half-gal on can by a thin wire handle.
The tattooed man tottered a moment on the bridge and then he was gone, into the warren of shacks, out of sight.
The breeze blew cold across the hil side. “Paint thinner,” said the journalist to himself and then he repeated the line into his tape recorder.
He stepped towards his car, slid into the seat, threw the recorder down beside him. With an empty inner thud, he realized that he didn't know the tattooed man's name, that he'd never asked for it, had not been given it, did not require it, the transaction had been nameless, the man, the woman, the children, the baby. He rubbed his hands on the steering wheel and looked down at the recorder. It lay, running, the tiny spools turning in the silence.
“No name,” he said, and he clicked the tape recorder off, stamped the clutch, and shoved the gearstick hard into first.
He turned on his headlights in the dusk, and drove away from the settlement, insects smashing against the windscreen.
2001
IT STRUCK ME EARLY THIS MORNING, while lighting the first of the kerosene lamps, how strange it is to be so much at peace and yet stil nothing certain.
The lamplight fil ed the room. I opened up the rol top drawer of the old desk, shook the fountain pen awake. The ink splotched the paper. I went to the window and looked out. Enrico used to tel me that it takes a great deal of strength to get the snow out of the mind—not so much the path out from the mil down to the road, or the blanket the length of the val ey, or the mounds backed up against the road, or the whiteness of the vil age, or the patches of sheer ice high in the Dolomites—it is the snow in the mind that takes the most getting used to. I failed to put any words on paper, so I pul ed on a pair of his old shoes and walked down into the vil age. There was nothing about, not a footprint except his own—which were my own—
and I sat on the steps of the old pastry shop and wondered about what you asked, about how a road could ever have brought me to such a place.
Before the vil age began to stir, I walked back up the winding road to the mil house, in the stil -dark. I put wood on the stove and turned on the other two kerosene lamps. The room was warm and amber. Al I could hear was your father's voice in everything, even his shoes had left a wet mark on the floor.
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do. Seventy-three winters have passed now across my brow. I have often settled by your bed and whispered to you of distant days, have told you of the young girl staring backwards, of your great-grandfather, and what happened to us in the Shivering Hil s, of how we crossed and recrossed our land, of how I sang and what happened to me and those songs. I could never have known what would become of the pencil in my fingers. For a good while, in that previous life, I was celebrated. They seemed like the best of years, but they did not last—maybe they were not meant to—and then came the time when I was banished. In my new life, I could not bear the thought of my old poems. Even a flash of them across my mind brought a coldness to my spine. I had already made a little grave for them, the day of my judgment back in Bratislava, when I walked out from beneath the towerblocks and away. I promised myself that I would never write again, nor would I try to remember the old poems. There were times, of course, when their rhythm flitted across my mind, but for the most part I closed them off, pushed them away, left them behind. If they returned to me at al , they returned as song.
In al those years I never dared put a pen to paper, and yet I must admit that once or twice, after I met your father, I found myself stirred. I sat waiting for him to come across the mountain, or to walk up the mil road, or to appear at the window, and I thought that perhaps, in the silence, I should crack open the cap on the fountain pen, remove a page from his blank journal, and put down my simple thoughts. Yet it scared me. It reminded me of too much and I could not do it. It seems strange now after al these years, and to you, chonorroeja, it might seem ridiculous, but I feared that if I tried to give written meaning to my life that I would once again lose what I had gained. There were these mountains, these silences, your father and you—these were not things I was wil ing to part with. Your father bought me books but he never asked me to write. The only person he told about my poems was Paoli, and he said that Paoli would not have known a poem unless you had him drink it. Both are gone now, Paoli and your dear father, and you are elsewhere, far away, and I have grown old and stooped and even happily gray, but in the face of your questions it strikes me now that I have no reason to fight it anymore, so I sit down at this rough-hewn table and attempt once again to put pen to paper.
Forty-two years!
When a bird breaks the line of the window it surprises me almost as much as a word.
I am sorry now that I burned your father's belongings, and I know I should have kept them for you, but in grief we do such foolish things. He told me once that he wanted his body brought to the summit where he could look down on both countries, Italy, Austria, so he could contemplate the memory of a life spent dragging cigarettes, tractor parts, coffee, medicines, from one side to the other. He said he was content for his body to be left up there for the hawks and the eagles and whatever else wandered his way—he almost relished the idea of becoming part of the buzzards, he cal ed them the most Tyrolean of birds. In the end I could not do that, dearest heart, the thought of leaving him there was far too much, so I took al of his possessions, except one pair of shoes made from his old suitcase, and burned them not far from the mil house. I lay down in the place of the burning, an old form of mourning. What I loved most of al were the shirts he wore, most especial y the woolen ones, do you recal them? They were patched and repatched and patched again. He had learned, when he first moved to the mountains, to darn the elbows with needles, using single strands of birch twigs sharpened to a point. He joked that he was glad that I was going to burn his shirts, but it would not take long. I came back days afterwards and searched in the scorched earth for the buttons and the metal beltloop from his jacket, but the fire had burned everything down.
There is an old Romani song that says we share little pieces of our hearts with people and the further we go along, the less we have for ourselves until there is not enough left to go around and that's cal ed traveling, and it's also cal ed death, and since it happens to us al there's nothing more ordinary than that.
In Bratislava I burned my poems. I walked down the swaying staircase into the bright light of day carrying another man's possessions—his boots, his shirts, his radio, his watch. I could see nothing for my future. I was twenty-nine years old. I was cast off. So much of my life had been taken from me and yet I did not want to
