“True enough.”
“And when I came back—”
“We were in a terrible way. We had let Julita—”
“But I found work again. Here. The best job in the whole town.”
“No, Anton. You can’t work now.”
“That’s very like you, Dad. Why can’t you respect my efforts, why?”
“Don’t sit up.”
“Why?”
“Hush! You forget, no matter how many times I tell you. You nod, you say you remember, and then—gone again, away to your palace. God, it hurts me—” His father is actually crying, shaking Anton’s shoulders. “Don’t tell your mother I’m saying this. But I don’t want to let you go. I want you here with us a little longer. That’s why I keep telling you.”
“Telling me what?”
His father is falling to pieces. “The same things. That she’s with child, Julita, but he’s let her go. He kept his horrible bargain with you. That you did it, you got her away from him, and we shouldn’t ever have agreed to it, but we were hungry, and afraid, and you never, never wrote—”
Anton begins to scream. His father bends down, sobbing, holding his son’s chin against his chest.
Hiltan Posnr, nearing sixty, ox-strong, one eye bulbous and staring, splattered with pig shit to his knees, a glob of it clinging to the brandy bottle in his hand, balances high on the groaning rail of a fence in his pig stockade like a squat, greasy-haired god. He reels a bit, but holds on. There is a small, filthy dog with a torn ear on the ground ten feet to his left. Head cocked to one side, it is staring into the pond of gray feces that surrounds them, stinking worse than the foulest reek of the sewers of Constanta. The squealing of pigs innumerable, pigs for forty hectares, rends the air.
Posnr wears an unpleasant smile.
“You think it’s a sin, don’t you, my nobbly nephew?”
Anton, on the edge of this sea of shit, behind a gate, says, “No, Mr. Posnr. I just think she would be happier with someone her age.”
“You’re smart enough to remember your manners, boy. But you’re a bad bargainer. She’s my wife. Your daddy gave her to me. And thanks to me, the doctor came and stilled your mother’s fever, and the creditors left off sniffing round his shop.”
“She’s only sixteen, sir.”
“My mother was.”
“But today—”
“The first Mrs. Posnr was.”
“But sir. Today—” Ridiculous, ridiculous! “—women want to marry someone close to themselves in years.”
“An expert on women, Lord help us.” He tips the bottle up, lurches backward. “Glah. Call me Hiltan. What are you here for, boy?”
Anton would like to ask Posnr the same question. He cannot fathom why the richest farmer for a hundred miles, the owner of the village’s largest house and (it is said) three thousand hogs, should be perched here, high on a fence in the center of his wallow, with only a dazed dog for company, drunk enough to topple into the swill. He would like to know why this unwanted, undreamed-of brother-in-law calls him nephew. He would like to turn and bolt down the hill.
But Anton is not in command of the situation.
“I wrote—I came here—when I heard you had married Julita.”
“’Twas more’n a month ago!”
“I was in Constanta, sir. In music school.”
The fact catches Posnr’s attention. His grin widens to a leer; from his throat a slobbery laugh escapes. He begins to sing, a sort of depraved caricature of a sonata. He lifts the whiskey bottle to his shoulder, stabs the air with his other hand, aping a violinist. Again he almost falls.
Anton’s stomach lurches. He can only wait, nauseated and wracked with guilt. It is a gray afternoon, his eighth in the village after ten months absence. His parents’ faces in the threshold of the house, dry, hope-robbed faces, are stamped on his eyes. He had known at once. Something had taken Julita away.
“We couldn’t find you, Anton.” His father, ashen and morose. “And what would you have done? Your mother might have died.”
“And been at blessed rest.” She turns back to the shadows.
Anton bellows: “You married her to an ogre!”
He does not even succeed in angering his father.
“We sent her to be his maid. She chose to marry, later.” His father gestures in the doorway, impotent as death. “It was done—”
Anton can fill in the rest. To save the home. To pay the doctor. To shoulder the burden her brother dropped.
“She was always a good child,” says his mother, invisible.