The Right Hand of Sleep

by John Wray

  —They do get on, the two of them, don’t they, Else said, raising the fold of her dress up over the sack and dropping the chanterelles in all at once. —Feel abandoned?

  Voxlauer shrugged. —Ties of blood, Fräulein. There’s just no getting around them.

  —You should talk to him, Oskar. I’d like for you to talk to him.

  Voxlauer fished a mushroom out of the sack and sniffed at it.

  —Should I not let him come up? she said. —Is that what you think?

  —He’d come up just the same. Whether or not you asked him.

  —He’s not after you, if that’s your worry. He’s told me.

  Voxlauer hung back a moment. —He said that?

  She nodded.

  —When?

  —This morning.

  —So he’s only just decided, said Voxlauer, starting to walk again.

  He felt her coming up behind him. —He’s still just a boy, really. You have to understand that. Prideful and stubborn as a boy.

  —A boy? said Voxlauer, stopping short.

  Else looked away immediately. —I know what you’re thinking now, she said, setting her features defiantly, even scornfully. —I know what you’ll say next.

  —That’s a lie you just told, Else. That’s a lie. You know it is.

  —Oskar—

  —Don’t start lying to me now, because of him.

  Else brought a hand slowly to her mouth and bit it. Voxlauer watched her as if from a great distance and she, for her part, seemed to have forgotten him entirely. Eventually she roused herself and said:—Yes, Oskar. It was a lie. She slid her arm under his and curled her hand around his shoulder. —Please don’t let’s talk about him again. Will you promise me? I don’t think I can stand it.

  Sometime later they came to the creek and found Kurt and Resi sprawled out against each other in the shade. Resi lay on her side with her head in Kurt’s lap and her legs scissored into his. Kurt’s eyes opened as they came down and he raised a finger conspiratorially to his lips. —Can you take over, Liesi? he whispered. —I’d like to go for a walk with Oskar.

  Else nodded, avoiding Voxlauer’s look. Kurt slid out carefully from under Resi’s legs and climbed to where Voxlauer was standing. —Come along, Oskar! he said, striking Voxlauer playfully on the shoulder.

  —Why here? said Voxlauer, looking down into the muddy water.

  Kurt stood with his hands in his pockets, surveying the cottage with the woods behind it. His thick hair stirred lightly in the wind. He shrugged. —One place is as good as another. I had fine times here as a boy.

  —So did I.

  —Did you? Kurt frowned slightly, wrinkling his nose. —I can’t say I remember you.

  —I’m not surprised. You’d have been less than a glimmer.

  —Ah yes! Of course, Kurt said, bringing a hand up into his hair and patting it down nervously. He shaded his eyes with the same hand and looked toward the cottage. —I like you, Oskar, he said suddenly.

  —Does that mean no more beatings, Obersturmführer?

  Kurt looked at Voxlauer, blinking at him slowly, squinting now and again, as if to make him out more clearly. —I’d pictured you darker, somehow. More heavyset. He puffed out his chest. —More of a woodsman.

  —You’re exactly as I pictured you, said Voxlauer.

  —Pardon me for not believing you. I hardly look the type. Kurt cocked his head, still squinting. —You do, though, actually, in your weather-beaten way.

  —Yes? What type is that?

  —The lover, Kurt said softly.

  Voxlauer said nothing. Kurt watched him awhile longer, head cocked strangely to one side, then leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. —I’m not threatening you, Oskar.

  —No?

  Kurt shook his head. —Not in the slightest. Though I don’t expect you to believe me yet.

  —I’d like to believe you, Obersturmführer. Very much. But first I’d have to understand you.

  —It’s really very simple, Kurt said, his face very close now, wide-eyed and sincere. —I wanted to thank you, Oskar. That’s why we’re here.

  Voxlauer laughed, fighting the urge to take a step backward. — Thank me? What in hell for?

  —For allowing this to happen. My time with Else. This . . . reunion.

  —I had nothing to do with that, Obersturmführer. Believe me.

  —Never mind. Accept my thanks anyway, cousin-in-law, if you can bear to.

  Voxlauer looked at him for a long moment, studying his round, freckled, boyish face, smooth-featured and impossible to decipher, before raising his shoulders once and letting them fall. —All right, he said.

  Kurt took a deep breath. —When I called on your mother with that summons note, Oskar, he said, turning again to face the water—I’d determined to make clear to you the fact of my return. I had every intention of threatening you then. You are suspected of being a Bolshevist and a spy. Your choice of occupation is highly suspect and your motive for hiding yourself away in this muddy little corner of nowhere equally so. Of course, on that last count I was privy to a certain knowledge. He grimaced. —The thought of my cousin consorting with such a person sickened me to my innermost self. I resolved to meet with you face-to-face and to make this understood.

  —What stopped you?

  —I had my reasons at that time, Herr Voxlauer, for avoiding this valley.

  —I see.

  —Do you? Good. Don’t trouble yourself any further about them. It might not be too much to say that they saved you a great deal of suffering.

  —I’m grateful, said Voxlauer. He paused, wheezing slightly, feeling a weakness building in his chest. Please let it not come just yet. Please not just yet, he thought. He stepped back and to one side, feeling light and unsteady on his feet.

  —Now, Oskar, we’ve made our peace. Else has made things clear to me as best she can and you and I have had this very important talk. I’ve thanked you for welcoming me hospitably, I might even say charitably, back to this valley. And you’ve accepted my thanks.

  —I see, Voxlauer said, feeling the ground underneath him settle.

  —Yes. In the shade of his hand Kurt’s expression changed slightly. —My role in town is to serve as the mouthpiece of the party that made me, Oskar, and little else besides. I had hoped, firmly intended, in fact, that up here I might begin to have a different purpose. He let out a sigh. —What do you think? Would that be possible?

  Voxlauer said nothing for a long moment. —What purpose?

  Kurt’s eyes were clear and patient. —You have your ideas about illegals and the unification and your ideas are very well known to me. Does that surprise you?

  Voxlauer shook his head.

  —I have my own problems with the unification. Kurt took a step back, as if to see him better. —Yes; I thought that might give you pause. Shall I tell you what they are?

  —Please.

  —It may appear to you, Voxlauer, that the unification movement has made me a powerful man. I don’t fault anyone for that assumption, you least of all, but the fact is that I have been made a fool of. He waved his fingers in the air. —Things were said and written and alluded to, promises, I suppose you’d say, meant to keep me happy and committed to my work, which was often very dangerous. Of these many promises not a single one was kept. I never wanted to return this way, as some kind of . . .

  His voice drifted off. —Are you listening to me at all, Voxlauer?

  —I’m listening.

  Kurt sighed. —It wasn’t going to happen this way, that’s all. The old guard, all the old illegals pensioned off, farmed out into the hills, Reichs-German fops in every post. This wasn’t what any of us wanted for this country. Ever. We were coming as equals to the Reich, not as some bastard colony. The Austrians were to have positions. I, he said, tapping himself on the breastbone—I was to have a position, Voxlauer. A real one. I would have rearranged things in this stinking country of ours, I can tell you. You wouldn’t have recognized it.


  —I don’t recognize it now, said Voxlauer.

  —What is it you think about me? That I hate the Jews? I’ve known many in my life that I’ve liked well. I’m an intelligent man, Oskar. I reserve the right to judge every man’s Jewishness, such as it is, for myself.

  —I congratulate you.

  —Just the same I admire strength in a man, Oskar, and I despise all forms of cunning. I think I may safely say that I hate cunning more than any other human failing. I hate it with a blind and unrelenting hate. You make a mistake, for example, if you think your Herr Ryslavy is suffering for any other reason. I am not a brute, Oskar, or a fanatic. But neither am I a fool.

  —I never thought you were, Obersturmführer.

  —Call me Kurt, for heaven’s sake, Oskar. Kurt coughed. —We’re practically family.

  —You’re not a fool, Kurt.

  Kurt was still watching him. —Understand, Oskar, that when I come on these visits I come in my civilian dress. My uniform stays behind in my rooms, thank Christ, airing out on a little wooden peg. He breathed in deeply. —We’re outside of history here, the four of us.

  —If I was a Red you’d have had me killed anyway.

  —Maybe so, said Kurt. —Eventually. But only for the sin of bringing history into this valley.

  —What is there, exactly, between you and Else now, aside from history? said Voxlauer carefully.

  —Blood, of course, Kurt said, stepping away from the bank. —The girl, Oskar. Some small sense of the future. Doesn’t the future matter to you at all?

  —It matters, said Voxlauer. —It’s beginning to.

  —And you ask what binds me to my only cousin? You’re wonderfully dense at times, Voxlauer, for a man of the great outdoors.

  —I didn’t ask you that, said Voxlauer, squinting at him against the glare. —I asked what there was between you.

  —There’s you, Herr Voxlauer, first of all, Kurt said brightly, starting toward the cottage. Voxlauer hung back very briefly, playing with the idea of striking off into the pines. Watching Kurt’s small-boned frame moving jerkily over the marshy ground, his thick reddish hair pressed imperfectly down onto his head, Voxlauer saw him for one fleeting instant as a young boy, walking with that same gait in pond-sodden clothes toward that same cottage, empty-headed and self-assured. Whatever menace he’d held vanished utterly in that instant. He was wonderful to watch, moving awkwardly across the meadow, as lovely in his way as Else was: her complement. Resi, too, corresponded to them absolutely. As he began to walk forward the thought came to Voxlauer that it might be best, after all, to keep out of such a perfect picture.

  Reaching the door first, Kurt glanced over his shoulder before trying the handle. Voxlauer held the keys up and jangled them. Kurt shook his head good-naturedly.

  —It’s a strange sort of floating peace you’ve made for yourself up here, Voxlauer. You must feel very satisfied, holed up in your little patch of woods.

  Voxlauer came slowly up the steps. —It’s not my patch of woods. You know that very well.

  —Come now, cousin-in-law! Confess! All alone up here, uncomplicated by politics, no one to watch over you; you must feel wonderfully free!

  —I have someone to watch over me, Obersturmführer. Have you forgotten?

  Kurt only shrugged his shoulders. —Are you a Red, Oskar? he said almost wistfully.

  —Does that word have a meaning up here, outside of history? Voxlauer brought his shoulder against the door and pushed it open.

  —Ah! You’re a wily bastard, aren’t you! Kurt said appreciatively. He leaned forward to peer past Voxlauer into the gloom. —What did you leave behind with the Bolsheviks, you wily bastard? A girl? A wife? Family?

  —A wife, said Voxlauer, stepping away from the door to let Kurt pass. —No family.

  —And I have a family without a wife! We make quite a pair, don’t we.

  —You have the future, said Voxlauer, smiling. —You have the Reich.

  Kurt paused in mid-stride, looking back at him thoughtfully. —When I was in Berlin, Voxlauer, during the term of my exile, I watched our cause gaining momentum hour by hour. A beautiful thing, beautiful, to have a cause, especially when you are lonely. We nursed it together like midwives, the best of us, and the people who scorned it or hindered it gradually fell away. Some tried, when it was far too late, to recast themselves as our comrades. He pursed his lips. —That’s not your idea, is it?

  —Would it work? said Voxlauer.

  —We’ll see, Kurt said, ducking under the lintel. —May I enter?

  When he’d searched the cottage to his satisfaction Kurt sat down at the table and flipped idly through the sketches. —These are by the old man, these two, he said, holding up the portraits. —I remember when he did them.

  —The one on the left’s of Resi, said Voxlauer, leaning against the doorframe.

  —Yes. I recognize her mother in it.

  —Not her father?

  Kurt frowned. —No, not her father so much.

  —Where is he now?

  —He left.

  —A friend of yours?

  —He was. Yes. We went away together.

  —I see.

  —She still thinks of me as a deserter, doesn’t she, Kurt said quietly.

  Voxlauer didn’t answer.

  —What do you think, Oskar? You’re no stranger to it, after all.

  —To what?

  Kurt grinned. —Desertion, of course.

  —I don’t actually cherish an opinion on the subject, Voxlauer said tightly.

  —No? Tell me something, Herr Voxlauer, said Kurt, looking around the room. —What was it drove you to hide away up here in this filthy hole? He let the sketches flutter one by one onto the table. —What was it, Voxlauer? He paused a moment. —Shame?

  Voxlauer went to the door and held it open. —I suppose it was, he said. —But not the sort you’d understand, Obersturmführer.

  THE ILLEGALS

  AUGUST 1938

  The morning of the day we shot Chancellor Dollfuss a rally was announced over the radio. The usual selection of bureaucrats would speak, followed by assorted Home Front mannequins, and finally Dollfuss himself, on the thirteen-inch brass platform he brought with him to all his speeches, sometime in the early evening. The Brown Shirts were planning to attend with their smoke bombs and their broom handles and we said nothing to discourage them. “Let’s just keep them in the dark for the time being,” said our operations chief, Glass, grinning at no one in particular from his couch by the teletype. “It’s their natural condition.” One of the younger boys guffawed. Glass leaned back and continued to wait for word from Berlin with absolute serenity, hands folded neatly in his lap. As I watched him I reminded myself again how much I admired his carefree air. The rest of us stood awkwardly about the office, glancing skittishly at one another, waiting for Glass to nod off as he always did after breakfast so we could stop holding in our excitement. I walked with measured slowness to the window. In the courtyard the boys were filing in lazily in twos and threes.

  We spent the rest of the morning strangely bored, playing tarok, watching Glass twitch and mumble in his sleep and dreaming up titles for ourselves in the postputsch government. I was elected minister of cultural sanitation or some such silliness. The putsch was still nothing more than fantasy to us. Street brawls and so on were for the Brown Shirts; we fancied ourselves an elite. A few of us had been hunting with our fathers and knew how to handle, load and fire a rifle. One or two of us had even shot a deer.

  Glass was the fat sly old uncle we were all desperate to impress. I had impressed him most thus far, largely through flattery, and thus was allowed to eavesdrop from time to time on his affairs, to spy on the other boys and to order them about when Glass himself was occupied or napping. At present there was nothing to be done but wait. Rain came down from the north shortly after ten, darkening the pavements. I played cards for a while, grew distracted, lost a little money. At noon the wire came from Berlin giving us our mandate
.

  Glass cabled the Brown Shirts straightaway with select details: a full and total putsch, signed into being by the Chancellor himself, whose abduction that afternoon he, Glass, was personally overseeing; seizure of rail and tramway lines, and radio; immediate opening of the border to Bavaria with the assistance of the Republic’s own Home Guard, already secretly sworn in allegiance to the Führer. In short, the complete incorporation, within thirty-six hours, of the Austrian Republic into the Greater German Reich. The Brown Shirts were furious, of course—it all came as a complete surprise to them. The telephone rang in seconds. I could hear the local SA brass screaming like Gypsies one after the other in Glass’s ear, refusing to back us. There was talk of double-dealings, provocateurship, even treason. They wanted a line straight to Himmler. Glass, needless to say, was tickled.

  “There’s no such thing as a direct line to the SS Führer,” Glass cooed, rolling his eyes at me. “If you’d like to protest to the Home Council, comrades . . .” He was still on the line when the first trucks arrived. Hearing them rolling in, he excused himself blithely and hung up the receiver. At that point we still had confidence the army would back us, and the Brown Shirts must have, too, or else figured us done for. Not that they would have warned us in any event. The Brown Shirts had their own plans for Dollfuss; execution by broom handle, most likely. We should have expected them to auction us off to the highest bidder. As it was, they sold us to the first one they could find.

  One of Glass’s more recent protégés knocked shyly on the office door, holding our disguises. We got into them quickly, no longer trying to choke back our excitement, giggling at our reflections in the hallway mirror like toddlers in a Nativity play. I was dressed as a lieutenant in the State Police, in creased, pleated grays and blacks; Glass had selected a Civil Guard’s uniform for himself, although he was not actually coming with us. “The spirit of the thing and so on, Bauer,” he said, struggling to wedge his calves into the knickerbockers. “They wouldn’t take me in the Guards, you know, back in ’23.”