by John Wray
He sat perfectly still. —Not till you answer me.
She turned back to the screen and was quiet. Finally she said: —She won’t come because he can keep her from coming. She won’t come because of who he is.
—Obersturmführer, you mean?
—Her father. He’s her father, she said, bringing a hand up to her mouth.
—Why could you not tell me this? Voxlauer said softly. —I’d already guessed.
—Because I knew you. Because I knew what you would think of me. Because if I had had a child—she was talking quickly now, on the verge again of anger, looking not at him but at the floor, the chairs, the screen door, all about her—Because I knew what you would think of me, having a child by such a man. Because I knew what kind of man he was. Because—
—What kind of man? said Voxlauer.
She stopped short. —What?
—You told me before, when I asked, that you didn’t know.
That you didn’t know what kind of man he was. That you didn’t know what it was he did. He paused to take a breath. —Was that a lie?
—Oskar, she said, crouching down beside his chair and taking hold of his arm. It was very dark in the room but he could see that her eyes were wet and she was trembling. Her hand on his arm was trembling too, moving up and down slowly from his wrist to his elbow. —Please, she said, breathing stutteringly. —Say you’ll go to him—
—You go to hell, said Voxlauer, getting up from the chair. He stepped past her where she crouched with her hand still trailing toward him and took up his coat. She made a low sound as he stepped past her and reached for the back of the chair to steady herself. Voxlauer pulled open the screen of the door and a stirring of warm air came into the room, rousing him as if out of a heavy sleep.
One hour later he was kneeling by the bank of the lower pond, pressing his fingers into the warm mud and breathing in the smell of the grass and the floating pollen. The water lapped shyly against the reeds. He moved further along the bank to a low bluff of gravel and washed his hands. A trout broke the surface close by, to his left. When his hands felt clean he stood and walked over the wet ground to the cottage.
The cottage gave off a low white hum as it had when he’d first seen it, glowing white against the flat blue slope like chalk against a blackboard. Long ago, now, he thought. How much simpler things were then. I was unhappy. He smiled. The cottage door hung slightly open. He stepped inside and felt about him for the table and chair, then sat down facing the vague blue rhombus of the door and waited.
Before long the first tracings of gray crept under the shutters and the room began to fill with a tentative yellow light. Voxlauer got up from the chair and opened the shutters, then sat down as before. After another hour he stood up stiffly and went down the steps and out to the road. The sweet damp smell of the ponds rose up to him as he passed the standing water. Midges and damselflies, reticulate and green, spun before him in fiery arabesques over the grass. As he watched them razor-thin streaks of light appeared in the wake of their serpentines and the ground underneath darkened suddenly, as though in an eclipse. Voxlauer ducked quickly down into the shadow of the pines and clenched his eyes shut. The ground fell away under his feet and rose up like a swinging door and fell away and he knelt down in a depression at the edge of the woods and doubled over till his face was pressed into the dust. His breath came more and more painfully and a cord of bile surged into his mouth and clung there, frothing and clotting against his lips. He lay down and pressed his arms against his sides. Beneath the smell of the bile a fine dry smell, comforting and close, crept up from the sun-warmed needles. He curled into a ball and sank slowly into the earth.
After a measureless length of time his breath came back to him and he was able to raise himself from the ground and spit out the rest of the bile. He sat forward and propped himself on his elbows and waited for his eyes to focus. The bile glistened in a puddle at his side. Gathering up a handful of needles and dirt, he covered it over, then brushed the needles from his clothes and climbed to the road.
At the road Voxlauer stood for a time with his head tipped back, helping his sight to clear by following the clouds from west to east, then turned down valley. He walked slowly through the trees from sunspot to sunspot, lingering in each for a moment or two with his arms close against his sides, shivering. At the junction he hesitated briefly, glancing up again at the sky, then went left up the trail to the meadow and the colony.
The huts stood bright and unchanged on the far side of the grass, half in shadow and half in weak, cloud-muted sunshine. A few fluttering rags still hung from lines strung between them. He moved toward them over the dew-heavy grass, the water seeping into his boots. All around the huts was a deep vibrating quiet. That’s a strange sound that quiet makes, thought Voxlauer. Like the sound of a train going into a tunnel, if you took away the noise of the rails. His footfalls as he began to move again seemed amplified by the clapboard walls around him and echoed grotesquely along the hard-packed ground. At the small circle of tamped earth at the center of the colony he hesitated, looking to his right and left.
The little pen to one side stood empty now and derelict and the wall of the terraced garden buckled in along its length where the soil had run out in the late spring rains. A few cracked plates jutted like sun-bleached bones out from the mud. By the garden wall he found a few turnips not yet turned up by deer and he ate them gratefully. His stomach hurt with a constant quiet pain. He leaned sideways with his cheek against the warm slate of the wall and closed his eyes.
The noise of a door clattering shut roused him a short while later. The sun had moved more completely now into the low bank of clouds and a steady wind was coming down off the cliffs. He slid from the wall and found the door of the meetinghouse swinging on its hinges, burls of dust floating and settling and swirling up again on the floor of the narrow entryway. Pushing on the door, he went into the little hall, which was pleasantly cool and desolate. A ring of water stains darkened the smooth plank floor where once a supper had been held. Many suppers, thought Voxlauer. Yes. But one especially. He remembered Else’s voice as it had sounded to him that first day, before she had ever whispered to him in desire or shouted at him or spoken his name, before he had known even the smallest thing about her. He stood remembering the room as it had looked then. A moth-gnawed blanket huddled now in one corner like a sleeping child. He thought of the blanket that had lain on the floor that day, the food in wooden bowls, the circle of nervous, jaundiced faces. Crossing to the blanket he pulled it up and uncovered the husked-out carcass of a mouse.
Passing through the other rooms he found nothing beyond some straw pallets thrown together in an alcove and the faint lingering smell of unwashed bodies. In the pantry a few sunflower seeds lay scattered along a high shelf and he put them one by one into his mouth, feeling worryless and numb. He looked out a long time at the bright blue beehouses as they changed hue almost imperceptibly in the fading light. After a time he went out through the hall and down the steps and around the house to them. A dark stream of bees came and went from a vent at the bottom of each door, silently and flickeringly, like light from a cinema projector. A few meters from the cabinets Voxlauer stopped and watched them funnel out and upward as though blown from a tiny puckered mouth. Everything was bright and still and silent. He moved his arm slowly toward the cabinet and felt nothing but coolness and a shivering in the air. All at once, as though shut off by a switch, the line of bees disappeared. The flickering had stopped. The cabinet doors hung slackly open, revealing the lifeless hives. Voxlauer looked about him, blinking. The sound of wind came down to him as always through the pines.
“Where are his shoes?” I asked after a moment.
“I have them here,” said Spengler.
I flirted momentarily with the idea of asking why Spengler had the shoes but said instead: “There are still Home Guard troops and bulls everywhere, Heinrich. They have sharpshooters now. I was almost just given a full state pardon, if
you take my meaning.”
Spengler furrowed his brow at this. He glanced at Ley. “Well?”
Ley got to his feet and began buttoning up his jacket. “I suppose I’d best go out to them,” he said, as casually as he could.
I stared at Spengler. “You’re not really going to let him waltz out of here, are you, Heinrich? With only the secretary of security left for us to haggle over?”
Spengler smiled at Ley, ignoring me completely. “Go on, Herr Minister. Go on out. Inform your men.”
I stared at them both, my mind a perfect blank. After a moment or two I realized I was holding the door for Ley and pushed it closed. “Could you possibly be such an idiot, Heinrich?” I managed to stutter. He continued to pay me no mind whatsoever. Ley put on his yellow minister’s cap and stepped to the door, turning to Spengler at the last moment and bowing. “Long live your revolution, Herr Spengler,” he said, touching his cap.
Spengler said nothing. Ley bowed once more and walked serenely out of the room.
“Just a minute!” Spengler shouted. Ley reappeared after a few seconds, frowning very slightly. “Yes?”
“Take old granddad here along with you,” Spengler said, pointing at the secretary of security, who looked up at us with an expression of amazement and rose uncertainly to his feet.
“Heinrich,” I pleaded.
“I’m tired of looking at you, granddad,” Spengler said kindly. The secretary hesitated the briefest instant, perhaps debating whether or not to take a bow, then shuffled quickly after his colleague, already vanished around the doorframe. I watched Spengler as he watched them go. “Why, Heinrich, for the love of God?”
Spengler shrugged. “One old man more or less. If you must know, I really was tired of looking at him, the ugly bugger.”
“I meant why shoot Dollfuss? Why? Do you honestly believe that Ley won’t cross us?”
Spengler shrugged again.
“Are you trying to kill yourself, Heinrich?” My voice had a far-off, hollow sound, like the rattling of two peas in a rubbish can.
Spengler only grimaced. He seemed hypnotized, or drunk, or half asleep. “Control yourself, Bauer. Eh? We have the Home Guard, don’t we?”
“The Home Guard just left, Heinrich. With the secretary of security.”
“The secretary of security,” Spengler repeated. He laughed. “Is that what he was, the old gasbag?”
Just then I was able to see an angel of death hovering quite clearly above Spengler’s left shoulder, opening like an umbrella. I saw it quite clearly. I closed my eyes, rubbed them and looked again. It was still there, much larger already, spreading now to take in the entire room. The nausea I’d felt earlier in the day hit me all at once and buckled me over against the wall. Spengler, for his part, took no notice of anything. He was busy reloading his pistol, sliding each greased green cartridge into its barrel with nurturing care. I took my eyes away from him and stared again at the blood-caked sheet covering Dollfuss’s tiny body.
“I’m going to check on Little Ernst and the boys,” I said, feeling behind me for the door handle.
Spengler glanced up. “Is that necessary?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“All right,” he said. I backed slowly out of the room and shut the door.
The conference room was abandoned. I went out through the reeking reception room to the corridor. Little Ernst had disappeared. Three boys I recognized only vaguely were there, leaning sleepily on their rifle stocks. The chancellery guards lay face down, just as they’d been before, but all of the tension seemed to have gone out of their bodies. Seeing me, the boys drew themselves to attention.
I raised my arm automatically in return, glancing again at the guards on the floor as I went by. When I was almost past them I stopped short. “Did you kill these men?” I said to the nearest boy.
“Yes, Obersturmführer.”
I sighed very deeply. “Why? Why did you kill them?”
The boy looked at me confusedly. “They were making noises, Obersturmführer.” He hesitated, scratching the back of his neck. “We told them two or three times to stop.”
I stepped very close to him. He was sixteen, seventeen at the oldest. Wide pink blotches of acne decorated his cheeks. “This is a suicide pact you’ve all drawn up together. Is that it?”
He looked down at his feet for a time without answering. “No, Obersturmführer.”
“Take these corpses downstairs, in-the-name-of-Christ!”
The boys nodded and said that they would and thanked me and saluted and clicked their heels. The one I’d spoken to looked troubled. “Downstairs where, Obersturmführer?”
The guards lay together in a slack brown pile with their hands still folded neatly against the backs of their heads. Some of them had wide round bloodstains on the backs of their shirts; some of them only looked asleep. The others looked to have been shot in the stomach and there was a huge amount of blood all around them on the floor. “Anywhere downstairs,” I said after a time. “Do you think you can manage them now without too much trouble?”
One of the other of the boys smiled. “Oh yes, Obersturmführer.” He was tall and had a clipped brown mustache and might have been as old as nineteen. “We can manage them now.”
As Voxlauer walked down to Pergau a cool rain began to fall. He wrapped the honeycomb he’d cut from the hives in a handkerchief of Else’s he’d found in a pocket of his coat and hurried through the town. Coming up the drive he slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether. She was in the garden, working on the hinges of the gate, and he felt himself overcome by a sudden fear of facing her out of doors. He turned and went a short distance down and waited until he heard the clatter of the screen, then walked slowly up the drive again, wondering what he could possibly say to her.
She was in the kitchen, washing her hands in a pressed-tin bowl. At his knock on the door she shifted slightly and granted him a weary smile. —You’ve brought something, she said, almost to herself. She took up a dish towel and dried her hands. —Aren’t you coming in?
Voxlauer opened the screen door, hanging back uncertainly in its frame, one foot still on the topmost step. —What do you have there? said Else.
He set the parcel down next to her without looking her in the eyes and went and sat mutely and penitently at the kitchen table. He heard her behind him pulling away the folds of the handkerchief and letting out a sigh, whether of relief or pleasure or resignation he would not have ventured to guess. A short while later she came to the table with the honeycomb on a china plate.
—The bees disappeared, said Voxlauer.
—What?
—All of a sudden.
—Oskar? she said, putting the plate down. —What is it?
—I don’t know, he said, still not able to look at her. —I didn’t come back for you to take care of me, he said after a moment.
Else smiled. —But you always come back sick, don’t you. It must be a very shabby, disease-infested place you go to, when you run away.
—I hate that goddamned cottage, said Voxlauer, smiling faintly.
She laughed a little and crossed over to the table and took him by the hair. —Oskar Voxlauer! she said after a moment, tugging his head back and forth. —By all rights you should be on the blacklist.
—I thought I was already.
—Not theirs. Mine. I have one of my own.
—I can’t think who would be on it, if not me.
—Yes. She laid her hand against his forehead. —I think you have a fever, she said after a moment. —I’m sure of it.
—I don’t care. Please don’t forgive me this easily, Else. I couldn’t stand it.
—Where did you sleep last night? she said, ignoring him. —Down a rabbit hole?
—In a casket, said Voxlauer. —Did I tell you . . . He let his voice trail away.
—What is it?
—I feel dizzy.
Else sighed. —Don’t run out like that again. I was up half the night. You’ll ruin my lo
oks if you’re not careful.
—I went up to the colony.
—The colony?
—There’s the proof, he said, pointing at the honey.
—Why there, of all places? What’s left to see?
Voxlauer didn’t answer for a time. Her hands on his temples lay smooth as polished wood and he was afraid if he said anything she might remove them. —A mouse, he said finally.
—And bees.
—Yes. But they disappeared. I told you before—
—Go to bed, Herr Gamekeeper. She raised his head and smoothed the hair back from his face. —You go to bed now.
—It’s just past noon, said Voxlauer, sitting up.
—That’s never stopped you before, has it? said Else. —I’ll come with you, if you want.
—In that case, said Voxlauer, following bashfully behind her. Sometime after dark he woke alone in the bed with a light streaming over the kitchen steps. He heard voices in the kitchen: Else’s and a man’s. He sat on the edge of the bed, dressing quietly without lighting the lamp. They were talking in a low monotone, his voice often indistinguishable from hers. Voxlauer finished dressing and went up the steps. —Oh! Hello, Pauli, he said after a moment, smiling confusedly.
—Oskar . . . Ryslavy said. He rose awkwardly from his place at the table.
Voxlauer looked from him to Else. —Why didn’t anybody wake me?
—You were fast asleep, said Else.
—What’s going on? said Voxlauer. —What are you two plotting?
—Oh, Oskar, said Ryslavy quietly.
Maman lay stretched out on a linen-covered plank over two wooden sawhorses in the parlor. A faint dew had gathered on her waxen upper lip. Voxlauer bent over and brought his face down close to hers. She looked younger now than before, younger and finer-featured and in some strange way more alive. But she was not, not at all. He laid his hands on hers and felt the rigor in them. A vague odor of lilac hung in the room. He turned round to Ryslavy. —Did you have her perfumed?
—I don’t think so, said Ryslavy. He stood a bit behind, shifting from foot to foot.
