The Sojourn (15 page)

I had one more round in my clip, and Zlee's ghost had fallen too far from me to crawl to him for what cartridges might remain in his field pouch, and I knew that the next time I stood would be my last. I thought of my father and wondered what it would be like to live a life as long as his, if I would have become him in the end, weaker but wiser from all that's lost as well as hard-won, and if he might have preferred to have died a young man full of ambition. And I thought of Zlee and what he would do now, surrender or fight to the end, and I wished that we could have sat and talked about the mountains and hills of Pastvina, or at least said good-bye to each other like brothers. I had lost all faith in the belief that I would see those I loved again, but I didn't want to die and disappear like every other soldier who fought and died and decayed in the flood and layers of indifferent rivers and mud. And I was overcome with fear.

I rose and threw my hands up, heard a rifle crack, and spun around as though someone had grabbed my right arm and heaved me. My fingers felt numb, and then as though they were on fire, and as I, too, lay on the ground in our trench among the bodies of all the others, one of the soldiers—an Italian, from the look of his uniform—entered the trench from the side and stood over me with his rifle pointed at my head.

“Please,” I said in English.

He fired. Dirt from the ground where the bullet struck beside me sprayed and stung my face.

“Please,” I begged, not for myself, but for all of the men I had killed because I had been trained never to miss.

He cursed, chambered another round, and raised his
rifle again, when an English soldier ran up from behind him and pushed him away.

“We don't execute prisoners, mate.” He scowled at the Italian, yanked me to my feet, and smashed me in the ribs with the butt of his rifle. I doubled over in pain but willed myself not to drop to my feet again.

“Bloody good shooting, you bastard,” he said, not knowing that I understood every word. Then he began to search me, even though I was in a position no sharpshooter would ever have considered a hide, or even been given an order to take up, as he looked for patches, field glasses, rifle scope, maps, or diagrams I might have made, all signs of a sniper. But all that I'd left back in the mountain ravine where Zlee lay dead and frozen, all but the lanyard, which Lieutenant Holub burned in a candle flame on the far side of the river before we made our final attack.

The Italian cursed louder and mock-inspected his rifle, while the Englishman ignored him, pocketed my dagger, and shoved me down the wet and narrow corridor of mud and out into a wide-open and clearing sky.

“Get a fucking move on,” he said, and I remember that, the accent, the scorn in that soldier's voice, the way in which fighting a war seemed just another thing this man not much older than I had been trained to do well, and so did it, as I had done, for the fighting was over now, and I raised my arms above my head and felt blood as it dripped slowly and soaked into my filthy uniform sleeve, cooled in the air, and rested on my skin.

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.