“Thirty-seven . . . Of course he will have to go. Every man up to the age of 42, if he served his turn in the army.”
“And what about my Andrew’s children? And his wife? What will they do?”
“Oh, as to them they write nothing. The king orders that every one who had been a soldier and is not yet more than 42 years old must join his regiment.”
“That cannot be, Michael; you don’t get it right. What can they do with such an elderly fellow, especially as he has rheumatism? He will be only in the way; he can hardly walk, and how could he run? No. I am going to see a notary. It cannot be as you explain it.”
“Go on to the notary, if you want to,” answered Michael. “It is so written on the placard, and it is actually written in our Slovak language plainly, so that everyone would understand it.”
“Why that is so! Look at that Slovak placard,” Josef Sidovie called out as he passed by and stopped behind Michael. “All of a sudden these fine gentlemen have learned to write Slovak, when they need us. Lala, even the king himself signed his name in Slovak: Fráňo Jozef.”
******
Jano Cárach went to town with his wife.
“And what else shall I buy, now that the war is here?”
“Don’t buy very much—get a half sack of peas, a sack of middlings for the pig, so that you would have lard in the winter, and a sack of flour.”
“Why get so much of it? Michael won’t be home, there will be only the three of you. You have a lot of potatoes and enough cabbage to last you till next summer. If you get more, it will spoil.”
“Jano, when the Russians come, what will I give them?” answered the wife.
******
At Riadek below the gardens there is a small neat house. In the house there is a living room, a small kitchen and a tiny bedroom from which a little window looks out on the street through a fence covered with bean plants, and in the house lives an old widow.
For two months she received no news from her only son, who had been taken into the army. Every morning she went out before the gate and watched for the mail carrier.
“Please look once more, Andrew—” she begged the mail man, “perhaps there is a little card in there from my Jožko. He has been such a good boy and he surely could not have forgotten me. How he tried to cheer me, when he went away: ‘Don’t be afraid, little mother, they won’t kill me. And I will write to you every day’—but now two months are gone and not a line from him. Could they have killed him after all?”
It was Sunday. The women all went to church, only the old widow could not get ready. Everything seemed to go wrong with her and she could not find her things. Finally she was out of the house, when it struck her that she forgot to take a penny for the collection.
She went back into the room and took a dime; she would get it changed on the way, or maybe she will give it to the priest to mention Jožko in the prayers.
And as she was going out once more, Andrejko, the mail carrier, met her.
“I have got news for you. He has written. Don’t tell anyone. He is a prisoner.”
“What does it matter, as long as he writes and is alive,” and she pressed the dime into Andrejko’s hand; “and what does he write, read it to me.”
“He says that he is well, that he was captured on the sixth day after he got to the front, and that now he is working again at his trade, making benches in Siberia, in Russia. They are putting up a new school there and he has got to make the benches.” ‘I have even saved a few rubles,’ he writes at the end.”
“The Lord be praised; just think of that bad fellow Drahurad who changed his name to Denes so that it would look Magyar; he was telling every one that the Cossacks would kill all the men they catch.”
After dinner the widow Hanka had a visitor. Zusa Zvadovie who lived across the street came to talk about their men in the war; Zuza had two sons and a son-in-law at the front.
“What is the matter, Hanka, you are smiling? Why are you so gay? Did you get anything from Jožko?”
“Yes, he wrote to me. But for God’s sake don’t mention it to anybody. He is alive. He is a prisoner. Today as I was going to church, Ondrejko brought me a card from him. But the people at the town hall must not know about it. I would lose the seven crowns that I get a month, and God knows what other trouble I might have. Don’t mention a word to anyone.”
“God forbid, not a word to anyone.”
Three weeks later Andrew, the mail carrier, stopped at the Zvadovie farm. The widow Hanka who saw him through her little window ran out to the gate, as soon as he left the house across the street, but Zuza Zvadovie was shouting already across the street: “Hanka, my Mike is a prisoner, too.”
******
“Don’t cry, my golden mother,” little seven-year-old Janik was cheering his mama.
“My sweet child, how can I keep from crying, when they are going to kill your poor papa in the war? What will we do then?”
“Don’t cry, little mother, they won’t kill papa, because he likes the Russians. When they start to shoot, he will lie in a hole, and as soon as they stop he will go over to them.”
“Anything may happen in the war.”
“Oh, no, they won’t kill our papa. When the Cossacks get to him and he will say: ‘Brothers, I am going with you,’ and you will see they won’t kill him. Why the Russians are our brothers, too,” Janik assured his mother.
