by Colum McCann
Her daughter hitches the dress at the shoulders.
“Are you all right, Mamma?”
“I wouldn't know I had it if it didn't hurt,” says Zoli, and a smile loosens over her face.
At the door there is a series of three gold locks she had not noticed earlier. Three. And one hanging chain. It strikes Zoli that she has never lived in a place with locks on the door.
“We should take the elevator.”
“No, chonorroeja, we'll walk down.”
Outside, in the darkness, the engine of the car purrs. Henri waves them over with the sort of grin that already seems to throw out opinions and confidences. She will try hard to like him, she tells herself. He has, in any case, a fine name—so much like Enrico, though the sound is not as round or as full—and he is handsome in a measured way. She slides into the front seat and pats his arm.
“Onwards,” Henri says abruptly, and they drive off through a light rain.
By the time they reach the center of Paris, the rain has let up and the streets shine wet and black under lamplight. Elegant statues and houses, each angle planned, each tree thought out. Boats along the Seine dimple the water. Zoli opens the window to hear the rushing of the water, but receives only traffic.
At the restaurant there are engraved mirrors behind the bar. Wood and heavy glass. Waiters in long white aprons. She is given a menu and it strikes her with a start, how absurd, a menu in French, but her daughter says: “I'll help you, Mamma.” So many things to choose from, and nothing amongst them simple. She sits in a mild haze, listening to her daughter and Henri talk about their jobs, social work with immigrants, of how there is always a heartbreaking story, how it is hard to believe, in a civilized society, that these things still go on, day after day.
Zoli finds herself drifting, watching the movement of the waiters in the background, their intricate steps. She circles her fork around the edges of her wineglass, but snaps herself back when Francesca touches her hand: “Did you hear me, Mamma?”
It is, she knows, a story about an Algerian man and a hospital and flowers by someone's bed, but she can't quite locate the center of the story, and has to catch up. She surmises that the man sends the flowers to himself, and it seems to her not so much a sadness as a triumph, sending flowers to his own bedside, but she doesn't say so, she is caught up in the caughtness of her daughter who has a tear at the edge of her eye, which she brushes away.
A waiter arrives bearing three large plates. The dinner unfolds and Henri seems to sweep in behind Francesca, as if he has started driving the table, taken the front seat, lowered the pedal. He rattles on, in a high voice, about the plight of the Islamic women and how nobody takes them seriously at all, how their lives are denned by the narrowness that others bring to it, how they have been poisoned by stereotype, that it's time for people to open up and listen. He is, thinks Zoli, the sort of man who knows in advance all that, for him, is worth knowing.
Dessert arrives and the taste of coffee fills her with sadness.
She wakes in the backseat of the car, startled a moment as Henri points out the Arc de Triomphe. “Yes, yes,” she says, “it's beautiful,” though the car is sandwiched in traffic and she can hardly see it at all. They swing past a tower and then zoom along the quays. Henri clicks on the radio and begins to hum. Soon they merge onto a highway and it seems like only moments later when Zoli is being brought up in the elevator. She panics briefly and reaches for the buttons but her daughter catches her arm and strokes her hand. “It's all right, Mamma, we'll be there in a flash.” A strange word, it seems, and the light actually flashes across her mind as if invited. She feels her daughter support her indoors. Zoli flops to the bed with a little laugh: “I think I drank too much wine.”
In the morning she rises early and kneels down by the couch and combs her sleeping daughter's hair, the same way she used to comb it when Francesca was a child. Francesca stirs, smiles. Zoli kisses her cheek, rises, and searches in the kitchen for breakfast items, finds a card on the fridge with a magnet attached. She runs the magnet over her own hair and suddenly Francesca is there behind her with a phone to her ear: “What are you doing, Mamma?”
“Oh, nothing, Franca,” she says, and it's a name so close to Conka that it still manages, at times, to hollow out Zoli's chest.
“What's the magnet for?”
“Oh, I don't know,” says Zoli. “No reason really.”
Her daughter begins chatting rapid-fire into the phone. There is, it seems, a seating issue at the conference and some rooms have been overbooked. Francesca clicks down the phone and sighs. In the kitchen she opens a can of coffee beans, grinds them, fills a contraption with water. So much white machinery, thinks Zoli. She can feel a slight tension between her and her daughter, this is not what she wants, she will not embrace it, conference or not, and she asks Francesca how she slept and she says, “Oh fine,” and then Zoli asks her in Romani. It is the first time they have used the language, it seems to stun the air between them, and Francesca leans forward and says: “Mamma, I really wish that you would speak for us, I really wish you would.”
“What is there for me to speak of?”
“You could read a poem. Times have changed.”
“Not for me, chonorroeja.”
“It would be good for so many people.”
“They said that fifty years ago.”
“Sometimes it takes fifty years. There's going to be people from all over Europe, even some Americans.”
“And what do I care for Americans? ”
“I'm just saying it's the biggest conference in years.”
“This thing makes good coffee?”
“Please, Mamma.”
“I cannot do it, my heart's love.”
“We've put so much money in. It's huge, people from all over the world, it's a mosaic. They're all coming.”
“In the end, it won't matter.”
“Oh, you don't believe that,” says her daughter. “You've never believed that, come on, Mamma!”
“Have you told anyone about the poems?”
No.
“Promise? ”
Mamma, I promise. Please.”
I can t do it, says Zoh. I m sorry. I just can t.
She places her hands on the table, emphatically, as if the argument itself has been tamped beneath her fingers, and they sit in silence at a small round kitchen table with a rough-hewn surface. She can tell her daughter has paid a lot of money for the table, beautifully crafted, yet factory-made all the same. Perhaps it is a fashion. Things come around again and again. A memory nicks her. Enrico used to spread his hands out on the kitchen table and playfully stab a knife between his fingers, over and over, until the wood at the head of the table was coarse and pitted.
“You know, Franca, this coffee is awful, your father would roll over.”
They look at each other then, mother and daughter, and together they smile broadly at the thought of this man now slid briefly between their ribcages.
“You know that no matter what, I am still polluted.”
“But you said it yourself, Mamma, that's all gone, it's over.”
“That's gone, yes, those times, but I'm still of those times.”
“I love you dearly, Mamma, but you're exasperating.” Francesca says it with a smile, but Zoli turns away, looks towards the kitchen window. No more than a meter away is the brickwork of a neighboring building.
“Come on,” says Zoli, “let's go for a little stroll. I'd like to see those ladies I saw yesterday, near that market, maybe we'll buy some headscarves.” “Headscarves?”
“And then you can show me where you work.”
“Mamma.”
“That's what I'd like, chonorroeja, I'd like a little stroll. I need to walk.”
By the time they reach the front courtyard of the apartment, Zoli is already wheezing. A few grackles fly out from the trees and make a fuss above them as they walk along the cracked pavement, her daughter busy with a mobile phone. There is talk, Z
oli knows, of the cancellations and registrations and mealtimes and a dozen other things more important than the last. It strikes Zoli that she has never once in her life had a telephone and she is startled when Francesca snaps hers shut and then open again, holds it out in front of them, clicks a button and shows her the photograph.
“Older than a rock,” Zoli says.
“Prettier though.”
“This young man of yours …”
“Henri.”
“Should I get the linden blossoms ready?”
“ Course not, Mamma! It gets so tiring sometimes. They just want you to be their Gypsy girl. They think during breakfast that you will somehow, I don't know …”
“Clack your fingers?”
“I've gone through so many of them, maybe I should get an accountant.”
They sit in the sunshine awhile, happy, silent, then walk back arm-in-arm to Francesca's car, a beetle-shaped thing, bright purple. Zoli slides in the front seat, surprised, but gladdened, by the disorder. There are cups on the floor, papers, clothing, and an ashtray brimming with cigarette ends. It thrills her, the complicated promise of a life so different. On the floor, at Zoli's feet, she sees one of the colored fliers for the conference. She studies it as the car lurches forward, trying hard to figure out the wording. Finally her daughter says, as she shifts the gearstick: “From Wheel to Parliament: Romani Memory and Imagination.”
“A mouthful,” says Zoli.
“A good mouthful, though, wouldn't you say?”
“Yes, a good one. I like it.”
And she does like it, she thinks, it has force and power, decency, respect, all the things she has ever wanted for her daughter. The wheel on the front of the flier has been distorted so that a Romani flag, a photograph of an empty parliament, and a young girl dancing appear through it. The edge of the flier is blurred, distorted, and the colors are lively. She bends down, picks it up, knows her daughter feels heartened. She flips it open and sees a series of names, times, rooms, a schedule for dinners and receptions. She will not, she thinks, go to any of these.
In the flier there are photographs of speakers, one a Czech woman with high cheekbones and dark eyes. The thought of it gaffs Zoli a moment—a Czech professor, a Rom—but she does not let on, she closes the flier, clenches at a bump in the road, and says: “I can't wait.”
“If you speak I could arrange something, on gala night, maybe, or the last night.”
“I'm not made for galas, Franca.”
“One time you were.”
“I was once, yes, one time.”
The car winds out to the suburbs of Paris and in the distance she can see a number of small towers. She recalls the time she stood on the hill with Enrico, overlooking the landscape of
Bratislava. She feels, tenderly, the touch of him, inhales his smell, and sees—she does not know why—the ends of his trousers napping in the wind.
“This is where you work?”
“We've a clinic out here.”
“These people are poor,” says Zoli.
“We're building a center. We've got five lawyers. There's an immigration hotline. We get a lot of Muslims. North Africans. Arabs too.”
“Our own?”
“I have a project going in the schools in Saint Denis, one in Montreuil as well. An art thing for Romani girls. You'll see some of the paintings later, I'll show you.”
They park the car in the shadows of the towers. Two young boys roll a car tire along a pavement. The ancient games don't change, thinks Zoli. A number of men stand brooding against the gray metal of a shuttered shop, brightened with graffiti. A cat stands high-shouldered and alert in the shop doorway. An older boy hunches down into his jacket, aims a kick at the cat, lifts it a couple of feet in the air, but it lands nimbly and screeches off. The boy raises the flap of his jacket and then his head disappears into the cloth.
“Glue,” says Francesca.
“What?”
“He's sniffing glue.”
Zoli watches the young man, breathing at the bag, like the pulse of a strange gray heart.
A thought comes back to her: Paris and its wide elegant avenue of sound.
They link arms and Francesca says something about the unemployment rate, but Zoli doesn't quite hear, watches instead a few shadows appear and disappear on the high balconies of the flats. She smoothes down the front of her dress as they walk across a stretch of scorched grass towards the door of a low office building propped on cinder blocks. The door is locked with a metal bar. Francesca flips out a key and fumbles at the lock, opens it, and the door swings open when the metal bar is pressed. Inside there is a row of small cubicles with a number of people working in them, mostly young women. They raise their heads and smile. Her daughter calls for a security guard at the far side of the cabin to go and lock the outside door.
“But how do we get out?” asks Zoli.
“There's another door. He guards that one, and we lock the front one.”
“Oh.”
She hears the clicking of computer keyboards die down and sees a number of people rising from their desks, their heads popping above the low corkwood walls.
“Hi, everyone!” shouts her daughter. “This is my mother, Zoli!”
And before she can even take a breath there are a half dozen people around her. She wonders what she should do, if she should hold her dress and bow, or whether she might have to kiss them in the French way, but they extend their hands to shake hers and it seems that they are saying how nice it is to finally meet her, finally like a very small blade between her shoulders, she intuits it from the Italian, and she hardly knows in what language to speak back. They crowd her and she feels her heart going way too fast. She looks around for her daughter, but can't find her, in the faces, how many faces, Lord how many faces, and the word eiderdown slides across her mind, she does not know why, she feels her knees buckle, she is on a road, she is around a corner, but she catches herself, shakes her head, returns, and suddenly her daughter is there, holding her aloft, saying: “Mamma, let's get you some water, you're pale.”
She is brought across to a brown swivel chair. She leans back in it: “I'm all right, it's just been a long journey.”
And then she wonders, as she takes the glass of water, in which language she has said this, and what, if anything, it has meant.
“This is my cubicle,” says Francesca.
Zoli looks up to see photographs of herself and Enrico, standing in the valley on a summer afternoon. She reaches out to touch his face, dark with sun. There is also one of Francesca as a child of eight, a kerchief on her hair, standing outside the millhouse, the turn of the wheel slightly blurred. Did we really live this way? she wonders. She wants to ask the question aloud, but nothing comes, and then she snaps herself back, pinches her wrist, and remarks how nice the office is, though clearly it is a temporary structure, cramped, leaky, tight.
“What were you saying about eiderdowns, Mamma?” I m not sure.
“You're pale,” Francesca says again.
“It's just a little hot in here.”
Her daughter clicks on a small white fan and directs it at Zoli's face.
“I have always had some paleness,” says Zoli, and she means it as a joke, but it's not a joke, nobody gets it, not even her own daughter. She reaches forward and turns the fan off, and can feel Francesca's warm breath on her cheeks, can hear her saying: “Mamma, maybe I should take you home.”
“No, no, I'm fine.”
“I'll just make some phone calls.”
“You go ahead, chonorroeja.”
“You don't mind? It's just a few calls, that's all. A couple of other things and then I'm all yours.”
“Headscarves,” says Zoli for no reason that she can recognize or discern.
When they emerge through the back door, there is a group of young boys swinging along, carrying a giant radio on their shoulders. They wear baseball caps turned backwards and wide baggy trousers with brightly colored shoes. The beat of the
song, loud and jarring, is not entirely foreign and Zoli thinks that she has heard it somewhere before, but perhaps all songs come around to the same song, and she wishes for a moment that she could walk with the boys, over the hill of rubbish to the cluttered construction site, just to figure out where exactly she has heard it before.
“Drive me around, Franca,” she says.
“But you're tired.”
“Please, I want to drive around.”
“You're the boss,” says her daughter, and it's meant as something sweet, Zoli knows, though it comes out barbed and strange-sounding. They round the back of the makeshift cabin and her daughter stops short. “Oh, shit,” she says as she leans over the hood of the car, pulls back the windscreen wipers. “They took the rubber,” she says. “They use them for catapults. That's the fourth time this year. Shit!”
A pebble lands at the back of the car and rolls on the tar.
“Get in, Mamma.”
“Why?”
“Get in! Please.”
Zoli settles in the front seat. Her daughter leans against the car, her breasts against the window, and Zoli can hear her talking urgently into the phone. Within moments the security guard is out, his radio crackling. Francesca points at a number of children scampering away in different directions. The security guard bends down to Zoli's window: “I'm very sorry, Madame,” he says in a broad African accent, then walks wearily towards the construction site.
“Can you believe that?” says Francesca. “I'm going to get you out of here.”
“I want to see it.”
“What is there to see, Mamma? It's not exactly the valley. Sometimes the gendarmes won't even come in here. There's a few vigilante groups now, they keep it quieter. Mamma, don't you think—I shouldn't have brought you out here, I'm sorry.”
“And where are ours? ”
“Ours?” Yes, ours.
“Block eight. There's a few out near the highway too. They've built little shelters for themselves. They come and go.”
