The Sojourn (6 page)

One morning before first light we heard the hard bleating of a ewe in distress and my father was outside and moving fast through the flock before Zlee and I even knew what was happening. I heard a shot as I came out of the door of the cabin, and another as I broke into a run. When I reached my father, he was holding the barrel high and staring off into the light rising in the east.

There was barely enough dawn to see, but if my father had pulled a trigger—and twice—I believed there was reason, and so I asked breathlessly, “Did you get her?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Let's follow the blood. Which direction did she run in?”

“I don't know,” he said again, scaring me a little.

“You don't know?” I asked, more out of disbelief than anything.

“For Christ's sake, Jozef. I said I don't know.”

We were silent for some time, and I listened to the mauled ewe suck air (she had fought in what way she could, big and strong as she was) and kick at the hard ground with her hooves, until she stopped kicking and breathing altogether and lay in her bed of grass and gore.

Two days later, we buried Sawatch in a shade of pines to the back of the cabin and went inside without a word. My father began packing food (what looked like enough for three days) into a rucksack, threw four rounds into a side pocket, took the Krag down from the wall and handed it to Zlee, then gave me the rucksack and a leather case with the field glasses inside.

“I was up all night figuring this, even while that thing was killing my dog,” he said. “She's hunting from the top of Krí• ik Ridge. Has to be. I want you boys to come back with most of those rounds and enough food for a guest. I don't even want to see that cat.”

Zlee and I took a lame ram we were going to have to put down anyway, hiked the whole day up to the ridge—the highest point just above the tree line there in that part of the mountains, Krí•ik was named for the crosslike shape it resembled, with a long horizontal cave that rested on the top of a towering shaft of granite—left the ram on the trail and found a thick stand of birch about 250 yards away and upwind, where we sat hidden, waiting.

The ram brayed, tried to run, grazed on some lowgrowing thistle, and then slept. We spent the night listening and resting in shifts. I glassed the ridge at sunrise but didn't see a thing. We watched all morning and into the afternoon, then left our cover and walked the ram back down into a meadow, clearing the air before we tried again the next night. Nothing. Three days we spent observing that
ridge, until I woke up the next morning and saw Zlee standing to take in the view of the valley behind us and a slice of the distant range visible from our blind.

“Your father's wrong,” he said. “That lion's not here. And if she was, she's not coming back here, at least not to hunt anything tied down.”

We had run out of food, so, disappointed as I was that we wouldn't get the cat, I was glad we'd be heading back to our camp, and I said to Zlee, “Do you mean in the mountains, or not here on this ridge?”

“I mean not where we are,” he said. “If this lion's hunting, why do we believe that we can leave some old animal in her path and expect her to show up for us? We're not tracking a creature of habit. She's stayed alive in these mountains for a long time by doing more than stalking sheep.”

I told him I understood, and that we should take the ram back to the camp, reprovision ourselves, and try again in another place.

“Jozef, don't you see?” His eyes flashed, lightless as it was, and I don't think he had slept at all. That lion had picked through the best of the flock, he said, not the weak and the lame, but the strong, and she was going to keep on hunting for one better prize after another. “And all we've done is wait for her, and fired into the air at her shadow. But if we could find her, without her seeing us, while she stalks, we just might be able to kill her. There's no other way.”

We tethered the ram to a stake at the mouth of a thrum-cap overhang. Then, our packs empty, we set off for the valley where my father said that he was taking the sheep for some protection until we returned, a day's hike from there.

It was dusk when we arrived. I still remember looking down on him from the brow of a hill we had just come over. He was scanning the perimeter of those same hills rising out of the valley in which he and his sheep had lain down for the night, but he didn't see us, just turned his back and set to the chores of the evening, slowly and with a break every now and then when he'd sit and stare at the ground, not, it seemed, because he was tired but, rather, as though he had forgotten what it was he needed to do next. I felt the wind coming up out of the mountains from the northeast.

We had approached on purpose in a long sweep from the west. I carried the Krag, while Zlee scouted ahead and found a group of large boulders midway up the hill, and we nestled in behind them. They covered our backs and gave us a good view of the surrounding terrain. I had watched my father from a distance before and he had always somehow seen me without my knowing. Now, with no idea that Zlee and I were there, he seemed fragile and alone as he finished setting up his small tent, built a fire, and warmed his soup. I felt alone, too. I wanted to go to him, listen to him talk as he stirred what would be our supper, or hear him read, and be a boy again there in the mountains.

Zlee and I hadn't eaten all day, but we didn't speak of food. We communicated in signs and short sentences, the last of which was when he shook me awake before dawn, held a finger to his lips for silence and handed me the field glasses.

“Four hundred yards,” he whispered, and I saw the brown-and-silvery figure threading past makeshift pens of sleeping sheep. How was it that nothing stirred? By some power or invisibility, the lion stalked along steadily, and I could tell that she was through with killing sheep.
It crossed my mind, briefly, to ask Zlee if he wanted to take the shot, but the movement involved in the very act of turning and questioning might be discernible to the cat. So I settled into my breathing, and the only other words Zlee spoke were a short comment on the growing light, and wind, which I took to mean that I hadn't much time.

I thought of my father, who was sleeping soundly below, not knowing what lay in store for him if I missed. He would be rising soon, and I suspect the cat was waiting for when her prey would emerge from the tent and move away from the protective cover of canvas. I had one shot. The sky was brightening in that way morning seems to come on all at once in the summer, and I waited, holding the animal's haunch in my sight. I eased the barrel slightly right, took one full breath and could smell the faint musk of the well-oiled gun stock mingling with my own unbathed stench, and almost sighed as I pulled the trigger. The shot's echo seemed to crack open the valley, and the cat, as though powering in that direction, slumped to one side.

 

 

WHEN WE WENT BACK DOWN TO PASTVINA FOR THE WINTER in 1914, all we heard was talk of the war. Boys a few years older than I wore their cadet uniforms daily, and men from our village marched off to the conscription office in Eperjes to join the fight against the Russians on the eastern front. There was a fever rising, and not just for battle. Young men, as always, sensed a chance to leave the boredom of their villages and see to the borders of the empire and beyond, but this time their departure was imminent, and so they lived and worked and moved in a tension between excitement and rage. Or maybe I'm
just remembering what the thoughts of war began to evoke in me.

I never felt at home there in the village, the closepacked houses, the lack of privacy, the sense, as I grew to be a young man, that my father was seen as a failure or a kind of fool. His wife, who must have sensed the man's declining confidence, berated him endlessly about money, and his stepsons acted as though they were the men of the house, when they were nothing more than layabouts. I even saw it when we went to the shop along the main street of the village. No one greeted my father or asked him how the summer had treated him in the mountains. Not so much as “Dobr• den•.” He was, indeed, a man who appeared as though he had come down off a mountain and yet seemed weaker, somehow less a man among other men as a result of it. And I wanted to grab those people and cuff them for their ignorance, hold them by the neck and make them kneel before my father, but when I turned to him, looking for and expecting to see in him—for my sake—something of the man I knew, who had shaped me, he seemed, year after year, to shrink before us all, as though somehow the streets and houses and villagers we walked among now reminded him of not just a humility but a weakness waiting to inhabit him, and it was his duty to relent.

My stepbrothers were doing their mandatory cadet service that year and were waiting to be conscripted into the Honvéd in the spring. By December, they moved about the house with a kind of recklessness. I saw it in others, too, just boys who knew there was something larger than they could imagine happening hundreds of miles to the east and west of us, something that in all likelihood, once they were a part of it, would destroy them.
But my stepmother's sons, who mistook her coddling for belief in their natural superiority, became nothing more than spoiled thugs. I despised them, especially Tibor. Both of them were bug-eyed and fleshy, which was a rare thing in that part of the world, because there wasn't that much food or time to be idle. But their mother fed them constantly, as she had done from childhood, kept them from work, and filled their heads with the notion that they deserved more and would receive more once they found their opportunity to leave Pastvina and claim the greatness that was rightfully theirs.

That January, I was in the barn, replacing a board on an old cart we used for transporting the wooden boxes of bryndza. It was cold, but I had to saw and plane pinewood to shape and so I worked without a coat on. I heard someone come into the barn and I looked up, expecting to find Zlee, because I had asked him for help and was wondering why he had forgotten. Then I saw Tibor and Miro standing in front of me. It wasn't quite noon, but they were drunk, and from that short distance I could smell on their breaths the homemade slivovica they had stolen from my father's cellar.

“Look at Jozef,” Tibor said to Miro. “Strong enough to work in this cold as though it were summer in the mountains.” He took a long drag on the cigarette he was smoking, exhaled, dropped the fag on the dirt floor, and left it to smolder.

I said, “Isn't there work of your own you two need to do?” and turned back to planing the side of that board. And before I could tell what was happening, Miro grabbed me and punched me twice in the stomach, the shock and pain of the blow doubling me over, so that I fell and couldn't move.

“That's for Tibor's coat,” he said, as though it had happened yesterday.

Miro was even fatter than his brother, not the smarter of the two, and he pinned me down while Tibor came over and started to tie my wrists and ankles together with a length of rope. Every time I tried to push or kick free, Miro pummeled me. When all I could think to do was to spit on him, he punched me in the stomach again and picked me up and threw me over a sawhorse.

I heard Tibor hiss, “I'm first,” and I made one last kick to free myself, but Miro brought his pulpy fist into the side of my head. “Isn't this how you do it at your sheep camp, Jozef?” Tibor panted, the alcohol on his breath the only thing keeping me from passing out.

Then I heard Zlee's voice, slow and full-toned as it was. “Tibor, you pig!”

The brothers could not have felt anything but fear. Miro turned and rushed at Zlee, and Zlee landed a punch so hard to the center of Miro's chest that he seemed to shoot upright and gasp for breath all in one motion. Then Zlee brought his knee up into Miro's crotch and I heard a crack and a strange squeaking sound. I rolled off the wooden horse and, in a daze, saw Tibor run to the back of the barn.

“You, you s-stay away from me, Pes,” he said.

Zlee backed him into a stall and hit him hard in the midsection, first one punch, then another, each one knocking more wind out of him, until he collapsed. Then, working as methodically as though these were animals he had come to feed, Zlee stuffed a fistful of hay into Tibor's mouth, grabbed his arm, and bent it back until it snapped. Tibor screamed and Zlee shoved another fistful of hay into his face.

I came to my senses on the ground, kicking against the ropes while Zlee untied me, and my voice rose through anger and pain. “Let me kill him!” I said.

But Zlee told me to hold still, untied me, wiped blood from my lip with a handkerchief that smelled of lye soap and said, “No. It's over. Let's go. You hurt them now and it's prison with the real pigs. They've got worse coming.”

But rage welled in me and I shook off Zlee, stood up, grabbed a pitchfork propped in a corner, and walked over to Tibor, who lay whimpering in the frozen shit and mud of that empty stall. I raised the tines above my head and summoned all of the strength I could to drive them through his body. And I would have if Zlee hadn't taken it from me and set it down as I held my head in my hands and wept.

“Let's go,” he said again. “We need to tell your father about this before he finds them and they give him a story.” And we walked back into the house, where my father was writing letters by the stove.

I don't know if it's a punishment or meant for some other purpose, but if there is a God, He has seen to it that I should remember every face that has ever looked at or spoken to me. And yet of all the faces that crowd my memory, I can still see the face of Miro as we passed him on the way out of the barn that morning. It appears like a short series of pictures: His knees are drawn up and he's holding his legs and hiccupping for air, when he suddenly looks at me, reaches out his hand, and tries to plead with me to help him, as though the young man that bore his likeness minutes before has been transformed, leaving only an innocent caught up in a fight he doesn't understand, and unable to make a sound.