The Right Hand of Sleep (37 page)

—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.

He floated face downward with his arms trailing into the green as long as he could without breathing, listening to the far-off, bellows-like sounds coming up through the water, as though the whole of the world were breathing in his ears. Slowly he began to forget. Long thin filaments of bubbles swayed here and there above the green heaving curtain below him. The water was ice cold and soon he felt himself begin to shiver. He rolled onto his back and pushed his face above the surface of the pond. The air felt oily on his skin. A vibration made itself heard, loudening very gradually, and after a time a motorcycle came into view. Its driver saw Voxlauer in the water and held up a hand. Voxlauer found his footing and stood up slowly.