The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [53]
Austrian or Slav, the Italians treated us with contempt, and without the English officers back on the Piave to stop them, they would have shot every last one of us, I am convinced. But the Sardinians who met our steamer (in what I later learned was the town of Olbia), herded us onto the train, rode with us on the long, slow trek by rail, marched us to our internment, and ordered our lives, were men of the hills and the mountains, who understood us and trusted us, strangely, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, and so I came to love my jailers. They wanted us to live and thrive (they were visibly upset when one of us died, and so many of the men with whom I was sent there died), and gradually we ate what they ate, and those of us who stayed healthy were given coats for our outdoor work details as the hot summer months gave way to a chilly autumn, and if there was anything they forced us to do, it was to go outside.
“Ki proiri, arreparari. ... Ma proiri?” they’d say in their staccato tongue (a dialect strange even to the Italianspeaking Austrian in my cell block, who came to realize what they were saying to us one day, and that they meant well). “A roof is for the rain. Do you see any rain?” And to be sure, that summer it never rained, and though we were the beaten prisoners of a lost war, the sun and sky up above were freedom enough.
Or at least enough to remember that we were there for only a short time. For, often when we returned to our cells, the thin gruel they delivered was topped with two or three olives. “Mangia!” they’d say, their sunburned faces stretched into a smile. And sometimes, when all I expected was water in my tin cup, they poured a half ration of their wine, scarlet and tasting of earth and drupe, as though it had come to be by the hands of some god. Then they would adopt a tone of mock authority as they dolled out this drink to me and the other men in my row.
“One word of protest from you sheep fuckers tonight and we will turn the guns on you,” they’d say in the slow and measured Italian of the common soldier, a language I quickly came to understand. And guns? They had a few British Enfields that had been given to them and never fired, and some wore pistols low and loose in belts around their waists. But we were all just a bunch of sheep fuckers, they knew that, and they saw it in their hearts to have mercy on us, and I cradled my cup of wine, took in its scent as it rose, drained it, and gave in to sleep.
But not always did I sleep. Now that I was alone and flanked only by stone, the sights and sounds and smells of war were nowhere but in my memory, and yet from that more vivid and persistent life I began to see the faces of the men whom I’d held in the crosshairs of my sight before I fired on them. Their lips moved and yet they had no voice, and I knew that they thought of others who didn’t know they would be the last ones on their minds, and sometimes I saw them turn toward me in surprise—sometimes terror—somehow knowing that I was watching them, and they stared back, pleading, but I took no pity. I told myself over and over that it was war, but when you do this, it is like opening a gate and then turning away, as though what comes and goes is of no matter, until you are overrun and it is too late to bar the gate again against intruders.
And so I thought of the men on the Soca, the Tolmin, and in Plava. I thought of the first man I killed, and the man who lifted his head to shout and warn the others of me. I thought of the deserters we killed, and the sergeant and the captain I hated, and any man I passed in wave after wave of shelling whose eyes seemed to say, I’m waiting. I thought of the men on lookout across our lines in Kobarid, sometimes five a day Zlee and I killed, as simply as spotting pigeons. I thought of the father and son we were roped to in the Dolomiten and the bed of ice in which they now lay, the brothers at Cherle, Lieutenant Holub, the gunners and the boy who fought and died beside me on Papadopoli Island. And I never stopped thinking of Zlee,