The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [62]
In this way, we moved into the last month of her confinement, like a couple that communicates by intention nearly as much as by word, so in tune are they to each other and their surroundings. One of the curious things I had found in the loft of the barn was an old wooden cradle that had one of its rockers broken off. It had a shallow-enough arc that I could carve a new one out of a single board with a sharp plane that was among the tools, and so I measured the curve and set a board in a vise and started planing, the feel of the metal on wood drawing me back to the barn in Pastvina, the scent of wood shavings on my clothes and strewn about the floor, the low of a cow if the weather meant they had to remain inside, and the whiff of manure everywhere, and I felt nothing but mournfulness, not out of an urge to go back there, but a realization that I would have to face one day all that I loved and all that I hated about the place. Or would I? And when I looked up from my work, the girl was standing in the door, her arms folded over her enormous belly and her body leaning against the door frame. Then she smiled and said, “There’s hot tea if you’ll take it,” and waddled like a goose back toward the house.
Another time, when I came out of the barn and saw her lumbering across the yard with a full pail of water, I rushed up and took it from her and our hands touched and she let that touch linger, though she had let go of the pail, and she thanked me and told me that she was feeling tired. I carried it into the kitchen and turned to leave, when she asked me why I hadn’t left her and gone my own way, “after we had killed those soldiers,” she said, as though we were brothers in arms who had fought their way out of some besieged hollow. I stopped and held the back of a chair and told her that she was about to have a baby, and this wasn’t exactly the kind of countryside where one might find villagers hospitable to Gypsy women, pregnant or otherwise.
What she meant, she said, was didn’t I have a home, a wife, a family that I wanted to get to, and I said no, that my mother died when I was an infant, and my brother died in the war. “I have a father,” I said, “and I miss him more than I thought possible when I was with him, but I’m not sure he’s even alive, or if he is, if he’ll want to see me now.”
Why, she asked, and I said because I had rejected him and run off to war, and couldn’t return as either a victor or a hero, “or even a man brave enough to save his brother.”
She sat quietly for a while and then said that she thought this was sad, and she told me that for a boy, I sounded like an old Gypsy woman who sat by a stove in her house and talked about the dead more than the living. “But even this old woman is surrounded by family,” she said. “In the Sátoraljaújhely, I have more family than I can count. No one is ever alone.”
I asked her why, then, she and her husband were traveling alone, and she said, “Brother. He was my older brother. He was helping me to get to Ljubljana, where I was to meet up with my lover so that we could be married.”
And she told me the story of having met a young first lieutenant in the Honvéd in Miskolc when she had gone there with her mother and sisters to sell lace in the market. He was right out of cadet training, on leave, and once he caught sight of the girl, he shadowed her for the entire day and the next. Their caravan traveled down to Hatvan, and he followed, this time approaching their stall and pretending to want to buy some handkerchiefs when she was minding the goods while her mother prepared food. Young herself and giddy with the delight that a man in uniform was paying her so much close attention, she returned his glances and asked him directly if there was anything of hers that he thought was pretty and to his liking.
At the meal, her mother, who had seen and heard everything, slapped her across the face and told her