Zoli (29 page)

Doctor Marcus arrived at the end of my bed every noon, her stethoscope twinkling in the light, a row of pens in her pocket, one with a Canadian flag, and although she looked not a bit like

Swann, I could not help thinking that she was like a sister to him, with her light hair, hazel eyes, her oval face.

You don't have to suffer, she said. There's no point. Why don't you tell me your situation and then I can help?

It was like an old song, a children's rhyme, I had heard it so often, it was as if she had taken the words of a bureaucrat and put them in a child's mouth.

I know you can talk, she said. The nurses heard you. On the first day, you were screaming in a language they didn't recognize, surely it was Gypsy, am I right, was it Gypsy?

I turned away.

Some people think you're Polish, she said.

Then she leaned in even closer.

But I think you're from outer space.

That almost made me smile, yet when Doctor Marcus left I stared at the ceiling, and the more I stared, the more it pressed down on me.

They did not know my name let alone my anguish.

Later in the day Doctor Marcus came back and shone her flashlight into my eyes and wrote something on her chart. Pills were given to me with water, white tablets with orange writing. I had the strange thought that I was swallowing words and Swann's face kept coming to my mind. I had lost a tooth in my journey and the orange pills fitted perfectly in the gap. I spat them out when the nurses left, dropped them down a hole in the top of the metal bedstead.

I don't think that even now I can find the proper words to describe the feeling of having left my life behind. I was suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch. Every time I turned in the bed I would see an old road, the lane at the back
of the chocolate factory, or the road to the schoolhouse near Presov, or the high path to the forest above the vineyards; small flashes that burst out green and yellow into my mind. I turned to the other side of the bed and more flashes came. I was at a strange bridge. I did not know how wide it was. I tried crossing it. I stood in the dark waving at what was, a second ago, the bright sky. Leather straps were buckled down across my chest. They put a piece of rubber between my teeth. The child I was came back to me, hovered above me, her lazy eye looking down. After a while I recognized that the child was Conka too, but her hair was hacked off. She sat watching things retreating into the distance. Strange noises came, nothing like melody. A line of trees went out of sight. A tent napped in the wind. The nurses hovered over me and a needle went into my arm. I turned away and tried to rattle the orange pills from the bottom of the bedstead. I would have taken them all in one go. They were terrible days, they could not have been worse.

The doctor finally said she would not give me any more pills or injections. She barked at the nurse to put her arm under mine and allowed me to walk through the ward. I stood and swayed. Walking helped cure some things and for the next few weeks they fed me well and all my lacerations healed, my hair began to grow back, and my feet were carefully tended to. They replaced the bandages three times a day, using a soft creamy medicine that smelled of mint. They allowed me to mark my sheets—I did not want to share my bedclothes even if they were to be washed, I made it clear by holding on to them and wrapping them around my wrist.

Doctor Marcus said let her keep them, they're only sheets, it's a small price, she will open up soon.

But I said to myself that I would not open up, I would make
a little place for myself in my mind, I would close its door, settle behind it, and I would not step across to open it again, ever. I walked around and around, like a clockhand. After a while my feet began to recover and my legs felt strong. Doctor Marcus came in and said: Oh, what rosy cheeks we have today. I thought that I should give her one of Stränsky's old lectures on Marxism and the historical dialectic, and then she wouldn't think me such a broken paltry thing wandering around her hospital floor, but in truth I never really thought about the days with Stränsky or Swann—no, it was more my childhood that kept coming back to me, the touch of Grandfather's shirt, nine drops of water in the ashes, looking from the back of the wagon while the caravan bounced, and I think now that these thoughts were there to protect me and to make sure that I kept myself intact, although at the time they almost drove me to an edge I did not recognize.

You can die of madness, daughter, but you can also die of silence.

There is a quiver in my fingers and the hairs on my arms still rise when I put voice to these things. I dress in the dark these days, remove the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp, take the lid off the firebox, crumple the paper, drop it in, strike a match, wait for the flame to catch, then bring the same match to the stove. I have been spared another night to come into this day. Soon I hear the ticking of the metal and the char-sound of wood, and it becomes light enough to see and the room comes alive.

I had, today, a strange thought as I walked down all the way to the village. It was just past noon and the light seemed to sus-
pend the street, full of years somehow. I walked along the road, towards Paoli's old shop. I kept my eyes down on the pavement and watched the feet of people as they went past. The bell clanged when I went in—it is still one of the few shops where the old ways have held. Paoli's son Domenico was behind the counter, lighting candles to put on a table.

It was then that it flashed in front of my eyes, a simple thought and yet I still cannot shake it. For a brief second, I saw Conka. She wore a scarf and her hair was bundled beneath. She stood near the bottom of the towerblock where I had left her long ago, in Czechoslovakia. Her children were grown and gone. She wore a dark dress and her hands were shoved deep in her pockets. She walked towards the towerblocks, but the lift was broken, so she began to climb the stairs. At first I thought that she was looking for firewood, that she was going to rip up the floorboards from the flats, carry the wood down and burn it so she could cook a meal for her family. But all the doors to the flats were locked. She climbed higher, going from floor to floor. It grew dark. She got to the top of the towerblock, reached into her pocket, and took out a potato candle. From the other pocket she took out a match. She fumbled awhile to light it, but finally the wick took. It sat there, flickering on the top wall of the flats. She watched it a long time and then she reached forward and pushed it off the edge and down it went, through the air, aflame.

Why I thought this I still do not know. Domenico took my arm and told me to sit down on the corner stool in the shop, my hands were trembling so. His brother, Luca, the smallest of them, carried my groceries home, relit the kerosene lamp for me. He asked me if I would be all right and I said yes, I would. He asked for you and I told him you were in Paris, that you
send letters, you live in an apartment, that your work is good and healthy and keeps your mind sharp.

Paris, he said.

I am quite sure his eyes sparkled—you are not forgotten, chonorroeja.

He bid me goodbye and he spotted the pages on the table, but I am sure he thought nothing of them. I could hear him whistling as he went down the hill.

After a few days in quarantine I could stand it no longer and I called on Doctor Marcus and said to her in German, Am I a prisoner? She stared at me as if I had just somersaulted twice through the air. She said, Of course not, no. I told her that I was ready to go. She said it was not that simple and why hadn't I talked earlier, it would have been much easier. Why do you say that I am not a prisoner? I asked again. There are certain rules we must adhere to for the good of everybody, she said. Is this not the free West? Pardon me? she said. Is this not the democratic West? What an interesting thing to say, she said. Tell me why I am being held prisoner. There are no prisoners here, she replied.

I told her that I wanted to be released immediately, that it was my right, and she sprang back indignantly that she would do her very best, and she could promise me that at the very least I would be allowed out of the hospital if I helped them with information. Be thankful, she said, for what you have.

They always ask you to be thankful, chonorroeja, after they have locked you up. Perhaps they also ask you to kiss them when they throw away the key.

My name is Marienka, I told her.

The chair scraped as she pulled it up closer.

Marienka, she said, that's a beautiful name.

Is it? I asked.

She blushed.

Doctor Marcus took down my strange story on her white notepad. My German was not good enough, nor did I want to speak in Slovak, so I spoke to her in Magyar. The translator was a pious young man from Budapest who wore a giant crucifix at his neck. I did not call myself Zoli for fear of two things, their laughter at my name and the chance that the word would take wing and they might find out exactly who I was.

The story was simple. I had been born in the Hungarian lands. I was abandoned by my husband and I wanted to join my children who were living in France. They had left in ‘56, but I could not go since I was arrested and beaten. I got out of jail and went back to my settlement which was near the border. My people had never cared about borders. Once it had been one giant country and we still treated it that way. The Party card was something I had found on the ground near a dump by the border. I saw Doctor Marcus pale with doubt, so I circled back and told her that I'd inserted a picture of myself into the card and that one of my family was an accomplished forger. Doctor Marcus shrugged. She said: All right, go on, go on. For a little gaiety, I said I'd taken a bus from the city of Györ but the bus broke down and I bartered for a bicycle. It was my first time riding such a machine. I wobbled down the road and farmers laughed at me. I slept in abandoned farmhouses, ate nettle soup, and made a borscht from sour cherries. I threw away the bicycle when I got a flat tire. Doctor Marcus began smiling then, and as the story went on she became triumphant and
scribbled everything down as fast as she could. I began to like this person I was creating, and so I said that I had stolen a second bicycle, except this one had a giant basket on the front and, of course, I had borrowed some chickens, tied them down in the basket, feathers flying, and had lived on them until I made my break for freedom.

You can make them swallow any lie with enough sugar and tears. They will lick the tears and sugar and make of them a paste called sympathy. Try it, chonorroeja, and you might feel yourself dissolve.

I cannot explain why so many of them have hated us so much over so many years, and even if I could, it would make it too easy for them. They cut our tongues and make us speechless and then they try to get an answer from us. They do not wish to think for themselves and they dislike those who do. They are comfortable only with the whip above their heads, yet so many of us have spent our lives armed with little more dangerous than song. I am filled with the memory of those who have lived and died. We have our own fools and evils, chonorroeja, but we are pulled together by the hatred of those who surround us. Show me a single patch of land we did not leave, or would not leave, a single place we have not turned from. And while I have cursed so many of my own, our sleight of hand, our twin tongues, my own vain stupidities, even the worst of us has never been amongst the worst of them. They make enemies of us so that they do not have to look at themselves. They take freedom from one and give it to another. They turn justice into revenge and still call it by its old name. They expect us to see the future or at least to rob its pockets. They shave our heads and say: You are thieves, you are liars, you are filthy, why can't you just be like us?

This is the truth of how I felt then, daughter, and so I said to myself that I would be like them only for as long as it took to get out of the camp and move on elsewhere.

I was transferred from the hospital into the camp, given blue status, on a day of sunlight. Doctor Marcus reeled off a long list of rules. I would be permitted to go to the nearby town two days a week, but I would not be allowed to beg or tell fortunes or any of the other things they expected us to do, they were against local rules. I could leave at eight in the morning and had to be home by curfew. They would give me a ration book and I could deposit it in the camp bank. No drinking alcohol, she said, or relations with men, and beyond the camp walls I was not allowed to fraternize with the guards.