Zoli (20 page)

“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.

She turns to take a look at the small hut—the laceless boot, the bent grass between floorboards, the scorch marks—and she touches her left breast. For the first time since judgment, Zoli
feels a pulse of strength: she will return now to the city and leave nothing behind, not even a trace.

As she moves out, across the stone wall, onto the tarmac, she has the sudden feeling that if a truck screams down the roadway now she will undoubtedly be able to stand out of its way.

Z
OLI SHAMBLES DOWN the footpath, in the shadows of the pines, under their tall, lamenting sway. She moves against the current of the river until she reaches the Red Army Bridge, wind-bitten and vapory in the morning. Behind her, chains of smoke rise from the outlying factories and, further still, the curve of distant hills against the sky. The Danube shines, skeins of oil floating on the surface. A wheat barge, toiling upstream, lets out a high whistle.

Across the river sits the old town of Bratislava: the castle on the hill, the chimneys, the cathedral.

Zoli hobbles out from under the steel girdings, over weeds sprouting from cinder and muck, up the grassy embankment. At the top of the bank, the wind blows cold and fast. Early traffic thrums past and the bridge shakes. Two men labor with a broken-down car, one at the rear, the other at the driver's window, guiding the steering wheel.

Zoli pulls her kerchief tight across her face.

On the far side of the bridge she cleans her hands in a small puddle and dries them on a lamppost poster, a Russian circus announcement, red and yellow with curled Cyrillic. Two trapeze artists swing at the top of the poster, blond women stretching out towards one another in the air. Rain has bubbled underneath and swollen their bodies. At the bottom of the poster, a ringmaster, a hoop on fire, and a dancing bear. How I used to love them, those dancing bears in their roped circles, heavy-
pawed and majestic, brought from far away. They came lurching through Trnava square, red-hatted and shit-smeared, into the shadows cast down from churches. The music was wound by the carnival man on the painted box, and the tambourine was struck and we shouted for our favorite songs: /
have two wives, one of them sober, one of them drunk, both of them I love the same.
Old men stood away from streetcorners, shopkeepers closed their doors, and women stood up from pail and rag. All around the square was the hum and bustle of merchants, with the local crier, the policemen, the schoolchildren.

Zoli edges her finger along the paper to where it bunches at her fingertips.

She turns from the lamppost, crosses the road onto a small pebbled footpath. A squeal of brakes as a car swerves towards the footpath. She turns quickly. A shower of mud. The car horn beeps as one of the men from the bridge leans out and leers at her.

“Shit on you,” she says quietly when they are far enough away. She wipes the muck from her cheek.

At the underpass, swarms of men and women from the early shifts walk towards work, their shoes slapping against the pavement. Most of them wear identical blue hats of the armament factory, and, as they descend, they merge into the same stream of color.

Across the square, past the bare winter trees, she passes the Carlton Hotel, where men in the dark overcoats of the security police trundle back and forth. She shudders at the thought of stepping inside: the silver door handles, the huge paintings, the gilded frames, the beveled mirrors, the curving staircase. How foreign it is now, the columns, the pillars, the plastic plants in
the windows. There used to be applause when I entered the front rooms. They would hold their cigarettes to their mouths and squint. The soft-faced women would nod and whisper. Always the feeling that they were looking right through me, past me, anxious to be with anybody but themselves. The way they smoked, as if it would never belong to them. How loud it was when stepping from the carpet to the tiled floor. Something galloping under my ribs. Looking for Swann, his familiar face. He used to arrive hours beforehand just so I'd not feel nervous, waiting there with his hat tapping against his thigh, a copy of
Rudepravo
rolled up in his pocket.

A low swing of sadness in her belly, Zoli crosses away from the hotel and up the hill, into the short and vaulted alleyways of the old city. A banner is strung between lampposts:
Citizens, We Must Conserve Bread.
It flaps and twists in the breeze, and, as she gets nearer, one end of the banner snaps, curtsies a moment, falls to the ground, and sags in the cobblestone puddles. She steps over the slogan, walks on, hand trailing the lichen on the walls.

Quieter here, darker: the light gone out of things.

She moves along the rutted path, in the shadows, hidden especially from the troopers. If she dawdles they will stop her, cock their rifles, question her, the mud on her overcoat, the dark bloodstains on her ankles, and then bring her to the nearest all-weather post. Flip open the gray cover and examine the raised stamp of her Party card, the thumbprint, the details: 169.5 cm, black eyes, black hair, distinguishing feature a lazy left eye, a 2 cm scar on lower right lip, chin dimple, poet. She used to sign her name with three Xs, and the most perceptive of them used to ask her why. If she replied at all she would simply
shrug her shoulders, making them more difficult, more probing, more insistent: “But how can you be a poet and sign XXX?” Often the whole transaction would have to wait for confirmation over the radio: “That's Comrade Novotna, you idiot, let her go.”

Past the flaking wall of an old city monastery, sandals slapping against the cobblestones. The monastery has long been gutted. What remnants of incense, stained glass, wax candles? What small ruby flames still burn behind pier glass? She looks up to see a number of narrow window slots in the upper reaches of the building, near the timbered roof. Birds fly in the windows, wings held together, and flare out again seconds later into the sky.

In the drizzle, she notices a group of young boys standing in her path. Their ease, their nonchalance. At the end of the line, one boy toes at the carcass of a dead pigeon. The boy is white-skinned. Red-shirted. Hair shorn close. He flicks the pigeon with his boot and it sails a moment in the air, thuds on the cobbles with a spray of tiny feathers. Zoli pulls together the folds in her dress and steps over it. Heart quick and thumping. She hears a whistle behind her, and then the sound of footsteps.

Even when the bird hits her in the back of the head she does not turn.

Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. All that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of
their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, allowed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again? Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hell's fire on them, they will not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I will not bow a second time, no.

She rounds the corner of the theater, beyond the ironwork fence, past the dead winter gardens. In the tenements, gnarled women stare out from behind high windows, their bodies lost to brickwork. At a roadblock she stops cold: four troopers stand scanning the street, billyclubs banging into their hands. Traffic passes by in a muted rumble. Some pedestrians are waved through, raw-looking girls in headscarves and soiled white uniforms. Zoli bends to adjust her sandals, accustomed now to the mess of her feet. She waits until the troopers put their hands up in front of a dark automobile and lean in either window, billy-clubs prodding. Breathe softly. Easy. No sudden movement. Beyond the roadblock she goes, careful not to glance at them.

A voice: “Hey, you.”

A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice full of snarl: “Where to, Auntie?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Just past the market a little way, Comrade.”

“That's nowhere?”

“Just up the road a way.”

“Identification.”

She unties the knots, hikes the zajda from her back and deliberately sifts through the bundle. “Shit,” he says, holding his nose. The toe of his boot stamps down hard on the cloth. “Go on, woman, out of here.”

The tin cup punches at her spine when she lifts the bundle. Shit on you too, she thinks. Who are you to say I'm filthy? Who are you to ask where I am going? She turns the corner and spits into the gutter. Paris, you idiot, I am going to Paris. Do you hear me? Paris. She has no idea why the city comes to mind, but she strikes her fist against the left side of her chest. Paris. That's where I'm going. Paris.

At the top of the road she slows again, a stitch in her ribcage. A line of forgotten laundry is strung from one side of Galandrova to the other, the wet shirts moving in the wind as if waiting for men to inhabit them. Under the trees, beyond the warehouses, past the printing mill, she goes, staying close to the shadows. She can already smell the ink and hear the sound of the rollers—the fumes make her head reel momentarily.