“When he’d caught his breath, the old man laughed aloud. He took the ax and his hat down from the wall and laughed again until the tears came as he poked his short, powerful fingers through the rent in the fur. He dragged me into the house by the arm, showed the hat, and told the tale. Soon my uncle had added a new verse to his poem about the “bold generation that is to be,” how I would not submit under pressure, and everyone roared with new laughter.
“But I grew sick to my stomach as the full impact of what I had done came to me. Such a black and violent thing! It had turned me against my own flesh and blood. This thing, to which my family was addicted—how could they tell, when under its influence, whether what they did was right or not? I had spoken of my concerns to the village priest and he affirmed my feelings. ‘They who live by the sword die by the sword,’ he quoted to me.
“Yet, I realize now that when it serves them, priests are just as able to quote words about how the enemies of God should utterly perish and ‘he who is not for me is against me.’ At that time, however, our priest had Protestant leanings and preferred being subject to the Turks than to Austrian Latin heretics, and so peace is what he spoke. I believed him and set my heart on the priesthood as a vocation.”
XL
With his web of words, Ghazanfer Agha returned me to the world of his childhood, his dream of a monastic life. “Of course, even a whisper of this notion spoken at home brought down the wrath of heaven,” he said. “‘And have I fed that fine, strong body of yours and clothed it these ten years that it should rot in a cloister? What about your father? What about Valpo?’
“My uncles and grandfather turned all their energies now—when they weren’t beating Turks—to beating me. To make me tough, they said. If they only knew how many times I crawled with their welts on my backside to the little icon I had hidden in my bed in the loft! It was a picture of Jesus whom the artist had rendered beardless and effeminate to suggest his meekness and gentleness. That became my ideal in all my suffering.
“When finally he did catch me at my devotions, my grandfather tossed the image out the window, which shows you what sort of Christianity he was fighting Turks to keep. Me he dragged down by the scruff of the neck to be whipped once again in the presence of all the family.
“The old wolf was livid, growling in his throat as if he’d missed his kill. When he made me drop my pants and saw that the wounds from his last beating were still raw, it made him furious that so much pain should have so little effect. Before he could pick up his riding whip once more, his madness drove him to leap at me with his knife drawn, like a wolf to his prey.
“My male member contracted as it felt the cold blade against it. ‘By God, I shall unman you!’ he cried. ‘You are not fit to be numbered among us.’
“I was shaking with fear, but somehow I managed to whisper, ‘Go ahead.’
“‘What did you say, boy?’
“My voice came much louder this time; it was high and thin as a woman’s. ‘Go ahead and cut,’ I said, ‘If to be a man means to be like you, I don’t want to be one.’
“The wolf’s eyes narrowed to slits and fire spat from beneath his mustache. He turned from me as from an obscenity. And it was obscene, was it not? For him, castrating the son of his son was like castrating himself—unthinkable. The wolf strode to the corner of the hut while all my kinsfolk watched in horrified silence. Then he began to bay as if at a full moon, to growl as wolves do the minute before they leap. But in my grandfather’s case, the sound was laughter. As soon as they saw it was laughter, the rest of the household laughed, too, from relief and because their master was no longer angry.
“‘You’ll be a man,’ he turned to me and said. ‘You’ll be a man, never fear. Which of my other sons ever had the courage to say that with a knife at his crotch?’
“Then they laughed louder and stronger and my grandfather tousled my hair and told me to pull up my pants. I did so and they laughed even more.
“My face was on fire and, rather than give them the pleasure of seeing the tears that must douse that heat, I fled out into the snow. My family’s laughter pursued me like the howling of a pack of wolves on the trail.
“Two feet of snow lay in drifts where the night wind had blown it, but the air was now still and grey as iron. I hardly dared to breathe, lest the air stick to my lungs and rip them raw on the exhale. I immediately wished I had put on more clothes—another pair of mittens and a shirt or two more under the sheepskin—but I was not going back in that house, I swore, until I was dead and they carried me in.
I picked up my ax: Exercise, I thought, might serve in place of those clothes or a fire, for I was young and had no real desire to die. So armed, I set off through the drifts towards the woods.
“I decorated tree trunks with blobs of snow—heavy eyebrows and a white mustache—the old wolf; a tree
