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By Root 314 0

upon her as she walked ahead as an altogether unknown and unsettling thing, unsettling to me on that morning (I knew then and will confess now) for her beauty. She had sloe-colored almond eyes and sharp cheeks centered by a kind of prizefighters’s nose, which was broad but perfectly symmetrical and almost elegant as it drew up and out of those cheeks. Her mouth and lips were more than full—they were too large and took up the entire lower portion of her face, while somehow still looking delicate whenever she spoke, and I never saw her smile. And all of her features were framed by black hair of a hue that seemed not to reflect light so much as exude it and which she kept pulled back to each side in braids in the manner of a schoolgirl, reminding me, in fact, that she was yet a girl. A girl who had a presence and allure to her that tugged at me in a way that I had never felt in a woman or a girl in my life. When I thought of it as we walked (she a good stretch out front but never out of sight), I told myself that it was strength. Her strength was what had attracted and held me. She seemed to have a strength that I, in all of my training and soldiering, could only grasp at. And she looked down on me. I was the filthy one. I was the man whose life she had saved, “for no good reason,” she’d said the first night we camped in a stand of firs and cooked the meat of a squirrel I had shot to bits. She moved about me as though I were a leper, insisted that she clean the meat herself, and doled out what portions there were unevenly, right in front of me, as though I were a child she’d just as soon backhand if I challenged her.

There wasn’t much discussion, though, about anything in those first few days we traveled together—or rather, moved in close proximity to each other. The only authority I had was with the rifle, and I said to her that we should save what bullets we had left for larger game, for I could see that we were never far from a deer or two. But there was no chance of tracking and shooting one as we walked forest paths and down empty roads while she kicked stones and picked up sticks, sang to herself, or lagged so far behind that when she wanted to scold me for any number of reasons she could think of, she had to yell ahead, until I told her that she should go on without me if she had no interest in food, because I was going to sit and wait and find some game to kill. She began to cry and said that she was very hungry and was only trying to take her mind off of that hunger. And so I told her that if she could keep a fire going, I could shoot and dress a deer, and then we’d have our fill.

We found a moss floor under snow near a creek, cleared some ground and camped there for a day and a night, and had to settle for a skinny hare for our supper, and the next morning hiked back out to the road and continued our journey, although she never kicked another stone, and sang quietly to her unborn child in a voice that was close and soothing to me, as well.

When she stopped suddenly once and I asked why, she shushed me and stood stiff and still by the roadside. Within minutes, a horse and cart appeared, the driver slowed and then sped up at the sight of us, his gaze fixed forward and his mouth in a sneer as he whipped his horse into a trot, and in his wake, we went along as before.

There were any number of places we could have stopped and rested for a few days, or longer, before moving on, although to where was never clear. Old hunting cabins, good caves, glens protected by stands of pine so thick that they worked better than walls to keep out the cold and wind. Yet the girl seemed to be in search of something, not her home village so much as a place or destination she had envisioned (or knew existed) along this path and would not cease walking until we had reached it. So we continued to camp, but never more than a full day, and in the morning she would poke me awake with a stick and say in Slovak, as though she needed to be sure that I understood it was time to leave, “Pod’me.”

But the snows were deep when we weren’t on a traveled