Colum McCann - Zoli

Nothing happened. A smell of cabbage wafted out from a nearby restaurant. I could hear the buzz around me, the restaurant workers gathering at the door to watch, to smoke, to point. Austrian women in long brown coats passed with their heads cocked indifferently, but I could sense an excitement they did not want to betray. I listened to the sound of their shoes as they turned, nearly always six paces beyond. Just a moment's hesitation, and then they moved on. I had settled on silence as a form of communication, as good as any. A young man hunkered down on the ground in front of me and held out his palm. I placed the stones in his hand and asked him to roll them across the table. I told him to be calm, that he had nothing to be afraid of. Take my hand, I said, but do not look into my eyes. His own hands were smooth and unlined, his arms were thin and his shoulders narrow. His face, though, was generous, and on his wide nose were the red marks of one who usually wears eyeglasses, so I said to him that I had a strong feeling that he had left something behind, perhaps it had something to do with distance. He shook his head, no. Well, then, I said, maybe it has something to do with sight. His mouth twitched. Yes, he stut- tered, and he took the glasses from his pocket, put them on. I had a hold on him already. It was nothing more or less mysterious than that. I touched the scattered stones one by one and in-canted some gibberish above them.

I thought of myself then in a poor reflection of what I used to be and yet it did not disturb me. I felt at ease with the sham, and I began by asking: The heart or wealth?

The question meant nothing, yet seemed to have the right weight.

The heart, the boy replied immediately. I made the sign of the cross on his palm. He rolled the stones a second time. He had been through dark times, I said. Yes. He was searching now for a different place. Yes. Some of it, I said, involved flight or movement. His eyes lit up and he leaned in closer. A city or town, I said, not far away. Yes, yes, Graz, he replied. There had been dark things in Graz, I said, and he had held on to the hand of someone. Yes, he declared, and his eyes grew big. He said that he had a friend named Tomas who had died after the war, he had stepped on a tram line and his foot had been caught and he was killed, the tram bearing down on him, unstoppable. I closed my eyes, then asked him to roll the stones across the board again. There was awful sorrow at the death of Tomas, I said, and here I furrowed my brow. It was something to do with trains. Yes, yes, he told me, it was a tram! Tomas was suffering, I said, from something during the war, some awful moment, it had something to do with his uniform. Yes, you're right, the boy whispered, he had wanted to desert. He wanted to leave the army, I repeated, and he was afraid of what would happen, the disgrace. Yes, said the boy, his Uncle Felix. I stared into his eyes and told him that there were other secrets too, and here I deepened my brow. I touched the boy's cold hands and said, after a long silence, the name uncle Felix. But how do you know, said the boy, how on earth do you know that name?

I wanted to say that some things are more important than the truth, but I did not.

From this distance of four decades it may seem that I was not scared, but I can tell you now that my blood was coursing triple time, for I kept expecting troopers to round the corner, or some dead family spirit to lean in from a doorway to see what had happened to me, how I had betrayed all that I had ever known. I had no name for what I had become, it did not exist in either pain or pleasure.

Still, the less I talked, the more the boy talked, and he was not even aware of what he was telling me. They never remember what they have said, chonorroeja, instead they wait for the wisdom which you have borrowed. He gave me his answers and I repeated them back and made them mine, he had no idea of my trickery. I could have dressed the dead in bearskins and taught them how to dance and still he would have believed that they were there to console him. His voice became low and even. I said to him that he should carry bread in his pocket as protection against bad luck and that in the spirit world everything was fine for his good friend Tomas. I talked of goodness and purpose and vision. Keep things close to your heart, I said, and they will be a power. The boy stood, reached deep in his pocket and took out a whole handful of coins, which he laid on the wooden board.

You cannot understand what this means to me, he said.

I pocketed the coins and hurried back to the dump. I found an old chair and set it up in the alleyway and by noontime I had four customers, each of whom paid successively more, relegated as they were to their own peculiar dooms.

There are times I must admit that I had a little giggle at the foot of their foolishness. Once a trooper came by, slapping his truncheon at his thigh. For all his snarl he could have been a Hlinka, but I rolled the riverstones for him and filled him with folly about his good life, and he promised that he would leave me alone as long as I did not make too much of a fuss. I told him he should wear socks of a different color for good luck and the next day he walked past me, flicked a quick look at me, raised his trouser legs, one after the other, brown and blue, and marched on.

A number of weeks went by and I lost myself in the telling. Word of my talents spread. Many young men in particular came to visit me. I could see that something inside them had gone soft and loose and hopeless, but when they talked about it they briefly forgot it. I filled them with promises of cures and good days to come. I made a cross of wax mixed with charcoal and wrapped it in hair. I sewed two yellow buttons together and tied them on a stick. These I called my little corpses and I set them up around me; such ridiculous charms only gave weight to my words. They paid me good money for such foolishness and I sat watching the shadows reach out for other shadows as the idiots rolled a few riverstones across a cupboard table. I had no mercy for them, it was not my pocket they were reaching into.

Mozol almost cried her eyes out onto her breast when I gave her all the money.

In the height of autumn, 1961, Mozol left on a canvas-covered truck. Her few possessions were stacked high in the air and her children still higher upon them. Her husband was spread out over them to keep them from falling, but was already sleeping. She smiled, clasped my hands, and looked me in the eye. For many years I would remember that look, how close I came to telling her the truth. I stopped her several times as she gathered her possessions together and said: Mozol, I must tell you something. But she said, I am too busy, tell me later. I am quite sure she knew, she kissed my forehead when she left, then put my hand against her heart.

There is no single goodbye for us, chonorroeja. Ach Dev-lesa. Dza Devlesa. One is staying. One is leaving. Stay with God, go with God.

I saw the white mountains and how they lay against the sky, and I am not ashamed to tell you that the sight was terrifying.

You'll be next Marienka, said Doctor Marcus. She walked back towards her clinic with her hands tight behind her back.

How lost I felt then, daughter, how very alone.

Only people with desires can be fooled, and I had none. My friend was gone. The next morning I put on the same clothes that I had worn for months, took my makeshift table, and prepared to go into town. But then I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and let me tell it to you straight, daughter, I knew that in my shame I had lost every shred of dignity that I had ever worked to own. I do not seek to make a complicated dance of it, I had done these things for a purpose, but now the purpose had disappeared. I looked at myself and saw nothing that shored me up on the left shoulder and little to shore me up on the right. The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, had become it.