The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [71]
In the morning, I joined a caravan of wagons that was traveling along the Hernád into the Sátoraljaújhely. I asked them before I left if I might see the boy and look into his eyes, so that I would have something to remember him by, and they brought him out into the dawn, shadowy and crepuscular, but he was awake and moving, having already nursed, and I could see his mother’s hair, silky black and thick on his head, and her lines around the nose and mouth, but I knew that he would have his troubles in life, too, with the Rom, for his eyes—a blue the likes of which I’ve since seen only in the same morning sky on the open ocean—had to be his father’s, and I kissed him on the forehead and wished him great peace and purpose.
I traveled with them under cover of the band on its way to the marketplace until nightfall, when I slipped away to cross into what was now the nation of Czechoslovakia. I longed only to see my father again, if that gift might possibly be waiting for me, and I held out hope still.
I DON’T REMEMBER SLEEPING WHEN I REACHED KASSA. I skirted the city and its flimsy checkpoint—a guard shack that stood on the main road, as though every other access to this country had a wall keeping people in or out—and kept walking north, past Eperjes and farther on up into the mountains. It took days. I must have eaten something and slept somewhere, but nothing of it stands out from that long trek. Nothing. What I do remember is being passed by a lone Gypsy with horse and cart on the road into Pastvina, a young man bouncing along behind a small but strong horse. He slowed as he approached and I thought he might stop, but when I turned to greet him, he yawed the horse and kept on.
It was morning when I came around the hill and could see the spire of the church rising through the morning mist. The village was quiet. I crunched along through a blanket of frost, crusty from the freezing nights that hung on still this far north and into the mountains. Smoke rose from huts and I could hear the sound of cocks crowing randomly from inside the muffled interiors of barns. All the sights and sounds of a place just as they were before I wondered if I would ever see that place again. Smoke was rising, too, from the house I had grown up in—grown up in, that is, when I wasn’t in the mountains. The thought of seeing my father suddenly made me quicken, and as fast as I was able (which wasn’t very able), I ran the last hundred yards and opened the door without even considering who or what I would find after two years and a war.
My stepmother was inside, alone. She startled and screamed when she saw me and dropped onto the floor the cup of chickory she had just brewed. The porcelain smashed into slivers and black liquid splashed both our feet. I looked down at my boots and then back at her.
“Bo•e môj!” she cried out, and crossed herself.
I stood still and wondered if I should embrace her, but she began to back away from me slowly until she found the edge of the kitchen table to steady herself and sat down. Her hair had rangy streaks of gray in it and her face, always lined with the contempt she held for everyone except her sons, looked etched with an ugliness she had carried inside for a lifetime and which now visibly framed her. She dropped that face into her leathery hands and began to cry.
Am I wrong? I thought. Has she found some peace on this side of her own drawn-out battles and war? I sat down across from her, took her hands into mine, and held them, but she looked up, her eyes flaring red like a rabid dog’s I’d once watched attack a lame horse just before someone shot it, and said, “Why aren’t you dead like the rest of them?” Then she got up and left me alone at that table in the kitchen.
I sat there until the stove went cold. I had gotten so used to the outdoors that I felt uncomfortable in the heat behind four walls. I thought, too, that it might be the only way to get the old lady to come back and face me. I wanted to tell her how—how, not why—it was that I was not dead like the rest of them.