Colum McCann - Zoli

Yet what was once funny turned out to be inevitable; what was once strange was, now, finally, true.

Zoli feels as if she is carrying the sandy-haired Englishman on her back. Impossible to shuck him. She wonders how long she might walk before the weight of him drags her down, again, to the ground. He told her once that she looked like a Russian poet he had seen in photographs: the dark eyes, high forehead, her hair swept back, her tall body, her complicated stare. He brought her to the National Library and showed her the poet, Akhmatova, though she could see no resemblance. She had always thought herself dark, simple, black, yet in the photos the Russian woman looked white, heavy-eyed, and beautiful. Swann read to her a line about standing as witness to the common lot. He had asked her if she would marry him and she was stunned by the simplicity of his plea. She had loved him then, but he did not know the extent of the impossible. In the printing mill, at the end, he was not able to hold her gaze. He had not printed the poems yet, but she knew he would. What else had she expected? Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important. Wasn't it Swann who told her once about a bird, a glukhar, that went deaf with its own mating calls? Both of us with that inextinguishable need to make noise, she thinks. If only I could have known. If only I could have seen.

Zoli wonders now if Swann is searching for her now. If he is, she thinks, he will not find me. He will seek and seek. He will wander the ends of the earth and return with nothing, not even a name.

Zoli clambers over a gate, down a hill, through a muddy field, where some irrigation pipes are laid out on the ground. She tries to figure a way to make it across the field: a maze of tubes and muck with a barbed-wire fence at the far end. The vast concrete sleeves have sunk a little in the mud, and the only way to cross is to walk along the top of the pipes, arms held wide for balance. She slips, her leg in the mud up to her ankle. She lifts it out noisily, cleans her sandal on the rough edge of the pipe, kneels down into the opening and looks into the hol-lowness of it, imagines her breath traveling all the way around the field, circling and returning, added to by the grasses and the muck.

“Hey, Gyp.”

A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hill, four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.

The other children top the hill and call back to him. He lets out a long arc of spit which lands a meter in front of her, then turns and gallops up the slope.

They will bring back the adults, thinks Zoli. Cite me for trespassing. Bring a sergeant to arrest me. Fingerprint me. Find out who I am. Take me back to the city. Place me in front of my people again, shame me, humiliate me. Banish me once more.

She scrambles across the pipes and up the hill, each step a half-step backwards into the last.

A wooden stake scrapes her ankle and she stops in midfur-row, looks up, catches sight of a wooden roof. So here I am. I have walked all day and have come full circle, and am back in the vineyard once again. I could just as easily be anywhere else. I have spent another day walking, and what else is there to do? Nothing else. If there has been a pencil beneath me it would have made great, useless circles.

She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the small round scorch mark of her fire from the night before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a small light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swollen terribly.

The whole of her right cheek is puffy, her neck bloated, her right eye almost shut. I must deal with the tooth now. Be done with it. Pull it out.

In a corner she finds a single boot, the lace still intact. It is against all custom to touch the boot, another small betrayal, unclean, taboo, but she yanks at the lace until it pulls through, scattering small flakes of dried mud. She rubs the lace in her fingers to warm it, holds it beneath the dripping pipe to moisten the fabric. She makes a loop in the string, reaches into her mouth, hooks the tooth and draws in a sharp breath, yanks hard upwards, tries not to dry-heave. She feels the roots being dragged up from the bottom of her jawbone. Eyes full of tears. Blood falling now from her mouth to her chin. She wipes it away, head to her shoulder, closes her eyes, hauls again. Darkness.

The tooth rises and tears and for a moment she sees little Woowoodzhi, feverish against a tree, a nail perfectly inserted between his handbones, and he is gone, then back again, feverish once more, and she tugs harder, his small face dissolving.

A sound rips through her jawbone like the tearing of paper, and the tooth lifts.

In the morning she feels for the gap with the edge of her tongue. The wound is large and she wonders if she should try to sear it shut, sterilize it with her lighter. She rises to rinse her mouth out in the trickle from the tap. She lifts the tooth from the sink, dark and rotten at its base, the roots clotted and fibrous.

On the wall above the sink, there is a perfect trapeze of light from the rising sun. She watches it crawl, like something breathing, until another long shadow passes within the box of light, and Zoli drops the tooth with a clank.

A farmer stands in the field outside, the rheumy-eyed dog at his heels. A face like a Hlinka guard: thick eyebrows and small eyes and a neck with skinfolds. A long burlap sack lies at his feet; a shotgun clasped alongside his leg. He taps the gun against his high rubber boots, then hitches it to his waist and steps forward, moves out of the range of the window.

Zoli hears the clicking of dog nails, the turn of a boot at the entrance. She waits for him to come in, push the door open, put the shotgun to her neck and take her while the dog watches. The same dog, she thinks, that nosed in my own filth. She slides to the floor, brings her knees to her chest, tries to hold her breath. No movement, no sound, and she goes to the doorway. Her fingers reach around the frame and she pushes it gently, waits for the click of the gun or the thud of his fist in her face. The door swings open further and she peers around the frame.

Small acts of kindness.

Outside, the farmer has left two bread rolls and a tin cup, half-filled with black tea. So what if others have drunk from it? I will drink it anyway. She picks it up and sips, and for a split second she wonders if it has, perhaps, been poisoned.

She drinks the rest quickly, tucks the tin cup into the pocket of her skirt, touches the bread against her lips and inhales its freshness.

From the window, the farmer and dog are nowhere to be seen. Zoli rips a chunk of the bread and puts it in her mouth, then tongues it into her gum to soak up the last of the blood. At the window, only the same emptiness of trees and vineyard. She wipes a coatsleeve across her brow. Her forehead is dry and un-fevered now, and in the shard of mirror her face has already begun to lose its swelling. Did I walk all day yesterday or did I just dream it? She digs deep in the fabric of her pocket, finds a pine nut and rolls it in her palm. In what sort of chance universe have I been brought back to a place where there is a waterpipe and a loaf of bread? In what curious conjunction of fever and road have I been allowed such generosity?