In the kitchen, I spilled the oil lamp across the table and onto the wooden floor, drew a burning log from the stove and set fire to the house, ran out into the night, moonlit for the first in a long time, and began to move quickly east.
I RAN LIKE A FUGITIVE IN THE DARK, NOT KNOWING WHERE I was going, only why, and I would have run throughout the night, the next day, and another night, for all nights if I had to, until I collapsed, because for the first time in years, since the war, since I’d embraced my father and said good-bye, I held hard to life, a life that needed me to move on this road, in this direction, waiting to come to the river she called the Sajó, if her son was to survive.
For the first few hours, he slept, squirming occasionally and crying out in whatever confusion he was capable of feeling, but otherwise he breathed in silence, lulled by the steady trot I had fallen into. I never knew exactly how far into Hungarian territory the girl and I had walked. It was she who had set the stiff pace that I’d had to condition myself to follow, so unconditioned to days of continuous walking was I after six months in prison. And not every farmer with a horse and cart passed us by without regard. One stranger or another would stop for us if he felt moved more to charity for the young girl with child than derision for her race, and we would climb onto the back of the cart and bounce along in discomfort until he indicated that he had taken us as far as he was able, and we would climb off and keep walking. She otherwise had tried to avoid all cities and towns, only rarely venturing into a local village when she recognized it as a place not inhospitable. There she’d buy a loaf of bread, cheese, or soft old apples with what few coins she had left, and then take the low road, a lift of her head the only sign to tell me that her errands were done and she was going.
So I wasn’t completely certain that if I kept moving east I would come to any river in a day’s time. The boy would not live if we weren’t any closer, and I spoke this out loud to her as I slipped through a small candlelit village in the dark and began to doubt that I could physically do what it was she had asked of me, and said so, as though she ran beside me. But then I realized why she had stopped that day as we came out of the forest, how it was she’d seemed to know that house, and why she hadn’t gone home to have her baby, even when she’d remained perhaps only a day’s ride from her own family. She’d feared they wouldn’t have her, wouldn’t take her back and welcome her son, but would shun her, leaving her to face the world alone, an impossible thought, and so she’d hovered between remaining lost in their memory and found in their lives, and died there. And all of this conjuring made me long for her, made me wish that by some reversal of time, or miracle of divine Providence, I might return to that homestead and find her alive, and once again live and move in her presence and shadow.
BY FIRST LIGHT, I RECOGNIZED TERRAIN SIMILAR TO THAT of Kassa. Wild grapevines grew along the brown plains, and I couldn’t go a few kilometers without passing some peasant setting out for a field, often with a dog that was more than willing to snap at me, so that I picked up a staff along the way and began bringing it down on the heads of at least two curs before the sun was up. The days had gotten warmer, too, so I knew that I was in the basin lands that stretched between the Duna and the Hernád. I have to cross a river soon, I thought, or a border.
I was reduced to a slow crawl by the time I saw the military truck approaching. To them, from a distance, I was probably just another villager with a pack slung back to front, and not worth bothering, but I couldn’t take that chance. I ducked off the road and made for a shack where a rusted tractor, useless and idle, was parked in its permanent shade. I crouched down against the wall as the truck passed, but when I tried to get up, my legs crumbled and I slumped over, unable to go any farther. The boy woke and began to cry, but his bleats now sounded as weak and expiring as he was. Neither one of us had taken food in the hours of which I had lost track. How much longer can he go? I wondered, and whispered to his covered head that we would be home soon, then leaned back against the shed wall to keep from smothering him and told myself I would rest there for just a few minutes, while those weakening moans haunted the air about me.
I woke, to find an old man prodding me with my staff. His body stood in the full light of the sun, which had come around to the side of the shack I’d been sleeping against. When I stirred, he bent down and pulled off the cover of the sling to see the child, and then he waved to a woman in a horse-drawn dray, helped me to my feet, and said in Hungarian (although I saw his face and knew that he was a Rom), “Quickly, the soldiers are returning.”
He walked me out to the road, took the baby, and handed him to the woman, who put him to her breast. Then he waved me under a tarp that covered a load of manure piled high on the back of the heavy cart. “Keep quiet and don’t move,” he said, “and they’ll think you’re just another mound.” He dropped the tarp, so that I lay curled up in darkness, and climbed aboard and nudged the horse gently on so as not to draw attention. I could hear the woman singing to the baby, felt her rocking him as we rode, and I knew when I heard her begin to cry that she, too, feared for his life.
The truck came up fast; I could tell this when I heard it brake hard in front of us and order the man to pull over. The soldiers had gotten word of an army deserter in the area, they said, a thin, bearded man carrying a walking stick and a field pack.
“Have you seen him?” they asked.
The man said that he hadn’t, that he and his wife were only taking this load of manure to their village across the Sajó, and I could hear the rest of the men joke about which was worse, the stink of a Gypsy or the stink of cow shit, then footsteps crunching along the dirt and stone, getting louder as they approached the back of the dray, and then a rifle barrel poked under the tarp to lift it.
“Let’s go, Ábel!” the other men in the truck yelled. “These two stink!” And the tarp lowered again and the truck drove off, shifting hard through its gears, until there was silence all around me and I wondered if the man seated in the cart and holding the horse’s reins was still there with the woman and child.
I fell asleep in that bed of shit, though I was brought to the edge of waking occasionally by the ruts and rocks in the road that my driver failed to miss, until he came to a stop and threw off my cover. The noonday sun was bright and warm and I rubbed my eyes against it and looked out. We had crossed a bridge, the water below wide and brown and shallow. Along the banks to the east sat a Romany village where smoke rose from the makeshift chimneys of makeshift huts, and I watched the figures of small children emerge from one of these huts to chase a mangy dog through the dirt and mud and then disappear, although it was hard to say where. The old man told me in Hungarian that this was as far as he was going.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked him, and he pointed to his wife, or daughter, or whoever she was. She flinched and pulled the baby to her. “He needs nursing,” I said.
“He’s being nursed,” the old man said.
The woman yelled back with scorn and a heavy accent that he might have died, but the man glared at her.
I said that I was grateful for their rescue but that I had to take the boy to his home, where he belonged. “His mother was from a village across the Sajó,” I said, “and I made her a promise. Give him to me.”