by Colum McCann
The doctor finally said she would not give me any more pills or injections. She barked at the nurse to put her arm under mine and allowed me to walk through the ward. I stood and swayed. Walking helped cure some things and for the next few weeks they fed me well and all my lacerations healed, my hair began to grow back, and my feet were carefully tended to. They replaced the bandages three times a day, using a soft creamy medicine that smelled of mint. They allowed me to mark my sheets—I did not want to share my bedclothes even if they were to be washed, I made it clear by holding on to them and wrapping them around my wrist.
Doctor Marcus said let her keep them, they're only sheets, it's a small price, she will open up soon.
But I said to myself that I would not open up, I would make a little place for myself in my mind, I would close its door, settle behind it, and I would not step across to open it again, ever. I walked around and around, like a clockhand. After a while my feet began to recover and my legs felt strong. Doctor Marcus came in and said: Oh, what rosy cheeks we have today. I thought that I should give her one of Stränsky's old lectures on Marxism and the historical dialectic, and then she wouldn't think me such a broken paltry thing wandering around her hospital floor, but in truth I never really thought about the days with Stränsky or Swann—no, it was more my childhood that kept coming back to me, the touch of Grandfather's shirt, nine drops of water in the ashes, looking from the back of the wagon while the caravan bounced, and I think now that these thoughts were there to protect me and to make sure that I kept myself intact, although at the time they almost drove me to an edge I did not recognize.
You can die of madness, daughter, but you can also die of silence.
There is a quiver in my fingers and the hairs on my arms still rise when I put voice to these things. I dress in the dark these days, remove the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp, take the lid off the firebox, crumple the paper, drop it in, strike a match, wait for the flame to catch, then bring the same match to the stove. I have been spared another night to come into this day. Soon I hear the ticking of the metal and the char-sound of wood, and it becomes light enough to see and the room comes alive.
I had, today, a strange thought as I walked down all the way to the village. It was just past noon and the light seemed to sus- pend the street, full of years somehow. I walked along the road, towards Paoli's old shop. I kept my eyes down on the pavement and watched the feet of people as they went past. The bell clanged when I went in—it is still one of the few shops where the old ways have held. Paoli's son Domenico was behind the counter, lighting candles to put on a table.
It was then that it flashed in front of my eyes, a simple thought and yet I still cannot shake it. For a brief second, I saw Conka. She wore a scarf and her hair was bundled beneath. She stood near the bottom of the towerblock where I had left her long ago, in Czechoslovakia. Her children were grown and gone. She wore a dark dress and her hands were shoved deep in her pockets. She walked towards the towerblocks, but the lift was broken, so she began to climb the stairs. At first I thought that she was looking for firewood, that she was going to rip up the floorboards from the flats, carry the wood down and burn it so she could cook a meal for her family. But all the doors to the flats were locked. She climbed higher, going from floor to floor. It grew dark. She got to the top of the towerblock, reached into her pocket, and took out a potato candle. From the other pocket she took out a match. She fumbled awhile to light it, but finally the wick took. It sat there, flickering on the top wall of the flats. She watched it a long time and then she reached forward and pushed it off the edge and down it went, through the air, aflame.
Why I thought this I still do not know. Domenico took my arm and told me to sit down on the corner stool in the shop, my hands were trembling so. His brother, Luca, the smallest of them, carried my groceries home, relit the kerosene lamp for me. He asked me if I would be all right and I said yes, I would. He asked for you and I told him you were in Paris, that you send letters, you live in an apartment, that your work is good and healthy and keeps your mind sharp.
Paris, he said.
I am quite sure his eyes sparkled—you are not forgotten, chonorroeja.
He bid me goodbye and he spotted the pages on the table, but I am sure he thought nothing of them. I could hear him whistling as he went down the hill.
After a few days in quarantine I could stand it no longer and I called on Doctor Marcus and said to her in German, Am I a prisoner? She stared at me as if I had just somersaulted twice through the air. She said, Of course not, no. I told her that I was ready to go. She said it was not that simple and why hadn't I talked earlier, it would have been much easier. Why do you say that I am not a prisoner? I asked again. There are certain rules we must adhere to for the good of everybody, she said. Is this not the free West? Pardon me? she said. Is this not the democratic West? What an interesting thing to say, she said. Tell me why I am being held prisoner. There are no prisoners here, she replied.
I told her that I wanted to be released immediately, that it was my right, and she sprang back indignantly that she would do her very best, and she could promise me that at the very least I would be allowed out of the hospital if I helped them with information. Be thankful, she said, for what you have.
They always ask you to be thankful, chonorroeja, after they have locked you up. Perhaps they also ask you to kiss them when they throw away the key.
My name is Marienka, I told her.
The chair scraped as she pulled it up closer.
Marienka, she said, that's a beautiful name.
Is it? I asked.
She blushed.
Doctor Marcus took down my strange story on her white notepad. My German was not good enough, nor did I want to speak in Slovak, so I spoke to her in Magyar. The translator was a pious young man from Budapest who wore a giant crucifix at his neck. I did not call myself Zoli for fear of two things, their laughter at my name and the chance that the word would take wing and they might find out exactly who I was.
The story was simple. I had been born in the Hungarian lands. I was abandoned by my husband and I wanted to join my children who were living in France. They had left in ‘56, but I could not go since I was arrested and beaten. I got out of jail and went back to my settlement which was near the border. My people had never cared about borders. Once it had been one giant country and we still treated it that way. The Party card was something I had found on the ground near a dump by the border. I saw Doctor Marcus pale with doubt, so I circled back and told her that I'd inserted a picture of myself into the card and that one of my family was an accomplished forger. Doctor Marcus shrugged. She said: All right, go on, go on. For a little gaiety, I said I'd taken a bus from the city of Györ but the bus broke down and I bartered for a bicycle. It was my first time riding such a machine. I wobbled down the road and farmers laughed at me. I slept in abandoned farmhouses, ate nettle soup, and made a borscht from sour cherries. I threw away the bicycle when I got a flat tire. Doctor Marcus began smiling then, and as the story went on she became triumphant and scribbled everything down as fast as she could. I began to like this person I was creating, and so I said that I had stolen a second bicycle, except this one had a giant basket on the front and, of course, I had borrowed some chickens, tied them down in the basket, feathers flying, and had lived on them until I made my break for freedom.
You can make them swallow any lie with enough sugar and tears. They will lick the tears and sugar and make of them a paste called sympathy. Try it, chonorroeja, and you might feel yourself dissolve.
I cannot explain why so many of them have hated us so much over so many years, and even if I could, it would make it too easy for them. They cut our tongues and make us speechless and then they try to get an answer from us. They do not wish to think for themselves and they dislike those who do. They are comfortable only with the whip above their heads, yet so many of us have spent our lives armed with little more dangerous than song. I am filled with the memory
of those who have lived and died. We have our own fools and evils, chonorroeja, but we are pulled together by the hatred of those who surround us. Show me a single patch of land we did not leave, or would not leave, a single place we have not turned from. And while I have cursed so many of my own, our sleight of hand, our twin tongues, my own vain stupidities, even the worst of us has never been amongst the worst of them. They make enemies of us so that they do not have to look at themselves. They take freedom from one and give it to another. They turn justice into revenge and still call it by its old name. They expect us to see the future or at least to rob its pockets. They shave our heads and say: You are thieves, you are liars, you are filthy, why can't you just be like us?
This is the truth of how I felt then, daughter, and so I said to myself that I would be like them only for as long as it took to get out of the camp and move on elsewhere.
I was transferred from the hospital into the camp, given blue status, on a day of sunlight. Doctor Marcus reeled off a long list of rules. I would be permitted to go to the nearby town two days a week, but I would not be allowed to beg or tell fortunes or any of the other things they expected us to do, they were against local rules. I could leave at eight in the morning and had to be home by curfew. They would give me a ration book and I could deposit it in the camp bank. No drinking alcohol, she said, or relations with men, and beyond the camp walls I was not allowed to fraternize with the guards.
Before I left the hospital the nurses pretended they'd found another louse in my hair just so they could shave it off. They pulled the razor hard across my scalp.
My other clothes had been burned, but what could I do, mourn for them?
I was taken to the storeroom. I found a long scarf to put over my scalp and I was given new sandals to parade around in, brown with a shiny brass buckle. I chose some Portuguese dresses in splendid yellows and reds, but when I put them on I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked so much like my old self that I turned around and chose a long gray dress donated by the people of the United States. I was given my useless money and Party card and even my onyx-handled knife. I burned the card right away. I opened the envelope to see Conka's coin sitting there. I kissed it and thanked my dear lost friend for not spitting at me, and yet for giving her children the dignity to do so.
Doctor Marcus escorted me to a special room at the far end of the wooden barracks. Only the very youngest children were about and they trailed behind me, laughing, pulling at my sleeve. Some of them were kicking a ball made from a pig's bladder and their high voices split the air. The women looked out from the kitchens. Most were Hungarians. I felt a tenderness for them since I knew they had been here since they walked across the border in ‘56, four years before. Someone had written on the wall in Magyar: We have left behind the raincoats, pray for us.
When we turned the final corner towards the last barracks, near the wire fence, I stopped cold. A woman, dark, long-skirted, sat on the steps nursing a young baby. She put her hand to her mouth in surprise, handed her baby to another child, and came to touch my head.
Lamb of heaven, she said, they shaved off all your hair.
I cannot tell you, chonorroeja, how low my heart dropped at the sight of this woman, and I knew almost immediately that I would have to escape, not only because I was polluted, but because eventually they would know, they would feel it from me, I tell you the bare truth, a Rom always knows, and I would bring the shame to them too. She took my hand in hers and gave me a slab of bread. I cannot do this, I thought, I am a traitor. And yet what was I betraying? What was left of my old self to betray? How distant I felt from the Zoli who had spent many hours in the rooms of Budermice, and the ringing phones of the writers’ union, and the pulsing machines of Stränsky's printing mill, and the shining chandeliers of the Carlton Hotel, and all the other places I met Doom and put on her shining jewelry.
Now here was bread being put in my hands by a dark sister, jabbering in our sweet and ancient tongue.
Her name was Mozol. She grabbed my elbow and pulled me inside the dark barracks—her blankets, several bundles, a series of mats unrolled on the floor—and pointed at a fat man sleeping under a hat, on a tattered couch. That's my husband, Panch, she said, he's lazier than a bad sin. He snores even when he walks, I tell you. Come, come, I will show you around. We are rich with room. None of the gadze want to be with us, so we have the whole barracks to ourselves, can you imagine?
She touched my cheek then spun me around and dizzied me with her voice: Lord above, I kiss your tired eyes.
With Mozol all I had to do was nod and listen. She put one and two words together, and soon they made ten thousand. Her endless jabberjaw filled my ears, but it felt as if a salve had been put at the raw points of my mind. She showed me around the barracks, led me through the camp towards the shop where I could use the ration slips. On and on Mozol talked, I am not sure she ever paused for breath. Her husband couldn't get a word in either. He called her his little nightingale, but even then she would drown out his voice with her babble. Mozol had seven children and was working on her eighth, and if there was nobody around to talk to she would have talked to her own belly.
All hardships, chonorroeja, have a streak of laughter in them.
Those few days are welded into me now and I cannot speak of them quietly. I took on a life I did not know. I was no longer a poet nor a singer, or one who read books, not even one who traveled. I woke in the same place each day. I put a saucepan of coffee on. I aired the mattress, beat it with my bare hands. I ate with Mozol's family around their three-legged pot. I was privy to their yarns and confidences. I had never had such a life before.
I swapped out my clothes for a few of the Portuguese dresses once again. I caught sight of myself, colorful, in the windows of the offices. My hair grew, and I sewed the coin in the strands. My old language bore me to the window.
You may ask why I did not leave, move out from the camp under cover of darkness, and keep moving, why I brought the secret shame to Mozol's family, why I never told them who I was and what had happened to me. The fence surrounding the barracks was so low that a child could have climbed it, but we were scared of what lay outside. The awfulness of the camp was less than the fear of what lay beyond. And I will also tell you this: there was a terrible plague of insects one day a few weeks after I left the camp hospital, grubby little things with small yellow wings. I got up early one morning and found a good many of these insects clinging to the wall. They had lost their way, and had clung there until dead, held fast by their tiny claws, stiffened into their last moment. I went to wipe the dead ones away, but as soon as I did one of them, just one, came out of its stiffened pose, and I bore it on a cloth to the open window with the one bit of life still left in it.
And so, for a while, I allowed myself to live under the awning of my own people once again. An invisible hand had reached in and turned my heart a small notch backwards.
In the camp I had taken one great big year of breath and held on to it. I did not attempt to escape.
Mozol and I began to collect flowers, which we sold in the marketplace near to Domplatz. At home in the barracks we buried our money in the corner behind the stove. Mozol had spent twelve years in the camps, her children had been born there, and she dreamed of nothing more than leaving, but she needed a country to take her in, and who would sponsor the Gypsies when they thought of us as something less than human? But one morning she came running up to me and thrust a paper into my hand, a Canadian insignia stamped on it. Doctor Marcus had told her what was in the letter. I opened the envelope, took a glance, and then announced myself happy indeed. Mozol gazed at me. How did you know what the letter said? she asked. My spirits dropped. How did you know what the letter said, my heart's friend? I looked to the ground. I almost told her that I had read it, daughter, that I could indeed read and write, that all along I had brought the shame to her, but I caught myself. I walked across the high wire then, saying I was able to feel what was in the letter
, it trilled through my toes, it was intuition. She looked at me doubtfully but I spun her around in the dust and she began to laugh. She was on her way to Toronto, but within a few days another note came to say that she and Panch would have to pay for a portion of their own passage. The nurse who read the letter aloud had a shine in her eyes when she read it. The fare was enormous, it would have bought them a patch of land. Mozol could not understand. Surely I can go by train, she said. To Canada? said the nurse and she laughed.
Mozol lay in her wickerbound bed crying. Bit by bit she began to descend, if you can imagine, into silence. She said that Jesus had wept for everyone, but the gadze had put a roof in the sky and yelled down destruction so his tears could not refresh us. I have never really believed in God or a heaven or any of that loud ranting, but I believed in it for her, it is what she wanted. She ran rosary beads through her fingers and I called back our old prayer: Bless these bits, these bridles, these reins, keep these wheels firm to your solid ground.
Later that week we were sitting on the steps of the barracks. An ant crossed in front of me, carrying another ant bent double. I pressed my hand to the cool earth. The ant stopped at my hand and looked for a way around but then climbed my fingers and took the body of the dead one across. I leaned down and blew it gently off my finger.
