I understood what Stransky had understood too late—we had interrupted her solitude in order to compensate for our own.
That afternoon I stood by the new Romayon printing machine. Her poems had been set, but they had not yet been printed. I ran my fingers over the metal ingots. I placed the gal ey trays. I turned the switch. The metal began to rol . Its dark and constant rhyme. I couldn't now give it a meaning even if I wanted to, the cogs caught and the rol ers spun, and I betrayed her.
Under the mackling hum, I tried to convince myself that with a book, a bound book, she might stil be able to rescue her people—they would not blame her, or banish her, she'd become their conscience and the rest of us would listen and understand, we'd study her poems in school, she'd travel the country, her words would bring her people back onto the road, the ones in the settlements would walk up through their towns without being spat on, and she would return that dignity, it would final y come together, simply, elegantly, and we would al be given a row of red medals to wear upon our chests.
It is astounding how terrifying words can be. No act is too shal ow so long as we give it a decent name.
I worked on in a sweat and a fury. A memory gaffed me. I saw those young guards who had beaten the bottoms of my feet when I first crossed the border. They sat on the back of the flatbed trucks, waiting. I felt myself back on the train with Stransky, about to move, and then I heard two clear pistol shots ring out in the air.
By early morning the first of the poems was rol ing off the press. I looked up at the light in Kysely's office. He was peeking through the blinds. He nodded, raised his hand, smiled.
I climbed the stairs towards the cutting machines, the weight of her work in my hands.
The heart's old furniture, watch it burn. I lie here now and my leg has healed enough to know that it wil never real y heal. Just a few days ago, after she was banished by her own people, I went searching for her. I met some farmers in a field near Trnava. They said they had seen her, and that she was walking east. There was no reason to believe them—they were working fields that were no longer their own, and they were nervous at the sight of me. The youngest had the clipped speech of one wel educated. He mumbled “Siberia” under his breath, said it could be seen from the tal est tree around, I should climb up and take a look. He struck a shovel into the ground and threw a clod back over his shoulder.
As I drove away I thought that I would, without hesitation, do that work now: go into a field not my own and strike down deep into it.
I only wish I could astonish with some last-page grace. But what should I do? Stay here and read aloud my ration book? Sit down and write a revolutionary opera?
I asked Stransky once if there would be music in the dark times, and he said, yes, there had always been music in the dark times, because that's what they mostly are, dark times. He had seen the hil s of rotting corpses and they did not speak back to him.
Yet there are moments I can name and miss—I wil miss the tal trees around the wagons, the way the harps sounded when the wheels moved, the soaring hawks around the lakes when her kumpanija pul ed out to the road. I wil miss her wandering around the machinery in the mil , touching her fingers against the smudges of ink, reciting the older songs, changing them, restoring them. I wil miss the way she pinched her dress with her fingers whenever she passed a man she did not know, the slight skip in her younger step, the quiver of the two moles at the base of her neck when she sang. And I wil miss the urgent swerve of her Romani, the way she said “Comrade,” how ful and alive it felt, and I wil miss the poems though they are stacked within me stil .
To be where I am now is the whole of it. The days wil not get any brighter. I do not seek to imagine what echo my words wil find. Kysely knocked on my door yesterday when I didn't appear for work five days in a row. He gave a thin little smile as he looked me up and down and said: “Tough shit, son, you have a job to do.”
And so I am off, now, on my crutches, towards the mil .
1959-1960
FOR A LONG TIME NOW the road has been deserted. Vineyards and endless rows of pines. She steps along the grass verge between the mudtracks, her sandals sodden, her feet raw. At a slight bend she is surprised by a low stone wal and, through a stand of young saplings, a smal wooden hut. No horse. No car tracks. No roof smoke. She walks beyond the trees to the edge of the hut, forces the door, peers inside. Dead winter grass lies in the cracks of the planks. Pieces of winecrate, empty buckets, shriveled leaves. The door hangs off its wooden hinges, but the roof is strong and arched, and might keep the worst of the weather out.
Zoli pauses at the threshold a moment, framed between light and shadow.
A cracked sink stands in the corner, a trickle from its tap. When she opens the spigot, the pipes rattle and groan. She holds her hand under the drip for it to pool and fil , then drinks from her palm, so thirsty that she can feel the water fal ing through her body.
She bends to remove her sandals. The layers of flesh tear and flap. The skin smarts most at the edges where the dead meets the living. She swings one foot up into the sink but, in the solitary drip, can only massage the dirt deeper into her wounds. Zoli pushes the bunched skin back into place, crosses the floor, leans against the wal , lays her head on the floor, cold against the side where her jaw aches.
She sleeps erratical y, woken at times by the heavy rain and the wind outside, making the trees swing and rear and canter. The noise on the roof sounds to her like a drum she was once given as a child—it is as if she has stepped inside the hol ow-ness of it.
From the darkest corner of the hut, she hears a series of skittering noises. Across the narrow expanse a single brown rat looks at her with curiosity. Zoli hisses the rat away but it returns with a mate. It sits on its hindlegs, licking its forepaws. The second darts forward, stops, touches its long tail against the face of the first, draws a lazy circle with its body. Zoli hammers her sandal on the ground. The rats twitch, turn, return, but she slaps the shoe off the metal windowframe and the rats scamper to the dark corner. Zoli fumbles in the hut to col ect leaves, sticks, and bits of crate.
She builds them into a smal teepee, shakes out the cap of her lighter, cups her hands around the kindling, blows it to flame. When the rats peek out again she slides lit spears of twig across the floor, one after the other, bouncing shards of light. The twig ends burn slowly, scorching the wooden boards.
