“You are under my protection, Herr Stern,” Zlee said. “And I can make a bullet in your head look like it came from the enemy, although I might not have to.”
The sergeant turned to his infantrymen for support, but they were blank. He spat, cursed his disapproval, and the six of us set off again.
Word must have gotten out, because no one or thing showed itself that night, or the next. In the half-light of the early morning of the third day, a scrawny buck leapt over the ground in front of us and the sergeant ordered, “Flare!”
Zlee was the shooter that hour, but he never lifted the rifle from where it rested on his thigh. The sapper fired on command and the flare riffed in a wavering arc into the faint sky and exploded over the ground before us, bathing that entire section of forested battlefield in green light. The deer stood frozen, dived forward, tripped over its front hooves, regained its balance, and sprinted down the mountain toward the Italians as the flare sputtered and dropped. We got our week’s rest after four nights, and when we returned to the line, we hiked through that sector as though it were a worn path or a place forgotten.
WHEN WE WERE WELL OUT OF EARSHOT OF THE SENTRIES, though, we doubled back and took position on an outcropping of rock no more than one hundred yards above where we had sat in a trench with that loudmouthed sergeant and his skittish men two weeks prior. The weather was better, but the moon had waned to new since then, which meant anyone else going out was as blind as we were, until first light, and there we waited.
Sometime just before dawn broke, we heard sentries rustling and whispering, convinced, I suppose, that everyone at war was asleep but them. Then we watched two soldiers, rifleless and shorn of all uniform decorations, go over the top. Though trying hard to move quickly, they seemed to hop in slow motion among the shattered trunks and shell holes that defined the ground.
During our rest, Zlee and I had removed the bullets from one of our clips and reversed the heads. It was something Bücher had taught us. With the flatter back end of the slug at the front of the projectile, the bullet mashes and tumbles as soon as it hits. The Germans used these to penetrate firing plates, and we figured we’d be shooting at moving targets and so would have to aim for the body, which meant that even if the shot hit wide, it would still tear up the chest cavity and be lethal.
I was shooter when the deserters emerged, and I got the first one in my sights, waited as he loped and tucked, and then led him to the right, exactly where he was supposed to step, and shot him between the shoulder blades. When he went down, the other one stopped and looked back. I could see his face as though I were looking through a mirror: young, filthy from not having washed in a long time, eyes big with fear. I aimed for his head, but in that split second I realized that he wouldn’t stand in profile like that for long, and so I lowered the rifle as he spun back around, and fired. His arm seemed to whip out from the force of the turn and, when the bullet hit his shoulder, tore off his body and into the air. He dropped and screamed for one involuntary second, then lay motionless and quiet on the ground.
Light was barely discernible, a brief, shadowy dawn particular to the mountains. Zlee glassed the ground and said, “He’s still alive.”
I could hear the weak sounds of leaves and sticks crackling slowly, and said, “Let’s go.” He would bleed to death eventually, and there would be short-range artillery soon.
But Zlee said, “They’d have opened up by now. No one over there knows what’s going on. We have to finish this.”
So we left cover and moved out along a sap that barely came to shoulder height. I didn’t like being out in the open so close to morning. The Italians had snipers, too, and I was afraid Zlee was wrong, that someone over there was watching us, but we came to a place where the trench dead-ended against a tussle of roots and rocks, and we settled into that for a hide.
The near-quiet woods and the knowledge that I had failed to get my kill unnerved and fatigued me, so I handed Zlee the rifle. He took his time observing the wounded man. Two minutes, ten — I don’t know. His trigger finger moved slightly along the inside of the grasping groove like it was stroking a chin, and I whispered, “One hundred and fifty yards,” and noted a fluky breeze. Zlee adjusted slightly for it, then lay still and breathed slowly as he peered through the scope, and all I could think about was the light and what a shame it would be to get killed on a morning as beautiful as this one. Then Zlee drew the rifle in tight and fired.
From there, we continued north. The line broke and we bouldered over an exposed but high escarpment above the Soca, still running, so deep and strangely blue. High pressure along with the wind seemed to have settled over the entire valley, and I remembered that it was May. We came into a new sector just south of Plava and ranged among the mountains the Italians called the Three Saints, and which our armies held: Santo, San Gabriele, and San Daniele. That evening, a Croatian outfit shared with us their supper of pine-needle tea and gamey horse meat, and then paraded around two Italian deserters, whom they were going to shoot in the morning.
“You cold bastards shouldn’t get to have all the fun,” they said, laughing and a little drunk on wine they had found in the basement of an old church. We kept to ourselves after that and hiked and spotted from higher ground at intervals that suited us.
One night we camped near a small stream at the back of San Daniele so that our fire wouldn’t be detected. Artillery thumped slow but steady in the distance like the ouff of waves on a shore, and Zlee and I ate vodici we picked in those hills and boiled with our tea and talked about Pastvina, my father, and what we hoped to do after the war. I said that I wanted to travel to America, live by a pond in Massachusetts, and leave behind everything about Pastvina, and Hungary, and the people I had no love for anymore.
Zlee laughed. “Well then, my brother, I’ll miss you, because I’d be happy doing nothing more than living the rest of my life as a shepherd,” he said, with only my father around to talk to, and that’s all he wanted to do now.
And I thought of the way in which my father had taken Zlee and shaped him and given him a life he certainly would never have known if he had remained on the streets of Eperjes with his mother until it came time for him to go off to war, and I asked him if he had ever heard from his mother, if he knew where she was, or ever thought of going to find her.
His mood darkened, and I saw a flash of the old mad dog in his eyes.
“Find her?” he said. “For years she knew where to find me, but after a few months of writing to tell me that she was getting herself back on her feet, and that she had met a wonderful man who was quite rich and looking forward to meeting me, it all stopped, and your father took me into the mountains. You don’t know how angry those letters made me, or how many times that winter I nearly left to go in search of her, just to see her, to see if she had lied about her life or not. At the camp that spring, I wanted to walk down into the city and find her, and show her that, in spite of her having left me, I had become a man. I had even risen early one morning, intent on going, but when I walked out the door of the cabin, I stood looking out over the hills. There was a faint light in the sky, a few sheep bleating, and Sawatch came up and lay down at my feet. I felt as though I couldn’t move, and I thought, What of her rich men and good life? Otec and you treat me like a son and a brother, and that’s already more than I ever expected to be given in any life.”
And that night she came to me in my dreams again, my own mother, and she seemed as fearful as she had been the last time, although she still appeared to be shimmering, as though the beatific perfection of that faded print my father kept, every curve and shadow of which I had memorized as a boy. She waved to me and began to walk away, and I shouted, “No!” She turned and, hands outstretched, said, “Stay, Jozef. You’ll be safe,” and I begged her to come back, but she kept walking, with her back to me, until she dissipated like a mist.