“Go to sleep, child,” she would whisper as she bent over him; “do not walk to-night.”
But almost of a certainty he would rise in his sleep and walk to the room in which his mother sat, his eyes open and luminous, his little hands stretched palm upwards in front of him. Then she would tremblingly put down her work, go to him, and just touching him with the tips of her fingers, guide him back to bed.
If, as often happened, the boy’s father was in the house when Vuk walked, the gnarled old man would roughly seize him and shake him into terrified wakefulness.
“It’s a beating the lad wants,” the father would say; and, indeed, one night he raised his hand and his son staggered and shrieked under the blow he received.
Vuk’s father had reason, though he knew it not, to dislike the boy. Karadjitch was a cuckold, but so little suspicion had he of this, that he smiled with secret pleasure when neighbours remarked how like to him was his wife’s handsome boy.
One evening the mother arranged a curtain over the bedroom window so that the moon could not get at her son. But even on that night Vuk walked. And, a few evenings later, softly entering his room, his mother saw him standing on the back of a high chair at the window, his body precariously balanced, his dilated eyes fixed most questioningly on the molten moon....
She spoke nothing to her neighbours of all these things which, I must tell you, happened fifteen years ago in that most lovely of towns—Doiran so white and perfect standing by the blue, deep lake whose name is also Doiran.
Kirekoj has no lake like Doiran, yet Vuk, now a young man of twenty-three, loved this place cupped so gently in the mountains. He had only to walk up through the vineyards and orchards and drag himself to the top of the ridge to see Langaza which, though not so beautiful as Doiran, is perhaps more mysterious.
Just as, when a boy, he had been employed to scare away birds from the crops, so was he now paid to guard the fruit-burdened orchards from robbers....
One night in August his depression was so great that, as he sat with his back against a young pomegranate tree, he allowed his mind to become numb with wretchedness. There was no moon this night, and he had come to depend so much upon this far-off friend of his that a great loneliness oppressed him. A dog, snuffing in the undergrowth, came to him and put his nose in Vuk’s open hand. The young man made no response, but the dog licked and liked him and stayed with him. And every night the affectionate wild creature would come and sit by him. Never once did Vuk give him a caress or vouch him a word. Yet he never wished the dog to go away.