Like the Appearance of Horses, page 1
THE BOOKS OF THE DARDAN TRILOGY
Like the Appearance of Horses
The Signal Flame
The Sojourn
ALSO BY ANDREW KRIVAK
The Bear (fiction)
A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (nonfiction)
Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves (poetry)
Islands (poetry)
LIKE THE
APPEARANCE
OF HORSES
ANDREW KRIVAK
BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS
NEW YORK
First published in the United States in 2023
by Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2023 by Andrew Krivak
The chapter “Moth and Rust” first appeared in Image, Issue 112.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krivak, Andrew, author.
Title: Like the appearance of horses / Andrew Krivak.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Bellevue Literary Press, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022007013 | ISBN 9781954276130 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781954276147 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3561.R569 L55 2023 | DDC 811/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
hardcover ISBN: 978-1-954276-13-0
ebook ISBN: 978-1-954276-14-7
In memory of
Irene Therese and Thomas Francis
Their appearance is like the appearance of horses,
and like war horses, so they run.
—JOEL 2:4
CONTENTS
Unto the Land
Moth and Rust
From a Long Way Off
A Settled Place
The Sojourner and the Fatherless
And Wished for the Day
The Mourning House
No Night There
Genealogy
Acknowledgments
UNTO THE LAND(1933–1938)
1
She was eleven and she stood before the picture window of her father’s house and watched the figure of the traveler as he came into view from the road. Watched him walk stooped from the pack on his back, then straighten when she knew he could see the house before he could see the treetops. Watched him quicken his step as though he had walked a long way for a long time and what he sought was now as close as walking through a gate, and this was his sole intention. He stopped for a moment and squared himself before the entrance of the property, his eyes moving, his head lifting slowly, slowly, all with a kind of wonder, from the orchard grounds to the stone foundation, the balcony and high framed windows, the slate tile roof. Then he lowered his head and stepped from the road to the dirt drive that skirted the long line of apple trees and pear trees and split off onto paving cobbles that bent like a silver river through the silver-rimed grass and stopped at the foot of the stone front steps.
From a distance he looked like a man. Closer now she could see he was a boy in the clothes of a man. Clothes from a place where a man and the work he did were nothing like any man who worked and lived in Dardan. She remembered the photographs she had seen of people, to her eye, similarly dressed in the pages of the National Geographic magazines her father brought to her from Miss Cording’s house (the woman who was one-third owner of the Endless Roughing Mill handing Jozef Vinich a stack bound by a lavender ribbon, and saying, Take these for Hannah, poor girl, all alone up there on that mountain of yours, when Vinich and Asa Pound met with her over brandy to discuss the finances of the mill). The South American gauchos who rode their brown and piebald horses along the lowland pampas grass, mountains snowcapped in the distance. The colorful Mongol riders of the steppes who pressed forward mounts short and large-headed across land some god had created for them alone to cross. And a people called the Lovari Roma, outcasts wandering in great caravans of vardos drawn by collared equine that followed paths among not mountains or grasslands but the hinterlands of the towns and cities of Middle Europe. And yet for all of these riders her imagination conjured, this boy, this young man, came alone and on foot and looking as though the land he had left was land bereft of any horse, rider, or path, and that was why he had come. His boots were creased and scuffed and colorless from toe to shaft, the soles themselves looking as though they were sewn tight to their uppers by sinew known only to the cobbler who had fashioned them. The trousers he wore appeared so faded and thin, the material of which they were made seemed to carry as much dust as threads between each woof and warp. On his back he had only a thin canvas coat, not unlike the coat her father wore to pick out stalls and gather firewood and looking no better, despite the shined medallions and varicolored cords that hung from his arms and chest. And inside the upturned collar of the coat, a bright white silk scarf hung in a loose knot at the jugular notch, so that it appeared to be caressing his neck as he walked.
She watched him bend before the porch from the weight of what the pack held and climb those steps like one would climb the steps of a church in which there waited sanctuary or reckoning, or both. He removed the broad-rimmed hat he wore, pushed back his black hair, studied the door. She could see his face through the glass now, his eyes deep and round and strangely blue. His cheeks sunken from some hunger. A wisp of down beginning to trace a line of soot across his upper lip. He seemed to sense her and turned his head to where she watched from the window, but she didn’t move. If he saw her through the glass, he didn’t show it. He turned back, raised his hand for the hitching-post ring that had been fashioned into a knocker and polished and bolted to the oak-paneled front door, and drew it.
The knocks were loud and slow, and still she didn’t move. Just stood behind the curtain close to the glass while the boom of the iron against the thick wood echoed inside the foyer and drawing room. When no one came, he drew back the ring and brought it down again. And once more there was silence in the wake of those echoes in the house. On the porch he looked down at his feet and toed the boards with his boots and looked in the window where she knew he knew she was. Then he reached for the knocker and brought it down a third time.
She heard the sound of footsteps then, coming through the hall in a quick and gentle counterpoint, and she turned and saw her mother standing in the foyer with her hands in the pockets of the kitchen apron she wore over a yellow housedress. She stepped out from behind the drapes and her mother started to speak as though to chide the girl for making her come all this way from her work in the kitchen because she would not answer the door, but she held one finger up to her lips. And there, in the foyer, Hannah Vinich whispered to her mother that there was a stranger outside, but not the kind of stranger she thought they ought to be afraid of. Rather (and she could not say why), he was someone she had been waiting for. With surety and in one breath Hannah described the boy and almost pleaded with her mother not just to let him in and feed him and send him on his way but to let him stay at their table at least until Papa came home. Because she knew he hadn’t come from town like the others when they knew there was no other man around. He had come from someplace unlike any she or her mother could imagine, and she wondered if it was the place her father had spoken of, in a story told before she fell asleep one night, about a kingdom of people dressed like this boy, a kingdom so vast, its borders of mountains and rivers could not be crossed by foot in four phases of a moon. And if that was so, if that’s where he’d come from, then they had to open their door, or this stranger, unlike the sheepish and shifty ones, would knock and knock until that knock was answered and the boots that looked as though they could go no farther came in through the door. She didn’t just believe it. She knew it. Knew that whatever had begun in what was once his house, village, or kingdom even, would play itself out inside the walls her father had built not to withstand but to hold, his land not borderless but vast nevertheless. And the boy must know it, too. Had known it somehow since he was young and was told about the soldier who had carried him in a wrap to the camp on the river at
Helen Vinich looked at the door and back at her daughter, then walked to the door and opened it.
And there he stood, stooped and filthy and bareheaded. He pinched his hat in his fingers and looked up at the woman in front of him, over at the girl by her side fixed and mesmerized, then back at the woman, and asked if Mr. Vine was at home in English so accented and practiced, Hannah could tell without even knowing what language it was he spoke in his dreams that these were all the words he knew of the language she spoke in hers.
Helen Vinich stared at him and didn’t answer, and he asked again.
Is Mr. Vine at home?
No, young man, Helen said with some hesitation in her voice. He’s across town. But I expect him within the hour. Come inside and you can wait for him here.
The boy turned to the girl, and Hannah could see the slight tremble on his lips and the question rising in the wrinkle of his brow. Helen reached out to take him by the hand, and he stepped back and hooked his thumbs in the shoulder straps of his rucksack and wouldn’t move. His eyes swept from the chandelier on the ceiling to the oak newel at the foot of the stairs to the pier glass above a table on which sat a vase and a clutch of spring pussy willows and rested there, caught in the glass. As though the image in festooned coat and sinew-held boots had come to the end of its pilgrimage and another step would make the young man pilgrim no longer but orphan again, like the boy, beginning to end to beginning.
To je v poriadku, Helen said in Slovak, the tone softer now, and he looked at the woman with her long hair brushed and tied back, the eyes and face not yet etched with the lines of age (nor would they ever be), the kitchen apron so clean, it seemed she laundered it with the dress.
Si hladný? she asked.
Áno d’akujem, he said.
Of course you’re hungry, she said in Slovak again. There’s food on the kitchen table, but we can’t eat it from here. Leave your coat and bag and come.
His shoulders dropped and he slipped off the rucksack so that it made a thud when it hit the floor, and she took his coat and hung it up on the one bare hook on the coatrack and left his pack in the corner by the door. Then she told Hannah to run ahead and put the kettle on.
They were drinking tea in the kitchen when the Ford AA pickup pulled into the driveway and parked near the barn and Jozef Vinich came in the house by the back door. The boy had risen to his feet at the sound of the truck, and when the door opened and he saw Vinich, he began to speak in Hungarian, a language Hannah heard spoken so rarely, it sounded to her like the harbinger of impending doom. Slovak was the language in which her father and mother spoke to their daughter and to each other, and with which they often addressed the priest. But the boy seemed to come alive as he tried to explain (Hannah supposed by the tone) why and how he had found the vine. And when he finished, he remained standing and staring wide-eyed next to the chair.
Vinich said nothing. He stood and looked at Helen and stroked his jaw with his hand, the scrape of calluses on that hand against a day’s growth of whiskers and the ticking of the clock the only sounds that could be heard. The boy turned and walked from the kitchen down the hall to the front foyer.
Papa, please say something so that he’ll come back, Hannah pleaded.
But still Vinich said nothing. And the boy returned shouldering his rucksack, out of which he produced an old rusted knife and a sling of coarse cotton, as gift or proof, Hannah couldn’t tell.
Édesanyámat Aishenek hívták. Én Bexhet vagyok, he said to Vinich in Hungarian, the words sounding to Hannah like bees caught between a window and a screen. She glanced back and forth between her father and the boy.
What did he say, Papa? she asked.
He said his mother’s name was Aishe, and his name is Bexhet. But I knew that already.
Where is his mother?
She’s dead.
Jozef.
It’s all right, Helen. She died just after the war, Hannah. Giving birth to this young man. I was there. I promised her I would deliver him to her family. And I did.
No one spoke. Vinich took off his coat and draped it over the back of the chair and sat down at the table, smoothed his hand along the weave of the wrap, and began to nod. Then he turned to look at the boy once more.
Fifteen years I’ve wondered about him, if he was alive even, Vinich said. Wondered if anyone in that camp along the river was alive. He sure must have loved this boy to have gotten him out.
Who is that, Jozef? Helen asked.
The old man. The grandfather. The one who hid me from the Honvéd when he didn’t have to. His name was Samuel, but they called him Meska.
THE CALENDAR SAID IT WAS SPRING, BUT NOT THE COLD OR THE snow on the ground, and still the boy would sleep only in the hayloft when he found they kept a horse, a gelding Vinich called Pushkin. Each morning he was awake and sitting on the back steps of the house before even Helen had come down to fire the stove. When Vinich left for the mill in the Ford, and when he came home in the evening, he spoke to the boy in a hushed and direct voice, sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in Slovak, so that even if Hannah could follow the initial questions about how he had conducted his day, the answers turned into clipped pronouncements or phrases so cryptic and oblique, she was lost again inside whatever language it was he spoke. She asked her father one morning before school what they talked about and Vinich shook his head.
There’s no talk, Hannah. He asks me when the villagers are going to come for him, and I tell him we are the villagers and that he came to us. Then he asks if he can ride Pushkin out of here when they do come, and I tell him we don’t ride the horse. Not anymore. Then he goes back into the barn.
She watched him like this each day. As though from a distance, separated still by the presence of window glass. And she wondered herself when he would leave, so beautiful and odd he looked to her as he moved about the house, the yard, the barn, and stuck out against what she had come to see as the ordinary portrait of the farm. The profile of porch, paddock, fruit trees terraced into the land, and forest and mountain rising up in the distance like an old painting she looked at differently now and saw other details that had always been there. Like the stained glass in the corners of the front window. The joinery of the wood as she moved from the foyer past the drawing room and into the kitchen. And the way the orchard received sunlight all day, because it was in each of these places he had stood and looked back at her with a wonder all his own.
Helen shortened the name he had given to them on the first day to Becks, but he would still only speak to Vinich.
Does he have a family name, Jozef? Helen asked at dinner one evening, the boy sitting out of earshot on a chair in the pantry because he refused to sit with them at meals.
Well, Vinich said. The surname on his passport is Konar, though that’s likely counterfeit.
Supper was over and Hannah had begun to clear the table while her father stared down at his plate as though the pattern at the edge were runes he might study for the answer to an altogether different question puzzling him.
I can see why the old man would have taken the name and forged the documents, he said. But I can’t figure out how after all these years he’d have faith enough to send him away, get him on a train that could take him to a port and tell him there would be someone waiting for him on the other side when he got off the ship. Someone who would take him in because he had saved his life once before and would do it again.
Vinich turned and looked into the pantry and watched the boy eat, searching there for the traces of the mother in the eyes and face, the woman Vinich had traveled with in the short span of a spring and a summer when she was with child and the land in which the two had found each other was no longer at war, though nor was it at peace, for all on the road seemed to be traveling back to or away from a home they once knew, and there was no telling in country, village, or bend of that road what manner of good or ill, peace or war, life or death one would find. And so Vinich made the promise to the girl, who never told him her name, only that it was a secret, the girl whose ashes he committed to the earth, believing he and the infant to whom she had given birth, the infant he took from her arms and swaddled and ran with after he had set fire to the woodsman’s cottage in which they had sojourned, would be of that earth as well by end of day.
