The Sojourn (22 page)

 

 

WHEN I CAME DOWN OFF OF THE MOUNTAIN, I TOLD MY stepmother that I was going to Pozsony (although word had just come east that the city was now called Bratislava) to join the Czecho-Slovak army and asked her for money for the train ticket. She said it was about time I decided to do something so that I could send her a regular salary, and for that reason only, she gave me the fare, which wasn't a small sum, as it's almost a full day's journey from the east to old Pozsony. I cleaned up the shotgun and sold it in Kassa, along with the field glasses and knife, and with that bought a ticket clear to Prague, where the new country's economy was booming. Prague seemed like a land from a fairy tale to me, and so I distrusted it for that reason, staying only long enough to sort papers and book a train out of there. I got a good exchange on an ounce of gold, mailed the advance my stepmother had given me back to her in a letter, saying that I had been sent to Prague for induction, then received my American passport at the new consulate and boarded a train for Hamburg, Germany.

Although I had never been so far west or north before, crossing that border into Germany was like crossing back into the misery of the war, fields untended, little
food to be had anywhere for any price, and entire towns eerily empty of men. There were old men, and there were children, but anyone who might have been of fighting age and fit to do it had given his life, or any number of limbs, to that fight. Western Europe seemed to me a place wherein no one lived any better than we had for centuries in our miserable corner of the northern Carpathians.

The travel agent in Prague told me that I was to meet a boat called the Mount Clay in Hamburg, an old troopship converted to a passenger steamer, but that he was uncertain as to when exactly it was scheduled to arrive and embark again for the United States. I thought that I had missed it by the time I arrived, but it turned out that it was two days late, and then took two more days to disembark its passengers and resupply, due to the lack of longshoremen. Those were a lost and empty four days—bleak skies, a chill drizzle, and everyone starving, though too tired even to look for food. All I remember about that city, apart from my steamer at dock on the river, is the unlikely number of trees and the amount of unbroken ground that shaped its environs. More ships came into its port than any other place in Europe, and yet I felt as though I was spending a week in a country house on a lake, one whose inhabitants consisted entirely of mute and starving prisoners.

When we boarded, I went below to survey my tiny room in steerage, though the smell of diesel and the stale air reminded me of the train I had taken after leaving Sardinia, and so I walked back up on deck, in spite of the rain, which kept others under tarpaulins or down below. I looked across the river to a flock of derricks idle and waiting for freight either yet to come or that had never showed. A figure moved slowly among them and then stood in full view of me—a man, a dockworker perhaps,
as idle as the steel that surrounded him, and yet seeming fit enough to walk, which was something. I tried to calculate the distance between him and me, but I was suddenly disoriented and lost my entire sense of direction. I put my head in my hands and rested them on the rail to steady myself. Below, the current swirled brown and in eddies along the side of the ship. When my vertigo dissipated, I looked up and glanced downriver to where the water bent and rose to the horizon until it disappeared. I turned and searched for the worker, and there he stood, still on the shipyard bulkhead. He lit a cigarette and gazed at our transport, and I had the urge suddenly to respond to his searching and to make my presence known. I raised my arm above the parapet of deck railing and waved in a gesture that was all at once greeting, salute, and leave-taking. He returned my wave as though he had come here just to see me off, flicked his cigarette into the water, and disappeared amid the forest of cranes and rigging.

 

 

THAT WAS THE END OF MY SOJOURN IN WHAT A FEW AROUND me here still call “the ol' kawntree,” though it is no country for which I long or somehow miss in my old age, when memory is supposed to ease and there comes a forgiveness with forgetting. It will always be a mourning land, a place longing for redemption, for there is no end to the memory of it, no chance of forgetting, and so I knew that day that I would have to go home, though I wondered what would await me there in the country in which I was born but had never belonged. If I would be welcomed after my time away. If I might begin again in a manner befitting one who is no longer a soldier or even a
son, just a man, with so much lost behind me, and so much left yet to be done.

The gangplank backed away, and the Mount Clay gave one prolonged blast from her pilothouse. Smokestacks puffed black diesel fumes that hung low and heavy on the harbor in the rain, and we seemed the last to leave a place decimated by plague. The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into midriver, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known—the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk—receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the following for their generous help in the writing of this story: Lt. Col. Guy Bartle-Jones, Warren Cook, Paul Cornish (firearms curator, Imperial War Museum, London), Jared Crawford, Royal Hansen, Faith Johnson, Matthew Meyer, Renata Meyer, Gianluigi Panozzo, Virág Sárdí, Michael Silitch, and Claudio Siniscalco. Special thanks to Erika Goldman, Betsy Lerner, and as always, Amelia Dunlop, for her unwavering support.

Also, a debt of gratitude is due to the following writers and their work: George H. Cassar, The Forgotten Front: The British Campaign in Italy 1917–1918; Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey; Martin Pegler, Out of Nowhere: A History of the Military Sniper; John R. Schindler, Isonzo: The Forgotten Sacrifice of the Great War; Peter R. Senich, The German Sniper 1914–1945; and Jan F. Triska, The Great War's Forgotten Front.

First published in the United States in 2011 by
Bellevue Literary Press, New York

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Copyright © 2011 by Andrew Krivak

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With a special thanks to the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation
and Jan T. Vilcek.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

eISBN : 978-1-934-13741-3