The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [19]
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