Zoli by Colum McCann Page A

my cheap white shirt.
    A week later she came back to say that the elders had accepted it and it could be published—they saw it as a nod of gratitude to Stränsky for what he'd done in the war, but we were convinced it went beyond that; we were building a vanguard, there'd never been a poetry like it before, we were preserving and shaping their world while the world changed around them.
    “The incredible happens,” she said when Stränsky took us to a bookshop in the old town. She wandered along the rows of shelves, touching the spines of the books. “It's like not having any walls.” For a while she stood next to me, ran her fingers ab-sentmindedly along my forearm, then looked down at her hand and quickly pulled it away. She turned and walked the length of the shelves, said she could feel the words running like horses. It seemed raw and childish, until Stränsky told me she'd possibly not been in many bookshops before. She spent hours wandering around and then sat to read a copy of Mayakovsky. It hadn't even dawned on her that she could own it. I bought it for her and she touched my forearm again and then, outside, she hid the book in the pocket of her third skirt.
    Stränsky looked at us hard and askance, whispered to me: “She's got a husband, son.”
    We took the train out to the countryside. The other passengers watched us: me in my overalls, Zoli in the colorful dresses that she hitched sideways when she sat down. Together we read Mayakovsky, our knees not quite touching. I recognized it as a tawdry desire, but more than anything I wanted to see her hair loosened. She couldn't do it, it was the habit of a married woman to wear her head covered, though I had begun to make sketches of her in my mind, what she might look like, how that hair would fall if unfastened, how I would take the weight of it in my fingers.
    At the station she ran towards Petr who sat waiting on the horsecart, his dented hat on his knee. He looked a little confused, but she whispered in his ear. He laughed, slapped the reins, and took off.
    I saw myself then at a distance, as someone else, doing things that only another person would do—I waited for them to return. The Stationmaster shrugged and hid a grin. A clock-tower chimed. I remained three hours, then walked the long country roads towards the camp with my rucksack on my shoulder. At nightfall, my feet bloodied, I reached the camp. The men were by the fire, cheering. A jar of booze was shoved my way. Petr shook my hand. “You look like you've been slapped,” he said.
    Zoli had made up a song about a wandering Englishman waiting for a train station whistle and, with the violin at his shoulder, Petr played alongside her while the crowd laughed.
    I grinned and thought about punching Petr, pounding him into the mud.
    He walked around camp, wheezing. He seemed to carry his sickness tucked under his arm, but when he sat, the sickness spread out all around him. After a while, he didn't have the strength to leave the caravan at all. Zoli would come back in darkness, after singing, and sit at his bedside, waiting for him to fall asleep, his cough to subside.
    “How young are the girls when they marry in England?” she asked. She was on the steps of her caravan, absently pleating the hem of her dress.
    “Eighteen, nineteen, some not until they're twenty-five.”
    “Oh,” she said, “that's quite old, isn't it?”
    The truth was that I didn't really know. I had for some years considered myself to be Czechoslovakian but, in retrospect, I was too English for that, too Irish to be fully English, and too Slovakian to be in any way Irish. Translation had always got in the way of definition. Listening to the radio in the coalshed in Liverpool with my father, I had dreamed myself into the landscape of his country. It was not the place I had foreseen— endless mountains, rushing rivers—but it didn't matter anymore, I'd become someone new and the thought of her held me fast. Each word she came up