My stepmother shook off her false grief and came out to stoke up the stove just as I was finishing the letter.
“He was a silly old fool in the end, your father,” she hissed. “Kept moaning about how he had nothing to leave you if you made it home from the war. If, I told him. And then he produced that musty old folder and said to make sure you got this so you’d at least remember him. Hah!”
I told her that I needed nothing to remember him by, and she said, “Nothing. That’s what you got in the end,” and looked at me to see if she might be mistaken.
But I acted as cold as if I was about to put a bullet through her head at four hundred yards and said, “I’ll be expecting my meal at noon,” so that she’d think I had nowhere else to go.
I waited at the house for a few days, visited my father’s grave, which seemed cold and unreal to me, but I otherwise remained a recluse in the barn, where I slept. I could tell that snow was on the way, so I lingered until the front came in, packed up some food and found the shotgun in the barn, which, surprisingly, my stepmother hadn’t managed to sell. Shells my father kept in a false floor were still dry, without any apparent rust around the primers, and so I armed myself, thinking the old gun just might come in handy. He had hidden the field glasses and a good hunting knife in there, too. The knife was still sharp. But there was no trace or mention anywhere of the Krag, not in the letter, not in Borka’s enmity, not in the barn.
I left the next day before sunrise in the middle of a freakish and substantial spring storm, which covered my tracks almost as quickly as I made them. The climb out of Pastvina seemed easier, in spite of the deep snow. No month-long packs of provisions, no mule, no horse, but no one else, either, to accompany me. I missed my father and Zlee, and the kind of world I knew before I marched off to war, and the old terrain seemed worn to me, the hills less challenging, the vistas not vast so much as merely broad from where I stood, as though what once to the boy appeared daunting mountains had become in the sight of the man merely stones.
At the camp, I waited for the storm to taper off, but it seemed unwilling to let up, and when it blew over, two feet of fresh powder blanketed the hills. I cleared the cabin of a few rodents and one big snake cold and still under a crate that had once held potatoes. I got the stove going, made some tea, lit the old oil lamp, laid out my supper of bacon and beetroot, and sat listening to the night, wishing I could summon into my presence the ghosts of everyone who had gone before me — friend or foe, civilian or soldier, family or Gypsy — embrace them, and send them home. But I rested now as they had left me. Alone.
I had enough food for three days, and so I waited that long before I hiked up to the ridge and climbed inside of the cave, which still smelled faintly of the fires we used to make there, the wall closest to the opening blackened permanently with soot. And, there in the back, out of the light, so that it would have been easy to miss, I found the stone veined with quartz. I pried it loose and lifted the sack from its resting place.
Five ounces of gold is a heavy five ounces. It felt odd in my pocket, as though it would weigh me down and keep me there, rather than become my means of departure from a world and a place in which no one would mourn for me should I disappear without a word or trace.
I climbed up onto the ridge — the sun high and growing warm again as it melted the snow — and suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of my father and the comforting shadow of Zlee, as though I might turn and find them both climbing up behind me on this same outcropping of boulders to shout “Jozef!” and come to me and embrace me.
But there was no one, just the wind, and the rustling branches of a lone tree, and I knelt down and began to weep and then wail like a child, an infant at his birth, in my naked grief and desolation, howling for who and what I wanted most to touch and see, all of which had been taken from me, and at this I lowered my head and dug at the rock as tears streamed down my face and my fingers began to bleed, until I rolled over sobbing onto my side and fell asleep.
WHEN I CAME DOWN OFF OF THE MOUNTAIN, I TOLD MY stepmother that I was going to Pozsony (although word had just come east that the city was now called Bratislava) to join the Czecho-Slovak army and asked her for money for the train ticket. She said it was about time I decided to do something so that I could send her a regular salary, and for that reason only, she gave me the fare, which wasn’t a small sum, as it’s almost a full day’s journey from the east to old Pozsony. I cleaned up the shotgun and sold it in Kassa, along with the field glasses and knife, and with that bought a ticket clear to Prague, where the new country’s economy was booming. Prague seemed like a land from a fairy tale to me, and so I distrusted it for that reason, staying only long enough to sort papers and book a train out of there. I got a good exchange on an ounce of gold, mailed the advance my stepmother had given me back to her in a letter, saying that I had been sent to Prague for induction, then received my American passport at the new consulate and boarded a train for Hamburg, Germany.
Although I had never been so far west or north before, crossing that border into Germany was like crossing back into the misery of the war, fields untended, little food to be had anywhere for any price, and entire towns eerily empty of men. There were old men, and there were children, but anyone who might have been of fighting age and fit to do it had given his life, or any number of limbs, to that fight. Western Europe seemed to me a place wherein no one lived any better than we had for centuries in our miserable corner of the northern Carpathians.
The travel agent in Prague told me that I was to meet a boat called the Mount Clay in Hamburg, an old troopship converted to a passenger steamer, but that he was uncertain as to when exactly it was scheduled to arrive and embark again for the United States. I thought that I had missed it by the time I arrived, but it turned out that it was two days late, and then took two more days to disembark its passengers and resupply, due to the lack of longshoremen. Those were a lost and empty four days — bleak skies, a chill drizzle, and everyone starving, though too tired even to look for food. All I remember about that city, apart from my steamer at dock on the river, is the unlikely number of trees and the amount of unbroken ground that shaped its environs. More ships came into its port than any other place in Europe, and yet I felt as though I was spending a week in a country house on a lake, one whose inhabitants consisted entirely of mute and starving prisoners.
When we boarded, I went below to survey my tiny room in steerage, though the smell of diesel and the stale air reminded me of the train I had taken after leaving Sardinia, and so I walked back up on deck, in spite of the rain, which kept others under tarpaulins or down below. I looked across the river to a flock of derricks idle and waiting for freight either yet to come or that had never showed. A figure moved slowly among them and then stood in full view of me — a man, a dockworker perhaps, as idle as the steel that surrounded him, and yet seeming fit enough to walk, which was something. I tried to calculate the distance between him and me, but I was suddenly disoriented and lost my entire sense of direction. I put my head in my hands and rested them on the rail to steady myself. Below, the current swirled brown and in eddies along the side of the ship. When my vertigo dissipated, I looked up and glanced downriver to where the water bent and rose to the horizon until it disappeared. I turned and searched for the worker, and there he stood, still on the shipyard bulkhead. He lit a cigarette and gazed at our transport, and I had the urge suddenly to respond to his searching and to make my presence known. I raised my arm above the parapet of deck railing and waved in a gesture that was all at once greeting, salute, and leave-taking. He returned my wave as though he had come here just to see me off, flicked his cigarette into the water, and disappeared amid the forest of cranes and rigging.