That night I faced again the same parade of visitors, and when it was over, Zlee sat at my bedside, as he always did, and I said nothing this time until I awoke and the sun was already high and hot in the sky, and the guard shouted through the door, “Russo!” (because every Slav was a Russian). “Tuto bene?”
That afternoon, the sun beginning already to sink low on the horizon, the wind picking up and bringing in the fresh scent of the sea, Banquo and I sat in the lengthening shade in the yard and I told him about the faces of the men who wouldn’t leave me or let me rest, the visitations I received afterward from my brother Zlee, and the feeling that it was I, more than all these others, who should have gone before them.
“Why,” he said, “so that you can haunt them?” He put his hand on my shoulder and said as he stared across the prison yard, “Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can’t give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don’t anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature.”
I told him that I had had a long time to think about the acceptance of my life and the outcome of the war, though I could not believe, after all that I’d seen, that there could be anything other than chance and misery in it.
“And then the spirits come, one by one, and when it’s over, there is Zlee, sitting, not speaking, waiting, and then nodding when I can only ask if there is something wrong, until he leaves me. Except this time I didn’t say a word, and he seemed saddened by this, and for me.”
“Ghosts are weak,” Banquo said, “and they want only to please. Don’t ask him questions. His questions have all been answered. Tell him that you love him, your brother, that you are sorry not to be with him, and that this is how our fates have been ordered. Ghosts are not the dead. They are our fear of death. Tell yourself, Jozef, not to be afraid.”
After a time, I asked, “What is left to be afraid of?”
And he said, “The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That’s it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake. Perhaps your brother Marian knows this.”
I never saw Zlee again in that prison or anywhere else (although there are days still when I would welcome his spirit before me, though I am fast approaching the same place where that spirit has gone). And the men, too, who haunted me began slowly in their time to fade away, so that when Banquo asked me one day if the faces of war still marched under the banner of death toward me, I said that the last time I had seen those faces, I’d addressed them and told them that I had put down my weapon and wanted to march with my back to the fight in the direction of home, and they disappeared into the morning.
“Bene,” he said, and, not long after, Banquo, who had saved me, fell ill with fever and never woke.
WE WERE RELEASED IN EARLY DECEMBER, THE JAILERS ONLY saying to us as they unlocked each of our cells and brought us out into the air of a frigid but brilliant dawn, “You should go now,” as though it was our idea to have come there in the first place.
But there are times, even now in my life, when I wonder if I might have stayed on that island, if those Sardinian guards had given me any chance whatsoever to fall out of line on the way to that same coal steamer that had brought us across the sea, slip away, and hide forever in the house of whatever man or woman would have me. For, though I say that I longed for home, I couldn’t say where that home was now. I had shed what rags were left of my uniform for a coarse shirt, trousers, and a woolen coat lined with sheepskin. I grew my first beard, thin and patchy as it was, because there were no razors to be found, and the food and work that marked my days brought some color and fullness back to my face. I left that island looking like not an Austrian prisoner of war but the Sardinians who had cared for me and fed me, and with familiarity came a tinge of fear at the distance and uncertainty in the world beyond that waited, so that when the steamer reached the mainland, I thought to stow away belowdecks and return for good to Sardinia, but we were under the charge of the police, and so we quickly boarded the trains that would take us to the borders of the new Italy, and an Austria bereft of its monarchy.
In Padua, we changed trains and moved northeast to Treviso, then across the Piave and Tagliamento again, rivers steely and quiet in the winter cold, but with scars of the war carved everywhere along their banks. From there, we pushed farther north to the upper valley until we came to the town of Pontebba. On the morning of the third day of our journey north, they uncoupled the car we had been riding in and shunted it off to a siding. A cold wind blew down from the Alps and I could tell that it was going to get colder, but after the close and filthy quarters of the train, the cloudless sky and sharp air were a welcome relief.
The scent of bread wafted from a bakery near the train station. Men who had thrown away or never worn a uniform walked through the streets on their way to work or a café, and women who might once have tended the wounded and who now tended goats opened shutters of shops and homes to let the winter light in. I moved slowly, more out of cautious hesitation than fatigue. I wasn’t strong, but I was healthy enough. The Italian police said that the new border was just a few miles from there and that the town of Villach was directly northeast.
“Illegal immigrants will be shot,” they warned. “Now go.” And that was it. We set off walking, first as a mob, then as large groups, then clusters still clinging to some sense of security in numbers. In Austria, on the banks of the Drava, I broke away from ten other men who said they were going to cross into Bohemia at Gmünd, where the legionnaires had headquarters. I turned and followed that river east until I came to the outskirts of Klagenfurt and the tiny village of Abtei, then turned south into the Karawanken Range so as to avoid all gatherings of men. For, even with the beard, there was no mistaking me for a twenty-year-old — soldier or no — and because these new armies of legionnaires were made up mostly of deserters, there was a feeling in Austria and Hungary that the war had been lost because of the Slavs. Moreover, with no money, the countryside was the only place I stood any chance to get food, whether by begging, stealing, or killing it, though I had no weapon with which to do so, and yet I found myself at peace in the mountains, feeling again that there I would not want for anything, nor would I be put upon to serve some malevolent master.
I TRAVELED EAST — IN THE BROAD DIRECTION OF THE HOME I had once known, like some migratory bird following the compass of instinct — and came out of the mountains and hugged the forested roads that connected the small hamlets and villages that had once made up the lands of old Hungary. For weeks I trekked, and in late morning on a day when I had already been walking for several hours, I could see from one of those roads a run-down hut nestled deep in a hollow. Some kind of camp, I thought, or just a poor lodging left to crumble, yet from a distance I could see a hole in the roof and a bird’s nest in the eve. It hadn’t been occupied for some time, but I thought there still might be something to eat, or something of value, inside.
As I got closer, I could hear voices, men’s voices, laughing and cajoling, as if they were at a game, and speaking Hungarian, although it sounded drunken. I crept up to a front window and peered inside. There were two Honvéd soldiers, looking as though they had gone through worse than I, one sitting at a wooden table, legs crossed, drinking from a bottle, the other bare-assed and having his way with some desperate whore lying inert on the dirt floor.