The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [22]
That was how we passed most spring and summer nights that year, exhausted in the candlelight of our cabin from the work we did, while the animals we shepherded ate or slept along the hills outside and boys marched off to war from their families and farms below. Until I got it into my head that the man who had raised me, and all his views, were the ridiculous and subversive rantings of a drunken coward and it was time that I rejected them.
When Zlee turned eighteen in March 1916 and had to register at the conscription office in Eperjes, I had a printer in the city alter my identity card so I could join up early, and I went to present my papers along with all those who were of fighting age. In any other year, they might have balked, checked, and sent me home to wait, but the Honvéd were so desperate for conscripts that it turned a blind eye when Zlee said to the officer in charge, “He’s from the mountains, sir, and can shoot.” That was all they needed. I passed my physical and was told to report back in two days, ready for basic training.
And so, it was on the eve of my departure to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the Great War—a night I spent with my father down off the mountain (he had paid the Rusyn peasants to watch his flocks for two days), in spring, so that, as we walked into the village at midday, the green grass and fruit tree blossoms and din of children’s voices and animals who had given birth in the barnyards that were attached to houses like second rooms seemed the stage of some play I happened upon and watched from behind a curtain—that my father told me all that he remembered about the day my mother died over the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado, and why it was we left America for the old country.
“I stopped believing a long time ago,” he said into the darkness, against which we had lit a single candle, “but that doesn’t mean, like any unbeliever, that I might not be mistaken. You see, I felt the conviction that some judgment had been passed down by God, and the others who said they feared this God, so that if I didn’t somehow atone for what I’d failed to do, after losing everything, I’d lose the only person I’d ever loved in this world. You.”
In the morning, he waited for me by the door, kissed me on the forehead, whispered into my ear, “Lúbim t’a,” and we parted.
ZLEE AND I WERE LUCKY TO HAVE JOINED UP TOGETHER. Basic training, with its weeks of constant drilling from dawn well into the night, seemed a thing requiring no effort. We were used to a life of early mornings and physical labor outside all day. It knocked us down a few pegs, got us used to hearing obscenities for marching sloppily or wearing scuffed boots, or maybe it was just to remind us that there was someone whose job it was to tell us what to do every waking hour of those days, and I began to miss the leisure of books and conversation, but I confronted these obstacles as a simple rite of passage. And Zlee, Zlee had this way—maddening to our corporal, who had never seen battle, and would likely have turned tail if he had—of conforming to the least detail with obsessive perfection, all the while making it clear by his indifferent, canine stride and aloof, unanimated face that these least details (which he would see to their completion) meant nothing to him. Zlee was as indomitable as he was bereft of guile.
But it wasn’t until the final weeks, when we began to practice on the rifle range, that our fate, you might say, was sealed, when the training officer discovered that we really could shoot.
Conditions on those firing ranges were ideal—no reflecting sun, no tree branches, no animals bolting when you got a bead on them. The only thing we weren’t used to were the Steyr Mannlicher rifles we fired, standard infantry issue in the army of the empire. They were thin top-bolt rifles with a five-clip magazine, one of the first of their kind. They had a strong kick and could jam easily when exposed to dirt, but we didn’t have to worry about any of this yet. It took the two of us a few rounds