The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [38]
And on the last day of November, at an outpost where our team caught up with the unit we had been dogging, Commander Klammer passed around a clear glass bottle of grappa to celebrate his patron, Saint Andrew, and I remembered celebrating the same, my father’s name day, each year in Pastvina, the mutton, the rich red Hungarian wine (before he took to slivovica, and the only time drink was ever allowed), the reminder that the old man painted with a parted beard and a scroll brought wisdom and the Word, and this all foreshadowing the Savior the pious men surrounding me said was to come.
My father, who was drunk on so little in those days, used to say with a cherubic smile, although his tone had sounded sad, “There is God in all of this,” and I wondered that night in the mountains of Austria if he was right, or if he was bending to the fear that over the years had begun to encompass him, and I said out loud, “Where is God in all of this, Father? Where?” But he was silent there. No word. No wisdom. Was he where I had left him, his kiss dry, his eyes wet? Or was he silent now because he had gone from me? Zlee and I downed our toast of the strong drink that tasted like grapes soaked in turpentine and butter, heard someone who had just been told why it was we were on that odyssey whisper, “Armer Kerl,” slept fitfully for the cold, and woke before the sun was up to leave with this new unit of Landesschützen, the one that would take us, finally, to Fort Cherle, although, as it turned out, the storm of the winter was yet to descend, and it would be nearly another month of hiking and waiting in the high mountains before we arrived at that garrison.
I REMEMBER STILL, AS WE APPROACHED FORT CHERLE, THE new snow falling on the already deep pack we skied, and the strange lack of harassing fire from either the Italian or Austrian positions as we pushed up the access road that led to the back of the fort, and in the silence of the forest, I thought of Bücher. He had been right about the time it would take us to get there. Had he been right, too, about the fighting and the war?
We reported to Captain Edmund Prosch, a bored and phlegmatic officer assigned to this stalemated outpost. Or maybe he was happy there, away from battle on the open plains below, where our army now pursued with a thirst to destroy its enemy (it was said), news of which he had certainly received, for there was a tone of anticipated victory at Cherle, and everywhere, for that matter, along the northern front. After he looked us over and told us never to report to a commanding officer without having washed and shaved first, he bent down to his papers.
We waited, undismissed, until he looked up and said, as though this was the first day we had spent in the army—and the conversation with our superior officer had in fact been seamless—“You men will do as I say, and go where I tell you to go,” and then informed us that there would be Mass at midnight in the fort’s refectory. “Mandatory. You’re not Protestants, are you?” he asked as he turned back to the papers he kept riffling through, occasionally adding his signature.
I said that we weren’t, and he said, “Good. Let them desert to the English all they want, because I would just as soon shoot them coming at me as running away.”
And so we moved along the tunnels of that fort to a dank and makeshift chapel, listened in our weariness and the darkness lit by candlelight to the high Latin of the Christmas liturgy, with which we were wholly unfamiliar, and fell off to sleep afterward on folded blankets and steel racks bolted into crumbling bricks, where the cold emanated from the walls.
Fort Cherle