“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 Sojourn Page 16
