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.
In the kitchen, I spilled the oil lamp across the table and onto the wooden floor, drew a burning log from the stove and set fire to the house, ran out into the night, moonlit for the first in a long time, and began to move quickly east.
I RAN LIKE A FUGITIVE IN THE DARK, NOT KNOWING WHERE I was going, only why, and I would have run throughout the night, the next day, and another night, for all nights if I had to, until I collapsed, because for the first time in years, since the war, since I’d embraced my father and said good-bye, I held hard to life, a life that needed me to move on this road
, in this direction, waiting to come to the river she called the Sajó, if her son was to survive.
For the first few hours, he slept, squirming occasionally and crying out in whatever confusion he was capable of feeling, but otherwise he breathed in silence, lulled by the steady trot I had fallen into. I never knew exactly how far into Hungarian territory the girl and I had walked. It was she who had set the stiff pace that I’d had to condition myself to follow, so unconditioned to days of continuous walking was I after six months in prison. And not every farmer with a horse and cart passed us by without regard. One stranger or another would stop for us if he felt moved more to charity for the young girl with child than derision for her race, and we would climb onto the back of the cart and bounce along in discomfort until he indicated that he had taken us as far as he was able, and we would climb off and keep walking. She otherwise had tried to avoid all cities and towns, only rarely venturing into a local village when she recognized it as a place not inhospitable. There she’d buy a loaf of bread, cheese, or soft old apples with what few coins she had left, and then take the low road, a lift of her head the only sign to tell me that her errands were done and she was going.
So I wasn’t completely certain that if I kept moving east I would come to any river in a day’s time. The boy would not live if we weren’t any closer, and I spoke this out loud to her as I slipped through a small candlelit village in the dark and began to doubt that I could physically do what it was she had asked of me, and said so, as though she ran beside me. But then I realized why she had stopped that day as we came out of the forest, how it was she’d seemed to know that house, and why she hadn’t gone home to have her baby, even when she’d remained perhaps only a day’s ride from her own family. She’d feared they wouldn’t have her, wouldn’t take her back and welcome her son, but would shun her, leaving her to face the world alone, an impossible thought, and so she’d hovered between remaining lost in their memory and found in their lives, and died there. And all of this conjuring made me long for her, made me wish that by some reversal of time, or miracle of divine Providence, I might return to that homestead and find her alive, and once again live and move in her presence and shadow.
BY FIRST LIGHT, I RECOGNIZED TERRAIN SIMILAR TO THAT of Kassa. Wild grapevines grew along the brown plains, and I couldn’t go a few kilometers without passing some peasant setting out for a field, often with a dog that was more than willing to snap at me, so that I picked up a staff along the way and began bringing it down on the heads of at least two curs before the sun was up. The days had gotten warmer, too, so I knew that I was in the basin lands that stretched between the Duna and the Hernád. I have to cross a river soon, I thought, or a border.
I was reduced to a slow crawl by the time I saw the military truck approaching. To them, from a distance, I was probably just another villager with a pack slung back to front, and not worth bothering, but I couldn’t take that chance. I ducked off the road and made for a shack where a rusted tractor, useless and idle, was parked in its permanent shade. I crouched down against the wall as the truck passed, but when I tried to get up, my legs crumbled and I slumped over, unable to go any farther. The boy woke and began to cry, but his bleats now sounded as weak and expiring as he was. Neither one of us had taken food in the hours of which I had lost track. How much longer can he go? I wondered, and whispered to his covered head that we would be home soon, then leaned back against the shed wall to keep from smothering him and told myself I would rest there for just a few minutes, while those weakening moans haunted the air about me.
I woke, to find an old man prodding me with my staff. His body stood in the full light of the sun, which had come around to the side of the shack I’d been sleeping against. When I stirred, he bent down and pulled off the cover of the sling to see the child, and then he waved to a woman in a horse-drawn dray, helped me to my feet, and said in Hungarian (although I saw his face and knew that he was a Rom), “Quickly, the soldiers are returning.”
He walked me out to the road, took the baby, and handed him to the woman, who put him to her breast. Then he waved me under a tarp that covered a load of manure piled high on the back of the heavy cart. “Keep quiet and don’t move,” he said, “and they’ll think you’re just another mound.” He dropped the tarp, so that I lay curled up in darkness, and climbed aboard and nudged the horse gently on so as not to draw attention. I could hear the woman singing to the baby, felt her rocking him as we rode, and I knew when I heard her begin to cry that she, too, feared for his life.
The truck came up fast; I could tell this when I heard it brake hard in front of us and order the man to pull over. The soldiers had gotten word of an army deserter in the area, they said, a thin, bearded man carrying a walking stick and a field pack.
“Have you seen him?” they asked.
The man said that he hadn’t, that he and his wife were only taking this load of manure to their village across the Sajó, and I could hear the rest of the men joke about which was worse, the stink of a Gypsy or the stink of cow shit, then footsteps crunching along the dirt and stone, getting louder as they approached the back of the dray, and then a rifle barrel poked under the tarp to lift it.
“Let’s go, Ábel!” the other men in the truck yelled. “These two stink!” And the tarp lowered again and the truck drove off, shifting hard through its gears, until there was silence all around me and I wondered if the man seated in the cart and holding the horse’s reins was still there with the woman and child.
I fell asleep in that bed of shit, though I was brought to the edge of waking occasionally by the ruts and rocks in the road that my driver failed to miss, until he came to a stop and threw off my cover. The noonday sun was bright and warm and I rubbed my eyes against it and looked out. We had crossed a bridge, the water below wide and brown and shallow. Along the banks to the east sat a Romany village where smoke rose from the makeshift chimneys of makeshift huts, and I watched the figures of small children emerge from one of these huts to chase a mangy dog through the dirt and mud and then disappear, although it was hard to say where. The old man told me in Hungarian that this was as far as he was going.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked him, and he pointed to his wife, or daughter, or whoever she was. She flinched and pulled the baby to her. “He needs nursing,” I said.
“He’s being nursed,” the old man said.
The woman yelled back with scorn and a heavy accent that he might have died, but the man glared at her.
I said that I was grateful for their rescue but that I had to take the boy to his home, where he belonged. “His mother was from a village across the Sajó,” I said, “and I made her a promise. Give him to me.”
“This is the Sajó,” the old man said, and pointed to the water with a long sweep of his hand. “Who is this woman you’re speaking of?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. I never suspected that the truths and lies she had gathered and spun for her tale of love and wandering would mean nothing without a name she had refused to give, or even without thinking might have spoken. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her name.”
“I see,” he said, disbelieving my own story of deliverance. “The boy is being nursed, and he looks strong enough to survive. You’ve done what your . . . lover asked you to do, no? He’ll be safe with us.”
I reached for the dagger I kept in my boot and held it up weakly to the old man. “He comes with me,” I said, but the man stood there unfazed. The woman uttered some incomprehensible taunt or invective and he nodded his head but otherwise said nothing more and didn’t move, and I realized then that I had made a stand with the intent to kill not for the baby, whose eyes I can say I had never seen in the light of day, but for a promise to a woman who would have considered my love a taboo, and whose ashes lay beneath the smoking rubble of a house in the forest, ashes that one day soon would be lifted by the wind, and my knowledge of this would be more than any one on earth could say they knew of her.
By this time, the vil
lagers had begun to wonder why we three stood unmoving near their bridge, and people started swarming up the banks for a closer look, shocked to see one of their own being threatened with a knife. Some shouted their own threats, and a boy who could not have been more than ten kept saying over and over in a Hungarian he’d probably learned in school, “Fight me! Fight me!”
Then the man, some kind of elder—this was clear to me from the response of the others—held his hand up to the crowd, commanded their silence, and asked me in a quiet voice, “The boy’s mother, was she a young girl?”
I said she was, and that she’d been traveling with her brother. “When I came upon them, he had already been killed by Honvéd. Deserters, I’m sure they were.”
“And where are these deserters now?” he asked.
I told him that I’d killed them when I saw what they were doing to the girl, and he feigned surprise at this. “You killed a Hungarian soldier in order to save the life of a Gypsy?”
I told him that I’d killed one soldier and the girl had killed the other in order to save my life, but that I had killed many men in the war without regard for what coat they wore or what language they spoke. It was all the same to me.
“Did you kill her brother, too?” he asked.
“No. I told you,” I said, “he was dead already. I helped her to bury him.”
“That seems unlikely,” he said, “since we have our own rituals for burial.” Someone else shouted from the crowd that I should be turned over to the police so that they wouldn’t think the villagers were harboring deserters and return to arrest them and burn their houses.
I told them that I wasn’t a deserter, that I’d been a prisoner of the Italians, and when the war ended, they’d released me, put me on a train to the border, and left me to walk home.
“You’ve come a long way, then,” the old man said, and the crowd went silent again, as though wondering who would move or admit to defeat first, I or the old man. What could I say to convince them, though? And I wondered in my exhaustion if it was even worth it. If I started walking now and followed the road in front of me to wherever it might lead, I would have done all that I had promised I’d do, even if it meant that I’d likely be inside of a Hungarian prison by nightfall.
The Sojourn Page 15