Colum McCann - Zoli

We went that night from the Yellow Farmer's place, sloshing down the bowerpaths through a mudstorm. The wheels got stuck in the puddled roads. We lifted them out and walked bowlegged for a better grip, following the notched bones and bundled straw and other signs. A boy my age, Bakro, the cousin of Conka, walked alongside me. I think he already had the desire for me. He squandered his time in the mirror at the back of the caravan, fixing his black hair. A line of tanks went past and the last one stopped to search us, they didn't even clean their boots on the steps. Conka and I hid under an eiderdown, but the Hlinka who came in lifted it immediately and prodded at our dresses with his boot, then spat at us. Nothing could be worse for a Romani girl. When they left, we called them pigs, lizards, snakes. They were unclean, the last of the last.

On we went, walking at the paced hollow clop of the horse's hooves. Bakro whispered to me that he would protect me, no matter what, but my grandfather fixed an eye on us and I did not feel a sway in my belly for Bakro the way I did for other boys.

At night, Grandfather released Red and stepped between the tongues of the carriage, hoisting it with his bare hands. He turned it slightly while I slipped small rocks under the wheels, and in the morning we moved on again.

The radio reports came in from across what we now called, once more, Slovakia-it was confusing with Bohemia and Moravia and Germany and Hungary and Poland and Russia, and so Grandfather stood up one night and said that one day it would all soon be Rromanestan or the Soviet Russia, but someone else said that it might be America, where a very blue lady would hold a torch for us and everyone was created equal. We were moving around the country then, every week a new place, but someone, usually Boot's father, always returned to the forest and stayed with the harps. At night he slept near them. He swore there were restless spirits who came to play.

I soon reached womanhood and had to burn the red rags. It happened in a forest of white poplars and Conka knew what was going on, she had already been through it herself. She gave me a strip of cloth to clean myself up. I was careful now where I stepped, the touch of my skirt could dirty a man. She said no matter, but be careful not to go behind the hedge with a boy, they might take advantage. Together we sewed pebbles in the hem of our dresses to weigh them down. Nine days later Grandfather said that I had to learn to call him Stanislaus now; he did not want to be grandfather to a grown woman. I blushed and knew that soon it would be time to walk under the linden blossoms with a husband.

Stanislaus, I said, go ahead, horse, and shit.

It was the first time I had said such a word in his presence, and he squeezed my shoulder and pulled me to his chest and laughed.

Bakro gave me a silver chain and, although I didn't wear it around my neck, I kept it in my pocket and wound it around my fingers. The next day he came along and put a gingerbread heart in my hand. I was quite sure we were to be married and I begged Stainislaus not to let it happen, but he looked away from me, said he had other things to worry about, and walked off through the mud to talk to Petr.

Grandfather pointed over at me, and Petr nodded. I put my head down, kept my paths to myself. In my mind the old songs repeated themselves, took a new direction, turned, swerved.

We went further east and, by the banks of the Hron River, on a muddy morning, Red died. She was found on the ground with a single eye open. Grandfather lifted her with ropes and took her off to the glueyard. The blood sloshed in her as she was dragged along. I would never forget the sound. She was hoisted onto a cart. The body thumped, her eye still open. Grandfather came back with a bottle of fine slivovitz and offered me some, but I turned away and said no. He said, These things happen, girl. No they don't, I said. He grabbed my braids and said to me: Do you hear me, girl, these things happen, you're no longer a child. He let go of me and I watched as he stamped away through the bushes.

A couple of years later, chonorroeja, when so much of my life was taking place in the city of Bratislava, and in the printing mill, using words that had come from the songs, I asked Strän-sky and the Englishman Swann not to put the few pages of my first poems together with glue, rather to stitch them with thread. I thought the glue might have come from the same yard. They didn't know what I was talking about, and, in truth I don't know why I expected them to. I could not stand the notion of the glue of Red traveling along the spine of the book, leaning down to things so foreign to her, who would want their own horse in their book, holding it together?

I was writing things down then, on any paper I could find, even the labels from bottles. I dunked them in water, dried them out, and filled the emptiness with ink. Old newspapers. Brown butcher sheets. I dried them out until the bloodstains were faint. It was still a secret, my writing. I pretended to most that I could not read, but, I thought, then, surely it could do no harm? I said to myself that writing was no more nor less than song. My pencil was busy and almost down to a nubbin.

Wash your dress in running water. Dry it on the southern side of the rock. Let them have four guesses and make them all be wrong. Take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. Cook haluski with hot sweet butter. Drink cold milk to clean your in-sides. Be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you were. Don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. Ignore curfew. Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. Dress in oiled cloth around sickness. Adore darkness. Turn sideways in the wind. The changing of stories is a cheerful affair. Give the impression of not having known. Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur.

There are things you can see and hear, nowadays, long after: the way the ditches were dug, and the way the ground trembled, and the way birds don't fly anymore over Belsen, about what happened to all our Czech brothers, our Polish sisters, our Hungarian cousins, how we in Slovakia were spared, though they beat us and tortured us and jailed us and took our music, how they forced us into workcamps, Hodonin and Lety and Petic, how they placed a hard curfew, and even that curfew had curfews upon it, how they spat at us in the streets. You can hear stories about the badges that were sewn on the sleeves, and the Z that split the length of our people's arms, the red and white armbands, and the way there were no lean dogs near the camps, the way Zyklon-B turned all the hair of the dead brown, and how the barbed wire flew little flags of skin, the slippers that were made of our hair. You can hear all this and more. What happened to the least of us, happened to us all, but little will ever bring it back to me in quite the same way as the day when my grandfather, Stanislaus, was stopped by a tall fair-haired soldier in the little gray streets of Bratislava.

We had gone, on a coal train, all the way through Trnava, beyond the lake, to the thick air and stinking puddles of the city. Grandfather was carrying six homemade toothbrushes to sell at a house where it was reputed there were streetwalkers: it was the only way in those days to make a little money.

Thirteen years to heaven, I had grown curious about the life beyond. What a sight the city was for me-the laundered shirts on strings across the streets, the fancy paper wrappers on the ground, the tall cathedral, the bony cats staring out from windows. Grandfather said to keep close by his side-there were a lot more Germans around now the resistance was stronger, they were helping the Hlinkas with reinforcements, and it was best to keep out of their way. There were rumors of what they would do to us if we took a wrong step. Still, I fell behind. He called at me: Come on, you lanky camel, keep up. I hurried and linked my arm in his. We came to a narrow alley in a hundred narrow alleys, up on the hill, near the castle. I stopped a moment and watched a child playing with a paper kite. Grandfather turned a corner. When I caught up, he was standing boardstiff, next to a kiosk. I said: Grandfather, what's wrong? Say nothing, he said. His eyes had grown huge and he began to tremble slightly. A German soldier was coming towards us. He had fair hair, like so many of them. We had not broken curfew and I said to Grandfather: Come on, don't worry.