Colum McCann - Zoli

There's a bed if you want it, he said. He showed me the stairs to a small room at the top of the house where I would be allowed to sleep. In return I was asked to clean the floors of the church, to keep the sacristy in order, and to attend his services-simple daily tasks that were more difficult for me than they should have been. In the end I stayed for three months and I still recall those days, how unusual they were, full of cloths and dishes and furniture polish. For all my worldliness, the simple mechanics of a vacuum cleaner stumped me and I had never before used bleach. I made holes in the young priest's shirts. I left an iron sitting on a tea towel and burned the ironing board, but Father Renk found it all amusing. He sat in the kitchen and watched me and chuckled and once even took the vacuum himself, singing as he guided it down the hallway. There were long cold mornings spent listening to his homilies about peace-he stood at his altar and said to his parishioners that we must live together in fellowship, one and all, that it was a simple thing to do, black, white, Austrian, Italian, Gypsy, it did not matter. How little he knows, I thought, but I did not say a word, I went about my cleaning duties and kept my head low.

One night he saw me, not kneeling, but sitting at the altar. He sat across from me in the front pew and asked what it was I was searching for. To go across the mountain, I replied. He said it was a good proposition but only God knew where it would take me to. I replied that God and I were hardly friends, though the Devil seemed to like me sometimes, a notion which made him turn to the window and smile.

Over the next few days Father Renk made several phone calls, until one morning he said to me: Pack up, Marienka, come on. Pack what? I said. He grinned and put money in the palm of my hand, then drove me south through beautiful countryside, past villages where people waved at the priest's car. On the underside of a bridge was a sign: One Tyrol. Up we drove, through bends that seemed never to end, hairpins and switchbacks, so that it felt like I might turn around and meet myself. With every meter there was something new to take my breath away-the mountains sheer and gray, a flock of sheep taking the whole mountain road with ease, the sudden shadow of a buzzard darkening the roadside grass.

We stopped in the little village of Maria Luggua where Father Renk walked the twelve stations of the cross, blessed me for my journey, and then left me in a village cafe with a man who hardly looked at me from over the rim of his cup.

Across the mountain? he said in German, though I could tell straightaway it was not his language.

I nodded.

There are two things in this part of the world, he said. God and money. You are lucky that you found the first.

He had never taken a person across before and he did not cherish the idea, and would only do so if I could carry a sack on my back. I knew nothing about smuggling, or contraband, or taxes, but I said I could carry my weight and more in order to get to Paris. He chuckled at me and said, Paris? Of course, I said. Paris? he said again. He could not stop himself from laughing and I thought him a detestable thing in his leather waistcoat, with his stringy hair and his lined face. It's the wrong way, he said, unless you want to climb the mountains for another year or two. He drew a map for me on the back of his hand where he showed me Paris and then he showed me Italy and then he showed me Rome. I am not a fool, I said to him. He drank his small dark coffee and said, I'm not either. He stamped his cigarette out on the floor, rose, and didn't look back.

Down the street, he finally turned and pointed at me and told me that my luck only ran as far as my friendship with the priest.

Over the other side of the mountain and that's all. Do you understand me? he said.

Three sackloads of syringes were what he carried the night he brought me across the border. He did not, in the end, allow me to carry anything. We silently set out along the valley floor, the moonlight blue on the riverstones. We waded through a high meadow where the grass reached above my waist. He had instructed me that there were two types of troopers on either side of the border, and they were strung along the hills at various intervals. The Italians, he said, hated him most of all. You know you could be arrested? he said. I replied that it was hardly a new prospect for me, I knew the difference between a door and a key. We stopped at the edge of a forest. You're full of pepper, aren't you? he said. He shook his head and sighed, then looped a string around my waist which he tied to his own belt. He said he was sorry to have to treat me like a donkey but in the darkness I could get lost. The string was only long enough to stretch out and touch his shoulder. He was surprised that I kept pace with him and only once or twice did the string tighten around my waist. Halfway up he turned and raised his eyebrows and smiled at me.

His shirtfront pulsed, but I thought little of him yet, chonor-roeja, there was no skip yet in my heart for him.

The moon disappeared, the darkness was full, and there seemed more star than sky. We stayed away from any of the paths or dirt roads that ran up the mountainside, and instead we kept to the trees, feeling the hard pull of our legs against the steep ground. He grew at ease with the silence between us and only once on the ascent did he turn quickly at a noise. He put his hand on my head and forced me to hunker low. Far off, in the trees, two flashlights shone beams at a steep ledge, the lights sweeping the rock. It struck me that we might have to climb, but we turned sideways, and went quietly through the forest, and away. The climb grew ever upwards until the trees stopped. A long run of rocky scree loomed in front of us. Be careful with the rocks, he said, they're slippy. We went onwards, cresting the mountain, but, just over the top, he turned and said that the tough part was still ahead of us, the carabinieri had a grudge against him, and they would like nothing more than his capture.

For the descent he untied the string and shifted the weight of the contraband on his back. The water grew louder the further down we went, following the course of large gray boulders. Rain began to fall and I slipped in the mud. He lifted me. He said he knew that sooner or later my balance would become undone, but I had no idea what he meant.

Are you not scared of troopers? he asked.

I built the sentence slowly in my mind to lay the full impact of it on him, as it was something Stanislaus had been fond of saying a long time ago, and I wanted to leave one good thing with this strange man, Enrico, and so I said in German: I would happily lick a cat's arse, my heart's friend, if it got the taste of troopers out of my mouth.

He reared back and laughed.

I stayed that night in the hut he had built. He had made latches on the door from the remnants of tires and the planks were stained with black tar. The windows were small. Only one piece of furniture looked out of place-a rolltop desk crammed with papers, some of them watermarked. He gave me blankets and a carafe of cold mountain water, stacked a few provisions on the table, and said I was welcome to all of it, smoked meat, dried vegetables, matches, condensed milk, even a lantern. He left the hut, still in the darkness, to complete whatever business he had in the village of Sappada and the door clicked behind him.

I had crossed yet another border and was now in Italy.

The sight of the bed filled me with happiness and I fell crosswise on it from one corner to the other. Outside, the river babbled in its fastness. I quickly fell asleep. I knew he had come back in, for I saw the mark of wet bootprints upon the floor. It must have been hours later, for the light was intense and yellow, when I heard the rattle of his breath in a nearby chair. He mumbled some words in Italian to what he thought was my sleeping form and then he left again, shutting the door gently behind him.