Read Online The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak - Free Book Online

protecting even himself anymore. “Go and get the doctor, and we’ll see what comes of this.”
    Nothing came of it. Miro and Tibor left for the war together in the summer of 1915 and were sent to fight in Galicia, in spite of Tibor’s poorly set arm. Sometime in the fall, we got preprinted postcards, which every soldier on the front initialed and sent home before battle. Then, in the winter, the only villager who ever returned to us from the east alive (he had lost a leg and spoke with a quaver in his voice) told us that Tibor had been shot and killed point-blank in the trench by his commanding officer for refusing to attack when ordered. Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some
time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him. Their mother believed they had died heroes, and no one saw any reason to tell her otherwise. She gave all the money she had to the priest, who said Masses for their souls. And yet when I heard about their deaths, I wished I had killed them, carrying that rage within me like an animal tied down and caged, and I prayed for the war to last, though I still had a year to go.
    That night, my mother came to me in a dream again. Her face seemed no longer radiant, as it had been when I was a boy, but, rather, etched with sadness. No, not sadness. Fear. The look of fear. I know, because I saw that look everywhere. And while I wondered what it was she was afraid of, and even began to feel it rising in me, she spoke for the first time. Her arms outstretched, as they always were, she said, “Lúbim t’a,” words of love from a mother to a son, and I reached out for her, wanting her to speak again, to tell me why, and to remain there so that I might know something of who she was, if she did, in fact, love me, as she said. But her image fluttered and shook, and when I awoke, the solace I had felt from her in the past comfort of those dreams had been replaced by a hard and intractable anger.
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    ASH WEDNESDAY CAME IN MID-FEBRUARY IN 1915, AND from the day we set out in late winter of that year on the trail that took us from the village into the mountains, the skies threatening and the path already buried in snow, if I wasn’t quiet and sullen enough to ignore all but the simplest requests made of me, I took to arguing with my father’s opinions, regardless of where I stood on them. He’d look dismayed, and then disdainful, until we just
stopped talking, or until Zlee brought up the weather.
    My father was against the war. He was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Americans came in on the side of the English and French, which would mean the end of Germany and Austria-Hungary. But few people in Pastvina, or any of the other surrounding villages, could read anything beyond the Hungarian the few years of state school gave them, and all of the papers printed in Kassa and Budapest praised the emperor and his unmatched, loyal army, reporting only the victories we achieved against hapless Russians and now the Italians, who outnumbered us. Even as more and more food, men, and morale disappeared.
    He hadn’t hatched these ideas on his own. Along with supplies we needed at the camp, my father also managed to bring back from his trips to Kassa a few black-market back issues of The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian. These were meant to be part of our English lessons, but they also shaped his view that the Habsburg dynasty had reached its twilight and was about to be snuffed out. My father was convinced that the problem of the Slavs, as they referred to the conflicts that kept rising up out of every corner of the empire, was the one thing Ferdinand might have reformed. His wife was even a Czech. And then he was assassinated—by a Slav.
    â€œThe problem of the Slavs is