The Right Hand of Sleep by John Wray

Author:John Wray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Murder, Gamekeepers, Jews, Jewish, Villages, Fiction, Literary, Austria, Historical, General
ISBN: 9780375706400
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2002-05-14T00:34:10+00:00

THE ILLEGALS

AUGUST 1938

The morning of the day we shot Chancellor Dollfuss a rally was announced over the radio. The usual selection of bureaucrats would speak, followed by assorted Home Front mannequins, and finally Dollfuss himself, on the thirteen-inch brass platform he brought with him to all his speeches, sometime in the early evening. The Brown Shirts were planning to attend with their smoke bombs and their broom handles and we said nothing to discourage them. “Let’s just keep them in the dark for the time being,” said our operations chief, Glass, grinning at no one in particular from his couch by the teletype. “It’s their natural condition.” One of the younger boys guffawed. Glass leaned back and continued to wait for word from Berlin with absolute serenity, hands folded neatly in his lap. As I watched him I reminded myself again how much I admired his carefree air. The rest of us stood awkwardly about the office, glancing skittishly at one another, waiting for Glass to nod off as he always did after breakfast so we could stop holding in our excitement. I walked with measured slowness to the window. In the courtyard the boys were filing in lazily in twos and threes.

We spent the rest of the morning strangely bored, playing tarok, watching Glass twitch and mumble in his sleep and dreaming up titles for ourselves in the postputsch government. I was elected minister of cultural sanitation or some such silliness. The putsch was still nothing more than fantasy to us. Street brawls and so on were for the Brown Shirts; we fancied ourselves an elite. A few of us had been hunting with our fathers and knew how to handle, load and fire a rifle. One or two of us had even shot a deer.

Glass was the fat sly old uncle we were all desperate to impress. I had impressed him most thus far, largely through flattery, and thus was allowed to eavesdrop from time to time on his affairs, to spy on the other boys and to order them about when Glass himself was occupied or napping. At present there was nothing to be done but wait. Rain came down from the north shortly after ten, darkening the pavements. I played cards for a while, grew distracted, lost a little money. At noon the wire came from Berlin giving us our mandate.

Glass cabled the Brown Shirts straightaway with select details: a full and total putsch, signed into being by the Chancellor himself, whose abduction that afternoon he, Glass, was personally overseeing; seizure of rail and tramway lines, and radio; immediate opening of the border to Bavaria with the assistance of the Republic’s own Home Guard, already secretly sworn in allegiance to the Führer. In short, the complete incorporation, within thirty-six hours, of the Austrian Republic into the Greater German Reich. The Brown Shirts were furious, of course—it all came as a complete surprise to them. The telephone rang in seconds. I could hear the local SA brass screaming like Gypsies one after the other in Glass’s ear, refusing to back us.

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