“Nothing, I hope. And if you knock that sight out of line, you can be sure you’ll never carry it again. Now get.”
I reached the cabin in a few easy hours, placed the rifle on its pegs, swept the winter dust and droppings, and waited.
There was silence all about, none of the sheeps’ constant bleating, and no hint yet of their mephitis, which saturated the air and our surroundings once the summer months settled in, but to which one simply grew accustomed, and I enjoyed the strange sameness and yet difference about the place.
After a few more hours alone and with no sign of my father, though, I became nervous and decided to go back and see how far he had yet to come. And when I reached a small cliff and could just see the trail where it emerged from the forest, I noticed him standing there eating an apple and watching me, the horse grazing, the dog running a few strays up out of the trees.
“I thought I wasn’t going to see you until we got to the camp?” he called out.
“I…” I stammered. “I thought you might need some help.”
He pitched the core into the brush and said, “Sure could. Come on.” He whistled for the dog, and when I scrambled down the side of the cliff, he handed me the bridle strap of the horse. “Take the flock. Sawatch and I’ll get the rest of the strays.”
That night, after dinner, he asked me if I had understood what he was trying to do, giving me the rifle to carry on the trail. I said no, I hadn’t, and he nodded his head as if to say, I thought not.
“I wanted to see if you were predictable.”
I told him (the tone of disappointment in my voice unmistakable) that I would stand in front of a train for him.
“That’s not what I said, Jozef. I’d never question your loyalty. I said you’re predictable. I wanted to see if I was right about what you’d do, and I was. I knew that if I sent you on ahead, you’d move fast, and reach the cabin, and that you’d turn right around and come back to me. I was betting the distance of the forest trail and one apple. And there you were, just as I expected. Now, if you want to learn how to shoot, and how to be a good hunter, you’ve got to learn to predict, but, more importantly, in yourself, how to be unpredictable.”
That summer, he sent me out to hide and watch him herd. I had to make notes of how he worked, where he stood, details of the terrain around him, without him finding me. It was a game we were to play, and we played it month after month. If he saw me — a glint from a buckle, a stone I’d kicked loose — he’d drive the sheep in my direction, which meant I had to get up and move, and the more I moved, the less I could observe of him. At dusk, when we met back at the camp or built a fire and slept out, we compared notes. I could fire the Krag only when I had more information about him than he had about me.
It was August before I could scratch more than two details to my father’s five, and in that time I came to understand what he meant. Which way was the wind blowing? Where was the sun? What was my target? How big or how far away? Was it moving or stationary? Distracted or attentive? At work or rest? Could it see, hear, or smell me? Could I have slipped away from where I hid as easily as if I’d stayed, unknown, unnoticed, and unafraid?
I learned how to move when he moved, remain when he remained, anticipate a turn because I saw the lip of rock before he and the flock did, or knew exactly which gill they would follow because its course was the path of least resistance. My father was loath to waste a shot, so practice was always some form of a hunting party, which meant that we ate well in the mountains, and that fall I killed my first deer. I did everything right — found my position upwind of him, watched him emerge from the cover of wood into a wild and fragrant crab-apple grove, and made sure my shot was clear. Prone behind a fallen tree that served as a good barrel rest and gave me a slight height advantage, I snuggled my cheek into the weld of the stock, reckoned that he was little less than a hundred yards away, filled the fore sight blade with the front of his body, took a deep breath, let out half, held, aimed just behind the shoulder of the foreleg where the heart is, and pulled the trigger.
LATE IN THE AUTUMN OF THAT YEAR, A WOMAN CAME TO THE door of our house in Pastvina. She was dressed in a coat two sizes too big and wrapped in a shawl on top of that, and she was weeping, looking as though all that she’d ever had was lost but for these few articles of ill-fitting clothing. She knew my father’s name, and he embraced her in return. A boy stood behind her, his stature and expression the exact opposite of this woman who led him. He was tall, gangly almost, the coat he wore too small and thin for the first snow and wind, although his face gave away nothing of whether he felt cold or comfort. I stared at him and he stared back, his eyes a deep beryl blue, his hair (when he removed his hat) as fine and blond as mine. It was as though I was looking at my older brother, who himself seemed nonplussed to have found me. After a long conversation with my father (her words indiscernible at times through the sobs), the woman left. The boy slept on the floor in the kitchen that night and the next, until my father built a bunk bed above me in my corner of the house and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the winter.
His name was Marian Pes. His mother was a distant cousin, a woman for whom, when they were children, my father had a fondness because of her own restless desire to leave the village and see something of the world, and the two stole away from chores in the afternoon to climb the hills that framed Pastvina and lay down in the newmown hay, where they planned their getaway together. Eperjes was the farthest she got, where she worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an old hotel. (My father married my mother and left for America not long after.) When she became pregnant by a man who promised to marry her and then disappeared, the bishop (who had seen her attend the divine liturgy every Sunday) gave her a housekeeping job in the priests’ quarters at the seminary, and when her time came, she named the baby boy Marian out of gratitude and devotion, wondering, perhaps, if he might one day sweep down those same tiled hallways wearing the black cassock and an attitude of meditation.
In time, though, the local priests and their parishioners talked. The seminarians were disedified, they said, and so she left and drifted through what jobs she found to keep her son in food and clothing, until she wound up back at the hotel, this time serving coffee to the men who read their newspapers in the lobby each morning.
She caught the eye of an older gentleman from Budapest, who wished to have a mistress when he traveled to the ari• region on business, and so she lived under his care (and happy, it was said, the man even treating the boy like a son) in a small but elegant flat in the center of town for many years, until he died at his home, surrounded by family, and she was forgotten. She didn’t know where she would go or what she would do, she told my father the night she showed up at our door after months of slipping further and further into destitution. She only knew that the fates had turned against her, too, as if she’d been cursed somehow, and she wanted her Marian to escape the same, if he could, to live somewhere besides the streets and learn something more than how to steal food from hotel kitchens.
When she asked my father if he would do this final kindness for her, if he would take her son, though she feared she couldn’t bear it, my father said, “I will treat him as though he were my own.” And after a lull, as she turned to go, he asked, “What will you do, Zuska?”
Lowering her eyes, she said, “God’s will,” and they must have wondered then, those two, how the children who had lain on a hillside and dreamed of life in far-off places conjured for escape like fortune-tellers could have known how much of that dream would come true.
In the first few months of his living with us, Marian remained aloof from all but my father. He spoke in a mannered Hungarian, which I suppose he had picked up from his mother’s lover and the other men who gathered at the hotel when they weren’t concerned with matters of business, as though it were the extension of some salon they frequented in Budapest. But to look at him, there was no mistaking him for the child of the streets that he had become.