The Sojourn (16 page)

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, especially 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.”

I never saw Zlee again in that prison or anywhere
else (although there are days still when I would welcome his spirit before me, though I am fast approaching the same place where that spirit has gone). And the men, too, who haunted me began slowly in their time to fade away, so that when Banquo asked me one day if the faces of war still marched under the banner of death toward me, I said that the last time I had seen those faces, I'd addressed them and told them that I had put down my weapon and wanted to march with my back to the fight in the direction of home, and they disappeared into the morning.

“Bene
,
” he said, and, not long after, Banquo, who had saved me, fell ill with fever and never woke.

 

 

WE WERE RELEASED IN EARLY DECEMBER, THE JAILERS ONLY saying to us as they unlocked each of our cells and brought us out into the air of a frigid but brilliant dawn, “You should go now,” as though it was our idea to have come there in the first place.

But there are times, even now in my life, when I wonder if I might have stayed on that island, if those Sardinian guards had given me any chance whatsoever to fall out of line on the way to that same coal steamer that had brought us across the sea, slip away, and hide forever in the house of whatever man or woman would have me. For, though I say that I longed for home, I couldn't say where that home was now. I had shed what rags were left of my uniform for a coarse shirt, trousers, and a woolen coat lined with sheepskin. I grew my first beard, thin and patchy as it was, because there were no razors to be found, and the food and work that marked my days brought some color and fullness back to my face. I left that island looking like not an
Austrian prisoner of war but the Sardinians who had cared for me and fed me, and with familiarity came a tinge of fear at the distance and uncertainty in the world beyond that waited, so that when the steamer reached the mainland, I thought to stow away belowdecks and return for good to Sardinia, but we were under the charge of the police, and so we quickly boarded the trains that would take us to the borders of the new Italy, and an Austria bereft of its monarchy.