The Sojourn (20 page)

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 villagers 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.

“What's your name?” he asked, and I told him. The boy began to bawl from underneath a covering shawl on the woman still sitting in her seat atop the dray, and it sounded to me like the strongest cry I had heard him utter yet in his brief life. What does it matter, I thought, if this village or some other raises him? What will he know of life, his mother, or even me, regardless? He will grow, learn, love, fight, and die, and someone, whether he knew them or not, will deliver him into his grave.

And I remembered how she had wept over the body of the brother she'd called her husband, and so I said to the old man, “Bexhet. Her brother's name was Bexhet,” and I sheathed the knife and turned to go.

 

 

I WALKED ACROSS THE BRIDGE AND CONTINUED DOWN THE road in the direction from where I'd come, or where at least I thought I had traveled from. The sun was high and warm, the air dry, and green shoots of whatever grains or tubers farmers and tenant farmers planted here protruded from furrows that came right to the ditch at the edge of that road. The stillness of a midday at rest in spring was a world I was content to walk through in whatever moments of stillness and freedom I might have left to me. And yet I walked in that direction with the conviction, if not the belief, that I could resurrect her still, even from
ashes, and so I would go there, come what may, or who (for I would have been executed as a deserter once the police found me), because it was what I thought of as home.

It seemed as though I had been walking for days when the old man's horse and cart pulled up next to me on the road. He motioned for me to climb up and then turned back in the direction of the village, no more than a few miles away. And he told me as we rode that his son Bexhet and his daughter Aishe had left them months and months ago, after Aishe became pregnant by a Honvéd field officer. The community blamed her and her insolence for this shameful indiscretion, but within the immediate family they found themselves at fault for not reading the signs, for not believing that this
gadjo
was capable of seducing their daughter, and that she would find him anything more than a rogue.

“Perhaps,” the old man said, “perhaps she did love him. And—I will say this only to you—perhaps he loved her, too.”

The last they knew, a fortune-teller, whom they had since driven from their midst, convinced Aishe, and Bexhet with her, to run away to Ljubljana in search of the young lieutenant, although she confessed that she knew nothing of where the officer was and had only heard someone speak of the old city that day as a place where the emperor had kept headquarters during the war. An old woman who never slept and who was prone to seeing things as a result said she'd caught them stealing about on the night of their disappearance, but they gave her no mind.