The Sojourn (7 page)

But when we told my father that Tibor and Miro were hurt and in the barn after they had tried to beat me for some long-held grudge, he became angry, said that those two were just nervous about their induction and that at heart they were good boys who didn't know any better. “How bad are they?” he asked.

“Otec,” Zlee said, calling him “Father,” just as I did, “they were trying to—”

I cut him off. “No, Zlee.”

“Marian,” my father asked again, his voice rising and impatient now. “How bad are they?”

“Vel'mi zl•,” he replied.

“Goddamn it!” My father brought his fist down on the table and began to shout at us there in the kitchen, telling Zlee that he was tired of the fighting and stories of beatings that followed him everywhere he went. “There'll come a time when I won't be able to protect you any longer, and I'm not even sure that I'll want to,” he said, though we all knew that he was incapable of protecting even himself anymore. “Go and get the doctor, and we'll see what comes of this.”

Nothing came of it. Miro and Tibor left for the war together in the summer of 1915 and were sent to fight in Galicia, in spite of Tibor's poorly set arm. Sometime in the fall, we got preprinted postcards, which every soldier on the front initialed and sent home before battle. Then, in the winter, the only villager who ever returned to us from the east alive (he had lost a leg and spoke with a quaver in his voice) told us that Tibor had been shot and killed point-blank in the trench by his commanding officer for refusing to attack when ordered. Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some
time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him. Their mother believed they had died heroes, and no one saw any reason to tell her otherwise. She gave all the money she had to the priest, who said Masses for their souls. And yet when I heard about their deaths, I wished I had killed them, carrying that rage within me like an animal tied down and caged, and I prayed for the war to last, though I still had a year to go.

That night, my mother came to me in a dream again. Her face seemed no longer radiant, as it had been when I was a boy, but, rather, etched with sadness. No, not sadness. Fear. The look of fear. I know, because I saw that look everywhere. And while I wondered what it was she was afraid of, and even began to feel it rising in me, she spoke for the first time. Her arms outstretched, as they always were, she said, “Lúbim t'a,” words of love from a mother to a son, and I reached out for her, wanting her to speak again, to tell me
why,
and to remain there so that I might know something of who she was, if she did, in fact, love me, as she said. But her image fluttered and shook, and when I awoke, the solace I had felt from her in the past comfort of those dreams had been replaced by a hard and intractable anger.

 

 

ASH WEDNESDAY CAME IN MID-FEBRUARY IN 1915, AND from the day we set out in late winter of that year on the trail that took us from the village into the mountains, the skies threatening and the path already buried in snow, if I wasn't quiet and sullen enough to ignore all but the simplest requests made of me, I took to arguing with my father's opinions, regardless of where I stood on them. He'd look dismayed, and then disdainful, until we just
stopped talking, or until Zlee brought up the weather.

My father was against the war. He was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Americans came in on the side of the English and French, which would mean the end of Germany and Austria-Hungary. But few people in Pastvina, or any of the other surrounding villages, could read anything beyond the Hungarian the few years of state school gave them, and all of the papers printed in Kassa and Budapest praised the emperor and his unmatched, loyal army, reporting only the victories we achieved against hapless Russians and now the Italians, who outnumbered us. Even as more and more food, men, and morale disappeared.

He hadn't hatched these ideas on his own. Along with supplies we needed at the camp, my father also managed to bring back from his trips to Kassa a few black-market back issues of The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian. These were meant to be part of our English lessons, but they also shaped his view that the Habsburg dynasty had reached its twilight and was about to be snuffed out. My father was convinced that the problem of the Slavs, as they referred to the conflicts that kept rising up out of every corner of the empire, was the one thing Ferdinand might have reformed. His wife was even a Czech. And then he was assassinated—by a Slav.

“The problem of the Slavs is the Slavs themselves,” my father would say when our debates turned to whether Russia's revolution was a force of good or just another struggle that would benefit a few and leave the peasants starving. Then he would pick up a book from his precious shelf of works in English, heft it, and say, depending on whom he felt like reading, “We need a Grant” or “We need a Lincoln, not a Trotsky.”

That was how we passed most spring and summer nights that year, exhausted in the candlelight of our cabin from the work we did, while the animals we shepherded ate or slept along the hills outside and boys marched off to war from their families and farms below. Until I got it into my head that the man who had raised me, and all his views, were the ridiculous and subversive rantings of a drunken coward and it was time that I rejected them.

When Zlee turned eighteen in March 1916 and had to register at the conscription office in Eperjes, I had a printer in the city alter my identity card so I could join up early, and I went to present my papers along with all those who were of fighting age. In any other year, they might have balked, checked, and sent me home to wait, but the Honvéd were so desperate for conscripts that it turned a blind eye when Zlee said to the officer in charge, “He's from the mountains, sir, and can shoot.” That was all they needed. I passed my physical and was told to report back in two days, ready for basic training.

And so, it was on the eve of my departure to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the Great War—a night I spent with my father down off the mountain (he had paid the Rusyn peasants to watch his flocks for two days), in spring, so that, as we walked into the village at midday, the green grass and fruit tree blossoms and din of children's voices and animals who had given birth in the barnyards that were attached to houses like second rooms seemed the stage of some play I happened upon and watched from behind a curtain—that my father told me all that he remembered about the day my mother died over the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado, and why it was we left America for the old country.

“I stopped believing a long time ago,” he said into the
darkness, against which we had lit a single candle, “but that doesn't mean, like any unbeliever, that I might not be mistaken. You see, I felt the conviction that some judgment had been passed down by God, and the others who said they feared this God, so that if I didn't somehow atone for what I'd failed to do, after losing everything, I'd lose the only person I'd ever loved in this world. You.”

In the morning, he waited for me by the door, kissed me on the forehead, whispered into my ear, “Lúbim t'a,” and we parted.

ZLEE AND I WERE LUCKY TO HAVE JOINED UP TOGETHER. Basic training, with its weeks of constant drilling from dawn well into the night, seemed a thing requiring no effort. We were used to a life of early mornings and physical labor outside all day. It knocked us down a few pegs, got us used to hearing obscenities for marching sloppily or wearing scuffed boots, or maybe it was just to remind us that there was someone whose job it was to tell us what to do every waking hour of those days, and I began to miss the leisure of books and conversation, but I confronted these obstacles as a simple rite of passage. And Zlee, Zlee had this way—maddening to our corporal, who had never seen battle, and would likely have turned tail if he had—of conforming to the least detail with obsessive perfection, all the while making it clear by his indifferent, canine stride and aloof, unanimated face that these least details (which he would see to their completion) meant nothing to him. Zlee was as indomitable as he was bereft of guile.

But it wasn't until the final weeks, when we began to practice on the rifle range, that our fate, you might say, was sealed, when the training officer discovered that we really could shoot.

Conditions on those firing ranges were ideal—no reflecting sun, no tree branches, no animals bolting when
you got a bead on them. The only thing we weren't used to were the Steyr Mannlicher rifles we fired, standard infantry issue in the army of the empire. They were thin top-bolt rifles with a five-clip magazine, one of the first of their kind. They had a strong kick and could jam easily when exposed to dirt, but we didn't have to worry about any of this yet. It took the two of us a few rounds to sight them, and after that, on the twenty-five-yard range, Zlee and I hit ten out of ten bull's-eyes, dead center, some of the rounds piled up on top of one another. The other conscripts barely raised dirt around those targets.

At first, we were assigned, along with all the others who mustered in Eperjes, to General Kray's command. Kray was a Napoleonic Hungarian who led a brigade made up of Slovak march batallions, which meant that we'd be fighting with men who shared not only a common language but the experience of daily life, ritual, and labor. Kray's soldiers were known for being good fighters because they worked the land and weren't soft, and I had a deep sense of having done the right thing, feeling as though I had been called somehow to take leave of my father and Pastvina and to prove myself in the world.

Then, at the end of our basic training, Zlee and I were pulled from the ranks without explanation and led into a tent where a captain sat behind a desk made up of two trunks with a board laid across the top. He was Austrian, which was evident by his uniform, and spoke to us in a bookish-sounding Hungarian. He wore black boots that had a soft, worn gloss to them, and he fiddled with a riding crop.

“So, you are from one of Kray's regiments,” he said, and began to pace behind his station and question us about our village, our parents, how it was we had learned
to shoot so well. He seemed intrigued by Zlee's insistence that he was an orphan adopted by my father and that we were brothers not of blood but of labor and the land.

“Labor,” he said. “You sound like a Communist. Don't all mothers labor to bear their sons in blood?”

Zlee said that he had never met a Communist and so couldn't say what one sounded like. What he meant was that he and I were as close as brothers because of the life my father had given us both. “Sir, I have seen him work on the land, and so I know what this Soldat will do in battle,” Zlee said, staring straight ahead as he spoke of me as a Soldat, which I was, all the while maintaining the soldier's respect for his superior and never once making eye contact with that captain, who cursed and spat and said, “You know nothing of battle.”

Then he turned to me. “Und Sie,” he said. “Was haben Sie über diese Bruderschaft zu sagen?”

I don't know why he switched to his native language then, but I knew enough German to understand that he wanted to know what I thought of this brotherhood Zlee spoke of. The summer before I signed up, I had studied the standard commands of the army so that I wouldn't be turned away if they questioned me, and the language came easily. Could he have known this? Could he have known, too, that Zlee's German didn't go beyond twenty or so words because he had no head for anything that required study, from a book, that is? No, this captain was testing my loyalty—it was plain to me—wanting to see how I would respond if I was given a chance to speak privately. And so, thinking not in German but in a foreign language I knew, I replied in English, “Sir, there is nothing my father taught me that he didn't teach him also.”

The captain looked surprised, smiled, and asked Zlee, “How is your English, Private Pes?”

Zlee, still staring doggedly at some point on the wall, said, “Sir, better than you might expect.”

A few days later, just before the entire battalion was supposed to move out, we were released from our regiment, given lance corporal stars to attach to our uniform collars, and boarded a train with a company of other soldiers going in the same direction, but not the same place.

That night, we arrived at a camp on the Duna outside of Pozsony. A sergeant barked orders at us there in the dark, where we stood at attention for what seemed like hours, until two officers showed up, and the sergeant snapped to attention himself and then receded. One, another Austrian captain, did all the talking, while the other, whose uniform was German but whose overcoat looked more like some Bavarian hunter's, stood by, listening and surveying us there in the harsh light.

Nineteen sixteen was the year the Austrians started sending sharpshooters to learn sniping skills for the front. Most of these schools recruited men from the Tirolean region of the Southern Alps, on the border with Italy, and were run by German officers. Scharfschützen, they called them. The Italians called them cecchini and (we were to learn in time) feared them more than anything else in those mountains. Under that veil of mock secrecy, it emerged that we were being sent to a place in Austria called Klagenfurt to be trained as Scharfschützen for the empire's defense of its culture and threatened borders on the southern front. We had been chosen, the captain told us, not only for our marksmanship but for our character and ability to endure hardship in conditions under which most men would buckle, although I'm sure he knew or
cared nothing about my character. The emperor himself understood who we were and how important our mission was, he said to us, and from there on out we were ordered never to speak unless spoken to by a superior officer, and any soldier showing the least amount of weakness or lack of discipline and restraint would be sent straight back to his regiment and a trench on the eastern front.