The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [13]
His name was Marian Pes. His mother was a distant cousin, a woman for whom, when they were children, my father had a fondness because of her own restless desire to leave the village and see something of the world, and the two stole away from chores in the afternoon to climb the hills that framed Pastvina and lay down in the newmown hay, where they planned their getaway together. Eperjes was the farthest she got, where she worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an old hotel. (My father married my mother and left for America not long after.) When she became pregnant by a man who promised to marry her and then disappeared, the bishop (who had seen her attend the divine liturgy every Sunday) gave her a housekeeping job in the priests’ quarters at the seminary, and when her time came, she named the baby boy Marian out of gratitude and devotion, wondering, perhaps, if he might one day sweep down those same tiled hallways wearing the black cassock and an attitude of meditation.
In time, though, the local priests and their parishioners talked. The seminarians were disedified, they said, and so she left and drifted through what jobs she found to keep her son in food and clothing, until she wound up back at the hotel, this time serving coffee to the men who read their newspapers in the lobby each morning.
She caught the eye of an older gentleman from Budapest, who wished to have a mistress when he traveled to the •ari• region on business, and so she lived under his care (and happy, it was said, the man even treating the boy like a son) in a small but elegant flat in the center of town for many years, until he died at his home, surrounded by family, and she was forgotten. She didn’t know where she would go or what she would do, she told my father the night she showed up at our door after months of slipping further and further into destitution. She only knew that the fates had turned against her, too, as if she’d been cursed somehow, and she wanted her Marian to escape the same, if he could, to live somewhere besides the streets and learn something more than how to steal food from hotel kitchens.
When she asked my father if he would do this final kindness for her, if he would take her son, though she feared she couldn’t bear it, my father said, “I will treat him as though he were my own.” And after a lull, as she turned to go, he asked, “What will you do, Zuska?”
Lowering her eyes, she said, “God’s will,” and they must have wondered then, those two, how the children who had lain on a hillside and dreamed of life in far-off places conjured for escape like fortune-tellers could have known how much of that dream would come true.
In the first few months of his living with us, Marian remained aloof from all but my father. He spoke in a mannered Hungarian, which I suppose he had picked up from his mother’s lover and the other men who gathered at the hotel when they weren’t concerned with matters of business, as though it were the extension of some salon they frequented in Budapest. But to look at him, there was no mistaking him for the child of the streets that he had become.
He never spoke of his mother. He rarely spoke at all. I remember my father handing him a thin yellow envelope every other week or so, which Marian would push into his coat pocket and then disappear. When he returned, he looked more aloof and sullen than before. And then the fights would begin.
My stepbrothers, Tibor and Miro, made fun constantly of Marian’s poorly fitting and nearly threadbare clothing, and taunted him, though always from a distance and not long before they ran away. They called him zl• pes, a bad dog in Slovak, and Marian usually ignored them, until