The Sojourn (13 page)

His face as blank a slate as ever, Zlee just shook his head, and I didn't know if it was out of disappointment for his own failure or my suggestion that we desert.

“If only for the wind,” he said, “if only for the wind. I could see that bastard's shoulders sticking up above those boulders like he'd been trained to shoot at a carnival. Hell, let there be more fog. I could see his muzzle flash. What a shame, Jozef, if we have to end it like this.”

We sat in our hide the entire morning, melting snow into a cup of pine needles until we knew that we had waited too long, and there was nothing left for us to do but to stay and hope we'd get one more chance to face our antagonist, for that's how we thought of him now, this actor who opposed and called into question our very selves. In the meantime, we listened for the dogs and the party of soldiers we thought would be sent out to find us, but no one or thing stirred. And when the sun disappeared behind the highest peak, Zlee said out loud and to no one, “Because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out.”

High clouds rolled in without precipitation that night and the air warmed. We slept in hour shifts, and, after 0300, spotted in intervals of thirty minutes to keep our eyes sharp. At first light, the clouds began to disperse, and by the time dawn shone, the same stalking mist rose from the snow, although appearing lighter, so that visibility was improved. I glassed the hide from where the shooter had fired the day before, and there he sat, looking like a man in his own library.

Zlee woke up and took a mouthful of water, and then, fully alert, said, “Tell me.”

I confirmed the range of eleven hundred yards and noted that windage was zero across the entire distance, and, through the light mist, the target was in our direct line of sight. Zlee nestled into his stance and began to breathe steadily. I continued to observe and watched the target turn in our direction, as though oblivious to us and our purpose, and noted to myself that he was right-handed, so that when he turned back to take aim at someone or something at Fort Cherle, his cheek and face were covered by the gun stock. And yet he looked oddly familiar, until I realized that he was one of the Tiroleans from our sharpshooter school who had been returned to his regiment, and by the time this was clear to me, Zlee had already adjusted his sight for the distance, drawn breath, and said, “Christ forgive me.”

And I heard him exhale with a grunt and felt the warm, moist touch of blood on my face, head, and hands, the report echoing a few seconds later in the high mountain air.

I dropped my field glasses and rolled as the next shot shattered the scope on the Mannlicher, but I knew that it was meant for me. It had come from behind, at four o'clock to our position's twelve. We'd been set up between two shooters, and caught in their cross fire with a ruse that made ours pale, and all I could do was keep moving fast and low as I scrambled along the ground and kicked up snow. I moved crabwise around to the front of the stone that shielded us to the south and got into a position that protected me from the shooter behind but left me exposed to the one who had been sniping at Cherle across the mountain. I crawled over the rock and back into our hide, propped Zlee's inert and lifeless bulk against it, and pushed him over the top and down the other side.
I spoke to him as I worked, told him who had hit him, that the useless jokers were pretty good after all but that I'd have him out of there and out of danger soon, so that we could go back to the fort, finish the war, and get home, and I crawled over that rock and out into the open myself and waited for the next shot to hit me.

When it came—from the south this time and the shooter in the valley—I had Zlee over my shoulder just as I was about to drop down an embankment for cover. I felt the force of the bullet as it slammed into his side at the height of my neck and I fell off balance and rolled toward a cliff and tried to grab at the ground with one hand while holding on to Zlee's body with the other, but our weight gathered too much speed and momentum on the incline, and as I approached the sheer edge, I grabbed a scrub pine growing from a crack in a formation of rock and let Zlee's body tumble down into the ravine.

 

 

I HUNG ON TO THAT TREE FOR SOME TIME, WONDERING IF I shouldn't let go, let go and remain with my brother, rather than having to trek again through the mountains and snows of a hostile and desolate country, until my arms began to grow tired and that weariness shook me hard, and I found the will and enough strength to swing my legs and mantle my body up onto the ledge. I sat there, willing grief and sorrow as the sun began to bend to the west and I felt a chill, knew that there was no time now for grief, and realized that I had lost my hat and gloves, canteen, field glasses, and rucksack, and could find only my knife still sheathed where I kept it tied to my leg.

In my mind, I climbed with stealth and nothing but a good coat and that knife to the side of the shooter to the
north, caught him by surprise, and slit his throat. Then I walked back south to where his twin waited for him, approached from behind the boulders that gave him shelter, whispered “Boom,” and in the confusion slid into his hide and thrust my knife—still soaked with the blood of his comrade—into his chest. And with two rifles and two days' rations, I hiked north and east—not west but east—back into the Karnische and through the lands of the empire, toward the only home Zlee had said he'd ever known, or wanted to know.

But I knew, too, that both shooters were long gone by now, not certain but convinced, perhaps, that I had been hit and fallen to my death. And so I waited for nightfall and retraced my steps back to Fort Cherle.

There was a full moon, but it was bitter cold. I wove some soft fir branches together to cover my head, and walked (when I could) with my bare hands thrust into my armpits. I risked being shot by the sentry if they had changed the password, but this seemed a small and ironic threat to me in the new dawn, and at the command
“Halt!”
I replied, “Don't shoot,” then gave my name and rank and the password from three days before. There seemed some hesitation on the other side, until the men could see who I was by my uniform, and I was led like a prisoner into the fort.

I stood outside the iron door of Prosch's office long enough to wish I had walked the other way until I could walk no farther, and then I was escorted inside. I was shivering from the cold, and Prosch, in my defeat, let me shiver.

“Our dummy took a bullet in the neck, just as planned, Corporal Vinich,” he said. “And when my sentry, the fool, stood to alert the gunners, he took a bullet in the head. Not as planned, Corporal Vinich.”

I tried to control my breathing while he paced.

“Corporal Pes?”

I said, “Dead, sir.”

“You leave your brother behind I see. And you disobey orders.”

I said that our orders were to hunt an enemy sharpshooter, not knowing that there were two. “But they knew,” I said. “About us they knew.”

Prosch walked slowly out from behind his desk, removed his sidearm—a gleaming German 9—and held it to my forehead. “Speak without being asked a direct question again, Corporal Vinich, and those words will be your last.”

We stood motionless and in silence like that as I waited for what he would do next, until Prosch holstered his weapon and turned back to face his wet stone wall.

“Make yourself useful,” he said to the wall. “Take two men from the kitchen for a hunting party and go find a deer or a goat or a goddamn mastodon. I don't care. Shoot it and get us some meat. I'll decide what to do with you tomorrow. Dismissed.”

I shot a scrawny red deer at dusk that day, and a pregnant doe the next. The men with me hauled them out of the forest and gutted them at the fort, where a thin venison stew was served in the mess hall at every meal, the cook even making use of the tongue and the brains. For a week after, I was on what felt like perpetual guard duty at dawn every morning, Prosch no doubt hoping I'd be the next sentry to take a bullet in the face, until the high command requested that Fort Cherle send a platoon of men to the fort in Luserna and await for further instruction there, and I was stripped of my lance corporal's star, issued an ill-used carbine, and made the forty-first man in
that platoon when we fell in and moved out the following day.

Soldiers rarely get to glimpse the maps of the high command and they maneuver out of discipline and duty to those positions where they are ordered, pawns needed to stand and hold until the enemy is drawn out and exposed, at the expense of many pawns. Prosch knew that an Austrian offensive was being planned for June, a pincer attack similar to what the Germans had helped us achieve at Kobarid, and that the two points of the fight would be on the Piave River and in the mountains of the Trentino, where Fort Cherle would provide supporting fire and sharpshooters would remain invaluable. But in the mud trenches of a river plain, there was room for nothing but cannon fodder, so he handed down my death sentence, betting that I might kill a few more Italians before it was my turn for the firing squad of dysentery, machine guns, and long-range shells.

But I had neither the vision of command nor the recourse to question an officer, and so I marched east that spring with the ragged souls of that platoon, led by a lieutenant so green no one seemed to know his name, or even cared to inquire. At Luserna, we joined two more platoons and were put under a captain who had never commanded a company, and sent through the Valsugana along the Brenta until we came to the upper Piave River, and then marched south along the line that Austria held precariously.

It was early April when we came to the edge of the Asiago Plateau and began our descent toward a river island called Papadopoli, and I glimpsed for the first time the heights to which I'd climbed into those mountains when Zlee and I made our approach from the Soca, what seemed now like years ago. The men of our company had
slogged hard through deep, wet snow and then the impassable mud conditions that came with the spring melt, and we were hungry and exhausted and believed (there was scant evidence that our army could push any farther past this river, or even hold its line defensively) that the mud plains and beds that continued to widen would become our graves.

One morning as I looked down at the river flowing below through a valley already turning into a tapestry of greens, yellows, and whites as far as the blue of the Adriatic, and back to the still snowcapped and windblown mountain range behind, rising all at once far into the Alps, I realized that I had no desire and no drive to fight anymore, no rage at having been wronged somehow, no belief in the right and purpose of kings. I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered—if I could slip out of camp unobserved—whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end. But in the same moment this will to live overtook me, we were ordered to fall in, and so we shouldered our packs and rifles and set out like thin sheep kept in line with the promise of food and sleep, too numb to expect our slaughter. And we marched no better.

 

 

DAYS DRAGGED ON, THE WEATHER WET, COLD, AND UNSETTLED. What food we had became scarcer and scarcer as we moved closer to the heart of the army I'd once known from the hills of Görz, and by the time we reconnoitered with the regiment to which we'd been assigned, we were
down to two days' ration. As a whole, the regiment fared worse. Stretched, their food (what our company could have eaten in twenty-four hours) would last three days. Fuel for their trucks was long spent, so they walked and moved slowly as a result. And all but two horses had died from disease or exhaustion, a lack the soldiers as well as the officers felt, since horses became meat when they were no longer a good means of transport. The men—among whom I was just another Infanterist, a private, determined to stay alive—turned as gray and thin as the spring snow on the side of the road. Some ate what they found rotting in towns we passed through, or drank deliriously from wells fouled and abandoned. When they couldn't move from their own vomit and diarrhea, we left them with what good water we could spare and moved on.

We arrived at our position on Easter of that year (the sight of a sad and slight old priest dressed in white vestments and setting up for Mass on the altar of a box of ammunition my memory of the day) and camped on the Montello rise, where we had a commanding view of the Italian trenches to the west of the Piave, and I fell ill with a fever that same night. The last conscious things I remember were the purposeful movements of the lieutenant, who still commanded our platoon, to make a comfortable bed for me to lie in while I sweated and shook, and the look of concern on his face as he knelt over me and mopped my forehead with a rag he soaked in a bucket of river water.

We had never exchanged more than passing comment in our entire march south, but he seemed a tempered and rational man, even second-guessing a sergeant's estimate of range in the mountains and—out of nowhere—asking me what I thought, and so I told him that I believed that
the target was at least a thousand yards farther than what he'd been offered, to which he nodded his assent, and which turned out to be true. He whispered softly (though with urgency) to me that night and coaxed me to drink a brew of herbs he said, as though speaking to himself (because he thought that I had already lost consciousness and couldn't hear him), that he had bartered from a Hungarian and boiled down, and then told me to sleep while he sang an old Slovak song that I had learned as a boy about a shepherd who has a vision of the Virgin Mary and becomes a great soldier for Christ.

And in my delirium, I dreamed of my mother once again. This time, we were walking together and I was telling her about my life in Pastvina and how I missed my father now that I understood the wisdom I had mistaken for weakness, and that I wished she could have been with us there to watch over him as she had watched over me. She didn't speak, but kept staring with the same bright and shimmering face of the woman who had first come to me as a boy, on the boat from America to the old country.