by Colum McCann
You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you follow the valleys and the rivers. It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that will guide you along anyway.
My river was the Mürz, clear and leaping. I walked for many days, hugging the bank. On the floodplain there were a few small huts where I could lie down and sleep for a few hours, sometimes on swales of straw. I watched the circles of a hawk swooping down for food in the tilted grass. I made a canopy above my head with sticks and an old cloth bag to keep out rain and sunshine. When I was forced to move from the riverbank and follow the direct line of the road, there were always a few kind drivers who brought me a distance down the valley. I knew that I was going west by the fall and rise of the sun. Flocks of wild geese flew overhead, and I saw myself as one who lagged behind their formations. In places the road became wide and ambitious with more lanes than I had ever seen before, although, where possible, I still kept to the small back-ways or the riverbank. Voices rang out from steepled churches. Laughter and good smells spilled from restaurants. In the smaller villages, some of the Austrians taunted me—Gyp, thief, Black Pharaoh—though just as many raised their hats in greeting, or sent their children after me with cheese, bread, cake. A boy put me on a scooter and promised to take me around a railway tunnel but he did not, he simply rode his scooter up and down in front of his friends who jeered and taunted. I pretended to put a spell on him and he stopped—they are so fearful, sometimes, of their own invented fears.
Once I passed a burning house in the night with the family outside. I returned and gave to them what little food I had, some bread, some strips of chicken meat. They did not throw the food to the ground as I expected, they just huddled down, prayed, and thanked me, and it struck me then that the world is as varied in goodness as it is in evil.
I had acquired the confidence of a blind woman—I could have stepped down the road with my eyes fully closed. I was following the grass along the busy way to Kapfenberg, Brück, Leoben, when the mountains began to rise, higher even than the biggest of the Shivering Hills. I paused at the path heading south, and the other heading north, and took, like many times before, the wrong one. I walked north along a different river, the mountains crowding in closer, the trees on the cliff faces above me, steep rocks held back by giant nets. The traffic whizzed past and it was then that I saw signs for a tunnel, a red sign with a white border. Nothing petrified me more—even when I was a child I refused to go into such darkness. I looped backwards and tried to find a smaller road, but there was no way around. In a roadside petrol station I made inquiries of an old man who said that there were roads that would lead me over the mountains, but I would surely perish. The safest way to get through the tunnel was with the Lastwagenfahrer, the truck drivers.
They lined up behind the petrol station and talked across from truck to truck in languages as coarse as they were varied. I was not sure if they would look kindly on a Romani woman traveling alone, but the truth is that I was so deeply scared of the tunnels I would have done anything to avoid walking through them. For two days I turned and returned to that station before I bought myself, to my shame, a bottle to put me under a spell. The bottle was labeled with green vines and tasted of cough mixture, but it gave me courage to walk in amongst the drivers time after time. I climbed into the trucks, brought my knees to my chest, stared straight ahead. There were many tunnels, of course. Often they were only just being built and we would sit for hours, but the drivers, up until the last, were good to the core. They gave me cigarettes and sometimes the last of their food. They showed me pictures of their children and one allowed me to take the small statue he cherished of Saint Jude. Later I sold it, to my shame, for food. At the end of each tunnel I got out of the truck to clear my head and bid goodbye to the men who often told me that I could go further with them if I wanted. But my spirit had been put in my feet, chonorroeja, and I felt safe there, and wanted to walk again, and I thought, Am I cursed to this?
I kept my head down and for the most part I still stayed in the valleys and slept in the abandoned sheds down on the valley floor. At times I balanced on narrow tree trunks laid across streams so I could find shelter in a light forest. When I approached the tunnels I bought myself a bottle and went then to wherever the trucks might stop.
It seemed to me that there were two different worlds, that of trees and that of engines: one seemed clear, the other dark.
Sometimes when I got to a village there would be a few of our own people on the outskirts. For my own safety—I did not want to talk to my own for fear of polluting them—I could easily shoo the children off with curses. I remember, though, a settlement on the edge of a small town in the plains beneath the central Alps. A few young boys could be seen through the low trees. I did not want to be seen by any adults, but a woman came over from a well carrying water and she greeted me first in German and then Romani. Her dialect was hard to fathom, but in her delight she dropped the bucket and blessed me three times and then took me to their camp. I could not get away, she had such a grip on my arm. The children danced around me, tugging at my clothes. I became so caught up with them that I sprinkled a metal sheet with a pile of sand and used a saw to show them how the sand jumped. They giggled and rolled about in joy. The women cooked me potato pancakes and filled my cup with fruit juice, I tell you the truth, there was never such generosity.
Five girls were brought out to dance. They wore identical green dresses with corded sashes of white tied around the waist. Listening to the music, I was happy, but imagine my raw fear, daughter, when they announced that there were three of our own from near Trnava who had been staying with them for some years now. They would be back in the evening from their work in an automobile factory. I tried to break away but could not, the force of their friendliness was too strong. They even gave me some old clothes and washed my own for me. I feared for the evening and, sure enough, when the men came along, the first word that came out of their dark mouths was Zoli.
Nobody had called me this name in such a long time that it had the strength of a slingshot.
And yet they did not cower or retreat, nor spit or curse me. Instead they raised my name to the air. They were of settled folk from out near the chocolate factory, but they had left shortly after the war. They had seen me singing a few times but did not know of my time as a poet. It was soon clear to me that they knew nothing of what had happened in the judgment, nor even what occurred in the last few years to our people, the resettlement, the laws, the burnings. They had been turned back at the border several times now, these men. They still knew routes across the Danube, they would get back eventually to Slovakia they said, there was no other place they wanted to be. One always loves what is left behind—and I feared I would break their hearts if I were to tell them the truth about what had been done to our people, although I knew that sooner or later in the evening the questions would come to me, deep hard questions that I would be called on to answer.
The mind can do anything it wants. All along I had blocked out song, it was a denial that came from deep inside. The choice to forget is a way of surviving. Yet at that moment I knew that, to survive, I had to sing once again. The people crowded around me, a lantern was turned on, bottles were passed. I knew I would never sing one of the songs I had written down—that was the pact I had made with myself—but I could sing the old songs, the ones I had known as a child. I took a deep breath. The first notes were awful. The people cowered. Then I relaxed and I felt the music move through me. When I cut brown bread don't look at me angrily, don't look at me angrily because I'm not going to eat it. The old horse is standing though he is not sleeping, he always has a watching eye, a watching eye, a watching eye. If you have the money you can think what you like. I do not suppose that you will doubt it when I say that there were tears in the eyes of the people that evening and they hugged me to their hearts like I was their very own sister. I thought, I am polluting them and they do not know, I am bringing shame down upon t
hem and they have no idea.
It brought a sharp knife to my heart and yet what was I to do? How many small betrayals would there be for me? It is rules not mirrors that steal away our souls.
They danced that night, the firelight catching the red thread in their black dresses. In the morning, when I stole away, I allowed myself to sing a few of the songs as I went. They surprised me with their beauty and carried me along. Once or twice I would hear some of my own songs in my head, those I had written down, but I forced them out, I did not want them.
The road hooked west. A family stopped for me and the man jerked his thumb and told me to get into the back with his children. The children unrolled the window and I felt the warm wind blowing on my face. There were nose prints of a dog on the rear window, but no animal. I did not ask, though I could see tearmarks on the faces of the children, and I had an idea that they had lost their pet. Red, I thought. To gladden them I began to hum the tune of the old horse song. The man turned in his seat and gave a small smile, though the mother kept looking straight ahead. I sat back and hummed some more and he said he liked the humming and I surprised myself with song. My voice tipped out into the wind and back over the hundreds of roads I had already traveled.
When the man dropped me off outside a cafe the children cried, and the mother gave me money. The father pinched his hat by the crown, tipped it to me and said that he always had a warm heart for the outdoor life. In the tanned leather of his face, he smiled.
You sing well, he said to me.
I had not heard these last words in such a long time and I mouthed them in the distance as I left the town for the hinterland. Later I sat, lit myself a fire, and watched the riverspiders on the water. They moved quickly across the surface, uncanny, ancient, leaving no circles nor ripples, as if they were part of the water itself.
It was many days later, and some towns further on, that I met my final truck driver.
He pulled the truck over to the side of the road, near a laneway, where some boys were playing, and said that a little kiss would not go astray. I said to him that I would tell him his fortune, but he said to me that he knew it already, it was plain to see, it was there in front of his eyes, it involved a little kiss. His face was greasy and shining with sweat. When my hand hit the doorhandle he grabbed the other and he said yet again that a little thanks was needed. I yanked the handle but he clamped hard on my neck and pushed me down, his thumbs deep in the hollow of my throat. I prayed for all my strength and hauled back my fist and blackeyed him, but he just laughed. Then he gritted his teeth and hit my forehead with his. Things went black. I saw myself then as Conka's mother, her fingernails as they were pli-ered out. He ripped all the buttons off what I wore and his hands went to my second dress and he tore that open too. It is no long story, what I tell. I watched his hands. He went soft-faced and gentle for a moment, and said: Come on, woman, one little kiss. I knew then, as he was stroking my shoulder and the side of my face, that what I had stolen was what would save me.
The blade went into his eye socket with an ease not far from butter.
I was out of the truck, hauling all that I had, and he was stumbling around, shouting the whore took my eye out, she took my fucking eye out. Indeed the knife was in his hand and his eye was a bloody mess. Some boys gathered around him and began to shout and then they pointed at me excitedly. I ran down the narrow laneway, looking for a turn. I passed a wooden shed and pulled back one of the rotting boards, crept through. Fresh shards of wood fell to the ground where I pulled the plank back and I knew I had left a marker for them to follow, but I had no time. Loud footfalls in the alleyway. Inside the shed were piles of broken slates, some farm machinery, and a blue automobile. I tested the door handles but they were locked tight. I hunkered down at the back of the car and pulled the silver latch. The trunk flew up. I flung my bundle of possessions inside, then looked about in terror and climbed in. I held the lid of the boot so it would not close. From the shed came the ripping of a plank. The boys shouted and banged around. I heard them tug the handles and I was quite sure I was finished.
When I think of it now it was such bare stupidity, but when they left the shed—one shouting that he had seen me running across the fields—I lay back and cried, chonorroeja. Would things always be like this? I pulled the lid of the boot down but lay part of my blanket over the latch so it wouldn't shut me in. I curled up against the dark.
In the morning, I woke as the boot-lid bounced up and down.
My ordeal with the onyx knife did not land me in prison, as you might expect. The man who found me in his car wore a smart collar and tiepin. He stared in at me, then slammed the lid of the boot down. As we drove, I could hear him muttering amid the rattle of what must have been rosary beads. I was sure he would lead me to the courthouse, or to the officials, or to yet another camp, but when the boot was opened up, an hour or more later, a young man in a black suit and white collar looked down on me. I blinked against the light, clutched at my torn clothes.
All yours, said the man with the tiepin.
I was terrified, but the young priest guided me along the pebbled path towards a house. I had heard much about priests, and knew how easily they turn into bureaucrats, but something about Father Renk stopped me from running. He sat me down at a small table in the kitchen of his house. He was a young man, with a little badger streak of gray at the temples. He ‘d known many Gypsies in his life, he said, some good, some bad, he did not make judgments, but how in the world did I end up in the back of a motorcar? I began to invent a story but he said, sharp and sudden: The truth, woman. I told him the story, and he said that indeed the police probably were searching for me, but not to worry, I had been driven a good distance away. He had dealt with displaced persons before, in the nearby Peggetz camp.
There's a bed if you want it, he said. He showed me the stairs to a small room at the top of the house where I would be allowed to sleep. In return I was asked to clean the floors of the church, to keep the sacristy in order, and to attend his services—simple daily tasks that were more difficult for me than they should have been. In the end I stayed for three months and I still recall those days, how unusual they were, full of cloths and dishes and furniture polish. For all my worldliness, the simple mechanics of a vacuum cleaner stumped me and I had never before used bleach. I made holes in the young priest's shirts. I left an iron sitting on a tea towel and burned the ironing board, but Father Renk found it all amusing. He sat in the kitchen and watched me and chuckled and once even took the vacuum himself, singing as he guided it down the hallway. There were long cold mornings spent listening to his homilies about peace—he stood at his altar and said to his parishioners that we must live together in fellowship, one and all, that it was a simple thing to do, black, white, Austrian, Italian, Gypsy, it did not matter. How little he knows, I thought, but I did not say a word, I went about my cleaning duties and kept my head low.
One night he saw me, not kneeling, but sitting at the altar. He sat across from me in the front pew and asked what it was I was searching for. To go across the mountain, I replied. He said it was a good proposition but only God knew where it would take me to. I replied that God and I were hardly friends, though the Devil seemed to like me sometimes, a notion which made him turn to the window and smile.
Over the next few days Father Renk made several phone calls, until one morning he said to me: Pack up, Marienka, come on. Pack what? I said. He grinned and put money in the palm of my hand, then drove me south through beautiful countryside, past villages where people waved at the priest's car. On the underside of a bridge was a sign: One Tyrol. Up we drove, through bends that seemed never to end, hairpins and switchbacks, so that it felt like I might turn around and meet myself. With every meter there was something new to take my breath away—the mountains sheer and gray, a flock of sheep taking the whole mountain road with ease, the sudden shadow of a buzzard darkening the roadside grass.
We stopped in the little village of Maria Luggua where Father
Renk walked the twelve stations of the cross, blessed me for my journey, and then left me in a village cafe with a man who hardly looked at me from over the rim of his cup.
Across the mountain? he said in German, though I could tell straightaway it was not his language.
I nodded.
There are two things in this part of the world, he said. God and money. You are lucky that you found the first.
He had never taken a person across before and he did not cherish the idea, and would only do so if I could carry a sack on my back. I knew nothing about smuggling, or contraband, or taxes, but I said I could carry my weight and more in order to get to Paris. He chuckled at me and said, Paris? Of course, I said. Paris? he said again. He could not stop himself from laughing and I thought him a detestable thing in his leather waistcoat, with his stringy hair and his lined face. It's the wrong way, he said, unless you want to climb the mountains for another year or two. He drew a map for me on the back of his hand where he showed me Paris and then he showed me Italy and then he showed me Rome. I am not a fool, I said to him. He drank his small dark coffee and said, I'm not either. He stamped his cigarette out on the floor, rose, and didn't look back.
Down the street, he finally turned and pointed at me and told me that my luck only ran as far as my friendship with the priest.
Over the other side of the mountain and that's all. Do you understand me? he said.
Three sackloads of syringes were what he carried the night he brought me across the border. He did not, in the end, allow me to carry anything. We silently set out along the valley floor, the moonlight blue on the riverstones. We waded through a high meadow where the grass reached above my waist. He had instructed me that there were two types of troopers on either side of the border, and they were strung along the hills at various intervals. The Italians, he said, hated him most of all. You know you could be arrested? he said. I replied that it was hardly a new prospect for me, I knew the difference between a door and a key. We stopped at the edge of a forest. You're full of pepper, aren't you? he said. He shook his head and sighed, then looped a string around my waist which he tied to his own belt. He said he was sorry to have to treat me like a donkey but in the darkness I could get lost. The string was only long enough to stretch out and touch his shoulder. He was surprised that I kept pace with him and only once or twice did the string tighten around my waist. Halfway up he turned and raised his eyebrows and smiled at me.
