The Right Hand of Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

though he knew she must pass through it daily to reach the verandah. A line of wash was strung through the open door and he recognized his own linen dangling from it, steaming in the midmorning sun. He sat himself down with the sun at his back and his feet on the warm clay tiles and spread open a folio of photographs.
    The folio held several bundles of varying sizes randomly bound together. He undid the twine from each bundle and organized them into heaps, oldest to newest, along the yellow-glazed wall of the verandah. The first to catch his eye was a large overexposed picture of his father on the steps of the opera in a wide-brimmed fedora and a loden jacket, pointing at the ground. On the back of the photograph the words “new shoes” were scrawled in his father’s crimped, fastidious hand. A woman who might or might not have been Maman stood laughing in the middle distance, waving a patterned shawl.
    In the next picture she was more clearly visible. She stood frowning at the camera in mock displeasure, the playful curl of her lips wholly alien to his conception of her. In the third his father had removed his fedora and sat cross-legged on the steps, grinning and gesturing at the sky with his baton. On its back he had written “the fool.” Voxlauer looked at this picture for a long time, trying to imagine his mother and Père’s life before his birth, before she’d left the opera, before Père had stopped composing and become ill. He thought of their slow, courtly promenades along the canal, acknowledging the greetings of the passersby, and tried to imagine them much younger still, on a similar walk in Arnstadt, or in Teplitz-Schönau, or in Berlin. But the memory of Père in his last year came to him instead, as it always did: on his bench in the farthest corner of the orchard, hollowed out and unsure of his surroundings, aged beyond measure by his sickness and by the slow corruption of everything, the murders of the Kaiserin and of Archduke Ferdinand, the workers’ strikes and the revolutions and the Kaiser’s own idiocies and lastly, most of all, by the unforeseeable vastness of the war. Voxlauer laid the print down carefully by its edges.
    There followed in the pile a number of photographs well known to him of Maman in various of the roles she had performed in the years before her marriage, carefully composed publicity shots taken against a painted drop of Grecian tombs and arbors. La Bohème, Turandot, La Traviata. Names he’d been entranced by as a child. The gilt edges of the daguerreotypes muddied and discolored by thumbprints. Maman at seventeen, barely distinguishable behind crepe veils and sequins in a large-scale cast portrait for Aída. The opera house in Arnstadt, weather-stained and somber. A picture of his father visibly older and ill-of-health, reclining in a loose-fitting summer shirt on the verandah—fifty years of age, possibly a little more, reading to him from a tattered paper copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers.
    Later he found the pictures of Anna taken on the farm and at the market in Cherkassy. In the first she was in front of the house, her face to the hard, flat sun, the bright puddles of snow-thaw behind her bleeding into her outline. Her hair hung in two thick plaits and shone warmly through the sepia of the print. Her plain straight mouth was open slightly, as though she’d been talking as he fidgeted with the borrowed camera, and her hands were clasped tightly at her waist. In the photograph from Cherkassy they stood an arm’s length apart, both regarding the camera suspiciously, as though it were an unwelcome witness to their happiness. His cheeks were drawn and sunken from his vagrancy and his beard was growing in uneven, downy patches, like an adolescent’s or a beggar’s. Already these photographs, too, were taking on the quality of publicity shots for a wholly imaginary life. And this parlor and verandah which in past years he’d not been capable of remembering