The Sojourn

by Andrew Krivak

  There, on the rise of a hill, set some ways back from the road and framed by a stand of birch so that it wasn’t immediately visible, a farmhouse stood like a cutout in a fairy tale for children. To me, it was in a place too obvious and exposed, and for that reason I was suspicious and thought that we should go on and avoid it. Yet, she looked neither tentative nor surprised to see any of this—house or farmland—standing before her. We approached slowly and I helloed the porch in German and Hungarian but got no answer. A hen scratched about the yard until I tried to catch it and scared it into a weathered but passable barn. She told me to leave it, said, “We might get eggs from that one,” and pushed open the front door without any hesitation and walked inside as though she had intended to stop here to rest for a while. I slung the carbine I had been carrying at the ready over my shoulder and followed her.

  What looked like a living area was clean and uncluttered, although largely because it was emptied. A white porcelain angel stood out of place on a fieldstone mantel above the hearth and there was an old photograph on the opposite wall of a bride and groom, but there was no furniture or bookshelves or anything of value beyond the personal. The kitchen was orderly, too, in its scarcity. There were some dry goods left in a pantry, but nothing to suggest anyone was coming back soon to prepare dinner. Two back rooms had been made up and then left, and the whole place seemed not a home but some Pietist’s boardinghouse that admitted only the plain and virtuous. The girl rocked a shovelful of ashes from the stove, shook out the box, ordered me to find wood so that we could get a fire going, and said that I might find something to cut with in the barn. Then she began rummaging through the pantry jars and tins for what edible things might remain there and told me before I left that if I found a bucket in the barn, I should check the well at the back of the house and see if it was fouled or still drinkable. “If it is, bring me some water before you fill the wood box.”

  Outside, everything I needed was where she knew I could find it. A broken-down hayrack looked like it would keep us in kindling for a while. The barn had good tools that had been left hanging on a wall (where I found a bow saw and an ax that had been sharpened not too long ago), and at the back of the house, the well still had a pail attached to strong rope and a hand crank, and it splashed down after sixteen turns and came up with cold, clear springwater in it. I took a bucketful in to her, then pulled apart the hayrack and set to splitting some logs, and it occurred to me what we had stumbled upon, what the girl had anticipated, though without expecting such complete abandonment: the house of an entire family lost to the war. Father and sons had no doubt been conscripted and sent to the front, never to return. The mother and any other women left behind must have traveled to stay with relatives, moved to the city to find work and a means to support themselves, or died—somewhere, away from here—of disease or loneliness. Now there was only the dust and loess on the floors and windowsills of the place to indicate that no one would be returning to this house in any earthly fullness of time, and so that was where we stopped and lived, for the next month, it turned out, the girl and I, before it was her time.

  WE HAD NO WAY OF MEASURING THE DAYS, AND IF WE’D HAD, I’m not sure we’d have kept track anyway. I would awake from the floor in the living room, where I slept always, to find her standing over the stove in that cabin, the scent of freshly brewed wintergreen and pine-needle tea mixed with wood smoke in the air, and an egg on the fire, if the old hen had decided to give one up, or strips of venison and rabbit, of which I kept us in thin supply. I searched for the wild asparagus that grew in the woods and hills around Görz and along the Soca, and for which Zlee and I had often foraged, but the dirt was too much like clay here and there weren’t the tall firs of the Slovenian forests. Still, the girl managed to find some beets in a root cellar, and where the snow was melting, there was witchgrass coming through, and these and rest sustained us.

  One morning over tea, as though we had known each other our whole, short lives, I asked her if she had a name that I might call her by and she said she did but would never tell me. When I asked why, she said, “Because then you’ll know the truth,” and so I began to call her Tajna after that, a secret that would not be told, and she seemed to like it and began to answer to her new name.

  We slipped into patterns of work, what little we could do, patterns prescribed to us by mores we knew without thought or effort. She remained in the kitchen whenever I was around, and cleaned or worked at sewing an old blanket she had found in a cedar chest when I wasn’t. I seemed drawn more to the collecting and repairing of what tools or discarded furniture I found in the barn than to hunting, which I did, but which I did only for the food we needed to sustain us, so that I found myself carrying what game I might have shot that day back to the cabin at a brisk pace, so anxious was I to return to her.

  In this way, we moved into the last month of her confinement, like a couple that communicates by intention nearly as much as by word, so in tune are they to each other and their surroundings. One of the curious things I had found in the loft of the barn was an old wooden cradle that had one of its rockers broken off. It had a shallow-enough arc that I could carve a new one out of a single board with a sharp plane that was among the tools, and so I measured the curve and set a board in a vise and started planing, the feel of the metal on wood drawing me back to the barn in Pastvina, the scent of wood shavings on my clothes and strewn about the floor, the low of a cow if the weather meant they had to remain inside, and the whiff of manure everywhere, and I felt nothing but mournfulness, not out of an urge to go back there, but a realization that I would have to face one day all that I loved and all that I hated about the place. Or would I? And when I looked up from my work, the girl was standing in the door, her arms folded over her enormous belly and her body leaning against the door frame. Then she smiled and said, “There’s hot tea if you’ll take it,” and waddled like a goose back toward the house.

  Another time, when I came out of the barn and saw her lumbering across the yard with a full pail of water, I rushed up and took it from her and our hands touched and she let that touch linger, though she had let go of the pail, and she thanked me and told me that she was feeling tired. I carried it into the kitchen and turned to leave, when she asked me why I hadn’t left her and gone my own way, “after we had killed those soldiers,” she said, as though we were brothers in arms who had fought their way out of some besieged hollow. I stopped and held the back of a chair and told her that she was about to have a baby, and this wasn’t exactly the kind of countryside where one might find villagers hospitable to Gypsy women, pregnant or otherwise.

  What she meant, she said, was didn’t I have a home, a wife, a family that I wanted to get to, and I said no, that my mother died when I was an infant, and my brother died in the war. “I have a father,” I said, “and I miss him more than I thought possible when I was with him, but I’m not sure he’s even alive, or if he is, if he’ll want to see me now.”

  Why, she asked, and I said because I had rejected him and run off to war, and couldn’t return as either a victor or a hero, “or even a man brave enough to save his brother.”

  She sat quietly for a while and then said that she thought this was sad, and she told me that for a boy, I sounded like an old Gypsy woman who sat by a stove in her house and talked about the dead more than the living. “But even this old woman is surrounded by family,” she said. “In the Sátoraljaújhely, I have more family than I can count. No one is ever alone.”

  I asked her why, then, she and her husband were traveling alone, and she said, “Brother. He was my older brother. He was helping me to get to Ljubljana, where I was to meet up with my lover so that we could be married.”

  And she told me the story of having met a young first lieutenant in the Honvéd in Miskolc when she had gone there with her mother and sisters to sell lace in the market. He was right out of cadet training, on leave, and once he caught sight of the girl, he shadowed her for the entire day and the next. Their ca
ravan traveled down to Hatvan, and he followed, this time approaching their stall and pretending to want to buy some handkerchiefs when she was minding the goods while her mother prepared food. Young herself and giddy with the delight that a man in uniform was paying her so much close attention, she returned his glances and asked him directly if there was anything of hers that he thought was pretty and to his liking.

  At the meal, her mother, who had seen and heard everything, slapped her across the face and told her to keep away from such filthy men, but this only emboldened her. Surely this prince wanted only to give her beauty the recognition it deserved, and give her the life and luxury her mother and sisters could only dream of. They are jealous, she thought, and I will not let my prince go.

  It was that very evening when she noticed a soldier, a young private, lingering on the periphery of the caravan, and when she went to speak to him, he said that he had been (as she suspected) sent by the lieutenant to find out all that he could discover about her, and not to return until he knew who she was, where she was from, and where she was going. So she told the private to tell his commanding officer that she and her family were to stop in the city of Eger on their way home and visit cousins there. She could slip out at the evening meal, when she wouldn’t be missed, and they could meet at the fountain in the square near the castle. She pulled a flower from her blouse, gave it to the messenger, and said, “Give this to him, and tell him that he need only to come and he will find out all there is to know about who I am, where I am from, and where I may or may not be going.”

  Days later, after they had strolled from the fountain, through the square, up to the castle, and onto a secluded rampart, their kisses turned to his promises of marriage, and they made love, “without even so much as his coat for a pillow, and only the night above,” she said, and she never saw him again.

  When she discovered that she was with child, her mother confined her to housework and cooking—most of which she did anyway—but away from everyone except the old woman who talked only of the dead. All the while, her mother kept saying that when the child was born, it would go straight to the orphanage in Miskolc.

  One night, her favorite brother sneaked in to see her and she told him what had happened, and that she was convinced her prince was alive but couldn’t come to her because he was at the front. A few days later, her brother returned at night and took her to the house of a fortune-teller, who said she could see the young officer clearly, could see that he was stricken with love for his princess, and that he longed in his heart to be reunited with her, if only he could survive the war. Brave men often died in battle, and this man was one of the bravest, the fortune-teller assured her. The girl was beside herself with grief, so much so that her brother began to fear for her and the child. It was then that the fortune-teller added that she could see faintly the young man walking the streets of what looked to her like the old town of Ljubljana, although she couldn’t be certain. He wouldn’t be there long, however, for his orders back to the front for the empire’s final, victorious push were imminent. If the girl could get there before his leave was over, she would find the happiness she desired.

  “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 woul
d 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?”