Colum McCann - Zoli

Even when the bird hits her in the back of the head she does not turn.

Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. All that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, allowed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again? Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hell's fire on them, they will not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I will not bow a second time, no.

She rounds the corner of the theater, beyond the ironwork fence, past the dead winter gardens. In the tenements, gnarled women stare out from behind high windows, their bodies lost to brickwork. At a roadblock she stops cold: four troopers stand scanning the street, billyclubs banging into their hands. Traffic passes by in a muted rumble. Some pedestrians are waved through, raw-looking girls in headscarves and soiled white uniforms. Zoli bends to adjust her sandals, accustomed now to the mess of her feet. She waits until the troopers put their hands up in front of a dark automobile and lean in either window, billy-clubs prodding. Breathe softly. Easy. No sudden movement. Beyond the roadblock she goes, careful not to glance at them.

A voice: “Hey, you.”

A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice full of snarl: “Where to, Auntie?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Just past the market a little way, Comrade.”

“That's nowhere?”

“Just up the road a way.”

“Identification.”

She unties the knots, hikes the zajda from her back and deliberately sifts through the bundle. “Shit,” he says, holding his nose. The toe of his boot stamps down hard on the cloth. “Go on, woman, out of here.”

The tin cup punches at her spine when she lifts the bundle. Shit on you too, she thinks. Who are you to say I'm filthy? Who are you to ask where I am going? She turns the corner and spits into the gutter. Paris, you idiot, I am going to Paris. Do you hear me? Paris. She has no idea why the city comes to mind, but she strikes her fist against the left side of her chest. Paris. That's where I'm going. Paris.

At the top of the road she slows again, a stitch in her ribcage. A line of forgotten laundry is strung from one side of Galandrova to the other, the wet shirts moving in the wind as if waiting for men to inhabit them. Under the trees, beyond the warehouses, past the printing mill, she goes, staying close to the shadows. She can already smell the ink and hear the sound of the rollers-the fumes make her head reel momentarily.

Swann will be in there now, she thinks, printing government posters behind the blacked-out windows, his fingers stained, his shirt askew, the machines churning around him. We Salute Our Persecuted American Negro Brothers. Solidarity with Egypt. Ciechoslovakians for African Unity. We Must Struggle, Comrades, Against Ignorance and Illiteracy.

And the one with her face, changed slightly, no lazy eye: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

At the top of the stairs she grips the rail, pauses, walks briskly down the communal corridor. Cambering floorboards. Broken plaster. A faint smell of mold and dust. She walks high- toed, shushing her squelching sandals, turns the door handle, and backs carefully away as it swings on its creaking hinges.

It is a room tuned to Swann-the dark linoleum curling where it meets the wall, a half-empty pewter jug of old cucu on the bedside table, the windowframe rattling in the weather, Marx and Engels each in many different languages. Gramsci, Radek, Vygotsky. Some volumes with their spines taken off, others re-stitched. On a single wall hook hangs a ratty shirt, faded and anonymous. On the floor, orange peels curled and ambered with age. Three fire irons, but no fireplace. The huge pile of overcoats from Brno in the corner. Swann has set up a simple chair for looking out the small window onto the street, four stories below.

From the room above, transistor music filters down, muffled and worn, shot through with the hammering of steampipes.

She flips through the books open on the table-Dreiser, Steinbeck, Lindsay-and rifles through their Slovak equivalents, handwriting spidery and blotchy with ink. She pushes the books off the table in one quick sweep. They land cantered on the floor. Beneath the desk lie four containers from the printing mill. She yanks them out and turns them upside down. Pages and pages of Swann's work. Dozens of issues of Credo. A few obscure journals from Prague. Some letters. A book about Jack London. A collection of Mayakovsky's poetry. How many times have I heard that name, late at night when the two of them worked in the printing mill, the metal letters scattered all around them? Their laughter as they quoted the poems back and forth. The hollow of desire in my stomach, and another hollow, there, shame. I liked to watch him then, enjoyed it, it seemed so easy. The way he carried his body, the slope of his shoulders, the crackle of his voice. The lines going between him and Stränsky, chains, and, later still, the same with my songs, speaking them to one another, quoting them back and forth, taking them, bending them, praising them, making them theirs.

She rips another container out from under the table where it clangs against the leg. A sudden pop of glass. Zoli wheels around but the window is intact and there is nobody at the door, no sound along the corridor. Losing my mind. Imagining things. She turns again and feels a coldness run along her fingers. She looks down, perplexed. Her nails and fingers are stretched out, blue, and for a moment she looks at her hand as if it can't possibly be hers. She rights the fallen inkwell and picks up the pieces of glass scattered near the radiator. The dark liquid gullies in the gap between the floorboards and the hissing pipe.

Zoli wipes her hand on the floorboard and the wood streaks with ink. Her thumbprints on the cardboard, the table, the books themselves. She empties the third and fourth containers into the middle of the floor. Yet more journals and translations, nothing else. She looks up at the sad petals of green wallpaper hanging just below the ceiling. A great pain in her eyeballs, like the pressure of swimming in deep water. Easing herself up from the floor, she catches her finger on a stray piece of inkwell glass. She sucks the splinter out, the ink heavy at the end of her tongue. Stränsky, she remembers. Budermice. A cold thread pulls the length of her spine.

She kicks over the table and then she spots, against the wall, a black cardboard trunk with metal latches. Inside, the poems are neatly stacked on top of each other, tied with thick elastic bands, in phonetic Romani and Slovak both. The newer poems are crisp and straight-edged but the older ones have yellowed over the years. So be it. Soon they will be dust.

She hunkers over the suitcase. All the dates, towns, fields, and settlements where they were recorded have been carefully labeled. By what is broken, what is snapped, I create what is required. When the axe comes to the forest the handle doesn't say I am home. The road is long with sorrow, everywhere twice as wide. They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. They are, she realizes, the first thing she has read since the judgment.