The Sojourn (17 page)

In Padua, we changed trains and moved northeast to Treviso, then across the Piave and Tagliamento again, rivers steely and quiet in the winter cold, but with scars of the war carved everywhere along their banks. From there, we pushed farther north to the upper valley until we came to the town of Pontebba. On the morning of the third day of our journey north, they uncoupled the car we had been riding in and shunted it off to a siding. A cold wind blew down from the Alps and I could tell that it was going to get colder, but after the close and filthy quarters of the train, the cloudless sky and sharp air were a welcome relief.

The scent of bread wafted from a bakery near the train station. Men who had thrown away or never worn a uniform walked through the streets on their way to work or a café, and women who might once have tended the wounded and who now tended goats opened shutters of shops and homes to let the winter light in. I moved slowly, more out of cautious hesitation than fatigue. I wasn't strong, but I was healthy enough. The Italian police said that the new border was just a few miles from there and that the town of Villach was directly northeast.

“Illegal immigrants will be shot,” they warned. “Now go.” And that was it. We set off walking, first as a
mob, then as large groups, then clusters still clinging to some sense of security in numbers. In Austria, on the banks of the Drava, I broke away from ten other men who said they were going to cross into Bohemia at Gmünd, where the legionnaires had headquarters. I turned and followed that river east until I came to the outskirts of Klagenfurt and the tiny village of Abtei, then turned south into the Karawanken Range so as to avoid all gatherings of men. For, even with the beard, there was no mistaking me for a twenty-year-old—soldier or no—and because these new armies of legionnaires were made up mostly of deserters, there was a feeling in Austria and Hungary that the war had been lost because of the Slavs. Moreover, with no money, the countryside was the only place I stood any chance to get food, whether by begging, stealing, or killing it, though I had no weapon with which to do so, and yet I found myself at peace in the mountains, feeling again that there I would not want for anything, nor would I be put upon to serve some malevolent master.

 

 

I TRAVELED EAST—IN THE BROAD DIRECTION OF THE HOME I had once known, like some migratory bird following the compass of instinct—and came out of the mountains and hugged the forested roads that connected the small hamlets and villages that had once made up the lands of old Hungary. For weeks I trekked, and in late morning on a day when I had already been walking for several hours, I could see from one of those roads a run-down hut nestled deep in a hollow. Some kind of camp, I thought, or just a poor lodging left to crumble, yet from a distance I could see a hole in the roof and a bird's nest in the eve. It hadn't
been occupied for some time, but I thought there still might be something to eat, or something of value, inside.

As I got closer, I could hear voices, men's voices, laughing and cajoling, as if they were at a game, and speaking Hungarian, although it sounded drunken. I crept up to a front window and peered inside. There were two Honvéd soldiers, looking as though they had gone through worse than I, one sitting at a wooden table, legs crossed, drinking from a bottle, the other bare-assed and having his way with some desperate whore lying inert on the dirt floor.

I didn't want this kind of trouble, but just as I ducked down to creep away, I heard the one at the table shout too loudly for the small space, “Give me a turn! Then I'm gonna gut the bitch.”

The other rolled off and slapped the girl in the face as he did so, and I could see plainly that she was just a girl. A Gypsy, it appeared, from her features, thirteen, fourteen maybe, at the most, and I could see that she was pregnant, and far along, by the looks of it. The man swaggered as he got up from the table, and she didn't try to run or roll over or do anything. I thought she might be dead until I saw her hands reach down and touch her belly, big as a globe.

“That's right, that's right,” the man spit out as he pulled down his trousers. “Three Gypsies in one day, Emil, hey?” And his friend smiled with his teeth, sat down at the same table, and finished off whatever liquid swirled in that bottle.

They must have been drunk when they got there, because there was a carbine at the back of the hut, just out of arm's reach of the girl, and another one propped against the wall next to the door. They wouldn't have been so careless otherwise, or maybe they would have.
From where I crouched, I was almost within arm's reach of the closest weapon. Even if it wasn't loaded, I figured, I could use the butt of it on the bastard sitting in the chair. I crept from the window to the door, pushed it open, grabbed the rifle, and quickly checked the bolt. One round left. The man at the table was rising, his eyes wide and teeth snarling. He looked bigger, and I suddenly wondered what it was I was trying to do. He came at me fast, too fast for that room, and I shot him point-blank in the neck, and he jerked back like he was on a rope and blood poured out of him in a flume, covering my head and face, so that I was blinded for a moment. That was when the other one jumped on me with his knife, the same kind of dagger we'd all carried in the trenches. I reached up as he was about to sink it into my chest and held his hand above my head with both arms. He was strong and I ... I wasn't so much anymore. Slowly, slowly he brought the knife toward me, as if I was losing at a game of arm wrestling, though this game wasn't for a drink of brandy. With one last gasp, I pushed his hand up as hard as I could and his whole body tensed, eyes squinting with pain and surprise, then he dropped the knife and crumpled on top of me.

The girl was standing over him, her hands bloodied, a knife in the dead man's side, right below the rib cage and into the kidney. I got on my feet and said to her in Hungarian, “You're safe now.”

She kicked the dead Honvéd and spat. “Gadjo.”

That's what he was, just as I was.
Gadjo
. A non-Rom, no better than these same deserters who had raped and tried to kill her and her unborn baby, and as I wiped blood off my face and hands and cursed that it had fouled my coat, the girl ripped through the pockets of the soldiers
and threw a mixture of gold coins and large silver buttons into the fold of her dress. It seemed like a great deal of money and trinkets for a couple of drunken Honvéd to have on them. When she was done, she stood holding her dress and the knife and looked at me as though measuring me with her eyes, trying to decide if she might not have been better off with the drunks.

“I need you to help me bury my husband,” she said.

We walked out of the hut and toward the edge of the forest. There, by a tree, lay the body of man who had already been dead for a few days, facedown in the dirt, hands tied with cheap hemp behind his back while flies buzzed the muss of hair and blood and brains caked around his head. He had begun to smell like the rotting dead, a smell I had only gotten out of my nose after breathing sea air in Sardinia. The girl grabbed him by the back of the neck, lifted him, and laid him down again so that he faced upward, what was left of his face anyway.

She bent over him, began to straighten his clothes, and cried “Oh Bexhet, my poor Bexhet,” and then she stopped and looked up at me. “Something to dig with,” she said.

I went back to the house to get the knife and a wooden bucket I had seen near the door. When I returned, she was whispering into the dead man's ears and putting the silver buttons she had taken from the Honvéd into his pockets. “They were ... my husband's,” she said out loud. “He kept them on his jacket.” And I could see, then, torn threads on the man's breast.

“What about the gold?” I asked.

“What about it? It's mine. My wedding gift. Just another
Cigánka
, you think, eh, you bastard? Shut up and dig.” She used the Slovak word for Gypsy, so I knew
that she had probably come from somewhere in the east and might be moving east as well, although I wanted no traveling companion and hoped to be rid of her after we had buried her husband and I knew she was able to look after herself.

It took a few hours, but we eventually made a pit large enough to roll a corpse into. We packed down the earth hard over it, then piled a pyramid of rocks, four deep, to keep the animals out until that body was nothing more than bones. It was dark when we were finished.

“We'll need to rest,” I said.

“We?” she said, derisively for a young girl. “You rest. I'm going.”

But she didn't move from the spot. I went back into the hut and dragged the bodies of the soldiers outside, heavy as they were. I couldn't move them far and only hoped that they wouldn't attract animals at night. There was a fire pit on the other side of the hut, and so I used a piece of flint one of the prison guards had given me before I left and the Honvéd's trench dagger (which I kept) to make a fire with a bit of burlap I found and a piece of paper the girl had discarded when she went through the soldiers' pockets. It was going to be a cold night, and for as strong as that girl was trying to be, I knew she was, at that point, little stronger than I.

 

 

I FELL ASLEEP ON THE GROUND BY THE FIRE AND IN THE MORNING ached with cold, fatigue, and hunger. I thought that the girl had left me until I heard her rustling around inside the hut, where she had gone to sleep. She came outside holding both carbines and said, “If we don't find food and somewhere else to sleep, we'll die.”

She had cleaned up somehow—not a trace of dirt or any struggle she had been through from the day before. I stood up and stomped my feet to get some blood running through them, and she handed me the rifle that was loaded (I checked) and started walking, without any other word spoken.

I had seen and lived near Roma my entire life, and I knew only that they were despised and mistrusted for their singular desire to remain detached from all but their own insular culture and society. From this truth rose all other myths about them. Yet this young woman seemed not to hold in any way to that measure of mistrust around which I had been raised, and I looked upon her as she walked ahead as an altogether unknown and unsettling thing, unsettling to me on that morning (I knew then and will confess now) for her beauty. She had sloe-colored almond eyes and sharp cheeks centered by a kind of prizefighters's nose, which was broad but perfectly symmetrical and almost elegant as it drew up and out of those cheeks. Her mouth and lips were more than full—they were too large and took up the entire lower portion of her face, while somehow still looking delicate whenever she spoke, and I never saw her smile. And all of her features were framed by black hair of a hue that seemed not to reflect light so much as exude it and which she kept pulled back to each side in braids in the manner of a schoolgirl, reminding me, in fact, that she was yet a girl. A girl who had a presence and allure to her that tugged at me in a way that I had never felt in a woman or a girl in my life. When I thought of it as we walked (she a good stretch out front but never out of sight), I told myself that it was strength. Her strength was what had attracted and held
me. She seemed to have a strength that I, in all of my training and soldiering, could only grasp at. And she looked down on me. I was the filthy one. I was the man whose life she had saved, “for no good reason,” she'd said the first night we camped in a stand of firs and cooked the meat of a squirrel I had shot to bits. She moved about me as though I were a leper, insisted that she clean the meat herself, and doled out what portions there were unevenly, right in front of me, as though I were a child she'd just as soon backhand if I challenged her.

There wasn't much discussion, though, about anything in those first few days we traveled together—or rather, moved in close proximity to each other. The only authority I had was with the rifle, and I said to her that we should save what bullets we had left for larger game, for I could see that we were never far from a deer or two. But there was no chance of tracking and shooting one as we walked forest paths and down empty roads while she kicked stones and picked up sticks, sang to herself, or lagged so far behind that when she wanted to scold me for any number of reasons she could think of, she had to yell ahead, until I told her that she should go on without me if she had no interest in food, because I was going to sit and wait and find some game to kill. She began to cry and said that she was very hungry and was only trying to take her mind off of that hunger. And so I told her that if she could keep a fire going, I could shoot and dress a deer, and then we'd have our fill.

We found a moss floor under snow near a creek, cleared some ground and camped there for a day and a night, and had to settle for a skinny hare for our supper, and the next morning hiked back out to the road and
continued our journey, although she never kicked another stone, and sang quietly to her unborn child in a voice that was close and soothing to me, as well.

When she stopped suddenly once and I asked why, she shushed me and stood stiff and still by the roadside. Within minutes, a horse and cart appeared, the driver slowed and then sped up at the sight of us, his gaze fixed forward and his mouth in a sneer as he whipped his horse into a trot, and in his wake, we went along as before.

There were any number of places we could have stopped and rested for a few days, or longer, before moving on, although to where was never clear. Old hunting cabins, good caves, glens protected by stands of pine so thick that they worked better than walls to keep out the cold and wind. Yet the girl seemed to be in search of something, not her home village so much as a place or destination she had envisioned (or knew existed) along this path and would not cease walking until we had reached it. So we continued to camp, but never more than a full day, and in the morning she would poke me awake with a stick and say in Slovak, as though she needed to be sure that I understood it was time to leave, “Pod'me.”