The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [69]
I said that I was grateful for their rescue but that I had to take the boy to his home, where he belonged. “His mother was from a village across the Sajó,” I said, “and I made her a promise. Give him to me.”
“This is the Sajó,” the old man said, and pointed to the water with a long sweep of his hand. “Who is this woman you’re speaking of?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. I never suspected that the truths and lies she had gathered and spun for her tale of love and wandering would mean nothing without a name she had refused to give, or even without thinking might have spoken. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her name.”
“I see,” he said, disbelieving my own story of deliverance. “The boy is being nursed, and he looks strong enough to survive. You’ve done what your . . . lover asked you to do, no? He’ll be safe with us.”
I reached for the dagger I kept in my boot and held it up weakly to the old man. “He comes with me,” I said, but the man stood there unfazed. The woman uttered some incomprehensible taunt or invective and he nodded his head but otherwise said nothing more and didn’t move, and I realized then that I had made a stand with the intent to kill not for the baby, whose eyes I can say I had never seen in the light of day, but for a promise to a woman who would have considered my love a taboo, and whose ashes lay beneath the smoking rubble of a house in the forest, ashes that one day soon would be lifted by the wind, and my knowledge of this would be more than any one on earth could say they knew of her.
By this time, the villagers had begun to wonder why we three stood unmoving near their bridge, and people started swarming up the banks for a closer look, shocked to see one of their own being threatened with a knife. Some shouted their own threats, and a boy who could not have been more than ten kept saying over and over in a Hungarian he’d probably learned in school, “Fight me! Fight me!”
Then the man, some kind of elder—this was clear to me from the response of the others—held his hand up to the crowd, commanded their silence, and asked me in a quiet voice, “The boy’s mother, was she a young girl?”
I said she was, and that she’d been traveling with her brother. “When I came upon them, he had already been killed by Honvéd. Deserters, I’m sure they were.”
“And where are these deserters now?” he asked.
I told him that I’d killed them when I saw what they were doing to the girl, and he feigned surprise at this. “You killed a Hungarian soldier in order to save the life of a Gypsy?”
I told him that I’d killed one soldier and the girl had killed the other in order to save my life, but that I had killed many men in the war without regard for what coat they wore or what language they spoke. It was all the same to me.
“Did you kill her brother, too?” he asked.
“No. I told you,” I said, “he was dead already. I helped her to bury him.”
“That seems unlikely,” he said, “since we have our own rituals for burial.” Someone else shouted from the crowd that I should be turned over to the police so that they wouldn’t think the villagers were harboring deserters and return to arrest them and burn their houses.
I told them that I wasn’t a deserter, that I’d been a prisoner of the Italians, and when the war ended, they’d released me, put me on a train to the border, and left me to walk home.
“You’ve come a long way, then,” the old man said, and the crowd went silent again, as though wondering who would move or admit to defeat first, I or the old man. What could I say to convince them, though? And I wondered in my exhaustion if it was even worth it. If I started walking now and followed the road in front of me to wherever it might lead, I would have done all that I had promised I’d do, even if it meant that I’d likely be inside of a Hungarian prison by nightfall.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and I told him. The boy began to bawl from underneath a covering shawl on the woman still sitting in her seat atop the dray, and it sounded to me