The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [58]
“I need you to help me bury my husband,” she said.
We walked out of the hut and toward the edge of the forest. There, by a tree, lay the body of man who had already been dead for a few days, facedown in the dirt, hands tied with cheap hemp behind his back while flies buzzed the muss of hair and blood and brains caked around his head. He had begun to smell like the rotting dead, a smell I had only gotten out of my nose after breathing sea air in Sardinia. The girl grabbed him by the back of the neck, lifted him, and laid him down again so that he faced upward, what was left of his face anyway.
She bent over him, began to straighten his clothes, and cried “Oh Bexhet, my poor Bexhet,” and then she stopped and looked up at me. “Something to dig with,” she said.
I went back to the house to get the knife and a wooden bucket I had seen near the door. When I returned, she was whispering into the dead man’s ears and putting the silver buttons she had taken from the Honvéd into his pockets. “They were ... my husband’s,” she said out loud. “He kept them on his jacket.” And I could see, then, torn threads on the man’s breast.
“What about the gold?” I asked.
“What about it? It’s mine. My wedding gift. Just another Cigánka, you think, eh, you bastard? Shut up and dig.” She used the Slovak word for Gypsy, so I knew that she had probably come from somewhere in the east and might be moving east as well, although I wanted no traveling companion and hoped to be rid of her after we had buried her husband and I knew she was able to look after herself.
It took a few hours, but we eventually made a pit large enough to roll a corpse into. We packed down the earth hard over it, then piled a pyramid of rocks, four deep, to keep the animals out until that body was nothing more than bones. It was dark when we were finished.
“We’ll need to rest,” I said.
“We?” she said, derisively for a young girl. “You rest. I’m going.”
But she didn’t move from the spot. I went back into the hut and dragged the bodies of the soldiers outside, heavy as they were. I couldn’t move them far and only hoped that they wouldn’t attract animals at night. There was a fire pit on the other side of the hut, and so I used a piece of flint one of the prison guards had given me before I left and the Honvéd’s trench dagger (which I kept) to make a fire with a bit of burlap I found and a piece of paper the girl had discarded when she went through the soldiers’ pockets. It was going to be a cold night, and for as strong as that girl was trying to be, I knew she was, at that point, little stronger than I.
I FELL ASLEEP ON THE GROUND BY THE FIRE AND IN THE MORNING ached with cold, fatigue, and hunger. I thought that the girl had left me until I heard her rustling around inside the hut, where she had gone to sleep. She came outside holding both carbines and said, “If we don’t find food and somewhere else to sleep, we’ll die.”
She had cleaned up somehow—not a trace of dirt or any struggle she had been through from the day before. I stood up and stomped my feet to get some blood running through them, and she handed me the rifle that was loaded (I checked) and started walking, without any other word spoken.
I had seen and lived near Roma my entire life, and I knew only that they were despised and mistrusted for their singular desire to remain detached from all but their own insular culture and society. From this truth rose all other myths about them. Yet this young woman seemed not to hold in any way to that measure of mistrust around which I had been raised, and I looked