The Right Hand of Sleep (3 page)

The Germans had new, lightweight artillery and quick-loading
mortars and shells filled with chlorine gas; they moved among us
like royalty the next few weeks, clean-shaven and imperious, giving lessons in the loading of shells. Everyone was talking about a
last big offensive before the snow made it impossible to move. The
general opinion among the Germans was that we were an unqualified disgrace and would have stayed where we were for the rest of
the war if not for the new artillery. Tullberg, their commanding
officer, compared us to a mouthful of rotten teeth, crying whenever the wind blew. Most of the others resented the Gemans but I,
for one, was eager to learn everything I could from them, especially
about the guns. My father had often explained to me that while
our empire was unsurpassed in the sophistication of its arts, he
credited his time in Berlin and Leipzig with whatever understanding of the modern world he might possess. “The Germans are our
rule-and-compass-toting cousins, Oskar,” he was fond of saying.
“Regrettable as it seems to us, we must study them.”

The new shells were black around the seams and flew off
soundlessly when you fired. I remember that best, out of everything: the soft, flat report of the firing gun and the faint click just
after, muffled and bright at once, like a cup or a spoon falling from
a low height onto the carpet. Gas burns were blue and white and
began under the skin. The gunners were all German and wore
down-quilted anoraks and yellow cowhide gloves to protect their
hands.

By the time of the twelfth offensive the snow had begun in
earnest and the new trenches we dug were set slantwise into the
drifts. We were closer to the Italians now than we’d ever been.
Mortars tore into the walls as though they were confetti paper and
burst through in great pillars of twisting smoke, scattering us like
pigeons up and down the line. The Germans had brought an
entirely different war with them from the one we’d been in; even
the Italians seemed to have noticed. I tried to imagine them huddled up the hill in their own dugouts, feeling the same fear I was
beginning to feel, but I could never manage to picture them as anything other than flat, gray-faced caricatures. Occasionally voices
would carry down to us in the pauses between shellings but they
always had a smoothed-over, lifeless quality to them because of the
snow and the trees and the near-to-constant wind. Sometimes at
night we’d hear the sound of singing.

Two days before the offensive the shelling stopped almost
completely. It was clear to everyone that the Italians knew what
was coming and when, but the Germans were relaxed and confident. On the day of the offensive we sat in a long row against the
uphill wall, pounding on our feet through the toes of our boots to
bring the feeling back into them, waiting on the order. Finally late
at night the word came through.

The bombardment lasted more than seven hours. I was feeder
to a German fusilier, a taps sergeant named Wachmann who was
patrician and friendly and spat whenever he had to give an order.
His sense of humor reminded me of my Uncle Gustl’s, self-serving
and full of bluster; he also had Gustl’s same Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches. I found myself wanting very badly to please him. We fired
at eight-minute intervals, sowing cover for the infantry, pausing
to give them time to reach their next point of shelter, then firing again. After three and a half hours of loading my hands were
numb and white with cold and Wachmann sent me down for
padded mittens. The walls of the back trenches made the firing
seem very far off and the narrow strip of sky overhead was patterned by clouds with streaks of thin, rust-colored smoke across
them. I was a long time getting the mittens.

When I came back to the post I saw that the wall had fallen in
and an instant or two later I saw Wachmann himself, pressed down
backward into the snow with his eyes shut and bleeding and violet
scalloped burns over his face and shoulders. He rocked from side
to side, arms pushed tightly down against his legs, murmuring
something through his blackened teeth I couldn’t decipher. His
mustache and eyebrows had been burned away and his face looked
to have been lifted up somehow and shifted slightly off its bones. I
knew as I looked at him that the noise of the bombardment was all
around me and that I myself was saying or shouting something but
all I could hear was the noise of Wachmann trying to speak. It was
a sickening noise. I stood without moving for a few moments
longer listening to it and deciding whether or not to touch him
or to take his pistol from its holster and kill him with it before
the sound of the shelling and my stuttering voice returned all
at once and I ran back through the trench and the columns of
infantry that were suddenly filling it, screaming for an officer. The
taps sergeant’s been hit, I gasped to the fusilier in the next gunner’s
post. He turned round and looked at me as though I’d just asked
him whether he could spare a schilling. Get back to your position,
you idiot! he yelled, shooing me away with his yellow gloves.

I ran back through the smoke to find the wall fallen further in
and the mortar canting over against the pile of shells. Wachmann
was still there with his head lolling back and a cord of thickened
mucus jutting like a tusk from his mouth into the snow. I watched
him for a little while, waiting for him to move, then crossed to the
far side of the dugout and vomited. Afterward I sat back against a
heap of spent shell casings and did nothing for a long time with the
guns booming all around me. I knew my leaving for the mittens
had had nothing to do with the rest but it was exactly that, the
thought that nothing I did could have made any difference, that
made me feel I should have been in the dugout when the shell came
down. Wachmann was just on the other side of the casings but I
couldn’t look at him anymore. I felt very small and very light. A
strange smell hung in the air, a smell like the tips in a box of
wooden matches that has gotten wet. The air was clotted thickly in
my mouth and it was hard to breathe. I stretched myself out on the
ground and tried to lie completely still, looking up at the play of
clouds and smoke across the sky. Hours passed. The returning fire
grew fainter and fainter, like the clatter of a departing train, then
vanished altogether. For the next half hour there was no sound
along the line but a wet, muffled buzzing. Then even that ended.
Everything was silent, palpable and alive, like the air between pealings of an enormous bell.

Voxlauer awoke late that night as the train entered the last limestone gorge curving down onto the plain. His pulse quickened instantly and he felt a cold weight pressing against his forehead and shoulders. He put his face to the window. The passageway now empty of freight threw its light onto the closing rock walls, leaded over and sheer. They could of course have been any walls but he knew it was the last gorge and memories fought for precedence in his brain and he felt bewildered and childlike in his fear. Why he should be afraid now, so groundlessly, he had no idea, but he was helpless in the face of it. With a great effort he brought the walls into focus. Fifty-odd meters down ran the brook, soon to vanish under the rubble of its bed only to reemerge two kilometers downstream in the pools of the old spa at Brunner’s Cross. His breath clung to the windowpane but he made no effort to clean the glass, looking out instead through the ebbing and gathering fog as the pines flew past. The bloodless white lights of the spa when they came marked the opening of the gorge into fir-shrouded eaves curving off to each side like the pages of an album, falling away and turning. Then came the river and the bend by which the bell towers were visible for the first time, the ruin looming up behind them like the hull of an immense capsized ship. To the left was the toll road to Italy running south between the willow rows; to the right the canal which held the half-moon-shaped town fast against the foothills, laddering up into the pines. He could feel the breath clutching in his throat like a baby’s, close-gutted and strange. But the air, when it came, was a nectar to him.

He chose not to enter by the front gate where Maman was sure to be waiting for him on the verandah, a little smaller than he remembered but otherwise unchanged with the ancient house behind her. At the last bend of the canal he turned down the narrow side lane into the orchard. The trees were still much as he’d pictured them, though they seemed a bit sparer, and the gravel of the lane was near to vanished under scrub. He gathered from this that the old gardener, Greiss, had died or else grown too old finally and moved down to Judenbach, where his son had a small property. Then it occurred to him that Greiss had already been old, very old, twenty years before and that his son had been called to duty three weeks before he, Voxlauer, had been. The son had been five or six years older than Voxlauer with thick orange hair and milk-colored skin and when his sister brought the news to his table at the Niessener Hof he had wept and taken off his shoes and refused to go home. And the old man had come and dragged him back to the garden and had beaten him with a split poplar cane until Maman threw open the shutters and shouted Enough! in that imperious way of hers. And the son had apologized to her and to everyone and had set off for the Isonzo the very next morning.

Coming to the back gate he found it locked and mortared shut at both its joinings. He kicked his pack under the lichened fence boards and proceeded to haul himself over it, no differently than he had in distant summers when he’d come home from Ryslavy’s after she and Père were already in bed. Coming down he landed on a cart leaning against the wall and his right foot drove clean through the cankered wood. He cursed sharply in the dark, pulled his foot back up through the planks, then crouched and felt around him for the pack. Finding it, he stood up carefully and walked as quietly as he could around the barn.

She had heard him crossing the plank footbridge over the creek and the house lights came on as he passed the old wine trellises. He’d not imagined it this way, when he’d still imagined it at all: arriving furtively in the middle of the night with only the empty house and her to greet him. As if nothing had happened in the world. When he came to the front gate she was waiting for him on the steps. She looked at him a full minute up and down pretending not to recognize him before smiling a little, almost ruefully, and leading him up to the verandah.

—Hello, Maman, he said, trying to find in her the person he remembered. She looked old, terribly old, older than even she had a right to look after all she’d lived through. She must be sick, he thought suddenly. The thought broke slowly over the next few moments, spreading inside him with a coldness that seemed to reach back over decades. I wonder how long she’s been like this, he thought. I wonder when it started. It seemed to him now, in the cold light that shone over everything, that he could remember a change in her letters of three or four years past, a sharper sense of reproach, shriller, more urgent. But I never thought she would look like this, he thought. She’s only just past sixty, for the love of God.

Yes. And Anna was only forty-eight, a few months over, and she died. The coldness washed over him again and he stood speechless, motionless, staring at her.

She was still studying him in silence, making the same frightened concessions, the same adjustments that he was making. Gradually a light began to kindle in her crumpled features and she broke into a smile. She pulled him to her and embraced him and he felt her withered arms and the lightness of her body.

—You’ve been away so long, she said finally, almost apologetically, in a voice far kinder than he’d expected.

—Don’t you know me anymore, Maman?

—Ach!
I know you, Oskar. She was still studying him, her face knit strangely together, out of sorrow or bemusement or some other long-preserved and near-to-forgotten emotion he could not have said. It was hard to say one thing or the other for the lines and the grimness around her bright, hard eyes. The smile still held somewhat flickeringly to her mouth.

—I’d had things to say, she said finally, slowly. —But I can’t remember any of them. It doesn’t matter. I’m happy I’ve lived to see you back, that’s all. I’m happy to see you, anyway, she said, blinking.

—I’m happy to see you too, Maman.

—But not to be back?

He looked around him at the verandah and the garden. —I don’t quite feel back, as yet.

—You will. She looked at him now without smiling but more comfortably, more confidently than she had before. —You do recognize your mother, don’t you? The woman who gave you life?

He grinned. —I thought you’d disavowed that act, Maman.

She laughed at this. —Only so I could keep my place in church, Oskar. You’ll not begrudge me that, I hope. She smiled again and took his arm. —Are you tired from the train? Hungry? Shall I make you something to eat?