Colum McCann - Zoli

The tiny yellow beak of the bird sits in the palm of her hand and she tilts it over and drops it into the flames.

She squats over the fire, thankful for her lighter. I must, she thinks, be careful in the use of it. Soon there will be no more fuel. Small fires are unseen. Small fires can be perched above and drawn upwards into the body. Small fires ignore curfew.

She feels her stomach churn, and, in the late hours, she lies tossing, turning, under Swann's blanket.

She rises dizzy, the sun a bright disc in the trees. A tall os-prey surveys her from a pine tree, his neck curved long and nonchalant, only his eyeballs moving. The branch looks built to him, a perfect blue and gray melding. The osprey turns as if bored, swings its long head to the side, pecks at its feathers, then takes off lazily into the forest.

Moments later it is on the bank, a fish in its beak. Zoli inches silently towards the fire, patiently picks up half a log, flings it. It misses the osprey but the log skitters and bursts into bright embers across the ice. The bird turns to look at her, drops the fish, then lifts its wings and bursts out over the reeds. She hobbles over to retrieve the fish; it is no bigger than the length of her hand.

“You could at least have found me a bigger one,” she says aloud.

The sound of her own voice surprises her, the clarity of it, crisp in the air. She looks quickly about her as if someone might be listening.

“You,” she says, looking around once more. “A big fish would have been more generous. You hear me?”

She chatters to herself as she builds up her fire. She eats the white flesh, licks the bones clean, then plunges her feet in the river once more. One more day and they will be ready. I can walk and keep walking: long roads, fence lines, pylons. Nothing will catch me, not even the sound of my own voice.

It had seemed so strange a few days ago, near the roadblock, when Paris leaped into her mind for no reason at all, but now it comes back and she tries the weight of the word upon her tongue.

“Paris.”

She stretches it out, a wide elegant avenue of sound.

The following morning she builds up Swann's boots with the socks, places dry moss at the ankle of each, starts off along the riverbank, watching for the osprey, expecting it to appear, stately, serene, to do something magnificent-to come down the river on a floe of ice, or to burst from the trees, but nothing stirs.

She finds a length of oak branch with a knobbed end and picks it up, tests it against the ground as a cane. It bends under her tall weight and she shakes the stick in the air.

“Thank you,” she says to the nothingness, then strikes out against the road with her new cane, clouds of white breath leaving her for the morning air.

Paris. An absurdity. How many borders is that? How many watchtowers? How many troopers lined along the barbed wire? How many roadblocks? She tries the word again, and it seems that it arrives in everything around her as the days go by, a Paris in the tree branch, a Paris in the mud of a roadside ditch, a Paris in a sidelong dog that retreats at a half-trot, a Paris in the red of a collective tractor driven distantly across a field. She clings to its ridiculousness, its simple repetition. She likes the heft of it on her lips and finds that, as she goes along, it is a sound that helps her think of nothing at all, rhythmically bumping against the air, carrying her forward, a sort of contraband, a repetition so formless, so impossible, so bizarre that it matches her footsteps and Zoli learns exactly when the first of the word will hit with her heel against the ground, and the last of the word will hit with her toe, so that she is going, in perfect conjunction, sound and step, onwards.

At the stillness of a crossroads, she makes out the dot of a vehicle coming towards her, a motorbike, a flash of small metal, and she takes cover with her back against the damp of a roadside ditch.

The motorbike bounces past with a tinny roar. It is Swann, she can tell by the lean of him, his crutches strapped to the back of the bike. She rises and watches him labor up the bumpy road, through small countries of light and shadow, swerving once to avoid a rabbit. The animal bounds into a field, its ears held high as if amused by the encounter.

“You will not find me,” she says to his disappearing form. She strikes the cane down hard on the road as the engine sound stutters into the distance. It seems to her, in the silence, that if it weren't for Swann she could almost sleep while walking.

In a tiny village market she buys a slab of meat, some cheese, a loaf of bread. “Comrade,” an old fruitseller says to her, “are there many of you?” The fruitseller watches Zoli go as she cuts across a field and doubles back around to make sure she is not followed.

Later in the evening, not far from the village, she happens upon a burned-out camp, not in runic signs but a terrified clamber.

She stops short. So this, then, is why they asked. The marks are still everywhere-in the returning grass, the ruts, the peg-holes, the mounds of earth where they hastily covered their fires. Around the camp, there is a zigzag of tires and, against the trees, a single burned-out carriage, its wheels missing. The hub of one wheel has been shoved into the earth while the rest- spokes and rim-have burned into the ground. An iron wheel-hoop, fused shapeless. Bits of melted canvas frozen against the burnt wooden boards. The tongue of the carriage pierces the muddy ground, as if it just bowed down and accepted defeat. Zoli touches the wood. One of the timbers falls with a faint snap. The dark carcass of a radio sits in a corner of the carriage. She can tell by other marks in the ground that the men had tried to carry the carriage to the forest without benefit of horses but gave up after only a few paces. No sign of bones or weapons.

Zoli tears off the burnt canvas, cuts around it with her knife. Nothing else to salvage. She touches her left breast, bows her head, moves away. All that we wanted, she thinks. All that we ended up with.

A short distance from the camp she hooks the canvas among the branches and settles down for the evening. By dark she is sure she hears something pacing in a half-circle around her camp. A wolf or a deer or an elk. Not a man. Men do not circle in that way. She sits upright and stirs the loose embers of the fire, throws on more leaves. The flames jump in the pitch-dark. She rips a piece of cloth from the sleeve of one of Swann's shirts and sets it aflame, circles her camp with the rag burning.

She remains awake until morning, knees drawn to her chest, then dozes until a patch of wet shocks her cheekbones. Giant flakes of snow gently falling. It is as if the weather, too, wants to make a fool of her.

The snowfall makes the tree branches darkly flamboyant, pencil lines in a pale drawing. Crows gather on the branches and flap off black into the sky. She can see, in the nearby trees, an eyebrow of white on the burnt-out carriage.

“Blessings,” she says aloud, for no reason she can fathom.

A reply slices the crisp air. Perhaps it is the wind in the trees, or a branch falling, but then there is another sound, and a deep bronchial coughing. Zoli hurries to gather her things and bundles them in her zajda. Frosted leaves snap beneath her feet.

A voice then.

She spins.

Two men in loden jackets lumber through the trees, axes over their shoulders. They halt and one drops his axe. Together they shout as she scrambles through the snow. The whip of a twig against her face. Her foot catches on an exposed tree root. She falls, slams into a cut-off tree trunk. She rises again, but the men are upon her, above her, looking down. One is young and fresh-faced. The other wears a shabby beard and broken eyeglasses. The younger one leers. She turns in the snow and curses them but the younger one gazes down, amused. The older reaches to pick her up and she bites at his arm. He jumps back. She shouts at them in Romani and the younger says: “I told you there was someone out here. Last night. I told you. I felt it.”