The Right Hand of Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page B

facing the cupboard door. —I haven’t said anything yet.
    —That’s a lie, Voxlauer said simply.
    After dinner he shaved off his beard with his father’s straight razor and let her cut his hair in front of a full-length mirror she’d saved from her opera days. Then he went out into the twilight, still dressed in his traveling clothes, and walked down through the garden.
    When he came to the bridge he turned and followed the creek for a minute or so till he reached the southern boundary stone. Then he went left, stepping over the creek, and made his way through the tight-woven bracken till he’d traced the property line east to the orchard. In places he barely recognized the garden and full-grown trees appeared suddenly before him where none existed in his memory. The birchwood pavilion at the northwest corner of the orchard was badly decayed and the floorboards felt spongelike and slippery beneath his feet. The house where Greiss and his son had lived was now locked and shuttered. The open barn next to it was empty except for the cart he’d fallen onto the night before. He wondered who had moved it. Had she? No, she was too old to do such things. Not too old, he reminded himself. Still.
    —Still, she looks old, said Voxlauer aloud.
    The vegetable garden lay under a thin shirt of ice where the slate wall shadowed it and skeletons of the last year’s wine hung in curls from the trellises and rattled with an angry tenacity as he brushed past them. When he rounded the house Maman was waiting for him on the verandah. —Don’t be too late, she called down. He said nothing in reply but went out through the gate and shutting it behind him made a small gesture, more an acknowledgment than a wave, and set off up the snow-guttered road to the ruin.
    Past the canal the road curved sharply uphill to the hump of pocked granite the ruin rose from, black and crumbling, like scaffolding for a vanished building. Three quarters around the outcrop the houses fell away and a trail wound through snarls of winter bracken to the summit. From there the ruin was like an immense stage set, gothic and fragile, behind which the entire plain lay shuttered against the cold. A ladder led up through the remains of the sacristy and he climbed to the roof and looked across the hillside.
    St. Michael’s and the square lay bare and unpeopled except for a few sedans and delivery cars spaced evenly in the snow and a pack of dogs circling the fountain, dry and crated over for the winter. The Niessener Hof and Gasthaus Rindt faced each other sullenly across the square, the Bahnhofstrasse lolling out between them. The avenue itself was largely unlit and he noticed that many of the shops he remembered toward the station had disappeared. A train was just pulling out and beyond it the alleys and lanes of town gave way to a belt of newer, more landed properties and beyond those the first modest farms. He cast about for the creek and found it where it forked at the canal and followed it with his eyes down into the garden and past the house where a light was still burning and further out still along the toll-road through the willows southward. The train passed silently between them, its twin taillights fluttering. He turned and clambered back down the ladder. The sky overhead was clear and cold.
    The fusilier came by a short time later and looked the sergeant over. He asked me if I had been wounded and I shook my head. He looked at me a moment, then told me to put my helmet on. I searched for it around me in the snow but couldn’t find it. Come over here, Private, the fusilier said. He motioned to me to take the sergeant’s legs and, leaning stiffly over, took hold of him by the sheepskin collar of his coat and pulled. The sergeant came away from the wall with a noise like tearing crepe and a little ravine of yellow snow tumbled after him onto our boots. We went with the body to the back lines, stumbling and slipping on the wet planks laid in pairs over the