“Look at Jozef,” Tibor said to Miro. “Strong enough to work in this cold as though it were summer in the mountains.” He took a long drag on the cigarette he was smoking, exhaled, dropped the fag on the dirt floor, and left it to smolder.
I said, “Isn’t there work of your own you two need to do?” and turned back to planing the side of that board. And before I could tell what was happening, Miro grabbed me and punched me twice in the stomach, the shock and pain of the blow doubling me over, so that I fell and couldn’t move.
“That’s for Tibor’s coat,” he said, as though it had happened yesterday.
Miro was even fatter than his brother, not the smarter of the two, and he pinned me down while Tibor came over and started to tie my wrists and ankles together with a length of rope. Every time I tried to push or kick free, Miro pummeled me. When all I could think to do was to spit on him, he punched me in the stomach again and picked me up and threw me over a sawhorse.
I heard Tibor hiss, “I’m first,” and I made one last kick to free myself, but Miro brought his pulpy fist into the side of my head. “Isn’t this how you do it at your sheep camp, Jozef?” Tibor panted, the alcohol on his breath the only thing keeping me from passing out.
Then I heard Zlee’s voice, slow and full-toned as it was. “Tibor, you pig!”
The brothers could not have felt anything but fear. Miro turned and rushed at Zlee, and Zlee landed a punch so hard to the center of Miro’s chest that he seemed to shoot upright and gasp for breath all in one motion. Then Zlee brought his knee up into Miro’s crotch and I heard a crack and a strange squeaking sound. I rolled off the wooden horse and, in a daze, saw Tibor run to the back of the barn.
“You, you s-stay away from me, Pes,” he said.
Zlee backed him into a stall and hit him hard in the midsection, first one punch, then another, each one knocking more wind out of him, until he collapsed. Then, working as methodically as though these were animals he had come to feed, Zlee stuffed a fistful of hay into Tibor’s mouth, grabbed his arm, and bent it back until it snapped. Tibor screamed and Zlee shoved another fistful of hay into his face.
I came to my senses on the ground, kicking against the ropes while Zlee untied me, and my voice rose through anger and pain. “Let me kill him!” I said.
But Zlee told me to hold still, untied me, wiped blood from my lip with a handkerchief that smelled of lye soap and said, “No. It’s over. Let’s go. You hurt them now and it’s prison with the real pigs. They’ve got worse coming.”
But rage welled in me and I shook off Zlee, stood up, grabbed a pitchfork propped in a corner, and walked over to Tibor, who lay whimpering in the frozen shit and mud of that empty stall. I raised the tines above my head and summoned all of the strength I could to drive them through his body. And I would have if Zlee hadn’t taken it from me and set it down as I held my head in my hands and wept.
“Let’s go,” he said again. “We need to tell your father about this before he finds them and they give him a story.” And we walked back into the house, where my father was writing letters by the stove.
I don’t know if it’s a punishment or meant for some other purpose, but if there is a God, He has seen to it that I should remember every face that has ever looked at or spoken to me. And yet of all the faces that crowd my memory, I can still see the face of Miro as we passed him on the way out of the barn that morning. It appears like a short series of pictures: His knees are drawn up and he’s holding his legs and hiccupping for air, when he suddenly looks at me, reaches out his hand, and tries to plead with me to help him, as though the young man that bore his likeness minutes before has been transformed, leaving only an innocent caught up in a fight he doesn’t understand, and unable to make a sound.
But when we told my father that Tibor and Miro were hurt and in the barn after they had tried to beat me for some long-held grudge, he became angry, said that those two were just nervous about their induction and that at heart they were good boys who didn’t know any better. “How bad are they?” he asked.
“Otec,” Zlee said, calling him “Father,” just as I did, “they were trying to—”
I cut him off. “No, Zlee.”
“Marian,” my father asked again, his voice rising and impatient now. “How bad are they?”
“Vel’mi zl,” he replied.
“Goddamn it!” My father brought his fist down on the table and began to shout at us there in the kitchen, telling Zlee that he was tired of the fighting and stories of beatings that followed him everywhere he went. “There’ll come a time when I won’t be able to protect you any longer, and I’m not even sure that I’ll want to,” he said, though we all knew that he was incapable of protecting even himself anymore. “Go and get the doctor, and we’ll see what comes of this.”
Nothing came of it. Miro and Tibor left for the war together in the summer of 1915 and were sent to fight in Galicia, in spite of Tibor’s poorly set arm. Sometime in the fall, we got preprinted postcards, which every soldier on the front initialed and sent home before battle. Then, in the winter, the only villager who ever returned to us from the east alive (he had lost a leg and spoke with a quaver in his voice) told us that Tibor had been shot and killed point-blank in the trench by his commanding officer for refusing to attack when ordered. Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him. Their mother believed they had died heroes, and no one saw any reason to tell her otherwise. She gave all the money she had to the priest, who said Masses for their souls. And yet when I heard about their deaths, I wished I had killed them, carrying that rage within me like an animal tied down and caged, and I prayed for the war to last, though I still had a year to go.
That night, my mother came to me in a dream again. Her face seemed no longer radiant, as it had been when I was a boy, but, rather, etched with sadness. No, not sadness. Fear. The look of fear. I know, because I saw that look everywhere. And while I wondered what it was she was afraid of, and even began to feel it rising in me, she spoke for the first time. Her arms outstretched, as they always were, she said, “Lúbim t’a,” words of love from a mother to a son, and I reached out for her, wanting her to speak again, to tell me why, and to remain there so that I might know something of who she was, if she did, in fact, love me, as she said. But her image fluttered and shook, and when I awoke, the solace I had felt from her in the past comfort of those dreams had been replaced by a hard and intractable anger.
ASH WEDNESDAY CAME IN MID-FEBRUARY IN 1915, AND from the day we set out in late winter of that year on the trail that took us from the village into the mountains, the skies threatening and the path already buried in snow, if I wasn’t quiet and sullen enough to ignore all but the simplest requests made of me, I took to arguing with my father’s opinions, regardless of where I stood on them. He’d look dismayed, and then disdainful, until we just stopped talking, or until Zlee brought up the weather.
My father was against the war. He was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Americans came in on the side of the English and French, which would mean the end of Germany and Austria-Hungary. But few people in Pastvina, or any of the other surrounding villages, could read anything beyond the Hungarian the few years of state school gave them, and all of the papers printed in Kassa and Budapest praised the emperor and his unmatched, loyal army, reporting only the victories we achieved against hapless Russians and now the Italians, who outnumbered us. Even as more and more food, men, and morale disappeared.