Colum McCann - Zoli

I went down past the cathedral to Franz-Liszt Street. No sound came from the high shuttered windows. I set my things around me. The people gathered and I gave them all bad omens that they accepted and wore like masks. The next day, I walked beyond the red-white-red barrier like there was nothing unusual at all, but instead of going down by the dump road I went towards the mountains.

Last night I woke thinking Enrico was here. I rose and flamed the lamp but found only these pages. Out the window, I could see way down into the valley. What is it about the cold that sharpens the edges of everything? Enrico used to say that the emptiest days are the loveliest.

Do you, daughter, recall the sight of your father coming home after a foray across the rocky part of the northern mountain when he had cut himself from a fall off a small cliff? He was carrying animal medicines then-steroids, hormones, injections to sell on the other side. He had packed them solid into a giant rucksack, had even filled his pockets and socks, and then he trudged off to Maria Luggua. A blizzard blew up, a curtain of snow opening and closing around him. He was edging his way around the point in the mountain where not even the goats ventured. He stepped off into nothing but air, and his fall was broken only by an outcrop of rock. He landed in a drift and he looked down to see that his leg had been ripped open. He contemplated the animal injections but didn't know which might help him with the pain. He had to dig himself out with a small folding shovel strapped to the side of his rucksack. The blood filled UDhis snowboot. He could onlv recognize where he was by the feel of the trees-the further down he went on the slope the less gnarled the bark became. When he reached home, he dropped the rucksack, and simply said: Put the kettle on, Zoli, I'm freezing.

He pulled off the snowboot, put it by the stove and said it had been a very bad evening for a walk. He had been gone three whole days.

I can see him now, his thin nose, his wide mouth, the lines grooved deep in his face, his eyes half-closed against the glare of the snow.

When the new trade laws came in, there was no longer any need for medicines or cigarettes or coffee or seeds to be brought across the mountain, and he had always refused to bring dynamite for the Tyroleans who were blowing up pylons and causing havoc. He stopped his trade, just as suddenly as he had started, and he seldom walked the mountain anymore, except on festive days, and he made his living instead at the millhouse, and when the millhouse went the way of everything else, he bought it, moved with us in here, kept the wheel running, and did whatever handyman jobs he could find around the valley. Two or three times a day he stood in the doorway, looking out over the weather above the mountain. He could have walked out blindfolded and still found his way there.

I have loved your father, pure and simple; his and yours are the only lives I have never betrayed.

The first truck to ever give me a lift belonged to a fruit farmer. He wore a black suit. His cheeks were red and newly shaven, his eyes bloodshot. He knew that I was running from something, but at first he did not say a word. I sat tight in the seat as the gears clanked and the engine rumbled into life. The farmer asked where I was going and when I didn't answer he shrugged and said he was on his way to the market a few towns down the road and I was welcome to join him so long as I did not make a fuss. I feigned being mute once again and the farmer sighed deeply as if it were the oldest trick, which it was, and one that has always failed me, as much as looking over my shoulder.

Scared of something? he asked.

The hedges shot by, trees and windmills, and I realized just how strange it had been to have walked so far, things being so much different at speed. I still did not recall how I had walked in the haze after the judgment. I kept that part of my mind blank, I could not face it, how I had crossed the border first from Slovakia and then from Hungary, and then to Austria. Nor did I think of where I was going. Paris seemed as good, or as ridiculous, a place as any.

After a while it began to rain. The windscreen wipers were broken but the farmer had made a rope that he could pull from inside the truck. He showed me how to do it with exaggerated movements and it made me happy, this small task. I tugged the rope from one side of the dashboard to the other. The fruit farmer complimented me, but I noticed that he had opened his window and was smoking furiously. So he thinks I smell, I thought. I wanted to laugh. I rolled down my window and felt the cold wind blowing. We went west in open country under the shadow of the mountains. The road was long and straight and the trees snapped to attention. The mountains lay white and enormous in the distance. It was curious to me that the closer we came to them the further away they seemed to drift. The farmer drove with one hand on the steering wheel and looked across at me every now and then.

You know those Russians put another satellite up in the air? he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about, nor for what reason he said it.

You can see them at night like small stars moving, he said.

I made a complicated series of hand gestures and finished by scrunching my fingers down into the palm of my hand, like grinding a tooth that might once have laid there, long ago. The fruit farmer shook his head and sighed. He steered with his knee and lit yet another cigarette. Two streams of pale blue smoke came from his nostrils and then he leaned across and passed the cigarette to me. I shook my head, no, but another voice said take it, Zoli, for crying out loud take it. He shrugged and held the cigarette near the window, and I watched as it reddened and burned down. Sparks flew from his fingers. The smell of tobacco made my head spin. That was one of my first lessons about the West-they do not ask twice. You should always say yes. Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes.

The road sped beneath us. For the first time I began to think I was truly in a different country. I turned to look at a family collecting blackberries at the side of the road until they became small dots in the distance. Tall silos gave way to church steeples and, near the outskirts of a large town, the farmer pulled into the roadside verge. Right, here we are, he said. He climbed out, lifted a tarp and handed me some apples. I've always had a passion for the traveling life, he said. I nodded. Just steer clear of the Kieberer, he said, and you'll be all right.

For whatever reason I forgot my mute ways and asked: What's a Kieberer?

He did not blink an eye and said: The gendarmes.

Oh, thank you, I said.

He laughed long and hard and then said: I thought as much.

I felt my body tighten and I yanked the door handle, but he threw his head back and laughed again.

He drove the truck alongside me as I tried to walk away along the verge of the road. Traffic was zooming past and blaring their horns. To one side was a grazing field, the other a stoneworks. When I quickened my pace the fruit farmer quickened too. He was rolling tobacco with two hands and steering the truck with his knees, but then he brought the truck to a halt, sealed the paper with his tongue, leaned out the window and gave me two hand-rolled cigarettes. I took them straightaway.

I'm fond of escape stories, he said.

He clanged through the gears and drove off in a cloud. I stood watching and thought: Well, here I am in Austria, with two hand-rolled cigarettes and a man waving me goodbye from a battered fruit truck, if ever I had four guesses of where I would be after so many years, all of them would be wrong.