Colum McCann - Zoli

It was the occasion of Enrico's brother's wedding and so his family was there, some outside on the lawn, others drinking on the veranda, the women arguing in preparation for supper. His father grinned and smashed a glass when we appeared. His brothers cheered. His mother, your grandmother, was a refined woman-but not so refined, chonorroeja, that she couldn't eventually tell me so. I held my dark head high and took it in my stride, I was not going to hide in the corners.

A feast was spread out on giant silver plates, glasses of the best wine, trays of the freshest olives, the finest meat, the most colorful and exotic of fruits. I thought to myself this was just a flicker and I was going to enjoy it, who knows how long it might last. Enrico stayed close to my shoulder. He said, Here's Zoli. Nothing more. I was glad-with him, my name was enough. More wine flowed. An opera singer stood up for an aria. We applauded and Enrico's father winked across the tables at me. He took my hand afterwards and walked me through the grounds and said that he would never know his son properly, but he had also never known him to put on such a suit, he was glad for it, something in him had shifted. You're a good influence, he said with a grin. Enrico's mother glared at us from across the lawn. I dared to smile at her and she turned away. Enrico and I were given rooms at opposite ends of the house, but he entered through my doorway late that night, drunk and singing, and fell asleep at the end of the bedspread. He woke in the morning with his tongue dry and his head thumping, and said we would be greeted at death together so why should we wait-it was his way of saying he wanted to marry.

On the train journey back, we stepped across a line while the train was still moving and he clasped me to him, that was all the formality he wanted.

It is only a few years ago now, 1991, I think-the label of years seem so little to me now-that the Wall fell, though perhaps it has never been a wall so much as an idea grown away from its own simplicity.

We walked down from the millhouse to Paoli's shop, Enrico and I, and we watched the television pictures from Berlin- how strange to think of those young men using hammers to break apart the bricks at the exact same time as Paoli cursed his little coffee machine that never worked. The scenes from Berlin seemed to me so much the work of my grandfather and his strong hatred of cement. Paoli kept the coffee shop open late that night, and your father walked me home with his arm across my shoulder.

Will you ever go back? he asked.

Of course my answer was just another disguise for yes. There were many nights when I had dreamed myself into the wide open spaces of my old life and the people who were now just shadows. Each year he would ask me again and so, four years later, your father borrowed just enough money for the trip from his brother in Verona. You will recall the time-you stayed with Paoli's family while we took the train all the way from Bolzano. We went clear across two countries and stopped in Vienna, your mother grown old in her headscarf, your father in his threadbare suit. The streets were so clean that they surprised me with the occasional piece of litter, a cigarette butt, a bottle cap. We bought our tickets for Bratislava but stayed one night in what was once a fine hotel on a street near the railway station, Kolschitzkygasse, where the streetlamps seemed to curtsy. There was a mirror on the dressing room table over which I draped the bedcover in order not to look at our reflections. We lay completely still. Your father had bought me an array of colored beads, which I intertwined around my waist for a belt, it was the closest I wore to the clothes of my old life. I cinched down on the beads and could hear the glass chipping as I tightened. The hotel was two lifetimes old. The dim hum of elevator cables sounded and the front desk bell clanged. There was cornicework high in the corners. Molding a handspan beneath the waterstains. I made pictures from the collision of stains and created my old self there. I still was not sure if I could ever make the journey back to the place I had been a child.

Enrico did not say a word when I stepped down off the train the following day and shook my head, saying: Sorry.

He turned his hat inside out and punched a small dent in it, and I knew full well that he was thinking of the money he had borrowed. We walked through the city of Vienna like two old piano notes floating, and later that evening took a bus out to the countryside for an hour or more, to Braunsberg. We walked up the hill overlooking the Danube and in the distance I could see the towers of Bratislava standing gray against the skyline. It looked like a thing made of child's building blocks, my old country. The river curled away from it. The wind blew strong. Enrico squeezed my hand and did not ask me what I was thinking of, but I turned away, I did not know an answer. It seemed to me that our lives, though mostly gone and getting smaller, were still large with doubt. The distant towers went in and out of cloud shadow. I held Enrico's arm and leaned against his shoulder. He spoke my name and that was all.

I could not go back there, not then, I could not make myself cross that river, it was too difficult for me, and he walked me back down the steep hill with his arm around me, and I thought us both a part of the silence.

The next morning we stood in the train station. I was tempted to make the journey as I watched the letters clacking on the signboards, but instead we took the train in the direction of what I could, I suppose, now call home. Your father laid his head against my shoulder and slept, he sounded for all the world like an old horse wheezing. Later he found me a berth on the train and put me to sleep and he climbed up beside me. That whole journey back to Italy, I wondered what I had missed, or what, perhaps, it was better to have missed. I feared my old country would be the same, and yet I also feared it would be terribly changed. How can I explain that there are times we hold on, even to the terrors? But if I speak the truth, it would have been the lake that I would have visited, along the road to Presov, the dark groves where we played the harps, and the small laneway where we danced at Conka's wedding-those days shone in my head like a bright coin.

There are times I still miss the crowded days and being old does not shelter me from sadness. Once I was guilty of thinking that only good things could happen; then I was guilty of thinking they would never happen again. Now I wait and make no judgment. You ask what it is that I love? I love the recollection of Paoli each time I hear the shop bell sound. I love the dark coffee brewed up by Paoli's daughter, Renata, who sits at the counter in her dangling earrings and painted fingernails. I love the accordionist, Franz, in the cafe corner shielding his bad teeth with his hand. I love the men who argue about the value of things they don't really like. The children who still put playing cards in the spokes of their wheels. The whistle of skis. The tourists who climb out of their cars and hold a hand to their eyes and then climb back in again, blind. The blue wool mittens of the children. Their laughter as they run down the street. I love that in the orchards the fruit trees grow out of mud. I love the stroll through woods in autumn. The deer walking up the narrow switchbacks, the lowering of their heads to drink, the black center of their very eyes. I love the wind when it blows down from the peaks. The young men in open ragged shirts down by the petrol station. The fires that burn in homemade stoves. The brass catches worn on the doorway. The old church where roofbeams lie noiselessly in rubble, and even the new church, though not its mechanical bell. I love the rolltop desk where the papers have not changed. I love to recall when you were one year old and you took your first steps and you fell on your bottom and cried, surprised at the hardness of the wood floor. The first stomp of your tomboy foot. The day you came in with the firewood and stood in the doorway, almost taller than I, and you said that you would be leaving soon, and I asked where and you replied to me: Exactly. I love the dawn of all these questions, they come around again and again and again. I love the winters that have crossed me and even the angry weather that has passed over us all, and our times of silence on those days when Enrico was not home, when I was left to wait for the click of the latch and he came in, shaking snow or rain or pollen off his boots.