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By Root 284 0

emptied. A white porcelain angel stood out of place on a fieldstone mantel above the hearth and there was an old photograph on the opposite wall of a bride and groom, but there was no furniture or bookshelves or anything of value beyond the personal. The kitchen was orderly, too, in its scarcity. There were some dry goods left in a pantry, but nothing to suggest anyone was coming back soon to prepare dinner. Two back rooms had been made up and then left, and the whole place seemed not a home but some Pietist’s boardinghouse that admitted only the plain and virtuous. The girl rocked a shovelful of ashes from the stove, shook out the box, ordered me to find wood so that we could get a fire going, and said that I might find something to cut with in the barn. Then she began rummaging through the pantry jars and tins for what edible things might remain there and told me before I left that if I found a bucket in the barn, I should check the well at the back of the house and see if it was fouled or still drinkable. “If it is, bring me some water before you fill the wood box.”

Outside, everything I needed was where she knew I could find it. A broken-down hayrack looked like it would keep us in kindling for a while. The barn had good tools that had been left hanging on a wall (where I found a bow saw and an ax that had been sharpened not too long ago), and at the back of the house, the well still had a pail attached to strong rope and a hand crank, and it splashed down after sixteen turns and came up with cold, clear springwater in it. I took a bucketful in to her, then pulled apart the hayrack and set to splitting some logs, and it occurred to me what we had stumbled upon, what the girl had anticipated, though without expecting such complete abandonment: the house of an entire family lost to the war. Father and sons had no doubt been conscripted and sent to the front, never to return. The mother and any other women left behind must have traveled to stay with relatives, moved to the city to find work and a means to support themselves, or died—somewhere, away from here—of disease or loneliness. Now there was only the dust and loess on the floors and windowsills of the place to indicate that no one would be returning to this house in any earthly fullness of time, and so that was where we stopped and lived, for the next month, it turned out, the girl and I, before it was her time.

WE HAD NO WAY OF MEASURING THE DAYS, AND IF WE’D HAD, I’m not sure we’d have kept track anyway. I would awake from the floor in the living room, where I slept always, to find her standing over the stove in that cabin, the scent of freshly brewed wintergreen and pine-needle tea mixed with wood smoke in the air, and an egg on the fire, if the old hen had decided to give one up, or strips of venison and rabbit, of which I kept us in thin supply. I searched for the wild asparagus that grew in the woods and hills around Görz and along the Soca, and for which Zlee and I had often foraged, but the dirt was too much like clay here and there weren’t the tall firs of the Slovenian forests. Still, the girl managed to find some beets in a root cellar, and where the snow was melting, there was witchgrass coming through, and these and rest sustained us.

One morning over tea, as though we had known each other our whole, short lives, I asked her if she had a name that I might call her by and she said she did but would never tell me. When I asked why, she said, “Because then you’ll know the truth,” and so I began to call her Tajna after that, a secret that would not be told, and she seemed to like it and began to answer to her new name.

We slipped into patterns of work, what little we could do, patterns prescribed to us by mores we knew without thought or effort. She remained in the kitchen whenever I was around, and cleaned or worked at sewing an old blanket she had found in a cedar chest when I wasn’t. I seemed drawn more to the collecting and repairing of what tools or discarded furniture I found in the barn than to hunting, which I did, but which I did only for