Footnote to History

Kissing cousins--a phrase that evokes all sorts of images, from the Rockwell-esque innocence of a pair of towheaded 6-year-olds sharing a malted to the Weimar-esque debauchery of a pair of towheaded libertines sharing a bed. In the Anschluss of March 1938, Austria rolled over and welcomed its kissing cousin Germany with open legs. Yet, in the way of all unhappy families, these relations were different in their own peculiar and mysterious way.

“The Right Hand of Sleep,” John Wray’s confident and compelling first novel, looks into one small corner of Austria during the Anschluss. What he finds adds little to the history of World War II but much to the exploration of human peculiarity.

His tale revolves around the adventures of one Oskar Voxlauer, an ordinary Austrian boy from the town of Niessen bei Villach. Voxlauer is the son of a famous opera composer and a second-rate opera singer who spends her days rolling balls of dough. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he is one of those hallowed children fortunate enough to fight two world wars.

His first is fought in Italy and is full of the microscopic confusion novelists paint better than historians. Shellshocked, he wanders away from his decimated battalion into desertion. But Voxlauer is one of those lucky people like Cain and Lazarus blessed with an immune system built of contradictions. As he travels eastward through Hungary and into the Bolshevik Ukraine, he is left unmolested by those he encounters. “My desertion,” he says, “was taken as nothing more than a romantic breach of decorum; the war had long since grown distasteful to these people. The idea of an Austrian boy of fine Biedermeier stock feeling sympathy for the Revolution, on the other hand, was preposterous to them--inconceivable, in fact. They were forced, eventually, to ignore me.”

Voxlauer passes the next 20 years living with a Ukrainian war widow, growing beets and surviving successive five-year plans. But the death of his beloved sends him westward back to Austria. The Niessen he finds upon his return in the spring of 1938 is a town infected with the early stages of National Socialism. His famous father has passed through a breakdown into suicide, and his Jewish friend Ryslavy is drinking more than he is making in his tavern. But Voxlauer and his mother are safe: Even the budding Nazis of Niessen, whose musical tastes run to Wagner and third-rate band composers, keep a respectful distance from the house of the famous composer and faded opera singer.

Nevertheless, Voxlauer runs to the hills, where he experiments with monasticism as Ryslavy’s gamekeeper. But as much of a loner as he may want to be, Voxlauer is human. He finds warmth in Else, who, once upon a time, had grown up in the gamekeeper’s hut, with her drunkard of a father and her cousin Kurt. Else brings protection to Voxlauer not only from the imagined terrors brought on by memories of his father’s suicide but also from the very real dangers approaching Niessen. As spring turns to fall, the homegrown Nazis begin to show their muscle. Fortunately for Voxlauer, they are led by the prodigal Kurt. Less fortunately, perhaps, Kurt may be more to Else than a kissing cousin.

Like Aharon Appelfeld’s “Badenheim 1939,” Wray’s “The Right Hand of Sleep” grinds its focus tightly on a small corner of the human comedy set on a larger tragic stage. While Wray sprawls at times and lets his hero use the bulkiness of a novel to wander into ill-defined thickets, he writes with an assurance that makes his Voxlauer both complex and compelling.

It is that much more surprising, therefore, that toward the end of the novel, Wray takes an unexpected and quite audacious leap away from his finest creation. Having done with Voxlauer’s own italicized flashback to the days of the World War I and post-revolutionary Russia, Wray italicizes the story of Nazi Kurt’s own glory days in exile. Thrown out of Austria for his membership in the illegal party, Kurt bands together with other Austrian Nazis as part of the ill-fated 1934 putsch that assassinated the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dllfuss and achieved little else. Kurt escapes back to Germany, eventually meets Heinrich Himmler and returns in the Anschluss to his native Niessen as the local Gauleiter.

But in the same way that his Ukrainian exile strengthened Voxlauer’s resolve to walk away from trouble, exile removed the illusions of glory and purpose from Kurt. Perhaps Wray’s message is that, whether their right hands are curled beneath their pillows or raised in salute, all exiles are unhappy in their own ways. God protect us from our cousins.