A rumble of engines as she passes the gates of a collective farm. Zoli pulls 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 hollowed as if they have been blown out with tiny explosives. Not a word from them. Staring ahead in the cold. All 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 Stränsky read my poems. The same ones who saluted me at the all-weather posts as I passed in the snow. One of them once had a copy of Credo rolled 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.
Pollution 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 Stränsky, 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 fell 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 all, 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 pulls aside one of the boards and peers inside. A tiny concrete shrine, only big enough to kneel in. All of the religious paraphernalia has been removed and the stone arch of the altar carefully drilled 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 small 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 wall 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 small 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 grill 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 smaller against the road, a last light twinkling from its roof as it rounds a corner.
It would, she thinks, have been just as easy to have stepped out in front of it.
She returns the way she came and sits under a giant sycamore, pulls a fistful of yellowed grass from the ground and puts it in her mouth against her aching tooth. She removes her over- coat and ties the arms together around her waist. It was Swann who gave her the coat a year ago. He had returned from Brno with a whole cardboard box of them balanced precariously on his motorbike. He had bought them for the kumpanija and had even found small sizes for the children. He could not understand her when she said no, that she did not want them, that she'd just as soon walk around with a yellow armband, or a truncheon stuck in her back. Swann sat in the wooden chair by his window, perplexed: “But it's not charity, Zoli, it's just a few coats, that's all.” He remained silent then, tapping the glass pane, his light hair framing his face. She crossed the room and said: “I'll take one each for Conka's children.” He brightened and sifted through the pile to find the right sizes. “One for you too,” he said, and put it around her, and as he touched her shoulders, he said that he had found a consignment of red shirts also. What strange laughter had come to her then, the idea of the whole kumpanija wandering down the road in the exact same cheap red shirts.
Yet what was once funny turned out to be inevitable; what was once strange was, now, finally, true.
Zoli feels as if she is carrying the sandy-haired Englishman on her back. Impossible to shuck him. She wonders how long she might walk before the weight of him drags her down, again, to the ground. He told her once that she looked like a Russian poet he had seen in photographs: the dark eyes, high forehead, her hair swept back, her tall body, her complicated stare. He brought her to the National Library and showed her the poet, Akhmatova, though she could see no resemblance. She had always thought herself dark, simple, black, yet in the photos the Russian woman looked white, heavy-eyed, and beautiful. Swann read to her a line about standing as witness to the common lot. He had asked her if she would marry him and she was stunned by the simplicity of his plea. She had loved him then, but he did not know the extent of the impossible. In the printing mill, at the end, he was not able to hold her gaze. He had not printed the poems yet, but she knew he would. What else had she expected? Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important. Wasn't it Swann who told her once about a bird, a glukhar, that went deaf with its own mating calls? Both of us with that inextinguishable need to make noise, she thinks. If only I could have known. If only I could have seen.
Zoli wonders now if Swann is searching for her now. If he is, she thinks, he will not find me. He will seek and seek. He will wander the ends of the earth and return with nothing, not even a name.
Zoli clambers over a gate, down a hill, through a muddy field, where some irrigation pipes are laid out on the ground. She tries to figure a way to make it across the field: a maze of tubes and muck with a barbed-wire fence at the far end. The vast concrete sleeves have sunk a little in the mud, and the only way to cross is to walk along the top of the pipes, arms held wide for balance. She slips, her leg in the mud up to her ankle. She lifts it out noisily, cleans her sandal on the rough edge of the pipe, kneels down into the opening and looks into the hol-lowness of it, imagines her breath traveling all the way around the field, circling and returning, added to by the grasses and the muck.
“Hey, Gyp.”
A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hill, four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.