He hadn’t hatched these ideas on his own. Along with supplies we needed at the camp, my father also managed to bring back from his trips to Kassa a few black-market back issues of The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian. These were meant to be part of our English lessons, but they also shaped his view that the Habsburg dynasty had reached its twilight and was about to be snuffed out. My father was convinced that the problem of the Slavs, as they referred to the conflicts that kept rising up out of every corner of the empire, was the one thing Ferdinand might have reformed. His wife was even a Czech. And then he was assassinated — by a Slav.
“The problem of the Slavs is the Slavs themselves,” my father would say when our debates turned to whether Russia’s revolution was a force of good or just another struggle that would benefit a few and leave the peasants starving. Then he would pick up a book from his precious shelf of works in English, heft it, and say, depending on whom he felt like reading, “We need a Grant” or “We need a Lincoln, not a Trotsky.”
That was how we passed most spring and summer nights that year, exhausted in the candlelight of our cabin from the work we did, while the animals we shepherded ate or slept along the hills outside and boys marched off to war from their families and farms below. Until I got it into my head that the man who had raised me, and all his views, were the ridiculous and subversive rantings of a drunken coward and it was time that I rejected them.
When Zlee turned eighteen in March 1916 and had to register at the conscription office in Eperjes, I had a printer in the city alter my identity card so I could join up early, and I went to present my papers along with all those who were of fighting age. In any other year, they might have balked, checked, and sent me home to wait, but the Honvéd were so desperate for conscripts that it turned a blind eye when Zlee said to the officer in charge, “He’s from the mountains, sir, and can shoot.” That was all they needed. I passed my physical and was told to report back in two days, ready for basic training.
And so, it was on the eve of my departure to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army in the Great War — a night I spent with my father down off the mountain (he had paid the Rusyn peasants to watch his flocks for two days), in spring, so that, as we walked into the village at midday, the green grass and fruit tree blossoms and din of children’s voices and animals who had given birth in the barnyards that were attached to houses like second rooms seemed the stage of some play I happened upon and watched from behind a curtain — that my father told me all that he remembered about the day my mother died over the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado, and why it was we left America for the old country.
“I stopped believing a long time ago,” he said into the darkness, against which we had lit a single candle, “but that doesn’t mean, like any unbeliever, that I might not be mistaken. You see, I felt the conviction that some judgment had been passed down by God, and the others who said they feared this God, so that if I didn’t somehow atone for what I’d failed to do, after losing everything, I’d lose the only person I’d ever loved in this world. You.”
In the morning, he waited for me by the door, kissed me on the forehead, whispered into my ear, “Lúbim t’a,” and we parted.
ZLEE AND I WERE LUCKY TO HAVE JOINED UP TOGETHER. Basic training, with its weeks of constant drilling from dawn well into the night, seemed a thing requiring no effort. We were used to a life of early mornings and physical labor outside all day. It knocked us down a few pegs, got us used to hearing obscenities for marching sloppily or wearing scuffed boots, or maybe it was just to remind us that there was someone whose job it was to tell us what to do every waking hour of those days, and I began to miss the leisure of books and conversation, but I confronted these obstacles as a simple rite of passage. And Zlee, Zlee had this way — maddening to our corporal, who had never seen battle, and would likely have turned tail if he had — of conforming to the least detail with obsessive perfection, all the while making it clear by his indifferent, canine stride and aloof, unanimated face that these least details (which he would see to their completion) meant nothing to him. Zlee was as indomitable as he was bereft of guile.
But it wasn’t until the final weeks, when we began to practice on the rifle range, that our fate, you might say, was sealed, when the training officer discovered that we really could shoot.
Conditions on those firing ranges were ideal — no reflecting sun, no tree branches, no animals bolting when you got a bead on them. The only thing we weren’t used to were the Steyr Mannlicher rifles we fired, standard infantry issue in the army of the empire. They were thin top-bolt rifles with a five-clip magazine, one of the first of their kind. They had a strong kick and could jam easily when exposed to dirt, but we didn’t have to worry about any of this yet. It took the two of us a few rounds to sight them, and after that, on the twenty-five-yard range, Zlee and I hit ten out of ten bull’s-eyes, dead center, some of the rounds piled up on top of one another. The other conscripts barely raised dirt around those targets.
At first, we were assigned, along with all the others who mustered in Eperjes, to General Kray’s command. Kray was a Napoleonic Hungarian who led a brigade made up of Slovak march batallions, which meant that we’d be fighting with men who shared not only a common language but the experience of daily life, ritual, and labor. Kray’s soldiers were known for being good fighters because they worked the land and weren’t soft, and I had a deep sense of having done the right thing, feeling as though I had been called somehow to take leave of my father and Pastvina and to prove myself in the world.
Then, at the end of our basic training, Zlee and I were pulled from the ranks without explanation and led into a tent where a captain sat behind a desk made up of two trunks with a board laid across the top. He was Austrian, which was evident by his uniform, and spoke to us in a bookish-sounding Hungarian. He wore black boots that had a soft, worn gloss to them, and he fiddled with a riding crop.
“So, you are from one of Kray’s regiments,” he said, and began to pace behind his station and question us about our village, our parents, how it was we had learned to shoot so well. He seemed intrigued by Zlee’s insistence that he was an orphan adopted by my father and that we were brothers not of blood but of labor and the land.
“Labor,” he said. “You sound like a Communist. Don’t all mothers labor to bear their sons in blood?”
Zlee said that he had never met a Communist and so couldn’t say what one sounded like. What he meant was that he and I were as close as brothers because of the life my father had given us both. “Sir, I have seen him work on the land, and so I know what this Soldat will do in battle,” Zlee said, staring straight ahead as he spoke of me as a Soldat, which I was, all the while maintaining the soldier’s respect for his superior and never once making eye contact with that captain, who cursed and spat and said, “You know nothing of battle.”
Then he turned to me. “Und Sie,” he said. “Was haben Sie über diese Bruderschaft zu sagen?”
I don’t know why he switched to his native language then, but I knew enough German to understand that he wanted to know what I thought of this brotherhood Zlee spoke of. The summer before I signed up, I had studied the standard commands of the army so that I wouldn’t be turned away if they questioned me, and the language came easily. Could he have known this? Could he have known, too, that Zlee’s German didn’t go beyond twenty or so words because he had no head for anything that required study, from a book, that is? No, this captain was testing my loyalty — it was plain to me — wanting to see how I would respond if I was given a chance to speak privately. And so, thinking not in German but in a foreign language I knew, I replied in English, “Sir, there is nothing my father taught me that he didn’t teach him also.”