Colum McCann - Zoli

She crosses towards the sink and stacks the poems over the drainhole, rubs her thumb along the wheel of Petr's old lighter. The curl of Petr's thumb along it, broad, slow, bringing it to life. Pipesmoke curling out. Him watching Swann. The days slowly slipping away from him. The coughing. The thought that he would soon be gone, spirit. Wandering around, hiding, waiting for Swann, thinking of him, the feel of his fingers over my eyes.

The high flame singes her eyebrows and she steps back, lifts some of the pages from the sink and begins again with a smaller scatter of poems. They take easily. She uses a fork to prop up the edges of the pages, to air them underneath. She inhales the scent as the poems burn and curl. Small pieces of ash float and fall. Zoli toes them into the linoleum where they leave dark stains.

Outside, the city goes about in the cold-tramsound, bus screech, the rain slicing steadily on the windowpane. She looks down onto the alleyway below. A sudden strange thrill runs the length of her body. All the meetings, all the speeches, all the factory visits, the trains, the labor parades, the celebrations, they are gone now, all gone-and only this is mine, this alone, this burning. She turns back into the room and the smoke fills her nostrils, fragrant, taut, sweet. She lifts more poems out of the suitcase and burns them in ever larger groups, flames surviving on flames, yellow to red to blue.

My tooth, she thinks, with half a smile, the way the mute farmer carried my tooth away in the palm of his hand.

Zoli puts the lighter back in her dress pocket: the heat of it traveling through to her skin. She brushes back strands of hair from beneath her kerchief and touches something small behind her ear. A white pigeon feather. She plucks it out and lets it fall to the floor. The early afternoon seems now so far away. When the pigeon hit the back of her head she had wondered for an instant if it had recognized flight, even in death: and then she had judged the thought worthless, vain.

She closes her eyes and exhales long and hard, turns towards the door. “Shit,” she says.

The tapes.

She returns and scours the room. Two umbrellas, three cigarette lighters, a snuffbox, a bottle with a ship inside it, a small square of linen decorated with flowers, a series of Soviet pins, a dozen leather bookmarks, a samovar, an English kettle. How can one man have so many useless things? She finds the tapes in a cardboard box underneath his bed-they too are meticulously dated and stamped.

The first spool falls from her fingers, unravels across the floor, long and shiny, catching light in places, as if her voice is going into the corners.

Swann was always so careful to hold the microphone close to her lips when they were out on the road. It had bothered her-not his closeness, she had liked that, it had livened things in her, sent a shiver through her-no, what truly bothered her was the idea that her songs were being taken and put back together again by a machine. When he had played the recording to her it did not sound a bit like her, as if some other Zoli had climbed inside. It captured other sounds too, the tapping of a stick on the ground, the high strike of a match, the creak of a doorframe: it seemed almost ghostly to her; things that she had never noticed in real time had suddenly acquired a weight. She had written one night, by the light of the candle, that small rivers carted up drops as they were never seen before-it was one of her worst poems, even Swann had found it tame, he suggested that it bordered on the bourgeois.

To hell with him, she thinks, to hell, with his hands held in the air, his apology, his sharp face when I slapped him, as if he should have been surprised, his stuttering when we stood in the mill and said he had done all he could do, to hell and high rivers with him.

The tape spins out and she slices it with a kitchen knife, doubling the tape over and cutting it with one quick motion, like gutting a small animal.

Fifteen spools.

Outside, the sky grows steadily darker, winter lying down upon it. Zoli takes the last spool to the window and watches the tape unfurl from her fingers, to the ground, spinning and twisting in the wind and rain. A tail of it catches on the upcurrent and floats on the air.

There go my songs. Good riddance.

She flings the last spool and the disc sails across the courtyard, smacking into the building opposite. From the street below comes a shout and then the delighted shriek of a child. Zoli leans out the window to see a young girl pulling the tape behind her.

Just then, footsteps along the corridor. A tapping on the floor-a truncheon perhaps, or a cane. She looks around, spots the pile of overcoats, steps across the buckled floorboards, and covers herself. How ridiculous. Absurd. I should stand up and walk out, past him, without a word, without recognition. Fuck you, Swann. I will stroll down the stairs and disappear in front of your eyes. Look backwards and curse you. She shifts under the weight of the coats, but then there is the sudden thought of Swann not long ago, out on the road, when they found a children's piano, fixed the pedals with bands of steel, replaced the keys with maple wood. They hung it from the ceiling of her wagon with a giant hook, and Swann had walked behind while the piano played the road, every bump and curve, the microphone held out in front of him.

A turn of the door handle. Shoe studs on the nailheads, the hissing of the radiator valve, the strange clop of his feet. A cane, she thinks. He must be walking on a cane.

A small broken sound comes from his throat as he rummages through the room. A wooden lid is lifted and banged down hard again. Cupboard doors open and close. The mattress flops sadly to the floor. Swann says something in English, a hard guttural noise. She is gripped with a nausea, her fingers clenched, neck rigid. She recalls the feel of his hand against her hip, her back against the bark, the way he rolled her hair around his forefinger, the hard taste of him at the neck, the sweat, the ink. He closes the door with a firm snap.

At the window, she catches sight of Swann rounding the streetcorner, his sandy-haired form disappearing, one of his crutches thrown aside. A long string of tape catches his ankle as he goes, dragging it through the rain.

They were my poems. They belonged to me. They were never yours.

She turns, finds a photo of herself in the corner of his shaving mirror. She tears it into pieces. On the bed she notices an open rosewood box with a silver clasp. Around it, scattered documents, and a balled-up handkerchief. Zoli waits a moment, leans down, and lifts the wooden lid, finds a panel kiltered sideways: a false bottom. Underneath that, a gold watch.

Things, he said, cannot wait. They have to be made. What Swann foresaw was a world raised up in an immense arc and everyone beneath it, looking up in admiration. He wanted to take hold of all that was vague and equal and give it form. He constantly rubbed his hands over his scalp so that when he was in the printing mill his hair became the color of whatever poster he was printing. In the cafe he would sit unaware of people looking at him, streaks of yellow and blue and red under his cap, his hands almost entirely black. He was afraid that he didn't sound Slovak enough, but he gave everything to it, listened to the workers, developed the same accent, strode out with them under their banners. After a while his arguments grew more defined, with stronger edges. It was like watching a piece of wood being carved right in front of her eyes, and she had liked the surprise of it. Certain men in the kumpanija could sculpt a spoon, or a bowl, or a bear at their fingertips-with Swann, he would sometimes create an idea and then hold it out as if it were something she could touch.