Colum McCann - Zoli

Zoli scoots backwards in the snow, wraps her hand around a length of stick, but the younger one knocks it out with a swift kick.

“I bet she's the one. Look at her.”

“Pick her up.”

“Watch the evil eye.”

“Oh, shit on your evil eye. Just pick her up.”

“I bet she's the one. Look at her coat.”

“Shut up.”

“She was going to hit us with that stick.”

“Pick her up.”

They lean down together and grab under each shoulder. Zoli jams her feet hard down in the snow and leans backwards, but the men have a hold and she feels useless between them. They bring her a good distance through the woods to a clearing where two donkeys pace patiently around the front of a wooden shack.

So that was last night's noise, thinks Zoli: only donkeys.

A wafer of snow slides from the roof and plops onto the ground below. Skinned logs stand in stacked piles around the shack. A piece of cutting machinery lies against the wall. Nearby, a trundlecart. The snow is footprinted and packed: more than just two men here, she thinks.

She spits on the ground and the younger one says: “She's trying to put a curse on us.”

“Don't be an idiot,” says the older.

Inside, the men knock snow off their boots and lead her to a chair. The air is heavy with sweat and old tobacco. Eight wooden bunks are screwed to the wall and an unlit lamp hangs from a chandelier of antler horns in the center of the room. The floor is made of flat riverrock. A workcamp of sorts, she thinks. Or illegal hunting. She watches as the younger one latches the door shut, kicks the bottom in place.

She reaches inside her pocket, opens the blade of the onyx-handled knife and slides it along her coatsleeve, the tip of the blade against her forefinger.

The older man turns away and bends down to the stove door. He opens it and pokes with a stick. The fire rises orange in the joints of the stove and a hot ember lands on his boot. He knocks it off, takes a saucepan, begins stirring food with the same stick. A hind leg of lamb hangs like a jacket above the stove. He shaves off a sliver with a blade and it drops directly into the pot.

“There's nothing good that will come to you out here,” says the man.

And as if by way of proof the younger one begins to undo his belt. He pulls it through the loops and snaps it in the air. His trousers, caked in mud, fall to the ground around his ankles, but he keeps his back turned. His underclothes are a filthy gray. Zoli slips the knife further down along her wrist and closes her eyes. A deep coughing comes from across the room. She looks up to see that the man has stepped into another pair of trousers. He adjusts the belt. His eyes sharpen. He toes a small cone of wood-dust on the floor, comes across, and reaches past her for a cup on the table.

With two fingers on his cup he raises it to drink. There is, she knows, nothing in the cup.

“What's your name?”

She slides the chair backwards but he pushes her once more into the table. A smell of resin to him.

“What's your name, Gypsy?”

Let me go.

The younger one slams the empty cup down and leans across her, his breath smelling, strangely, of fresh woodmint. So he knows the woods, she thinks, he will not be easily fooled. She nudges the knifeblade back into her coatsleeve where it feels cool against the soft of her wrist.

“Conka,” she says, immediately regretting it.

“Conka?”

“Elena. I was with my people.”

“Elena now is it?”

“When the troopers came.”

The younger one chuckles: “Is that so?”

“The families were taken away. The last of us were driven to the city under the new laws. We were pushed along by dogs. My husband was forced to carry a large wooden box with lacquer patterns and all our belongings inside.”

She hesitates and searches their expressions-nothing.

“A huge lacquer box,” she says. “He dropped it on the road. The rain was beating down like a drunk. Everyone was slipping in the mud. The dogs, they had such sharp teeth, you should have seen them. They ripped us. They took a chunk from my mother's leg. The troopers hit us with their sticks. I still have the marks. They let the leashes loose. My children got bitten. Eight children, I once had eleven. All our belongings were in that box. All my jewelry, papers, everything, inside that box. Wrapped in old twine.”

She pauses again-only a slight twitch at the side of the younger's face.

“I've come now from the city. To get the box. Eight children. Three died. One stepped on an electric cable by the cypress lake. When the thaw came they were digging by mistake with metal shovels. Once there were eleven.”

“A whole team?” says the younger with a grin.

She turns away and stares at the older man who smooths out the hairs of his eyebrow with his knuckle.

“We have a roof now,” says Zoli. “Electric lights that come on all the time, water that runs. The new directives have been good to us. Good times are coming. The leaders have been good to us. All I want is to find the box, that's all. Have you seen my things? ”

The older pushes himself wearily from the stove and sits down, carrying with him a bowl of kasha with small pieces of lamb scattered in it.

“You're lying,” he says.

“A blue lacquer box with silver clasps,” she says.

“For a Gypsy you don't even lie very well.”

Light crawls up and around the window-no curtains, she notices, no woman's hand in the cabin. She allows the tip of her knife to press deeper into her cupped finger.

“What's your name?” says the younger again.

Elena.

“That's a lie.”

The older man leans in, serious and gray-eyed. “There was a man out in these parts riding a two-stroke Jawa. An Englishman. He was looking for you, says you've gone missing. Says he's been searching all over. We saw him by the forest road. He wants to take you to a hospital. He looked like he should've been in the hospital himself, driving around with a broken leg. Hadn't shaved in a while. Said your name is Zoli.”

He slides the bowl of kasha across the table, but she does not touch it.

“I really need to find the box. It has so many precious things inside.”

“He said you were tall, with a lazy eye. He told us you'd be wearing a dark overcoat. That you might have a gold watch. Roll up your sleeve.”

“What?”

“Roll up your fucking sleeve,” says the younger.

He steps across and hikes her coat, wrist to elbow. The knife falls with a clatter to the floor. He stamps on it, picks it up, tests the blade with his thumb, then turns to the older. “I told you. Last night. I fucking told you.”

The older leans in further to Zoli: “Do you know him?”

“Know who?”

“Don't play us for fools.”

“I know nothing about a watch,” says Zoli.

“He said it was his father's. A precious timepiece.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“He asked for petrol for his motorbike. He didn't seem much of a threat. He spoke a funny Slovak. He tried to tell me he grew up here, but I know better. Is it true, then, what he says? How did you get a man's name?”

Zoli watches as the younger one cuts the hairs on his arm with the knife, whistling at the sharpness of the blade. The older takes off his cap, something soft and compassionate in the lift. His graying hair, a little damp, lies pressed against his scalp. When he leans forward she notices a small scapular swinging at his neck.

“It was given to me by my grandfather,” she says finally. “It was the name of his own father.”

“So you're a real Gypsy then?”

“You're a real woodsman?”

The older laughs and drums his fingers on the table: “What do I say? We're paid by the cubic meter.”