The Right Hand of Sleep

by John Wray

  —The love of Yids and Gypsies for our wives and mothers is well known, the officer said. Someone in the crowd began to jeer. Voxlauer stood still one brief instant longer, looking from one face to the other. No one seemed to be laughing yet, or even smiling. Ryslavy had fallen back into the crowd, watching with the rest of them. Those who had made a show of leaving during his speech had returned and now crowded in on all sides, craning their necks to see. There seemed to be many more of them than before. The older mourners stared at the stage in simple disbelief. Gustl was nowhere to be seen. The officer had just taken a breath and was about to go on.

  Voxlauer stepped over to him. The officer checked himself and looked up into Voxlauer’s face, smiling. Vaguely Voxlauer was aware of the other men pressed close around him.

  —If you say one more word over my mother’s body, I’ll kill you, Voxlauer said.

  The officer’s smile widened. He wants me to do this, thought Voxlauer, looking into the narrow face, reddening subtly along the jawline. He wants me to do this and I will. I will do what he wants.

  —Herr Wiedehopp! Herr Wiedehopp! Please! It was Gustl’s voice, close at hand, sycophantic. Voxlauer could see nothing but the flush-cheeked face in front of him. The face turned slightly.

  —Since when have you called me by that name, little comrade? the face said, not smiling any longer.

  I will hit him, thought Voxlauer. Let it happen now. He saw the events of the last five months running together like rails dovetailing into a station, converging inevitably toward the moment and the act, concrete and inescapable. —Go away, Gustl, he said.

  Gustl ignored him. —Please, Herr Oberführer. Look at all the people. The officer glanced grudgingly about him. —I’ll stop this now. This minute. Please. Move the boys away, Herr Oberführer. I’ll put an end to it.

  There was a brief pause. Gustl still stood between them. The other four SS were nothing now but a circle of starched black cloth and silver buttons. Voxlauer peered out between the uniforms, looking for Ryslavy. He felt calm in that moment, almost content. Ryslavy seemed to have gone. Gustl and the officer were talking together quietly, their heads almost touching.

  After a time the officer looked up and moved away from Gustl. —Disperse this crowd, he said, stepping past Voxlauer indifferently.

  The three men from the diocese remained behind, waiting for Voxlauer beside the casket. Voxlauer moved tiredly to his corner and took hold of it and they began to walk. They walked measuredly, entirely alone now, down the canting rows of headstones with the casket heavy and awkward between them. At the grave it was laid on joists of unvarnished yellow wood looped together with canvas strips. After a perfunctory pause the joists were pulled away and the casket lowered. One end touched bottom before the other and made a soft thump, like the jostling of a boat against a pier. Sliding on the cushions, Voxlauer thought. The priest appeared again and made a slow baroque sign of the cross over the opening.

  —Dora Anna-Marie Voxlauer, said the priest with his reedy voice. —Pulvis es, et in Pulverem revertaris. Amen. He lowered his hand and left without glancing once at Voxlauer. The three attendants lingered, waiting for the customary schilling, then finally left as well, grumbling to each other.

  Voxlauer looked down at the casket with the canvas runners still trailing onto the cemetery lawn. —Far away from here, he said.

  A few minutes later Gustl came puffing down the row. Passing the grave, he glanced down briefly, then took Voxlauer by the shoulder. —Come along now, you godforsaken lunatic. Let’s you and I find us a mug and a table and sit down behind it and have ourselves a conference. A little meeting of the minds.

  Voxlauer blinked. —Haven’t you given up on me yet, officer?

  Gustl didn’t answer but steered him quickly down the row and out the cemetery gate. Voxlauer let himself be pulled along by the crook of his arm like a truant schoolboy, past the lumberyards and the mill and across the mill brook and the canal, past a long row of lumber trucks idling on the road above the gymnasium. —Where could those trucks be heading, I wonder? Voxlauer said.

  —Great plans are afoot, Gustl said, tapping the side of his nose. —There’ll be great work to be done soon. Man’s work, Oskar. Construction.

  —I see. Voxlauer was quiet for a time, looking over at the trucks. —What is it we’re to be constructing, Uncle?

  —The future, said Gustl, beaming.

  —The future, said Voxlauer. —Who would have guessed.

  —Don’t play the innocent, Oskar. It’s not attractive in a man of middle years, this coyness.

  —I’m not playing at anything, Uncle. I don’t have the spirit for it.

  Gustl looked at him crookedly. —Not still waving the Red flag, are you, nephew?

  —The Red flag? said Voxlauer, smiling in spite of himself.

  —Nobody thinks your way anymore, do you understand? Not a soul. You must see that yourself. Today, at least, you must have seen it. You nearly got yourself plucked and gutted.

  —They didn’t think my way back in Cherkassy either, if it makes you feel any better, Uncle. Nobody has ever thought “my way,” as you put it so nicely. Not even in Red Russia. I’d be a bigger fool than even you think to expect anybody to start now.

  —I like to think I’ve thought your way, said Gustl slowly. —I’d like to think I have some notion of your take on things.

  —Would you, Gustl? Voxlauer stopped short in the middle of the road. —What exactly would it get you, you old arse-licker?

  Gustl reddened. —Go on! Have your fun with me, a tired old man. I know how you think. You think like your father, that goddamned tea-sipper. A man of the people, are you, because you made faces at your French tutors? Not for one minute. You’re another would-be lord of the manor without a house and stables. Another bed-wetter. Another holy martyr. He spat passionately onto the curb. —Know what the people want, do you? You don’t know any more than he did, with his blessed goddamned Kaiser and his tailored pants.

  —You can think what you like about it, said Voxlauer.

  —He wanted a private peace, too, remember. Above everybody. Nobody was good enough to change his knickers, either. Not even your mother, God rest her. And where did it get him? Where did it get him, after everything?

  —Some people are good enough to change my knickers, Uncle.

  —You want to end up like the old fool? Is that it?

  —No, said Voxlauer, taking a breath. —But then he was mad, wasn’t he, my father. Voxlauer put a finger to his skull and tapped it. —And I, on the other hand, am very sane. Too right in the head for my own good, most likely. He laughed. —Bless you, Uncle, for asking me that question. I’ve been waiting nearly my whole life to answer it.

  Gustl stood in front of him now suddenly, almost clownishly, holding out a fat red hand. —Come down to Rindt’s with me, Oskar. One last favor to your old uncle. He held his hand out straight at Voxlauer’s chest, opening and closing his stubby fingers. —They’ll be drinking to your health before closing. I promise you. Let’s us bring them round together, you and I. He paused. —I won’t ask again.

  —Thanks all the same, said Voxlauer, looking up the street.

  —How’s that?

  —I said no. No thank you, Gustl. Not today.

  Gustl’s hand was still outstretched, flapping clumsily in the air like a poorly managed puppet. His face was a flat and lifeless shade of white. —Perhaps it’s for the best, he said quietly after a time.

  —Yes. Maybe so.

  The hand fell. —Take care, then, nephew. Try to keep out of sight.

  —You keep out of trouble yourself, said Voxlauer. He waved Gustl off down the empty street.

  I stayed on the chancellery roof three days and nights, drinking water from the gutters when it rained and hiding in the shadow of the chimneys from the full heat of day. I felt grateful, in spite of myself, to Almighty Providence for the fact that the putsch had been planned for the summer months. No one came through the skylights
after me; I doubt now whether the attic was ever searched. By the second day I realized no one was likely to be coming and I felt a vague amazement at the thought. I thought often, as well, about the vision I’d had in the little room, how it had been reserved for me and me alone, and wondered whether Spengler was already dead.

  By the second night the patrols had let up on the Ring and I felt very weak. Sometime late in the third night I woke with a horrible last-ditch thirst, an unbearable burning in my mouth and my windpipe. I slid across the damp tiles to my skylight and pushed it open and felt around with my foot for the top of the column of crates. They were still where I’d piled them and I scuttled down their ricketing length onto the floor, then stood leaning against them to steady myself, waiting for the spots to clear from my eyes. After a long time my sight was no better but I decided to carry on. I groped my way to the stairwell and went down. Before pulling aside the drapes at the bottom, I listened without moving until I was close to fainting; all I heard was my own breathing, shallow and rushed, and a faraway humming noise.

  The long corridor was empty. I took off my boots and walked along the carpet past the conference hall and the chancellor’s rooms, past the place where the bodies of the guards had lain, to the head of the marble stairs leading down to the lobby. It was very dark on the stairs but a faint glow came in from the streetlamps. The cut-glass chandeliers flickered dimly. I sat awhile at the top of the stairs, waiting for the night watch to pass on its rounds. After a few minutes a man came out from beneath me and made a haphazard circuit of the lobby. I watched him through the banister, looking behind me now and again and tying my bootlaces. Eventually he was gone and I hurried down the stairs. The doors that had been battered open by the gendarmes were only poorly closed and I pushed one of them open and walked out through the courtyard into the open air.

  After leafing through the early-morning papers and learning to my profound relief that all conspirators, with the exception of Glass, were officially in police custody, I decided to buy a ticket for the next train to Bavaria at the main counter of the Westbahnhof like any other tourist. Before going to the station, I stopped at the house of a friend and supporter, a philology student at the university, to change into a plain brown suit I’d left there. My friend was very surprised to see me and confessed with a guilty look that he’d thrown away all the clothes I’d given him for fear of being arrested. As there was nothing else to be done, I helped myself to some clothes of his, a very handsome pair of spats and a suit of lightweight summer twill, and took twenty dog-eared marks to replace the hundred-schilling note I’d left in the pocket of my coat. He was a good boy really, of simple means, et cetera. His father was a draftsman in an engineering firm and a long-term supporter of the cause. He offered me his passport as well, but I saw no reason not to travel with my own.

  I boarded the Munich Express without a care in the world, rolling cozily into Bavaria in the first-class car, chatting about football matches and stomach trouble and politics and the latest styles of hats. My companions were mostly businesspeople of one kind or another, heavy sober-eyed men very worried over the state of international affairs. Every aspect of international affairs worried them, of course, but mainly they seemed worried about the possibility of a British trade embargo, or a “commodities freeze,” as a result of the Dollfuss affair. I was hard put to put on a somber face, giddy as I’d begun to feel the farther we traveled from Vienna, but I made a concerted effort—otherwise it would all have seemed just too ridiculously easy. I was asked whether as an Austrian, a neutral party, as it were, I thought an embargo might occur and I allowed that I thought it very likely. They shook their heads gravely at this and clucked at one another. A bristle-haired, mustachioed banker from the Berchtesgaden Chamber of Commerce, returning from a spa holiday with his tubercular-looking wife, asked me what it was that had brought me into Germany. “The assassination of the Austrian Chancellor,” I answered.

  “Of course,” he said, nodding sympathetically. “Are you very affected?”

  “I should say so, mein Herr. I am.”

  “Did you know the Chancellor well?” asked the wife.

  “Tut, Berthe!” said her husband. “I apologize for my wife’s indelicacies, Herr Bauer.”

  I waved this off. “Not very well, to be honest,” I said, turning to her. “But I was present at his execution. He died like a fish.” I rolled my eyes and made gulping noises at them across the aisle.

  “Good gracious!” said the wife. She seemed not at all taken aback. After a moment she glanced over at her husband, who was looking me over from top to bottom, his baggy-lidded eyes suddenly open very wide. “What exactly do you mean, Herr Bauer?” the wife whispered after a breathless little pause.

  I was still wearing my policeman’s shirt under the borrowed suit and I unbuttoned the jacket without further ado and showed it to them. They were incredulous at first, of course, but by the time the train pulled into the station at Munich I had convinced them completely and won my first admirers. I was to stay as an honored guest at their town house in the old city for a period of “convalescence,” however long that might be. “We are not only patriots of the Reich but patriots of all of Germany!” my host declared, perilously close to tears. His wife wept freely as she escorted me down the platform, flushed with excitement at the prospect of sheltering a “freedom fighter,” as I was newly christened. “Just think of it, Gottfried!” she said over and over.

  A man with a car was waiting for us outside the station and we climbed inside and rolled off down the avenue. My hostess asked with infinite gentleness if I wanted the top up or down and I answered: “Down.” The afternoon was hazy and warm. We drove at a slow, stately pace through the university, across the Isar and along the bank past one beautiful villa after another. I was overcome gradually by fatigue and happiness and a vast upsurging of relief. I fell asleep in the front passenger seat of the sedan beside the driver and woke sometime the next morning in a sun-flooded room on a canopied bed, happier than I’d ever been since leaving Niessen. I lay in bed, staring at the intricate plaster moldings of the ceiling, thinking idly about the future.

  I’d been awake for not quite an hour when a knock came on the gilt-rimmed, ebony-paneled door and a girl entered carrying a tray of Berchtner rolls and a pot of steaming chocolate. I stared at her. She crossed the room without a word and unclapped the copper legs of the tray, positioning it over my lap. Then she poured a cup of chocolate, set it down, took a few steps back and watched attentively while I ate. I talked to her a little between mouthfuls and learned that my patrons were away from the house and wouldn’t return till the following evening. I was to avail myself of every conceivable comfort. I looked again at the girl, who was small and firmly built, with cropped blond hair and thick-fingered, nervous hands. “Flutter about much, do they, our hosts?” I asked her. She shrugged and stared down at her feet, which were ever so slightly pigeon-toed. I decided to devote myself to the chocolate and the rolls and to ignore her.

  The girl stayed put, however, watching me. Every now and again she scuffed the floor restlessly with a heel, making a noise like the squeaking of a wooden hinge.

  “Well? What is it?” I asked finally, setting down my cup.

  She reddened a little. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “Are you one of them?” she paused. “. . . The Legion?”

  “What are you talking about, little sister?”

  The girl frowned. “Reichsführer Göring’s Grand Austrian Legion,” she said slowly. “Are you one of them or not? I have a bet.”

  I looked her over a moment. She was very pretty. I had never heard of any Grand Austrian Legion and was dead certain no such group had ever existed. “Absolutely,” I said, pouring myself more chocolate.

  Leaving town that last time Voxlauer walked slowly, committing each relevant detail to memory in a way he hadn’t thought to when first he’d left. The thick slow water of the canal, the three mortared bridges
, the Bahnhofstrasse and the square, the double-steepled cathedral with the ruin just above it. The Niessener Hof, now shut down and abandoned. A few people at the far end of the square in the shadow of the fountain, talking in pleasant deep-toned voices and calling a joke up every so often to the open windows of a house a short way up the hill.

  The light was just withdrawing from the rooftops as Voxlauer climbed through the tangled summer brush to the ruin for a look across the plain. The three great windows were smothered with ivy, purple and evening-colored, and the roofs of town glimmered a blunt red behind them like stones in a dried-out riverbed. Another train piled high with timber cantilevered its way northward. Voxlauer sat in the grass with his back to the crumbling wall and watched the cool lid of the sky drop forgivingly over the earth. As he had twice before, he felt a vague foreknowledge taking shape within him like a swell building at sea, silently and slowly, gathering itself into a wave. He waited for a time with his eyes tightly closed to see if it would come, but it was still far away, small and dim and unremarkable. A short while later he climbed down and walked through the ruin into the pines.

  He woke the next morning on the pallet with the daylight full and bright in the little alcove. His mind was empty and content, like a wide, shallow saucer full of milk, and he lay a long time watching dust motes eddy in the window beams, easing himself slowly into wakefulness. Gradually, one at a time, the events of the past days came and settled on the surface of his awareness and dissolved in it, dispersing a still, quiet sadness that made his body feel heavy-limbed and bloodless under the sheets. An hour passed before he was able to stand and cross the damp floorboards to the cottage door and throw it open, squinting upward at the slate-blue sky. It was already very hot and the steps shone painfully in the sun. Voxlauer took off his shirt and pants and went down along the pond bank to where the water reflected the sky’s color most gently, lacing it with a livid green. Then he let himself fall slackly into the shallows.