Colum McCann - Zoli

That night I found some lovely gardens, dense and private, to sleep in. A hard breeze was approaching, announced in advance by the clapping of house shutters. Rain came and I huddled against a wall. I woke to find that I had spent the night beneath a monument to war. Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especially for the carvers of stone, and I thought about the truth of that, when in every small village of Europe you can see Christ or Soldier hammered out in stone. But who, on a battlefield, chonorroeja, wants a monument? Who, in the middle of his fighting, thinks he will one day be in the hands of a mason?

I cursed my old poems and went down to the town square- I did not even know what town I was in-and told a series of fortunes for a paltry sum that brought me enough for a train ticket. A shiny train stood on the tracks. Questions rattled in my mind. Where could I go? How could I break a border without a passport? What place might accept me? I tried pushing these thoughts aside. I would buy a ticket west, that was all. I was halfway through the queue at the ticket window when two gendarmes appeared. One lifted my chin with the cold end of his truncheon. He turned and whispered to his colleague. I had a fair idea that they would make their own statue of me, so when the gendarme looked over again, this Gypsy woman was gone once more, on foot.

You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you follow the valleys and the rivers. It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that will guide you along anyway.

My river was the Mürz, clear and leaping. I walked for many days, hugging the bank. On the floodplain there were a few small huts where I could lie down and sleep for a few hours, sometimes on swales of straw. I watched the circles of a hawk swooping down for food in the tilted grass. I made a canopy above my head with sticks and an old cloth bag to keep out rain and sunshine. When I was forced to move from the riverbank and follow the direct line of the road, there were always a few kind drivers who brought me a distance down the valley. I knew that I was going west by the fall and rise of the sun. Flocks of wild geese flew overhead, and I saw myself as one who lagged behind their formations. In places the road became wide and ambitious with more lanes than I had ever seen before, although, where possible, I still kept to the small back-ways or the riverbank. Voices rang out from steepled churches. Laughter and good smells spilled from restaurants. In the smaller villages, some of the Austrians taunted me-Gyp, thief, Black Pharaoh-though just as many raised their hats in greeting, or sent their children after me with cheese, bread, cake. A boy put me on a scooter and promised to take me around a railway tunnel but he did not, he simply rode his scooter up and down in front of his friends who jeered and taunted. I pretended to put a spell on him and he stopped-they are so fearful, sometimes, of their own invented fears.

Once I passed a burning house in the night with the family outside. I returned and gave to them what little food I had, some bread, some strips of chicken meat. They did not throw the food to the ground as I expected, they just huddled down, prayed, and thanked me, and it struck me then that the world is as varied in goodness as it is in evil.

I had acquired the confidence of a blind woman-I could have stepped down the road with my eyes fully closed. I was following the grass along the busy way to Kapfenberg, Brück, Leoben, when the mountains began to rise, higher even than the biggest of the Shivering Hills. I paused at the path heading south, and the other heading north, and took, like many times before, the wrong one. I walked north along a different river, the mountains crowding in closer, the trees on the cliff faces above me, steep rocks held back by giant nets. The traffic whizzed past and it was then that I saw signs for a tunnel, a red sign with a white border. Nothing petrified me more-even when I was a child I refused to go into such darkness. I looped backwards and tried to find a smaller road, but there was no way around. In a roadside petrol station I made inquiries of an old man who said that there were roads that would lead me over the mountains, but I would surely perish. The safest way to get through the tunnel was with the Lastwagenfahrer, the truck drivers.

They lined up behind the petrol station and talked across from truck to truck in languages as coarse as they were varied. I was not sure if they would look kindly on a Romani woman traveling alone, but the truth is that I was so deeply scared of the tunnels I would have done anything to avoid walking through them. For two days I turned and returned to that station before I bought myself, to my shame, a bottle to put me under a spell. The bottle was labeled with green vines and tasted of cough mixture, but it gave me courage to walk in amongst the drivers time after time. I climbed into the trucks, brought my knees to my chest, stared straight ahead. There were many tunnels, of course. Often they were only just being built and we would sit for hours, but the drivers, up until the last, were good to the core. They gave me cigarettes and sometimes the last of their food. They showed me pictures of their children and one allowed me to take the small statue he cherished of Saint Jude. Later I sold it, to my shame, for food. At the end of each tunnel I got out of the truck to clear my head and bid goodbye to the men who often told me that I could go further with them if I wanted. But my spirit had been put in my feet, chonorroeja, and I felt safe there, and wanted to walk again, and I thought, Am I cursed to this?

I kept my head down and for the most part I still stayed in the valleys and slept in the abandoned sheds down on the valley floor. At times I balanced on narrow tree trunks laid across streams so I could find shelter in a light forest. When I approached the tunnels I bought myself a bottle and went then to wherever the trucks might stop.

It seemed to me that there were two different worlds, that of trees and that of engines: one seemed clear, the other dark.

Sometimes when I got to a village there would be a few of our own people on the outskirts. For my own safety-I did not want to talk to my own for fear of polluting them-I could easily shoo the children off with curses. I remember, though, a settlement on the edge of a small town in the plains beneath the central Alps. A few young boys could be seen through the low trees. I did not want to be seen by any adults, but a woman came over from a well carrying water and she greeted me first in German and then Romani. Her dialect was hard to fathom, but in her delight she dropped the bucket and blessed me three times and then took me to their camp. I could not get away, she had such a grip on my arm. The children danced around me, tugging at my clothes. I became so caught up with them that I sprinkled a metal sheet with a pile of sand and used a saw to show them how the sand jumped. They giggled and rolled about in joy. The women cooked me potato pancakes and filled my cup with fruit juice, I tell you the truth, there was never such generosity.

Five girls were brought out to dance. They wore identical green dresses with corded sashes of white tied around the waist. Listening to the music, I was happy, but imagine my raw fear, daughter, when they announced that there were three of our own from near Trnava who had been staying with them for some years now. They would be back in the evening from their work in an automobile factory. I tried to break away but could not, the force of their friendliness was too strong. They even gave me some old clothes and washed my own for me. I feared for the evening and, sure enough, when the men came along, the first word that came out of their dark mouths was Zoli.