by Colum McCann
Forty-two years!
When a bird breaks the line of the window it surprises me almost as much as a word.
I am sorry now that I burned your father's belongings, and I know I should have kept them for you, but in grief we do such foolish things. He told me once that he wanted his body brought to the summit where he could look down on both countries, Italy, Austria, so he could contemplate the memory of a life spent dragging cigarettes, tractor parts, coffee, medicines, from one side to the other. He said he was content for his body to be left up there for the hawks and the eagles and whatever else wandered his way—he almost relished the idea of becoming part of the buzzards, he called them the most Tyrolean of birds. In the end I could not do that, dearest heart, the thought of leaving him there was far too much, so I took all of his possessions, except one pair of shoes made from his old suitcase, and burned them not far from the millhouse. I lay down in the place of the burning, an old form of mourning. What I loved most of all were the shirts he wore, most especially the woolen ones, do you recall them? They were patched and repatched and patched again. He had learned, when he first moved to the mountains, to darn the elbows with needles, using single strands of birch twigs sharpened to a point. He joked that he was glad that I was going to burn his shirts, but it would not take long. I came back days afterwards and searched in the scorched earth for the buttons and the metal beltloop from his jacket, but the fire had burned everything down.
There is an old Romani song that says we share little pieces of our hearts with people and the further we go along, the less we have for ourselves until there is not enough left to go around and that's called traveling, and it's also called death, and since it happens to us all there's nothing more ordinary than that.
In Bratislava I burned my poems. I walked down the swaying staircase into the bright light of day carrying another man's possessions—his boots, his shirts, his radio, his watch. I could see nothing for my future. I was twenty-nine years old. I was cast off. So much of my life had been taken from me and yet I did not want to die.
I went out to the towerblocks for one last look. Eight shadows fell from the eight blocks, thick and dark across the ground where the children played. The caravans tilted sideways where the wheels had been ripped off. I turned away and began my terrible walk, all the way south through the small villages of Slovakia. They were the worst days of all, and often in the mornings, when I woke up in the forests, I was surprised—not so much at the notion that I had slept, but that I was alive at all.
I struck out west and crossed the border into Hungary where the only relief that came to me was the idea that I would not, now, be followed by Swann. He could not cross the border. That part of my life was behind me and I moved on to forget it. Snow came, thick in the wind. I bundled into my blankets. Villagers stared at me as I passed. I am sure I looked wretched, all skin and bone and rags. Some were kind and brought me bread, others asked where the caravans were. I selected a point in the snow's distance—a tree, a cliff, a pylon—and walked towards it. At a deserted farm, I filled my pockets with bonemeal from a feeding trough and later boiled it and ate it without thinking. The paste clove to the top of my mouth. I was eating the food of animals. I slept one night in a large cave, the roof tonsilled, the folds in the stone like curtains. Soldiers had carved words in the rock, names and dates, and I wondered how could wars extend so far? In the corner I found an old tin of meat, cracked it open with a rock, ate with my fingers. The truth is that I no longer, then, considered myself a Romani woman at all. They called me Gypsy, yet I was not even that. Nor did I think of myself as one who had read books or sung stories or written poems—if anything I thought of myself as only a primitive.
For days I kept myself low to the ground, then I waded into the lake which is, I suppose—if there is to be a beginning—the place where my life in the West began.
Even at this very moment I can feel the cold wall of water as it rose against my chest. All night long I waded through the lake so freezing cold that my feet burned. There were no rocks on the bottom of the lake and it was hard to walk, but I kept my arms high, and for once I was glad of my height. Some water plant wrapped itself around my ankle and I tried to shake it off, but lost my balance. Soon I was dripping wet from head to toe. I did not expect the rolls of barbed wire the Austrians had put down, so when I got nearer the edge of the lake I had to step over. At first I thought I was just bumping against another lake plant, but then I felt my skin ripping. My legs were sliced and bloody and yet I thought then that I was not made up of flesh or muscle or bone, I was made up of strength and it would take me onto land. I had been walking since early nightfall and all was silent. The only light was the sweep of searchlights along the frontier.
I was sure that, when dawn broke, the Russian soldiers would find me an easy shot against the light.
Stupidly, I had brought with me only bread and it had gone sodden in my pockets and drifted out into the lake. A few damp crusts were all that remained. What foolish things cross our minds at these times, daughter, the worst of times, and I thought that I would keep on going for just a glass of milk, and the prospect of this kept me wading, perhaps it was because when I was young, and traveling with the kumpanija, we were told that milk would keep our insides clean. I stumbled on, my mind unsteady. The shore seemed to retreat and for a while I thought maybe I was walking in one place, as in some awful dream, with the sandy underbottom accepting my steps one after the other, but I finally managed to wrap a blanket around my hands and pushed on. I got over the last of the underwater wires and collapsed on the ground. The searchlights swept along the shore in cones and the trees were ghost-shaped.
I stooped low and went to a marsh hole not far from the lake, lay back against the wet of the soil, and looked down upon the rips of flesh from the barbed wire. I searched my pockets for the last of the soggy crumbs and ate, trying to savor them in my mouth. The light crept up. In front of me was more marshland and surely more wooden towers with soldiers. I would do what I had done on the other side of the border—wait for the hour just before darkness, then stumble through until I found a friendly person or a farmhouse.
I was told as a girl that death always came with the hoot of an owl. I have never clung to old superstition, chonorroeja, my own grandfather dissuaded me of such things on the road to Presov, but I think what kept me alive that dark morning, strange as it might seem, was that I did hear an owl as he hooted long and hard, and it shocked me awake because I wanted to see in what sort of body death would arrive. It seemed to greet me with birdsong and insect noise. Something burst out of the nearby grass and I looked up to see a pheasant a little way up in the air, taunting me. How delicious it would be to catch her in my bare hands, wring her neck, and eat her without even use of a fire. I searched in the earth for anything at all to eat, even an earthworm, the most unclean of things, but there was nothing, and I sat, my body chattering in the cold. I had sewn Petr's lighter into my dress pocket. I tore it out and tried to flick it alight to warm my hands. No flame.
I woke under glaring light. A shadow fell across me and a white face looked down. I still to this day do not know how they found me, though I was told that I was discovered half-dead in the marsh and indeed they treated me like one dead at first.
The nurse shone a flashlight in my eyes, took hold of my jaw and said in German: Keep still. She pushed my head back onto the pillow and whirled away saying: She bit me, the little savage. I did indeed and did it well, and I would do it again, daughter, if I had to. I was sure straight away that they would arrest me, beat me, send me back to Czechoslovakia. Three nurses gathered, I could smell their sharp perfume. One grabbed hold of my cheeks, the other used a brown stick to hold down my tongue, and the third shone the flashlight into the back of my throat. The fat one wrote on a chart. The tallest took a little jar of something from her pocket and they passed it around one to the other, inhaling the fumes. It has always fascinated me that the gadze cannot smell themselves, I fin
d it strange that they do not know how unusual their soaps and foods and bad odor, but some people only have an eye for others and never themselves. They held the jar to their noses and coughed and said how much I stank. The nurses made a telephone call and asked for some assistance, then said: We're taking her down to the showers.
Believe you me, that is when hell's fury was let loose—all I had heard for a decade was talk of poverty, strikes, and persecution, of the ordinary people in the West beaten down, of how we were hounded, of how little had changed since the days of the fascists, of how the streets were strung with reams of barbed wire, and in my delirium it was possible to believe that in the West they had begun their showers again. Who would deny that if it happened once it would not happen again? There is nothing so terrible that they will not try to repeat it. I shouted in Romani that they would not take me to their showers, no! I would not let them take me! I pulled back the sheets and ripped the drip out of my arm. They whistled for the guard but I was already out of the bed. A siren went off. The tall white-haired nurse tried to stand in front of me, but I shoved her backwards, stumbled to the door, pushed it open, I do not know where the strength came from.
Three men in uniform appeared at the far end of the corridor. One banged his billyclub on the wall. I backed into a room. Light came through one small window. Outside, through the haze of glass, was a patch of green. I squeezed out and landed in the grass. A number of tents stood squat on the ground. Beyond them, a few wooden buildings where smoke rose from the tin-pot chimneys. I heard someone shouting in Hungarian and another language I didn't recognize. I ran down the dirt road, past the tents, towards the gate, but the men in uniform were standing there wearing white armbands. They put up their rifles and said, with half a smile: Halt. A single red-white-red wooden barrier lay across the road. I could see long flat plains and in the distance huge mountains, with clouds halfway up them, capped with snow against the blue sky—so this, then, was Austria and the West, what a strange way to see it, through an open gate, with nurses shuffling in the dust behind me, and a rifle pointed at me.
Along came a tall gray-haired woman with four soldiers trailing behind her. She had the air of a bureaucrat but she stood in front of me and said: This is a D.P. camp, don't worry.
Her voice was calm. We're here to help you, she said. She took another step forward.
Displaced persons, she said.
When I tried to break the line of soldiers, one of them caught me in the shoulder with the end of his rifle. The woman knocked his gun aside and said: Leave her alone, you brute. She bent down to me and began whispering that I would be all right, not to fret, she was a doctor, she would take care of me. Yet I did not trust her—who would? I pushed away from her, began to walk towards the red and white gate, my head held tall, my body straight.
Okay, said the woman, put her in cuffs.
They brought me to a gray building where the nurses undressed me. A few soldiers stood outside the shower room and although most of them looked away, one or two came to the small window and looked inside. I sat on a hardbacked chair under the stream of water, while the nurses rubbed me fiercely with hard soap and brushes on long broom handles.
I tried to hide my nakedness. On and on they went about how I wore no breast support, about how I smelled, and that there was no smell on earth like a Gypsy, but still I said nothing. Near the end of the shower one of the soldiers put his pink tongue against the glass and licked it. I curled into myself and closed my eyes. They threw me a towel, then led me to another hospital room where they razored my hair. When I looked down on the floor there were some white larvae moving through the clumps. I had no feeling. It was my hair, but so what? It hardly mattered, it was just another ornament. Since a young age I had cut it off many times, always against custom. They sprayed me with a white powder that made my eyes itch. I did not allow them to know I could speak a little German, but I understood their words and believe me they were not talking of me as a flower that had sprung from the earth.
I had escaped an old life and was caught in a new one, but I could have no sympathy for myself, it was of my own making.
I was brought back to the ward. The doctor put her stethoscope to my chest. She said I was being held for my own safety, she would look after me, I was protected under international treaties, there was no cause for concern. She had the confident voice of one who did not believe a single word she was saying.
Her name was Doctor Marcus, from Canada, and she spoke German like she had just shoved a fistful of stones into her mouth. She said she would give me medical quarantine for a month or two, but after that I would have to apply for refugee status and then I would be allowed the status of the other displaced people. On her desk Doctor Marcus had some of my possessions: my Party card, my knife, some paper krowns wrinkled from the lakewater, and the coin Conka had given me, still wrapped in strands of her fine red hair. I reached out to get my possessions but she dropped them in a large paper envelope and said that they would be returned when I began to comply. She spun the coin in her fingers, dropped it in the envelope, and closed the clasp. A hair had fallen onto the desk.
Are you willing to talk to me? the doctor asked.
I pretended again that I was mute. Doctor Marcus spoke into an intercom system, instructed them to bring in the translator, an enormous heap of a woman who asked me question after question, in Czech and Slovak both, who I was, how I got a Party card, what had happened to me, how did I cross the border, did I know anyone in Austria and, of course their favorite question, was I really a Gypsy? I looked like one, they said, I dressed in colorful rags like one, but I did not seem like one. I sat still with my hands in my lap. The translator told me to nod yes or no to her questions. Are you Czech? Are you Slo-vakian? Are you Gypsy? Why have you come in from Hungary? This coin is an unusual coin, isn't it? Is this your identity card? Are you a Communist? I sat still. The best way around her was silence. When they were finished, the translator threw her hands up in the air but Doctor Marcus leaned forward and said: I know you understand us, we only want to help you, why don't you let us?
I lifted the single strand of Conka's hair from the desk and they took me off to quarantine.
So much time was spent in the white rooms of the hospital that I began to think back on all that had happened. My voice is strong now when I recall this, but back then I was a weak and terrified thing, and I stopped in every corner I could find, real or not. I did not want the roads of my childhood to return, I attempted to put them out of my mind, but the more I did so the more they appeared.
We used to make potato candles, Conka and I, we hollowed them out and lit the thin walls of potato with light, and in winter Conka loved to skate with the lit candles in her hands, tree to tree, they kept her hands warm. She had a pair of skates her father had made from old boots and knifeblades. Sometimes the lights went out when she turned on the skates, or skidded and fell, or sometimes the ice sprayed up and put out the wick-flame. Above us the stars swung. These and other things returned to me while I lay in the Austrian bed—I sometimes felt as if I were still out on the ice. I heard cracking and saw hands reaching up for me. I could hear boots in the forest and there stood Swann and there stood Vashengo and there stood Strän-sky, rifling through a sheaf of papers and, behind them again, a row of bureaucrats and nurses and officers and guards. I turned and thrashed about in the bed, but the pictures returned harder, faster, with the insistence of things impossible to shake.
Doctor Marcus arrived at the end of my bed every noon, her stethoscope twinkling in the light, a row of pens in her pocket, one with a Canadian flag, and although she looked not a bit like
Swann, I could not help thinking that she was like a sister to him, with her light hair, hazel eyes, her oval face.
You don't have to suffer, she said. There's no point. Why don't you tell me your situation and then I can help?
It was like an old song, a children's rhyme, I had heard it so often, it was as if she had taken the wo
rds of a bureaucrat and put them in a child's mouth.
I know you can talk, she said. The nurses heard you. On the first day, you were screaming in a language they didn't recognize, surely it was Gypsy, am I right, was it Gypsy?
I turned away.
Some people think you're Polish, she said.
Then she leaned in even closer.
But I think you're from outer space.
That almost made me smile, yet when Doctor Marcus left I stared at the ceiling, and the more I stared, the more it pressed down on me.
They did not know my name let alone my anguish.
Later in the day Doctor Marcus came back and shone her flashlight into my eyes and wrote something on her chart. Pills were given to me with water, white tablets with orange writing. I had the strange thought that I was swallowing words and Swann's face kept coming to my mind. I had lost a tooth in my journey and the orange pills fitted perfectly in the gap. I spat them out when the nurses left, dropped them down a hole in the top of the metal bedstead.
I don't think that even now I can find the proper words to describe the feeling of having left my life behind. I was suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch. Every time I turned in the bed I would see an old road, the lane at the back of the chocolate factory, or the road to the schoolhouse near Presov, or the high path to the forest above the vineyards; small flashes that burst out green and yellow into my mind. I turned to the other side of the bed and more flashes came. I was at a strange bridge. I did not know how wide it was. I tried crossing it. I stood in the dark waving at what was, a second ago, the bright sky. Leather straps were buckled down across my chest. They put a piece of rubber between my teeth. The child I was came back to me, hovered above me, her lazy eye looking down. After a while I recognized that the child was Conka too, but her hair was hacked off. She sat watching things retreating into the distance. Strange noises came, nothing like melody. A line of trees went out of sight. A tent napped in the wind. The nurses hovered over me and a needle went into my arm. I turned away and tried to rattle the orange pills from the bottom of the bedstead. I would have taken them all in one go. They were terrible days, they could not have been worse.
