Colum McCann - Zoli

So, she thinks, a workcamp for prisoners. They remain out here, all summer and winter. Minimum security. Morning until night, sorting wood, gauging it, chopping it, weighing. She watches as the younger rises and goes to the door where he takes an oilskin cloth out of the hanging pair of trousers. He unties a string from the cloth and produces a set of playing cards, slides them across the table to Zoli.

“Our fortune.”

“What?”

“Don't be a God-fearing idiot,” says the older, slapping the cards off the table.

The younger one retrieves them from the floor. “Come on, tell us our fortune,” he says again.

“I don't tell fortunes,” says Zoli.

“It gets lonely out here,” says the younger. “All I want is my fortune told.”

“Shut up,” says the older.

“I'm just telling her it gets lonely. Doesn't it? It gets real lonely.”

“I'm telling you to shut up, Tomas.”

“She's worth money. You heard him. He said he'd pay us money. And you said-”

“Shut up and leave her alone.”

Zoli watches as the older goes to a small bookshelf where he takes down a leather volume. He returns to the table and folds back the cover.

“Can you read this?” he says.

“Christ rides!” says the younger.

“Can you read it?”

“Yes.”

“For fucksake!”

“Here's where you are now. Right here. It's an old map, so it looks like it's Hungary but it's not. This is where Hungary is, along here. The other way, over here, is Austria. They'll shoot you before they lay eyes on you. Thousands of soldiers. Do you understand? Thousands.”

“Yes.”

“The best way to make it through is this lake. It is only one meter deep, even in the middle. That's where the border is, in the middle. They don't patrol it with boats. And you won't drown. They may shoot you but you won't drown.”

“And this?”

“That's the old border.”

He closes the book and leans in close to Zoli. The younger looks back and forth, as if a language lies between them that he will never understand.

“Ah, fuck,” he says. “She's worth money. You heard what he said. A reward.”

“Give her back the knife.”

“Shit.”

“Give her the knife, Tomas.”

The younger skids the knife across the floor and sighs. Zoli picks it up, backs across the hard stone floor towards the door, pulls down the handle. Locked. A brief panic claws at her throat until the older man steps across, leans forward, turns the handle upwards, and the door swings open. A blast of cold wind.

“One thing,” he says. “Are you really a poet?” I sang. A smgerr

“Yes.”

“Same thing, no?”

“No, I don't think so,” she says.

All three step out into the stinging light of the morning. The oldest extends his hand.

“Josef,” he says.

“Marienka Bora Novotna.” She pauses a moment: “Zoli.”

“It's a funny name.”

“Perhaps.”

“May I ask one thing? I was wondering. I think I've seen your photograph once. In the newspaper.”

“Maybe.”

“I ask only then-”

“Yes?”

“How have you come to this?”

He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is called upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he will ask it again, later, when he feels the hard roll of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?

“There are worse things,” says Zoli.

“I can't think of them, can you?”

She turns her face towards the distance.

“Hey,” says the younger, “what are we going to say to the Englishman if he comes back?”

“Say to him?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you will tell him his fortune.”

At the top of a hill she looks north and south-Bratislava and its towers long gone now, not even a hint of them on the skyline. She is pleased by the silence as it reverberates from horizon to horizon. There are days when she walks great distances and the only sound she discerns is the swish of her own clothing.

At a lonely farmhouse she crouches behind a barn, listening. She crosses to the huts and undoes the string that holds the hasp. A few scrawny hens eye her from behind the wooden slats. When she reaches in, one erupts from the box with a long squawk and flies past her. Illegal, of course, to own chickens- they must belong to a family nearby. She reaches in a second time, keeping the gap in the door tight. In the uproar the others take to the air and she lunges and grabs one by the wing. She holds it in the well of her skirt, and breaks the neck with a simple twist, follows with a second. From the nesting boxes she fills her pockets with eggs and wraps them in the cathedral tea towel.

She unwinds a long piece of thread from her coat, ties it around the neck of the animals, and places them together at her belt, where they bounce against her thigh as she walks, as if still alive and protesting.

Hunger has made me original, she thinks: the chicken-stealing Gypsy.

Three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that she has already crossed the border into Hungary. She had expected a concertina of barbed wire to mark it, or a high concrete watchtower, but maybe it was just a hedge or a furrowed field or the little village where they spoke both languages. Perhaps it was when she crossed the shallow streambed in the forest, snow falling and trees darkly waving. It startles her, the ease with which she has crossed from one place into another, the landscape wholly alien and yet so much the same. The other border, East and West, she knows, will begin in a matter of days and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

The first of the wooden watchtowers appears on stilts like a tall wooden bird. Two soldiers perch within it, scanning the horizon. Here, Hungary. There, in the distance, Austria. She creeps along, half-bent to the earth, her body porous to every noise. Before her, the haze of mist drifting off the marsh. The air is cold, but lines of sweat run along her shoulderblades. She has stripped her bundle down to the barest needs-only a wickerjar of water, some cheese, some bread, the tarp, a blanket, her warmest clothes, the stolen knife. She backs a good distance away from the watchtowers, settles in the grass far from the dirt road, feels for a dry place to lie down.

No more movement, thinks Zoli, until nightfall.

She tracks the sun awhile across the sky, through the woven shapes of the branches above, until the last of the mist has burned off. How strange to try to sleep in such light, but it is important to rest, and to keep warm-there can be no fire.

Afternoon birdcall wakes her. The sun has shifted southward, red at its edges. She lifts her head slightly at the sound of an engine, and sees, in the distance, a squat truck with a canvas back trundling along the forest line. The voices of young soldiers, Russians, carry through the forest. How many dead bodies lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as they made the short trip from one place to the other? The army truck passes along the edge of the trees and away, and, as if by design, two white swans break across the sky, their shapes laboring above the treetops, quartering on the wind with their necks craned, apparitions not so much of grace as difficulty, with the gunneling sound that comes from their mouths, a deathcall.

Other people, she knows, have had reasons to cross-for land, or nation, or desire, but she has no reason, she is empty, clean, raw. Once, as a child, traveling with her grandfather, she had seen a hunger artist in a village west of the mountains. He had set himself up in a cage and made a spectacle of his starvation. She watched him as his ribs grew clearer, stronger, almost musical. He lasted forty-four days and he looked so much like an old man when they took him from the cage that she was surprised to see him given, at last, a plate of crumbs and a drink of milk. This is how I am, she thinks: I have made a spectacle of myself, and now I am taking their crumbs. It is still possible to turn around-there is nothing to prove. And yet I have come this far, there is no more reason to return than there is to advance.