by John Wray
When his eyes had adjusted to the light he stepped into the kitchen and looked about him. There was the oven, there the stove. A cluster of pots and ladles hung over a wooden counter. An unpainted cherry-wood cupboard faced the counter and the stove front. He crossed over to the cupboard and pulled it open.
Squares of bacon wrapped in butcher’s paper lined the uppermost shelf, ordered in neat, staggered rows like candles in a sacristy. Below the bacon were bundles of smoked sausage and bricks of cheese and below these were sacks of onions and potatoes and small plug-necked bottles of schnapps. Voxlauer took a few parcels of bacon and sausage and a handful of red onions and stuffed them into his pack. He sniffed at the potatoes, chose two of a good size, then uncorked a bottle and tipped it back and took a long, burning draft. —I’m on holiday today, too, said Voxlauer into the quiet. He stood awhile in the middle of the room, drinking. Then he took up the lamp and put away the bottle and went on into the darkened house.
The pantry behind the kitchen was piled to the rafters with jars of all sizes, cans of compote and preserves, fish and salted meat, vegetables and fruits floating gilded in their preservative brine. Voxlauer turned a jar of pickled eggs back and forth under the light, watching the oil swirl and settle. On his way into the parlor he stumbled over a stool and nearly let go of the lamp. He felt nauseous suddenly and stopped to breathe, setting the lamp down on a newly waxed cabinet covered in trinkets and curling brown photographs laid together end on end, like cards in a game of tarok. The room began to reel under his feet and he held tight to the cabinet’s rim, focusing on the white lace dust cover. The faces of the sons smiled up at him from out of dark, patinaed frames. Before the pictures lay a broken-stemmed pipe and a pair of pince-nez and to the right of these, in frames of twisted ironwork, portraits of Georg Schönerer and Adolf Hitler.
The room of the two sons lay just beyond the parlor and Voxlauer entered it cautiously, holding the dying lamp out in front of him. He was standing between the narrow beds, looking at the banners and slogans covering the four walls, when the attack came. A shuddering noise like the sound of air caught by a train window rushed into the room and doubled him over against the bed. His breath exited his chest in one pauseless sweep as though sucked out by a bellows. He clung to the burled, palm-smoothed bedpost and vomited. The banners and swastikas and placards on the walls combined before his sight into a screen of dancing symbols and he cursed at it voicelessly and clenched his eyes tightly shut. But a horizonless field of shifting forms spread itself in front of his closed eyes, heaving and reeling sickeningly, he was forced to open them again onto the room. And still the vision persisted, containing the room too within it now, yawning endlessly before him, cold and gray and inexhaustible, widening even as he watched. I know what it is now, thought Voxlauer. I have a name for it.
—The future, he said into the room.
For an instant all his drunkenness left him and he looked at the density and profusion of color surrounding him with something approaching awe. Then just as suddenly the vision abandoned him and the drunkenness returned. With it came a screeching, directionless anger, rearing and sickening him and doubling him over again until his face was almost to the floor. He stumbled about the room from one wall to another, clawing at the posters and hangings and throwing them down into a heap between the beds. When the four walls were stripped bare he fell back from them onto one of the beds, leaning against the bedpost, sucking air into his lungs. After a time he stood up shakily and went out of the room.
He found the butter and the cream Frau Holzer had left out for him on the kitchen counter and went back to the cupboard, filling his pack randomly with parcels from the various shelves. Stumbling among the coats in the entryway he cursed and kicked a boot hard against the wainscoting. I’ve done this now, he thought. I’ve done this thing, too. Even though she was kind to me. He felt clear and lucid again and stood a long time in the entryway, swaying very slightly from side to side.
Like hitting the man in Pauli’s bar. I can never come back here, either, he thought, sadly and calmly, as though looking back on himself from a place far removed in time. He began to take the parcels out again, one by one, from his pack, arranging them in a straight white row under the coats. Then he stopped himself, smiling a little. —That won’t do anything now, Oskar, he said aloud, picking the parcels up. A short time later he lurched out into the yard and stood watching his breath rise and spread across the sky, icy and black and without end.
The first weeks on the collective Anna moved and spoke and took in the things around her as though asleep. She knew what had happened, in the same sense that she knew her date of birth or her name or the time of year, and was able to learn, with my help, the things she needed to learn to satisfy the sovkhoz bosses, but something had shifted incontrovertibly in her image of the world and its intentions toward her and from then on it seemed as if our roles had been reversed—she was now the exile from a faraway country and I was both her translator and her guide. Most painfully of all to me, she never seemed indignant or resentful as she went about the various absurd and demeaning chores assigned to her to remove her “kulak sense of privilege”; if anything it was her eagerness to please, her blank-faced willingness to do whatever was asked of her, that confused the other workers in her brigade and kept her in regular disfavor with the Women’s Council. Each night she’d tell me with a strange, apologetic smile the things she’d done that day and I’d return her smile blankly, idiotically, knowing as well as she did that the jobs had been meant to humiliate her and the next day would bring more of the same.
Yet all during that time, incredible as it seems to me now, I held adamantly to my belief in Lenin and participated in the regular discussion groups on Wednesday and Friday evenings, asking countless questions of the cadre instructors, struggling to see the ideal behind the bleak fact of the collective. Anna began for some reason to believe that our time on the sovkhoz would soon be over and I made every effort not to discourage her, convinced as I was that conditions would soon improve. I began to write letters home to Maman, letters full of Leninist rhetoric and self-righteous contempt for my old life, but in spite of her difficulty understanding the change in me, I saw that she had long since forgiven me for deserting; it was clear from her first reply that she held Lenin and his international horde of terrorists and saboteurs to blame. Her regular rants against “Bolshevikism” provided Anna and me with a great many evenings’ entertainment. For a while we recovered something of our former happiness.
Our first three years on the sovkhoz passed more or less in this way. Then slowly, irresistibly, in a succession of lighter and heavier shocks, the last of our belief in things expired. Lenin’s death, when it finally came, seemed like nothing to me so much as a token of my own disillusionment. More and more of the collective’s yield was requisitioned each year to feed the workers in the cities and fund the first of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans; the bosses became more and more irritable and suspicious of everything, fighting openly now among themselves, and our standing in the sovkhoz remained peripheral and suspect in spite of my continuing avowals of enthusiasm and Anna’s unceasing efforts at goodwill.
On our brief furloughs home we found ourselves reviled as soviet lackeys by the same people who’d reported us to the cadres five years before; the regime had lost the last of its support in the countryside, and grain-hoarders and suspected rebels were shot daily in the villages. Many of the richer peasants slaughtered their animals in the public markets and burned their houses to the ground so no more could be taken from them. The roads from one town to another began to fill with families with the stricken, uncomprehending look of people in the initial stages of starvation. A saying from before the Revolution came back into common use, even on the collective: “A bad harvest comes from God; famine comes from the Tsar.” Already some were predicting the coming famine would be the worst that the country had ever seen.
When the Great Famine hit in the winter of ’32 I learne
d quickly that the hunger I’d known in the time of my desertion had been less than a passing pang. The produce storehouses of the collective were put under round-the-clock watch by an entire company of Red Army infantry and anyone approaching within twenty meters was fired on. The cities were far worse off than the countryside: in Cherkassy the people ate dogs, the bark off trees, even one another. Grain continued to be sent north by train to finance the latest of Stalin’s construction drives. Anna fell ill, as did many others on the collective, and I had nothing at all to give her. When it became clear to everyone that she was dying I was allowed to take her home and she bettered slightly there, enough to move frailly through the house from one window to another, watching women from the village sowing cabbage and beets on the narrow strip of land that had once briefly belonged to her.
This and another three years, Père, I would have to tell you
At first light of day Voxlauer was high on the west ridge, shivering in the shadow of the tree line along a strip of clear-cut turf. The tangle of the ridge spread and fell away beneath him and vanished over Pergau into the mist. He leaned back against a knotted pine, staring down along the ridge out of the wet, red corners of his eyes. An hour earlier he’d passed through the clearing where the bones of the deer lay scattered in all directions through the scrub and the silvered bracken, radiating out spokelike from the gutted ribs. At some point in the night he’d been down to the cottage where he’d emptied his pack and put on his coat and stowed the bottle in one of its pockets. At some point also he had vomited and a clotted pinkish oil clung to his collar and beard and crept slowly in a crescent down his shirtfront. He sat back with the chamber of the shotgun across his knees and waited, wheezing quietly from the cold.
The shadow of the pines grew steadily sharper and a high reel of birdsong inclined up the slope toward him. Light was gathering now and the thought of day brought with it a panic he’d not known for years, sweeping over him inescapably, holding his body suspended in its center like a wave of dark gray water. —Mother of Christ, he said aloud. He shut his eyes and felt a shiver run down his leg and a warm trickle of piss a moment after. Reluctantly he allowed his eyes to open. There was a movement in the trees and he leaned over gratefully into the cold wet turf.
It was a doe this time with a very young fawn. Voxlauer’s hands spasmed as he undid the safety of the shotgun and brought it level, bracing the stock against his collarbone. All along the tree line now the brush seemed alive with furtive movement. He shifted the shotgun slightly and both deer jerked up at once and struck off with loud harsh barks into the pines.
Voxlauer scrabbled to his feet and ran across the slope into the trees. As though down a long corridor he heard the snapping of twigs hush and recede behind a thickening screen of yellow wood. He struck in after the sound, holding the gun barrel crosswise in front of him like a King’s Hussar, throwing all the weight of his body forward. Branches clawed at his sleeves then lifted suddenly and spread apart as the ground fell away and he felt himself sliding and tumbling and brought the rifle close to his chest. He was rolling now and let the slope carry him down in loose ragged somersaults, faster and faster, with his legs flying up behind him and the roots gouging into his shoulders and ribs. The light spun and heaved. At a buckling in the slope the gun discharged both its barrels and he felt a pain across his thighs that beat hotly in his throat and against his closed eyes. He came to rest on his back with his head facing downhill and warm wellings of blood pooling under the tails of his shirt. The sky was still turning, buckling, righting itself and buckling again. Somewhere close to his head was the sound of running water.
Voxlauer lay for a long time with his eyes on the raked sky. His mouth felt chapped and blistered and eventually he pulled himself down to the water and drank. Afterward he rolled onto his back again, breathing in soft, musical rasps, and tried to stand. To his amazement he found that he could and that the pain was abstract and far away. His pants and shirtfront were wet and this troubled him vaguely but as he walked he tried hard to think of something else and after a time he succeeded. He felt small and lighter than air and saw himself drifting in a boat on a wide, shallow lake, letting his arms trail down in the water, dragging his fingers through the weeds.
He managed to reach a road before he collapsed again. Close by was a house and the smell of woodsmoke wafted sweetly down to him. He closed his eyes and lay back with his knees drawn into his chest and that was how she discovered him, his legs half in the ditch and his coat bunched and furled around his ankles, his arms trailing off in the dirt to either side. She pulled him upright by the shirt collar and shook him until the color came back into his face and shoulders, then forced him to stand and, one arm braced against his back to steady him, led him up to the villa.
THE VALLEY
APRIL–JULY 1938
Else set the pot and cups on a lacquered tray and brought it in to him where he sat propped up on the bed with his swaddled legs spread in a V over the quilting. There was dust in the room and she couldn’t see his face clearly for the sunbeams but she knew he was awake. He shifted heavily as she entered and the loose bed frame creaked under him. —I’ve made coffee, she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be there.
Voxlauer stared at her a moment. She was standing over him, gracious and matronlike, waiting for him to speak. —Thank you, Fräulein, he said finally. He took the cup offered him and levered it slowly up to his mouth. —It’s wonderfully bright in here.
She frowned at this. —Should I pull the curtains?
—No. Leave them open, please.
—I thought you might like some air, she said, going to the window. —It’s not warm outside, but the air is fine.
—Thank you. Open it if you want to.
—What?
—I said open it if you want to. The window. Please do as you would on any other day.
She turned to him and smiled. —On any other day, Herr Voxlauer?
—I’d like not to put you to any sort of trouble.
—Well, she said, turning to the window again and pulling it carefully open with both hands, as though a pane might fall— aside from the trouble of hauling a full-grown body up into my kitchen and spending a night keeping it from bleeding all over my bedsheets, and three nights after that listening to it muttering all sorts of horrors, and making my bed here on the parlor couch, which, as you can see, she said, turning to smile at him—is losing its stuffing, you’ve not put me out so very much. Besides, having put yourself to the trouble, Herr Voxlauer, of falling on a loaded gun, it doesn’t seem so much for me to open my own parlor window.
Voxlauer was quiet a moment. —I thought this was the bedroom, he said.
—Where you are is the bedroom, said Else, opening a second window. —Where I am, Herr Voxlauer, is the parlor. She brought a footstool over to the bed and sat down on it. —So.
—So, said Voxlauer. He smiled shamefacedly. —I suppose a knock on your front door might have been simpler.
She had brought a pair of boots from under the bed and was working her feet into them, frowning slightly. They closed with buckles across the ankles and she drew them snug and then raised her eyes to look at him. The coffee she had given him was cold but strong and he passed his tongue back and forth across his teeth, grateful for its bitterness.
—How did you get me up here, Fräulein? With pulleys?
Else shrugged. —I’m heavy-boned, thank you. Built for the country life. Unlike yourself, if I may say so.
—Yes, Fräulein. I’m sure you’re right. He passed a hand over his forehead. —Have I had a fever?
She nodded, letting out a mock-weary breath. —A right plague of it. You were very talkative, as I’ve said, but a bit weak on specifics. Her fine straight hair wisped outward with her breath and her head tilted back from him distrustfully. The light behind her was whorled and dark, like river water. —How on God’s earth did you manage it?
Voxlauer looked down at
his legs. A band of black stains traversed his thighs from right to left, fanning out along his left leg, graceful and intricate as a tattoo. He shook his head. —Fool’s luck, he said at last, grinning at her.
In the evening she undid the wraps and cleaned the cuts and painted them with Mercurochrome and he saw that they were not very deep. The strangeness of what had happened was dawning on him now, coldly and steadily, but Else seemed perfectly at ease and happy to have him there to complain about and tend to. She showed him some loose bits of shot on a saucer and pointed to the holes each had come from, thin rust-colored grooves bordered by a dull, lifeless white. The skin was flayed in ribbons above his knee-caps and the muscle underneath showed a bright garish red, like the inside of a deerskin, but he found he could move both legs slowly up and down without too much pain. —Sit back now, Else said angrily. —You’ll only start them going again. And in fact as he brought his legs together he felt a warmth welling under the bandages and a prickling seeping into the bone just above the cuts. He lay back very carefully and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again the light was ebbing from the room and he saw her highlighted through the glass, working a round patch of earth in the garden with a spade. She had come and gone all day from the room, taking little notice of him as he lay on the bed, rarely staying long in his sight. Her attitude toward him was so different now from what it had been on their walk down the hill, so inexplicably mild and gracious, indulgent and disinterested at once, as though his presence there on her bed were a given, not to be fretted over—his confusion had grown steadily more complete since the morning. Now he watched her in quiet detail as she fussed somewhat coquettishly over the ground, worrying it with sharp quick gouges of the spade. After every few passes she stepped back and surveyed the plot, her round face twisting into a smile as though acknowledging her foolishness. Her hair caught the last weak light in its gloss and darkened her smooth, ageless, nearly sexless features. Voxlauer closed his eyes for a long time and when he opened them she was still in the garden, crouched down pulling roots from the spaded ground, the color almost gone from the windowpanes. As he watched her, the twilight wandered down across them, stooping like a willow bough. A few minutes later she came inside.
