by Colum McCann
“Block eight, then.”
“It's not a good idea, Mamma.” Please.
Francesca shifts the car into gear and drives past the shuttered shops, pulls up at a series of yellow bollards. She points across a gray courtyard at the buildings, six stories high, where laundry is strung from balconies and shattered windows are patched with thick gray tape.
Zoli watches a tiny girl running through the courtyard, carrying a folded red paper flower stuck on the end of a coat-hanger. The girl picks her way across the gloom, past the hulk of a burned-out van, and begins to climb a set of black railings. She twirls the coathanger above her head. The folded flower takes off and she jumps and catches it in midnight.
“How many live here, Franca?”
“A couple of hundred.”
The figure of an enormous woman looms out onto a balcony. She leans over the railing—the fat of her arms wobbling—and screams at the little girl. The child darts into the shadow of the stairwell, pauses, flicks her wrist, and the paper flower takes off again in the air, and then she is swallowed by darkness. Zoli feels as if she has seen her before, in some other place, some other time, that if she spends long enough she will recognize her.
The girl appears on the top balcony, where she skips along and is suddenly dragged into the doorway.
“I'm sorry, Mamma.”
“It's okay, love.”
“We try to help as much as possible.”
“Go ahead, horse, and shit,” says Zoli, and the engine catches and the car pulls away.
By the motorway Zoli catches sight of the camp, strung out along a half-finished piece of road. The doors of the caravans are open and four burnt-out vans stand nearby, their front bonnets open. Three barechested men are bent over one engine. A teenage boy drags a stick in the dirt; behind him, a wake of pale ash. Some older men sit on chairs, like stone figures quarried. One of them dabs at his mouth with a flap end of shirt. Smoke rises from sundry fires. An array of shoes are strung on a telephone wire. Tires lie strewn around an upended wheelbarrow.
They pass in a raw, cold silence.
Zoli stares out at the blur of the cars, barriers, low bushes, the quick whip of white lines on the road.
“Who are all these people tonight?”
“Mamma?”
“At the conference, who are they?”
“Academics,” says Francesca. “Social scientists. There are Romani writers now, Mamma. Some poets. One is coming all the way from Croatia. There are some brilliant people about these days, Mamma. The Croatian's a poet. There's a man from the University of—”
“That's nice.”
“Mamma, are you okay?”
“Did you see that wheelbarrow?”
“Mamma?”
“Someone should turn it the right way up.”
“We'll be home soon, don't worry.”
In the apartment she falls asleep quickly, hugging the pillow to her chest. She wakes in the afternoon, the room silent. In the adjacent bathroom she drinks deep from the cold-water tap. She dresses and lies on the bed with her hands on her stomach. She could stay like this, she thinks, for quite a while, though she would need a view, maybe a chair, or some sunlight.
In the early afternoon Henri comes breezing through the door. He stops at the sight of her, as if he ‘d forgotten she ‘d be there. He is dressed in crisp white trousers and a light blue shirt. He clamps a phone to his ear, smiles broadly, blows her an air-kiss. Zoli has no idea what to do with the gesture. She nods back at him. This is his room, she thinks, these are his shirts, his cupboard, his photo frames, one of which she herself inhabits.
In the bathroom, she sprinkles some water on her face and readies herself for the living room. She is glad to hear the sound of Francesca's voice, from the kitchen, talking about some catering accident. Henri, it seems, is on the lookout for a band of musicians, drunk somewhere and due to play at tonight's opening tonight.
“Scottish,” he shouts into the phone, “they're Scottish, not Irish!”
Across the room Francesca winks at her, circling her hand in the air as if to hurry her phone call along. In the background the television is on, mute. Zoli sits at the coffee table and flips open the photographs of India. The dead along the Ganges. A crowd in front of a temple. She turns a page as Henri begins clicking his fingers frantically, first at Francesca, then at Zoli. “My God, my God, oh, my God!” he says as he slams the phone down and turns the volume of the television up high. On the screen he appears tight and nervous. The camera sweeps away from him to a group of young girls in traditional costume, dancing. The screen flashes with the title of the conference, then back to the dancing girls once more.
Francesca sits on the couch beside Zoli and when the report is finished she takes her mother's hand and squeezes it.
“Well, did I foul it up?” says Henri, combing back his hair with his fingers.
“You were perfect,” says Francesca, “but you might have been better if you'd taken off that straitjacket.”
“Hmmr?”
“Just joking.”
Mother and daughter lean into each other, hands clasped. Light slides through the curtains and seems to spread itself out at their feet.
“Well, you might have just loosened it a little,” Francesca says, and then she lays her head on Zoli's shoulder and both of them laugh together as one.
“Well, I think I did just fine.”
He turns on his heels, stomps back to the kitchen.
The two women sit, foreheads touching. It seems to Zoli the perfect moment, unbidden, unforced. She would like to freeze it all here, rise up, leave her daughter on the couch, in the warmth of laughter, walk through the apartment, pick up her shoes at the door, stroll down the stairs, through the quiet streets, and leave all of Paris frozen in this one moment of strange beauty, floating through the city on the only moving thing in the world, the train, heading towards home.
Zoli showers by sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it. The water mists her hair. She hears stirrings in the bedroom, the fast shuffle of feet, the quick closing snap of the door. Henri's voice is harried, looking for his cufflinks. She can hear Francesca insisting that he hurry up and leave. There is silence from Francesca and then a long sigh.
Zoli closes her eyes and allows the water to fall along her body.
The front door closes with more than its usual noise and then she hears a gentle knocking on the bathroom door.
“Coast is clear, Mamma.”
They dress together in the bedroom. Zoli keeps her back turned though she catches a glimpse of her daughter in the corner of the mirrored armoire, the skin taut at her waist, the brown length of her leg. Francesca wiggles into a blue dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes.
Zoli leans against the armoire, closes her eyes to the reflection: “Maybe I should skip it, chonorroeja, I'm a little tired.”
“You can't skip it, Mamma, it's the opening night.”
“I feel a bit dizzy.”
“It's nothing to worry about, I promise.”
“I could just stay here. I'll watch for Henri on the TV.”
“And die of boredom? Come on, Mamma!”
Her daughter fumbles in a drawer, then stands behind Zoli and drapes a long necklace over her throat. “It's an old Persian piece,” she says, “I found it in the market in Saint Ouen. It wasn't expensive. I want you to have it.”
Francesca's hand touches, soft, against the pulse of her throat.
“Thank you,” says Zoli.
On the drive over—through a maze of highways and overpasses—Francesca drums on the wheel, saying how it was nearly impossible to find a hotel for the conference. “We had to drop the word Romani and change it to European, just so they'd let us in.” She laughs and wipes a smudge from the windscreen with the end of her shawl. “European memory and imagination! Imagine! And then we had to put the word back in, of course, for the flier, so the hotel tried to pull out. We can't have Gypsies, they said. We had to thre
aten a lawsuit and then the prices rose, we almost had to cancel. Can you believe that?”
The car loops in front of the hotel, palm-fronted, glassy, glossed over with a high cheapness.
“And they wanted to know if there'd be any horsecarts!” She unbuckles her seat belt before the car stops, laughs hard, and hits the steering wheel and, mistakenly, the horn, so that the car seems to arrive angrily at the curb. She flips open the seat belt across her body: “Academics on Appaloosas! I mean, what century are we living in? ”
Zoli hears birdsong and it takes a moment for her to realize that it is being piped through loudspeakers. So much the world changes, so much it stays the same. She passes through the revolving doorway, treading slowly so that for a moment the electronic door almost hits the back of her ankle. She inches forward and the door goes with her and she feels as if she is moving through a millwheel.
“I hate those doors,” says Francesca as she guides Zoli along the corridor, past a series of small signs, to where a giant version of the flier sits outside a large brown-paneled conference room.
Zoli recognizes some faces from Francesca's workplace, their wide-open smiles, and indeed a few of her own—a Rom always knows—she can tell in the swirl of faces, the eyes, the quick glances, the happy grasp of shoulders. My language, she thinks. She can hear it in snatches, like a bird in a room, one corner to the other. It feels as if air has entered her legs. She sways. A glass of water is thrust in her hand.
Zoli sips the water and feels a flush of emptiness. Why the fuss? Why the worry? Why not be back in the valley, watching the sun sink beneath the windowframe?
Across the hallway she sees Henri pumping hands with a tall man in a banded white hat.
“That's the poet,” whispers Francesca. “And across there, that's one of our big donors, I'll introduce you later. And that girl's from Paris-Match, a reporter, isn't she gorgeous?”
All the faces seem to blur into one. Zoli wishes for anger but can't dredge it up. She wants to reach out and grasp whatever she can find, a fencepost, a rosebush, a rough wooden railing, her daughter's arm, anything.
“Mamma?”
“Yes, yes, I'm fine.”
A bell rings and Francesca guides her along the corridor into the ballroom where circular tables have been arranged with shining cutlery and folded napkins.
Laughter sounds through the hall, but a gradual silence descends at the sound of knives tinkling against glass. A speaker stands up at a podium, a tall Swedish man, and his speech is translated into French. Zoli is lost, but happily so, though every now and then her daughter leans across and whispers the context of the speech in her ear—a sharp sense of our own experience, memory as a funnel, understanding Romani silence, no access to public grievance, the lack of preservation, the implicit memory at the heart of all things. They seem like such large words for small times, and Zoli allows them to wash over her as applause ripples through the room.
She watches her daughter walk onstage, swishing up in her beautiful blue dress, to give a brief welcoming speech in Romani and French both, and to outline the three days of conference, the Holocaust, the Devouring, Lexical Impoverishment, Cultural Values in Scottish Balladry, Police Perception of Belgian Roma, Economic Stratification, and, at the core, Issues of Romani Memory. How proud she is, she says, to see so many scholars, and so much interest at last: “We will not be made to stay at the margins any longer!” A great cheer goes up from the tables, and there is talk then of names and sponsors and donors and although Zoli has begged her not to mention her name she does so anyway, and it feels as if the room has hushed and the air has been sucked out to fill the space. There is a brief round of applause, brief, thank God, and no spotlight. Henri grabs her hand and squeezes it, and really all she wants now is to be back in the apartment, lying on the bed with her hands folded across her stomach, but it means so much to Francesca, all of this, she must remain, stand side by side with her daughter, and what does it matter anyway? It is such a small thing to give. She feels a small shame at the walls of her heart. I should stand and applaud her. I should sing out her name. All I have been is small against this. Petty, foolish, selfish. Zoli hikes the hem of her dress and stands, applauds as her daughter comes down the steps on her high heels, a beaming smile, a triumph.
They nestle in to one another. This is what I have, thinks Zoli. This is my flesh and blood.
Onstage the Scottish musicians begin to break the skin of the evening and the music fills the room—mandolin, guitar, fiddle. Laughter sounds out all around and movement blurs the hall. Waiters. Hotel staff. Tall men with leather patches on their sleeves.
Zoli leans back in her chair, touches her throat, and is surprised by the feel of the new necklace against her skin. She barely remembers putting it on. How long, she wonders, since she wore something like this? She closes her eyes to Enrico. He strides up the hillside, towards the mill. His coat is thrown off his shoulders before he even enters. He kicks the mud off his boots and closes the door.
Go, violin, she thinks, go.
The pulse of the music rises. Under the table, she releases one foot from its shoe. The air feels cool against her toes. She lifts off the second shoe and stretches backwards and feels a light tapping at her shoulder. A voice from behind. Her name. She turns in the chair and fumbles to get the shoes back on her feet. Her name again. She stands. He, the visitor, is fleshy, wiry-haired, mid-forties or so—something about him open and full, a wide smile on his face. He stretches out his hand, plump and soft.
“David Smolenak,” he says. “From Presov.”
The air around her suddenly compresses.
“I do have the right person, don't I? Zoli Novotna?”
She stares at the row of pens in his waistcoat pocket.
“Are you Zoli Novotna?”
It is the first time she has heard Slovak spoken in many years. It sounds so acutely foreign now, out of place, dredged up. She has, she thinks, been transported elsewhere, her body playing games, her mind tripping her up.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Did I get the wrong person?”
She scans the room and sees the rows of faces at table after table, animated with music. She stammers, shakes her head, then nods, yes and no.
“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”
“I'm here with my daughter,” she says, as if that might account for her whole life.
“It's a pleasure,” he says.
She wonders what pleasure it could possibly be, and feels a flush of heat at her core.
“Presov?” she says, as she catches the edge of the table.
“Would you have a minute, maybe?” he asks. “I'd love to talk to you. I read your book. I found a copy in a secondhand store in Bratislava. It's amazing. I've been to the settlements, Hermanovce, places like that. They're quite a sight.”
“Yes,” she says.
He balls up his fist, coughs into it, and says: “You're hard to keep track of.”
“Me?”
“I ran into you first when I was reading some articles about other writers, Tatarka, Bondy, Stränsky, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, and it feels to her as if all of the windows have been closed all at once.
“I didn't know you were going to be here,” he says, almost stuttering. “I assumed …” He laughs the sort of laugh designed to fill spaces. “If it wasn't for Stepän, I wouldn't have known anything.”
He lights a cigarette and moves his hand in a coil of blue smoke. Zoli watches the smooth trajectory of the cigarette to his lips, and the movement of his hands in the air, the quick fingers. It is as if the words come out in odd streaks from his mouth—talk of Slovakia, the plight of the Roma, what it means now to European integration, and suddenly he is in Bratislava, he is talking of a towerblock called the Pentagon, graffiti in the stairwells, dealers in the dark shadows—what sort of dealers? she wonders—and something about an exhibition, about Stränsky's poems being resurrected, a strange word, she thinks, Stränsky would not
like it, no, the very thought of him billowing through the gardens at Budermice, resurrected.
The journalist touches her elbow and she wants to say, No, please leave me alone, leave me be, I am in a garden, I am walking, I am not where you think I am, I am gone, but he is off again on a tangent about a poem, one of her old songs, something about the trunk of a linden tree. He was searching out Stränsky, he says, and discovered Credo, and then a chapbook, they were odd, these poems, rare, beautiful, in a dusty back issue, and when he went searching for the book he was told it could be bought in the secondhand shops, there was a small cult around it, that she is seen as a voice, a new voice from old times, and he has been looking, searching, digging, and then he says the name again, Stepan, how he helped out when he finally got in touch with him. He crushes the cigarette into a saucer on the table. The smoke rises and she watches it curl. Stepan, the journalist says yet again, and then he mentions something about a photograph taken at the piano of the Carlton Hotel, the clarity of it, the beauty, and she wants more than anything just to lean over and to pour water on the smoldering cigarette, to extinguish it, but the more she watches it the more the smoke rises in stutters.
“Swann?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Stephen Swann?”
“Yes, of course,” he says.
Zoli drags the chair across the carpet, lowers herself into it. She reaches for a glass of water, puts it to her lips. She does not know whose it was, yet she turns it a half-circle and takes a sip. Taboo to drink from someone else's glass, but the water feels immediately cool at the back of her throat.
On the far side of the room a pale face comes forward into the light.
“In the reception,” the journalist says, or seems to say, but his voice feels blown sideways, past her, beyond. It is as if there is a rush of air at her ears, the words make no sense, they are just bits and pieces. The journalist leans forward, earnest and podgy-eyed, his breath stale with cigarette smoke: “I met him today.”
He goes to his knees in front of her, arm on her chair, and she can feel the weight of his other hand on her wrist.
