The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [20]
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.
But when we told my father that Tibor and Miro were hurt and in the barn after they had tried to beat me for some long-held grudge, he became angry, said that those two were just nervous about their induction and that at heart they were good boys who didn’t know any better. “How bad are they?” he asked.
“Otec,” Zlee said, calling him “Father,” just as I did, “they were trying to—”
I cut him off. “No, Zlee.”
“Marian,” my father asked again, his voice rising and impatient now. “How bad are they?”
“Vel’mi zl•,” he replied.
“Goddamn it!” My father brought his fist down on the table and began to shout at us there in the kitchen, telling Zlee that he was tired of the fighting and stories of beatings that followed him everywhere he went. “There’ll come a time when I won’t be able to protect you any longer, and I’m not even sure that I’ll want to,” he said, though we all knew that he was incapable of protecting even himself anymore. “Go and get the doctor, and we’ll see what comes of this.”
Nothing came of it. Miro and Tibor left for the war together in the summer of 1915