by Colum McCann
Just then, footsteps along the corridor. A tapping on the floor—a truncheon perhaps, or a cane. She looks around, spots the pile of overcoats, steps across the buckled floorboards, and covers herself. How ridiculous. Absurd. I should stand up and walk out, past him, without a word, without recognition. Fuck you, Swann. I will stroll down the stairs and disappear in front of your eyes. Look backwards and curse you. She shifts under the weight of the coats, but then there is the sudden thought of Swann not long ago, out on the road, when they found a children's piano, fixed the pedals with bands of steel, replaced the keys with maple wood. They hung it from the ceiling of her wagon with a giant hook, and Swann had walked behind while the piano played the road, every bump and curve, the microphone held out in front of him.
A turn of the door handle. Shoe studs on the nailheads, the hissing of the radiator valve, the strange clop of his feet. A cane, she thinks. He must be walking on a cane.
A small broken sound comes from his throat as he rummages through the room. A wooden lid is lifted and banged down hard again. Cupboard doors open and close. The mattress flops sadly to the floor. Swann says something in English, a hard guttural noise. She is gripped with a nausea, her fingers clenched, neck rigid. She recalls the feel of his hand against her hip, her back against the bark, the way he rolled her hair around his forefinger, the hard taste of him at the neck, the sweat, the ink. He closes the door with a firm snap.
At the window, she catches sight of Swann rounding the streetcorner, his sandy-haired form disappearing, one of his crutches thrown aside. A long string of tape catches his ankle as he goes, dragging it through the rain.
They were my poems. They belonged to me. They were never yours.
She turns, finds a photo of herself in the corner of his shaving mirror. She tears it into pieces. On the bed she notices an open rosewood box with a silver clasp. Around it, scattered documents, and a balled-up handkerchief. Zoli waits a moment, leans down, and lifts the wooden lid, finds a panel kiltered sideways: a false bottom. Underneath that, a gold watch.
Things, he said, cannot wait. They have to be made. What Swann foresaw was a world raised up in an immense arc and everyone beneath it, looking up in admiration. He wanted to take hold of all that was vague and equal and give it form. He constantly rubbed his hands over his scalp so that when he was in the printing mill his hair became the color of whatever poster he was printing. In the cafe he would sit unaware of people looking at him, streaks of yellow and blue and red under his cap, his hands almost entirely black. He was afraid that he didn't sound Slovak enough, but he gave everything to it, listened to the workers, developed the same accent, strode out with them under their banners. After a while his arguments grew more defined, with stronger edges. It was like watching a piece of wood being carved right in front of her eyes, and she had liked the surprise of it. Certain men in the kumpanija could sculpt a spoon, or a bowl, or a bear at their fingertips—with Swann, he would sometimes create an idea and then hold it out as if it were something she could touch.
He suggested once that she always carry a book around to defeat their notion of her. Even if she did not read it, the others would see it. That was enough, he said. Just let them see you. Astound them by writing it all down.
As if books could stop the massacres. As if they could be somehow more than harps or violins.
From the arch of the doorway hangs a red velvet rope-pull, the tasseled end cold to the touch. A woman in an embroidered dress answers, her feet in slippers, hair in a blue string net. She leans out the door, looks down the length of the alleyway, and in one quick movement pulls Zoli inside.
“Yes?”
“I have some things.”
“I do not trade,” says the woman.
A single shaft of light shines through the dark of the small house, onto a cupboard lined with large china plates.
“My grandfather was here many times,” says Zoli. “Stanislaus. You knew him by that name.”
“I've no idea who you're talking about.”
“It was a different place then, but you knew him by that name.”
The woman takes Zoli by the shoulders, turns her around, stares down at her feet.
“I have good horse teeth too.”
“What did you say?”
“I am here to sell my things. That is all.”
“You people will be the death of me.”
“Not before you have everything we own.”
“You've an errant mouth for a Gypsy.”
“I've nothing to lose.”
“Then leave.”
Zoli measures her steps back to the doorway. The rattle of the doorknob. Silence from the street outside. The woman's voice behind her, once, twice, higher now but still measured: “And if I was interested what might you have?”
“I have told you already, the best.”
“I've heard that so often even my ears tire me.”
Zoli snaps the door shut and opens the giant bundle made of Swann's bedsheets. The woman feigns nonchalance, blows air from her cheeks. “I see,” she says. She shakes the keys and leads Zoli through a series of dark-paneled rooms to a rear parlor where a bearded man sits on a high stool with what looks like a small jar dangling at his neck. In front of him sits a solitary game of tarock. He adjusts his stomach in his waistcoat. With an exaggerated sweep, he takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose, then tucks the cloth back in his pocket. She watches with a shiver of disgust.
“Yes?”
Zoli places Swann's wireless radio on the nicked wooden counter. The jeweler lowers his head, pushes the buttons, fingers the dial.
“Useless,” he says.
He examines the underside of a picture frame, purses his lower lip: “You're wasting my time.”
“And this?”
She lays Swann's gold watch upon the counter, stretching out either end of the strap.
The jeweler takes the monocle from around his neck and examines the watch, looking up twice at Zoli. On the table lies a switchblade knife with a black onyx handle. He flips open the back clasp of the watch and looks at the inner workings, a small universe of dials and cogs. He clips it back, laces his fingers, stretches his hands wide on the table. They are, she notices, ancient and liver-spotted.
“It isn't worth much.”
“I'm not one who bargains,” says Zoli.
“These things are English.”
“I will take two hundred.”
“I cannot sell them, they are foreign.”
“Two hundred,” she says. “No less.”
The jeweler huffs: “One hundred and fifty.”
He unlocks his desk drawer, takes a long leather pouch, and slowly counts the bills out, making a show of sliding the beads across a wooden abacus. He counts another ten and says with a grin: “You look as if you need it.”
“It's a bad price.”
“Go elsewhere, woman.”
“There's nowhere to go.”
“Well then, it's a good price, isn't it?”
He pushes the bills across the table, puts the wallet back in the drawer, turns the key once more, and, with a chuckle, reaches across for a ledger and makes an entry. He stands, clasping his hands behind his back.
“Well?” he says, flourishing his handkerchief.
Zoli is already halfway down the street when the jeweler comes out of his house at a fat man's trot. She can hear the flap of his shoes on the wet pavement and the high pitch of his shouts.
She darts towards the busy thoroughfare where the market is winding down. Blue tarps are being folded away and the legs of tables collapsed. A few lean fish rest in beds of salted ice. A half dozen potatoes sit cupped on a weighing machine. Swerving between the tables, Zoli crosses the marketplace, veers down an alleyway, doubles back, sidesteps another two stalls, ducks in behind a large yellow container.
From across the marketplace come the jeweler's shouts. In the shadows, amid an acrid scent of rubbish, Zoli squats down, breathing hard. She lifts
her head for an instant, peeps over the metal lip. At one of the stalls the potato-seller, heavy and white-aproned, gestures to keep low.
I used to wear gold coins in my hair, she thinks. We were faithful to that, we stole nothing.
The jeweler's last defeated roar drifts across to her, but she remains out of sight until she is sure he is long gone. She stands, taps her overcoat where she can feel the handle of her brand-new onyx-handled knife.
She flicks open the blade and tests it on the thread of her overcoat: it is sharp, honed to a point.
When you fall, thinks Zoli, you never fall halfway.
The rain hammers, pours, soaks: in the fluted gutters it sluices along, carrying small rafts of rubbish down the streets. By the river, the sparse jewelry of the bridge lights. Beyond that, the silhouette of the giant towers where the kumpanija has been resettled. The electricity is out in the towers again. Zoli wonders if she might be able to catch that moment when the electricity comes on, lighting up all eight buildings at once, their only moment of beauty. It was Stränsky who had told her, years ago, that only poetry was capable of capturing the true horrors of human consciousness, but she had doubted that idea immediately, thinking that poems came on and off again only like tower lights, no more and no less.
The towers appear small and fragile now: almost as if she might lift up parts and replace them at will.
At the foot of the bridge she stamps about in her wet clothes. Underneath her skirts she wears a pair of Swann's old trousers. His boots have been stuffed with socks to make them comfortable. In the bundle on her back, the rest of his possessions. From somewhere in the night comes the sound of a motorbike, sputtering into the distance. Figures emerge from the night fog along the river—any one of them might be Swann. How is it that he hurt his leg? Did he fall, was he beaten, was he thrown down a flight of stairs? Those days by the river. His fingers along her shoulder, his chin at her neck, his head within the shadow of hers. Watching the patterns the wolf feet made on the bank.
She shivers, curses, moves along the river's edge. The bundle on her back, soaked through with damp now, grows heavier with every step.
She turns the corner into Sedlärska, past a building site, and stops at a pile of red bricks on the ground. She toes one, rolls it over on its side. How many times, this same street, these same buildings, these same cracks in the footpath? She walks towards a squat building with two huge picturefront windows. No lights on, nobody around. She steps to the window and runs her fingers along the pane. The glass frame is so big that in the center it quivers and bounces. In the instant that she brings her arm forward she also withdraws, so that the brick is still in her hand when the glass spiders and shatters.
The last chime of the last shard falls away and silence closes around her.
Two young workers appear on the other side of the street, looking across, staring. She wonders how it is that they have seen it: a woman in a huge overcoat and headscarf and a man's black boots, in the darkness walking away from the shattered window of the Union of Slovak Writers, but what matter now? They can take me, they can do what they want—when hell freezes over I will not skate towards them.
Under the awning of the riverside cinema she stops to rest. There is a poster with a blond woman and a green-coated man behind a glass pane: The Best Will Happen Tomorrow. Zoli catches her reflection in the glass and marks, carefully and coldly in one glance, her hair askew under her scarf, her cheek muck-splattered, her eyes blackened with lack of sleep, the laddered boneshapes of her cheeks. She looks down on Swann's boots, their ridiculous brown weight, their long laces, their shiny eyes, stuffed with socks to make them comfortable.
It had always been, when Swann was around, the time of evening that promised most brightness. Into the dark lobby. Up the stairs. Past the waterstains on the walls. The air hard with cigarette smoke. Swann would flick a lighter for them to find their way. Through the swinging door. A few heads turned. Swann liked to think that they were already stepping into saloon territory. They stood for the national anthem, then sat against the hard-backed seats and waited for their eyes to adjust. After a few moments the first ripples began, tiny craters of whiteness, dark hairlines, bright splotches, and then an eruption of color. She could sense him relaxing, waiting for the images to flare into life: the snakefence, the basin of water with soap, the deer wading through high drifts, the hand around a whisky glass. What amazed him most was that all the films were shot in Czechoslovakia. Afterwards, when they were walking through the streets, she would push her way through the imaginary doors in the Trigger-Happy Saloon and talk of the empty buffalo fields and the temperance girls and Winnetou, I—she was sure that Swann was watching her more than he had watched the screen, his mouth ajar, stunned, leaning close to her.
How distant now, thinks Zoli.
Cowboy films.
The sky lightens over the city as she makes her way across the tramtracks, down towards the river in the early morning. A rusty fishing boat sloughs through the wide channel, pulling behind it a trail of smoke. She climbs the long ramp to the bridge, her back bent beneath the bundle. Zoli totals up what she has to her name: one hundred and sixty krowns, an onyx-handled knife, one bedsheet, two blankets, an overcoat, boots, a pair of Swann's trousers, three shirts, a hairbrush, a pair of thick gloves, a tin cup, and a tea towel.
Someone has inserted a bouquet of flowers into the ironwork curls of the bridge. Zoli leans against the drooping stems and looks down into the water. The wind fans across the surface, ricocheting off the far bank. I should throw something in the water, climb the railing, and leap right here. Tie a kerchief around my chin. Spread my arms out. Say nothing. Tumble. Hit the surface with my skirt above my head. Disappear into the depths. Send up a flume of spray.
She recognizes the thought in an instant: it is gadzikano, vacant, pathetic. She will not allow them such simplicity.
How stupid I was. I went to their table and kissed it in thanks. They promised to leave us alone, but they did not. How strange it was to be so liked amongst those she could never quite comprehend: the parties, the chalets, the hotel gatherings, the way they rolled her out at the conventions. Their vodka, their caviar, their sweet haluski. They packaged me up and made an eloquent ribbon of me and then they allowed me the short walk up the hangman's ramp. The noose, the trapdoor, the lever.
Lightheaded, Zoli pauses on the bridge and looks down at the river, and in the vertigo of shadow there is the sudden realization that she has not burned her poems at all; there are hundreds of them still out there, in printed copies, in the mill, in the union houses, even in the bookshops along Zelenä. All she has done is burn the originals and given strength to the others.
Zoli crosses to the end of the bridge at a slow walk and stands at the junction on the far side. West, the towers. South, the road away. She pulls her arms close in against her stomach, cradles her elbows in the palms of her hands, hikes her belongings on her back, and shuffles down past the line of red dump-sters, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence. Tractors move in the early morning. Cement tankers. Men alongside the sheet-metal huts, their slick yellow jackets bright against the morning gray. One bends over a pot, stirring coffee. She moves beyond him, unnoticed. Most of the towers are inhabited now but there are three blocks still under construction. The grand experiment. They wanted the best for the Gypsies, they said— as if they could be a single throbbing organism, forty thousand people lumped into one. Running water, electric switches, heating.
You hurry on the light, she thinks, it just hastens the darkness.
Zoli ducks through another hole in the barbed wire and stops at a long wall, a distance from the caravans. Hundreds of wagons are strewn around, still clumped together by kumpa-nija. At least they did not burn the carriages, she thinks, only the wheels.
She leans forward, the imprint of the pebbles against her hands.
In the barren squares of grass, a few of the wagons are already ringed with campfires. Pins of firelight wheel the ai
r. One or two dim figures move in and out of the shadows. So, some have abandoned the towers already, taken the floorboards out, come down to the ground, burnt what should have been beneath their feet. A small triumph. Further along the wall, someone has put up a lean-to against the concrete blocks. Old roofing tin, wooden boards from the apartment floors, and an orange highway sign. She squints to read it. Slow: Construction in Progress. Over the boards hang quilts and army blankets. A miscellany of junk along the wall. A woman kneels to the dirt floor and cleans it with a cloth. Around her a few children still sleep, dark shapeless mounds, beneath their quilted blankets. Inside, an oil lamp sits on a packing crate and a long table has been created from three boards, the light from the lamp dulled by ash. This, then, is how they will live now: soot on the glass flute.
Zoli presses against the corner of the wall and peers into the distance. A wreckage of a dog paddles beside the hulk of an abandoned car, recently burned out, as if someone has died in it. At the far end of the camp, a child rolls a barrel hoop and beyond him a man stands by the fire. She knows Vashengo by the outline of his hat alone. Graco carries a coal-oil lamp. Milena, Jolana, Eliska, and one or two of the children are already awake. No Conka.
She pushes her palms deeper into the pebbled wall, favoring one leg so her hip tilts out. She longs to tilt the other forward and stride into the camp, but she is as separate from them now as she can ever be. She watches the nickering campfires, the cigarettes traveling at mouth level, a rimless wheel of red light moving. I would, she thinks, set fire to all my words just to travel that air once more.
Some children break the line beyond the campfires towards the wall. From where do they come? How far down the road were they driven? Zoli steps back and turns her face into the collar of Swann's overcoat. In what words will the children speak of me now that I have vanished?
High above the towers a yellow crane swings through the air. It stops for a moment, lets a bundle dangle and swerve in the middle of the air. It settles, then starts to swing once more. Zoli pulls at her zajda, brings it tight around her, and ducks back out through the fence.
