Zoli

  We fall out of rhythm with our earliest ways. There were so many times when I had forgotten my old life, I even forgot I was polluted, or maybe I had just put a rag on the blade, and in some ways I had begun to think of myself as Mozol's sister. The decision had no fear. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why. I knew the town well. I did not like what I was about to do, daughter, but I had forced myself not to think about it. I cut the nerve that twitched in me and went to the dump at the edge of town. Some piles of rubbish were smoking from early fires. Ash and dust wheeled in the air. I rescued the door of a thrown-away cupboard, yellow with flaking paint. I tore it from its hinges and gauged its weight. I carved a set of maple leaves and a griffin on either side of the door—ridiculous, of course, but I did not care.

  I fashioned two grand rubber earrings from parts of a discarded carburetor.

  In the early dawn, I found a Spanish scarf in the collection of camp clothing. I tied it around my head, went out the gate, and wandered along the streambank at the rear of the camp. I picked pebbles from the water, the smoother and more polished the better. The pebbles clacked in my pocket as I made my way into the center of the town, carrying all my materials. Gusts of wind encouraged me along. I passed through a cobbled square. How strange the light was, it filled everything up, yet nothing seemed to cast a shadow. I kept expecting to have trouble, but found none. A woman on her own did not present too much of a threat. I wandered until I settled on a narrow alleyway just off the long Odenburger, not far from the railway station. I was struck by the stillness of the alley, though many were passing on foot. I found two broken concrete blocks in an unpainted doorway, set the door on top, put a blanket underneath, and sat down with my head bowed. I said to myself over and over that I was a traitor to everything, even myself.

  Nothing happened. A smell of cabbage wafted out from a nearby restaurant. I could hear the buzz around me, the restaurant workers gathering at the door to watch, to smoke, to point. Austrian women in long brown coats passed with their heads cocked indifferently, but I could sense an excitement they did not want to betray. I listened to the sound of their shoes as they turned, nearly always six paces beyond. Just a moment's hesitation, and then they moved on. I had settled on silence as a form of communication, as good as any. A young man hunkered down on the ground in front of me and held out his palm. I placed the stones in his hand and asked him to roll them across the table. I told him to be calm, that he had nothing to be afraid of. Take my hand, I said, but do not look into my eyes. His own hands were smooth and unlined, his arms were thin and his shoulders narrow. His face, though, was generous, and on his wide nose were the red marks of one who usually wears eyeglasses, so I said to him that I had a strong feeling that he had left something behind, perhaps it had something to do with distance. He shook his head, no. Well, then, I said, maybe it has something to do with sight. His mouth twitched. Yes, he stut- tered, and he took the glasses from his pocket, put them on. I had a hold on him already. It was nothing more or less mysterious than that. I touched the scattered stones one by one and in-canted some gibberish above them.

  I thought of myself then in a poor reflection of what I used to be and yet it did not disturb me. I felt at ease with the sham, and I began by asking: The heart or wealth?

  The question meant nothing, yet seemed to have the right weight.

  The heart, the boy replied immediately. I made the sign of the cross on his palm. He rolled the stones a second time. He had been through dark times, I said. Yes. He was searching now for a different place. Yes. Some of it, I said, involved flight or movement. His eyes lit up and he leaned in closer. A city or town, I said, not far away. Yes, yes, Graz, he replied. There had been dark things in Graz, I said, and he had held on to the hand of someone. Yes, he declared, and his eyes grew big. He said that he had a friend named Tomas who had died after the war, he had stepped on a tram line and his foot had been caught and he was killed, the tram bearing down on him, unstoppable. I closed my eyes, then asked him to roll the stones across the board again. There was awful sorrow at the death of Tomas, I said, and here I furrowed my brow. It was something to do with trains. Yes, yes, he told me, it was a tram! Tomas was suffering, I said, from something during the war, some awful moment, it had something to do with his uniform. Yes, you're right, the boy whispered, he had wanted to desert. He wanted to leave the army, I repeated, and he was afraid of what would happen, the disgrace. Yes, said the boy, his Uncle Felix. I stared into his eyes and told him that there were other secrets too, and here I deepened my brow. I touched the boy's cold hands and said, after a long silence, the name uncle Felix. But how do you know, said the boy, how on earth do you know that name?

  I wanted to say that some things are more important than the truth, but I did not.

  From this distance of four decades it may seem that I was not scared, but I can tell you now that my blood was coursing triple time, for I kept expecting troopers to round the corner, or some dead family spirit to lean in from a doorway to see what had happened to me, how I had betrayed all that I had ever known. I had no name for what I had become, it did not exist in either pain or pleasure.

  Still, the less I talked, the more the boy talked, and he was not even aware of what he was telling me. They never remember what they have said, chonorroeja, instead they wait for the wisdom which you have borrowed. He gave me his answers and I repeated them back and made them mine, he had no idea of my trickery. I could have dressed the dead in bearskins and taught them how to dance and still he would have believed that they were there to console him. His voice became low and even. I said to him that he should carry bread in his pocket as protection against bad luck and that in the spirit world everything was fine for his good friend Tomas. I talked of goodness and purpose and vision. Keep things close to your heart, I said, and they will be a power. The boy stood, reached deep in his pocket and took out a whole handful of coins, which he laid on the wooden board.

  You cannot understand what this means to me, he said.

  I pocketed the coins and hurried back to the dump. I found an old chair and set it up in the alleyway and by noontime I had four customers, each of whom paid successively more, relegated as they were to their own peculiar dooms.

  There are times I must admit that I had a little giggle at the foot of their foolishness. Once a trooper came by, slapping his truncheon at his thigh. For all his snarl he could have been a Hlinka, but I rolled the riverstones for him and filled him with folly about his good life, and he promised that he would leave me alone as long as I did not make too much of a fuss. I told him he should wear socks of a different color for good luck and the next day he walked past me, flicked a quick look at me, raised his trouser legs, one after the other, brown and blue, and marched on.

  A number of weeks went by and I lost myself in the telling. Word of my talents spread. Many young men in particular came to visit me. I could see that something inside them had gone soft and loose and hopeless, but when they talked about it they briefly forgot it. I filled them with promises of cures and good days to come. I made a cross of wax mixed with charcoal and wrapped it in hair. I sewed two yellow buttons together and tied them on a stick. These I called my little corpses and I set them up around me; such ridiculous charms only gave weight to my words. They paid me good money for such foolishness and I sat watching the shadows reach out for other shadows as the idiots rolled a few riverstones across a cupboard table. I had no mercy for them, it was not my pocket they were reaching into.

  Mozol almost cried her eyes out onto her breast when I gave her all the money.

  In the height of autumn, 1961, Mozol left on a canvas-covered truck. Her few possessions were stacked high in the air and her children still higher upon them. Her husband was spread out over them to keep them from falling, but was already sleeping. She smiled, clasped my hands, and looked me in the eye. For many years I would remember that look, how close I came to telling her the truth. I stopped her several times as s
he gathered her possessions together and said: Mozol, I must tell you something. But she said, I am too busy, tell me later. I am quite sure she knew, she kissed my forehead when she left, then put my hand against her heart.

  There is no single goodbye for us, chonorroeja. Ach Dev-lesa. Dza Devlesa. One is staying. One is leaving. Stay with God, go with God.

  I saw the white mountains and how they lay against the sky, and I am not ashamed to tell you that the sight was terrifying.

  You'll be next Marienka, said Doctor Marcus. She walked back towards her clinic with her hands tight behind her back.

  How lost I felt then, daughter, how very alone.

  Only people with desires can be fooled, and I had none. My friend was gone. The next morning I put on the same clothes that I had worn for months, took my makeshift table, and prepared to go into town. But then I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and let me tell it to you straight, daughter, I knew that in my shame I had lost every shred of dignity that I had ever worked to own. I do not seek to make a complicated dance of it, I had done these things for a purpose, but now the purpose had disappeared. I looked at myself and saw nothing that shored me up on the left shoulder and little to shore me up on the right. The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, had become it.

  I went down past the cathedral to Franz-Liszt Street. No sound came from the high shuttered windows. I set my things around me. The people gathered and I gave them all bad omens that they accepted and wore like masks. The next day, I walked beyond the red-white-red barrier like there was nothing unusual at all, but instead of going down by the dump road I went towards the mountains.

  Last night I woke thinking Enrico was here. I rose and flamed the lamp but found only these pages. Out the window, I could see way down into the valley. What is it about the cold that sharpens the edges of everything? Enrico used to say that the emptiest days are the loveliest.

  Do you, daughter, recall the sight of your father coming home after a foray across the rocky part of the northern mountain when he had cut himself from a fall off a small cliff? He was carrying animal medicines then—steroids, hormones, injections to sell on the other side. He had packed them solid into a giant rucksack, had even filled his pockets and socks, and then he trudged off to Maria Luggua. A blizzard blew up, a curtain of snow opening and closing around him. He was edging his way around the point in the mountain where not even the goats ventured. He stepped off into nothing but air, and his fall was broken only by an outcrop of rock. He landed in a drift and he looked down to see that his leg had been ripped open. He contemplated the animal injections but didn't know which might help him with the pain. He had to dig himself out with a small folding shovel strapped to the side of his rucksack. The blood filled UDhis snowboot. He could onlv recognize where he was by the feel of the trees—the further down he went on the slope the less gnarled the bark became. When he reached home, he dropped the rucksack, and simply said: Put the kettle on, Zoli, I'm freezing.

  He pulled off the snowboot, put it by the stove and said it had been a very bad evening for a walk. He had been gone three whole days.

  I can see him now, his thin nose, his wide mouth, the lines grooved deep in his face, his eyes half-closed against the glare of the snow.

  When the new trade laws came in, there was no longer any need for medicines or cigarettes or coffee or seeds to be brought across the mountain, and he had always refused to bring dynamite for the Tyroleans who were blowing up pylons and causing havoc. He stopped his trade, just as suddenly as he had started, and he seldom walked the mountain anymore, except on festive days, and he made his living instead at the millhouse, and when the millhouse went the way of everything else, he bought it, moved with us in here, kept the wheel running, and did whatever handyman jobs he could find around the valley. Two or three times a day he stood in the doorway, looking out over the weather above the mountain. He could have walked out blindfolded and still found his way there.

  I have loved your father, pure and simple; his and yours are the only lives I have never betrayed.

  The first truck to ever give me a lift belonged to a fruit farmer. He wore a black suit. His cheeks were red and newly shaven, his eyes bloodshot. He knew that I was running from something, but at first he did not say a word. I sat tight in the seat as the gears clanked and the engine rumbled into life. The farmer asked where I was going and when I didn't answer he shrugged and said he was on his way to the market a few towns down the road and I was welcome to join him so long as I did not make a fuss. I feigned being mute once again and the farmer sighed deeply as if it were the oldest trick, which it was, and one that has always failed me, as much as looking over my shoulder.

  Scared of something? he asked.

  The hedges shot by, trees and windmills, and I realized just how strange it had been to have walked so far, things being so much different at speed. I still did not recall how I had walked in the haze after the judgment. I kept that part of my mind blank, I could not face it, how I had crossed the border first from Slovakia and then from Hungary, and then to Austria. Nor did I think of where I was going. Paris seemed as good, or as ridiculous, a place as any.

  After a while it began to rain. The windscreen wipers were broken but the farmer had made a rope that he could pull from inside the truck. He showed me how to do it with exaggerated movements and it made me happy, this small task. I tugged the rope from one side of the dashboard to the other. The fruit farmer complimented me, but I noticed that he had opened his window and was smoking furiously. So he thinks I smell, I thought. I wanted to laugh. I rolled down my window and felt the cold wind blowing. We went west in open country under the shadow of the mountains. The road was long and straight and the trees snapped to attention. The mountains lay white and enormous in the distance. It was curious to me that the closer we came to them the further away they seemed to drift. The farmer drove with one hand on the steering wheel and looked across at me every now and then.

  You know those Russians put another satellite up in the air? he said.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, nor for what reason he said it.

  You can see them at night like small stars moving, he said.

  I made a complicated series of hand gestures and finished by scrunching my fingers down into the palm of my hand, like grinding a tooth that might once have laid there, long ago. The fruit farmer shook his head and sighed. He steered with his knee and lit yet another cigarette. Two streams of pale blue smoke came from his nostrils and then he leaned across and passed the cigarette to me. I shook my head, no, but another voice said take it, Zoli, for crying out loud take it. He shrugged and held the cigarette near the window, and I watched as it reddened and burned down. Sparks flew from his fingers. The smell of tobacco made my head spin. That was one of my first lessons about the West—they do not ask twice. You should always say yes. Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes.

  The road sped beneath us. For the first time I began to think I was truly in a different country. I turned to look at a family collecting blackberries at the side of the road until they became small dots in the distance. Tall silos gave way to church steeples and, near the outskirts of a large town, the farmer pulled into the roadside verge. Right, here we are, he said. He climbed out, lifted a tarp and handed me some apples. I've always had a passion for the traveling life, he said. I nodded. Just steer clear of the Kieberer, he said, and you'll be all right.

  For whatever reason I forgot my mute ways and asked: What's a Kieberer?

  He did not blink an eye and said: The gendarmes.

  Oh, thank you, I said.

  He laughed long and hard and then said: I thought as much.

  I felt my body tighten and I yanke
d the door handle, but he threw his head back and laughed again.

  He drove the truck alongside me as I tried to walk away along the verge of the road. Traffic was zooming past and blaring their horns. To one side was a grazing field, the other a stoneworks. When I quickened my pace the fruit farmer quickened too. He was rolling tobacco with two hands and steering the truck with his knees, but then he brought the truck to a halt, sealed the paper with his tongue, leaned out the window and gave me two hand-rolled cigarettes. I took them straightaway.

  I'm fond of escape stories, he said.

  He clanged through the gears and drove off in a cloud. I stood watching and thought: Well, here I am in Austria, with two hand-rolled cigarettes and a man waving me goodbye from a battered fruit truck, if ever I had four guesses of where I would be after so many years, all of them would be wrong.

  That night I found some lovely gardens, dense and private, to sleep in. A hard breeze was approaching, announced in advance by the clapping of house shutters. Rain came and I huddled against a wall. I woke to find that I had spent the night beneath a monument to war. Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especially for the carvers of stone, and I thought about the truth of that, when in every small village of Europe you can see Christ or Soldier hammered out in stone. But who, on a battlefield, chonorroeja, wants a monument? Who, in the middle of his fighting, thinks he will one day be in the hands of a mason?

  I cursed my old poems and went down to the town square— I did not even know what town I was in—and told a series of fortunes for a paltry sum that brought me enough for a train ticket. A shiny train stood on the tracks. Questions rattled in my mind. Where could I go? How could I break a border without a passport? What place might accept me? I tried pushing these thoughts aside. I would buy a ticket west, that was all. I was halfway through the queue at the ticket window when two gendarmes appeared. One lifted my chin with the cold end of his truncheon. He turned and whispered to his colleague. I had a fair idea that they would make their own statue of me, so when the gendarme looked over again, this Gypsy woman was gone once more, on foot.