“This is the Sajó,” the old man said, and pointed to the water with a long sweep of his hand. “Who is this woman you’re speaking of?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. I never suspected that the truths and lies she had gathered and spun for her tale of love and wandering would mean nothing without a name she had refused to give, or even without thinking might have spoken. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her name.”
“I see,” he said, disbelieving my own story of deliverance. “The boy is being nursed, and he looks strong enough to survive. You’ve done what your. . lover asked you to do, no? He’ll be safe with us.”
I reached for the dagger I kept in my boot and held it up weakly to the old man. “He comes with me,” I said, but the man stood there unfazed. The woman uttered some incomprehensible taunt or invective and he nodded his head but otherwise said nothing more and didn’t move, and I realized then that I had made a stand with the intent to kill not for the baby, whose eyes I can say I had never seen in the light of day, but for a promise to a woman who would have considered my love a taboo, and whose ashes lay beneath the smoking rubble of a house in the forest, ashes that one day soon would be lifted by the wind, and my knowledge of this would be more than any one on earth could say they knew of her.
By this time, the villagers had begun to wonder why we three stood unmoving near their bridge, and people started swarming up the banks for a closer look, shocked to see one of their own being threatened with a knife. Some shouted their own threats, and a boy who could not have been more than ten kept saying over and over in a Hungarian he’d probably learned in school, “Fight me! Fight me!”
Then the man, some kind of elder — this was clear to me from the response of the others — held his hand up to the crowd, commanded their silence, and asked me in a quiet voice, “The boy’s mother, was she a young girl?”
I said she was, and that she’d been traveling with her brother. “When I came upon them, he had already been killed by Honvéd. Deserters, I’m sure they were.”
“And where are these deserters now?” he asked.
I told him that I’d killed them when I saw what they were doing to the girl, and he feigned surprise at this. “You killed a Hungarian soldier in order to save the life of a Gypsy?”
I told him that I’d killed one soldier and the girl had killed the other in order to save my life, but that I had killed many men in the war without regard for what coat they wore or what language they spoke. It was all the same to me.
“Did you kill her brother, too?” he asked.
“No. I told you,” I said, “he was dead already. I helped her to bury him.”
“That seems unlikely,” he said, “since we have our own rituals for burial.” Someone else shouted from the crowd that I should be turned over to the police so that they wouldn’t think the villagers were harboring deserters and return to arrest them and burn their houses.
I told them that I wasn’t a deserter, that I’d been a prisoner of the Italians, and when the war ended, they’d released me, put me on a train to the border, and left me to walk home.
“You’ve come a long way, then,” the old man said, and the crowd went silent again, as though wondering who would move or admit to defeat first, I or the old man. What could I say to convince them, though? And I wondered in my exhaustion if it was even worth it. If I started walking now and followed the road in front of me to wherever it might lead, I would have done all that I had promised I’d do, even if it meant that I’d likely be inside of a Hungarian prison by nightfall.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and I told him. The boy began to bawl from underneath a covering shawl on the woman still sitting in her seat atop the dray, and it sounded to me like the strongest cry I had heard him utter yet in his brief life. What does it matter, I thought, if this village or some other raises him? What will he know of life, his mother, or even me, regardless? He will grow, learn, love, fight, and die, and someone, whether he knew them or not, will deliver him into his grave.
And I remembered how she had wept over the body of the brother she’d called her husband, and so I said to the old man, “Bexhet. Her brother’s name was Bexhet,” and I sheathed the knife and turned to go.
I WALKED ACROSS THE BRIDGE AND CONTINUED DOWN THE road in the direction from where I’d come, or where at least I thought I had traveled from. The sun was high and warm, the air dry, and green shoots of whatever grains or tubers farmers and tenant farmers planted here protruded from furrows that came right to the ditch at the edge of that road. The stillness of a midday at rest in spring was a world I was content to walk through in whatever moments of stillness and freedom I might have left to me. And yet I walked in that direction with the conviction, if not the belief, that I could resurrect her still, even from ashes, and so I would go there, come what may, or who (for I would have been executed as a deserter once the police found me), because it was what I thought of as home.
It seemed as though I had been walking for days when the old man’s horse and cart pulled up next to me on the road. He motioned for me to climb up and then turned back in the direction of the village, no more than a few miles away. And he told me as we rode that his son Bexhet and his daughter Aishe had left them months and months ago, after Aishe became pregnant by a Honvéd field officer. The community blamed her and her insolence for this shameful indiscretion, but within the immediate family they found themselves at fault for not reading the signs, for not believing that this gadjo was capable of seducing their daughter, and that she would find him anything more than a rogue.
“Perhaps,” the old man said, “perhaps she did love him. And — I will say this only to you — perhaps he loved her, too.”
The last they knew, a fortune-teller, whom they had since driven from their midst, convinced Aishe, and Bexhet with her, to run away to Ljubljana in search of the young lieutenant, although she confessed that she knew nothing of where the officer was and had only heard someone speak of the old city that day as a place where the emperor had kept headquarters during the war. An old woman who never slept and who was prone to seeing things as a result said she’d caught them stealing about on the night of their disappearance, but they gave her no mind.
“It turns out that was the last anyone had seen or heard of them. Until we had heard about you. No officer, it’s clear,” he said, his eyes still fixed to the road, “but Aishe loved to exaggerate. She was my youngest daughter.”
When we returned to the village, life seemed as I might have imagined it there yesterday, untouched and unworried, no one suspecting who or what was to come. Two stern spinsters washed me and trimmed my beard (I wanted to keep it to avoid looking like a soldier), and I was invited to sit with the king of the Gypsies — the old man himself — while we ate and spoke of a promising crop of potatoes that year, if the spring weather was any indication, and the beautiful new foal that had been given to him by a distant relative for his kindness to a brother during the war. Then he raised his glass and said, “To the vine, who has brought one of our own back to us. May there be many branches.”
Strangely, there was no more talk of his daughter, no request for me to tell of how she died, or what we might have spoken of in the last few months of her life. When I asked out of concern if someone could tell me how the child was doing, they laughed and said that he was fine.
“Already the women call him Bexhet and coddle him. A boy that strong will grow up to be a greater king than I,” the old man said, a boast that sounded unlike the one who wouldn’t believe a word I said and yet was still willing to spare my life.