The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [70]
And I remembered how she had wept over the body of the brother she’d called her husband, and so I said to the old man, “Bexhet. Her brother’s name was Bexhet,” and I sheathed the knife and turned to go.
I WALKED ACROSS THE BRIDGE AND CONTINUED DOWN THE road in the direction from where I’d come, or where at least I thought I had traveled from. The sun was high and warm, the air dry, and green shoots of whatever grains or tubers farmers and tenant farmers planted here protruded from furrows that came right to the ditch at the edge of that road. The stillness of a midday at rest in spring was a world I was content to walk through in whatever moments of stillness and freedom I might have left to me. And yet I walked in that direction with the conviction, if not the belief, that I could resurrect her still, even from ashes, and so I would go there, come what may, or who (for I would have been executed as a deserter once the police found me), because it was what I thought of as home.
It seemed as though I had been walking for days when the old man’s horse and cart pulled up next to me on the road. He motioned for me to climb up and then turned back in the direction of the village, no more than a few miles away. And he told me as we rode that his son Bexhet and his daughter Aishe had left them months and months ago, after Aishe became pregnant by a Honvéd field officer. The community blamed her and her insolence for this shameful indiscretion, but within the immediate family they found themselves at fault for not reading the signs, for not believing that this gadjo was capable of seducing their daughter, and that she would find him anything more than a rogue.
“Perhaps,” the old man said, “perhaps she did love him. And—I will say this only to you—perhaps he loved her, too.”
The last they knew, a fortune-teller, whom they had since driven from their midst, convinced Aishe, and Bexhet with her, to run away to Ljubljana in search of the young lieutenant, although she confessed that she knew nothing of where the officer was and had only heard someone speak of the old city that day as a place where the emperor had kept headquarters during the war. An old woman who never slept and who was prone to seeing things as a result said she’d caught them stealing about on the night of their disappearance, but they gave her no mind.
“It turns out that was the last anyone had seen or heard of them. Until we had heard about you. No officer, it’s clear,” he said, his eyes still fixed to the road, “but Aishe loved to exaggerate. She was my youngest daughter.”
When we returned to the village, life seemed as I might have imagined it there yesterday, untouched and unworried, no one suspecting who or what was to come. Two stern spinsters washed me and trimmed my beard (I wanted to keep it to avoid looking like a soldier), and I was invited to sit with the king of the Gypsies—the old man himself—while we ate and spoke of a promising crop of potatoes that year, if the spring weather was any indication, and the beautiful new foal that had been given to him by a distant relative for his kindness to a brother during the war. Then he raised his glass and said, “To the vine, who has brought one of our own back to us. May there be many branches.”
Strangely, there was no more talk of his daughter, no request for me to tell of how she died, or what we might have spoken of in the last few months of her life. When I asked out of concern if someone could tell me how the child was doing, they laughed and said that he was fine.
“Already the women call him Bexhet and coddle him. A boy that strong will grow up to be a greater king than I,” the old man said, a boast that sounded unlike the one who wouldn’t believe a word I said and yet was