Free The Right Hand of Sleep by John Wray

altogether different in the east than we thought of it at home, something vast and full of strange designs, a thing to keep well clear of. Jan himself came from a wealthy Prague family and had never questioned the architecture of things, as he termed it, until going to the war. He’d been on the Isonzo front for nearly two years and had spent the better part of his second year planning his desertion. We became friends over the following weeks and talked about the war and our decision to leave it until we were both of us free of any doubt. I came to see the restlessness of my last few years as the inevitable response to the smallness of Niessen, to its baubles-and-penance religion, to borrow another of Jan’s phrases, and to the way we’d had of living at a remove from things, discouraging all but a few friendships, keeping my father’s condition hidden as long as we could. Jan was something of a socialist and under his direction I came to view my past life as an haut-bourgeois evil and my father’s filigreed, salon-ready compositions as its most grotesque flowering. I began to blame the music, Niessen, the war, and anything else I could think of for my father’s death. The farther east we traveled the more my disgust grew at all that I had been raised to cherish and admire, from the French we had spoken each night at the dinner table to my mother’s cultivated fondness for Italian sweets.
    I had my seventeenth-birthday supper in a field by an open well for oxen, somewhere just southwest of Budapest: two autumn hares in a little brass tureen with a carrot and a spoonful of rancid butter. Welcome to the rest of life, Jan said proudly. I felt old, looking at him, and terrifyingly clear-headed. I knew even then that I’d not see Niessen again as a young man.
    Two or three nights later we came to a small farm on the city’s outskirts, a few low plaster buildings with sloping roofs set around a pond on a parcel of steep, muddy ground. We hadn’t eaten for two days and stared across the dull brackish water at the lights of the house. We waited a long time for them to go out, sitting on our rucksacks in the damp grass. There seemed to be a party going on. Finally Jan muttered something in Czech to two of the men and they stood and walked around the pond to the gate. We watched them go. Isn’t it a little dangerous, with everyone awake? I asked.
    Jan laughed. I’ve only sent them to beg, Oskar.
    We waited in silence. Suddenly there was a shout and the gate clattered open and the two Czechs came galloping full tilt around the pond. What the hell is it? Jan shouted once they’d reached us.
    We’re to come right in, they said, half in disbelief. Every one of us.
    When we came to the house we found that a huge plank table had already been cleared and pushed into the middle of the kitchen, and long benches dragged out from the pantry. The farmer and his three sons greeted us warmly as we entered and motioned to us to sit down and begin. They told us in cheerful patchwork German that the lady of the house was boiling potatoes and cabbage and had gone to the smokehouse for another yard of sausages. We looked at them in blank confusion, sheepish in our hunger, not daring to ask any further questions or touch any of the food. After a few minutes of painful, friendly silence, broken only by the growling of our stomachs, the farmer’s wife returned with a platter of smoked meats and a thick loaf of bread and set them down in front of us with a pitcher of pond-cooled beer. We must have sat dumbfoundedly for another moment blinking up at her because she laughed and lifted her upturned hands, saying Eat! Eat!
    We looked at each other for a few seconds and then set in, all of us grinning now like idiots.
    The wife spoke better German than her husband and as we ate she stood watching us proudly. She asked which regiment we’d deserted from and where we were headed. She was particularly curious as to how I’d come into the company. How