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 smell of mold and dust. She walks high- toed, shushing her squelching sandals, turns the door handle, and backs carefully away as it swings on its creaking hinges.
It is a room tuned to Swann-the dark linoleum curling where it meets the wall, 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 wall 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 small 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 mill. 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 collection of Mayakovsky's poetry. How many times have I heard that name, late at night when the two of them worked in the printing mill, the metal letters scattered all around them? Their laughter as they quoted the poems back and forth. The hollow of desire in my stomach, and another hollow, 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 Stränsky, chains, and, later still, 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 fallen inkwell and picks up the pieces of glass scattered near the radiator. The dark liquid gullies 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 wallpaper hanging just below the ceiling. A great pain in her eyeballs, like the pressure of swimming in deep water. Easing herself up from the floor, she catches her finger on a stray piece of inkwell glass. She sucks the splinter out, the ink heavy at the end of her tongue. Stränsky, she remembers. Budermice. A cold thread pulls the length of her spine.
She kicks over the table and then she spots, against the wall, 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 yellowed over the years. So be it. Soon they will be dust.
She hunkers over the suitcase. All the dates, towns, fields, and settlements where they were recorded have been carefully 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, the feel of his fingers over my eyes.
The high flame singes her eyebrows and she steps back, lifts some of the pages from the sink and begins again with a smaller scatter of poems. They take easily. She uses a fork to prop up the edges of the pages, to air them underneath. She inhales the scent as the poems burn and curl. Small pieces of ash float and fall. Zoli toes them into the linoleum where they leave dark stains.
Outside, the city goes about in the cold-tramsound, bus screech, the rain slicing steadily on the windowpane. She looks down onto the alleyway below. A sudden strange thrill runs the length of her body. All the meetings, all the speeches, all the factory visits, the trains, the labor parades, the celebrations, they are gone now, all gone-and only this is mine, this alone, this burning. She turns back into the room and the smoke fills her nostrils, fragrant, taut, sweet. She lifts more poems out of the suitcase and burns them in ever larger groups, flames surviving on flames, yellow to red to blue.
My tooth, she thinks, with half a smile, the way the mute farmer carried my tooth away in the palm of his hand.
Zoli puts the lighter back in her dress pocket: the heat of it traveling through to her skin. She brushes back strands of hair from beneath her kerchief and touches something small behind her ear. A white pigeon feather. She plucks it out and lets it fall to the floor. The early afternoon seems now so far away. When the pigeon hit the back of her head she had wondered for an instant if it had recognized flight, even in death: and then she had judged the thought worthless, vain.
She closes her eyes and exhales long and hard, turns towards the door. “Shit,” she says.
The tapes.
She returns and scours the room. Two umbrellas, three cigarette lighters, a snuffbox, a bottle with a ship inside it, a small square of linen decorated with flowers, a series of Soviet pins, a dozen leather bookmarks, a samovar, an English kettle. How can one man have so many useless things? She finds the tapes in a cardboard box underneath his bed-they too are meticulously dated and stamped.
The first spool falls from her fingers, unravels across the floor, long and shiny, catching light in places, as if her voice is going into the corners.
Swann was always so careful to hold the microphone close to her lips when they were out on the road. It had bothered her-not his closeness, she had liked that, it had livened things in her, sent a shiver through her-no, what truly bothered her was the idea that her songs were being taken and put back together again by a machine. When he had played the recording to her it did not sound a bit like her, as if some other Zoli had climbed inside. It captured other sounds too, the tapping of a stick on the ground, the high strike of a match, the creak of a doorframe: it seemed almost ghostly to her; things that she had never noticed in real time had suddenly acquired a weight. She had written one night, by the light of the candle, that small rivers carted up drops as they were never seen before-it was one of her worst poems, even Swann had found it tame, he suggested that it bordered on the bourgeois.