The Sojourn

by Andrew Krivak

And so, America became for me on those nights not a place but a voice, the voice of one man sitting alone at his table and telling another of what he had seen and had made—or would like yet to make, if there would be time—of the world.

IF I COULD HAVE CEASED WHAT PENDULUMS SWUNG, OR WHEELS turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.

The waiting and silence that came with shepherding and shooting both seemed to appeal to a natural discipline in Zlee that made him—and I say this from the distance of these many years—not part of man’s world, but God’s, so that as we worked and spoke and rested in silence, day after day and month after month, he became more like some contemplative seraph than a mere shepherd, a being at once willing and capable of defending what is good and beautiful and so moves easily and without disturbance from blithe to fearsome when the time comes to act.

He was, indeed, a man who appeared as though he had come down off a mountain and yet seemed weaker, somehow less a man among other men as a result of it. And I wanted to grab those people and cuff them for their ignorance, hold them by the neck and make them kneel before my father, but when I turned to him, looking for and expecting to see in him—for my sake—something of the man I knew, who had shaped me, he seemed, year after year, to shrink before us all, as though somehow the streets and houses and villagers we walked among now reminded him of not just a humility but a weakness waiting to inhabit him, and it was his duty to relent.

and I will tell you that I never once wondered who those men might be, if they were in love with anyone or if they had families. They were the enemy, and they would stand and fight and try to kill as many men as I might pass in the night to or from the trenches that separated us not just in battle but—we were told—by the will of God, and so I killed as I had been instructed and believed that death and death alone would save me.

Banquo asked me in the yard, where we were drinking coffee and playing cards, how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well the sentence of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me.

If there was a difference, he said, it was that I had marched with an army and that he had acted alone, but each believed that God was on his side, for no one raises a hand without convincing himself first that he is right.

“Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can’t give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don’t anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature.”

“The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That’s it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening and closing in a wake. Perhaps your brother Marian knows this.”

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.

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.

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.

THAT WAS THE END OF MY SOJOURN IN WHAT A FEW AROUND me here still call “the ol’ kawntree,” though it is no country for which I long or somehow miss in my old age, when memory is supposed to ease and there comes a forgiveness with forgetting. It will always be a mourning land, a place longing for redemption, for there is no end to the memory of it, no chance of forgetting, and so I knew that day that I would have to go home, though I wondered what would await me there in the country in which I was born but had never belonged. If I would be welcomed after my time away. If I might begin again in a manner befitting one who is no longer a soldier or even a son, just a man, with so much lost behind me, and so much left yet to be done.