Colum McCann - Zoli

“It's a mistake,” said Zoli. “It must be.”

“It's no mistake, Citizen. Can you not read?”

“I can read.”

“Then you must do what it says.”

Zoli stood up, tore the paper into pieces, stuffed it back into the woman's palm. It was an order to bring Woowoodzhi to the local mental institution.

“Please leave,” said Zoli.

“Just give me the child and there'll be no problems.”

Zoli spat at the woman's feet. A riffle of whispers went around the caravan. The woman blanched and reached for Zoli's arm, dug her fingers in: “The child needs proper care.”

Zoli backhanded her twice across the face. A cheer went up around the caravan.

Two hours later the troopers arrived but all the Gypsies were gone-they had disappeared without a trace.

Stränsky loved the story-the troopers arrived at the mill with an arrest warrant for Zoli and told us everything-and I had to admit it thrilled me too, but we had no idea where to find the kumpanija. We searched and found nothing, not even a rumor.

Without Zoli they were days of gnawing restlessness and gloom. Flocks of gulls argued above the Danube. I worked at the mill, attended a conference on Russian typography, then sat at home, books propped open on my chest-Mayakovsky, Dreiser, Larkin.

It was a full two months later, on a day of slanting sunlight, that Zoli arrived back. She looked different: a moving rawness. In the mill she stood amid the noise and the high clacking of machinery, inhaled the smell of grease and ink. I hurried across to greet her, but she leaned away from me.

“Where've you been?” asked Stränsky from the staircase.

“Here and there,” she said.

He repeated it and half-laughed, went up the staircase, and left us alone together.

She drew herself up to a height. I watched as she stepped towards the hellbox and searched through the old broken ingots, looked at all the backward letters, arranged them to form a song that she had composed in her mind, My grave is hiding from me, a quick and luminous poem where she said she felt locked like wood within a tree. She set the letters out on the counter and pressed her hands down on the hard metal. She said she could still feel bits of Woowoodzhi in her cuticles: he had died, she said, from a bout of influenza, contracted on the same night that the caravans were trying to escape.

“They killed him, Stephen.”

“Be careful, Zoli,” I said, looking around.

“I don't know what careful means,” she said. “What does careful mean? Why should I be careful?”

“You've seen the news?”

In her absence, Zoli had become something of a cult figure- the arrest warrant had been torn up by no less than the Minister of Culture himself. A new tomorrow was on the way, he said. Part of it would include the Roma. Zoli was the subject of a whole new series of editorials that professed she had been painting the old world so it could finally, at last, change. They saw her as heroic, the vanguard of a new wave of Romani thinkers.

One of her poems had been reprinted in a Prague-based university journal. Tapes of her singing were played again on the radio. The further away she was the bigger she had become. Now there was talk in government circles of allowing the Gypsies to halt, of settling them in government housing, giving them absolute power over their own lives. The idea of them living out in the forest had become bizarre and old-fashioned, almost bourgeois to the pure-minded. Why should they be forced to live out on the roads? The papers said they should be cut free from the troubles of primitivism. There would be no more Gypsy fires, only in the theater.

“Allow us to halt?” The chuckle caught in her throat.

She picked up a pigeon feather from the ground and let it fall from her fingers. “The troubles of primitivism}” Something in my spine went liquid. She left the mill with a bundle of papers under her arms. Down the road, she climbed onto a horse-cart which she operated on her own. She slapped the horse and it reared high for a moment, then clattered down onto the cobbles.

I walked alone down by the Danube. A soldier with a megaphone shouted me away from the bank. In the distance, Austria. Beyond that, all the places that young men had fought for, died for, millions of them, fed to the soil, and beyond that, it seemed to me, France, the channel, England, and the soot of my early years. It had been nine years since I arrived in Czechoslovakia, jittery and expectant. Someone had borrowed the jaunt from my step. I could feel it in the way I walked. So much of my revolutionary promise seemed to be slipping away, my hard grip on the world, but, still, it didn't seem possible that there would come a time when it would vanish completely.

Across the river the lights from the towers twinkled once and then went off. The streets were lifeless, cold-the only mystery was that I expected them to be otherwise.

“Don't sulk,” said Stränsky when I pushed open the door of the mill again. “She's only waking up. She's going to do something that'll stun us all, just you watch.”

That summer, in 1957, one of the few places we saw Zoli was the house at Budermice. It was set on parkland in the shadow of the Little Carpathian hills, a country mansion maintained by the Union of Slovak Writers. A long row of chestnut trees lined the lane. The driveway curled to a grand front entrance with marble steps. Several rooms on the top floor were kept locked and most of the bedrooms were dusty. Downstairs the union had burned the old furniture-too imperial, too bourgeois-so plastic chairs had been installed, hardtop counters, towering Russian prints. Stränsky managed to get the house for the whole summer-he hated anything that smacked of cronyism, but he saw it as a time for some serious creativity. He wanted us to finish a whole book with Zoli-there'd only been a chapbook, but now a real volume, he knew, would cement her reputation: he was convinced that she had a vision that would lift the Gypsies out of their quandaries.

The lawn sloped down to a stream that was conducted through a wooden pipe the size of a giant barrel. Here and there the wooden structure was pierced to irrigate the lawn. Water arced out into the grass and onto the well-tended paths. Even on clear summer nights it sounded as if it were raining outside.

Stränsky went walking with her every day-Zoli, in her skirts and kerchief and dark blouses, he in his white collarless shirts that made him look a little quixotic. They strolled past the fountains, looking as if they were whispering secrets to each other. She was at the height of her powers then, and they were working out patterns for her poems. Stränsky would come to me, clap his hands together and recite her lyrics. I had seldom seen a man so worked-up, burning high, wandering around the house, saying: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” A Steinway still sat in the main dining room, one of the last of the old artifacts, though the markings had been rubbed out. Stränsky raised the lacquered lid, sat on the stool, clinked his ring finger against the ivory, and denounced the empty elegance of art without purpose. He winked and then played “The Internationale.”

One night, from the staircase, Stränsky took a flying leap at the chandelier. It fell from the ceiling with a crash and he lay there stunned.

“Adoration's more fragile than rope,” he said, looking around, as if surprised.

Zoli came and sat beside him on the marble floor. I watched from the balcony above. Stränsky was half-smiling, looking at a small cut on his hand-a tiny bit of glass was stuck in his skin. She took his wrist and pinched the glass up from the folds in his hand. She hushed him and guided his finger to his mouth. Stränsky sucked out the sliver of glass.