The Sojourn Read online

  Zlee and I hadn’t eaten all day, but we didn’t speak of food. We communicated in signs and short sentences, the last of which was when he shook me awake before dawn, held a finger to his lips for silence and handed me the field glasses.

  “Four hundred yards,” he whispered, and I saw the brown-and-silvery figure threading past makeshift pens of sleeping sheep. How was it that nothing stirred? By some power or invisibility, the lion stalked along steadily, and I could tell that she was through with killing sheep. It crossed my mind, briefly, to ask Zlee if he wanted to take the shot, but the movement involved in the very act of turning and questioning might be discernible to the cat. So I settled into my breathing, and the only other words Zlee spoke were a short comment on the growing light, and wind, which I took to mean that I hadn’t much time.

  I thought of my father, who was sleeping soundly below, not knowing what lay in store for him if I missed. He would be rising soon, and I suspect the cat was waiting for when her prey would emerge from the tent and move away from the protective cover of canvas. I had one shot. The sky was brightening in that way morning seems to come on all at once in the summer, and I waited, holding the animal’s haunch in my sight. I eased the barrel slightly right, took one full breath and could smell the faint musk of the well-oiled gun stock mingling with my own unbathed stench, and almost sighed as I pulled the trigger. The shot’s echo seemed to crack open the valley, and the cat, as though powering in that direction, slumped to one side.

  WHEN WE WENT BACK DOWN TO PASTVINA FOR THE WINTER in 1914, all we heard was talk of the war. Boys a few years older than I wore their cadet uniforms daily, and men from our village marched off to the conscription office in Eperjes to join the fight against the Russians on the eastern front. There was a fever rising, and not just for battle. Young men, as always, sensed a chance to leave the boredom of their villages and see to the borders of the empire and beyond, but this time their departure was imminent, and so they lived and worked and moved in a tension between excitement and rage. Or maybe I’m just remembering what the thoughts of war began to evoke in me.

  I never felt at home there in the village, the closepacked houses, the lack of privacy, the sense, as I grew to be a young man, that my father was seen as a failure or a kind of fool. His wife, who must have sensed the man’s declining confidence, berated him endlessly about money, and his stepsons acted as though they were the men of the house, when they were nothing more than layabouts. I even saw it when we went to the shop along the main street of the village. No one greeted my father or asked him how the summer had treated him in the mountains. Not so much as “Dobr• den•.” He was, indeed, a man who appeared as though he had come down off a mountain and yet seemed weaker, somehow less a man among other men as a result of it. And I wanted to grab those people and cuff them for their ignorance, hold them by the neck and make them kneel before my father, but when I turned to him, looking for and expecting to see in him—for my sake—something of the man I knew, who had shaped me, he seemed, year after year, to shrink before us all, as though somehow the streets and houses and villagers we walked among now reminded him of not just a humility but a weakness waiting to inhabit him, and it was his duty to relent.

  My stepbrothers were doing their mandatory cadet service that year and were waiting to be conscripted into the Honvéd in the spring. By December, they moved about the house with a kind of recklessness. I saw it in others, too, just boys who knew there was something larger than they could imagine happening hundreds of miles to the east and west of us, something that in all likelihood, once they were a part of it, would destroy them. But my stepmother’s sons, who mistook her coddling for belief in their natural superiority, became nothing more than spoiled thugs. I despised them, especially Tibor. Both of them were bug-eyed and fleshy, which was a rare thing in that part of the world, because there wasn’t that much food or time to be idle. But their mother fed them constantly, as she had done from childhood, kept them from work, and filled their heads with the notion that they deserved more and would receive more once they found their opportunity to leave Pastvina and claim the greatness that was rightfully theirs.

  That January, I was in the barn, replacing a board on an old cart we used for transporting the wooden boxes of bryndza. It was cold, but I had to saw and plane pinewood to shape and so I worked without a coat on. I heard someone come into the barn and I looked up, expecting to find Zlee, because I had asked him for help and was wondering why he had forgotten. Then I saw Tibor and Miro standing in front of me. It wasn’t quite noon, but they were drunk, and from that short distance I could smell on their breaths the homemade slivovica they had stolen from my father’s cellar.

  “Look at Jozef,” Tibor said to Miro. “Strong enough to work in this cold as though it were summer in the mountains.” He took a long drag on the cigarette he was smoking, exhaled, dropped the fag on the dirt floor, and left it to smolder.

  I said, “Isn’t there work of your own you two need to do?” and turned back to planing the side of that board. And before I could tell what was happening, Miro grabbed me and punched me twice in the stomach, the shock and pain of the blow doubling me over, so that I fell and couldn’t move.

  “That’s for Tibor’s coat,” he said, as though it had happened yesterday.

  Miro was even fatter than his brother, not the smarter of the two, and he pinned me down while Tibor came over and started to tie my wrists and ankles together with a length of rope. Every time I tried to push or kick free, Miro pummeled me. When all I could think to do was to spit on him, he punched me in the stomach again and picked me up and threw me over a sawhorse.

  I heard Tibor hiss, “I’m first,” and I made one last kick to free myself, but Miro brought his pulpy fist into the side of my head. “Isn’t this how you do it at your sheep camp, Jozef?” Tibor panted, the alcohol on his breath the only thing keeping me from passing out.

  Then I heard Zlee’s voice, slow and full-toned as it was. “Tibor, you pig!”

  The brothers could not have felt anything but fear. Miro turned and rushed at Zlee, and Zlee landed a punch so hard to the center of Miro’s chest that he seemed to shoot upright and gasp for breath all in one motion. Then Zlee brought his knee up into Miro’s crotch and I heard a crack and a strange squeaking sound. I rolled off the wooden horse and, in a daze, saw Tibor run to the back of the barn.

  “You, you s-stay away from me, Pes,” he said.

  Zlee backed him into a stall and hit him hard in the midsection, first one punch, then another, each one knocking more wind out of him, until he collapsed. Then, working as methodically as though these were animals he had come to feed, Zlee stuffed a fistful of hay into Tibor’s mouth, grabbed his arm, and bent it back until it snapped. Tibor screamed and Zlee shoved another fistful of hay into his face.

  I came to my senses on the ground, kicking against the ropes while Zlee untied me, and my voice rose through anger and pain. “Let me kill him!” I said.

  But Zlee told me to hold still, untied me, wiped blood from my lip with a handkerchief that smelled of lye soap and said, “No. It’s over. Let’s go. You hurt them now and it’s prison with the real pigs. They’ve got worse coming.”

  But rage welled in me and I shook off Zlee, stood up, grabbed a pitchfork propped in a corner, and walked over to Tibor, who lay whimpering in the frozen shit and mud of that empty stall. I raised the tines above my head and summoned all of the strength I could to drive them through his body. And I would have if Zlee hadn’t taken it from me and set it down as I held my head in my hands and wept.

  “Let’s go,” he said again. “We need to tell your father about this before he finds them and they give him a story.” And we walked back into the house, where my father was writing letters by the stove.

  I don’t know if it’s a punishment or meant for some other purpose, but if there is a God, He has seen to it that I should remember every face that has ever looked at or spoken to me. And yet of all the faces that crowd
my memory, I can still see the face of Miro as we passed him on the way out of the barn that morning. It appears like a short series of pictures: His knees are drawn up and he’s holding his legs and hiccupping for air, when he suddenly looks at me, reaches out his hand, and tries to plead with me to help him, as though the young man that bore his likeness minutes before has been transformed, leaving only an innocent caught up in a fight he doesn’t understand, and unable to make a sound.

  But when we told my father that Tibor and Miro were hurt and in the barn after they had tried to beat me for some long-held grudge, he became angry, said that those two were just nervous about their induction and that at heart they were good boys who didn’t know any better. “How bad are they?” he asked.

  “Otec,” Zlee said, calling him “Father,” just as I did, “they were trying to—”

  I cut him off. “No, Zlee.”

  “Marian,” my father asked again, his voice rising and impatient now. “How bad are they?”

  “Vel’mi zl•,” he replied.

  “Goddamn it!” My father brought his fist down on the table and began to shout at us there in the kitchen, telling Zlee that he was tired of the fighting and stories of beatings that followed him everywhere he went. “There’ll come a time when I won’t be able to protect you any longer, and I’m not even sure that I’ll want to,” he said, though we all knew that he was incapable of protecting even himself anymore. “Go and get the doctor, and we’ll see what comes of this.”

  Nothing came of it. Miro and Tibor left for the war together in the summer of 1915 and were sent to fight in Galicia, in spite of Tibor’s poorly set arm. Sometime in the fall, we got preprinted postcards, which every soldier on the front initialed and sent home before battle. Then, in the winter, the only villager who ever returned to us from the east alive (he had lost a leg and spoke with a quaver in his voice) told us that Tibor had been shot and killed point-blank in the trench by his commanding officer for refusing to attack when ordered. Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him. Their mother believed they had died heroes, and no one saw any reason to tell her otherwise. She gave all the money she had to the priest, who said Masses for their souls. And yet when I heard about their deaths, I wished I had killed them, carrying that rage within me like an animal tied down and caged, and I prayed for the war to last, though I still had a year to go.

  That night, my mother came to me in a dream again. Her face seemed no longer radiant, as it had been when I was a boy, but, rather, etched with sadness. No, not sadness. Fear. The look of fear. I know, because I saw that look everywhere. And while I wondered what it was she was afraid of, and even began to feel it rising in me, she spoke for the first time. Her arms outstretched, as they always were, she said, “Lúbim t’a,” words of love from a mother to a son, and I reached out for her, wanting her to speak again, to tell me why, and to remain there so that I might know something of who she was, if she did, in fact, love me, as she said. But her image fluttered and shook, and when I awoke, the solace I had felt from her in the past comfort of those dreams had been replaced by a hard and intractable anger.

  ASH WEDNESDAY CAME IN MID-FEBRUARY IN 1915, AND from the day we set out in late winter of that year on the trail that took us from the village into the mountains, the skies threatening and the path already buried in snow, if I wasn’t quiet and sullen enough to ignore all but the simplest requests made of me, I took to arguing with my father’s opinions, regardless of where I stood on them. He’d look dismayed, and then disdainful, until we just stopped talking, or until Zlee brought up the weather.

  My father was against the war. He was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Americans came in on the side of the English and French, which would mean the end of Germany and Austria-Hungary. But few people in Pastvina, or any of the other surrounding villages, could read anything beyond the Hungarian the few years of state school gave them, and all of the papers printed in Kassa and Budapest praised the emperor and his unmatched, loyal army, reporting only the victories we achieved against hapless Russians and now the Italians, who outnumbered us. Even as more and more food, men, and morale disappeared.

  He hadn’t hatched these ideas on his own. Along with supplies we needed at the camp, my father also managed to bring back from his trips to Kassa a few black-market back issues of The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian. These were meant to be part of our English lessons, but they also shaped his view that the Habsburg dynasty had reached its twilight and was about to be snuffed out. My father was convinced that the problem of the Slavs, as they referred to the conflicts that kept rising up out of every corner of the empire, was the one thing Ferdinand might have reformed. His wife was even a Czech. And then he was assassinated—by a Slav.

  “The problem of the Slavs is the Slavs themselves,” my father would say when our debates turned to whether Russia’s revolution was a force of good or just another struggle that would benefit a few and leave the peasants starving. Then he would pick up a book from his precious shelf of works in English, heft it, and say, depending on whom he felt like reading, “We need a Grant” or “We need a Lincoln, not a Trotsky.”

  That was how we passed most spring and summer nights that year, exhausted in the candlelight of our cabin from the work we did, while the animals we shepherded ate or slept along the hills outside and boys marched off to war from their families and farms below. Until I got it into my head that the man who had raised me, and all his views, were the ridiculous and subversive rantings of a drunken coward and it was time that I rejected them.

  When Zlee turned eighteen in March 1916 and had to register at the conscription office in Eperjes, I had a printer in the city alter my identity card so I could join up early, and I went to present my papers along with all those who were of fighting age. In any other year, they might have balked, checked, and sent me home to wait, but the Honvéd were so desperate for conscripts that it turned a blind eye when Zlee said to the officer in charge, “He’s from the mountains, sir, and can shoot.” That was all they needed. I passed my physical and was told to report back in two days, ready for basic training.

  And so, it was on the eve of my departure to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the Great War—a night I spent with my father down off the mountain (he had paid the Rusyn peasants to watch his flocks for two days), in spring, so that, as we walked into the village at midday, the green grass and fruit tree blossoms and din of children’s voices and animals who had given birth in the barnyards that were attached to houses like second rooms seemed the stage of some play I happened upon and watched from behind a curtain—that my father told me all that he remembered about the day my mother died over the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado, and why it was we left America for the old country.

  “I stopped believing a long time ago,” he said into the darkness, against which we had lit a single candle, “but that doesn’t mean, like any unbeliever, that I might not be mistaken. You see, I felt the conviction that some judgment had been passed down by God, and the others who said they feared this God, so that if I didn’t somehow atone for what I’d failed to do, after losing everything, I’d lose the only person I’d ever loved in this world. You.”

  In the morning, he waited for me by the door, kissed me on the forehead, whispered into my ear, “Lúbim t’a,” and we parted.

  ZLEE AND I WERE LUCKY TO HAVE JOINED UP TOGETHER. Basic training, with its weeks of constant drilling from dawn well into the night, seemed a thing requiring no effort. We were used to a life of early mornings and physical labor outside all day. It knocked us down a few pegs, got us used to hearing obscenities for marching sloppily or wearing scuffed boots, or maybe it was just to remind us that there was someone whose job it was to tell us what to do every waking hour of those days, a
nd I began to miss the leisure of books and conversation, but I confronted these obstacles as a simple rite of passage. And Zlee, Zlee had this way—maddening to our corporal, who had never seen battle, and would likely have turned tail if he had—of conforming to the least detail with obsessive perfection, all the while making it clear by his indifferent, canine stride and aloof, unanimated face that these least details (which he would see to their completion) meant nothing to him. Zlee was as indomitable as he was bereft of guile.

  But it wasn’t until the final weeks, when we began to practice on the rifle range, that our fate, you might say, was sealed, when the training officer discovered that we really could shoot.

  Conditions on those firing ranges were ideal—no reflecting sun, no tree branches, no animals bolting when you got a bead on them. The only thing we weren’t used to were the Steyr Mannlicher rifles we fired, standard infantry issue in the army of the empire. They were thin top-bolt rifles with a five-clip magazine, one of the first of their kind. They had a strong kick and could jam easily when exposed to dirt, but we didn’t have to worry about any of this yet. It took the two of us a few rounds to sight them, and after that, on the twenty-five-yard range, Zlee and I hit ten out of ten bull’s-eyes, dead center, some of the rounds piled up on top of one another. The other conscripts barely raised dirt around those targets.

  At first, we were assigned, along with all the others who mustered in Eperjes, to General Kray’s command. Kray was a Napoleonic Hungarian who led a brigade made up of Slovak march batallions, which meant that we’d be fighting with men who shared not only a common language but the experience of daily life, ritual, and labor. Kray’s soldiers were known for being good fighters because they worked the land and weren’t soft, and I had a deep sense of having done the right thing, feeling as though I had been called somehow to take leave of my father and Pastvina and to prove myself in the world.