Zoli

by Colum McCann

  “Don't sulk,” said Stränsky when I pushed open the door of the mill again. “She's only waking up. She's going to do something that'll stun us all, just you watch.”

  That summer, in 1957, one of the few places we saw Zoli was the house at Budermice. It was set on parkland in the shadow of the Little Carpathian hills, a country mansion maintained by the Union of Slovak Writers. A long row of chestnut trees lined the lane. The driveway curled to a grand front entrance with marble steps. Several rooms on the top floor were kept locked and most of the bedrooms were dusty. Downstairs the union had burned the old furniture—too imperial, too bourgeois—so plastic chairs had been installed, hardtop counters, towering Russian prints. Stränsky managed to get the house for the whole summer—he hated anything that smacked of cronyism, but he saw it as a time for some serious creativity. He wanted us to finish a whole book with Zoli—there'd only been a chapbook, but now a real volume, he knew, would cement her reputation: he was convinced that she had a vision that would lift the Gypsies out of their quandaries.

  The lawn sloped down to a stream that was conducted through a wooden pipe the size of a giant barrel. Here and there the wooden structure was pierced to irrigate the lawn. Water arced out into the grass and onto the well-tended paths. Even on clear summer nights it sounded as if it were raining outside.

  Stränsky went walking with her every day—Zoli, in her skirts and kerchief and dark blouses, he in his white collarless shirts that made him look a little quixotic. They strolled past the fountains, looking as if they were whispering secrets to each other. She was at the height of her powers then, and they were working out patterns for her poems. Stränsky would come to me, clap his hands together and recite her lyrics. I had seldom seen a man so worked-up, burning high, wandering around the house, saying: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” A Steinway still sat in the main dining room, one of the last of the old artifacts, though the markings had been rubbed out. Stränsky raised the lacquered lid, sat on the stool, clinked his ring finger against the ivory, and denounced the empty elegance of art without purpose. He winked and then played “The Internationale.”

  One night, from the staircase, Stränsky took a flying leap at the chandelier. It fell from the ceiling with a crash and he lay there stunned.

  “Adoration's more fragile than rope,” he said, looking around, as if surprised.

  Zoli came and sat beside him on the marble floor. I watched from the balcony above. Stränsky was half-smiling, looking at a small cut on his hand—a tiny bit of glass was stuck in his skin. She took his wrist and pinched the glass up from the folds in his hand. She hushed him and guided his finger to his mouth. Stränsky sucked out the sliver of glass.

  I came down the stairs, stepping loudly. She looked up and smiled: “Martin's drunk again.”

  “No, I'm not,” he said, grasping her elbow. He fell again. I lifted him from the floor, told him he needed a cold bath. He put his arm around my shoulder. Halfway up the stairs I had a brief vision of dropping him, watching from a height as he tumbled down.

  From below, Zoli smiled at me and then she stepped outside to where she slept. She wasn't used to sleeping in a room. She felt that it was closing in on her and so she kept her bedding in the rose garden. I woke in the morning to find her dozing happily under the noribundas. She washed in the running stream distant from the house. She couldn't fathom someone taking a bath in standing water. Stränsky took to bathing in a giant tub outside, just to mock her gently. He sat singing in the tub, soaping himself, drinking, and laughing. She dismissed him and wandered off into the woods, coming home with bunches of wild garlic, edible flowers, nuts.

  “Where's she gone?” I asked him one afternoon.

  “Oh, get the stick out of your arse, would you, young manr

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “She's out walking. She's clearing her head, she doesn't need you and she doesn't need me.”

  “You've got a wife, Stränsky.”

  “Don't be a chamber pot,” he said.

  It was an old expression, odd and formal, one my father had used many years before. Stränsky caught me square and I stepped back from him. He squeezed my shoulder, just enough to show that he still had a young man's power.

  “I'm looking after her poems,” he told me. “That's all. Nothing else.”

  Towards the end of summer, Zoli's kumpanija showed up. Twenty caravans camped in the field right at the back of the house. The backs of the horses were shiny with sweat. I woke up in the morning and smelled campfire. Conka wore a fresh scar, from eyecrook to the nape of her neck, and one upper tooth was gone. She stepped down from her caravan in the shadow of her husband, Fyodor. She wore a yellow dress patterned with feathers. Down the steps, she suddenly had a limp and I wondered who could possibly bear the courage to live that way? Her breasts sagged and her stomach pushed against the cloth dress, and for a moment she was like something I recognized from a melancholy viewing elsewhere.

  Kids ran naked in the fountains. The men had already taken some of the plastic kitchen chairs and had set them up beside their caravans. Zoli was in the middle of the crowd, laughing. Stränsky too was suddenly in the thick of things. He and Vashengo drank together. Vashengo had found a case of Harvey's Bristol Cream—an extraordinary thing, how they got it I never knew, but it was contraband, and could get them arrested. They drank it down to the final drop, then started in on bottles of slivovitz.

  The night rose up like something to be exhausted.

  Zoli sang that week, the thorn was in her skin, and we got some of her best poems. Stränsky said he could detect a new music in her, and it gave him different beats for the poems, always listening, watching. He saw her as fully authentic now, she had forged herself in a world that was not ours, a poet filled with mysterious voices that sometimes even she didn't know the meaning of. He said to me that she had an intellect that came to her like a bird off a branch, unrecognized, the images chasing each other with speed. And he swallowed the portions of abstraction and romanticism that annoyed him with other poets, allowed her what he saw as her mistakes, tamed her line length, structured the work into verses.

  Still, in my mind, I can hang a painting of it in midair: Stränsky, after working a whole afternoon with Zoli, walking to the wagons and sitting down, playing bl'aski with tin cards, his shirt filthy, looking like one who belonged. And there I was, standing outside, waiting for her.

  By the end of the week the house was ransacked. The kumpanija had taken almost every ounce of food. The broken chandelier hung in the middle of one of their caravans.

  I found Zoli sitting on a chair in one of the half-empty rooms upstairs, a crumpled handkerchief in her hand. When she saw me in the doorway she rose, said it was nothing, she had only caught a cold, but as she went past me she ran her fingers along my arm.

  “Vashengo says that there are more rumors,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Resettlement. They want to give us schools and houses and clinics.” She knuckled her lazy eye. “They're saying we used to be backward. Now we're new. They say it's for our own good. They call it Law 74.”

  “It's just talk, Zoli.”

  “How is it that some people always know what is best for others?”

  “Stränsky?” I said.

  “Stränsky has nothing to do with it.”

  “Do you love him?”

  She stared at me, grew quiet, looked out the window to the gardens below. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  From outside came the sound of laughter that abruptly broke the silence, lingered, and died.

  We met early the next afternoon, away from Budermice, by the wheel of an old flour mill. The water had been diverted. Zoli had tripled her path to make sure she was not followed. She had in her pocket a photograph, a shot of splintered lightning, a bright blue flash across a dark landscape. She said it came from a magazine she had found, a feature on Mexico, that someday she wouldn't mind traveling there, it was a lo
ng way, but she ‘d like to go. Perhaps when things were finally good, she said, she'd take off, follow that path. She quoted a line from Neruda about falling out of a tree he had not climbed. I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen—how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.

  “Stephen,” she said. “You'll fight with us if we have to, right?”

  “Of course.”

  She smiled then, and became so much like the very young Zoli I'd seen in the early years at the mill, her shoulders loosened, her face lit up, a warmth came to her. She stepped towards me, placed my hand on the curve of her hip. Her back against a tree, our feet slipping in the leaves, her hair across her face, she seemed dismantled.

  There are always moments we return to. We are in them. We rest there and there is nothing else.

  Later that night we made love once again in the high empty rooms of the house. A white sheet took on the print of our bodies. A bead of sweat from my forehead ran down her cheek. She left with a finger to her lips. In the morning I ached for her, I had never known that such a thing existed, a pain that tightened my chest, and yet we still could not be seen together, we couldn't ford that gap. It felt to me as if we were falling from a cliff face, perfect weightlessness and then a thump.

  “If they catch us,” she said, “there'll be more trouble than we can invent.”

  An official from the Ministry came along later that same week, a tall gray-haired bureaucrat with an air of pencil sharpeners about him. He sat and glared at the women doing their washing in the fountains. He talked with Stränsky, voices raised. The cords in the bureaucrat's neck shone. A sleeve moved across his brow. Stränsky leaned closer, spittle flying from his mouth. The bureaucrat went inside the house and ran his fingers over the piano. All the ivory keys were missing. He turned on his heels.

  Within a few hours he was back, troopers with him. Va-shengo jabbed his pitchfork at a line of six troopers. “Put it down,” Stränsky pleaded. The troopers backed away and watched as the smallest children picked up rocks from the gardens. Stränsky came between them all, arms outstretched. The troopers left with a promise that the kumpanija would leave the next day.

  The following morning Zoli sat on a horsecart. I walked across the gravel. She shook her head to keep me away. Something in me burned. I would have given it all, every word, every idea, to turn around and walk with her up the stairs into that old mansion again, but she turned sideways, and someone whipped the back of the horse. Behind her, Conka smirked. Vashengo led the kumpanija away.

  I found Stränsky on the steps of the big house, palms pressed tight against his temples. He seemed suddenly so very old, so full of sorrow, you could see it in his eyes: “We're drinking off their coffin lids, Swann, you know that?”

  Stränsky once wrote that only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way, becomes a verse—one's death explains oneself. Stränsky was the sort of man who was always going to do something that would take the floor from beneath his feet—he'd been disappearing for a long time, restless with the way things were evolving. Stalin's death, though he hardly celebrated him, had winded Stränsky. The Congress buoyed him up for a while, but then came the events in Hungary in ‘56, the tanks rolling south, and a new series of trials in Czechoslovakia. In the Tatra Hotel he raked his wedding ring along a polished table, gave a long speech about living in the margins. He wrote a poem in a Prague journal saying that he was no longer interested in rubbing his lips with red crepe paper. What he meant, I suppose, was that the more people were given power, the more they learned to despise the process that had given it to them—the country had changed, turned sour, lost its edge. Our cures were so much less powerful than our wounds.

  Stränsky's old political friends stopped calling over to his flat, and his visits to the Ministry of Culture found him patrolling the waiting rooms. He stopped lecturing in factory auditoriums, clubs, rural houses of culture. In the mill, he drank heavily.

  “I assure you,” he said, “it's the vodka that's drinking me, but I've still two fingers left.”

  He spread his arms out wide in the air.

  “Alcohol as biography.”

  He finished the bottle.

  In the early winter of ‘58, Elena left him. His marriage had been unraveling for a while—he had started to think that he was becoming a caricature in her cartoons, a small fat man with an axe to grind. I found Stränsky in the corner of the mill, framed by windowlight. I had never seen him so silent. He had punched the wall and the bandage on his hand was already stained with ink.

  He stubbed a cigarette out into the cloth and pointed to two men who paced the street outside.

  Over the next few weeks Stränsky grew gaunt and hollow-eyed. He wandered the mill, making paper cuts in his hand. The cuts kept him awake so he could work. Sometimes he lit a match off his fingernail and inhaled the sulphur. He wouldn't allow anyone to see his new poems and we didn't ask—it was better not to. I avoided him. It was only a matter of time. He allowed me to drift. It was his form of generosity—he would not drag me down with him. The hours passed like hours pass, yet they seemed longer hours than ever before. I plunged myself into creating posters, working with other artists and designers. My skill was turning out a four-color poster on the Zephyr printer. I could do it alone, in a matter of hours. Stränsky would sometimes come down the stairs in the mill and walk over the freshly printed posters. Then he would return upstairs, leaving fresh ink with his footsteps.

  He still delved into Zoli's work and reworked her poems, added words and fixed rhymes, checked them with her, fired back at those who said her work was formalistic and bourgeois because of her respect for nature, that she was drawing a social advantage from pain. He thought that the purpose of her poems was not to dazzle with any astonishing thought, but to make one single moment of existence unforgettable.

  The three of us were to meet one Thursday at the Carlton Hotel. Under the hotel awning we stood smoking cheap tobacco, waiting for Stränsky to show up. Zoli looked radiant in a bright red dress, small beads sewn into the fabric so that when she moved they caught the light, even beneath a shawl. Stränsky didn't appear. A grayness chilled the air, a sense that winter was on its way. We rounded the corner and went down by the

  Danube. The ground was damp but she kicked off her shoes anyway. There was very little grace in how she did it, except that her legs were momentarily liquid as they lost the shoes. She bent down to pick them up and dangled them in her right hand.

  “I haven't walked barefoot in years,” she said.

  A motorboat puttered up the Danube and a searchlight caught us. Within seconds she had gone up the riverside track, near where the nuclear bunkers were being built, and she was bending down to put on her shoes once more. Another searchlight caught her as she leaned. A soldier recognized her and shouted her name. The searchlight threw her distorted shadow about her and the dress sparkled. I thought then that we would never get away from the circles that held us.

  She whispered to me: “We can't be seen alone, Stephen. There's too much at stake now.”

  I didn't believe her. I couldn't. The prospect of having nothing stunned me. The darkness seemed miles thick.

  At home I fell asleep, too tired to dream: it was not yet my thirty-third birthday.

  When the knock came on the door early in the morning— just as dawn was breaking over Bratislava—I knew exactly who it was. Six agents turned the room inside out. They knew all the answers to their questions already. They checked my credentials and filled in an extensive dossier. They seemed upset at how housebroken my life was, how ordinary, how sanitized.

  There was no radio trial for Stränsky. He was labeled a parasite for the most recent of his poems, and his confession appeared in the newspaper. I scoured it for clues
to the man I had once worshiped. I kept seeing him in a cell, hoisted aloft, hands tied behind his back, a terrible splintering sound as the arms dislocated from the shoulder sockets. Rubber truncheons. Electrified baths. In the evenings I had visions of him walking along by the prison walls, chilled by the utter silence of what we had become.

  I was called into the Ministry and given a tour of the punishment cells. They told me to file a weekly report about what I knew: I learned a whole new vocabulary of sidestepping.

  Zoli was not arrested but instead she was brought in, for what they called a consultation. I waited near the headquarters. She emerged with her face a perfect mask, only two dark parallel streaks down her cheeks gave her away. She was driven away by motorcar, her dark hair against the beige leather of the seats. I watched the car go.

  She fell, then, into a period of prolonged silence. I searched, but couldn't find her. There were rumors that she had burned every bit of paper around her. Some said she had gone to Presov and would not be back. Yellow leaves floated on the Danube. I worked on her poems but, without her voice surrounding the words, they were not the same. Plans for publication of the book were shelved—we needed her to be around for it to have its full impact. After three months, she sent one of Conka's children to my door. The child had a message but it had been relayed through three others, and she could not remember the exact details. I asked for a letter, but the child stared at me dumbly and ran her fingers through her hair. In a rough rural accent she said that Zoli needed to talk to me, and she rattled off the names of some villages I presumed would roughly pinpoint her.

  I drove Stränsky's bike so hard that the engine began to sputter. I stopped under an arch of cypress trees. With a pair of old binoculars I watched Zoli at the back of her caravan, strumming a violin bow against a metal sheet, an old quirk of hers, making patterns on the metal with sugar, hordes of children gathered around her, and I stood there, and it felt as if I were gripping her neck in my hand, and the strut ran all along her body, with the strings going down to the curve in her belly, and I was chest-deep in her, lost.