The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [74]
I climbed up onto the ridge—the sun high and growing warm again as it melted the snow—and suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of my father and the comforting shadow of Zlee, as though I might turn and find them both climbing up behind me on this same outcropping of boulders to shout “Jozef!” and come to me and embrace me.
But there was no one, just the wind, and the rustling branches of a lone tree, and I knelt down and began to weep and then wail like a child, an infant at his birth, in my naked grief and desolation, howling for who and what I wanted most to touch and see, all of which had been taken from me, and at this I lowered my head and dug at the rock as tears streamed down my face and my fingers began to bleed, until I rolled over sobbing onto my side and fell asleep.
WHEN I CAME DOWN OFF OF THE MOUNTAIN, I TOLD MY stepmother that I was going to Pozsony (although word had just come east that the city was now called Bratislava) to join the Czecho-Slovak army and asked her for money for the train ticket. She said it was about time I decided to do something so that I could send her a regular salary, and for that reason only, she gave me the fare, which wasn’t a small sum, as it’s almost a full day’s journey from the east to old Pozsony. I cleaned up the shotgun and sold it in Kassa, along with the field glasses and knife, and with that bought a ticket clear to Prague, where the new country’s economy was booming. Prague seemed like a land from a fairy tale to me, and so I distrusted it for that reason, staying only long enough to sort papers and book a train out of there. I got a good exchange on an ounce of gold, mailed the advance my stepmother had given me back to her in a letter, saying that I had been sent to Prague for induction, then received my American passport at the new consulate and boarded a train for Hamburg, Germany.
Although I had never been so far west or north before, crossing that border into Germany was like crossing back into the misery of the war, fields untended, little food to be had anywhere for any price, and entire towns eerily empty of men. There were old men, and there were children, but anyone who might have been of fighting age and fit to do it had given his life, or any number of limbs, to that fight. Western Europe seemed to me a place wherein no one lived any better than we had for centuries in our miserable corner of the northern Carpathians.
The travel agent in Prague told me that I was to meet a boat called the Mount Clay in Hamburg, an old troopship converted to a passenger steamer, but that he was uncertain as to when exactly it was scheduled to arrive and embark again for the United States. I thought that I had missed it by the time I arrived, but it turned out that it was two days late, and then took two more days to disembark its passengers and resupply, due to the lack of longshoremen. Those were a lost and empty four days—bleak skies, a chill drizzle, and everyone starving, though too tired even to look for food. All I remember about that city, apart from my steamer at dock on the river, is the unlikely number of trees and the amount of unbroken ground that shaped its environs. More ships came into its port than any other place in Europe, and yet I felt as though I was spending a week in a country house on a lake, one whose inhabitants consisted entirely of mute and starving prisoners.
When we boarded, I went below to survey my tiny room in steerage, though the smell of diesel and the stale air reminded me of the train I had taken after leaving Sardinia, and so I walked back up on deck, in spite of the rain, which kept others under tarpaulins or down below. I looked across the river to a flock of derricks idle and waiting for freight either yet to come or that had never showed. A figure moved slowly among them and then stood in full view of me—a man, a dockworker perhaps, as idle