Across the river sits the old town of Bratislava: the castle on the hil , the chimneys, the cathedral.
Zoli hobbles out from under the steel girdings, over weeds sprouting from cinder and muck, up the grassy embankment. At the top of the bank, the wind blows cold and fast. Early traffic thrums past and the bridge shakes. Two men labor with a broken-down car, one at the rear, the other at the driver's window, guiding the steering wheel.
Zoli pul s her kerchief tight across her face.
On the far side of the bridge she cleans her hands in a smal puddle and dries them on a lamppost poster, a Russian circus announcement, red and yel ow with curled Cyril ic. Two trapeze artists swing at the top of the poster, blond women stretching out towards one another in the air. Rain has bubbled underneath and swol en their bodies. At the bottom of the poster, a ringmaster, a hoop on fire, and a dancing bear. How I used to love them, those dancing bears in their roped circles, heavy- pawed and majestic, brought from far away. They came lurching through Trnava square, red-hatted and shit-smeared, into the shadows cast down from churches. The music was wound by the carnival man on the painted box, and the tambourine was struck and we shouted for our favorite songs: / have two wives, one of them sober, one of them drunk, both of them I love the same. Old men stood away from streetcorners, shopkeepers closed their doors, and women stood up from pail and rag. Al around the square was the hum and bustle of merchants, with the local crier, the policemen, the schoolchildren.
Zoli edges her finger along the paper to where it bunches at her fingertips.
She turns from the lamppost, crosses the road onto a smal pebbled footpath. A squeal of brakes as a car swerves towards the footpath. She turns quickly. A shower of mud. The car horn beeps as one of the men from the bridge leans out and leers at her.
“Shit on you,” she says quietly when they are far enough away. She wipes the muck from her cheek.
At the underpass, swarms of men and women from the early shifts walk towards work, their shoes slapping against the pavement. Most of them wear identical blue hats of the armament factory, and, as they descend, they merge into the same stream of color.
Across the square, past the bare winter trees, she passes the Carlton Hotel, where men in the dark overcoats of the security police trundle back and forth. She shudders at the thought of stepping inside: the silver door handles, the huge paintings, the gilded frames, the beveled mirrors, the curving staircase. How foreign it is now, the columns, the pil ars, the plastic plants in the windows. There used to be applause when I entered the front rooms. They would hold their cigarettes to their mouths and squint. The soft-faced women would nod and whisper. Always the feeling that they were looking right through me, past me, anxious to be with anybody but themselves. The way they smoked, as if it would never belong to them. How loud it was when stepping from the carpet to the tiled floor. Something gal oping under my ribs. Looking for Swann, his familiar face. He used to arrive hours beforehand just so I'd not feel nervous, waiting there with his hat tapping against his thigh, a copy of Rudepravo rol ed up in his pocket.
A low swing of sadness in her bel y, Zoli crosses away from the hotel and up the hil , into the short and vaulted al eyways of the old city. A banner is strung between lampposts: Citizens, We Must Conserve Bread. It flaps and twists in the breeze, and, as she gets nearer, one end of the banner snaps, curtsies a moment, fal s to the ground, and sags in the cobblestone puddles. She steps over the slogan, walks on, hand trailing the lichen on the wal s.
Quieter here, darker: the light gone out of things.
She moves along the rutted path, in the shadows, hidden especial y from the troopers. If she dawdles they wil stop her, cock their rifles, question her, the mud on her overcoat, the dark bloodstains on her ankles, and then bring her to the nearest al -weather post. Flip open the gray cover and examine the raised stamp of her Party card, the thumbprint, the details: 169.5 cm, black eyes, black hair, distinguishing feature a lazy left eye, a 2
cm scar on lower right lip, chin dimple, poet. She used to sign her name with three Xs, and the most perceptive of them used to ask her why. If she replied at al she would simply shrug her shoulders, making them more difficult, more probing, more insistent: “But how can you be a poet and sign XXX?” Often the whole transaction would have to wait for confirmation over the radio: “That's Comrade Novotna, you idiot, let her go.”
Past the flaking wal of an old city monastery, sandals slapping against the cobblestones. The monastery has long been gutted. What remnants of incense, stained glass, wax candles? What smal ruby flames stil burn behind pier glass? She looks up to see a number of narrow window slots in the upper reaches of the building, near the timbered roof. Birds fly in the windows, wings held together, and flare out again seconds later into the sky.
In the drizzle, she notices a group of young boys standing in her path. Their ease, their nonchalance. At the end of the line, one boy toes at the carcass of a dead pigeon. The boy is white-skinned. Red-shirted. Hair shorn close. He flicks the pigeon with his boot and it sails a moment in the air, thuds on the cobbles with a spray of tiny feathers. Zoli pul s together the folds in her dress and steps over it. Heart quick and thumping. She hears a whistle behind her, and then the sound of footsteps.
Even when the bird hits her in the back of the head she does not turn.
Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. Al that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, al owed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again?
Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hel 's fire on them, they wil not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I wil not bow a second time, no.
She rounds the corner of the theater, beyond the ironwork fence, past the dead winter gardens. In the tenements, gnarled women stare out from behind high windows, their bodies lost to brickwork. At a roadblock she stops cold: four troopers stand scanning the street, bil yclubs banging into their hands. Traffic passes by in a muted rumble. Some pedestrians are waved through, raw-looking girls in headscarves and soiled white uniforms. Zoli bends to adjust her sandals, accustomed now to the mess of her feet. She waits until the troopers put their hands up in front of a dark automobile and lean in either window, bil y-clubs prodding. Breathe softly. Easy. No sudden movement. Beyond the roadblock she goes, careful not to glance at them.
A voice: “Hey, you.”
A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice ful of snarclass="underline" “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.