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 Stränsky, 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. Stränsky, 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, 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 smal er 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.
Smal pieces of ash float and fal . 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 al eyway below. A sudden strange thril runs the length of her body. Al the meetings, al the speeches, al the factory visits, the trains, the labor parades, the celebrations, they are gone now, al gone—and only this is mine, this alone, this burning. She turns back into the room and the smoke fil s her nostrils, fragrant, taut, sweet. She lifts more poems out of the suitcase and burns them in ever larger groups, flames surviving on flames, yel ow 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 smal behind her ear. A white pigeon feather. She plucks it out and lets it fal 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 umbrel as, three cigarette lighters, a snuffbox, a bottle with a ship inside it, a smal 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.