Colum McCann - Zoli

At the mill Stränsky had set up a small room where, in between printing jobs, he often sat and read. The room had no ceiling, and so one could look up to the high roof of the mill and watch the pigeons flap from eave to eave. I lay down on the green army bed he kept in the corner, and the noise of the machines rocked me to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept, but I woke disoriented, not even sure what day it was.

“Put your socks on for crying out loud,” said Stränsky from the doorway.

Behind him, a little confused, stood a tall young woman.

She was in her early twenties, not beautiful, or not traditionally so anyway, but the sort of woman who stalled the breath. She held herself at the door nervously, as if she were a bowl of water that would not be allowed to spill. Her skin was dark and her eyes were as black as any I'd ever seen. She wore a man's dark overcoat, but beneath it a wide skirt with a tripled-over hem: it appeared she had patched two or three skirts together and rolled the hems over each other. Her hair was tied back beneath a kerchief, and two thick plaits hung down either side of her face. She wore no earrings, no bracelets, no jangling necklaces. I rose from under the covers and slipped on my wet socks.

“Forgotten your manners, young scholar?” said Stränsky as he pushed past me. “Meet Zoli Novotna.”

I extended my hand for her to shake, but she did not take it. She stepped beyond the threshold only when Stränsky beckoned, and went to the table where he had already taken a bottle from his jacket.

“Comrade,” she said, nodding at me.

Stränsky had found Zoli, by chance, outside the Musicians Union and he had been given permission, through one of the elders, to talk to her about her songs. They were a secretive bunch, the Gypsies, but Stränsky had always been able to comb people out of themselves. He spoke a little Romani, knew their customs, how and where to tread, and he was one of the few they trusted. They also owed him a couple of favors-during the national uprising, he had commanded a regiment that had a few Gypsy fighters, in the hills, and had, by all accounts, saved some of them with the aid of a few bottles of penicillin.

The afternoon returns to me now as a step back into what we all once believed: revolution, equality, poetry. We pulled up chairs to the table and sat for hours, the clock ticking away. Zoli kept her head slightly bent, her glass untouched in front of her. She rattled off a few verses of the older songs. The words were in Slovak, but there was a touch of wildness to them: she wasn't used to speaking them aloud, she ‘d always sung them. Her style was to quietly build layer upon layer until, by the end, the songs became sad and declamatory, tales of bitterness and treachery, the verses repeated over and over, like the falling and layering of so many leaves. When she was finished, Zoli locked her knuckles and stared straight ahead.

“Good,” said Stränsky, rapping on the table.

She looked upwards as a bird feather fell from the ceiling and spun silently down to the floor, then smiled as she watched the pigeons fly around the ceiling beams; some of the birds were darkened with ink.

“Do they get out?”

“Only to shit,” said Stränsky, and she laughed, picked the feather up, and, for whatever reason, put it in the pocket of her overcoat.

I didn't know it then, but there'd only ever been a few Gypsy writers scattered across Europe and Russia before, and never any who were part of the establishment. It was an oral culture, they had no books or written-down stories to speak of, they distrusted the unchangeable word. But Zoli had grown up with a grandfather who had taught her how to read and write, an extraordinary thing among her people.

Stränsky ran a journal, Credo, in which he was always trying to push the limits: he was known for publishing daring young Socialist playwrights and obscure intellectuals and anyone else who vaguely amplified his beliefs. I was there to translate whatever foreigners he could get his hands on: Mexican poets, Cuban Communists, pamphlets by Welsh trade unionists, anyone whom Stränsky saw as a fellow traveler. Many of the Slo-vakian intellectuals had already moved north to Prague, but Stränsky wanted to stay in Bratislava where, he said, the heart of the Revolution could be. He himself wrote in Slovak against the idea that a smaller language was useless. And now, with Zoli, he thought he'd come upon the perfect proletarian poet.

He clapped his hands and clicked his fingers: “That's it, that's it, that's it.” Leaning back in his chair, he twirled the tiny peninsula of hair in the center of his forehead.

Zoli improvised as she went along-he'd ask her to repeat a certain verse so he could transcribe it, and the verse would shift and change. It seemed to me that her words contained simple, old-fashioned sounds that others had forgotten or didn't know how to use anymore: trees, pooh, forest, ash, oak, fire. Stränsky's hand rested on his leg, where he held a glass of vodka. He bounced his knee up and down, so when he finally stood up and went to the window there were dark stains on his overalls. Late in the afternoon, when darkness lengthened across the floor, Stränsky extended a pencil. Zoli took it gingerly, put the end of it against her teeth, and held it there, as if it were describing her.

“Go ahead,” said Stränsky, “just write it down.”

“I don't really create them on the page,” she said.

“Just scribble the last verse, go on.”

Stränsky tapped his knuckles on the edge of the table. Zoli turned the thread on a button. Her lip was bitten white. She lowered her gaze and began to write. Her penmanship was shabby and she had little idea about line breaks, capitalization, or even spelling, but Stränsky took the sheet and clutched it to his chest.

“Not bad, not bad at all, I can show this to people.”

Zoli pulled back her chair, bowed slightly to Stränsky, then turned to me and said a formal goodbye. Her kerchief had slipped back on her head and I noticed how pure the parting was in her hair, how dark the skin between two sets of darkness, how straight, how clean. She readjusted the scarf and there was a flash of white from her eyes. She stepped towards the door, and then she was gone, out into the street in the last of the light, under the trees. A few young men on a horsecart were waiting for her. She put her nose to the horse's neck and rubbed her forehead along the top of its spine.

“Well, well, well,” said Stränsky.

The horsecart went around the corner and away.

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck in my chest.

The next day Stränsky and I were invited to an air show for journalists on the outskirts of Bratislava: three brand-new Meta-Sokols, high-technology jets, were on display. Their noses were pointed westward. It was still a no-fly zone around Bratislava, and the pilots had been forced to drive the jets into the airfield on huge trucks, which had become bogged down and had to be pulled onto the field with ropes. Stränsky had been asked to write an article about the Slovak-born fighter pilots. He slinked around the machines with a general who lectured us earnestly about landing patterns, high-range radar, and ejector seats.

After the lecture, a young woman from the air force strode out to the planes. Stränsky nudged me: she had a stillness at her center that might have been called poise, but it wasn't, it was more like the tension that can be seen in tightrope walkers. Her blond hair was cut short, her body slim and winsome. He followed her up into the cockpit of one of the machines and they sat for a while, chatting and flirting, until she was called away. The journalists and dignitaries watched the thin sway of her as she climbed down. She reached up and helped Stränsky to the ground. “Wait,” he said. He kissed her hand and introduced me as his wayward son, but she blushed and shimmied off, with just one look over her shoulder-not at Stränsky, nor at me, but at the military jet stuck in the grass.