by John Wray
—For heaven’s sake, Oskar. She sat down tiredly in her chair. He noticed for the first time an involuntary shaking of her head, a constant slow avowal of disbelief. She let out a long, involuntary breath. —Is she feeding you well, at least?
—Maman, he said. —Couldn’t we sit quietly for a while?
—Yes, Oskar. I suppose.
The noon light passed through the screen of hanging ferns and dappled the white wall and the table and the plates and cups. The radio was on in the parlor and the garbled remains of an overture carried out to them through the open doors.
—Do you recognize it? she said.
—Barely.
She kept quiet. —Verdi, he offered.
—Yes. That’s right. You know, your Père and I—
—Is something wrong with the radio? said Voxlauer.
—What? Oh, the radio . . . she said, letting her voice trail away. Her lower lip began to tremble.
—That static. It’s terrible.
She nodded. —An Italian station, sad to say. Udine. I couldn’t bear any more Wagner preludes, or that Lortzing, saints preserve us.
—Who?
—Lortzing. A choirmaster or some such. From Linz. A great favorite of the new regime, apparently. A great lover of horns. She sighed.
Voxlauer smiled and took her cool, slack hand in his. —What was that about Verdi? he said.
That afternoon he took her walking through the garden and the new-budding orchard. She moved through the thick scrub unsteadily and had to be led by the arm and given many pauses to rest. They sat together on an iron bench by the groundskeeper’s cottage and watched the setting sun tilting behind the ruin, lingering in its tines and arches. —I’m so tired now, Oskar, she said, leaning weightlessly against his shoulder.
—I was tired too, Maman. Very tired. But now I’m wide awake.
—You’re so young yet. I’ve been tired now for ages. She sighed mildly. —Do you remember when you left? Do you? How young I was?
Voxlauer let out a hollow laugh. —Go on and say it.
—No. You’re a good boy, Oskar. A sweet dear boy. My dear boy.
—Maman, he said hesitantly. —You’re frightening me a little.
She sat without answering for a time. —Did Pauli tell you to come?
—Of course not.
—It doesn’t matter. I’m happy to see you. She laid her arm across his. —I was hoping you might explain things to me.
—I was hoping the same of you, Maman. I haven’t been to town in weeks.
—You’re in love, she said simply.
Voxlauer said nothing. She raised her head partly off his shoulder and let out a breath.
—It seems we’re part of Germany now, she said.
—Yes.
—Awful garbage in the papers.
—Yes.
—Is Pauli in trouble?
—No. I don’t think so.
—He hasn’t been to see me lately.
—I don’t think he’s in any trouble. Honestly.
—Ah, she said. She smiled strangely.
—Maman? he said. —What is it? Are you unwell?
—I don’t understand, she said, as if in answer. She was shaking her head fiercely now and looking down at her lap.
—Maman, he said again. She took no notice of him.
—The day you left, Oskar, as Père and I took you to the station, I knew you’d be very different, a stranger almost, when you came back. I knew it. You might never come back at all, but if you did I knew that you’d be changed. The world would change you. I prepared for it every day after you’d gone. She paused a moment, breathing and thinking, rubbing her hands together. —What never occurred to me was that I’d be changed. And this place, she said, looking around her at the garden. —That this place would be changed. That Père would be gone from it, gone so utterly. And not just him. You couldn’t find us here at all, any of us, if you looked. She let out a muted, pained sound, moving her hands as over the flat empty surface of a table, looking at him all at once confusedly, almost questioningly, eyes wandering from his face and then rushing gratefully back to it, remembering him.
—All these people, Oskar. All these people. I don’t recognize anybody at all, now, on the street. And they don’t recognize me. I never thought that could happen. Never. The streets are different also, and the houses. You must have noticed something, but you never said. I think about you so much now, Oskar. Every day. It must be terribly hard for you. God in heaven . . . She reached over and laid the knuckles of her left hand against his temple, as though checking him for fever. —God bless you, Oskar. My sweet sweet boy. Bless you. I wonder that you found your way back at all. Everything’s so different. Here is different: old. Even your old mother, Oskar. Even her, God rest her.
—Maman, said Voxlauer. His voice cracked slightly. —Don’t say that, Maman. Please.
—I don’t understand anymore, Oskar. That’s the shame of it. She paused. —I don’t understand at all.
The light on the ruin was dull and purple and the walls and buttresses looked grander and less forgotten, prouder now, in silhouette. A warm wind came down from the woods and rustled through the garden, heavy with the smell of rain. —I’ve never understood, Maman, Voxlauer said after a long while.
On his way up from town he held to the quieter roads and transcribed a wide circle around the Holzer farm. He came off the ridge at the last of the pens and wound his way along the creek’s northern bank into the spruce groves. In the younger stands the saplings clustered tightly together, round as fusilier’s brushes, and whisked into him as he moved forward. The flat blue needles felt warm and fleshlike against his eyes. He walked in circles with his arms together and his head bowed low, coming down with each step into the dense, rubbery bristles. After a time he stopped and listened carefully to his breathing. A strong wind bowed the treetops. He leaned backward and stared up at the clouds, ribboning and trailing away into wisps toward the south.
A dull light billowed in the air, spreading into a mist along the ground. The creek was to his left. Two wet planks stuck out over the water braced on heaps of yellow stones. He went carefully down to them and started across. As he was midway over the water the planks gave suddenly, plunging his legs into the current. He yelled loudly from the cold, marveling even as he yelled at the way the sound vanished into the spruce rows like a pebble into a well. He waded to the far bank and climbed out and shucked off his boots, laughing at himself. The hollow small noise of the creek rose hesitantly upward. He wrung the water from his socks and dried his feet against the mossy ground.
He was crouching there awkwardly with his boots in his hands when he saw them, half a dozen meters upriver, leaning on their rifle stocks and watching him. The older son carried a chamois fawn slung over his shoulder and a loose tinkling clatter of rabbit traps like a purse below it. His brother stood a few paces behind him, shifting from foot to foot and grinning. Voxlauer stood up slowly. They separated and came down on either side of him, rustling purposefully through the branches as though flushing up a deer. When they reached him he was still trying to get his feet into the water-sotted boots.
—Going for a swim, citizen? said the older son, laying the traps down carefully. Voxlauer said nothing. The younger son stepped forward and leaned his rifle against a stump and eased the chamois off his brother’s shoulders. —Go on, citizen. Speak freely, the older son said, not unkindly, leaning over slightly to let his load slip off onto the ground.
Voxlauer didn’t answer. One of the boots was half on his needle-covered foot and the other was in his hands, dripping onto the turf.
—Here’s a shy one, said the older son to his brother, leveling his rifle stock. The younger son nodded, blinking effortfully out of wide-set, cowlike eyes.
—Wait, said Voxlauer. The younger son had stepped around to the left and now swung his rifle hard into Voxlauer’s side, splaying him out onto the moss. —Wait, Voxlauer gasped. The older son pressed a boot against
Voxlauer’s head and drove his face into the turf, cooing gently. His brother raised his rifle butt and brought it downward like a gaffing spade again and again onto Voxlauer’s back and shoulders. Voxlauer could see nothing for the dirt and the sparks behind his eyes but he could taste the salt of his tears and of his mucus and hear himself crying Wait :
Wait:
until finally they left him.
When they were gone Voxlauer rolled over onto his back and looked up at the leaded-glass patterns of the branches with the white clouds just behind them. Drops of dew fell from the branches and streaked toward his face like chimney sparks, hissing and crackling as they passed. He lay with head back and felt the warm soft earth pulling him into it and was grateful. The air was very still, pale and green as bottle glass, and he shut his eyes and listened to the pat-pat-pat of water dripping steadily onto the moss. Now and then a drop would spatter against his eyelids in a halo of blue or orange fire.
A spider had dug a small round burrow, about the width of a child’s finger, in the dirt near his elbow and lined the entrance with a skirt of white silk. It sat drawn up in the burrow mouth, motionless and intent. Voxlauer twitched a finger and it vanished soundlessly.
They lay together on the pallet in the alcove in the close-fitting dark. Now and then Else would rise and shift the pillows under him or help him to sit up and cough into a white enamel bowl. He was talking almost without pause, gesturing with his hands in the air almost invisibly, the smell of rain coming through the open windows. There was the sound of rain against the shingles of the roof, and dripping from a gap above the stovepipe onto the floor. She listened to him from her corner of the bed and did not try to hush him or to coax him into sleeping. When he’d told her everything, all of it from the beginning, he lay his head back on the pillows and looked at her.
—That’s all, he said. —That’s everything I can think of.
—Tell me more about this Anna, said Else, drawing closer to him. —Was she like a mother to you?
—Very much, said Voxlauer. —Very much like a mother. He smiled. —With one or two noteworthy differences.
—Was she always running around behind you with Mercurochrome and a roll of tape, bandaging your cuts and so on?
—Hardly ever.
—I don’t believe it.
—I didn’t get into so much trouble in those days. I was a model Bolshevik.
—What did you do those fifteen years, to keep out of trouble? Mind the People’s trout?
—Close enough. I grew the People’s beets.
—Beets!
He nodded. —Beets and radishes.
She stared at him a moment, wide-eyed. —You know something. I’ve never had a beet.
—The worse for you, Fräulein. The beet is nature’s omnibus.
—How so?
He raised four fingers, folding them down one by one as he spoke:—It vivifies. It fortifies. It regulates. It clears the bowels.
—Who would ever have imagined it. Such a modest-looking item. A cross between a pickle and an egg.
—Excellent, also, for staining gums and fingers, said Voxlauer. He lay back again and stared up at the rafters. —What a dreary little ash can of a cottage this is, he said sleepily.
—I asked you about Anna, said Else. —Pay attention.
Voxlauer took a breath. —Can there be anything I haven’t told you yet?
—All sorts of things. She paused. —Ways we’re different, for example.
—Every way I can think of, said Voxlauer, yawning.
Else turned wordlessly to look out the little window.
—Should I have said the two of you are just alike?
—What did you do together, the two of you?
—We grew beets.
—Is that all you did for fifteen years, grow your beets? All day and night? Don’t you Bolsheviks ever take a holiday, in the name of God?
—We went back to her house twice a year. She had a phonograph. We played records on it.
—What kind of records?
He shrugged. —Operas. Operettas.
—Which operettas? Name them.
He looked at her. —You’ll be asking me my catechism in a minute.
She smiled. —Go on, Oskar Voxlauer. Recite.
—Fantiglio. The Bride of Cozumel. The Beggar’s Feast Day. Three or four others. None of my father’s, if that’s what you’re wondering. Her taste ran more to works of the great Saxon Romantics. Not unlike our Führer.
Else waved this off. —Back to the topic. Any children?
Voxlauer shook his head.
—None?
—We did try, if it please the court.
—No children, said Else. —That’s very sad.
—We loved each other, Voxlauer said tentatively.
—That’s more important, of course. Any idiot can have children.
—That’s true.
—I did.
—Yes.
—You do like Resi, don’t you, Oskar.
He nodded.
—Do you like her?
—Very much. I like her very much.
—If you didn’t like her you’d be turned out with the bedsheets first thing in the morning. You know that, I hope. Turned straight out without the smallest mercy.
—I love Resi like a sister, said Voxlauer solemnly. He coughed.
—That’s fine. She looked at him a moment. —Do you need the bowl?
—No. Anything but that.
—Do you need it?
—Christ, no.
They lay quietly. Voxlauer felt himself drifting off again toward sleep.
—Do you think about her often? Else said.
He groaned quietly.
—Answer me!
—Not often.
—You said that you loved her.
—Yes. I think I did.
—You think?
—I loved her. I’d like to go to sleep.
—You loved her, or you think you did, said Else, grimacing. —But now you never think of her.
—That’s right. You’ve summed it up perfectly.
—Think about her now. Wake up, Oskar! What was she like?
Voxlauer rolled onto his back. —Have you no pity?
—Speak or I’ll get the bowl. Speak!
He was quiet a moment. —Strait-laced, he said finally. —Tall and thin. Pale. Serious. Bourgeois. Unhappy.
—Unhappy? said Else.
—Yes. Unhappy.
—Always?
—No. Not always. Sometimes she was so happy she couldn’t sleep.
—Why? said Else after a little pause. —Why couldn’t she sleep?
—I don’t know.
—You don’t know?
—She never said.
—“She never said”? What do you mean by that? She sat bolt upright in the dark. —What did you talk about then, all day long?
—You’re very interested in her state of mind all of a sudden, said Voxlauer, rubbing his eyes.
She muttered something under her breath. —I just hope you talked to her, that’s all.
He tried to turn toward her, then lay back gingerly on the pallet. —You didn’t know her, did you, Else.
—You’re right, of course. I’m sorry. She yawned.
—I did talk to her.
—Well, then.
—Let’s talk about you for a while, he said, tapping her on the leg.
—Please, Oskar. She yawned again. —There’s nothing to tell.
—I doubt that very much.
—I’ve never been to Russia. She brought a hand down over his face, closing his eyes. —I’ve never farmed state’s beets. I’ve never been a Bolshevik.
—The worse for you, said Voxlauer. —Bolshevism is society’s beet.
—Good night, Oskar, she said, drawing the blankets up over them.
—Is it time to sleep? said Voxlauer into the quiet.
Slow and tidelike through the month of June the butterflies came and blanketed
the valley. The first to appear were translucent and white and sat harbored on the road like an armada of paper ships, folding and unfolding. —Postilions, said Else, stepping into them so they rose up on either side of her, shimmering and unreal, like crepe-paper snowflakes in a country theater. On into midsummer they settled in every patch of light, ranged in bands along the Pergauer road in beams of late sun or drifting in loose columns across the fields. Caught in the hand they left a roan dust behind, iridescent and fine as pollen.
Soon after came the rest, mourning cloaks and swallowtails and purple moors, chess pieces and white apollos, peacock’s-eyes and cyllabils and others whose names Voxlauer couldn’t remember ever having known. He would follow Else down along the water and tell her stories as she stalked them with her net and killing jar, struggling to keep up with her as she ran ahead through the heavy brush, following the tip of her net as it dipped and circled above the reeds. Often he would realize as a story was half finished that he’d lost track of her completely. Coming out onto the road a short while later, scratched and dusty and grinning, the end of the net tucked down into the ether, she’d beg his forgiveness and ask him to start over again at the beginning. More often than not, he’d abandon the story, sigh and lie down in the grass and think of something else to tell her.
One morning as they were sitting by the creek together and he sat playing a fly line into the current he found himself staring at the back of her head, dappled and striped by the overhanging reeds. —What is it? said Else after a minute or two had passed, turning round.
—Pauli says your cousin’s come back, he said, reeling the line in carefully.
—Yes.
He looked at her. —You knew?
—His mother sent word he’d asked where I was living. I’m not sure what she told him.
—Ah, said Voxlauer.
Else kicked at the water with the heel of her boot. —She didn’t say how long he was planning on staying. He might only have been passing. I’m not sure.
—He’s head of the new Reichs-Commission, Voxlauer said slowly. —From Gressach to the Steyrmark. I think it’s likely he’ll be staying for quite a while.
—I’ve asked her to tell him not to come, Oskar. I’ve told her not to say where I am. I can’t do more than that, can I?
