PRISONERS WHO HADN’T BEEN MAIMED WERE FORCEMARCHED from the Piave to Varago. Roads were littered with the dead, Austrians killed while running or making a final stand, Italian soldiers yet unclaimed. Some looked as though they were slumped over with sleep and that a shout as we passed might rouse them; others were caught in bizarre attitudes and poses, twisted, spitting, begging. One blackened figure knelt with head down and hands open, as though waiting to receive a blessing. Overhead, tight squadrons of planes buzzed loud and low, and the echoes of artillery still rumbled in the east. Not one of us—hundreds of us—said a word as the Italians barked orders and took whatever chances they could to abuse us. For the first time since becoming a soldier, I despised my enemy, now that I was unarmed and no longer had the desire or the means to kill him.

We marched south by southwest. The clouds lifted and I could tell by the sun in which direction it was we were going. A young Italian patrolling our column (no more than a boy in a uniform that shined for not having been washed yet) hit me in the shoulder with some martial-looking ornamental staff and the pain that shot down my arm to my hand became searing and relentless, so that I halted and tottered and nearly dropped, but the prisoner behind me (a Bosnian, his accent thick and guttural, though I understood him) said to be strong and held me up.

“Halt den Mund!” the boy shouted in German, and I stood, took a deep breath, and stepped back into line. Through the filthy puttee that I had taken off my leg and wrapped around my hand, I could feel only my thumb. The rest might just as well have been hacked off and discarded.

We were marched to a concentration camp on the outskirts of a town they called San Biagio di Callalta. The camp was a sorting station for Austrian prisoners of war, and from there we followed the road to Treviso and stopped in another camp near the town of Noale, where they began separating us according to nationality. I found myself among Czechs and Slovaks entirely, in spite of the fact that I answered in German every question I was asked.

In the camps, there was talk of the Czecho-Slovak Legion, an army being mustered to defend the borders of the new country, and men who bore the lynx-eyed features of the Slavs saw to it that we had a bath, bread, meat, fresh drinking water, and a tarpaulin to sleep under. It was hard to believe, until, in the morning, they offered every one of us a gun and freedom from Italian prison if we agreed to put on another uniform and fight to protect our nation from a weakened but vengeful Hungary. “Those same princes who had deserted us in battle when we needed them most,” they said, men who (I suspected) had never seen battle.

What was a Czecho-Slovak to me, though, a boy raised among Carpathian peasants in a Magyar culture, professing loyalty in a poor school to a Habsburg, and speaking a language in secret they spoke in a land called America? What could those Czech propagandists tell me about nationality? Yet, on and on they went, the Bohemian officers of the legionnaires, telling us that the Hungarian king had kept us in his pocket for centuries, that our own nation was a right to us, and that a Czecho-Slovak division was already being trained to fight against the Austrians in the mountains.

“We are giving you the chance to fight now for yourselves!” they said with a flourish that seemed more bombastic than persuasive.

I said no, and didn’t say that I had hunted and put bullets through more than one man who wanted to desert, Czech or Slovak, Austrian or Hungarian. It didn’t matter. I had killed enough for several countries and was happy to stay in prison, where I belonged, not under the command of men who had scheduled trains during most of the war and now made one another captains for yet another army they’d gladly watch march into battle. To them, I must have looked like just another conscript who needed food and a doctor. Get him that, they reasoned, and we’ll get ourselves a soldier.

The next day, I marched to Padua with a handful of men more unable than unwilling to fight, mostly Slovaks and Rusyns, stripped now of the luxuries we had been given the day before and pushed into the holding pens of Austrian and Honvéd prisoners of war, most of whom looked as though they wouldn’t last the night.

When I awoke in that camp, I couldn’t get up off the ground on which I had been sleeping. Those of us who could walk were being rounded up and put onto trains, though no one spoke of where, and although I tried (fearing the alternative), I couldn’t move into formation, I was so wracked with pain and shivering (and may even have been babbling, although all the world seemed suddenly quiet to me). An Italian guard began kicking me and shouting “Andiamo!” and then moved to shoulder his rifle when one of the English soldiers at the camp ordered two women orderlies to get a litter and put me in line to see a doctor.

There, the first women I had seen since Slovenia in the spring of 1917 undid the poor dressing on my hand, washed it in iodine, and wrapped it in clean linen before making a note on a piece of paper pinned to me. One was a small, oddly plump girl with a gray and pockmarked face, a local drafted into service, her white dress yellowed under the arms and soaked with blood around her chest and belly. I remember feeling self-conscious in my delirium, realizing I must smell worse to her than she did to me, and yet she took such care, all in silence.

When the doctor arrived, he spoke to himself out loud, believing, I guessed, that he was alone among a sea of triumphal victors and their beaten foes, neither one of whom spoke his language.

“These men look as though they’ve been living on grass and horse flesh,” he said, sounding more irritated than concerned. “Not a Boche among them. What the hell kind of army is this?”

I wanted to tell him that he was right, we had been, and there was the occasional cup of tea brewed with ditch water, when we had a chance to make a fire to boil it.

All the while, he worked on my hand with distracted swiftness and telegraphed his moves by narrating them, as though consulting some other doctor in the room, though he was the only one, as far as I could tell. “Infection? Damn near. Clean shot from fairly close up. Fifth gone. Ring finger? No use. Take them both. Nurse! I’ll need a tray and sutures, and change that bloody apron! No English. Christ! Okay, Fritz. Lie down. You’ll never play the piano again.”

After the amputation, they kept me in a bed at that poor excuse for a hospital, changed my bandages daily, and fed me. When I could stand and the risk of infection had passed, they gave me new clothes (some dead Austrian’s old uniform) and shipped me out with the rest of the prisoners.

All of the trains I rode from there were old boxcars bolted shut, and I never saw daylight until we reached what a chipped and peeling sign at the station said was Livorno. And there we were boarded into the hold of an old coal-steamer ferry, which chugged across a lurching sea and landed on the island of Sardinia. The harbor town was deserted as we disembarked. Or perhaps its locals remained out of sight while this boatload of despised Austrians boarded the trains those locals rode every day from one town to another, and we disappeared in order and silence to the sentences that awaited us.

After a long journey that I reckoned was taking us south, the train stopped at a siding that could have been any stretch of track that dead-ended in a desert, or a quarry, or at the base of a mountain—anywhere that was nowhere—and we were separated by rank, marched through the gates of a compound that had been built long ago, given showers, deloused, handed clothes to wear that felt like burlap, led four men at a time into dark, bare cells with small uncovered slits cut in the stone above head height (and through which more mosquitoes came than light), and doled out a ration of a crust of bread and a tin of water. Still, it was no worse than where I’d slept at Fort Cherle and like a villa compared to the muddy pits in which we had made our stand on the Piave. I slept on the floor, not wanting to fight for a rack that served as a bed, and in the morning one of the men in our cell was dead and we were three, although we didn’t announce to the guards that he was dead until after we had gotten our breakfast of more bread and watered-down goat’s milk and shared his among us.

Not one of us moved on that first full day of imprisonment. The other two men had no wounds but were listless and feverish, and we all three sat or lay as though taking a short break after a long morning of hard labor and intending to get back to our work soon, but not one of us got up, not even to empty our bowels, and the place began to reek of shit. By evening, one of the prisoners was moaning quietly and the other seemed able to take shallow breaths, if he took breath at all. My hand throbbed with pain, though I welcomed it, for then I knew there was enough life in the limb for me to keep it, and my own exhaustion was simply that: exhaustion. Already I was feeling (as one of the others rolled off his rack in the dark and remained on the floor) something of the strength I once knew return to me. So I moved on to the bed and slept as well as I had slept since the night before Zlee was killed.

In the morning, both of my cell mates were dead and there was no breakfast. I was dragged out of the room past men wearing masks and dipping brooms in what smelled like buckets of lye water, and I was taken to another part of the prison and put in a cell similar to the other in everything but the window, which was of regular size but with iron bars across, and left there by myself.

 

 

MY HAND HEALED SLOWLY BUT WELL. WHEN THE ITALIAN soldier on the Piave shot me, the top half of my little finger was ripped off by the bullet, and on the march to the prisoners’ sorting station, my ring finger had begun to get infected. I would surely have lost my arm, or died from sepsis, if the English doctor in Padua hadn’t taken both fingers off at the palm, and I remember saying when I unwrapped my own bandages and looked down and saw my hand form the shape of a small pistol, “I won’t die by the sword after all.”

Daily I felt my strength increase, and I began to move more and go outside when the guards allowed it, and take in where it was they had sent me. The prison was a sandstone compound in a valley near the town of Cagliari, to the south of the island. It baked in the heat of the Mediterranean by day and sat in the path of a cold wind funneling down it by night, and it might have been one among hundreds of prisons, for all I knew, although this one surely wasn’t a temporary structure that was built to house an enemy vanquished in a war, but, rather, a prison of old merely opened to accommodate new inmates. When we were let out into the yard, all I could see were rugged mountains in the distance—they looked like they had only the night before risen fully from the earth—but I could smell from whichever direction the wind was coming, the faintest breath of sea. Because it was an old smell to me, and its wet, briny musk scrubbed the stench of death from my nostrils and mind (even in that prison), I began to long to smell it, the sea, and wondered how one lived so as to be near it always.

But life was still, day after day, the life of a prisoner. There is nothing more to say. Around me, men lived behind walls and died behind walls. The only difference between life here and on the battlefield was there we believed that the outcome of the war would be different, and so fought to that end. Here, we were reminded of our defeat, for although they died among comrades, death came quietly to those who couldn’t hold out any longer, and into that silence, too, went all hope that we might have fought for some purpose.

Austrian or Slav, the Italians treated us with contempt, and without the English officers back on the Piave to stop them, they would have shot every last one of us, I am convinced. But the Sardinians who met our steamer (in what I later learned was the town of Olbia), herded us onto the train, rode with us on the long, slow trek by rail, marched us to our internment, and ordered our lives, were men of the hills and the mountains, who understood us and trusted us, strangely, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, and so I came to love my jailers. They wanted us to live and thrive (they were visibly upset when one of us died, and so many of the men with whom I was sent there died), and gradually we ate what they ate, and those of us who stayed healthy were given coats for our outdoor work details as the hot summer months gave way to a chilly autumn, and if there was anything they forced us to do, it was to go outside.

“Ki proiri, arreparari. ... Ma proiri?” they’d say in their staccato tongue (a dialect strange even to the Italianspeaking Austrian in my cell block, who came to realize what they were saying to us one day, and that they meant well). “A roof is for the rain. Do you see any rain?” And to be sure, that summer it never rained, and though we were the beaten prisoners of a lost war, the sun and sky up above were freedom enough.

Or at least enough to remember that we were there for only a short time. For, often when we returned to our cells, the thin gruel they delivered was topped with two or three olives. “Mangia!” they’d say, their sunburned faces stretched into a smile. And sometimes, when all I expected was water in my tin cup, they poured a half ration of their wine, scarlet and tasting of earth and drupe, as though it had come to be by the hands of some god. Then they would adopt a tone of mock authority as they dolled out this drink to me and the other men in my row.

“One word of protest from you sheep fuckers tonight and we will turn the guns on you,” they’d say in the slow and measured Italian of the common soldier, a language I quickly came to understand. And guns? They had a few British Enfields that had been given to them and never fired, and some wore pistols low and loose in belts around their waists. But we were all just a bunch of sheep fuckers, they knew that, and they saw it in their hearts to have mercy on us, and I cradled my cup of wine, took in its scent as it rose, drained it, and gave in to sleep.

But not always did I sleep. Now that I was alone and flanked only by stone, the sights and sounds and smells of war were nowhere but in my memory, and yet from that more vivid and persistent life I began to see the faces of the men whom I’d held in the crosshairs of my sight before I fired on them. Their lips moved and yet they had no voice, and I knew that they thought of others who didn’t know they would be the last ones on their minds, and sometimes I saw them turn toward me in surprise—sometimes terror—somehow knowing that I was watching them, and they stared back, pleading, but I took no pity. I told myself over and over that it was war, but when you do this, it is like opening a gate and then turning away, as though what comes and goes is of no matter, until you are overrun and it is too late to bar the gate again against intruders.

And so I thought of the men on the Soca, the Tolmin, and in Plava. I thought of the first man I killed, and the man who lifted his head to shout and warn the others of me. I thought of the deserters we killed, and the sergeant and the captain I hated, and any man I passed in wave after wave of shelling whose eyes seemed to say, I’m waiting. I thought of the men on lookout across our lines in Kobarid, sometimes five a day Zlee and I killed, as simply as spotting pigeons. I thought of the father and son we were roped to in the Dolomiten and the bed of ice in which they now lay, the brothers at Cherle, Lieutenant Holub, the gunners and the boy who fought and died beside me on Papadopoli Island. And I never stopped thinking of Zlee, so that when I awoke in the early morning and rose covered in the sweat of my nightmares, I sensed his presence there at the foot of my bed, as though my own will had summoned him. And I addressed his ghost and said, “Is it better where you are? Have they forgiven you for all of these?” And the ghost shook his head, and the movement of that spirit seemed to make him disappear altogether.

Soon, night after night, there was no end to the litany, as though, now that I had known war and lived, there was nowhere I could go in peace where the war wouldn’t find me, and I would have gone mad were it not for the men who guarded me, who could read my face each morning and each night, and who changed my cell and my routine, and spoke to me occasionally when my food arrived, and still there was no escaping, and so I sat in my cell and prayed for death so as not to live in madness.

But on one of the days when, overnight, the wind had shifted with the seasons and the air was fresh, one of the old guards shook me awake in the morning and led me out through the yard and into a part of the prison that still held island prisoners, jailed for crimes heinous and mundane. There, they sat me next to an old man who was taking coffee in the sun, and I, too, was brought a small cup, and he began to speak of the weather and how he had been waiting for this day, when, with the wind, the entire island seemed to shift and change.

He was a Corsican and they called him “Banquo” because he had been imprisoned in the old jail for so long, he seemed a ghost himself, and no one knew what his crime had been (although he said to me, without my ever asking, that long, long ago he had killed a nobleman who had taken the virginity of his sister, and he never regretted once having thrust a knife into that man’s heart and then watching him die powerless and bewildered), and this meeting became our morning ritual, so that I began to wake on my own again in anticipation of it. When I could be put back to work again, it was he who crossed the yard and accompanied me to crack stones or dig latrines and then sat in the shade and tutored me in Italian, his rough tone giving way to the patient demeanor of a schoolmaster, or read to me from Emilio Salgari’s I Misteri della Jungla Nera, which one of the guards had given to him when he announced one day that it was his birthday.

 

 

IN NOVEMBER THE PRISON SWELLED WITH THOSE MEN OF OUR army who hadn’t been killed on the Piave when the Italians crushed Austria’s stand that autumn, men who were paraded into their cells, looking more like wraiths than prisoners of war, and who died without rising from their beds.

As my Italian improved, my conversations with Banquo began to become more far ranging, and he seemed to have an interest in and knowledge of life beyond those walls in a balance equal to his stoic acceptance of perpetual incarceration. On a cold day when jailers carried bodies out of the prison to a mass grave like men on a fire brigade, Banquo asked me in the yard, where we were drinking coffee and playing cards, how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well the sentence of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me.

He sat quietly for a long time and then said, “Como Io.”

To which I said, yes, like him, except that I didn’t kill just one and wasn’t expected to stop until I had murdered an army’s worth of men.

“One or many,” he said. “Still, they are dead and we are alive.” If there was a difference, he said, it was that I had marched with an army and that he had acted alone, but each believed that God was on his side, for no one raises a hand without convincing himself first that he is right.

From a far-off corner of the prison, there came the sound of singing, one of the guards, for the song was in Italian and spoke of a warrior who left his home to fight for his king, and whose lover begged him not to go, but he did, and she was so brokenhearted that she took her own life, and that kingdom lost the war, and when the warrior returned home, he wanted nothing more than to be consoled in his defeat by the woman he had left for the fighting, but who was now long gone, and he grew old with his sword and his shield at his bedside.

“Arma virumque cano,” Banquo said, “the guard’s song has reminded me of that.” He asked me if I knew the line and the poem, but I said that I didn’t, and he said that it was an old poem written in Latin and that he had learned it in school when he was a boy but had forgotten all of it except these first few words, and that he believed that nothing proved truer in the course of one’s life than a man’s incessant need to fight—even when convinced that he wants nothing more than peace—against someone, something, some other, so that he doesn’t go to his grave having lived to no purpose.

“I have had enough of my purpose,” I said.

“Well then, welcome to death,” he said, and smiled, so that his aged teeth looked like slabs of white marble, and I did indeed feel vanquished.

That night I faced again the same parade of visitors, and when it was over, Zlee sat at my bedside, as he always did, and I said nothing this time until I awoke and the sun was already high and hot in the sky, and the guard shouted through the door, “Russo!” (because every Slav was a Russian). “Tuto bene?”

That afternoon, the sun beginning already to sink low on the horizon, the wind picking up and bringing in the fresh scent of the sea, Banquo and I sat in the lengthening shade in the yard and I told him about the faces of the men who wouldn’t leave me or let me rest, the visitations I received afterward from my brother Zlee, and the feeling that it was I, more than all these others, who should have gone before them.

“Why,” he said, “so that you can haunt them?” He put his hand on my shoulder and said as he stared across the prison yard, “Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can’t give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don’t anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature.”

I told him that I had had a long time to think about the acceptance of my life and the outcome of the war, though I could not believe, after all that I’d seen, that there could be anything other than chance and misery in it.

“And then the spirits come, one by one, and when it’s over, there is Zlee, sitting, not speaking, waiting, and then nodding when I can only ask if there is something wrong, until he leaves me. Except this time I didn’t say a word, and he seemed saddened by this, and for me.”

“Ghosts are weak,” Banquo said, “and they want only to please. Don’t ask him questions. His questions have all been answered. Tell him that you love him, your brother, that you are sorry not to be with him, and that this is how our fates have been ordered. Ghosts are not the dead. They are our fear of death. Tell yourself, Jozef, not to be afraid.”

After a time, I asked, “What is left to be afraid of?”

And he said, “The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That’s it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake. Perhaps your brother Marian knows this.”

I never saw Zlee again in that prison or anywhere else (although there are days still when I would welcome his spirit before me, though I am fast approaching the same place where that spirit has gone). And the men, too, who haunted me began slowly in their time to fade away, so that when Banquo asked me one day if the faces of war still marched under the banner of death toward me, I said that the last time I had seen those faces, I’d addressed them and told them that I had put down my weapon and wanted to march with my back to the fight in the direction of home, and they disappeared into the morning.

“Bene,” he said, and, not long after, Banquo, who had saved me, fell ill with fever and never woke.

 

 

WE WERE RELEASED IN EARLY DECEMBER, THE JAILERS ONLY saying to us as they unlocked each of our cells and brought us out into the air of a frigid but brilliant dawn, “You should go now,” as though it was our idea to have come there in the first place.

But there are times, even now in my life, when I wonder if I might have stayed on that island, if those Sardinian guards had given me any chance whatsoever to fall out of line on the way to that same coal steamer that had brought us across the sea, slip away, and hide forever in the house of whatever man or woman would have me. For, though I say that I longed for home, I couldn’t say where that home was now. I had shed what rags were left of my uniform for a coarse shirt, trousers, and a woolen coat lined with sheepskin. I grew my first beard, thin and patchy as it was, because there were no razors to be found, and the food and work that marked my days brought some color and fullness back to my face. I left that island looking like not an Austrian prisoner of war but the Sardinians who had cared for me and fed me, and with familiarity came a tinge of fear at the distance and uncertainty in the world beyond that waited, so that when the steamer reached the mainland, I thought to stow away belowdecks and return for good to Sardinia, but we were under the charge of the police, and so we quickly boarded the trains that would take us to the borders of the new Italy, and an Austria bereft of its monarchy.

In Padua, we changed trains and moved northeast to Treviso, then across the Piave and Tagliamento again, rivers steely and quiet in the winter cold, but with scars of the war carved everywhere along their banks. From there, we pushed farther north to the upper valley until we came to the town of Pontebba. On the morning of the third day of our journey north, they uncoupled the car we had been riding in and shunted it off to a siding. A cold wind blew down from the Alps and I could tell that it was going to get colder, but after the close and filthy quarters of the train, the cloudless sky and sharp air were a welcome relief.

The scent of bread wafted from a bakery near the train station. Men who had thrown away or never worn a uniform walked through the streets on their way to work or a café, and women who might once have tended the wounded and who now tended goats opened shutters of shops and homes to let the winter light in. I moved slowly, more out of cautious hesitation than fatigue. I wasn’t strong, but I was healthy enough. The Italian police said that the new border was just a few miles from there and that the town of Villach was directly northeast.

“Illegal immigrants will be shot,” they warned. “Now go.” And that was it. We set off walking, first as a mob, then as large groups, then clusters still clinging to some sense of security in numbers. In Austria, on the banks of the Drava, I broke away from ten other men who said they were going to cross into Bohemia at Gmünd, where the legionnaires had headquarters. I turned and followed that river east until I came to the outskirts of Klagenfurt and the tiny village of Abtei, then turned south into the Karawanken Range so as to avoid all gatherings of men. For, even with the beard, there was no mistaking me for a twenty-year-old—soldier or no—and because these new armies of legionnaires were made up mostly of deserters, there was a feeling in Austria and Hungary that the war had been lost because of the Slavs. Moreover, with no money, the countryside was the only place I stood any chance to get food, whether by begging, stealing, or killing it, though I had no weapon with which to do so, and yet I found myself at peace in the mountains, feeling again that there I would not want for anything, nor would I be put upon to serve some malevolent master.

 

 

I TRAVELED EAST—IN THE BROAD DIRECTION OF THE HOME I had once known, like some migratory bird following the compass of instinct—and came out of the mountains and hugged the forested roads that connected the small hamlets and villages that had once made up the lands of old Hungary. For weeks I trekked, and in late morning on a day when I had already been walking for several hours, I could see from one of those roads a run-down hut nestled deep in a hollow. Some kind of camp, I thought, or just a poor lodging left to crumble, yet from a distance I could see a hole in the roof and a bird’s nest in the eve. It hadn’t been occupied for some time, but I thought there still might be something to eat, or something of value, inside.

As I got closer, I could hear voices, men’s voices, laughing and cajoling, as if they were at a game, and speaking Hungarian, although it sounded drunken. I crept up to a front window and peered inside. There were two Honvéd soldiers, looking as though they had gone through worse than I, one sitting at a wooden table, legs crossed, drinking from a bottle, the other bare-assed and having his way with some desperate whore lying inert on the dirt floor.

I didn’t want this kind of trouble, but just as I ducked down to creep away, I heard the one at the table shout too loudly for the small space, “Give me a turn! Then I’m gonna gut the bitch.”

The other rolled off and slapped the girl in the face as he did so, and I could see plainly that she was just a girl. A Gypsy, it appeared, from her features, thirteen, fourteen maybe, at the most, and I could see that she was pregnant, and far along, by the looks of it. The man swaggered as he got up from the table, and she didn’t try to run or roll over or do anything. I thought she might be dead until I saw her hands reach down and touch her belly, big as a globe.

“That’s right, that’s right,” the man spit out as he pulled down his trousers. “Three Gypsies in one day, Emil, hey?” And his friend smiled with his teeth, sat down at the same table, and finished off whatever liquid swirled in that bottle.

They must have been drunk when they got there, because there was a carbine at the back of the hut, just out of arm’s reach of the girl, and another one propped against the wall next to the door. They wouldn’t have been so careless otherwise, or maybe they would have. From where I crouched, I was almost within arm’s reach of the closest weapon. Even if it wasn’t loaded, I figured, I could use the butt of it on the bastard sitting in the chair. I crept from the window to the door, pushed it open, grabbed the rifle, and quickly checked the bolt. One round left. The man at the table was rising, his eyes wide and teeth snarling. He looked bigger, and I suddenly wondered what it was I was trying to do. He came at me fast, too fast for that room, and I shot him point-blank in the neck, and he jerked back like he was on a rope and blood poured out of him in a flume, covering my head and face, so that I was blinded for a moment. That was when the other one jumped on me with his knife, the same kind of dagger we’d all carried in the trenches. I reached up as he was about to sink it into my chest and held his hand above my head with both arms. He was strong and I ... I wasn’t so much anymore. Slowly, slowly he brought the knife toward me, as if I was losing at a game of arm wrestling, though this game wasn’t for a drink of brandy. With one last gasp, I pushed his hand up as hard as I could and his whole body tensed, eyes squinting with pain and surprise, then he dropped the knife and crumpled on top of me.

The girl was standing over him, her hands bloodied, a knife in the dead man’s side, right below the rib cage and into the kidney. I got on my feet and said to her in Hungarian, “You’re safe now.”

She kicked the dead Honvéd and spat. “Gadjo.”

That’s what he was, just as I was. Gadjo. A non-Rom, no better than these same deserters who had raped and tried to kill her and her unborn baby, and as I wiped blood off my face and hands and cursed that it had fouled my coat, the girl ripped through the pockets of the soldiers and threw a mixture of gold coins and large silver buttons into the fold of her dress. It seemed like a great deal of money and trinkets for a couple of drunken Honvéd to have on them. When she was done, she stood holding her dress and the knife and looked at me as though measuring me with her eyes, trying to decide if she might not have been better off with the drunks.

“I need you to help me bury my husband,” she said.

We walked out of the hut and toward the edge of the forest. There, by a tree, lay the body of man who had already been dead for a few days, facedown in the dirt, hands tied with cheap hemp behind his back while flies buzzed the muss of hair and blood and brains caked around his head. He had begun to smell like the rotting dead, a smell I had only gotten out of my nose after breathing sea air in Sardinia. The girl grabbed him by the back of the neck, lifted him, and laid him down again so that he faced upward, what was left of his face anyway.

She bent over him, began to straighten his clothes, and cried “Oh Bexhet, my poor Bexhet,” and then she stopped and looked up at me. “Something to dig with,” she said.

I went back to the house to get the knife and a wooden bucket I had seen near the door. When I returned, she was whispering into the dead man’s ears and putting the silver buttons she had taken from the Honvéd into his pockets. “They were ... my husband’s,” she said out loud. “He kept them on his jacket.” And I could see, then, torn threads on the man’s breast.

“What about the gold?” I asked.

“What about it? It’s mine. My wedding gift. Just another Cigánka, you think, eh, you bastard? Shut up and dig.” She used the Slovak word for Gypsy, so I knew that she had probably come from somewhere in the east and might be moving east as well, although I wanted no traveling companion and hoped to be rid of her after we had buried her husband and I knew she was able to look after herself.

It took a few hours, but we eventually made a pit large enough to roll a corpse into. We packed down the earth hard over it, then piled a pyramid of rocks, four deep, to keep the animals out until that body was nothing more than bones. It was dark when we were finished.

“We’ll need to rest,” I said.

“We?” she said, derisively for a young girl. “You rest. I’m going.”

But she didn’t move from the spot. I went back into the hut and dragged the bodies of the soldiers outside, heavy as they were. I couldn’t move them far and only hoped that they wouldn’t attract animals at night. There was a fire pit on the other side of the hut, and so I used a piece of flint one of the prison guards had given me before I left and the Honvéd’s trench dagger (which I kept) to make a fire with a bit of burlap I found and a piece of paper the girl had discarded when she went through the soldiers’ pockets. It was going to be a cold night, and for as strong as that girl was trying to be, I knew she was, at that point, little stronger than I.

 

 

I FELL ASLEEP ON THE GROUND BY THE FIRE AND IN THE MORNING ached with cold, fatigue, and hunger. I thought that the girl had left me until I heard her rustling around inside the hut, where she had gone to sleep. She came outside holding both carbines and said, “If we don’t find food and somewhere else to sleep, we’ll die.”

She had cleaned up somehow—not a trace of dirt or any struggle she had been through from the day before. I stood up and stomped my feet to get some blood running through them, and she handed me the rifle that was loaded (I checked) and started walking, without any other word spoken.

I had seen and lived near Roma my entire life, and I knew only that they were despised and mistrusted for their singular desire to remain detached from all but their own insular culture and society. From this truth rose all other myths about them. Yet this young woman seemed not to hold in any way to that measure of mistrust around which I had been raised, and I looked upon her as she walked ahead as an altogether unknown and unsettling thing, unsettling to me on that morning (I knew then and will confess now) for her beauty. She had sloe-colored almond eyes and sharp cheeks centered by a kind of prizefighters’s nose, which was broad but perfectly symmetrical and almost elegant as it drew up and out of those cheeks. Her mouth and lips were more than full—they were too large and took up the entire lower portion of her face, while somehow still looking delicate whenever she spoke, and I never saw her smile. And all of her features were framed by black hair of a hue that seemed not to reflect light so much as exude it and which she kept pulled back to each side in braids in the manner of a schoolgirl, reminding me, in fact, that she was yet a girl. A girl who had a presence and allure to her that tugged at me in a way that I had never felt in a woman or a girl in my life. When I thought of it as we walked (she a good stretch out front but never out of sight), I told myself that it was strength. Her strength was what had attracted and held me. She seemed to have a strength that I, in all of my training and soldiering, could only grasp at. And she looked down on me. I was the filthy one. I was the man whose life she had saved, “for no good reason,” she’d said the first night we camped in a stand of firs and cooked the meat of a squirrel I had shot to bits. She moved about me as though I were a leper, insisted that she clean the meat herself, and doled out what portions there were unevenly, right in front of me, as though I were a child she’d just as soon backhand if I challenged her.

There wasn’t much discussion, though, about anything in those first few days we traveled together—or rather, moved in close proximity to each other. The only authority I had was with the rifle, and I said to her that we should save what bullets we had left for larger game, for I could see that we were never far from a deer or two. But there was no chance of tracking and shooting one as we walked forest paths and down empty roads while she kicked stones and picked up sticks, sang to herself, or lagged so far behind that when she wanted to scold me for any number of reasons she could think of, she had to yell ahead, until I told her that she should go on without me if she had no interest in food, because I was going to sit and wait and find some game to kill. She began to cry and said that she was very hungry and was only trying to take her mind off of that hunger. And so I told her that if she could keep a fire going, I could shoot and dress a deer, and then we’d have our fill.

We found a moss floor under snow near a creek, cleared some ground and camped there for a day and a night, and had to settle for a skinny hare for our supper, and the next morning hiked back out to the road and continued our journey, although she never kicked another stone, and sang quietly to her unborn child in a voice that was close and soothing to me, as well.

When she stopped suddenly once and I asked why, she shushed me and stood stiff and still by the roadside. Within minutes, a horse and cart appeared, the driver slowed and then sped up at the sight of us, his gaze fixed forward and his mouth in a sneer as he whipped his horse into a trot, and in his wake, we went along as before.

There were any number of places we could have stopped and rested for a few days, or longer, before moving on, although to where was never clear. Old hunting cabins, good caves, glens protected by stands of pine so thick that they worked better than walls to keep out the cold and wind. Yet the girl seemed to be in search of something, not her home village so much as a place or destination she had envisioned (or knew existed) along this path and would not cease walking until we had reached it. So we continued to camp, but never more than a full day, and in the morning she would poke me awake with a stick and say in Slovak, as though she needed to be sure that I understood it was time to leave, “Pod’me.”

But the snows were deep when we weren’t on a traveled road, and her condition hampered our progress more and more until we were lucky to go more than a few miles in daylight, and I no longer wondered to myself why I didn’t just hive off as we approached a town and make my own way to the border and then home. She had become a traveling companion by now, and although we still rarely spoke, after a while we no longer suspected each other of some impending treachery, and I felt the duty of a guide, or admirer-protector, and my thoughts turned to when— on the bank of what creek as she bent over to drink, or in the middle of the road, miles from anywhere—she would go into labor and I would be needed.

 

 

UNLIKELY AS IT SEEMED TO ME THEN, AND SOUNDS EVEN incredible now as I narrate these events, we covered as much distance on foot through the forests and farmlands of Slovenia and Hungary as our conditions allowed in the month of January 1919, and a great distance it was. And yet, our bodies weak and getting weaker, the nourishment we found along the way meager, I never feared for our physical well-being once the lingering threats of the war seemed to have abated and we found out how (or rather, she knew how) to avoid danger in the form of persons. What began to occupy me was the unspoken question of whether we would, together, make it to the end of the road we were on, which is to say, make it to the place we wanted, each to our own, to call home.

Do you see in that what was troubling me? I didn’t want to leave the side of this young woman whom the Fates had set in my path, or, to be fair, in whose path I had been set, a woman to whom my speaking would itself have been unlikely, if not forbidden or ridiculed in the world, and I struggled with a desire that seemed to have been pressed down or never allowed to emerge as it might have with a young man in another time and another place, for the young men of our time had had to turn themselves when they were yet boys to a man’s desire for war. But with that war over, and wandering solely through a world as though we two were the last, or perhaps the first again, man and woman alive, it was a desire to remain at her side, even if we could not touch, and witness birth as the snows melted and the days lengthened, after having witnessed death for so long.

And so it was that, after we had been walking from the setting of one new moon to another and it seemed I would spend the rest of my life afoot, regardless of where I lived, or what it was I did, and we both (though we each refused to admit this physical weakness) were approaching exhaustion from a lack of food (the game in the mountains and among the lakes and rivers we passed not as plentiful as I had hoped and expected), we came to a clearing on the edge of a forest and stopped. Up ahead, it looked as though the terrain was about to change, for there were no longer any dense stands of firs, or peaks visible in the distance. The ground looked more like clay, the trees sparser and yet heartier for having survived, although there was nothing naked or arid about the landscape, even in late winter.

There, on the rise of a hill, set some ways back from the road and framed by a stand of birch so that it wasn’t immediately visible, a farmhouse stood like a cutout in a fairy tale for children. To me, it was in a place too obvious and exposed, and for that reason I was suspicious and thought that we should go on and avoid it. Yet, she looked neither tentative nor surprised to see any of this—house or farmland—standing before her. We approached slowly and I helloed the porch in German and Hungarian but got no answer. A hen scratched about the yard until I tried to catch it and scared it into a weathered but passable barn. She told me to leave it, said, “We might get eggs from that one,” and pushed open the front door without any hesitation and walked inside as though she had intended to stop here to rest for a while. I slung the carbine I had been carrying at the ready over my shoulder and followed her.

What looked like a living area was clean and uncluttered, although largely because it was emptied. A white porcelain angel stood out of place on a fieldstone mantel above the hearth and there was an old photograph on the opposite wall of a bride and groom, but there was no furniture or bookshelves or anything of value beyond the personal. The kitchen was orderly, too, in its scarcity. There were some dry goods left in a pantry, but nothing to suggest anyone was coming back soon to prepare dinner. Two back rooms had been made up and then left, and the whole place seemed not a home but some Pietist’s boardinghouse that admitted only the plain and virtuous. The girl rocked a shovelful of ashes from the stove, shook out the box, ordered me to find wood so that we could get a fire going, and said that I might find something to cut with in the barn. Then she began rummaging through the pantry jars and tins for what edible things might remain there and told me before I left that if I found a bucket in the barn, I should check the well at the back of the house and see if it was fouled or still drinkable. “If it is, bring me some water before you fill the wood box.”

Outside, everything I needed was where she knew I could find it. A broken-down hayrack looked like it would keep us in kindling for a while. The barn had good tools that had been left hanging on a wall (where I found a bow saw and an ax that had been sharpened not too long ago), and at the back of the house, the well still had a pail attached to strong rope and a hand crank, and it splashed down after sixteen turns and came up with cold, clear springwater in it. I took a bucketful in to her, then pulled apart the hayrack and set to splitting some logs, and it occurred to me what we had stumbled upon, what the girl had anticipated, though without expecting such complete abandonment: the house of an entire family lost to the war. Father and sons had no doubt been conscripted and sent to the front, never to return. The mother and any other women left behind must have traveled to stay with relatives, moved to the city to find work and a means to support themselves, or died—somewhere, away from here—of disease or loneliness. Now there was only the dust and loess on the floors and windowsills of the place to indicate that no one would be returning to this house in any earthly fullness of time, and so that was where we stopped and lived, for the next month, it turned out, the girl and I, before it was her time.

 

 

WE HAD NO WAY OF MEASURING THE DAYS, AND IF WE’D HAD, I’m not sure we’d have kept track anyway. I would awake from the floor in the living room, where I slept always, to find her standing over the stove in that cabin, the scent of freshly brewed wintergreen and pine-needle tea mixed with wood smoke in the air, and an egg on the fire, if the old hen had decided to give one up, or strips of venison and rabbit, of which I kept us in thin supply. I searched for the wild asparagus that grew in the woods and hills around Görz and along the Soca, and for which Zlee and I had often foraged, but the dirt was too much like clay here and there weren’t the tall firs of the Slovenian forests. Still, the girl managed to find some beets in a root cellar, and where the snow was melting, there was witchgrass coming through, and these and rest sustained us.

One morning over tea, as though we had known each other our whole, short lives, I asked her if she had a name that I might call her by and she said she did but would never tell me. When I asked why, she said, “Because then you’ll know the truth,” and so I began to call her Tajna after that, a secret that would not be told, and she seemed to like it and began to answer to her new name.

We slipped into patterns of work, what little we could do, patterns prescribed to us by mores we knew without thought or effort. She remained in the kitchen whenever I was around, and cleaned or worked at sewing an old blanket she had found in a cedar chest when I wasn’t. I seemed drawn more to the collecting and repairing of what tools or discarded furniture I found in the barn than to hunting, which I did, but which I did only for the food we needed to sustain us, so that I found myself carrying what game I might have shot that day back to the cabin at a brisk pace, so anxious was I to return to her.

In this way, we moved into the last month of her confinement, like a couple that communicates by intention nearly as much as by word, so in tune are they to each other and their surroundings. One of the curious things I had found in the loft of the barn was an old wooden cradle that had one of its rockers broken off. It had a shallow-enough arc that I could carve a new one out of a single board with a sharp plane that was among the tools, and so I measured the curve and set a board in a vise and started planing, the feel of the metal on wood drawing me back to the barn in Pastvina, the scent of wood shavings on my clothes and strewn about the floor, the low of a cow if the weather meant they had to remain inside, and the whiff of manure everywhere, and I felt nothing but mournfulness, not out of an urge to go back there, but a realization that I would have to face one day all that I loved and all that I hated about the place. Or would I? And when I looked up from my work, the girl was standing in the door, her arms folded over her enormous belly and her body leaning against the door frame. Then she smiled and said, “There’s hot tea if you’ll take it,” and waddled like a goose back toward the house.

Another time, when I came out of the barn and saw her lumbering across the yard with a full pail of water, I rushed up and took it from her and our hands touched and she let that touch linger, though she had let go of the pail, and she thanked me and told me that she was feeling tired. I carried it into the kitchen and turned to leave, when she asked me why I hadn’t left her and gone my own way, “after we had killed those soldiers,” she said, as though we were brothers in arms who had fought their way out of some besieged hollow. I stopped and held the back of a chair and told her that she was about to have a baby, and this wasn’t exactly the kind of countryside where one might find villagers hospitable to Gypsy women, pregnant or otherwise.

What she meant, she said, was didn’t I have a home, a wife, a family that I wanted to get to, and I said no, that my mother died when I was an infant, and my brother died in the war. “I have a father,” I said, “and I miss him more than I thought possible when I was with him, but I’m not sure he’s even alive, or if he is, if he’ll want to see me now.”

Why, she asked, and I said because I had rejected him and run off to war, and couldn’t return as either a victor or a hero, “or even a man brave enough to save his brother.”

She sat quietly for a while and then said that she thought this was sad, and she told me that for a boy, I sounded like an old Gypsy woman who sat by a stove in her house and talked about the dead more than the living. “But even this old woman is surrounded by family,” she said. “In the Sátoraljaújhely, I have more family than I can count. No one is ever alone.”

I asked her why, then, she and her husband were traveling alone, and she said, “Brother. He was my older brother. He was helping me to get to Ljubljana, where I was to meet up with my lover so that we could be married.”

And she told me the story of having met a young first lieutenant in the Honvéd in Miskolc when she had gone there with her mother and sisters to sell lace in the market. He was right out of cadet training, on leave, and once he caught sight of the girl, he shadowed her for the entire day and the next. Their caravan traveled down to Hatvan, and he followed, this time approaching their stall and pretending to want to buy some handkerchiefs when she was minding the goods while her mother prepared food. Young herself and giddy with the delight that a man in uniform was paying her so much close attention, she returned his glances and asked him directly if there was anything of hers that he thought was pretty and to his liking.

At the meal, her mother, who had seen and heard everything, slapped her across the face and told her to keep away from such filthy men, but this only emboldened her. Surely this prince wanted only to give her beauty the recognition it deserved, and give her the life and luxury her mother and sisters could only dream of. They are jealous, she thought, and I will not let my prince go.

It was that very evening when she noticed a soldier, a young private, lingering on the periphery of the caravan, and when she went to speak to him, he said that he had been (as she suspected) sent by the lieutenant to find out all that he could discover about her, and not to return until he knew who she was, where she was from, and where she was going. So she told the private to tell his commanding officer that she and her family were to stop in the city of Eger on their way home and visit cousins there. She could slip out at the evening meal, when she wouldn’t be missed, and they could meet at the fountain in the square near the castle. She pulled a flower from her blouse, gave it to the messenger, and said, “Give this to him, and tell him that he need only to come and he will find out all there is to know about who I am, where I am from, and where I may or may not be going.”

Days later, after they had strolled from the fountain, through the square, up to the castle, and onto a secluded rampart, their kisses turned to his promises of marriage, and they made love, “without even so much as his coat for a pillow, and only the night above,” she said, and she never saw him again.

When she discovered that she was with child, her mother confined her to housework and cooking—most of which she did anyway—but away from everyone except the old woman who talked only of the dead. All the while, her mother kept saying that when the child was born, it would go straight to the orphanage in Miskolc.

One night, her favorite brother sneaked in to see her and she told him what had happened, and that she was convinced her prince was alive but couldn’t come to her because he was at the front. A few days later, her brother returned at night and took her to the house of a fortune-teller, who said she could see the young officer clearly, could see that he was stricken with love for his princess, and that he longed in his heart to be reunited with her, if only he could survive the war. Brave men often died in battle, and this man was one of the bravest, the fortune-teller assured her. The girl was beside herself with grief, so much so that her brother began to fear for her and the child. It was then that the fortune-teller added that she could see faintly the young man walking the streets of what looked to her like the old town of Ljubljana, although she couldn’t be certain. He wouldn’t be there long, however, for his orders back to the front for the empire’s final, victorious push were imminent. If the girl could get there before his leave was over, she would find the happiness she desired.

“I must tell you, though,” the fortune-teller moaned from her trance, “the journey is an impossible one. But for love, nothing is impossible.”

Keeping their escape a secret from everyone, including their mother, the girl and her brother borrowed what gold and other dowrylike possessions they could the following day, and then stole out of their village under cover of night.

“Maribor was far behind us,” she said, “and I swelled with the expectation of seeing my prince again, until those soldiers caught us at dusk, when we were tired and off guard. My poor brother fought as bravely as he could, but I knew when I saw them, and smelled them, that the fortune-teller had lied.”

And although we never spoke at length again about that or any other story (she never once wanting to know more about my father, or my mother, only asking me occasionally where it was I—a boy, she kept calling me—learned to do the things only women were allowed to do in her village), we were rarely out of sight of each other, unless I went into the forest to hunt, and when I returned, she would embrace me and scold me for having been gone for too long, before turning back to whatever chores occupied her. After a time, then, she would come to the barn with a pot of tea, call me to a table made from a tree stump (for the weather was breaking in that part of the world and the days were often warm and springlike), take my hand, and insist I sit and drink. And I wished in my heart that we would never have to leave.

 

 

IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME THAT WE FOUND A HORSE GRAZING on grass one morning by the side of the house. It had a bridle with a lead tied to it but was otherwise unmarked and bare. It didn’t appear hurt or lame, and the girl approached it and it shied, but she held out a slice of beet and it nickered and ate and she patted its foreleg and rubbed its neck, holding on to the bridle.

“It belongs to someone,” I said, “or it would have charged out of here before we got close.”

“She belongs to someone,” the girl said. “It’s a mare. And what’s the harm in keeping a horse if she wants to be kept?”

“No harm,” I said, “except that someone might come looking for it.”

The girl pared another slice of beet and the horse ate and licked her hand, so that it was covered in red, as though dyed or bleeding, and she said, sounding like someone weighing odds or options, “Let’s leave her and see what she’ll do.”

I filled a trough with some water and we went about our usual chores the whole day as she grazed on the new grass that was beginning to come through. The next morning, the mare was still sauntering about the grounds, and after breakfast the girl went out and led her into the barn and to a stall that must have held a jennet or a mule at one time, closed the gate behind her, and the mare lay right down on the ground to rest.

For the next few days, we fed and watered her and she came out of the barn for some exercise, which meant I walked her up and down the road, then took her back to the house and let her roam. She didn’t seem to want to go anywhere else. At meals now, the girl and I talked of the horses we had known, and I told her that my father’s fondness for the American general Ulysses S. Grant made me believe that in war horses were treated as well as soldiers, if not better, until I went to war and found that if a horse wasn’t good for pulling, it was good for eating, and shot. And if it wasn’t good for eating, it was good for nothing and was left on the roadside to rot, so that the stench of a dead horse could be smelled for miles as you approached. She shuddered when I said this and told me that the horses of the Roma were as good, and sometimes better, than the horses she had heard they rode in America.

“A horse is clean,” she said “and noble.” And then, as an afterthought of virtues, she added, “And it can work harder than a man.”

Still, I felt in my gut that this horse wasn’t meant to be a blessing to us, and two days later I came out of the woods in the late afternoon after a long day of hunting, during which I netted one hedgehog and a hare, and I saw from a distance that the front door was open but the girl wasn’t about. I picked up my step and looked into the barn, but I found neither the girl nor the horse, and I ran inside the house.

It was ransacked and overturned. In the kitchen, I found cupboards emptied, the table smashed, and, by the back room, the girl lying on the floor, blood on her lip and a welt below her eye where she’d been hit. I picked her up and pushed through the curtain that separated the room she slept in from the kitchen and laid her down on the bed. She was conscious and kept whispering over and over, “Where are you? Where are you?” but she kept her eyes closed, and every now and then she would wince and hold her belly.

“What happened here?” I said, out of breath and anger rising. “Who did this?”

“The boy,” she whispered, “the boy,” and I thought she meant the baby inside her (for she had divined some time ago that she was to deliver a son) and told her that the boy would be just fine if she lay still and slept for a while. I went out to the well and wet a rag, brought it in and laid it across her eye, and told her again to sleep. In the kitchen, I bolted the last round I had into the carbine, noticed the other one we kept with us was gone, and went outside to follow the tracks of the horse and whoever had taken her down the road.

I moved fast, as I knew there wouldn’t be much light left soon, and it didn’t take long before I saw the brown hide of the mare, but no one that I could discern was leading her, and I slowed so as not to spook horse or man, and when I was within fifty yards of them, I shouted at whoever was in front to stop and turn around slow.

As he did, I kept approaching with my rifle shouldered, and I could see as he stood in the road now with his hands raised, one still holding the lead, that it was just a boy, twelve, thirteen years old at the most, and I knew what the girl had meant. The other carbine was slung over his shoulder.

“You stole our horse,” I said, my cheek in the rifle’s weld so that I could shoot the moment he might draw a pistol or try to run.

“Your horse?” he said, his voice high-pitched but cocky for a young boy.

“Drop the lead and I won’t shoot you,” I said.

“Does a week of feeding my uncle’s mare grass and water make her yours?”

Which is what I would have countered with if I was staring down the barrel of a rifle and a stolen horse pawed and sulled at my side. “If it’s your family’s,” I asked, “where are they?”

“Dead,” he said, “like everyone else.”

“Why’d you beat the girl?”

“She came after me with a stove lid, the bitch. What are you doing living there?”

“It’s no concern of yours. Not anymore. Now drop the lead and leave the horse.” He stood there, not frozen or scared, just indifferent, like we’d been talking about what price he got in town for goods that were stored elsewhere. “Drop the lead and walk on,” I said again, “or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

He dropped the lead and brought the carbine around fast from his shoulder, faster than I thought possible, and the two of us stood in that position, duel-like. I could have killed him in the space of a breath, but he seemed pitiful to me, and yet noble for holding hard to this last remnant of his life.

“It’s not loaded,” I said.

“You don’t know that I’ve got bullets, do you?”

“I know.”

He lowered the barrel and pushed the rifle around to his back, hooked his thumb around the strap in one hand and the horse’s bridle in the other, and stood looking at me in the dusk.

“All right, then,” he said. “Shoot a man for a horse.” And he let go of both strap and bridle and stood there in the road with his arms outstretched, so that the mare thought he meant to give her some room, and she stepped into the grass to graze.

I held my rifle steady and aimed for the center of his chest, stroked the stock with my trigger finger above the guard, and breathed deeply in and out to calm myself. After a while, the boy turned and gave the horse a tug and she walked off along behind him, just as they had been doing when I came upon them, and I waited until they were out of range, ejected the last round from the magazine into the dirt, heaved the rifle into the woods, where it landed in thick moss beneath an oak, and ran at a trot back to the house and the girl.

 

 

I NURSED HER INTO THE EVENING AND NIGHT, HELD HER AND wiped her face as she came in and out of a light consciousness, and then she slept for a long stretch, so that I fell asleep, too, in the chair I kept at her bedside. She woke in the darkness of midnight, shook me awake, and said, “It’s time. It’s broken.”

I lit a lamp and looked down at the mess of sheet and ticking on which she slept and could see what looked in the light like mingled daubs of blood. She saw it, too, and said, “No, it can be that way sometimes. I was careful to shield myself when he hit me. Wash and put the water on.”

But she was still ashen and sweating, and I made her lie back down in her bed after I had stripped the soiled sheets and thrown some shirts and coats over the bare frame. For a long time, she lay resting and breathing deeply, time I took to bank the stove, get more water from the well, and fill the pot to boil.

When her labor began, I knew enough to tell that it was going to be hard. I had been around many animals giving birth, and the ones who seemed stronger, as though masking a fear, were the ones for whom birth often turned from life to death. But I had never been with a woman in labor, and I wondered if I would know what to expect, what to look and listen for.

For the first few hours of her contractions, she breathed and moaned and tried to rest, and I could comfort her only with the cool, wet rag. Then, as they came closer and intensified, she sat up and panted. “Jozef, my hand, hold my hand,” and she pushed down on my hand, the bed, the ground, and cried into the night, and this went on for hours as the morning came on, and then day, and what I never expected was the long resistance that child had to being born. I knew he wasn’t breech. But he was turned and so couldn’t move fully into the birth canal. I coaxed her and held her and tried to massage away her pain, but it grew and grew with yet more and longer hours, it seemed, the child not coming, only screams, and in my own exhaustion I weakened and buckled and wept, because in the early spring month we lived in that pastoral, waiting for this moment, I had prayed and dreamed that this girl might be some answer to another prayer I had made in a prison cell in Sardinia, that the misery and death I had dealt and seen might somehow be turned around, might somehow be wiped clean by a life unexpected.

I noticed that the sun was setting in the west, and I thought how quickly and yet full of burden a day can begin and end, and she pulled me close to her and said that if the child lived, I had to take it back to her village, that they would want it and care for it, in spite of her.

“Promise me, promise me,” she whispered, her lips brushing my cheeks. And I said that I would, and that she would come, too, because we had a long way yet to go. But she turned her head on the pillow and said, “No. It won’t be. Not me. Just go. Across the Sajó. It’s close. You’ll see. The baby,” she said, and wailed, and I knew that if she didn’t deliver soon, she and the baby both would die.

But she seemed to know this as well and, without my directing her, rose from the bed and sat on the edge so that gravity might do its best as a midwife. I placed a blanket on the floor and then held her from behind for support as she clenched her fists and stood and inhaled deeply, and the screams that came were unearthly, and the power in her back and arms was enough to bring tears to my eyes and make me wonder if she might crush my own hands as she bore down.

I saw the gush of fluids then and moved around quickly to take the child from her and keep it from strangling. The head had crowned and with each push more of the face emerged, though there was no wiping away or staunching of blood, so much blood it was, as though the child must swim through it as both test and augury, for she had torn, as I had seen sheep tear when the lamb was large or ill-positioned, and I knew later, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, that something had ruptured inside.

But in that moment of birthing, I grabbed the head, fully free, and as she pushed, I worked out the shoulder caught in her tiny girl-like pelvis, and it was a boy, stiff and blue, but he bent slowly and then kicked and wakened, determined but exhausted as he gulped his first breath of air and bellowed weakly there in the cup of my arms. I tied off the umbilicus with a strip of cloth and cut it with a pair of sewing shears and then wrapped him in a sheet and placed him in his mother’s arms.

She lay back on the bed. She was white and breathing shallowly, but she pulled her son to her and spoke to him softly in Romany, secrets I knew nothing of and would never hear whispered again. His bellows became mews as he searched her out in his hunger and then latched and sucked, and the two rested there.

When I returned with more rags and sawdust, she was coming in and out of sleep and looking ghostly from blood loss, but the boy clung to her and what life there was in the first and last precious drops of foremilk she fed him, until she was dead. I lifted him from her and he wailed out of longing, as I did, too, out of a grief I’d never known, so that the two of us were like a chorus of orphans lost and broken in the world. And as we sobbed, I bundled the child and made a sling on my chest out of webbing I had cut from the dead soldiers’ backpacks a long two months ago, and I felt her in that house, helping me and hurrying me, as though the valley wind itself whispered, Cross the Sajó! I had no idea how far, or how long, I or the child would be able to endure. We were both empty of what it was we desired. I went to her on the bed, pulled the quilt up to her chin, whispered, “Milujem t’a,” and kissed her cheek, which was cold and pale.

In the kitchen, I spilled the oil lamp across the table and onto the wooden floor, drew a burning log from the stove and set fire to the house, ran out into the night, moonlit for the first in a long time, and began to move quickly east.

 

 

I RAN LIKE A FUGITIVE IN THE DARK, NOT KNOWING WHERE I was going, only why, and I would have run throughout the night, the next day, and another night, for all nights if I had to, until I collapsed, because for the first time in years, since the war, since I’d embraced my father and said good-bye, I held hard to life, a life that needed me to move on this road, in this direction, waiting to come to the river she called the Sajó, if her son was to survive.

For the first few hours, he slept, squirming occasionally and crying out in whatever confusion he was capable of feeling, but otherwise he breathed in silence, lulled by the steady trot I had fallen into. I never knew exactly how far into Hungarian territory the girl and I had walked. It was she who had set the stiff pace that I’d had to condition myself to follow, so unconditioned to days of continuous walking was I after six months in prison. And not every farmer with a horse and cart passed us by without regard. One stranger or another would stop for us if he felt moved more to charity for the young girl with child than derision for her race, and we would climb onto the back of the cart and bounce along in discomfort until he indicated that he had taken us as far as he was able, and we would climb off and keep walking. She otherwise had tried to avoid all cities and towns, only rarely venturing into a local village when she recognized it as a place not inhospitable. There she’d buy a loaf of bread, cheese, or soft old apples with what few coins she had left, and then take the low road, a lift of her head the only sign to tell me that her errands were done and she was going.

So I wasn’t completely certain that if I kept moving east I would come to any river in a day’s time. The boy would not live if we weren’t any closer, and I spoke this out loud to her as I slipped through a small candlelit village in the dark and began to doubt that I could physically do what it was she had asked of me, and said so, as though she ran beside me. But then I realized why she had stopped that day as we came out of the forest, how it was she’d seemed to know that house, and why she hadn’t gone home to have her baby, even when she’d remained perhaps only a day’s ride from her own family. She’d feared they wouldn’t have her, wouldn’t take her back and welcome her son, but would shun her, leaving her to face the world alone, an impossible thought, and so she’d hovered between remaining lost in their memory and found in their lives, and died there. And all of this conjuring made me long for her, made me wish that by some reversal of time, or miracle of divine Providence, I might return to that homestead and find her alive, and once again live and move in her presence and shadow.

 

 

BY FIRST LIGHT, I RECOGNIZED TERRAIN SIMILAR TO THAT of Kassa. Wild grapevines grew along the brown plains, and I couldn’t go a few kilometers without passing some peasant setting out for a field, often with a dog that was more than willing to snap at me, so that I picked up a staff along the way and began bringing it down on the heads of at least two curs before the sun was up. The days had gotten warmer, too, so I knew that I was in the basin lands that stretched between the Duna and the Hernád. I have to cross a river soon, I thought, or a border.

I was reduced to a slow crawl by the time I saw the military truck approaching. To them, from a distance, I was probably just another villager with a pack slung back to front, and not worth bothering, but I couldn’t take that chance. I ducked off the road and made for a shack where a rusted tractor, useless and idle, was parked in its permanent shade. I crouched down against the wall as the truck passed, but when I tried to get up, my legs crumbled and I slumped over, unable to go any farther. The boy woke and began to cry, but his bleats now sounded as weak and expiring as he was. Neither one of us had taken food in the hours of which I had lost track. How much longer can he go? I wondered, and whispered to his covered head that we would be home soon, then leaned back against the shed wall to keep from smothering him and told myself I would rest there for just a few minutes, while those weakening moans haunted the air about me.

I woke, to find an old man prodding me with my staff. His body stood in the full light of the sun, which had come around to the side of the shack I’d been sleeping against. When I stirred, he bent down and pulled off the cover of the sling to see the child, and then he waved to a woman in a horse-drawn dray, helped me to my feet, and said in Hungarian (although I saw his face and knew that he was a Rom), “Quickly, the soldiers are returning.”

He walked me out to the road, took the baby, and handed him to the woman, who put him to her breast. Then he waved me under a tarp that covered a load of manure piled high on the back of the heavy cart. “Keep quiet and don’t move,” he said, “and they’ll think you’re just another mound.” He dropped the tarp, so that I lay curled up in darkness, and climbed aboard and nudged the horse gently on so as not to draw attention. I could hear the woman singing to the baby, felt her rocking him as we rode, and I knew when I heard her begin to cry that she, too, feared for his life.

The truck came up fast; I could tell this when I heard it brake hard in front of us and order the man to pull over. The soldiers had gotten word of an army deserter in the area, they said, a thin, bearded man carrying a walking stick and a field pack.

“Have you seen him?” they asked.

The man said that he hadn’t, that he and his wife were only taking this load of manure to their village across the Sajó, and I could hear the rest of the men joke about which was worse, the stink of a Gypsy or the stink of cow shit, then footsteps crunching along the dirt and stone, getting louder as they approached the back of the dray, and then a rifle barrel poked under the tarp to lift it.

“Let’s go, Ábel!” the other men in the truck yelled. “These two stink!” And the tarp lowered again and the truck drove off, shifting hard through its gears, until there was silence all around me and I wondered if the man seated in the cart and holding the horse’s reins was still there with the woman and child.

I fell asleep in that bed of shit, though I was brought to the edge of waking occasionally by the ruts and rocks in the road that my driver failed to miss, until he came to a stop and threw off my cover. The noonday sun was bright and warm and I rubbed my eyes against it and looked out. We had crossed a bridge, the water below wide and brown and shallow. Along the banks to the east sat a Romany village where smoke rose from the makeshift chimneys of makeshift huts, and I watched the figures of small children emerge from one of these huts to chase a mangy dog through the dirt and mud and then disappear, although it was hard to say where. The old man told me in Hungarian that this was as far as he was going.

“Where’s the boy?” I asked him, and he pointed to his wife, or daughter, or whoever she was. She flinched and pulled the baby to her. “He needs nursing,” I said.

“He’s being nursed,” the old man said.

The woman yelled back with scorn and a heavy accent that he might have died, but the man glared at her.

I said that I was grateful for their rescue but that I had to take the boy to his home, where he belonged. “His mother was from a village across the Sajó,” I said, “and I made her a promise. Give him to me.”

“This is the Sajó,” the old man said, and pointed to the water with a long sweep of his hand. “Who is this woman you’re speaking of?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. I never suspected that the truths and lies she had gathered and spun for her tale of love and wandering would mean nothing without a name she had refused to give, or even without thinking might have spoken. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her name.”

“I see,” he said, disbelieving my own story of deliverance. “The boy is being nursed, and he looks strong enough to survive. You’ve done what your . . . lover asked you to do, no? He’ll be safe with us.”

I reached for the dagger I kept in my boot and held it up weakly to the old man. “He comes with me,” I said, but the man stood there unfazed. The woman uttered some incomprehensible taunt or invective and he nodded his head but otherwise said nothing more and didn’t move, and I realized then that I had made a stand with the intent to kill not for the baby, whose eyes I can say I had never seen in the light of day, but for a promise to a woman who would have considered my love a taboo, and whose ashes lay beneath the smoking rubble of a house in the forest, ashes that one day soon would be lifted by the wind, and my knowledge of this would be more than any one on earth could say they knew of her.

By this time, the villagers had begun to wonder why we three stood unmoving near their bridge, and people started swarming up the banks for a closer look, shocked to see one of their own being threatened with a knife. Some shouted their own threats, and a boy who could not have been more than ten kept saying over and over in a Hungarian he’d probably learned in school, “Fight me! Fight me!”

Then the man, some kind of elder—this was clear to me from the response of the others—held his hand up to the crowd, commanded their silence, and asked me in a quiet voice, “The boy’s mother, was she a young girl?”

I said she was, and that she’d been traveling with her brother. “When I came upon them, he had already been killed by Honvéd. Deserters, I’m sure they were.”

“And where are these deserters now?” he asked.

I told him that I’d killed them when I saw what they were doing to the girl, and he feigned surprise at this. “You killed a Hungarian soldier in order to save the life of a Gypsy?”

I told him that I’d killed one soldier and the girl had killed the other in order to save my life, but that I had killed many men in the war without regard for what coat they wore or what language they spoke. It was all the same to me.

“Did you kill her brother, too?” he asked.

“No. I told you,” I said, “he was dead already. I helped her to bury him.”

“That seems unlikely,” he said, “since we have our own rituals for burial.” Someone else shouted from the crowd that I should be turned over to the police so that they wouldn’t think the villagers were harboring deserters and return to arrest them and burn their houses.

I told them that I wasn’t a deserter, that I’d been a prisoner of the Italians, and when the war ended, they’d released me, put me on a train to the border, and left me to walk home.

“You’ve come a long way, then,” the old man said, and the crowd went silent again, as though wondering who would move or admit to defeat first, I or the old man. What could I say to convince them, though? And I wondered in my exhaustion if it was even worth it. If I started walking now and followed the road in front of me to wherever it might lead, I would have done all that I had promised I’d do, even if it meant that I’d likely be inside of a Hungarian prison by nightfall.

“What’s your name?” he asked, and I told him. The boy began to bawl from underneath a covering shawl on the woman still sitting in her seat atop the dray, and it sounded to me like the strongest cry I had heard him utter yet in his brief life. What does it matter, I thought, if this village or some other raises him? What will he know of life, his mother, or even me, regardless? He will grow, learn, love, fight, and die, and someone, whether he knew them or not, will deliver him into his grave.

And I remembered how she had wept over the body of the brother she’d called her husband, and so I said to the old man, “Bexhet. Her brother’s name was Bexhet,” and I sheathed the knife and turned to go.

 

 

I WALKED ACROSS THE BRIDGE AND CONTINUED DOWN THE road in the direction from where I’d come, or where at least I thought I had traveled from. The sun was high and warm, the air dry, and green shoots of whatever grains or tubers farmers and tenant farmers planted here protruded from furrows that came right to the ditch at the edge of that road. The stillness of a midday at rest in spring was a world I was content to walk through in whatever moments of stillness and freedom I might have left to me. And yet I walked in that direction with the conviction, if not the belief, that I could resurrect her still, even from ashes, and so I would go there, come what may, or who (for I would have been executed as a deserter once the police found me), because it was what I thought of as home.

It seemed as though I had been walking for days when the old man’s horse and cart pulled up next to me on the road. He motioned for me to climb up and then turned back in the direction of the village, no more than a few miles away. And he told me as we rode that his son Bexhet and his daughter Aishe had left them months and months ago, after Aishe became pregnant by a Honvéd field officer. The community blamed her and her insolence for this shameful indiscretion, but within the immediate family they found themselves at fault for not reading the signs, for not believing that this gadjo was capable of seducing their daughter, and that she would find him anything more than a rogue.

“Perhaps,” the old man said, “perhaps she did love him. And—I will say this only to you—perhaps he loved her, too.”

The last they knew, a fortune-teller, whom they had since driven from their midst, convinced Aishe, and Bexhet with her, to run away to Ljubljana in search of the young lieutenant, although she confessed that she knew nothing of where the officer was and had only heard someone speak of the old city that day as a place where the emperor had kept headquarters during the war. An old woman who never slept and who was prone to seeing things as a result said she’d caught them stealing about on the night of their disappearance, but they gave her no mind.

“It turns out that was the last anyone had seen or heard of them. Until we had heard about you. No officer, it’s clear,” he said, his eyes still fixed to the road, “but Aishe loved to exaggerate. She was my youngest daughter.”

When we returned to the village, life seemed as I might have imagined it there yesterday, untouched and unworried, no one suspecting who or what was to come. Two stern spinsters washed me and trimmed my beard (I wanted to keep it to avoid looking like a soldier), and I was invited to sit with the king of the Gypsies—the old man himself—while we ate and spoke of a promising crop of potatoes that year, if the spring weather was any indication, and the beautiful new foal that had been given to him by a distant relative for his kindness to a brother during the war. Then he raised his glass and said, “To the vine, who has brought one of our own back to us. May there be many branches.”

Strangely, there was no more talk of his daughter, no request for me to tell of how she died, or what we might have spoken of in the last few months of her life. When I asked out of concern if someone could tell me how the child was doing, they laughed and said that he was fine.

“Already the women call him Bexhet and coddle him. A boy that strong will grow up to be a greater king than I,” the old man said, a boast that sounded unlike the one who wouldn’t believe a word I said and yet was still willing to spare my life.

In the morning, I joined a caravan of wagons that was traveling along the Hernád into the Sátoraljaújhely. I asked them before I left if I might see the boy and look into his eyes, so that I would have something to remember him by, and they brought him out into the dawn, shadowy and crepuscular, but he was awake and moving, having already nursed, and I could see his mother’s hair, silky black and thick on his head, and her lines around the nose and mouth, but I knew that he would have his troubles in life, too, with the Rom, for his eyes—a blue the likes of which I’ve since seen only in the same morning sky on the open ocean—had to be his father’s, and I kissed him on the forehead and wished him great peace and purpose.

I traveled with them under cover of the band on its way to the marketplace until nightfall, when I slipped away to cross into what was now the nation of Czechoslovakia. I longed only to see my father again, if that gift might possibly be waiting for me, and I held out hope still.

 

 

I DON’T REMEMBER SLEEPING WHEN I REACHED KASSA. I skirted the city and its flimsy checkpoint—a guard shack that stood on the main road, as though every other access to this country had a wall keeping people in or out—and kept walking north, past Eperjes and farther on up into the mountains. It took days. I must have eaten something and slept somewhere, but nothing of it stands out from that long trek. Nothing. What I do remember is being passed by a lone Gypsy with horse and cart on the road into Pastvina, a young man bouncing along behind a small but strong horse. He slowed as he approached and I thought he might stop, but when I turned to greet him, he yawed the horse and kept on.

It was morning when I came around the hill and could see the spire of the church rising through the morning mist. The village was quiet. I crunched along through a blanket of frost, crusty from the freezing nights that hung on still this far north and into the mountains. Smoke rose from huts and I could hear the sound of cocks crowing randomly from inside the muffled interiors of barns. All the sights and sounds of a place just as they were before I wondered if I would ever see that place again. Smoke was rising, too, from the house I had grown up in—grown up in, that is, when I wasn’t in the mountains. The thought of seeing my father suddenly made me quicken, and as fast as I was able (which wasn’t very able), I ran the last hundred yards and opened the door without even considering who or what I would find after two years and a war.

My stepmother was inside, alone. She startled and screamed when she saw me and dropped onto the floor the cup of chickory she had just brewed. The porcelain smashed into slivers and black liquid splashed both our feet. I looked down at my boots and then back at her.

“Bo•e môj!” she cried out, and crossed herself.

I stood still and wondered if I should embrace her, but she began to back away from me slowly until she found the edge of the kitchen table to steady herself and sat down. Her hair had rangy streaks of gray in it and her face, always lined with the contempt she held for everyone except her sons, looked etched with an ugliness she had carried inside for a lifetime and which now visibly framed her. She dropped that face into her leathery hands and began to cry.

Am I wrong? I thought. Has she found some peace on this side of her own drawn-out battles and war? I sat down across from her, took her hands into mine, and held them, but she looked up, her eyes flaring red like a rabid dog’s I’d once watched attack a lame horse just before someone shot it, and said, “Why aren’t you dead like the rest of them?” Then she got up and left me alone at that table in the kitchen.

I sat there until the stove went cold. I had gotten so used to the outdoors that I felt uncomfortable in the heat behind four walls. I thought, too, that it might be the only way to get the old lady to come back and face me. I wanted to tell her how—how, not why—it was that I was not dead like the rest of them. But when she did come back, wrapped up in a quilt she kept on her bed, it was only to drop a mildewed leather folder in front of me.

“This is all your father left you,” she said. “Don’t worry. There’s no money in it. I checked.” She cackled like a bird and walked back into her bedroom and closed the door, to die, for all I knew, or even cared.

There were papers inside the folder, one from the United States of America’s Department of State, certifying the birth of Jozef Ondrej Vinich in Pueblo, Colorado, on the thirty-first of March, 1899. The signatures of my father, Ondrej Pavel Vinich, and my mother, Magdalena Rose Sabo Vinich, were scrawled beneath the typed “PARENTS,” the ink as black as it must have been when they were alive and believed these marks would mean somehow a better life for all of us. Along with this was a letter from my father to me, written in English and dated the thirtieth of November, 1918. It was a thick ten pages of scrawl, and I wondered what it was he’d had to say, or if maybe he’d just been some kind of fool after all and these pages would only serve to remind me.

My Dearest Jozef, the letter began, with winter has come the end of my shepherding, and with the end of shepherding will come, soon, the end of what I have tried to make of this life. He was writing, he went on, from his bed, unable to get up and do any work anymore. He had sold what was left of his flock and let someone else do the business of taking care of other people’s animals. My stepmother took from him all the money he had left and spent it before it was worthless with the advent of the new Czechoslovak koruna. He had hoped to live past the end of the war, to see Marian and me come home as heroes, but he feared he would die before that happened, and now that the war was over, he believed death had taken us all. Still, I hope, he wrote. Hope that you are lost but alive somewhere. Or, having been wounded, perhaps, are resting in order to regain your strength before you come back to me. He spoke of what news he heard of the war from those few men who had come back to Pastvina, but knew, too, that they could tell him and the others no more than what they had seen, and often suffered, so that everyone merely hoped and prayed and resigned themselves to the reality of Austria-Hungary’s defeat.

Then he explained the papers. Although he had told me about my mother and their life in America, there was much left unsaid, much left yet to do, and he wanted most of all, before he died, to give me a better life, if life was still a gift God granted me. Enclosed was everything I needed to leave Pastvina and go to the United States. I was a citizen there and wouldn’t need any visas or permits. All I had to do was present myself at the new American embassy in Prague, show them these documents, and I would be issued a passport.

How, though, you must be wondering, he went on to write, fully eight pages into the letter by now, and I was. This, he explained, was the reason for the old folder, the American papers, the news and sentimental wanderings, and the impression that he was a broken man with little to give. All had to be done so as to convince Borka that nothing my father had left me was of any value. Although he had enjoyed writing of reminiscences, as it began to make him feel as though he were speaking to me in person, the letter was long so that my stepmother wouldn’t be tempted to send it off to a translator in Eperjes if she suspected my father was passing along any information about money or valuables. For, buried at the end of that letter, was this:

In the late fall of 1917, after Zlee and I had been gone for almost two years and my father knew that he was too old to go back to shepherding on his own, he walked up to the camp one last time in the winter to leave for me there the small fortune he had brought with him from America in 1901 and had kept hidden from my stepmother for seventeen years. Not silver, which is what he mined for the Canterbury Mining Company in Leadville when he and my mother first arrived out west, but gold, a good stash panned for and collected over the years before I was even born. It came to a little more than five ounces, but at the time, after the war, gold was worth over twenty dollars an ounce, and one hundred dollars would go a long way. He hid it in that same cavelike overhang of rock on Krí•ik Ridge that we used for shelter when we were away from the camp. At the back of the cave, there was a large loose stone with two thin veins of crystal running through it. The gold was behind that in a sheepskin sack. If you never read this letter, or never return from the war, he wrote, then that gold will go back to the earth, from where it came. Or make some poor shepherd a believer in miracles one day. But if you do come back, and all of this makes it into your hands, go, my son. And may you find your peace there. S Bohom.

My stepmother shook off her false grief and came out to stoke up the stove just as I was finishing the letter.

“He was a silly old fool in the end, your father,” she hissed. “Kept moaning about how he had nothing to leave you if you made it home from the war. If, I told him. And then he produced that musty old folder and said to make sure you got this so you’d at least remember him. Hah!”

I told her that I needed nothing to remember him by, and she said, “Nothing. That’s what you got in the end,” and looked at me to see if she might be mistaken.

But I acted as cold as if I was about to put a bullet through her head at four hundred yards and said, “I’ll be expecting my meal at noon,” so that she’d think I had nowhere else to go.

I waited at the house for a few days, visited my father’s grave, which seemed cold and unreal to me, but I otherwise remained a recluse in the barn, where I slept. I could tell that snow was on the way, so I lingered until the front came in, packed up some food and found the shotgun in the barn, which, surprisingly, my stepmother hadn’t managed to sell. Shells my father kept in a false floor were still dry, without any apparent rust around the primers, and so I armed myself, thinking the old gun just might come in handy. He had hidden the field glasses and a good hunting knife in there, too. The knife was still sharp. But there was no trace or mention anywhere of the Krag, not in the letter, not in Borka’s enmity, not in the barn.

I left the next day before sunrise in the middle of a freakish and substantial spring storm, which covered my tracks almost as quickly as I made them. The climb out of Pastvina seemed easier, in spite of the deep snow. No month-long packs of provisions, no mule, no horse, but no one else, either, to accompany me. I missed my father and Zlee, and the kind of world I knew before I marched off to war, and the old terrain seemed worn to me, the hills less challenging, the vistas not vast so much as merely broad from where I stood, as though what once to the boy appeared daunting mountains had become in the sight of the man merely stones.

At the camp, I waited for the storm to taper off, but it seemed unwilling to let up, and when it blew over, two feet of fresh powder blanketed the hills. I cleared the cabin of a few rodents and one big snake cold and still under a crate that had once held potatoes. I got the stove going, made some tea, lit the old oil lamp, laid out my supper of bacon and beetroot, and sat listening to the night, wishing I could summon into my presence the ghosts of everyone who had gone before me—friend or foe, civilian or soldier, family or Gypsy—embrace them, and send them home. But I rested now as they had left me. Alone.

I had enough food for three days, and so I waited that long before I hiked up to the ridge and climbed inside of the cave, which still smelled faintly of the fires we used to make there, the wall closest to the opening blackened permanently with soot. And, there in the back, out of the light, so that it would have been easy to miss, I found the stone veined with quartz. I pried it loose and lifted the sack from its resting place.

Five ounces of gold is a heavy five ounces. It felt odd in my pocket, as though it would weigh me down and keep me there, rather than become my means of departure from a world and a place in which no one would mourn for me should I disappear without a word or trace.

I climbed up onto the ridge—the sun high and growing warm again as it melted the snow—and suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of my father and the comforting shadow of Zlee, as though I might turn and find them both climbing up behind me on this same outcropping of boulders to shout “Jozef!” and come to me and embrace me.

But there was no one, just the wind, and the rustling branches of a lone tree, and I knelt down and began to weep and then wail like a child, an infant at his birth, in my naked grief and desolation, howling for who and what I wanted most to touch and see, all of which had been taken from me, and at this I lowered my head and dug at the rock as tears streamed down my face and my fingers began to bleed, until I rolled over sobbing onto my side and fell asleep.

 

 

WHEN I CAME DOWN OFF OF THE MOUNTAIN, I TOLD MY stepmother that I was going to Pozsony (although word had just come east that the city was now called Bratislava) to join the Czecho-Slovak army and asked her for money for the train ticket. She said it was about time I decided to do something so that I could send her a regular salary, and for that reason only, she gave me the fare, which wasn’t a small sum, as it’s almost a full day’s journey from the east to old Pozsony. I cleaned up the shotgun and sold it in Kassa, along with the field glasses and knife, and with that bought a ticket clear to Prague, where the new country’s economy was booming. Prague seemed like a land from a fairy tale to me, and so I distrusted it for that reason, staying only long enough to sort papers and book a train out of there. I got a good exchange on an ounce of gold, mailed the advance my stepmother had given me back to her in a letter, saying that I had been sent to Prague for induction, then received my American passport at the new consulate and boarded a train for Hamburg, Germany.

Although I had never been so far west or north before, crossing that border into Germany was like crossing back into the misery of the war, fields untended, little food to be had anywhere for any price, and entire towns eerily empty of men. There were old men, and there were children, but anyone who might have been of fighting age and fit to do it had given his life, or any number of limbs, to that fight. Western Europe seemed to me a place wherein no one lived any better than we had for centuries in our miserable corner of the northern Carpathians.

The travel agent in Prague told me that I was to meet a boat called the Mount Clay in Hamburg, an old troopship converted to a passenger steamer, but that he was uncertain as to when exactly it was scheduled to arrive and embark again for the United States. I thought that I had missed it by the time I arrived, but it turned out that it was two days late, and then took two more days to disembark its passengers and resupply, due to the lack of longshoremen. Those were a lost and empty four days—bleak skies, a chill drizzle, and everyone starving, though too tired even to look for food. All I remember about that city, apart from my steamer at dock on the river, is the unlikely number of trees and the amount of unbroken ground that shaped its environs. More ships came into its port than any other place in Europe, and yet I felt as though I was spending a week in a country house on a lake, one whose inhabitants consisted entirely of mute and starving prisoners.

When we boarded, I went below to survey my tiny room in steerage, though the smell of diesel and the stale air reminded me of the train I had taken after leaving Sardinia, and so I walked back up on deck, in spite of the rain, which kept others under tarpaulins or down below. I looked across the river to a flock of derricks idle and waiting for freight either yet to come or that had never showed. A figure moved slowly among them and then stood in full view of me—a man, a dockworker perhaps, as idle as the steel that surrounded him, and yet seeming fit enough to walk, which was something. I tried to calculate the distance between him and me, but I was suddenly disoriented and lost my entire sense of direction. I put my head in my hands and rested them on the rail to steady myself. Below, the current swirled brown and in eddies along the side of the ship. When my vertigo dissipated, I looked up and glanced downriver to where the water bent and rose to the horizon until it disappeared. I turned and searched for the worker, and there he stood, still on the shipyard bulkhead. He lit a cigarette and gazed at our transport, and I had the urge suddenly to respond to his searching and to make my presence known. I raised my arm above the parapet of deck railing and waved in a gesture that was all at once greeting, salute, and leave-taking. He returned my wave as though he had come here just to see me off, flicked his cigarette into the water, and disappeared amid the forest of cranes and rigging.

 

 

THAT WAS THE END OF MY SOJOURN IN WHAT A FEW AROUND me here still call “the ol’ kawntree,” though it is no country for which I long or somehow miss in my old age, when memory is supposed to ease and there comes a forgiveness with forgetting. It will always be a mourning land, a place longing for redemption, for there is no end to the memory of it, no chance of forgetting, and so I knew that day that I would have to go home, though I wondered what would await me there in the country in which I was born but had never belonged. If I would be welcomed after my time away. If I might begin again in a manner befitting one who is no longer a soldier or even a son, just a man, with so much lost behind me, and so much left yet to be done.

The gangplank backed away, and the Mount Clay gave one prolonged blast from her pilothouse. Smokestacks puffed black diesel fumes that hung low and heavy on the harbor in the rain, and we seemed the last to leave a place decimated by plague. The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into midriver, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known—the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk—receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe.