The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [55]
“Arma virumque cano,” Banquo said, “the guard’s song has reminded me of that.” He asked me if I knew the line and the poem, but I said that I didn’t, and he said that it was an old poem written in Latin and that he had learned it in school when he was a boy but had forgotten all of it except these first few words, and that he believed that nothing proved truer in the course of one’s life than a man’s incessant need to fight—even when convinced that he wants nothing more than peace—against someone, something, some other, so that he doesn’t go to his grave having lived to no purpose.
“I have had enough of my purpose,” I said.
“Well then, welcome to death,” he said, and smiled, so that his aged teeth looked like slabs of white marble, and I did indeed feel vanquished.
That night I faced again the same parade of visitors, and when it was over, Zlee sat at my bedside, as he always did, and I said nothing this time until I awoke and the sun was already high and hot in the sky, and the guard shouted through the door, “Russo!” (because every Slav was a Russian). “Tuto bene?”
That afternoon, the sun beginning already to sink low on the horizon, the wind picking up and bringing in the fresh scent of the sea, Banquo and I sat in the lengthening shade in the yard and I told him about the faces of the men who wouldn’t leave me or let me rest, the visitations I received afterward from my brother Zlee, and the feeling that it was I, more than all these others, who should have gone before them.
“Why,” he said, “so that you can haunt them?” He put his hand on my shoulder and said as he stared across the prison yard, “Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can’t give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don’t anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature.”
I told him that I had had a long time to think about the acceptance of my life and the outcome of the war, though I could not believe, after all that I’d seen, that there could be anything other than chance and misery in it.
“And then the spirits come, one by one, and when it’s over, there is Zlee, sitting, not speaking, waiting, and then nodding when I can only ask if there is something wrong, until he leaves me. Except this time I didn’t say a word, and he seemed saddened by this, and for me.”
“Ghosts are weak,” Banquo said, “and they want only to please. Don’t ask him questions. His questions have all been answered. Tell him that you love him, your brother, that you are sorry not to be with him, and that this is how our fates have been ordered. Ghosts are not the dead. They are our fear of death. Tell yourself, Jozef, not to be afraid.”
After a time, I asked, “What is left to be afraid of?”
And he said, “The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That’s it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake. Perhaps your brother Marian knows this.”
I never saw Zlee again in that prison or anywhere else (although there are days still when I would welcome his spirit before me, though I am fast approaching the same place where that spirit has gone). And the men, too, who haunted me began slowly in their time to fade away, so that when Banquo asked me one day if the faces of war still marched