The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [68]
I was reduced to a slow crawl by the time I saw the military truck approaching. To them, from a distance, I was probably just another villager with a pack slung back to front, and not worth bothering, but I couldn’t take that chance. I ducked off the road and made for a shack where a rusted tractor, useless and idle, was parked in its permanent shade. I crouched down against the wall as the truck passed, but when I tried to get up, my legs crumbled and I slumped over, unable to go any farther. The boy woke and began to cry, but his bleats now sounded as weak and expiring as he was. Neither one of us had taken food in the hours of which I had lost track. How much longer can he go? I wondered, and whispered to his covered head that we would be home soon, then leaned back against the shed wall to keep from smothering him and told myself I would rest there for just a few minutes, while those weakening moans haunted the air about me.
I woke, to find an old man prodding me with my staff. His body stood in the full light of the sun, which had come around to the side of the shack I’d been sleeping against. When I stirred, he bent down and pulled off the cover of the sling to see the child, and then he waved to a woman in a horse-drawn dray, helped me to my feet, and said in Hungarian (although I saw his face and knew that he was a Rom), “Quickly, the soldiers are returning.”
He walked me out to the road, took the baby, and handed him to the woman, who put him to her breast. Then he waved me under a tarp that covered a load of manure piled high on the back of the heavy cart. “Keep quiet and don’t move,” he said, “and they’ll think you’re just another mound.” He dropped the tarp, so that I lay curled up in darkness, and climbed aboard and nudged the horse gently on so as not to draw attention. I could hear the woman singing to the baby, felt her rocking him as we rode, and I knew when I heard her begin to cry that she, too, feared for his life.
The truck came up fast; I could tell this when I heard it brake hard in front of us and order the man to pull over. The soldiers had gotten word of an army deserter in the area, they said, a thin, bearded man carrying a walking stick and a field pack.
“Have you seen him?” they asked.
The man said that he hadn’t, that he and his wife were only taking this load of manure to their village across the Sajó, and I could hear the rest of the men joke about which was worse, the stink of a Gypsy or the stink of cow shit, then footsteps crunching along the dirt and stone, getting louder as they approached the back of the dray, and then a rifle barrel poked under the tarp to lift it.
“Let’s go, Ábel!” the other men in the truck yelled. “These two stink!” And the tarp lowered again and the truck drove off, shifting hard through its gears, until there was silence all around me and I wondered if the man seated in the cart and holding the horse’s reins was still there with the woman and child.
I fell asleep in that bed of shit, though I was brought to the edge of waking occasionally by the ruts and rocks in the road that my driver failed to miss, until he came to a stop and threw off my cover. The noonday sun was bright and warm and I rubbed my eyes against it and looked out. We had crossed a bridge, the water below wide and brown and shallow. Along the banks to the east sat a Romany village where smoke rose from the makeshift chimneys of makeshift huts, and I watched the figures of small children emerge from one of these huts to chase a mangy dog through the dirt and mud and then disappear, although it was hard to say where. The old man told me in Hungarian that this was as far as he was going.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked him, and he pointed to his wife, or daughter, or whoever she was. She flinched and pulled the baby to her. “He needs nursing,” I said.
“He’s being nursed,” the old man said.
The woman yelled back