by Colum McCann
With two fingers on his cup he raises it to drink. There is, she knows, nothing in the cup.
“What's your name?”
She slides the chair backwards but he pushes her once more into the table. A smell of resin to him.
“What's your name, Gypsy?”
Let me go.
The younger one slams the empty cup down and leans across her, his breath smelling, strangely, of fresh woodmint. So he knows the woods, she thinks, he will not be easily fooled. She nudges the knifeblade back into her coatsleeve where it feels cool against the soft of her wrist.
“Conka,” she says, immediately regretting it.
“Conka?”
“Elena. I was with my people.”
“Elena now is it?”
“When the troopers came.”
The younger one chuckles: “Is that so?”
“The families were taken away. The last of us were driven to the city under the new laws. We were pushed along by dogs. My husband was forced to carry a large wooden box with lacquer patterns and all our belongings inside.”
She hesitates and searches their expressions—nothing.
“A huge lacquer box,” she says. “He dropped it on the road. The rain was beating down like a drunk. Everyone was slipping in the mud. The dogs, they had such sharp teeth, you should have seen them. They ripped us. They took a chunk from my mother's leg. The troopers hit us with their sticks. I still have the marks. They let the leashes loose. My children got bitten. Eight children, I once had eleven. All our belongings were in that box. All my jewelry, papers, everything, inside that box. Wrapped in old twine.”
She pauses again—only a slight twitch at the side of the younger's face.
“I've come now from the city. To get the box. Eight children. Three died. One stepped on an electric cable by the cypress lake. When the thaw came they were digging by mistake with metal shovels. Once there were eleven.”
“A whole team?” says the younger with a grin.
She turns away and stares at the older man who smooths out the hairs of his eyebrow with his knuckle.
“We have a roof now,” says Zoli. “Electric lights that come on all the time, water that runs. The new directives have been good to us. Good times are coming. The leaders have been good to us. All I want is to find the box, that's all. Have you seen my things? ”
The older pushes himself wearily from the stove and sits down, carrying with him a bowl of kasha with small pieces of lamb scattered in it.
“You're lying,” he says.
“A blue lacquer box with silver clasps,” she says.
“For a Gypsy you don't even lie very well.”
Light crawls up and around the window—no curtains, she notices, no woman's hand in the cabin. She allows the tip of her knife to press deeper into her cupped finger.
“What's your name?” says the younger again.
Elena.
“That's a lie.”
The older man leans in, serious and gray-eyed. “There was a man out in these parts riding a two-stroke Jawa. An Englishman. He was looking for you, says you've gone missing. Says he's been searching all over. We saw him by the forest road. He wants to take you to a hospital. He looked like he should've been in the hospital himself, driving around with a broken leg. Hadn't shaved in a while. Said your name is Zoli.”
He slides the bowl of kasha across the table, but she does not touch it.
“I really need to find the box. It has so many precious things inside.”
“He said you were tall, with a lazy eye. He told us you'd be wearing a dark overcoat. That you might have a gold watch. Roll up your sleeve.”
“What?”
“Roll up your fucking sleeve,” says the younger.
He steps across and hikes her coat, wrist to elbow. The knife falls with a clatter to the floor. He stamps on it, picks it up, tests the blade with his thumb, then turns to the older. “I told you. Last night. I fucking told you.”
The older leans in further to Zoli: “Do you know him?”
“Know who?”
“Don't play us for fools.”
“I know nothing about a watch,” says Zoli.
“He said it was his father's. A precious timepiece.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“He asked for petrol for his motorbike. He didn't seem much of a threat. He spoke a funny Slovak. He tried to tell me he grew up here, but I know better. Is it true, then, what he says? How did you get a man's name?”
Zoli watches as the younger one cuts the hairs on his arm with the knife, whistling at the sharpness of the blade. The older takes off his cap, something soft and compassionate in the lift. His graying hair, a little damp, lies pressed against his scalp. When he leans forward she notices a small scapular swinging at his neck.
“It was given to me by my grandfather,” she says finally. “It was the name of his own father.”
“So you're a real Gypsy then?”
“You're a real woodsman?”
The older laughs and drums his fingers on the table: “What do I say? We're paid by the cubic meter.”
So, she thinks, a workcamp for prisoners. They remain out here, all summer and winter. Minimum security. Morning until night, sorting wood, gauging it, chopping it, weighing. She watches as the younger rises and goes to the door where he takes an oilskin cloth out of the hanging pair of trousers. He unties a string from the cloth and produces a set of playing cards, slides them across the table to Zoli.
“Our fortune.”
“What?”
“Don't be a God-fearing idiot,” says the older, slapping the cards off the table.
The younger one retrieves them from the floor. “Come on, tell us our fortune,” he says again.
“I don't tell fortunes,” says Zoli.
“It gets lonely out here,” says the younger. “All I want is my fortune told.”
“Shut up,” says the older.
“I'm just telling her it gets lonely. Doesn't it? It gets real lonely.”
“I'm telling you to shut up, Tomas.”
“She's worth money. You heard him. He said he'd pay us money. And you said—”
“Shut up and leave her alone.”
Zoli watches as the older goes to a small bookshelf where he takes down a leather volume. He returns to the table and folds back the cover.
“Can you read this?” he says.
“Christ rides!” says the younger.
“Can you read it?”
“Yes.”
“For fucksake!”
“Here's where you are now. Right here. It's an old map, so it looks like it's Hungary but it's not. This is where Hungary is, along here. The other way, over here, is Austria. They'll shoot you before they lay eyes on you. Thousands of soldiers. Do you understand? Thousands.”
“Yes.”
“The best way to make it through is this lake. It is only one meter deep, even in the middle. That's where the border is, in the middle. They don't patrol it with boats. And you won't drown. They may shoot you but you won't drown.”
“And this?”
“That's the old border.”
He closes the book and leans in close to Zoli. The younger looks back and forth, as if a language lies between them that he will never understand.
“Ah, fuck,” he says. “She's worth money. You heard what he said. A reward.”
“Give her back the knife.”
“Shit.”
“Give her the knife, Tomas.”
The younger skids the knife across the floor and sighs. Zoli picks it up, backs across the hard stone floor towards the door, pulls down the handle. Locked. A brief panic claws at her throat until the older man steps across, leans forward, turns the handle upwards, and the door swings open. A blast of cold wind.
“One thing,” he says. “Are you really a poet?” I sang. A smgerr
“Yes.”
“Same thing, no?”
“No, I don't think so,�
�� she says.
All three step out into the stinging light of the morning. The oldest extends his hand.
“Josef,” he says.
“Marienka Bora Novotna.” She pauses a moment: “Zoli.”
“It's a funny name.”
“Perhaps.”
“May I ask one thing? I was wondering. I think I've seen your photograph once. In the newspaper.”
“Maybe.”
“I ask only then—”
“Yes?”
“How have you come to this?”
He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is called upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he will ask it again, later, when he feels the hard roll of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?
“There are worse things,” says Zoli.
“I can't think of them, can you?”
She turns her face towards the distance.
“Hey,” says the younger, “what are we going to say to the Englishman if he comes back?”
“Say to him?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you will tell him his fortune.”
At the top of a hill she looks north and south—Bratislava and its towers long gone now, not even a hint of them on the skyline. She is pleased by the silence as it reverberates from horizon to horizon. There are days when she walks great distances and the only sound she discerns is the swish of her own clothing.
At a lonely farmhouse she crouches behind a barn, listening. She crosses to the huts and undoes the string that holds the hasp. A few scrawny hens eye her from behind the wooden slats. When she reaches in, one erupts from the box with a long squawk and flies past her. Illegal, of course, to own chickens— they must belong to a family nearby. She reaches in a second time, keeping the gap in the door tight. In the uproar the others take to the air and she lunges and grabs one by the wing. She holds it in the well of her skirt, and breaks the neck with a simple twist, follows with a second. From the nesting boxes she fills her pockets with eggs and wraps them in the cathedral tea towel.
She unwinds a long piece of thread from her coat, ties it around the neck of the animals, and places them together at her belt, where they bounce against her thigh as she walks, as if still alive and protesting.
Hunger has made me original, she thinks: the chicken-stealing Gypsy.
Three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that she has already crossed the border into Hungary. She had expected a concertina of barbed wire to mark it, or a high concrete watchtower, but maybe it was just a hedge or a furrowed field or the little village where they spoke both languages. Perhaps it was when she crossed the shallow streambed in the forest, snow falling and trees darkly waving. It startles her, the ease with which she has crossed from one place into another, the landscape wholly alien and yet so much the same. The other border, East and West, she knows, will begin in a matter of days and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
The first of the wooden watchtowers appears on stilts like a tall wooden bird. Two soldiers perch within it, scanning the horizon. Here, Hungary. There, in the distance, Austria. She creeps along, half-bent to the earth, her body porous to every noise. Before her, the haze of mist drifting off the marsh. The air is cold, but lines of sweat run along her shoulderblades. She has stripped her bundle down to the barest needs—only a wickerjar of water, some cheese, some bread, the tarp, a blanket, her warmest clothes, the stolen knife. She backs a good distance away from the watchtowers, settles in the grass far from the dirt road, feels for a dry place to lie down.
No more movement, thinks Zoli, until nightfall.
She tracks the sun awhile across the sky, through the woven shapes of the branches above, until the last of the mist has burned off. How strange to try to sleep in such light, but it is important to rest, and to keep warm—there can be no fire.
Afternoon birdcall wakes her. The sun has shifted southward, red at its edges. She lifts her head slightly at the sound of an engine, and sees, in the distance, a squat truck with a canvas back trundling along the forest line. The voices of young soldiers, Russians, carry through the forest. How many dead bodies lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as they made the short trip from one place to the other? The army truck passes along the edge of the trees and away, and, as if by design, two white swans break across the sky, their shapes laboring above the treetops, quartering on the wind with their necks craned, apparitions not so much of grace as difficulty, with the gunneling sound that comes from their mouths, a deathcall.
Other people, she knows, have had reasons to cross—for land, or nation, or desire, but she has no reason, she is empty, clean, raw. Once, as a child, traveling with her grandfather, she had seen a hunger artist in a village west of the mountains. He had set himself up in a cage and made a spectacle of his starvation. She watched him as his ribs grew clearer, stronger, almost musical. He lasted forty-four days and he looked so much like an old man when they took him from the cage that she was surprised to see him given, at last, a plate of crumbs and a drink of milk. This is how I am, she thinks: I have made a spectacle of myself, and now I am taking their crumbs. It is still possible to turn around—there is nothing to prove. And yet I have come this far, there is no more reason to return than there is to advance.
Zoli shifts slightly on the blanket. I should sleep, build up my strength, pull myself together, free my mind, become clear.
By early evening it seems to her that the darkness has begun to lift itself out of the earth, overtaking the grays and yellows of the marsh floor. It rises to the top of the trees and shoulders against the last patches of light. She considers a moment that it is, in fact, more beautiful than she has ever created in words, that the darkness actually restores the light. The trees more dark than the dark itself.
She bundles her belongings tight and rises up from between the logs. This is it. Take it now. Go. She taps her left breast, begins moving, hunched, carefully, deliberately. Windnoise in the grass. A shape in the distance catches her eye, another watch-tower, this one camouflaged with leaves and bushes and almost immediately she hears some dogs in the anonymous distance. She strains to hear what direction they are heading but it is hard to tell with the wind.
A high chorus, getting closer. Trained bloodhounds maybe. The sound of men's voices, joining the clamor. At a distant watchtower, two soldiers jump from the last rungs of the ladder to the ground, their rifles pointed at the sky, moving out at a trot. So this is it. I should just stand and raise my arms and have them call the dogs off. Why gibber? Why beg? And yet there is something about their excitement, a tension to their voices, that makes her wonder. She crouches down into the grass. The headlights of a truck on the far road light up the marshland. A second truck, a third. The dogs only a short distance away now. The lights paint the grass silver, spectral.
It is then she sees a brown flash along the road. Ten or twelve of them. Antlered, majestic. Dogs snapping behind them. A shout of grim confidence from a soldier and then a yelp of joy.
Deer. A whole herd of them.
Sweep left, she whispers, sweep left.
She hears the soldiers whooping under the clamor of the dogs. Her fate, she realizes, is within the swing of a deer foot. Swing away from me, away.
The herd passes through the forest line behind her. Over her shoulder the soldiers follow, shouting.
She races forward and through a low ditch. Water sprays upwards and she skews a moment on the slick mud before gaining her footing once more. Beyond the ditch, a line of trees. A light sweeps the landscape. She ducks into the shelter of a single cypress tree, slides down behind it, pauses for a breath and looks about in terror before lurching onwards. Her wet shoes make sucking sounds against the earth. She punches her way through a brake
of long grass. The thorns of a bush rip her hands. She hears another dog's barking and then a high yelp. Have they finished their chase? Cornered their animal?
Her breath wheens fast and uneven. Her lungs, scalded. I must get now to the lake. A quarter kilometer perhaps. To the water edge.
Zoli rolls her shoulders from her overcoat, and drops it on the ground. I will not fill my pockets with water, no.
Four searchlights tilt and sweep across her. She drops to the soft earth, face in the dirt. The lights stencil the marshland. In the distance the hounds are being held back from the deer and the laughing voices of the soldiers carry through the night. The deer with its belly split open, surely, the guts steaming on the ground.
Zoli ventures forward again, the bracing cold pulling at her skin, her heart, her lungs tight.
The merest luck, she thinks, has preserved me.
Slovakia
2003
THE BOTTLES WERE EMPTY, the ashtrays full. They had cheerfully slapped his back, sung for him, even fed him the last of their haluski. They had gazed at pictures of his child and posed for their own, by the fire, standing tall and fixed. They had laughed at the sound of their own voices on the tape recorder. He even played it for them in slow mode. They had accepted all his money, except for fifty krowns in a hidden pocket. They'd played him like a harp, he thought, but he was not fazed; he even felt for a while that he had a bit of the Gypsy in himself, that he'd been inducted into their ways, a character in one of their elaborate anecdotes. They led him this way and that about Zoli, and the more krown notes he laid on the table, the more their stories loosened—she was born right here, lam her cousin, she wasn't a singer, she was seen last month in Presov, her caravan was sold to a museum in Brno, she played the guitar, she taught in university, she was killed in the war by the Hlinkas—and he felt like a man who'd been expertly and lengthily duped.
He promised Boshor that he'd come back when he discovered anything more about her, maybe the next week, or the one after, but he knew he'd never return. The young girl, Andela, picked up the china cups from the table and smiled at him as she backed away—she wore his wristwatch high on her arm. He had even, towards the end, watched the cigarette foil being used to languidly clean a gap in Boshor's teeth.
