Zoli

A voice: “Hey, you.”

A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice ful of snarl: “Where to, Auntie?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Just past the market a little way, Comrade.”

“That's nowhere?”

“Just up the road a way.”

“Identification.”

She unties the knots, hikes the zajda from her back and deliberately sifts through the bundle. “Shit,” he says, holding his nose. The toe of his boot stamps down hard on the cloth. “Go on, woman, out of here.”

The tin cup punches at her spine when she lifts the bundle. Shit on you too, she thinks. Who are you to say I'm filthy? Who are you to ask where I am going? She turns the corner and spits into the gutter. Paris, you idiot, I am going to Paris. Do you hear me? Paris. She has no idea why the city comes to mind, but she strikes her fist against the left side of her chest. Paris. That's where I'm going. Paris.

At the top of the road she slows again, a stitch in her ribcage. A line of forgotten laundry is strung from one side of Galandrova to the other, the wet shirts moving in the wind as if waiting for men to inhabit them. Under the trees, beyond the warehouses, past the printing mil , she goes, staying close to the shadows. She can already smel the ink and hear the sound of the rol ers—the fumes make her head reel momentarily.

Swann wil be in there now, she thinks, printing government posters behind the blacked-out windows, his fingers stained, his shirt askew, the machines churning around him. We Salute Our Persecuted American Negro Brothers. Solidarity with Egypt. Ciechoslovakians for African Unity.

We Must Struggle, Comrades, Against Ignorance and Illiteracy.

And the one with her face, changed slightly, no lazy eye: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

At the top of the stairs she grips the rail, pauses, walks briskly down the communal corridor. Cambering floorboards. Broken plaster. A faint smel of mold and dust. She walks high- toed, shushing her squelching sandals, turns the door handle, and backs careful y away as it swings on its creaking hinges.

It is a room tuned to Swann—the dark linoleum curling where it meets the wal , a half-empty pewter jug of old cucu on the bedside table, the windowframe rattling in the weather, Marx and Engels each in many different languages. Gramsci, Radek, Vygotsky. Some volumes with their spines taken off, others re-stitched. On a single wal hook hangs a ratty shirt, faded and anonymous. On the floor, orange peels curled and ambered with age. Three fire irons, but no fireplace. The huge pile of overcoats from Brno in the corner. Swann has set up a simple chair for looking out the smal window onto the street, four stories below.

From the room above, transistor music filters down, muffled and worn, shot through with the hammering of steampipes.

She flips through the books open on the table—Dreiser, Steinbeck, Lindsay—and rifles through their Slovak equivalents, handwriting spidery and blotchy with ink. She pushes the books off the table in one quick sweep. They land cantered on the floor. Beneath the desk lie four containers from the printing mil . She yanks them out and turns them upside down. Pages and pages of Swann's work. Dozens of issues of Credo. A few obscure journals from Prague. Some letters. A book about Jack London. A col ection of Mayakovsky's poetry. How many times have I heard that name, late at night when the two of them worked in the printing mil , the metal letters scattered al around them? Their laughter as they quoted the poems back and forth. The hol ow of desire in my stomach, and another hol ow, there, shame. I liked to watch him then, enjoyed it, it seemed so easy. The way he carried his body, the slope of his shoulders, the crackle of his voice. The lines going between him and Stransky, chains, and, later stil , the same with my songs, speaking them to one another, quoting them back and forth, taking them, bending them, praising them, making them theirs.

She rips another container out from under the table where it clangs against the leg. A sudden pop of glass. Zoli wheels around but the window is intact and there is nobody at the door, no sound along the corridor. Losing my mind. Imagining things. She turns again and feels a coldness run along her fingers. She looks down, perplexed. Her nails and fingers are stretched out, blue, and for a moment she looks at her hand as if it can't possibly be hers. She rights the fal en inkwel and picks up the pieces of glass scattered near the radiator. The dark liquid gul ies in the gap between the floorboards and the hissing pipe.

Zoli wipes her hand on the floorboard and the wood streaks with ink. Her thumbprints on the cardboard, the table, the books themselves. She empties the third and fourth containers into the middle of the floor. Yet more journals and translations, nothing else. She looks up at the sad petals of green wal paper hanging just below the ceiling. A great pain in her eyebal s, like the pressure of swimming in deep water. Easing herself up from the floor, she catches her finger on a stray piece of inkwel glass. She sucks the splinter out, the ink heavy at the end of her tongue. Stransky, she remembers. Budermice. A cold thread pul s the length of her spine.

She kicks over the table and then she spots, against the wal , a black cardboard trunk with metal latches. Inside, the poems are neatly stacked on top of each other, tied with thick elastic bands, in phonetic Romani and Slovak both. The newer poems are crisp and straight-edged but the older ones have yel owed over the years. So be it. Soon they wil be dust.

She hunkers over the suitcase. Al the dates, towns, fields, and settlements where they were recorded have been careful y labeled. By what is broken, what is snapped, I create what is required. When the axe comes to the forest the handle doesn't say I am home. The road is long with sorrow, everywhere twice as wide. They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. They are, she realizes, the first

thing she has read since the judgment.

She crosses towards the sink and stacks the poems over the drainhole, rubs her thumb along the wheel of Petr's old lighter. The curl of Petr's thumb along it, broad, slow, bringing it to life. Pipesmoke curling out. Him watching Swann. The days slowly slipping away from him. The coughing.

The thought that he would soon be gone, spirit. Wandering around, hiding, waiting for Swann, thinking of him,