, for the love of God.
—You should have seen me yesterday, said Voxlauer.
The floor was carpeted in varicolored receipts, some of them still bearing the blue K&K of the imperial notary. A fly rod of red lacquered bamboo hung in a corner above an oliveskin tackle bag. The air stank of pipe fumes and carbon ink. Ryslavy stood a moment longer, then slipped around the desk. —A cautionary note: I’ve done nothing since you left but get fat. And go fishing.
—Two not unrelated pastimes.
—And breed. I have a daughter now. The fair Emelia.
—Maman told me. I believe I passed her at the bar.
—Yes.
—Or was that the missus?
Ryslavy made a face. —Ecch! The missus. Run off with an American, two years ago this April.
—An American?
—A stinking unwashed bugger.
—I’m sorry to hear that.
Ryslavy kept quiet.
—Sorry to have missed it, actually.
—A Baptist, believe it ot not, said Ryslavy, smiling. —The genuine article. A preacher of some stripe or other. If I wasn’t an atheist beforehand I definitely am one now.
They sat at a table in a hall off the kitchen, sipping pilsner from wide ceramic mugs, looking out across the square. Ryslavy packed his pipe fussily. He looked over at Voxlauer. —You look tired.
—I am. I’m perpetually tired.
—What was her maiden name?
—Rhyukina. Voxlauer turned his mug back and forth. —We were never married.
Ryslavy chewed his pipestem. —Of course I heard all of this from your mother, he said carefully. —I’ve felt like your older brother through this whole affair. I feel that way now.
—I know it.
—It’s a complicated time you’ve chosen. For Emelia and me especially.
—I know. I didn’t choose it.
They sat quietly awhile. Ryslavy lit his pipe. —Do you need money?
—Thank you. No.
—We’d love to take you on here if you did, now that you’ve been shaved and powdered.
—I don’t need any money. I’ve been here half a week and already I’m sick to death of this place.
—I don’t believe you.
—Well, I can’t stay in town.
They sipped at their beer. Ryslavy drew his lips together.
—I don’t understand, Oskar. Your mother—
—I was hoping to hire on somewhere near to here. As a cowsenner, maybe.
—Never come to town?
—Just to see her.
Ryslavy smiled. —And the rest of us can go to hell? Is that it?
Voxlauer looked out the window toward the patio at Rindt’s.
—Your silence has been duly noted, said Ryslavy. He took a swallow of beer. —You’ve not changed as much as one might have hoped. That is very obvious.
Voxlauer shrugged. —I never had much love for this town, Pauli.
—But the people in it, Oskar! said Ryslavy, setting down his mug and frowning. —The people in it.
—Yes. The people in it. My father and my mother. Well, my father is dead and you know that very well and everyone here knows it. And they know one or two other things about me, too, or so I gather. But they couldn’t know less about why I left or why I came back. He paused to breathe, leaning forward in his chair.
—Of course they couldn’t, Oskar. I didn’t mean you owed them anything.
—Or you, either. Or her.
—No.
Voxlauer closed his eyes. The breath was coming hard to him again, as it always did when things began to reel. He was right that he had to leave but he knew at that moment that they might not let him, Maman and Pauli and the rest. Uncle Gustl, Irma Gratzer, Kati Milnistch, all the others he’d not yet seen. He felt unsteady on the chair and lowered one arm carefully along the chairback. He expected to see Ryslavy staring at him when he opened his eyes but Ryslavy was looking quietly out the window, puffing on his pipe. Voxlauer closed his eyes again. After a time Ryslavy cleared his throat.
—I’m sorry about your father, Oskar.
—That’s all right.
—I’d heard you’ve been sick.
—Yes.
—I never found out exa
ctly what it was. Something from the war?
Voxlauer smiled. —Yes. Something from the war.
—What was it, exactly?
—It was attacks. He scratched the back of his neck. —Is attacks, I suppose.
—Attacks?
—Breathing trouble. That sort of business. Sometimes I see things.
Ryslavy raised his eyebrows. —What sort of things? Things from the war?
Voxlauer smiled. —Catholic things. You wouldn’t understand, Pauli.
—The hell I wouldn’t. I’m an honorary Catholic, on account of my firm belief in alcohol. Ask any of your papist brethren.
—I don’t like talking about it much.
—Oh, said Ryslavy. They sat quietly again.
—Has it gotten any better? said Ryslavy after a time.
Voxlauer dug his hands into his pockets and hunched forward, the toes of his boots pressed together under the table. Outside in the square a sparse dry snow was falling. —I thought it had, he said.
In the evening they drank on and played tarok and ate from huge heaping platters of cutlets and tatterbread dumplings. The girl came to clear the table and sat in on a few rounds. —Emelia, this is your old Uncle Oskar, said Ryslavy. —Oskar, Emelia.
—Pleased to meet you, Uncle, said the girl, smiling down at her cards.
After the round was played she stood up from the table and returned a short while later with a tray of prosciutto and melon and smoked sections of trout. They laid the fish on small wedges of oven-crusted bread, spattered the wedges and the fish with butter, then laid them whole onto their tongues.
—Ah. That’s lovely, said Voxlauer, leaning back.
—Fish want swimming, as they say, said Ryslavy, producing a thin yellow wine bottle from under the table. He poured the wine into two tall-stemmed glasses and proceeded to tell Voxlauer about stickle trout and river trout and the subtleties between them, in the water and in the pan, and his lease of spawning rights to the ponds in the valley above Holzer’s Cross. How word of his fish had spread to such a degree that it had grown necessary to install a pensioner in the valley as a warden, and, later, how the old man had become erratic with drink and for the last winter of his life could most often be found across the square at Rindt’s, splayed out cold across the benches. Voxlauer listened to it all patiently and closely.
