Colum McCann - Zoli

Home from the docklands, he used to put a dark thumbprint on the bread in order that I would know where it came from.

From a young age I was hooked on the plot of my father's homeland. We sat together on crates in the coalshed searching the radio bands. In the laneway behind, my friends played football. My father spent hours trying to tune in to the long-wave broadcasts from Bratislava, Kosice, Prague, while the ball thumped against the wall. Only at odd moments did the weather allow the radio a crackle from the beyond-we leaned forward and our heads touched. He wrote it down and later translated for me. At night, my prayers were in his native tongue.

When the Second World War struck, it didn't seem at all unusual that he took off to join the partisans in the Czechoslo-vakian mountains-he said he wanted to become a medic and that he'd carry stretchers, that wars were useless and God was democratic, and, with that in mind, he'd return shortly. He left me his wristwatch and a copy of Engels in the Slovak language. I found out, years later, that he had become an expert with dynamite; his specialty was blowing up bridges. The news that he had died in an ambush came in a two-line telegram. My mother wilted away. She took me on a trip back to Donegal for a week, but for whatever reason it was not the same place that she had left behind. “Nobody lives where they grew up anymore,” she said to me shortly before she died.

I was made a ward of the state and spent the last two of my school years with the Jesuits in Woolton, walking around the edges of rugby fields in a gray V-neck sweater.

What I recall of growing up: redbrick houses, rough stones from the worked-out pit, shaved shoulders of sunlight on street corners, dockside cranes, penny sweets, gulls, confessionals, brushing gray frost from the bicycle seat. It was not exactly violins I heard when I stuck my head out the train window and bid Liverpool goodbye. I'd missed the war-a measure of luck and youth and a dose of cowardice. I went south to London where I spent two years on a scholarship, studying Slovak. I ran with the Marxists and mouthed off on the soapboxes of Hyde Park, to little success. My work was published intermittently, but mostly I sat at a small window that looked out beyond the half-open blinds at a dark wall and the faded edge of an Oval-tine advertisement.

I fell in love, briefly, with a beautiful young librarian, Cait-lin, from Cardiff. I bumped into her on a ladder, quite literally, while she was shelving a book by Gramsci, but our politics didn't match and Caitlin sent me packing with a note that her life was too dull for revolution.

In my flat, the skyline became a shelf of books. I wrote long letters to novelists and playwrights in my old man's country, yet they seldom wrote back. I was fairly sure the letters were being censored in London, but every now and then a reply fell on the welcome mat and I brought it down to the local teashop where, amid the stains and the day-old cakes, I opened it.

The replies was always terse and clean and to the point: I burned them in the ashtray with the tip of a cigarette. But then in 1948, after a burst of ink-spattered correspondence, I was on my way to Czechoslovakia to translate for a literary journal run by the celebrated poet Martin Stränsky, who wrote to say that he could well do with a new set of legs-would it be possible, he asked, to bring a few bottles of Scotch whisky in my bags?

In Vienna the small wooden huts of the Russian sector were warmed by single-bar electric heaters. The guards interrogated me over cups of black tea. I was passed from hut to hut and finally put on a train. At the Czechoslovakian border, some leftover fascist guards roughed me over, rifled through my suitcase, took the bottles, and threw me into a makeshift cell. My hands were tied and they beat the bottoms of my feet with sticks rolled in newspaper. I was accused of falsifying documents, but two weeks later the door opened to Martin Stränsky who seemed, at first, just a shadow. He said my name, lifted me up, put his sleeve in a cold bucket of water, and cleaned my wounds. He was, against expectations, a small man, tough and balding.

“Did you bring the booze?” he asked.

As a youngster he had been friends with my father in an illegal Socialist youth group, and now he ‘d come full circle; he ‘d been instrumental in the Communist coup and was well liked by those newly in power. He slapped my back, put his arm around me, and walked me beyond the tin-roofed sheds where he had already taken care of the last of my paperwork. The two guards who'd beaten me and taken the bottles were sitting handcuffed in the back of an open truck. One stared down at the truckbed but the other was moving his bloodshot eyes side to side.

“Oh, don't worry about them, Comrade,” Stränsky said. “They'll be all right.”

He kept a tight grip on my arm and helped me towards a military train. The white headlamps burned and a brand-new Czechoslovakian flag fluttered from the roof. We took our seats and I felt buoyed by the shrill whistle and the blast of steam. As the train chugged off, I caught a last glimpse of the handcuffed guards. Stränsky laughed and slapped my knee.

“It's not so serious,” he said. “They'll have a day or two in lockup to recover from their hangovers, that's all.”

The train jolted forward and we passed through rows oftall forest and low cornfields towards Bratislava. Pylons. Chimneys. Red and white railway barriers.

From Hlvanä Station, we walked along the tramtracks, down the hill towards the old town. It struck me as medieval, wiry, even quaint, but revolutionary posters were pasted on the walls and thumping music rose from loudspeakers. I still had a slight limp from my beating, but I skipped along in the light rain, carrying, of all things, a cardboard suitcase. Stränsky chuckled when it opened up-a nightshirt fell out and a long sleeve trailed the cobblestones.

“A nightshirt?” he laughed. “Two weeks of political reeducation for you.”

He clapped his arm around me. In a vaulted beerhall, full of drunks and hanging pottery, we clinked glasses for the Revolution and for what Stränsky called, as he looked out the window towards the street, other fathers.

In the winter of 1950 I was sick for quite a while. When the day came for me to leave hospital, the doctor signed me out, undiagnosed, and told me to go home to rest.

I lived in a worker's flat in the old part of town. The communal kitchen, on the first floor, ran with mice. Laundry was strung up and down the length of the corridor-boiler suits, overcoats, shirts eaten through with acid. The staircase quite literally swayed under my feet. When I got up to my tiny fourth-floor room, a patch of snow lay on the wooden floor. The concierge had forgotten to fix the smashed window- a week before, in a dizzy spell, I had fallen against the pane-and a cold wind blew through. I took my bedding to the only warm part of the room, where the poppet valve on the radiator hissed. In gloves and overcoat I curled up near the valve and slept. I woke coughing in the early morning. It had snowed heavily again during the night, and the floor was already covered in stray flakes. Around the radiator pipes was a patch of wet wood. The things I adored the most, my books, lay ranged on the shelves, so many different volumes that it was impossible to see the wallpaper. Three translations awaited me-chapters from Theodore Dreiser, Jack Lindsay, and an article by Duncan Hallas-but the thought of delving into them filled me with dread.

I had bought a secondhand pair of boots, stamped by a Russian bootmaker, and, although they leaked, I liked them, they seemed to have a history. I went out into the cold streets, stepping over gutters and cobblestone, past the barracks, beyond the checkpoint.