by John Wray
The sack was too heavy to lift and Voxlauer was forced to drag it behind him through the brush where it caught every few meters on a root or in branches and resisted his pull like a still-living thing. He cursed it steadily as he went, turning on it finally and threatening it, kicking at it with his boots until self-awareness returned to him suddenly and he began to laugh. It was dark already in the pines and he felt light-headed and discovered when he was halfway down the slope that he had no clear idea where he was going. He sat down in the needles with the smell of resin all around him, staring up through the trees at the pink underpinnings of the clouds. The sky drew itself steadily westward.
That night another memory of Père came to him, softly and persistently, like a moth circling a light. He and Père were together on one of their favorite walks, a gently sloping path that began behind the ruin and ran along an avenue of young birches to a little glade. The light filtered grayly through the trees and he was holding Père’s hand and stepping over the roots and stones, frowning from the effort. Père was walking too quickly for him to follow; he was staring absently, fixedly ahead of him as he often did, mumbling in a low monotone without moving his lips, like a priest or a nun at their private prayers. —Père, he’d said, stopping in the path. —Père? Can we go slower?
Père had stopped as if struck on the back. —What’s that, Oskar?
—You’re going too fast.
—I . . . ? No, no, Oskar. No, no, my little Herr. He had smiled then, squinting slightly as he smiled, the look of an adult trying to explain something delicate and complex to a child. —I’m in a hurry, Oskar. That’s why I walk so fast. I wish I could walk much faster. I would feel better. It’s terrible, Oskar, you know. It’s terrible always to be in such a hurry.
He had smiled then, too, looking up at Père, searching for the joke. Père made jokes very often when they were together, instead of giving the answers he wanted. He knew very well that they couldn’t be in any kind of hurry. They had finished dinner early and Maman had said that tonight, for once, they could take their sweet time. He liked that expression very much, especially when Maman said it, which was not often. That was why he had remembered.
Père had begun walking again now, quicker even than before, and he had stamped his feet in protest, letting out a squeal of frustrated laughter. —Père! he had shouted. —Père! Stop! Don’t walk so fast!
Père had spun about suddenly on his heels and run back to him, gripping him hard by both of his shoulders and shaking him so that his head lolled back and forth like a pocketwatch on a chain. The trees blurred and rocked above him. —I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! Père had screamed, shaking him at every word. —I just told you, Oskar! Good God! Let it—
Père had let go of him then and turned round on the path, forgetting him completely, staring at a point far off through the trees. —Let it, Père had said again in a faraway voice, not talking to him any longer.
—Let what? he had said frightenedly, still stuttering in the wake of his first surprise. He’d looked up then and seen that Père was weeping, the tears running freely in bright swift streaks across his face and down the front of his fine white shirt. He had begun to cry then as well. Père was still turning in strong dizzying circles above his head, smiling and laughing and weeping, saying the same four words over and over:
—Let it happen now.
After a few nights of freezing rain in the valley there followed a steady period of warmer days. The snow melted into the dark spongelike turf and the ice on the ponds buckled slowly and sank under a thin layer of oily water. On one of these warm mornings Voxlauer was crossing the bridge when a man appeared at the road’s farthest turning. The man was tall and thin and dressed in cowled, flowing robes, like a monk’s, and the white bloom of his hair dipped and wobbled as he labored up the incline. Catching sight of Voxlauer he slowed and approached in loping steps marked and measured by a whittled bamboo cane. Reaching the bridge he planted the cane in the gravel and leaned forward slightly and looked out at the water. —Spring is bounteous, he said, smiling.
—I suppose it is, said Voxlauer.
—You are the new gamekeeper.
—That’s right.
—Oskar Voxlauer.
—Yes.
—As a gamekeeper, Herr Voxlauer, you must know very well that spring is bounteous.
Voxlauer looked at him squintingly. —With whom do I have the pleasure?
—Forgive me! Professor Walter Adolf Piedernig. He bowed. —Of the Pirestine Collective.
—The what?
—The Collective, child. The Disciples of Piraeus. Of the Body’s Four Humours as writ by name on the Pirestine parchments and brought westward from Damascus by that most blessed philosopher. He regarded Voxlauer for a moment expectantly. —The colony, he said finally.
—The one down in Pergau?
—Above Pergau. Yes.
—Ah, said Voxlauer. They stood awhile in silence. The older man looked down at the younger man benevolently. Then he turned and looked up the road, shading his eyes. —Were you headed to the pass?
—Only to the beehives.
—Then we can walk together a little while. I’m on my way this morning to the chapel on Birker Heath.
—The chapel? said Voxlauer, raising an eyebrow.
—Well, more to the heath itself, laughed the man. His clay-colored neck and arms glowed even redder where they emerged from his white homespun vestments. His face and jaw were latticed with deep curving furrows, like a sailor’s, and his brow where it sloped down from under its snowy crest was the color of turned soil. He stood surveying the pond bank and the water, smiling on it as if giving a benediction, rocking back and forth on his bare feet with his papery eyelids pulled down low against the sun. He seemed in no particular hurry for Voxlauer’s reply.
—What takes you up to the heath? said Voxlauer after they had been walking for some minutes.
—The same thing that takes anyone up there, said Piedernig. —The view.
—I’d thought maybe the hunting.
—I’m not interested in your game, Herr Voxlauer, said Piedernig without slackening. —Have confidence in that.
—I’d thought of going myself for that purpose, actually.
—You’re no more of a hunter than I am. Piedernig looked at him, then up the road. —Or a gamekeeper either, for that matter.
—I beg your pardon?
—I knew your father at one time. Enjoyed some of his airs.
—Ah.
—What you’re after in that tumbledown hovel of yours is an Egyptian mystery, to tell you plainly.
Voxlauer squinted a moment into the woods. —My father never mentioned you that I can recall.
—We went to gymnasium together. In Graz.
—I don’t recall him mentioning you.
—I said I knew the man, said Piedernig with a wave of his hand. —I didn’t say we cared much for each other.
A brief quiet followed. Voxlauer scuffed his bootheels in the dirt. —What were you before? he said. —Some sort of schoolmaster?
—About as much as you’re a gamekeeper, said Piedernig. He smiled.
They walked on until they came to the opening of the clearing at the top of which the beehouses leaned together like a row of stoved-in boats. —Those cabinets are in sorry shape, said Piedernig. —I don’t think old Bauer ever opened them. Afraid of getting stung, most likely.
—Did you know him well?
Piedernig shrugged. —Well enough, poor devil. His daughter worked under me when I was gamekeeper, in a manner of speaking, to fair Niessen’s pride and hope. He spat cheerily into the dirt. —Well enough to hazard these bees weren’t altogether smothered by his attentions.
Voxlauer smiled. —They don’t seem to have suffered too much for it, anyhow.
—How’s that?
—Well, said Voxlauer. —I was saying—
Piedernig looked at him sharply. —Would you know a happy bee fro
m an unhappy bee, Herr Voxlauer?
—I’m not sure I’d know a live bee from a dead one.
—Pay us a visit at the colony this week. Piedernig stopped and laid a sun-spotted brown hand on Voxlauer’s shoulder. —Our bees are in a perpetual state of bliss.
Voxlauer watched him as he gathered his robes together and stepped carefully over a puddle of runoff and disappeared into the spruce plantation. Not until he’d been gone for some minutes did it occur to Voxlauer to ask about the figure.
Arriving in Czernowitz, the last station on the civilian line, I left my smoking-car acquaintances behind as quickly as I could and made my way to the drab little center of town in search of news of the fighting and, if possible, a ride east to the front. I was told by the postmaster, a sad, dignified-looking Jew from the capital, that the fighting had ended three weeks before as far north as the town of Lemberg on the Polish border, six hours away by train, and the only soldiers left were deserters from the Hungarian Civil Guard. Why I’m still here I have no idea, he murmured, wagging his head side to side, as though to keep from falling asleep. In response to my torrent of questions about the east he exhaled soundlessly time and again and shrugged his shoulders, sliding small heaps of mail from one corner of his massive eagle-emblazoned desk to another. He barely looked up to acknowledge me as I wished him a safe return to Budapest and left.
Already I noticed a change in the Hungarians around me, most of them speaking German grudgingly, as if questioning my right to ask it of them. The Empire was fading quickly now, like a lamp running out of oil, and with it the last of the delusions that had kept everything comprehensible. No one seemed particularly surprised when I asked for transport to the border of the Ukraine. Some assumed I was a deserter, others a spy; nobody seemed to care very much one way or the other. In spite of this, I was taken on more and more reluctantly the closer we came to the border, riding the length of a few fields, then getting down and walking, often for hours, until the next cart passed. No one seemed to know any German now at all; I felt I was forgetting it with them.
At Jzerneska I forded the Dniester on a barge hauled across the water on sagging iron cables and midway across the river it dawned on me that I was free. The heavy gray water was tumbling and folding over on itself along the left side of the boat, sloughing over into the hull, and the sheer weight and stubbornness of it seemed to testify to my escape. The idea that I’d crossed bodily over into Bolshevik territory, territory that to me represented the opposite of everything I’d left, made me light-headed and breathless to get to shore. I allowed myself a few thoughts of Maman and Niessen but the thoughts became too big immediately and I concentrated again on the river. Reaching the bank, I gave the ferry driver near to the last of my money, and seeing this he smiled a guarded little smile. To my surprise he spoke in well-schooled German. Yes; I don’t think you’ll be needing these, he said, holding up the coins. They’re on a new system hereabouts.
What system is that? I asked.
Barter, he answered, holding up a palm. This potato for your wife. He laughed. He was grizzle-haired and tanned the color of marsh water and dressed in a skirt of knotted and sewn-together rags, like the Gypsy in Il Trovatore. I guessed him to be a Slovak. That’s fine, I answered after a moment. All the possible meanings and implications of his joke, if that was what it had been, revolved weakly in my tired brain. Finally I thought back to what Jan had explained to me about the withering away of capital under true communism and decided the Bolsheviks must have done away with money. That’s fine, I said again, more confidently.
The Slovak shrugged at this; not sadly, as the postmaster in Czernowitz had done, or doubtfully, but only blankly. We stood half on the barge and half on the shifting, reed-covered bank, watching the sun sink slowly over the wide planed earth with nothing to hide itself behind. A sudden panic gripped me at the thought of being abandoned there, but the Slovak seemed in no great hurry to push off. With a slow, careless motion of his hand he offered me a wedge of plug tobacco.
Very kind of you, I said. I looked at him again. Could you spare anything further?
He blinked a few times, his face flat and colorless in the weak sun. Meaning?
Food. Meaning food, I answered, more quickly than I’d intended.
His eyes slid back to me and he grinned again. That’ll cost you, little Kaiser.
I thought I might barter.
He nodded to himself and reached down into the hull of the barge and passed me a sodden loaf of bread and some marmalade in a damp brown fold of paper. Four kronens, Your Eminence, he said, touching his cap.
I laughed. I don’t have four kronens. I have two. My empire’s gone a bit to seed, as you might have noticed.
He was quiet awhile, looking past me, studying the horizon intently as though trying to decipher a tiny line of print. Two kronens, then.
I handed him the last of my money. He tucked it into his shirt with the same slow, untroubled movement he’d made offering me the tobacco and stepped off the bank. The sun was still sliding sluggishly downward. The feeling of momentousness I’d had while crossing the river had disappeared without my noticing and I felt my solitariness very keenly. A narrow puddle-dotted path ran down from the levee in three short turns and off into the boundaryless sweep of grass without the slightest dip or bend. I looked back a second time at the Slovak, who was watching me for the first time with something approaching curiosity, as though the incongruousness of my being there had only just occurred to him. Will this take me to the Bolsheviks? I half whispered, gesturing sheepishly at the path.
The look of casual curiosity on the Slovak’s face changed all at once into one of surprise and delight, as if he’d just been given a small but very charming present. Eventually, little Kaiser. Eventually it will. You’ll have to do a bit of walking on it first, though, I’m afraid.
I turned slowly back to face him. Why is that?
This territory belongs to the Holy German Empire, he answered, curtsying.
The cabinets when Voxlauer opened them seemed husked out and deserted. Dry, brittle shells littered the trays. Here and there a live bee crawled among them, confused by the sudden glare. The hives in the yellow house were the least decrepit and he cut into one at its bottom edge and pried off a dark wedge of honeycomb. Going back to the road he paused a moment, looking out toward Pergau in its nest of graphite fields. The snow line had lifted that past week to the bald tops of the hills and a dull green showed ahead of him in the spruce grove. The young trees looked stunted and unnatural in their geometric rows with the older growth behind them, regal and dark, and the shadow of the cliffs spread down over them as though covering a flaw. When Voxlauer came to the pastures he found a cow grazing at the roadside behind a new fence of barbed wire. It lowed at him, raised its head and took a few cautious steps toward the fence. When he made no sign of stopping it turned and lowered its face to the grass again.
He came to the Holzer farm just as the bell to supper was ringing and two men approached the house slowly over the freshly spaded ground. He hung back along the edge of the road and watched them. They were wide rangy men with long legs and large strides and they joked with one another as they passed through the little orchard and scraped together what little snow was left among the trees and threw it at each other and cursed. The older of the two looked to be near Voxlauer in age and wore his long hair tucked loosely into a woolen cap. The younger one was bearded, with wide-spaced, simple eyes, and cocked his felt hat sideways on his head like a beret. A dog loped between them but it appeared not to notice Voxlauer and neither did its masters. When they had almost reached the gate Frau Holzer came out onto the steps and called to them to bring kindling from the woodshed. She remained there with her arms crossed in the manner of a benevolent regent, waiting until they returned a few minutes later with arms full of fresh-cut pine quarters. Then she turned and stepped ahead of them into the house.
Instead of going back by the valley road Voxlauer climbed to the top o
f Birker ridge and followed it west. To his right a more broken arm ran up to the heath and the higher hills northward, and the valley, now completely in shadow, curved away to his left. After an hour’s walk through chest-high brush that clawed at his coat front and his sleeves he came out onto the clearing where the deer he’d killed lay scattered in all directions through the brush. Small black ants spread netlike over the carcass and welled up from the sockets and the heap of the bowels. The coil of the intestines had been bitten through and strung like tinsel over the bracken and it hung now in loose ribbons, yellowing in the sun. The smell was near to overpowering. Voxlauer stepped away and climbed back to the ridge.
In Italy he had seen bodies equally open and picked apart but the cold had always kept them from smelling. The wetness of everything around and the smell made him dizzy now and he fixed his eyes on the ground and walked stiffly onward through the trees. One infantryman he remembered, a Czech, had broken his leg crossing a foxhole and gangrene had set in within hours. He’d reeked so badly under the saltpeter compresses that the stretcher carriers, when they finally came, wound wet rags over their faces and turned their heads away from him as they walked. The deer had had that same smell, or close enough. He shut his eyes and tried to remember it more clearly: the damp of the foxholes, the bright rolling noise, the sulfurous taste of the air during shellings. The trench on the Parese front had had a particular smell, lived in so long that the stench of shell gas and piss sank down into the snow and froze there, seeping out in the slightest thaw. —That much I remember, he said aloud.
