The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [10]
That night, in an infirmary I don’t remember being taken to, I dreamed of my mother. She was the same wavering and lucent image that came to me first on the boat from America, and who stood before me, arms outstretched, every spring on the first night I spent in my father’s mountain cabin. Now, in my bed of fever sweat and wet sheets, she stood at my side and wiped my cheeks and forehead (for I felt the cool comfort of a cloth), and then she kissed me and I slept. And in the morning, after a breakfast of boiled eggs and mint tea, I returned to my dormitory, and to the classroom the next day, where I was told to take my seat, and did so without incident.
The lessons were rote, the teachers shrewish, the schoolboys I sat among filthy and unruly. I felt like a trapped animal living inside of a cage in the city (and indeed the school itself was a sort of jail, damp and cold and surrounded by iron fence work), my body weakening, my senses becoming dull, and the intense fear and need for self-preservation I once felt seemed long ago (though I had been there only a month) to have turned into a resignation that this was somehow all I could expect of life.
As the days lengthened, though, and the weather turned fair, we went outside at noon if there was no rain, into a dirt courtyard, where the other boys kicked a ball or scrapped with their fists, and I stood off to the side, leaning against a stone wall and listening to the long midday ringing of the Turkish bell (which our village church also rang and which could be heard far into the mountains on clear and windless days) until I was noticed, or until someone decided that I had been watched long enough, and I was taunted for being blond and unblemished and solitary, and so dragged into a fight.
But I was as angry about being in this company as I was quiet and bantam, and responded so quickly to the threats from my insolent schoolmates that the aggressor—a bigboned kid whose skin was gray and smelled of stale sweat—was forced to defend himself when I singled him out as the one to go after and began, without the hint of emotion, to throw hard and punishing blows to his head and body. I had never seen anyone fight and I had never been taught to defend myself. But I knew hurt and never wondered that day what it was I had to do if I didn’t want to be hurt again. I set my feet, took a breath, and swung my fists so as to go through anyone foolish enough to face me.
In the end, my coat was torn and my nose bloodied, but I otherwise held my ground, and when that boy dropped to the dirt, I stood over him with my foot on his chest until he begged me to stop, and I pushed down harder out of anger that I had been sent to this place, when all I wanted was to be with my father in his cabin, and the boy ceased bawling and began to thrash and gasp for air, and all of the others looking on went silent, until someone said out loud “Sta•ilo!” I stepped back, kicked him hard once more in the teeth and walked away.
After that, they sought out weakness elsewhere. I learned my sums, and I learned to read and write Hungarian, which is all we were expected to learn in school. And when the year was over, my father took me back into the mountains, the magistrate never returned to Pastvina for me, and my life, I thought, would resume as before, but for the pendulums, wheels, and water clocks.
BEFORE I HAD HEARD ABOUT COLORADO AND LEADVILLE, THE Sawatch Range, and a man named Orten, my father’s skills as a hunter were qualities I took for granted in the mountains, like hearing to a musician or sight to a painter, and what he taught me of marksmanship became, in the end, my only grasp on life, until I, too, laid down my weapon and went home.
The first spring day I went with my father into the mountains, I remember being fixated on the sight of the Krag as he unwrapped it from its leather cover and hung it up on pegs on the wall by his bed. The finished wood stock, shiny bolt, and bluish black metal of the barrel stood out amid the rest of the worn and beautyless tools and equipment and clothing