Zoli

by Colum McCann

  “Ms. Novotna?” he says.

  She rises to her feet and there across the room, standing like a silent sadness sunk down, is Stephen Swann, staring back at her.

  Zoli thinks a moment that she must be wrong, that her mind has slipped an instant, that she has found his face in someone else, that the mention of his name has brought his face to another, that the dizziness has misled her, that time has just shifted and fractured and landed in shards. The man—is it Swann?— looks directly across at her, one hand down by his side, a wooden cane in the other. He is dressed in a fine gray suit. His hair, or what remains of it, is gray. A shiny bald pate in the middle. Heavy lids frame his eyes. His face is thin, his brow furrowed. He does not move. Zoli looks about her for some escape. Her breath sounds to her like someone drowning. She casts about for her daughter again, grasps the back of the empty chair. Go away, she thinks. Please go away. Disappear. The music from the stage is loud, powerful, and the extended pull of a bow across a violin makes her shiver.

  “If you'll excuse me,” she says to the journalist.

  “I was just wondering if we could have a word—" I must go.

  “Later perhaps?”

  “Yes, yes, later.”

  The man across the room—it is Swann, she is sure of it— has begun to move in her direction, stiff and lopsided on the cane. His body moves in the folds of the suit, which creases and uncreases, like some strange gray animal.

  “All of us, we'll get together,” says the journalist.

  “Of course, yes.”

  “We'll meet here?”

  She stands suddenly and faces the journalist, stares into the round outline of his face, and says sharply: “You must excuse me, please.”

  From the corner of her eye she watches Swann, his neck a sack of sag, vanishing into the folds of the jacket. She thinks for a moment of curtains disintegrating on a rail. “Don't come here,” she whispers. She pushes the high back of a chair out of her way. Three tables away. “No.” She grabs the cloth of her dress and bundles it in her fingers. “Disappear,” she says quietly. “Leave.” Two tables, and then he is standing in front of her and he says his name, quietly, softly, “Stepän,” as if he is finally and entirely Slovak, as if he always has been, but then he corrects himself, maybe remembering something so old it has been carved from a tomb: “Stephen.”

  “I know who you are,” she says.

  “Zoli, can we sit?”

  She wants, in that instant, nothing more than a wicker chair faced to the sunset in the valley and to grow old and dead, that's what she wants, she would like to be in the valley on that brown wicker chair, yes, dying in the shadow of Enrico.

  “No,” she says.

  Swann tries what surely wants to be a smile, but is not. “I can't tell you how… I am… I…,” he says, as if he is trying to recall a Slovak word he might never have known. “So happy.” His words make a hollow imitation of his face. He takes a pen from his pocket and stares at it, nervously inverting it, his pale hands twitching. “I thought something had happened to you, I thought maybe you were, I thought maybe, all these years … it's so good to see your face, Zoli, so very good. May I sit, please, may we sit? How did you—” No.

  “I want to say something. Please.”

  “I know what you want to say.”

  “I have something I've wanted to say for years. I thought you were—”

  “I know what you thought.”

  He clears his throat as if to speak again, some knowledge, some good word, but it does not come, it seems caught in his throat, and he cannot disguise his shaking. He lowers his head and his eyes accumulate shadow.

  She steps sideways and she does not know why or from where, but in her hand she has picked up a small metal spoon. She thinks of placing it back on the nearby table but she doesn't, she pockets it, and she is sure then the waiters are watching, or the journalist, or the security guards, and they have seen her, she has stolen a spoon, that they will come across, accuse her, they will grab her forearm, say, Excuse me, come with us, show us the spoon, thief, liar, Gypsy. She can hear the thump of Swann's cane behind her. In front of her, a thick crowd—the young Croatian poet surrounded by women, the workers from her daughter's office. Swann shuffles behind her. The sound of his cane.

  She would like the people to part like water but she cannot get through, she must tap them on the shoulders. They turn and smile and their voices sound to Zoli as if they're speaking from inside a tree. She slides past, her nerve ends stripped clean.

  At the far side of the room, Francesca watches, a small frown on her face, confused, but Zoli shakes her head, gives a wave, as if she is all right, not to worry, chonorroeja, I'll be okay. She pushes the last chair aside. Out the door, into the corridor, fast now, around the corner.

  He's gone bald, she thinks. Old and bald and wearing a suit a size too big. Liver spots on his hands. White knuckles. A silver-tipped cane.

  She hurries towards the entrance, through reception, out the revolving door, where the concierge skips towards her. “Taxi, please,” she says in Slovak first, then Italian, and she feels as if she wants to tear at her tongue, remove all these languages. The concierge smiles and raises his hand, his glove so very white against the red of his uniform.

  Zoli is halfway in the taxi and halfway out when she realizes she doesn't have any money, and she thinks how absurd, climbing into this car, in a land she doesn't know, going towards a room she doesn't know, with no coins to take her there. “Wait, please,” she says to the driver.

  In the hotel glass, the reflection startles her, her gray hair, the bright dress, the shrunken bend of her back. To have come all this way and see herself like this. She pushes back through the revolving doors. Far down the corridor she sees Swann— he looks as if he has spent his life turning in every wrong direction he can find, and, for a moment, she sees him as that man on the motorbike, with a rabbit hopping in front of him, swerving to avoid it, his crutches strapped on the back, light and dark moving over the fields.

  She hurries down the corridor, ducking through the kitchen to the amazement of a young man chopping carrots into tiny slivers. Someone shouts at her. Her hip glances off the edge of a metal table. She follows a young waitress carrying a large silver tray out of the kitchen, into the hall again where she stops a moment, breathes deeply, looks for Francesca in all the faces, their confusion, their joy, their music.

  “Mamma?”

  Zoli shuffles across and takes her daughter's elbow. “I need some money. Some French money.”

  “Of course, Mamma. Why?”

  “I need to get a taxi. I need to go home. Your home. Hurry.”

  “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing, precious heart.”

  “Who was that man you were talking to?”

  “That was Swann,” she says. She is surprised at herself. She wanted to say: Nobody. To shake her head and shrug. To cast it off, pretend indifference. To stand there, a picture of ordinary strength. But she doesn't, and instead she says it again: “That was Stephen Swann. He has some journalist with him.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I just need some money for a taxi.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “What did I say? I don't know what I said, Franca. I need to go.”

  “What's he doing here?”

  “I don't know. Do you know?”

  “Why would I know, Mamma?”

  “Tell me.”

  “No,” says her daughter. “I didn't know.”

  “Just give me the money, please. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I beg of your sweet eyes, Franca.”

  She sees a light sweeping over the valley, a bird through treetops, a road rising white in front of her eyes, then she feels herself sway. Francesca takes her elbow and places the other hand tight around her mother's waist. The rush of hotel wallpaper. The quick glint of light on glass. Fingerprints at the low corners of the windowpanes. Swann is leaning against the wall, framed by two cheap prin
ts, his chest heaving. The journalist stands beside him, head bent, scribbling in his spiral notebook. Swann looks up as they pass. He raises his hand again.

  “Don't turn,” says Zoli. “Please don't turn.”

  They move towards the revolving door and the sound of taped birdsong. Francesca presses money into her hand.

  “I swear, Mamma, I had no idea. I swear on my life.”

  “Just take me out to the taxi.”

  “I'll go with you.”

  “No. I want to sit alone.”

  She catches a brief waft of her daughter's perfume as she slides into the backseat. “Keys!” shouts Francesca, and Zoli rolls down the window, takes the key ring in her palm.

  She can see Francesca mouthing something as the taxi pulls away—I love you, Mamma—and in the rear of the reception area, shuffling, trying to get through the crowd, is Swann, rail-thin, quivering. He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

  Zoli sits back against the warm plastic of the seat and looks out to the alarming beauty of the sky as the taxi swings away from the hotel.

  She takes the elevator without a second thought, places her head against the cool of the wooden panel, and recalls the noise of his cane, the shine of light on his forehead, the contours of his brow.

  For a long time she forgets to push the button.

  The chains clank and she rises. The elevator opens on another floor. A young woman and a dog step in to take her place. She walks the final flight of stairs. Turns the key in the door. Negotiates the long corridor in the dim light. She drops her dress to the floor and the metal spoon tumbles out of her pocket. Her underclothes fall behind her. She stands naked in front of the long mirror and gazes at her body—a paltry thing, brown and puckered. She reaches up and unloosens her hair, lets it fall. All the ancient codes violated. She walks into the living room and picks up the photograph of Enrico from the shelf near the window, takes it from the frame, returns to bed, lifts the covers, curls up under the sheets with the photo just beneath her left breast.

  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 fath
er'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.