The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [60]
UNLIKELY AS IT SEEMED TO ME THEN, AND SOUNDS EVEN incredible now as I narrate these events, we covered as much distance on foot through the forests and farmlands of Slovenia and Hungary as our conditions allowed in the month of January 1919, and a great distance it was. And yet, our bodies weak and getting weaker, the nourishment we found along the way meager, I never feared for our physical well-being once the lingering threats of the war seemed to have abated and we found out how (or rather, she knew how) to avoid danger in the form of persons. What began to occupy me was the unspoken question of whether we would, together, make it to the end of the road we were on, which is to say, make it to the place we wanted, each to our own, to call home.
Do you see in that what was troubling me? I didn’t want to leave the side of this young woman whom the Fates had set in my path, or, to be fair, in whose path I had been set, a woman to whom my speaking would itself have been unlikely, if not forbidden or ridiculed in the world, and I struggled with a desire that seemed to have been pressed down or never allowed to emerge as it might have with a young man in another time and another place, for the young men of our time had had to turn themselves when they were yet boys to a man’s desire for war. But with that war over, and wandering solely through a world as though we two were the last, or perhaps the first again, man and woman alive, it was a desire to remain at her side, even if we could not touch, and witness birth as the snows melted and the days lengthened, after having witnessed death for so long.
And so it was that, after we had been walking from the setting of one new moon to another and it seemed I would spend the rest of my life afoot, regardless of where I lived, or what it was I did, and we both (though we each refused to admit this physical weakness) were approaching exhaustion from a lack of food (the game in the mountains and among the lakes and rivers we passed not as plentiful as I had hoped and expected), we came to a clearing on the edge of a forest and stopped. Up ahead, it looked as though the terrain was about to change, for there were no longer any dense stands of firs, or peaks visible in the distance. The ground looked more like clay, the trees sparser and yet heartier for having survived, although there was nothing naked or arid about the landscape, even in late winter.
There, on the rise of a hill, set some ways back from the road and framed by a stand of birch so that it wasn’t immediately visible, a farmhouse stood like a cutout in a fairy tale for children. To me, it was in a place too obvious and exposed, and for that reason I was suspicious and thought that we should go on and avoid it. Yet, she looked neither tentative nor surprised to see any of this—house or farmland—standing before her. We approached slowly and I helloed the porch in German and Hungarian but got no answer. A hen scratched about the yard until I tried to catch it and scared it into a weathered but passable barn. She told me to leave it, said, “We might get eggs from that one,” and pushed open the front door without any hesitation and walked inside as though she had intended to stop here to rest for a while. I slung the carbine I had been carrying at the ready over my shoulder and followed her.
What looked like a living area was clean and uncluttered, although largely because it was