There wasn’t much discussion, though, about anything in those first few days we traveled together — or rather, moved in close proximity to each other. The only authority I had was with the rifle, and I said to her that we should save what bullets we had left for larger game, for I could see that we were never far from a deer or two. But there was no chance of tracking and shooting one as we walked forest paths and down empty roads while she kicked stones and picked up sticks, sang to herself, or lagged so far behind that when she wanted to scold me for any number of reasons she could think of, she had to yell ahead, until I told her that she should go on without me if she had no interest in food, because I was going to sit and wait and find some game to kill. She began to cry and said that she was very hungry and was only trying to take her mind off of that hunger. And so I told her that if she could keep a fire going, I could shoot and dress a deer, and then we’d have our fill.
We found a moss floor under snow near a creek, cleared some ground and camped there for a day and a night, and had to settle for a skinny hare for our supper, and the next morning hiked back out to the road and continued our journey, although she never kicked another stone, and sang quietly to her unborn child in a voice that was close and soothing to me, as well.
When she stopped suddenly once and I asked why, she shushed me and stood stiff and still by the roadside. Within minutes, a horse and cart appeared, the driver slowed and then sped up at the sight of us, his gaze fixed forward and his mouth in a sneer as he whipped his horse into a trot, and in his wake, we went along as before.
There were any number of places we could have stopped and rested for a few days, or longer, before moving on, although to where was never clear. Old hunting cabins, good caves, glens protected by stands of pine so thick that they worked better than walls to keep out the cold and wind. Yet the girl seemed to be in search of something, not her home village so much as a place or destination she had envisioned (or knew existed) along this path and would not cease walking until we had reached it. So we continued to camp, but never more than a full day, and in the morning she would poke me awake with a stick and say in Slovak, as though she needed to be sure that I understood it was time to leave, “Pod’me.”
But the snows were deep when we weren’t on a traveled road, and her condition hampered our progress more and more until we were lucky to go more than a few miles in daylight, and I no longer wondered to myself why I didn’t just hive off as we approached a town and make my own way to the border and then home. She had become a traveling companion by now, and although we still rarely spoke, after a while we no longer suspected each other of some impending treachery, and I felt the duty of a guide, or admirer-protector, and my thoughts turned to when— on the bank of what creek as she bent over to drink, or in the middle of the road, miles from anywhere — she would go into labor and I would be needed.
UNLIKELY AS IT SEEMED TO ME THEN, AND SOUNDS EVEN incredible now as I narrate these events, we covered as much distance on foot through the forests and farmlands of Slovenia and Hungary as our conditions allowed in the month of January 1919, and a great distance it was. And yet, our bodies weak and getting weaker, the nourishment we found along the way meager, I never feared for our physical well-being once the lingering threats of the war seemed to have abated and we found out how (or rather, she knew how) to avoid danger in the form of persons. What began to occupy me was the unspoken question of whether we would, together, make it to the end of the road we were on, which is to say, make it to the place we wanted, each to our own, to call home.
Do you see in that what was troubling me? I didn’t want to leave the side of this young woman whom the Fates had set in my path, or, to be fair, in whose path I had been set, a woman to whom my speaking would itself have been unlikely, if not forbidden or ridiculed in the world, and I struggled with a desire that seemed to have been pressed down or never allowed to emerge as it might have with a young man in another time and another place, for the young men of our time had had to turn themselves when they were yet boys to a man’s desire for war. But with that war over, and wandering solely through a world as though we two were the last, or perhaps the first again, man and woman alive, it was a desire to remain at her side, even if we could not touch, and witness birth as the snows melted and the days lengthened, after having witnessed death for so long.
And so it was that, after we had been walking from the setting of one new moon to another and it seemed I would spend the rest of my life afoot, regardless of where I lived, or what it was I did, and we both (though we each refused to admit this physical weakness) were approaching exhaustion from a lack of food (the game in the mountains and among the lakes and rivers we passed not as plentiful as I had hoped and expected), we came to a clearing on the edge of a forest and stopped. Up ahead, it looked as though the terrain was about to change, for there were no longer any dense stands of firs, or peaks visible in the distance. The ground looked more like clay, the trees sparser and yet heartier for having survived, although there was nothing naked or arid about the landscape, even in late winter.
There, on the rise of a hill, set some ways back from the road and framed by a stand of birch so that it wasn’t immediately visible, a farmhouse stood like a cutout in a fairy tale for children. To me, it was in a place too obvious and exposed, and for that reason I was suspicious and thought that we should go on and avoid it. Yet, she looked neither tentative nor surprised to see any of this — house or farmland — standing before her. We approached slowly and I helloed the porch in German and Hungarian but got no answer. A hen scratched about the yard until I tried to catch it and scared it into a weathered but passable barn. She told me to leave it, said, “We might get eggs from that one,” and pushed open the front door without any hesitation and walked inside as though she had intended to stop here to rest for a while. I slung the carbine I had been carrying at the ready over my shoulder and followed her.
What looked like a living area was clean and uncluttered, although largely because it was emptied. A white porcelain angel stood out of place on a fieldstone mantel above the hearth and there was an old photograph on the opposite wall of a bride and groom, but there was no furniture or bookshelves or anything of value beyond the personal. The kitchen was orderly, too, in its scarcity. There were some dry goods left in a pantry, but nothing to suggest anyone was coming back soon to prepare dinner. Two back rooms had been made up and then left, and the whole place seemed not a home but some Pietist’s boardinghouse that admitted only the plain and virtuous. The girl rocked a shovelful of ashes from the stove, shook out the box, ordered me to find wood so that we could get a fire going, and said that I might find something to cut with in the barn. Then she began rummaging through the pantry jars and tins for what edible things might remain there and told me before I left that if I found a bucket in the barn, I should check the well at the back of the house and see if it was fouled or still drinkable. “If it is, bring me some water before you fill the wood box.”