Zoli by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online

about being marched down the many-cornered road. Everyone now listened to my grandfather at the fire. He knew what was happening from his radio, and even Conka's father went with him to the millhouse where they were allowed barter for batteries.
    Grandfather didn't have time to build any more walls, he said that now everything was held together by factory cement, but if he ever built another wall he would do it his own way, and hold it together with what he called cunning.
    At night he turned the radio to polkas again, away from news of the war. Someone called Chamberlain had become a doormat, he said. Grandfather sat on the roof of our caravan and drank until he fell asleep under the stars. I whizzed theradio away from polkas and heard a man announce in Polish about what was happening, the same thing in Slovak too. Of course there was no Romani radio, there was not even a half-hour show, and we didn't hear news of our own people.
    Who needs news, Grandfather said, when it's all around us? A pig doesn't need a gold ring in its nose to know where it is sleeping, does it?
    Conka's mother went to Poprad but she got lost in the back-streets near the promenade, by the fruit market. Everyone searched for her, but she was picked up by the Hlinkas. They took her to the back of a bookshop, pushed her down on a table. They laughed at her long fingernails, said they were so lovely. One said he liked her fingernails so much that he would like to bring one of them home, maybe his wife would like to see such fine artistry. They held Conka's mother down by her shoulders. All she could see was a very dark patch of ceiling above her head and then the room began to spin. One held her arm. Another held the pliers. The nails came out one by one, though they left one little finger alone—they said it was so she could please herself if she got a Gypsy itch.
    They strung her nails on a little chain around her neck and sent her out of the bookshop into the street, where she fell. The troopers came out of the bookshop and brought her to hospital because, they said, she had grazed her knee. They said to the nurse: Take care of this woman's knee, it's very important that you fix her knee. On and on they went about her knee. The nurses lifted Conka's mother from the ground. Her hands were streaming blood.
    They tried to heal her but she left as quick as she could. None of our people wanted to remain in a hospital amongstsickness and death, it was not a good place to be. Conka's father drove her home, and she lay crying in the back of the cart. Her hands were huge with white bandages that soon turned brown no matter how much she boiled them. She stayed in her caravan. Every day she took off the bandages and bathed her hands in water mixed with dock leaves, and then she pasted the stumps of her fingers with woodsap and chamomile. She stared at her hands as if they did not belong to her at all. Conka said it was not the pain that made her mother wail, but because she would never be able to pluck the harp again. She tried the catgut strings with the stumps of her fingers, but her hands bled once more and that was it—the owls were in the sycamores, and things would never change.
    The bookshop burned down. My grandfather and Conka's father came back smelling of petrol. A feast was held. The tent rippled in the wind and my grandfather sang “The Internationale”—it was not the first time I had heard it, but now even Eliska joined in. She made a song up too: There are good rocks to throw and better roofs to burn, even Grandfather liked it, and I recall the last verse was that thorn trees would learn to grow from Hlinka hearts.
    We were in the thick of things. The axles were packed with grease and we got ready to leave our Polish brothers and sisters, although Eliska was coming with us. She had married Vashengo. Before we split, we gathered in a circle at the tent, and Grandfather told us the news: there was a new law out that said we needed licenses for