Zoli

by Colum McCann

  She turns to take a look at the small hut—the laceless boot, the bent grass between floorboards, the scorch marks—and she touches her left breast. For the first time since judgment, Zoli feels a pulse of strength: she will return now to the city and leave nothing behind, not even a trace.

  As she moves out, across the stone wall, onto the tarmac, she has the sudden feeling that if a truck screams down the roadway now she will undoubtedly be able to stand out of its way.

  ZOLI SHAMBLES DOWN the footpath, in the shadows of the pines, under their tall, lamenting sway. She moves against the current of the river until she reaches the Red Army Bridge, wind-bitten and vapory in the morning. Behind her, chains of smoke rise from the outlying factories and, further still, the curve of distant hills against the sky. The Danube shines, skeins of oil floating on the surface. A wheat barge, toiling upstream, lets out a high whistle.

  Across the river sits the old town of Bratislava: the castle on the hill, the chimneys, the cathedral.

  Zoli hobbles out from under the steel girdings, over weeds sprouting from cinder and muck, up the grassy embankment. At the top of the bank, the wind blows cold and fast. Early traffic thrums past and the bridge shakes. Two men labor with a broken-down car, one at the rear, the other at the driver's window, guiding the steering wheel.

  Zoli pulls her kerchief tight across her face.

  On the far side of the bridge she cleans her hands in a small puddle and dries them on a lamppost poster, a Russian circus announcement, red and yellow with curled Cyrillic. Two trapeze artists swing at the top of the poster, blond women stretching out towards one another in the air. Rain has bubbled underneath and swollen their bodies. At the bottom of the poster, a ringmaster, a hoop on fire, and a dancing bear. How I used to love them, those dancing bears in their roped circles, heavy- pawed and majestic, brought from far away. They came lurching through Trnava square, red-hatted and shit-smeared, into the shadows cast down from churches. The music was wound by the carnival man on the painted box, and the tambourine was struck and we shouted for our favorite songs: / have two wives, one of them sober, one of them drunk, both of them I love the same. Old men stood away from streetcorners, shopkeepers closed their doors, and women stood up from pail and rag. All around the square was the hum and bustle of merchants, with the local crier, the policemen, the schoolchildren.

  Zoli edges her finger along the paper to where it bunches at her fingertips.

  She turns from the lamppost, crosses the road onto a small pebbled footpath. A squeal of brakes as a car swerves towards the footpath. She turns quickly. A shower of mud. The car horn beeps as one of the men from the bridge leans out and leers at her.

  “Shit on you,” she says quietly when they are far enough away. She wipes the muck from her cheek.

  At the underpass, swarms of men and women from the early shifts walk towards work, their shoes slapping against the pavement. Most of them wear identical blue hats of the armament factory, and, as they descend, they merge into the same stream of color.

  Across the square, past the bare winter trees, she passes the Carlton Hotel, where men in the dark overcoats of the security police trundle back and forth. She shudders at the thought of stepping inside: the silver door handles, the huge paintings, the gilded frames, the beveled mirrors, the curving staircase. How foreign it is now, the columns, the pillars, the plastic plants in the windows. There used to be applause when I entered the front rooms. They would hold their cigarettes to their mouths and squint. The soft-faced women would nod and whisper. Always the feeling that they were looking right through me, past me, anxious to be with anybody but themselves. The way they smoked, as if it would never belong to them. How loud it was when stepping from the carpet to the tiled floor. Something galloping under my ribs. Looking for Swann, his familiar face. He used to arrive hours beforehand just so I'd not feel nervous, waiting there with his hat tapping against his thigh, a copy of Rudepravo rolled up in his pocket.

  A low swing of sadness in her belly, Zoli crosses away from the hotel and up the hill, into the short and vaulted alleyways of the old city. A banner is strung between lampposts: Citizens, We Must Conserve Bread. It flaps and twists in the breeze, and, as she gets nearer, one end of the banner snaps, curtsies a moment, falls to the ground, and sags in the cobblestone puddles. She steps over the slogan, walks on, hand trailing the lichen on the walls.

  Quieter here, darker: the light gone out of things.

  She moves along the rutted path, in the shadows, hidden especially from the troopers. If she dawdles they will stop her, cock their rifles, question her, the mud on her overcoat, the dark bloodstains on her ankles, and then bring her to the nearest all-weather post. Flip open the gray cover and examine the raised stamp of her Party card, the thumbprint, the details: 169.5 cm, black eyes, black hair, distinguishing feature a lazy left eye, a 2 cm scar on lower right lip, chin dimple, poet. She used to sign her name with three Xs, and the most perceptive of them used to ask her why. If she replied at all she would simply shrug her shoulders, making them more difficult, more probing, more insistent: “But how can you be a poet and sign XXX?” Often the whole transaction would have to wait for confirmation over the radio: “That's Comrade Novotna, you idiot, let her go.”

  Past the flaking wall of an old city monastery, sandals slapping against the cobblestones. The monastery has long been gutted. What remnants of incense, stained glass, wax candles? What small ruby flames still burn behind pier glass? She looks up to see a number of narrow window slots in the upper reaches of the building, near the timbered roof. Birds fly in the windows, wings held together, and flare out again seconds later into the sky.

  In the drizzle, she notices a group of young boys standing in her path. Their ease, their nonchalance. At the end of the line, one boy toes at the carcass of a dead pigeon. The boy is white-skinned. Red-shirted. Hair shorn close. He flicks the pigeon with his boot and it sails a moment in the air, thuds on the cobbles with a spray of tiny feathers. Zoli pulls together the folds in her dress and steps over it. Heart quick and thumping. She hears a whistle behind her, and then the sound of footsteps.

  Even when the bird hits her in the back of the head she does not turn.

  Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. All that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, allowed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again? Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hell's fire on them, they will not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I will not bow a second time, no.

  She rounds the corner of the theater, beyond the ironwork fence, past the dead winter gardens. In the tenements, gnarled women stare out from behind high windows, their bodies lost to brickwork. At a roadblock she stops cold: four troopers stand scanning the street, billyclubs banging into their hands. Traffic passes by in a muted rumble. Some pedestrians are waved through, raw-looking girls in headscarves and soiled white uniforms. Zoli bends to adjust her sandals, accustomed now to the mess of her feet. She waits until the troopers put their hands up in front of a dark automobile and lean in either window, billy-clubs prodding. Breathe softly. Easy. No sudden movement. Beyond the roadblock she goes, careful not to glance at them.

  A voice: “Hey, you.”

  A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice full of snarl: “Where to, Auntie?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “Just past the market a little way, Comrad
e.”

  “That's nowhere?”

  “Just up the road a way.”

  “Identification.”

  She unties the knots, hikes the zajda from her back and deliberately sifts through the bundle. “Shit,” he says, holding his nose. The toe of his boot stamps down hard on the cloth. “Go on, woman, out of here.”

  The tin cup punches at her spine when she lifts the bundle. Shit on you too, she thinks. Who are you to say I'm filthy? Who are you to ask where I am going? She turns the corner and spits into the gutter. Paris, you idiot, I am going to Paris. Do you hear me? Paris. She has no idea why the city comes to mind, but she strikes her fist against the left side of her chest. Paris. That's where I'm going. Paris.

  At the top of the road she slows again, a stitch in her ribcage. A line of forgotten laundry is strung from one side of Galandrova to the other, the wet shirts moving in the wind as if waiting for men to inhabit them. Under the trees, beyond the warehouses, past the printing mill, she goes, staying close to the shadows. She can already smell the ink and hear the sound of the rollers—the fumes make her head reel momentarily.

  Swann will be in there now, she thinks, printing government posters behind the blacked-out windows, his fingers stained, his shirt askew, the machines churning around him. We Salute Our Persecuted American Negro Brothers. Solidarity with Egypt. Ciechoslovakians for African Unity. We Must Struggle, Comrades, Against Ignorance and Illiteracy.

  And the one with her face, changed slightly, no lazy eye: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

  At the top of the stairs she grips the rail, pauses, walks briskly down the communal corridor. Cambering floorboards. Broken plaster. A faint smell of mold and dust. She walks high- toed, shushing her squelching sandals, turns the door handle, and backs carefully away as it swings on its creaking hinges.

  It is a room tuned to Swann—the dark linoleum curling where it meets the wall, a half-empty pewter jug of old cucu on the bedside table, the windowframe rattling in the weather, Marx and Engels each in many different languages. Gramsci, Radek, Vygotsky. Some volumes with their spines taken off, others re-stitched. On a single wall hook hangs a ratty shirt, faded and anonymous. On the floor, orange peels curled and ambered with age. Three fire irons, but no fireplace. The huge pile of overcoats from Brno in the corner. Swann has set up a simple chair for looking out the small window onto the street, four stories below.

  From the room above, transistor music filters down, muffled and worn, shot through with the hammering of steampipes.

  She flips through the books open on the table—Dreiser, Steinbeck, Lindsay—and rifles through their Slovak equivalents, handwriting spidery and blotchy with ink. She pushes the books off the table in one quick sweep. They land cantered on the floor. Beneath the desk lie four containers from the printing mill. She yanks them out and turns them upside down. Pages and pages of Swann's work. Dozens of issues of Credo. A few obscure journals from Prague. Some letters. A book about Jack London. A collection of Mayakovsky's poetry. How many times have I heard that name, late at night when the two of them worked in the printing mill, the metal letters scattered all around them? Their laughter as they quoted the poems back and forth. The hollow of desire in my stomach, and another hollow, there, shame. I liked to watch him then, enjoyed it, it seemed so easy. The way he carried his body, the slope of his shoulders, the crackle of his voice. The lines going between him and Stränsky, chains, and, later still, the same with my songs, speaking them to one another, quoting them back and forth, taking them, bending them, praising them, making them theirs.

  She rips another container out from under the table where it clangs against the leg. A sudden pop of glass. Zoli wheels around but the window is intact and there is nobody at the door, no sound along the corridor. Losing my mind. Imagining things. She turns again and feels a coldness run along her fingers. She looks down, perplexed. Her nails and fingers are stretched out, blue, and for a moment she looks at her hand as if it can't possibly be hers. She rights the fallen inkwell and picks up the pieces of glass scattered near the radiator. The dark liquid gullies in the gap between the floorboards and the hissing pipe.

  Zoli wipes her hand on the floorboard and the wood streaks with ink. Her thumbprints on the cardboard, the table, the books themselves. She empties the third and fourth containers into the middle of the floor. Yet more journals and translations, nothing else. She looks up at the sad petals of green wallpaper hanging just below the ceiling. A great pain in her eyeballs, like the pressure of swimming in deep water. Easing herself up from the floor, she catches her finger on a stray piece of inkwell glass. She sucks the splinter out, the ink heavy at the end of her tongue. Stränsky, she remembers. Budermice. A cold thread pulls the length of her spine.

  She kicks over the table and then she spots, against the wall, a black cardboard trunk with metal latches. Inside, the poems are neatly stacked on top of each other, tied with thick elastic bands, in phonetic Romani and Slovak both. The newer poems are crisp and straight-edged but the older ones have yellowed over the years. So be it. Soon they will be dust.

  She hunkers over the suitcase. All the dates, towns, fields, and settlements where they were recorded have been carefully labeled. By what is broken, what is snapped, I create what is required. When the axe comes to the forest the handle doesn't say I am home. The road is long with sorrow, everywhere twice as wide. They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. They are, she realizes, the first thing she has read since the judgment.

  She crosses towards the sink and stacks the poems over the drainhole, rubs her thumb along the wheel of Petr's old lighter. The curl of Petr's thumb along it, broad, slow, bringing it to life. Pipesmoke curling out. Him watching Swann. The days slowly slipping away from him. The coughing. The thought that he would soon be gone, spirit. Wandering around, hiding, waiting for Swann, thinking of him, the feel of his fingers over my eyes.

  The high flame singes her eyebrows and she steps back, lifts some of the pages from the sink and begins again with a smaller scatter of poems. They take easily. She uses a fork to prop up the edges of the pages, to air them underneath. She inhales the scent as the poems burn and curl. Small pieces of ash float and fall. Zoli toes them into the linoleum where they leave dark stains.

  Outside, the city goes about in the cold—tramsound, bus screech, the rain slicing steadily on the windowpane. She looks down onto the alleyway below. A sudden strange thrill runs the length of her body. All the meetings, all the speeches, all the factory visits, the trains, the labor parades, the celebrations, they are gone now, all gone—and only this is mine, this alone, this burning. She turns back into the room and the smoke fills her nostrils, fragrant, taut, sweet. She lifts more poems out of the suitcase and burns them in ever larger groups, flames surviving on flames, yellow to red to blue.

  My tooth, she thinks, with half a smile, the way the mute farmer carried my tooth away in the palm of his hand.

  Zoli puts the lighter back in her dress pocket: the heat of it traveling through to her skin. She brushes back strands of hair from beneath her kerchief and touches something small behind her ear. A white pigeon feather. She plucks it out and lets it fall to the floor. The early afternoon seems now so far away. When the pigeon hit the back of her head she had wondered for an instant if it had recognized flight, even in death: and then she had judged the thought worthless, vain.

  She closes her eyes and exhales long and hard, turns towards the door. “Shit,” she says.

  The tapes.

  She returns and scours the room. Two umbrellas, three cigarette lighters, a snuffbox, a bottle with a ship inside it, a small square of linen decorated with flowers, a series of Soviet pins, a dozen leather bookmarks, a samovar, an English kettle. How can one man have so many useless things? She finds the tapes in a cardboard box underneath his bed—they too are meticulously dated and stamped.

  The first spool falls from her fingers, unravels across the floor, long and shiny, c
atching light in places, as if her voice is going into the corners.

  Swann was always so careful to hold the microphone close to her lips when they were out on the road. It had bothered her—not his closeness, she had liked that, it had livened things in her, sent a shiver through her—no, what truly bothered her was the idea that her songs were being taken and put back together again by a machine. When he had played the recording to her it did not sound a bit like her, as if some other Zoli had climbed inside. It captured other sounds too, the tapping of a stick on the ground, the high strike of a match, the creak of a doorframe: it seemed almost ghostly to her; things that she had never noticed in real time had suddenly acquired a weight. She had written one night, by the light of the candle, that small rivers carted up drops as they were never seen before—it was one of her worst poems, even Swann had found it tame, he suggested that it bordered on the bourgeois.

  To hell with him, she thinks, to hell, with his hands held in the air, his apology, his sharp face when I slapped him, as if he should have been surprised, his stuttering when we stood in the mill and said he had done all he could do, to hell and high rivers with him.

  The tape spins out and she slices it with a kitchen knife, doubling the tape over and cutting it with one quick motion, like gutting a small animal.

  Fifteen spools.

  Outside, the sky grows steadily darker, winter lying down upon it. Zoli takes the last spool to the window and watches the tape unfurl from her fingers, to the ground, spinning and twisting in the wind and rain. A tail of it catches on the upcurrent and floats on the air.

  There go my songs. Good riddance.

  She flings the last spool and the disc sails across the courtyard, smacking into the building opposite. From the street below comes a shout and then the delighted shriek of a child. Zoli leans out the window to see a young girl pulling the tape behind her.