Colum McCann - Zoli

The last chime of the last shard falls away and silence closes around her.

Two young workers appear on the other side of the street, looking across, staring. She wonders how it is that they have seen it: a woman in a huge overcoat and headscarf and a man's black boots, in the darkness walking away from the shattered window of the Union of Slovak Writers, but what matter now? They can take me, they can do what they want-when hell freezes over I will not skate towards them.

Under the awning of the riverside cinema she stops to rest. There is a poster with a blond woman and a green-coated man behind a glass pane: The Best Will Happen Tomorrow. Zoli catches her reflection in the glass and marks, carefully and coldly in one glance, her hair askew under her scarf, her cheek muck-splattered, her eyes blackened with lack of sleep, the laddered boneshapes of her cheeks. She looks down on Swann's boots, their ridiculous brown weight, their long laces, their shiny eyes, stuffed with socks to make them comfortable.

It had always been, when Swann was around, the time of evening that promised most brightness. Into the dark lobby. Up the stairs. Past the waterstains on the walls. The air hard with cigarette smoke. Swann would flick a lighter for them to find their way. Through the swinging door. A few heads turned. Swann liked to think that they were already stepping into saloon territory. They stood for the national anthem, then sat against the hard-backed seats and waited for their eyes to adjust. After a few moments the first ripples began, tiny craters of whiteness, dark hairlines, bright splotches, and then an eruption of color. She could sense him relaxing, waiting for the images to flare into life: the snakefence, the basin of water with soap, the deer wading through high drifts, the hand around a whisky glass. What amazed him most was that all the films were shot in Czechoslovakia. Afterwards, when they were walking through the streets, she would push her way through the imaginary doors in the Trigger-Happy Saloon and talk of the empty buffalo fields and the temperance girls and Winnetou, I -she was sure that Swann was watching her more than he had watched the screen, his mouth ajar, stunned, leaning close to her.

How distant now, thinks Zoli.

Cowboy films.

The sky lightens over the city as she makes her way across the tramtracks, down towards the river in the early morning. A rusty fishing boat sloughs through the wide channel, pulling behind it a trail of smoke. She climbs the long ramp to the bridge, her back bent beneath the bundle. Zoli totals up what she has to her name: one hundred and sixty krowns, an onyx-handled knife, one bedsheet, two blankets, an overcoat, boots, a pair of Swann's trousers, three shirts, a hairbrush, a pair of thick gloves, a tin cup, and a tea towel.

Someone has inserted a bouquet of flowers into the ironwork curls of the bridge. Zoli leans against the drooping stems and looks down into the water. The wind fans across the surface, ricocheting off the far bank. I should throw something in the water, climb the railing, and leap right here. Tie a kerchief around my chin. Spread my arms out. Say nothing. Tumble. Hit the surface with my skirt above my head. Disappear into the depths. Send up a flume of spray.

She recognizes the thought in an instant: it is gadzikano, vacant, pathetic. She will not allow them such simplicity.

How stupid I was. I went to their table and kissed it in thanks. They promised to leave us alone, but they did not. How strange it was to be so liked amongst those she could never quite comprehend: the parties, the chalets, the hotel gatherings, the way they rolled her out at the conventions. Their vodka, their caviar, their sweet haluski. They packaged me up and made an eloquent ribbon of me and then they allowed me the short walk up the hangman's ramp. The noose, the trapdoor, the lever.

Lightheaded, Zoli pauses on the bridge and looks down at the river, and in the vertigo of shadow there is the sudden realization that she has not burned her poems at all; there are hundreds of them still out there, in printed copies, in the mill, in the union houses, even in the bookshops along Zelenä. All she has done is burn the originals and given strength to the others.

Zoli crosses to the end of the bridge at a slow walk and stands at the junction on the far side. West, the towers. South, the road away. She pulls her arms close in against her stomach, cradles her elbows in the palms of her hands, hikes her belongings on her back, and shuffles down past the line of red dump-sters, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence. Tractors move in the early morning. Cement tankers. Men alongside the sheet-metal huts, their slick yellow jackets bright against the morning gray. One bends over a pot, stirring coffee. She moves beyond him, unnoticed. Most of the towers are inhabited now but there are three blocks still under construction. The grand experiment. They wanted the best for the Gypsies, they said- as if they could be a single throbbing organism, forty thousand people lumped into one. Running water, electric switches, heating.

You hurry on the light, she thinks, it just hastens the darkness.

Zoli ducks through another hole in the barbed wire and stops at a long wall, a distance from the caravans. Hundreds of wagons are strewn around, still clumped together by kumpa-nija. At least they did not burn the carriages, she thinks, only the wheels.

She leans forward, the imprint of the pebbles against her hands.

In the barren squares of grass, a few of the wagons are already ringed with campfires. Pins of firelight wheel the air. One or two dim figures move in and out of the shadows. So, some have abandoned the towers already, taken the floorboards out, come down to the ground, burnt what should have been beneath their feet. A small triumph. Further along the wall, someone has put up a lean-to against the concrete blocks. Old roofing tin, wooden boards from the apartment floors, and an orange highway sign. She squints to read it. Slow: Construction in Progress. Over the boards hang quilts and army blankets. A miscellany of junk along the wall. A woman kneels to the dirt floor and cleans it with a cloth. Around her a few children still sleep, dark shapeless mounds, beneath their quilted blankets. Inside, an oil lamp sits on a packing crate and a long table has been created from three boards, the light from the lamp dulled by ash. This, then, is how they will live now: soot on the glass flute.

Zoli presses against the corner of the wall and peers into the distance. A wreckage of a dog paddles beside the hulk of an abandoned car, recently burned out, as if someone has died in it. At the far end of the camp, a child rolls a barrel hoop and beyond him a man stands by the fire. She knows Vashengo by the outline of his hat alone. Graco carries a coal-oil lamp. Milena, Jolana, Eliska, and one or two of the children are already awake. No Conka.

She pushes her palms deeper into the pebbled wall, favoring one leg so her hip tilts out. She longs to tilt the other forward and stride into the camp, but she is as separate from them now as she can ever be. She watches the nickering campfires, the cigarettes traveling at mouth level, a rimless wheel of red light moving. I would, she thinks, set fire to all my words just to travel that air once more.

Some children break the line beyond the campfires towards the wall. From where do they come? How far down the road were they driven? Zoli steps back and turns her face into the collar of Swann's overcoat. In what words will the children speak of me now that I have vanished?

High above the towers a yellow crane swings through the air. It stops for a moment, lets a bundle dangle and swerve in the middle of the air. It settles, then starts to swing once more. Zoli pulls at her zajda, brings it tight around her, and ducks back out through the fence.