Colum McCann - Zoli

She wishes for a moment that she had waited to hear the things that Swann might have had to say, but what would he say, what could he say, what would ever make sense? Zoli closes her eyes, grateful to the dark. Patterns passing, crystal patterns, snow now, gently settling. There are no days more full than those we go back to.

She wakes to the sound of people coming into the apartment. The clicking of bottles and a hollow boom of an instrument in a case being banged against a wall. She sits up and feels the photo pasted against her breast.

“Mamma.”

She is startled to see Francesca at the end of the bed, curled up, knees to her chest. The room seems familiar now, almost breathing.

“You'll take the life from me, precious heart.”

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“How long have you been there?”

“A little while. You were sleeping so well.”

“Who's there? Who's that? Outside?”

“I don't know, that asshole is bringing people here.”

“Who?” says Zoli.

“Henri.”

“I mean who's with him?”

“Oh, I don't know, just a group of drunks. The bars are closed. I'm sorry. I'll kick them out.”

“No, leave them be,” says Zoli. She pulls back the sheet and shifts sideways on the bed, puts her feet to the floor. “Can you give me my nightdress?”

She stands with her back to her daughter and pulls the dress over her head, rough against her skin.

“You were sleeping with Daddy?”

“Yes, how silly is that?”

“Just silly enough.”

A series of shushes come from the living room, then one clink of a bottle cap falling to the floor, rolling across the hardwood, and a series of stifled laughs.

“Mamma, are you okay? Can I get you something? Hot milk or something?”

“Did you talk to him? Swann?”

“Yes.”

“And he said he was sorry, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say what he was sorry for?”

“For everything, Mamma.”

“He's always been an idiot,” says Zoli.

The low sound of a mandolin niters through the apartment and then a harsh piece of laughter, followed by the faint pluck of a guitar.

“Come here beside me.”

Her daughter swings longways across the bed, spreads herself out, takes a piece of Zoli's hair and puts it in her mouth. In so many ways, her father's child. They lie side by side in the intimate dark.

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“I had no idea.”

“What else did he say?”

“He lives in Manchester now. He got out in ‘68, the whole Prague thing. He says he thought you were dead. There were bodies found along the border. He was sure that something bad had happened to you. Or that you were living in a hut somewhere in Slovakia. He says he looked for you. Searched all over.”

“What's he doing here?”

“He said he likes to follow things. To keep in touch. That it was a hobby. He still uses the word Gypsy. Goes to a lot of conferences and things. The festival down there in Santa Maria. All over the place. He says he owns a wine shop.”

“A wine shop?”

“In Manchester.”

“Nobody lives where they grew up anymore.”

“What's that?”

“Just something he said to me once.”

“He said he was heartbroken, Mamma. That's what he said. That he's been heartbroken ever since.”

“He lives alone?”

“I don't know.”

“Swann,” Zoli says with a slow, sad laugh. “Swann. A capitalist.”

She tries to imagine him there, amid a row of wooden racks, learning to count prices, the bell on the doorframe tinkling. He stands and greets the customer with a small bow of the head. Later, stooped, he shuffles to the corner shop to buy his half-liter of milk and a small loaf of bread, then goes home to a small house in a row of small houses. He sits in a soft yellow chair and looks towards the window, waiting for the light to disappear so he can have his evening meal, wander off to bed, read the books that will make up his mind for him.

“He wants to see you again, Mamma. He said that his ideas were borrowed, but your poems weren't.”

“More of his horseshit.”

“He says he has some of Stränsky's poems too.”

“Did he say anything about Conka?”

“He fell out of touch with everyone. They were made to stay in the towers, that's all he knows.”

Francesca's body stretches away from her as if, in their huddling, they might be able to extend each other.

“And the other man, the journalist?”

“He'd like to talk. That's what he said. He found an old book of yours, and went searching. He was just curious at first, enjoyed the poems, he said. He'd like to talk to you. Tomor-row.

“You can talk to him for me, Franca. Tell him something.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him I've gone somewhere.”

“You're going home, aren't you?”

“Of course I am.”

“What will I tell him?”

“Tell him that nothing is ever arrived at.”

“What?”

“Tell him that nothing is ever fully understood, that's what I'd like to say.”

A peace descends between them now, a quietness that travels across the sheets. Her daughter hikes herself onto an elbow, a little hill of shadow where her hip juts out.

“You know what he wanted to know? Swann. At the end?”

“Tell me,” says Zoli.

“He was a bit embarrassed. He kept looking at the floor. He said he just wanted to know one thing.”

“Yes…?”

“Well, he wanted to know what had happened to his father's watch.”

“That was his question?”

“Yes.”

Zoli watches as a small bar of light moves along the wall and down. Someone passes in the corridor outside and a series of shushes sound from the living room. She closes her eyes and is carried away on the notion of Swann resting on one small fixed point of an ancient clockhand, as if it all might come around again, as if it all could be repeated and cured. A single gold watch. She wonders if she should feel pity, or anger, or even amusement, but instead she locates the pulse of an odd tenderness for Swann, not for how he was, or what he has become, but for all he has lost, the flamboyance of what he had once so dearly believed in, how absolute it was, how fixed. What must it have been like for him, to break the border one final time and to move back to England? What must it have been like for him to return empty, to be back with less than he had ever imagined leaving with? Swann, she thinks, did not learn for himself how to be lost. He did not know the meaning of what it was to turn and change. She wishes now that she had kissed him, that she had taken his slack face in her hands, touched her lips against the pale forehead to release him, to let him walk away.

Zoli lays her head against her daughter's breastbone and feels the breath trembling through Francesca's body.

“You know what I want to do?” Zoli says. “I'm going to see him tomorrow. Then I'd like to get on a train and go back to the valley. I would very much like to wake up quietly in the dark. That's what I'd like.”

“You're going to tell Swann where you're living?”

“Of course not. I couldn't bear the thought of him coming there.”

And then Zoli knows for sure what she will do: she will take a taxi to the train station, stop off first at the hotel, move under the birdsong, call Swann's room, stand in the reception, wait, watch him shamble across towards her, hold his face in her hands for a moment, and kiss him, yes, on the forehead, kiss him. She will allow him his sorrow and then she will leave, take the train, alone, home to the valley.

“I'm happy there,” says Zoli.

A note jumps out from deep in the apartment, a hard discordant thing moving through the air, surrounded a second later by a new one, as if testing the old one, until they start to collide, rising and falling, taking air from each other.