Zoli (40 page)

“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 father'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.

“Idiot,” says Francesca. “I'll tell him to shut up.” Her body pulls taut, but Zoli taps her hand. “Wait a moment,” she says. The music rises and draws itself out, quicker, more turbulent.

“Get dressed,” says Zoli.

“Mamma?”

“Let's get dressed.”

Laughter bursts out with the music now and the smell of smoke filters along the corridor. The women step away from the bed. Their clothes lie scattered in the darkness. They fumble a moment: a nightgown, a blue dress, a high-heeled shoe. Francesca's arm gets caught in her sleeve, and Zoli helps it along. She strokes the side of her daughter's face. They stand together at the bedroom door.

“But you're in your nightdress,” says Francesca.

“I don t care.”

They cross the wooden floors of the corridor and a sharp silence fills the room when mother and daughter appear. Henri stands, wide-eyed, with a thin joint at his mouth. “Oh,” he says, swaying on his feet. Scattered around the room are the Scottish musicians. One of them, tall and handsome and curly-haired, stands and bows deeply. He stubs out his joint in a flowerpot. Francesca giggles and looks across at her mother. How glorious, thinks Zoli, how joyful, that it is all, still, even on this night, so unfinished.

Zoli nods to them and simply says: “Smoke away.”

The musician looks around, a little startled, fishes his joint from the pot. He straightens it, lights up, and laughs.

“What happened to the music?” says Zoli.

She used to play the sugar upon the metal, she recalls, in those old days when she gathered children at the back of her wagon—she would place a sheet of siding on a wooden saw-horse, sprinkle the sugar on the sheet, sometimes salt, or, if nothing else, seeds. She teased the violin bow along the very edge of the plate until the metal began to hum. The sugar jumped and swerved and found its own vibrating patterns: standing waves, circular clumps, solitary grains, like small white acrobats. Afterwards the children clamored to lick the sheet clean. She had loved those maps, their random patterns, their odd music, the way the children clapped the sugar into place. She had never thought of them as anything new or unusual, although she heard that others called them chladnis, sound charts—the sugar settling at the points where there was least sound—and she thought, even then, that she could have looked at the metal sheet and found a whole history of her people painted there.

“Go on,” she says. “Play.”

The curly-haired one strikes a note on the mandolin, a bad note, too high, though he rinses it out with the next, and the guitarist joins in, slowly at first, and a wave moves across the gathering, like wind over grass, and the room feels as if it is opening, one window, then another, then the walls themselves. The tall musician strikes a high chord and nods at Zoli—she smiles, lifts her head, and begins.

She begins.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/AUTHOR'S NOTE

WE GET OUR VOICES from the voices of others. I am enormously indebted to a number of people who have helped me research, refine, and radically change the structure of this novel over the past four years. I can claim no familial link with the Romani culture—it is, I suppose, the novelist's privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread. I have scavenged from all over and am indebted to so many sources that it would be impossible to list them all. Our stories are created from a multiplicity of witness.

The following artists and writers have inspired me—Ilona Lackovä in
A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia
(University of Hertfordshire Press); Milena Hiibschman-novä; Bronislawa Wajs (Papusza) and Jerzy Ficowksi. I have found enormous help in the work of Ian Hancock from the Center of Romani Archives at the University of Texas. The Romani language and orthography are only now in the process of being standardized. As Hancock has written, the word “Gypsy” is intently disliked by some Roma and tolerated by others. The persistence of the use of “Gypsy” lies in the fact that there is no single Romani equivalent universally agreed upon. Time and scholarship is changing this. I have used certain spellings and constructions determined by geography, history, and political affiliations that were current at the time when the novel takes place, sometimes purposely confused. The choices and mistakes are purely mine.

The story of Zoli was suggested to me after reading the extraordinary study
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey,
by Isabel Fonseca.
Zoli
is loosely inspired by the life of Papusza, the Polish poet who lived from 1910 to 1987. Zoli's poem in this novel is original, though it takes some of its form from the poetry of Papusza and others. Despite published reports to the contrary (including some statements attributed to characters in this novel), there have been many Roma poets in Europe down through the years—their work has been careful and loving, even if consistently ignored.

I would like to give very special thanks to Laco Oravec and Martin Fotta and everyone else at the Milan Simecka Foundation in Bratislava who, over the course of two months, helped me negotiate the contemporary Romani experience. The novel would have been impossible without their help. I can think of no better guides, nor no better hosts than the people of the settlements that I visited in eastern and western Slovakia. The following know their own role; I only wish I could give them deeper thanks: Richard Jurst, Robert Renk, Valerie Besl, Michal Hvorecky, Jana Belisova, Anna Jurovä, Daniela Hivesovä-Silanovä, Zuzanna Boselovä, Mark Slouka, Zdenek Slouka, Thomas Ueberhoff, Dirk Van Gunsteren, Thomas Böhm, Manfred Heid, Tom Kraushaar, Francoise Triffaux, Brigitte Semler, Martin Koffler, Barbara Stelzl-Marx, and the various people of the Roma camps and housing estates that I visited.

In New York I want to give sincere thanks to Lorcan Otway for all his advice and scholarship. Thanks to Hunter College and the Hertog fellowship program. A deep bow to Emily Stone, my research assistant. Gratitude also to Roz Bernstein, Frank McCourt, Terry Cooper, Gerard Donovan, Chris Barrett Kelly, Tom Kelly, Jeff Talarigo, Jim Harrison, Aleksandar Hemon (for the music!), Bill Cobert, and all at the American Irish Historical Society. The book is dedicated to all at the New York Public Library, including the scholars at the Cullman Center, but a specific thanks goes to Marzena Ermler and Woj-ciech Siemaszkiewicz, and of course to Jean Strouse, Pamela Leo, Adriana Nova, and Amy Aazarito.

Amongst the many, many authors whose writings I have found very helpful are Will Guy, Eva Davidovä, Emilia Horväthovä, Michael Stewart, Alaina Lemon, David Crowe, Donald Kenrick, Tera Fabianovä, Cecilia Woloch, Jan Yoors, Margriet de Moor, Louise Doughty, Vaclav Havel, and Walter Starkie, to name but a few.

Last, but never least, my thanks to Allison Hawke, Daniel Menaker, Kirsty Dunseath, and Sarah Chalfant.

A Conversation with Golum McCann and Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt: I was saddled with the quintessential miserable Irish childhood. You enjoyed the opposite, didn't you? What sort of life does a writer need these days in order to carve out a career in novels?

Colum McCann: That's where I envy you, Frank! You had something to write about from the beginning! I had to carve stories out of nothing! Seriously, though, you're right. There's advantages and disadvantages to both. I grew up in a safe, suburban Dublin household. My father didn't drink. My mother stayed at home. I remember when I came home from school at lunchtime, she would be waiting for me. She used to cut the crusts off my lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a tiny gesture, but representative. I was blessed in so many ways. They looked after us well. We ate together at the family table. We went for walks on Sunday afternoons. And we were surrounded by books. When I think about it, there were thousand of stories in our house. Of course it wasn't all simple and hunky-dory. It never can be. But it was close and it will always be home.