The Sojourn

by Andrew Krivak

  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, especia
lly 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.”