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who wished to have a mistress when he traveled to the •ari• region on business, and so she lived under his care (and happy, it was said, the man even treating the boy like a son) in a small but elegant flat in the center of town for many years, until he died at his home, surrounded by family, and she was forgotten. She didn’t know where she would go or what she would do, she told my father the night she showed up at our door after months of slipping further and further into destitution. She only knew that the fates had turned against her, too, as if she’d been cursed somehow, and she wanted her Marian to escape the same, if he could, to live somewhere besides the streets and learn something more than how to steal food from hotel kitchens.
    When she asked my father if he would do this final
kindness for her, if he would take her son, though she feared she couldn’t bear it, my father said, “I will treat him as though he were my own.” And after a lull, as she turned to go, he asked, “What will you do, Zuska?”
    Lowering her eyes, she said, “God’s will,” and they must have wondered then, those two, how the children who had lain on a hillside and dreamed of life in far-off places conjured for escape like fortune-tellers could have known how much of that dream would come true.
    In the first few months of his living with us, Marian remained aloof from all but my father. He spoke in a mannered Hungarian, which I suppose he had picked up from his mother’s lover and the other men who gathered at the hotel when they weren’t concerned with matters of business, as though it were the extension of some salon they frequented in Budapest. But to look at him, there was no mistaking him for the child of the streets that he had become.
    He never spoke of his mother. He rarely spoke at all. I remember my father handing him a thin yellow envelope every other week or so, which Marian would push into his coat pocket and then disappear. When he returned, he looked more aloof and sullen than before. And then the fights would begin.
    My stepbrothers, Tibor and Miro, made fun constantly of Marian’s poorly fitting and nearly threadbare clothing, and taunted him, though always from a distance and not long before they ran away. They called him zl• pes, a bad dog in Slovak, and Marian usually ignored them, until one day, when Tibor, the elder of the brothers, was alone and distracted, Marian (who had just emerged from a hiding place after reading one of his letters) took a stitching palm, reversed it on his hand so that the leather
fit the outside of his knuckles, walked up to him, and punched him hard in the center of the chest. Tibor wobbled for a moment and then dropped to the ground. Marian removed the palm and threw it onto a nearby table, then took Tibor’s good blanket-lined hunting coat off of him (it had been his dead father’s) like one might undress a drunkard who had fallen asleep, and put it on. I stood by, wanting to see how this would all play out.
    Marian buttoned the front of the coat, turned up the collar, and said to me, “Co myslí•, Jozef? Krásny, hej?”
    I told him that I’d never seen a finer coat, to which he nodded and said, “I’ll need it for the mountains,” although he had never been, and only heard my father speak obliquely of the flocks, the cabin, and the kind of work we did.
    Tibor complained to his mother, who insisted that “that animal” give her son back his coat, but my father ignored her, and Tibor was afraid to fight and in time gave up his coat as a thing lost. After that, only my father ever called Marian by his Christian name. To everyone else, he was Zlee.
    Which fit him better than even the coat, because something seemed to change in Zlee after he had tilted the balance of power there in the house, and he ventured out to see if it might work elsewhere, and began to look for fights,