Colum McCann - Zoli

He suggested once that she always carry a book around to defeat their notion of her. Even if she did not read it, the others would see it. That was enough, he said. Just let them see you. Astound them by writing it all down.

As if books could stop the massacres. As if they could be somehow more than harps or violins.

From the arch of the doorway hangs a red velvet rope-pull, the tasseled end cold to the touch. A woman in an embroidered dress answers, her feet in slippers, hair in a blue string net. She leans out the door, looks down the length of the alleyway, and in one quick movement pulls Zoli inside.

“Yes?”

“I have some things.”

“I do not trade,” says the woman.

A single shaft of light shines through the dark of the small house, onto a cupboard lined with large china plates.

“My grandfather was here many times,” says Zoli. “Stanislaus. You knew him by that name.”

“I've no idea who you're talking about.”

“It was a different place then, but you knew him by that name.”

The woman takes Zoli by the shoulders, turns her around, stares down at her feet.

“I have good horse teeth too.”

“What did you say?”

“I am here to sell my things. That is all.”

“You people will be the death of me.”

“Not before you have everything we own.”

“You've an errant mouth for a Gypsy.”

“I've nothing to lose.”

“Then leave.”

Zoli measures her steps back to the doorway. The rattle of the doorknob. Silence from the street outside. The woman's voice behind her, once, twice, higher now but still measured: “And if I was interested what might you have?”

“I have told you already, the best.”

“I've heard that so often even my ears tire me.”

Zoli snaps the door shut and opens the giant bundle made of Swann's bedsheets. The woman feigns nonchalance, blows air from her cheeks. “I see,” she says. She shakes the keys and leads Zoli through a series of dark-paneled rooms to a rear parlor where a bearded man sits on a high stool with what looks like a small jar dangling at his neck. In front of him sits a solitary game of tarock. He adjusts his stomach in his waistcoat. With an exaggerated sweep, he takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose, then tucks the cloth back in his pocket. She watches with a shiver of disgust.

“Yes?”

Zoli places Swann's wireless radio on the nicked wooden counter. The jeweler lowers his head, pushes the buttons, fingers the dial.

“Useless,” he says.

He examines the underside of a picture frame, purses his lower lip: “You're wasting my time.”

“And this?”

She lays Swann's gold watch upon the counter, stretching out either end of the strap.

The jeweler takes the monocle from around his neck and examines the watch, looking up twice at Zoli. On the table lies a switchblade knife with a black onyx handle. He flips open the back clasp of the watch and looks at the inner workings, a small universe of dials and cogs. He clips it back, laces his fingers, stretches his hands wide on the table. They are, she notices, ancient and liver-spotted.

“It isn't worth much.”

“I'm not one who bargains,” says Zoli.

“These things are English.”

“I will take two hundred.”

“I cannot sell them, they are foreign.”

“Two hundred,” she says. “No less.”

The jeweler huffs: “One hundred and fifty.”

He unlocks his desk drawer, takes a long leather pouch, and slowly counts the bills out, making a show of sliding the beads across a wooden abacus. He counts another ten and says with a grin: “You look as if you need it.”

“It's a bad price.”

“Go elsewhere, woman.”

“There's nowhere to go.”

“Well then, it's a good price, isn't it?”

He pushes the bills across the table, puts the wallet back in the drawer, turns the key once more, and, with a chuckle, reaches across for a ledger and makes an entry. He stands, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Well?” he says, flourishing his handkerchief.

Zoli is already halfway down the street when the jeweler comes out of his house at a fat man's trot. She can hear the flap of his shoes on the wet pavement and the high pitch of his shouts.

She darts towards the busy thoroughfare where the market is winding down. Blue tarps are being folded away and the legs of tables collapsed. A few lean fish rest in beds of salted ice. A half dozen potatoes sit cupped on a weighing machine. Swerving between the tables, Zoli crosses the marketplace, veers down an alleyway, doubles back, sidesteps another two stalls, ducks in behind a large yellow container.

From across the marketplace come the jeweler's shouts. In the shadows, amid an acrid scent of rubbish, Zoli squats down, breathing hard. She lifts her head for an instant, peeps over the metal lip. At one of the stalls the potato-seller, heavy and white-aproned, gestures to keep low.

I used to wear gold coins in my hair, she thinks. We were faithful to that, we stole nothing.

The jeweler's last defeated roar drifts across to her, but she remains out of sight until she is sure he is long gone. She stands, taps her overcoat where she can feel the handle of her brand-new onyx-handled knife.

She flicks open the blade and tests it on the thread of her overcoat: it is sharp, honed to a point.

When you fall, thinks Zoli, you never fall halfway.

The rain hammers, pours, soaks: in the fluted gutters it sluices along, carrying small rafts of rubbish down the streets. By the river, the sparse jewelry of the bridge lights. Beyond that, the silhouette of the giant towers where the kumpanija has been resettled. The electricity is out in the towers again. Zoli wonders if she might be able to catch that moment when the electricity comes on, lighting up all eight buildings at once, their only moment of beauty. It was Stränsky who had told her, years ago, that only poetry was capable of capturing the true horrors of human consciousness, but she had doubted that idea immediately, thinking that poems came on and off again only like tower lights, no more and no less.

The towers appear small and fragile now: almost as if she might lift up parts and replace them at will.

At the foot of the bridge she stamps about in her wet clothes. Underneath her skirts she wears a pair of Swann's old trousers. His boots have been stuffed with socks to make them comfortable. In the bundle on her back, the rest of his possessions. From somewhere in the night comes the sound of a motorbike, sputtering into the distance. Figures emerge from the night fog along the river-any one of them might be Swann. How is it that he hurt his leg? Did he fall, was he beaten, was he thrown down a flight of stairs? Those days by the river. His fingers along her shoulder, his chin at her neck, his head within the shadow of hers. Watching the patterns the wolf feet made on the bank.

She shivers, curses, moves along the river's edge. The bundle on her back, soaked through with damp now, grows heavier with every step.

She turns the corner into Sedlärska, past a building site, and stops at a pile of red bricks on the ground. She toes one, rolls it over on its side. How many times, this same street, these same buildings, these same cracks in the footpath? She walks towards a squat building with two huge picturefront windows. No lights on, nobody around. She steps to the window and runs her fingers along the pane. The glass frame is so big that in the center it quivers and bounces. In the instant that she brings her arm forward she also withdraws, so that the brick is still in her hand when the glass spiders and shatters.