Zoli

Zoli feels her stomach churn. She gathers the folds in her dress, shoves open the door and hurries to the stone wal . She pul s down her undergarments, the cold grass brushing against her skin. She steadies herself against the wal , one arm draped around the rock. Her stomach gives. The stench of her insides. She turns her head to her shoulder, away from the filth.

A huge brown dog stands lantern-eyed at the far end of the wal . The dog raises its head and howls, the rheumy folds of skin above its eyes shaking.

Zoli hikes her dresses, slips on the top stone of the wal . The stone scrapes the length of her knee. Her feet slosh in the muck. By the time she reaches the road the dog is already nosing in her filth and raw seeds.

She pul s her overcoat tight around her and hurries down the road, sandals slapping, away from the hut. She crosses another stone wal and sits with her back against it, chest heaving. Smal swal ows scissor soundlessly through the trees. No signs of houses or horsecarts. She rests awhile and recleans herself with wet grass, wipes her hands clean, swings her legs over the wal .

A larger road, this, blacktopped, long, straight.

The rain stops and she walks the shining tarmacadam in a spel of lavish winter sunlight. Her sandals squelch and rub her torn feet. I am, she thinks, a twenty-nine-year-old woman walking like one already grown old. She touches her chest with the fingers of her right hand and stretches her spine long. Her coat feels wet and heavy and an idea comes, almost comforting in its simplicity—I should just drape it over my arm. Lightheaded, she negotiates the middle of the road. Al about her are long rows of vines, sheds from the col ectives, and, in the distance, the mountains standing simple against the sky.

At a bend she stops to look at a lump in the roadway behind her. A thing, a person, a body, in the road. She pul s deep into the brambles. How did I step past a body in the road? How could I possibly miss it? She pushes herself further into the hedge, branches crisscrossed in front of her.

How did I fail to see a dead person lying there? She waits for a sound, any sound— a vehicle, a rifle shot, a moan—but nothing comes. She hooks her fingers around the strand of bushes to look again: the body lies flat and dark and prone in the roadway.

“Idiot,” she says aloud to herself.

Zoli climbs from the bushes and wearily trudges back to pick up the dropped coat. It lies on the roadway in a sprawl, one arm outstretched as if pointing in another direction.

A rumble of engines as she passes the gates of a col ective farm. Zoli pul s herself down into the long ditch grass. The engines grow loud until they are almost upon her, and she is surprised to see truckloads of young Czechoslovakian troopers going past, rifles held across their chests, faces darkened with shadow, cheeks hol owed as if they have been blown out with tiny explosives. Not a word from them. Staring ahead in the cold.

Al these young men, she thinks, hardened by long wars and short memories. The same ones who took us down the road, who sprinkled petrol on the wheels, who led the horses away to the farms, who sat outside the National Theater the night Stransky read my poems. The same ones who saluted me at the al -weather posts as I passed in the snow. One of them once had a copy of Credo rol ed up in his uniform pocket.

She shivers as the squadron sprays by, leaving tire tracks on the wet of the road.

A sudden sound startles her: like gunfire at first but she turns to see geese rising up by the hundreds from the fields, cutting a dark vee against the sky.

Pol ution for Life. In the Category of Infamy. It seems possible now to Zoli that she is walking in some terrible otherness, that she is not out in these wet winter fields, cast off from everything, but instead she is standing at the point where she was, long ago, before the poems, before the printings, before Swann, before Stransky, and for a moment she is like one who believes that to continue a good dream you must lie in the exact same place you fel asleep, so she might somehow be able to drift back into days that once had been, where there were no poems, just songs, a step back into the ordinary territory of the ago, before the gatherings and the meetings and the conferences and directives, before the flashbulbs

and the microphones, the openings and ovations. To become nothing at al , she thinks, a mind capable of nothing, a body capable of nothing, an escape backwards to a time when things were half-considered, inconsequential.

She had only meant for it to be good, for it to pierce the difference between stars and ceilings, but it did not, and now the words were shaped, carved, placed—they had become fact.

I have sold my voice, she thinks, to the arguments of power.

Caution, No Entry. She pul s aside one of the boards and peers inside. A tiny concrete shrine, only big enough to kneel in. Al of the religious paraphernalia has been removed and the stone arch of the altar careful y dril ed out. She searches for a candlestub left by some Citizen. A couple of gray feathers lie amid the dirt piles, and a spider toils in the upper rafters, moving towards a smal sliver of leaf at the edge of the web.

The bracket pops in the top of the wooden boards as she squeezes her way inside.

She sits awhile in the driest corner. A holy cross is scratched in the front wal of the shrine, and she puts her finger to her lip, touches the cross, then places her head on her bundled zajda and dozes in the safety of the shrine. How many travelers have passed over this cold floor? How many incantations? How many people beseeching God to make two plus two not equal four?

She is woken later, startled by the sound of an airplane. Outside, the brightness stings her eyes. A line of jet- smoke in the sky.

By early afternoon beads of sweat shine on her forehead and a dizziness propels her. I must find a stream to plunge my head into, some moving water to take this fever away. But she can find no sound of running streams along the road, only bird-song and wind among the trees. She reaches a smal tarmac road where a pile of chainsawed trees lie stacked like corpses. She turns as a large truck approaches, muck spraying up from the wheels. The horn blares long and loud. She stands, unmoving, as the truck bears down. The hum of the tires. The gril almost upon her, silver and slatted, light and dark. The horn blasts yet again. She closes her eyes and the wind sucks her close. Spray from the wheel splatters her face, and the driver screams out the window as the truck passes no more than a half meter from where she stands. She watches it go. The truck grows smal er against the road, a last light twinkling from its roof as it rounds a corner.