Colum McCann - Zoli

It is good, daughter, to be prepared for surprise. This is a place where a slant snowfall can arrive at any time-even in summer I have seen flakes fall, followed by gales of light and dark. It is strange to think how far my life has come, having discovered enough beauty that it still astounds me.

Enrico once told me of a time when he was just a boy, no more than five years old, the sort who was told to wear navy-blue calzoncini and long white kneesocks. He ran around the courtyard of his Verona home, its beautiful garden with large ferns and white brick and fountains and giant pots of towering plants that his mother's gardener tended to. In the far corner of the garden there stood a large brass statue of three chimpanzees: one with its hands over its eyes, one with its hands over its ears, one with its hands over its mouth. Beneath them was a small well of a pond where water gurgled in and out. Enrico used to sit there and pass his days.

I sometimes still see myself as a child and how much I was loved and how much I loved in return and in my childish heart I was sure it would never end, but I did not know what to do with such love and I relinquished it. I put my hand over my mouth, my ears, my eyes, but I have come around again, and I still call myself black even though I have rolled around in flour. I have always been with my people even though they have not been with me.

He never much asked me about my past, your father, so I told him willingly, I always thought that he, and you, were the only ones to whom I could trust these words of mine, the dark ink of what they have said.

SINCE BY THE BONES THEY BROKE WE CAN TELL NEW WEATHER: WHAT WE SAW UNDER THE HLINKAS IN THE YEARS ‘42 AND ‘43

What sharp stones lifted our wheels,

What high skies came to rest on the ground.

On a golden morning the river turned

And two uniforms appeared at our backs.

We asked by what roads we could escape-

They showed us the narrowest one.

Don't go looking for bread, dark father,

You won't find bread under breadcrumbs.

The spring died at the furthest corner

And our song went into the mountains

Where it sounded along the ridges

Then put on a twice-removed hat.

We called this song the quiet

But it came answering back.

Some days we went looking for the sky

But, Lord, it was a long walk upwards.

Land of black forests we grew from you.

We found the sun in your branches,

Warm shelter in your roots,

A shirt, a hat, a belt in all your moss.

Now it is raining and raining so hard,

Who can make our black ground dry?

The hour of our wandering has been

And passed and been and passed again.

They drove our wagons onto the ice

And ringed the white lake with fires,

So when the cold began to crack

The cheers went up from the Hlinkas.

We forced our best horses forward

But they skidded, bloody, to the shore.

My land, we are your children,

Shore up the ice, make it freeze!

The women came to their windows

To see what was up the road ahead.

They threw out the fire's ashes

So that some might rise in the wind.

The darkest birds of winter

Told others not to follow behind.

The snow fell large and white

And buried our wheels center deep.

How soft the road underfoot,

The branches gray and bare.

Light through light in the treetops

Warned other light not to return.

We had been everything to the forest

Except enemy and danger.

How many times the trees bowed

In our long and dark marching.

They loaded the railway trains

Until the springs went flat.

We heard the moaning of Gypsy children

Too hungry to sleep or dream.

Even those who stayed alive

Found a grave in each survival.

In all the white fields and forests

Old sorrows called out to the new.

At the gate two wooden poles,

Out of which nothing could be carved,

Not a spoon, a moon, nor a Gypsy sky,

Not a swift or an owl or another flight.

We went through them single file,

Our faces turned to the sky.

Who could tell the time from the stars

If the roof was an inch from their eyes?

A child's black fingers descended upon a moth

That descended upon a candleflame.

The winter was closing in

Cold and fast and blue.

We dreamed of a better place

Just above the roof of the pines.

Yet some small splinter of shade

Was nothing but another shadow.

We carried the streams of streams through seasons.

What sorrow and terrible wailing were heard

In all your lonely downcast corners,

Auschwitz, Majdanek, Thieresenstadt, Lod(.

Who gave them such places, O Lord,

Right on the edge of black forests?

We were taken in through their gates,

They let us up through their chimneys.

Gentle mother, make no friend

With the snake that even the snakes hate.

You ask why this song doesn't speak

To you of dreams and of opened gates?

Come and see the fallen wheels

On the ground and deep in the darkest mud.

Look at our fallen homes

And all the Jews and Gypsies broken!

But don't leave behind the dead, broken!

With whom we shared our hunger.

Don't let the snakes go free

Of what they wanted us to be.

Icicles eaten from the wire in winter

Will not freeze our tongues with weight.

We are watching still, brother,

The bend in the distant corner.

The bell that has been pealing

Is not the bell you heard before.

We will tear it to the ground

And use the old forged brass.

It will take us back around

The long five-cornered road.

I speak from the mossy earth to you-

Sound out your mouth ‘s violin!

The song of the wandering is in all the trees

And is heard in the last stars of daybreak.

It ripples in the bend of the river

Turning backwards towards us again.

Soon you shall see nothing in the chimney

Except silence and dim twilight.

The sky is red and the morning is too-

All is red on the horizon, Comrade!

Old Romani mother, don't hide your earrings,

Your coins, your sons, your dreams,

Not even inside your golden teeth,

And tell this to hell's dark brother:

When he goes collecting

He won't take any more of us along.

Who has said that your voice will be strange

To those who have risen from you?

Sun and moon and torn starlight,

Wagon and chicken and badger and knife,

All the sorrows have been heard