Zoli

by Colum McCann

  It would, she thinks, have been just as easy to have stepped out in front of it.

  She returns the way she came and sits under a giant sycamore, pulls a fistful of yellowed grass from the ground and puts it in her mouth against her aching tooth. She removes her over- coat and ties the arms together around her waist. It was Swann who gave her the coat a year ago. He had returned from Brno with a whole cardboard box of them balanced precariously on his motorbike. He had bought them for the kumpanija and had even found small sizes for the children. He could not understand her when she said no, that she did not want them, that she'd just as soon walk around with a yellow armband, or a truncheon stuck in her back. Swann sat in the wooden chair by his window, perplexed: “But it's not charity, Zoli, it's just a few coats, that's all.” He remained silent then, tapping the glass pane, his light hair framing his face. She crossed the room and said: “I'll take one each for Conka's children.” He brightened and sifted through the pile to find the right sizes. “One for you too,” he said, and put it around her, and as he touched her shoulders, he said that he had found a consignment of red shirts also. What strange laughter had come to her then, the idea of the whole kumpanija wandering down the road in the exact same cheap red shirts.

  Yet what was once funny turned out to be inevitable; what was once strange was, now, finally, true.

  Zoli feels as if she is carrying the sandy-haired Englishman on her back. Impossible to shuck him. She wonders how long she might walk before the weight of him drags her down, again, to the ground. He told her once that she looked like a Russian poet he had seen in photographs: the dark eyes, high forehead, her hair swept back, her tall body, her complicated stare. He brought her to the National Library and showed her the poet, Akhmatova, though she could see no resemblance. She had always thought herself dark, simple, black, yet in the photos the Russian woman looked white, heavy-eyed, and beautiful. Swann read to her a line about standing as witness to the common lot. He had asked her if she would marry him and she was stunned by the simplicity of his plea. She had loved him then, but he did not know the extent of the impossible. In the printing mill, at the end, he was not able to hold her gaze. He had not printed the poems yet, but she knew he would. What else had she expected? Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important. Wasn't it Swann who told her once about a bird, a glukhar, that went deaf with its own mating calls? Both of us with that inextinguishable need to make noise, she thinks. If only I could have known. If only I could have seen.

  Zoli wonders now if Swann is searching for her now. If he is, she thinks, he will not find me. He will seek and seek. He will wander the ends of the earth and return with nothing, not even a name.

  Zoli clambers over a gate, down a hill, through a muddy field, where some irrigation pipes are laid out on the ground. She tries to figure a way to make it across the field: a maze of tubes and muck with a barbed-wire fence at the far end. The vast concrete sleeves have sunk a little in the mud, and the only way to cross is to walk along the top of the pipes, arms held wide for balance. She slips, her leg in the mud up to her ankle. She lifts it out noisily, cleans her sandal on the rough edge of the pipe, kneels down into the opening and looks into the hol-lowness of it, imagines her breath traveling all the way around the field, circling and returning, added to by the grasses and the muck.

  “Hey, Gyp.”

  A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hill, four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.

  The other children top the hill and call back to him. He lets out a long arc of spit which lands a meter in front of her, then turns and gallops up the slope.

  They will bring back the adults, thinks Zoli. Cite me for trespassing. Bring a sergeant to arrest me. Fingerprint me. Find out who I am. Take me back to the city. Place me in front of my people again, shame me, humiliate me. Banish me once more.

  She scrambles across the pipes and up the hill, each step a half-step backwards into the last.

  A wooden stake scrapes her ankle and she stops in midfur-row, looks up, catches sight of a wooden roof. So here I am. I have walked all day and have come full circle, and am back in the vineyard once again. I could just as easily be anywhere else. I have spent another day walking, and what else is there to do? Nothing else. If there has been a pencil beneath me it would have made great, useless circles.

  She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the small round scorch mark of her fire from the night before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a small light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swollen terribly.

  The whole of her right cheek is puffy, her neck bloated, her right eye almost shut. I must deal with the tooth now. Be done with it. Pull it out.

  In a corner she finds a single boot, the lace still intact. It is against all custom to touch the boot, another small betrayal, unclean, taboo, but she yanks at the lace until it pulls through, scattering small flakes of dried mud. She rubs the lace in her fingers to warm it, holds it beneath the dripping pipe to moisten the fabric. She makes a loop in the string, reaches into her mouth, hooks the tooth and draws in a sharp breath, yanks hard upwards, tries not to dry-heave. She feels the roots being dragged up from the bottom of her jawbone. Eyes full of tears. Blood falling now from her mouth to her chin. She wipes it away, head to her shoulder, closes her eyes, hauls again. Darkness.

  The tooth rises and tears and for a moment she sees little Woowoodzhi, feverish against a tree, a nail perfectly inserted between his handbones, and he is gone, then back again, feverish once more, and she tugs harder, his small face dissolving.

  A sound rips through her jawbone like the tearing of paper, and the tooth lifts.

  In the morning she feels for the gap with the edge of her tongue. The wound is large and she wonders if she should try to sear it shut, sterilize it with her lighter. She rises to rinse her mouth out in the trickle from the tap. She lifts the tooth from the sink, dark and rotten at its base, the roots clotted and fibrous.

  On the wall above the sink, there is a perfect trapeze of light from the rising sun. She watches it crawl, like something breathing, until another long shadow passes within the box of light, and Zoli drops the tooth with a clank.

  A farmer stands in the field outside, the rheumy-eyed dog at his heels. A face like a Hlinka guard: thick eyebrows and small eyes and a neck with skinfolds. A long burlap sack lies at his feet; a shotgun clasped alongside his leg. He taps the gun against his high rubber boots, then hitches it to his waist and steps forward, moves out of the range of the window.

  Zoli hears the clicking of dog nails, the turn of a boot at the entrance. She waits for him to come in, push the door open, put the shotgun to her neck and take her while the dog watches. The same dog, she thinks, that nosed in my own filth. She slides to the floor, brings her knees to her chest, tries to hold her breath. No movement, no sound, and she goes to the doorway. Her fingers reach around the frame and she pushes it gently, waits for the click of the gun or the thud of his fist in her face. The door swings open further and she peers around the frame.

  Small acts of kindness.

  Outside, the farmer has left two bread rolls and a tin cup, half-filled with black tea. So what if others have drunk from it? I will drink it anyway. She picks it up and sips, and for a split second she wonders if it has, perhaps, been poisoned.

  She drinks the rest quickly, tucks the tin cup into the pocket of her skir
t, touches the bread against her lips and inhales its freshness.

  From the window, the farmer and dog are nowhere to be seen. Zoli rips a chunk of the bread and puts it in her mouth, then tongues it into her gum to soak up the last of the blood. At the window, only the same emptiness of trees and vineyard. She wipes a coatsleeve across her brow. Her forehead is dry and un-fevered now, and in the shard of mirror her face has already begun to lose its swelling. Did I walk all day yesterday or did I just dream it? She digs deep in the fabric of her pocket, finds a pine nut and rolls it in her palm. In what sort of chance universe have I been brought back to a place where there is a waterpipe and a loaf of bread? In what curious conjunction of fever and road have I been allowed such generosity?

  She eats half the farmer's bread and places the remainder in her zajda. Then, with a start, she remembers the rats: they will nibble right through the cloth to get at the least crumb. Zoli shunts upwards with one foot on the windowframe and places the remaining bread on a crossbeam. She pushes it further along the beam with a twig. No good, she thinks, the rats will follow from beam to beam, she has seen their like before. She goes up on her toes and knocks the bread down from the beam. With her headscarf, Zoli loops what is left of the loaf, then reaches up to tie the strange-looking bundle from an iron nail in the ceiling beam.

  For a long time she will recall herself by this: the loaf of bread, the ancient scarf, the spin of both in the air.

  Years ago Conka got hold of a radio, one that used a wind-up handle. It worked for no more than thirty seconds at a time and then the signal faded, but in the middle of a wet afternoon, when the kumpanija was traveling near Jarmociek, a recording came over the radio, a broadcast from Prague. The horses were hauled short near a small stream and were taken to be watered. Everyone sat listening to the radio, silent while Conka's husband wound the handle and Zoli's voice came through.

  Later, while the horses were shaking out their manes, the youngest, Bora, climbed up on Zoli's lap and asked how was it possible for her to be in both places, inside the radio and on the road, at the exact same time. She had laughed then, they all laughed, and Conka pushed her fingers through Bora's hair. But something lay behind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other.

  She wakes to the smallest one turning, face twitching. The other follows, fluent, waterlike. Nose to the floor, it whips across the boards to join its mate, both grown bold. Zoli backs into the corner and throws twigs across the floor, then builds three small makeshift fires in a ring around her, flings lit pine needles towards the rathole.

  She wonders what it might look like from the outside: the little wooden shed half-aglow in the darkness, tiny spears of light rolling across the floor.

  The morning rises along the windowledge. A long barrier of cloud is sliced by the movement of a tree branch in the wind. She looks down the length of her body. Her skirts are torn and there are small lumps of dried dirt at her knees. Her feet, still blood-raw and filthy. She stands, lifts her skirts. It is not right, she thinks, immodest, but it does not matter, I am not what I used to be. She rips a strip of white cloth from the underdress and folds it over, places it snugly at the back of her shoe. She tests it out, stepping lightly across the floor. Marime, unclean, but it works well and her feet feel cushioned. She leans over again and slowly lifts her dress once more, then hears, from outside, a rapping. The knock on the door is gentle yet it takes her breath away.

  Only gadze knock.

  She backs into the corner and sits, looking at the fire-marks beneath her, spreads her dresses over to hide them. Two more series of triple knocks. A grunt and a whisper, then rifle fire, she is sure it is rifle fire until she recognizes the high bark of a dog. The door is slowly pushed open and the dog comes through, arcing its body. It snaps at the end of a rope, bares its teeth. Light spreads sideways into the hut. The farmer and a woman stand in the doorway, made into portrait by shadow.

  The woman holds the shotgun and the farmer hovers behind her. Zoli wonders how they have made their silent approach, then notices that the dog has been muzzled: the contraption is hanging down in the farmer's hand.

  The woman stands gray-haired, sturdy, much older than the farmer. She wears a housedress many sizes too small. Her breasts swing low to her belly. She shouts at the dog to quieten. The dog whimpers and the hair roaches momentarily along its back. The woman looks around, finger still on the trigger of the gun. She glances at the burnt twig-ends and the small teepee of ashes, the one empty sandal in the middle of the floor.

  Spreading back the loop of Zoli's skirts with her foot, she bends down and examines her face.

  The long hairs on the woman's chin, the flare-out of her nose, the tiny twitch of her mouth, the smokeblue of her neck, the very green of her eyes, narrow, like the wick-slot of a lamp.

  She tilts the gun, lifts Zoli's chin. “We have laws here,” she says. “We have curfew.” The barrel touches, cold, against Zoli's throat.

  “Are you going far? Hey. Gypsy woman. I am talking to you. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going far? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I'm not sure, Comrade.”

  “Are there many of you? ”

  “Just me.

  “The first snow in a blizzard comes from nowhere,” says the woman.

  “It's just me, only me.”

  “If you're not telling me the truth I'll tell the troopers.”

  “It's the truth.”

  “I can swallow hot rocks easier than I can the word of a Gypsy.”

  The woman turns to the farmer with some silent gesture. He grins at Zoli, shuffles outside. A brief darkness until the door creaks open once more. He stands under the frame, carrying a plate covered with a towel. He grins again, leans across, exchanging the plate for the shotgun. The woman sighs, lifts the towel from the plate, and spreads the food on the floor in front of Zoli: cheese, bread, salt, and five homemade biscuits. A small dollop of yellow jam sits on the side of the plate with some butter. The woman hesitates a moment, takes a knife from her dress pocket, and lays it sideways on the edge of the plate.

  “You can't stay here,” she says, flattening out the edges of the tea towel with a picture of a cathedral on it. “Do you hear me? You cannot stay.”

  The farmer lumbers outside once more and comes back carrying a wicker-bound wine jug. He sets the jug on the floor, stamps his boot, and yanks the dog by the rope-leash.

  “It's just a little something,” says the woman. “Go ahead, eat. Drink. The milk is fresh.”

  The farmer crosses the floor and reaches up for the lace and bread hanging from the ceiling, then looks across into the sink where Zoli's tooth sits in the metal drainhole.

  “My son doesn't speak,” says the old woman. “He's mute. Do you understand?”

  The farmer stares at Zoli, the grin splayed from ear to ear.

  “He came home yesterday waving his arms. I didn't believe him, trying to tell me there's a woman out walking in the rain. But he was up early this morning, cooking. Supposed to be hunting goose but he's cooking breakfast instead. Burned the first four batches. Jesus of sweet heaven. He's never once cooked before, never in his life, not even for his mother. Cooking for a Gypsy. I slapped him. Look at the size of him. I slapped him. But there's one good thing I like about your people. You steal a chicken, you steal a chicken. The others, they come in, they steal all your chickens and don't even call it stealing. I am sure you know what I mean. I'm too old for double-talk. I suppose they'll put me in the cold ground for it. You go ahead and eat now. There are no five-year plans on that bread.”

  Zoli pulls the plate towards her. The edge of the tea towel rumples.

  “Are you not hungry? ”

  The woman rises from the floor and takes her son's elbow: “Let the woman eat in holy peace. Look at her. She wants to eat in peace.”

  “I bow deeply before you, Comrade,” says
Zoli.

  The woman blanches: “I don't expect you to be here when we return.” No.

  “Nor to ever return.” No.

  “I wish you a good journey. You can take the knife, the jug. The towel if you like it.”

  “I kiss your kind hands.”

  “I would not have used them,” says the woman.

  She guides her son towards the door of the hut and the dog follows, head bent low. They leave the door swinging open and the farmer turns slowly to look behind, his sloping walk, the tap of the gun against his leg. What curious destiny has brought him along the road, thinks Zoli, not once, but twice in his tall and lumbering silence?

  They make their way towards the line of the trees and a gap in the stone wall, the farmer still looking fondly over his shoulder.

  He grins and extends his hand: in his palm rolls the white and dark of Zoli's gone tooth.

  Zoli watches as mother and son become pale shapes against the land. She reaches out for one of the biscuits. It still holds, at its center, a touch of warmth. She smears the jam with her finger. The milk runs cold against the back of her throat. The butter she eats on its own, in one go. She wraps the shard of mirror in her pocket, carefully swaddling the tip so it will not pierce her, slides the knife into her rope belt, twisting it so that it hangs like a gewgaw. She folds the towel with its cathedral piercing a false blue sky. The plate she will leave behind.