The Sojourn (19 page)

“I must tell you, though,” the fortune-teller moaned from her trance, “the journey is an impossible one. But for love, nothing is impossible.”

Keeping their escape a secret from everyone, including their mother, the girl and her brother borrowed what gold and other dowrylike possessions they could the following day, and then stole out of their village under cover of night.

“Maribor was far behind us,” she said, “and I swelled with the expectation of seeing my prince again, until those soldiers caught us at dusk, when we were tired and off guard. My poor brother fought as bravely as he could, but I knew when I saw them, and smelled them, that the fortune-teller had lied.”

And although we never spoke at length again about that or any other story (she never once wanting to know more about my father, or my mother, only asking me occasionally where it was I—a boy, she kept calling me—learned to do the things only women were allowed to do in her village), we were rarely out of sight of each other, unless I went into the forest to hunt, and when I returned, she would embrace me and scold me for having been
gone for too long, before turning back to whatever chores occupied her. After a time, then, she would come to the barn with a pot of tea, call me to a table made from a tree stump (for the weather was breaking in that part of the world and the days were often warm and springlike), take my hand, and insist I sit and drink. And I wished in my heart that we would never have to leave.

 

 

IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME THAT WE FOUND A HORSE GRAZING on grass one morning by the side of the house. It had a bridle with a lead tied to it but was otherwise unmarked and bare. It didn't appear hurt or lame, and the girl approached it and it shied, but she held out a slice of beet and it nickered and ate and she patted its foreleg and rubbed its neck, holding on to the bridle.

“It belongs to someone,” I said, “or it would have charged out of here before we got close.”

“She belongs to someone,” the girl said. “It's a mare. And what's the harm in keeping a horse if she wants to be kept?”

“No harm,” I said, “except that someone might come looking for it.”

The girl pared another slice of beet and the horse ate and licked her hand, so that it was covered in red, as though dyed or bleeding, and she said, sounding like someone weighing odds or options, “Let's leave her and see what she'll do.”

I filled a trough with some water and we went about our usual chores the whole day as she grazed on the new grass that was beginning to come through. The next morning, the mare was still sauntering about the grounds, and after breakfast the girl went out and led her into the
barn and to a stall that must have held a jennet or a mule at one time, closed the gate behind her, and the mare lay right down on the ground to rest.

For the next few days, we fed and watered her and she came out of the barn for some exercise, which meant I walked her up and down the road, then took her back to the house and let her roam. She didn't seem to want to go anywhere else. At meals now, the girl and I talked of the horses we had known, and I told her that my father's fondness for the American general Ulysses S. Grant made me believe that in war horses were treated as well as soldiers, if not better, until I went to war and found that if a horse wasn't good for pulling, it was good for eating, and shot. And if it wasn't good for eating, it was good for nothing and was left on the roadside to rot, so that the stench of a dead horse could be smelled for miles as you approached. She shuddered when I said this and told me that the horses of the Roma were as good, and sometimes better, than the horses she had heard they rode in America.

“A horse is clean,” she said “and noble.” And then, as an afterthought of virtues, she added, “And it can work harder than a man.”

Still, I felt in my gut that this horse wasn't meant to be a blessing to us, and two days later I came out of the woods in the late afternoon after a long day of hunting, during which I netted one hedgehog and a hare, and I saw from a distance that the front door was open but the girl wasn't about. I picked up my step and looked into the barn, but I found neither the girl nor the horse, and I ran inside the house.

It was ransacked and overturned. In the kitchen, I found cupboards emptied, the table smashed, and, by the back room, the girl lying on the floor, blood on her lip and a welt
below her eye where she'd been hit. I picked her up and pushed through the curtain that separated the room she slept in from the kitchen and laid her down on the bed. She was conscious and kept whispering over and over, “Where are you? Where are you?” but she kept her eyes closed, and every now and then she would wince and hold her belly.

“What happened here?” I said, out of breath and anger rising. “Who did this?”

“The boy,” she whispered, “the boy,” and I thought she meant the baby inside her (for she had divined some time ago that she was to deliver a son) and told her that the boy would be just fine if she lay still and slept for a while. I went out to the well and wet a rag, brought it in and laid it across her eye, and told her again to sleep. In the kitchen, I bolted the last round I had into the carbine, noticed the other one we kept with us was gone, and went outside to follow the tracks of the horse and whoever had taken her down the road.

I moved fast, as I knew there wouldn't be much light left soon, and it didn't take long before I saw the brown hide of the mare, but no one that I could discern was leading her, and I slowed so as not to spook horse or man, and when I was within fifty yards of them, I shouted at whoever was in front to stop and turn around slow.

As he did, I kept approaching with my rifle shouldered, and I could see as he stood in the road now with his hands raised, one still holding the lead, that it was just a boy, twelve, thirteen years old at the most, and I knew what the girl had meant. The other carbine was slung over his shoulder.

“You stole our horse,” I said, my cheek in the rifle's weld so that I could shoot the moment he might draw a pistol or try to run.

“Your horse?” he said, his voice high-pitched but cocky for a young boy.

“Drop the lead and I won't shoot you,” I said.

“Does a week of feeding my uncle's mare grass and water make her yours?”

Which is what I would have countered with if I was staring down the barrel of a rifle and a stolen horse pawed and sulled at my side. “If it's your family's,” I asked, “where are they?”

“Dead,” he said, “like everyone else.”

“Why'd you beat the girl?”

“She came after me with a stove lid, the bitch. What are you doing living there?”

“It's no concern of yours. Not anymore. Now drop the lead and leave the horse.” He stood there, not frozen or scared, just indifferent, like we'd been talking about what price he got in town for goods that were stored elsewhere. “Drop the lead and walk on,” I said again, “or I'll shoot you where you stand.”

He dropped the lead and brought the carbine around fast from his shoulder, faster than I thought possible, and the two of us stood in that position, duel-like. I could have killed him in the space of a breath, but he seemed pitiful to me, and yet noble for holding hard to this last remnant of his life.

“It's not loaded,” I said.

“You don't know that I've got bullets, do you?”

“I know.”

He lowered the barrel and pushed the rifle around to his back, hooked his thumb around the strap in one hand and the horse's bridle in the other, and stood looking at me in the dusk.

“All right, then,” he said. “Shoot a man for a horse.” And he let go of both strap and bridle and stood there in
the road with his arms outstretched, so that the mare thought he meant to give her some room, and she stepped into the grass to graze.

I held my rifle steady and aimed for the center of his chest, stroked the stock with my trigger finger above the guard, and breathed deeply in and out to calm myself. After a while, the boy turned and gave the horse a tug and she walked off along behind him, just as they had been doing when I came upon them, and I waited until they were out of range, ejected the last round from the magazine into the dirt, heaved the rifle into the woods, where it landed in thick moss beneath an oak, and ran at a trot back to the house and the girl.

 

 

I NURSED HER INTO THE EVENING AND NIGHT, HELD HER AND wiped her face as she came in and out of a light consciousness, and then she slept for a long stretch, so that I fell asleep, too, in the chair I kept at her bedside. She woke in the darkness of midnight, shook me awake, and said, “It's time. It's broken.”

I lit a lamp and looked down at the mess of sheet and ticking on which she slept and could see what looked in the light like mingled daubs of blood. She saw it, too, and said, “No, it can be that way sometimes. I was careful to shield myself when he hit me. Wash and put the water on.”

But she was still ashen and sweating, and I made her lie back down in her bed after I had stripped the soiled sheets and thrown some shirts and coats over the bare frame. For a long time, she lay resting and breathing deeply, time I took to bank the stove, get more water from the well, and fill the pot to boil.

When her labor began, I knew enough to tell that it was going to be hard. I had been around many animals giving birth, and the ones who seemed stronger, as though masking a fear, were the ones for whom birth often turned from life to death. But I had never been with a woman in labor, and I wondered if I would know what to expect, what to look and listen for.

For the first few hours of her contractions, she breathed and moaned and tried to rest, and I could comfort her only with the cool, wet rag. Then, as they came closer and intensified, she sat up and panted. “Jozef, my hand, hold my hand,” and she pushed down on my hand, the bed, the ground, and cried into the night, and this went on for hours as the morning came on, and then day, and what I never expected was the long resistance that child had to being born. I knew he wasn't breech. But he was turned and so couldn't move fully into the birth canal. I coaxed her and held her and tried to massage away her pain, but it grew and grew with yet more and longer hours, it seemed, the child not coming, only screams, and in my own exhaustion I weakened and buckled and wept, because in the early spring month we lived in that pastoral, waiting for this moment, I had prayed and dreamed that this girl might be some answer to another prayer I had made in a prison cell in Sardinia, that the misery and death I had dealt and seen might somehow be turned around, might somehow be wiped clean by a life unexpected.

I noticed that the sun was setting in the west, and I thought how quickly and yet full of burden a day can begin and end, and she pulled me close to her and said that if the child lived, I had to take it back to her village, that they would want it and care for it, in spite of her.

“Promise me, promise me,” she whispered, her lips
brushing my cheeks. And I said that I would, and that she would come, too, because we had a long way yet to go. But she turned her head on the pillow and said, “No. It won't be. Not me. Just go. Across the Sajó. It's close. You'll see. The baby,” she said, and wailed, and I knew that if she didn't deliver soon, she and the baby both would die.

But she seemed to know this as well and, without my directing her, rose from the bed and sat on the edge so that gravity might do its best as a midwife. I placed a blanket on the floor and then held her from behind for support as she clenched her fists and stood and inhaled deeply, and the screams that came were unearthly, and the power in her back and arms was enough to bring tears to my eyes and make me wonder if she might crush my own hands as she bore down.

I saw the gush of fluids then and moved around quickly to take the child from her and keep it from strangling. The head had crowned and with each push more of the face emerged, though there was no wiping away or staunching of blood, so much blood it was, as though the child must swim through it as both test and augury, for she had torn, as I had seen sheep tear when the lamb was large or ill-positioned, and I knew later, when the bleeding wouldn't stop, that something had ruptured inside.

But in that moment of birthing, I grabbed the head, fully free, and as she pushed, I worked out the shoulder caught in her tiny girl-like pelvis, and it was a boy, stiff and blue, but he bent slowly and then kicked and wakened, determined but exhausted as he gulped his first breath of air and bellowed weakly there in the cup of my arms. I tied off the umbilicus with a strip of cloth and cut it with a pair of sewing shears and then wrapped him in a sheet and placed him in his mother's arms.

She lay back on the bed. She was white and breathing shallowly, but she pulled her son to her and spoke to him softly in Romany, secrets I knew nothing of and would never hear whispered again. His bellows became mews as he searched her out in his hunger and then latched and sucked, and the two rested there.

When I returned with more rags and sawdust, she was coming in and out of sleep and looking ghostly from blood loss, but the boy clung to her and what life there was in the first and last precious drops of foremilk she fed him, until she was dead. I lifted him from her and he wailed out of longing, as I did, too, out of a grief I'd never known, so that the two of us were like a chorus of orphans lost and broken in the world. And as we sobbed, I bundled the child and made a sling on my chest out of webbing I had cut from the dead soldiers' backpacks a long two months ago, and I felt her in that house, helping me and hurrying me, as though the valley wind itself whispered, Cross the Sajó! I had no idea how far, or how long, I or the child would be able to endure. We were both empty of what it was we desired. I went to her on the bed, pulled the quilt up to her chin, whispered, “Milujem t'a,” and kissed her cheek, which was cold and pale.