Zoli

PRAISE FOR Zoli

“Soaring and stumbling over decades of midcentury Eastern Europe, Zoli is a riveting novel. … [It has] an inner reality so authentic it could only have come from the matrix of the novelist's imagination…. Colum McCann is blessed with an unlikely mix of an adventurer's spirit and an introvert's compassionate eye. His fiction reflects this sweet incongruity, roaming among life's dispossessed with heartfelt ease…. [Zoli] gives us a tapestry of an entire culture, one shrouded and then marginalized into near extinction.”

— GAIL CALDWELL, Boston Sunday Globe

“Beautifully written … Beautifully conceived, wonderfully told, the story is proof of an indomitable spirit. The elusive character of Zoli, the brilliant artist, is unforgettable.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“McCann affirms with Zoli, his fourth novel, that he is a writer with a method and a mission…. The Roma hardships under the Nazis, their hopes and cruel disillusion under Communism, are grittily conveyed in scenes well researched and often grip ping.”

—Los Angeles Times

“As Zoli sets off across Europe on foot, stripped of not only the potency of her Romany heritage but the promise of a Utopian future, each new encounter is charged with both futility and wonder.”

—The New Yorker

“Lyrical… as rich and sensuous as loamy, freshly turned soil… McCann's research and lustrous prose bring Zoli vibrantly alive.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“As assured as anything McCann has ever written, rich in vivid detail but wise, too, about the cruelty of the world … McCann allows us to enter a world few of us know anything about…. his prose is just plain gorgeous.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Astonishing … a carefully crafted and subtle portrait of one woman's rich and troubled relationship with her people, and with her own Gypsy heart… With a subtle and nuanced appreciation of a culture far different from his own, McCann offers us a place at the Gypsies’ campfire and gives us compelling reasons to stick around and warm up.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“With a poet's language, McCann creates a haunting story about the pain of exile.”

—People

“Mesmerizing … McCann artfully weaves Romani traditions, superstitions and expressions into a vibrant tableau, vividly rendering Zoli's conflicting urges to flee and stay.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“McCann vividly animates an insular culture different from our own. Full of dense descriptions of everything from the intri cately carved caravans to the Gypsy women whose hair is sewn with gold coins, [he] tells a very convincing and very powerful story about the strength of community and the bur den of exile.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Fascinating and tragic. As in all of his books, McCann nails the hopes and quiet sadness of characters who've been displaced.”

—Time Out New York

“A great book and a marvelously crafted story. I loved the different angles, the images and the depiction of the Roma. This is life without being sentimental or defensive.”

—RODDY DOYLE

“If a writer's highest calling is to imagine what it is to be ‘other,’ then Colum McCann is a giant amonst us—fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath.”

—PETER CAREY

“I review a great many Roma-themed manuscripts for publishers, but none has ever moved me as profoundly as the haunting story of Zoli. With its stark imagery, it takes one deep into the heart of World War II Europe, and for many readers it will be their first introduction to the bleak reality of Romani life. Colum McCann has another winner.”

—I AN HANCOCK,director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin

“Zoli is an assiduously crafted and beautifully haunting story of Europe from one of Ireland's very best novelists. Every book from Colum McCann extends his range and excavates new territories. He is an audacious and wonderfully skilled writer.”

—JOSEPH O'CONNOR

Also by Colum McCann

FISHING THE SLOE-BLACK RIVER

SONGDOGS

THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS

EVERYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY MUST

DANCER

For Allison, Isabella, John Michael, and Christian

Much of this novel was written and esearched while I was a fellow at the orothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. It is dedicated to all of those at the library and to librarians everywhere: thank you.

If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die.

—Tahar Djaout

But in our century, when only evil and indifference are limitless, we cannot afford unnecessary questions; rather, we need to defend ourselves with whatever there is to hand of certainty. I know that you remember….

—John BergerAND OUR FACES, MY HEART, BRIEF AS PHOTOS

To get back before dark is the art of going.

—Wendell BerryTHE COLLECTED POEMS OF WENDELL BERRY I957-I982

Slovakia

2003

HE DRIVES ALONGSIDE the smal streambed, and the terrible shitscape looms up by increments—upturned buckets by the bend in the river, a broken baby carriage in the weeds, a petrol drum leaking out a dried tongue of rust, the carcass of a fridge in the brambles.

A dog, al bones and scars, noses out in front of the car, and within moments the dog has brought children, crowding up against the car windows.

He tries nonchalance as he snaps down the locks with his elbow. One boy is agile enough to jump onto the hood with hardly a noise—he grabs the windshield wipers and spreads himself out. A cheer goes up as two other kids take hold of the bumper and skate behind on the bare soles of their feet. Teenage girls jog alongside in their low-slung jeans. One of them points and laughs, but then stops, stil , silent. The boy slides off the hood and the skating kids let go of the bumper, and suddenly the river is in front of him, swirling, fast, brown, unexpected. He yanks the steering wheel hard.

Brambles scrape the windows. Tal grass crunches under the wheels. The car swerves back towards the mudtrack, and the children run alongside again in uproar.

On the far bank two old women stand up from where they're washing bedsheets using riverrock and lye. They shake their heads, half-smile, and stoop once more to their work.

He steers around another tight corner, towards a blind line of trees, past the remains of a shattered lettuce crate in the long grass, and there, across a rickety little joke of a bridge, is the gray Gypsy settlement, marooned on an island in the middle of the river, as if the water itself has changed its mind and flowed either side. Shanty houses. Windowless huts. Jagged pipes and mismatched wood. Thin scarves of smoke rising up from the chimneys. Each roof pockmarked with a satel ite dish and patched with scraps of corrugated iron. Far off in the distance a single blue coat flaps in the branches of a tree.

He guides the car into the long weeds, stops, pul s the handbrake, takes a second to pretend that he's looking for something in the glovebox, searches deep, though there's nothing there, not a thing, just a chance to get a smal respite. The children crowd the windows. He pushes open the car door, and al he can hear from the settlement across the water is a dozen radios blaring al at once, songs Slovakian and American and Czech.

Instantly the children thumb his sleeve, knuckle his ribcage, pat his jacket pockets. It's as if he has become a dozen hands al at once. “Quit!” he shouts, swatting them away. One boy hops on the front bumper so that the whole car bows to the rhythm. “Okay,” he shouts, “enough!” The older teenagers in dark leather jackets shrug. The girls in unbuttoned blouses step back and giggle. How immaculate their teeth. How quick the silver of their pupils. The tal est of the boys steps forward in a muscle-shirt. “Robo,” the boy says, puffing out his chest. They shake hands and he pul s the boy aside, has a word, face close to his ear. He tries to block the deep smel of the boy, wet wool and raw smoke, and within seconds a deal is struck—fifty krowns— to bring him to the elders and to keep the car safe.

Robo shouts out a warning to the others, backhands the child who is tiptoe on the rear bumper. They make their way towards the bridge. More children arrive from along the river, some naked, some in diapers, one in a torn pink dress and flip-flops, and the same girl seems to appear from al angles, but in different shoes each time; beautiful, coal-eyed, hair uncombed.

He watches the kids cross the bridge like a strange line of herons, one foot heavy on the solid planks, high-toed and light on the rest. The metal sheets vibrate under their weight. He totters a moment on a piece of plyboard, sways, reaches for a hold, but there is none. The children put their hands to their mouths and snigger—he is, he thinks, every idiot who has ever walked this way. He feels the weight of what he carries: two bottles, notepad, pencil, cigarettes, camera, and tiny recorder, al hidden away deep in his clothes. He pul s the jacket tight and leaps the final hole in the bridge, lands in the soft mud on the far side, just twenty yards from the shanties. He looks up, takes a deep breath, but it's as if a thousand chords have been struck al at once, his ribcage is thumping, he shouldn't have come here alone, a Slovakian journalist, forty-four years old, comfortably fat, a husband, a father, about to step into the heart of a Gypsy camp. He takes a step forward through a puddle, thinking how stupid it was to wear soft leather shoes for this trip, not even good for a quick retreat.

At the edge of the shacks he becomes aware of the brooding men leaning against woodpole doorways. Women stand with hands folded across their stomachs. He tries to catch their gaze, but they look beyond him and away with thousand-yard stares. Strange, he thinks, that they do not question him; maybe they've mistaken him for a policeman or a social worker or a parole officer or some other government fuckwad here on an official visit.

He feels briefly powerful as Robo leads him deeper into the warren of mudroutes.

Doorframes used as tables. Sackcloth for curtains. Empty cucu bottles strung up as windchimes. At his feet, bits of wood and porridge containers, lol ipop sticks and shattered glass, the ground-down bones of some dead animal. He catches glimpses of babies hammocked from ceilings, flies buzzing around them as they sleep. He reaches for his camera but is pushed on in the swel of children. Open doorways are quickly closed. Bare bulbs switched off. He notices carpets on the wal s, and pictures of Christ, and pictures of Lenin, and pictures of Mary Magdalene, and pictures of Saint Jude lit by smal red candles high above empty shelves. From everywhere comes the swel of music, no accordions, no harps, no violins, but every shack with a TV or a radio on ful volume, an endless thump.

Robo leans over and shouts in his ear, “Over here, Uncle, fol ow me,” and it strikes him how foreign this boy, how distant, how dark-skinned.

He is led around a sharp corner to the largest shanty of al . A satel ite dish sits new and shiny on the roof. He knocks on the plywood door. It swings open a little further with each knuckle rap. Inside there is a contingent of eight, nine, maybe ten men. They raise their heads like a parliament of ravens. A few of them nod, but they continue their hand, and he knows the game is nonchalance—he has played it himself in other parts of the country, the flats of Bratislava, the ghettos of Presov, the slums of Letanovce.

In the far corner of the room he notices two women watching him, wide-eyed. A hand pushes him at the smal of his back. “I'l wait for you here, mister,” says Robo, and the door creaks behind him.

He looks around the room, the immaculate floor, the ordered cupboards, the whiteness of the one shirt hanging on a nail from the ceiling.

“Nice house,” he says, and knows immediately how foolish it sounds. He flushes red-cheeked, then draws himself tal . In the corner sits a broad-shouldered man, tough, hard-jawed, gray hair tousled after a bad night's sleep. He steps across and announces quite softly that he's a journalist, he's here on a story, he'd like to talk to some of the old folk.

“We're the old folk,” says the man.

“Right,” he says, and pats his jacket. He fumbles in his pocket and breaks open a pack of Marlboros. Stupid, he knows, not to have broken the seal already. In the silence the others watch him. His hands shake. A bead of sweat runs down his brow. He can almost hear the chest hair rustle under his shirt. He unwinds the plastic, lifts the cel ophane, and shoves three cigarettes up like peeping toms.

“Just want to talk,” he says.

The man waits for a light, blows the smoke sideways.

“About what? ”

“The old days.”

“Yesterday was long,” says the man with a laugh, and the laughter ripples around the room, tentatively at first, until the women catch it and it builds, unraveling the tension. He is suddenly slapped on the shoulder and his grin breaks wide, and the men start to talk in an accent that starts low and ends high, musical, fast, jangly. Some of the words appear to be in Romani, and from what he can make out, the man's name is Boshor. He reaches past Boshor, throws the cigarettes on the table, and the men casual y reach for them. The women step across, one of them suddenly young and beautiful. She bends for a light, and he looks away from the low swing of her breasts. Boshor points to the cards and says: “We're playing for a little food, a little drink too.” The man pul s again on the cigarette. “We're not real y drinkers, though.”

He takes his cue from Boshor, opens a button, slips back his shirtfront, exposing his flabby chest, and removes the first bottle like a trophy.

Boshor picks up the bottle, turns it in his hands, nods approval, and rattles off a salvo of Romani to more laughter.

He watches as the young girl reaches into a cupboard. She takes down a mahogany box with a silver clasp, opens it wide. A matching set of china cups. She puts them on the table, unscrews the bottle. He is given, he notices, the only china cup that is not chipped.

Boshor leans back and gently says: “Health.”

They clink cups, and Boshor leans forward to whisper: “Oh, it's for money too, friend. We're playing cards for money.”

He doesn't even flinch; he slaps down two hundred krowns. Boshor takes it, slips it into his trousers, smiles, blows smoke towards the ceiling.

“Thank you, friend.”

The cards are put aside, and the drinking starts in earnest. He is amazed how close Boshor sits to him, their knees touching, the dark of the hand on his jacketsleeve, and he wonders now how he wil navigate their secrets—even their Slovak is a little difficult to understand, their country dialect

—but soon enough the second bottle is on the table. He does it calmly and quickly, as if to suggest it's always been there. The drinking unfolds, and they begin to talk to him about crooked mayors and bent bureaucrats and subsidies and the dole, and how Kolya was beaten with a pickaxe last week and how they are not al owed into the pubs—“We're not even al owed within fifty fucking meters”—al the things they know a journalist wants to hear. Even the Gypsies have soundbites, he thinks, as if he should be surprised, al the words down pat

— racism, integration, schooling, Roma rights, discrimination—and it's al horse-shit real y, though he's getting somewhere; they become more talkative as the bottles drain, the voices rise to a clamor, and they fal into a story about a motorbike taken by the cops.

“Everything that gets stolen is what we steal,” says Boshor as he leans forward, his eyes slightly bloodshot and tinged with yel ow. “It's always us, isn't it? We're prouder than that, you know.”

He nods at Boshor, shifts in his chair, seeks a pocket of silence, passes around more cigarettes, and flicks the matchstick to extinguish the flame.

“So,” he says, “are motorbikes the new Roma horses?”

He's briefly proud of his question until Boshor repeats it, not once, but twice, and then there's a giggle from the youngest girl and the men slap their thighs in laughter.

“Shit, friend,” says Boshor. “We don't even have bridles anymore.”

Another round of laughter goes up, but he pushes his question harder, saying surely horses are part of the ancient Gypsy ways. “Y'know,” he says,

“pride, tradition, heritage, that sort of thing? ”

Boshor's chair scrapes against the floor and he leans forward. “I told you, friend, we don't have any horses.”

“Different times?”

“It was better under the Communists,” says Boshor, flicking ash towards the doorway. “Those were the days.”

And that's where his heart surges, he's momentarily high on the lift of it, and just by leaning forward, ever so slightly, he has Boshor by the neck-scruff, a newsman's trick.

“Yeah, back with the Communists we had jobs, we had houses, we had food,” says Boshor. “They didn't knock us ‘round, no, friend, may my black heart stop beating if I tel a lie.”

“Isthat so?”

Boshor nods, and from a battered wal et takes out a photograph of a traveling kumpanija long ago in which the men are elegant and the women long-skirted. They are out on a country road, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle nutters from the caravan roof.

“That's my Uncle Jozef.”

He takes the photo from Boshor, turns it in his fingers, and wishes to Christ in the clouds above that he had clicked his tape recorder on, for now it has begun, but he wonders how he wil reach into his pocket without attracting too much attention, if the smal red light wil shine through his jacket, and where he should begin his real questions. He wants to say that he is here about Zoli, do you know about Zoli, she was born near here, a Gypsy, a poet, a singer, a Communist too, a Party member, she traveled with harpists once, she was expel ed, have you heard her name, did you hear her music, We sing to sweeten the dead grass, did you see her, is she stil talked of, From what is broken, what is cracked, I make what is required, was she damned, was she forgiven, did she leave any sign, I will not, no, never call the crooked finger straight, did your fathers tel stories, did your mothers sing her songs, was she ever al owed back?

But when he mentions her name—leaning forward to say, “Have you ever heard of Zoli Novotna?”—the air stal s, the drinking stops, the cigarettes are held at mouth-level, and a silence descends.

Boshor looks towards the doorway and says: “No, I don't know that name—do you understand me, fat-neck?—and even if I did, that's not something we would talk about.”

Czechoslovakia

1930S-1949

THERE ARE THINGS ABOUT youth that only youth knows, but what I recal most clearly was sitting in the back of the caravan, wearing red, staring out at the roads going backwards.

I was six years old. My hair was cut short. I'd hacked it off with a knife. I tel this to you directly, there is no other way to say it—my mother was gone, my father, my brother, my sisters and cousins too. They had been driven out on the ice by the Hlinka guards. Fires were lit in a ring around the shore, and guns were pointed so they could not escape. The caravans were forced to the middle of the lake as the day grew warmer. The ice cracked, the wheels sank, and the rest fol owed, harps and wheels and horses. I did not see any of it happen, daughter, but I could hear it in my mind and, although there was great music to come along later, sweet sounding moments when our people were raised up and strong and valued, that wil always be a time of looking backwards, listening and waiting for my dead family to catch up.

Only Grandfather and I escaped—we had been out beyond the lake, traveling three ful days. We came back to silence. He clapped his hand over my mouth. The horse reared and the caravan shuddered. Ash from dead fires ringed the lake. Grandfather jumped to the ground. Wait here, he said. He was not a man with whom you could dispute. He thought that places were good and most people were good, but the rules they put on the places were vile, and that people became vile with them.

He did not wait to shed a tear, nor did he pick up the hats and scarves and boxes that were floating among the shards of ice. Instead he walked across to me, his hair at his shoulders, and said, Quick now and silent, Zoli, don't say a word.

We pul ed the curtains on the windows and wrapped the sharp knives in towels so they would not clink. He draped the mirror in a shirt. Al the dishes were put in cloths. The road we took was smal , with a line of green down the middle, two mud-tracks worn on either side. It was already spring, which was why the ice had cracked. Smal buds were beginning on the trees. Birds whistled and the sun was bright as tin. I shut my eyes against it. I kept waiting for my mother to appear, my father too, my brother and my two sisters, al my cousins as wel , but Grandfather pul ed me close, looked over his shoulder, and said, Listen here, child, the Hlinkas are stil out there, you must not make another sound.

I had seen the Hlinkas, their leather boots that wrinkled below their knees, the bil yclubs that slapped along their thighs, the rifles across their chests, the rol of fat at the back of their necks.

Grandfather guided Red along until dark, then pul ed us into a grove of trees. The stars were like clawmarks above us. I sat in the corner and rocked back and forth, then chopped my hair off with a very sharp knife. I hid the braids in my pil ow. When Grandfather saw me, he slapped my face twice and said, What have you done? He took one of the braids, put it in his pocket, pul ed me close, and whispered to me that my mother had once done the same when she was a child, it was not a good thing, it was against our laws.

When we woke, there were dark marks in a line down my grandfather's cheeks. He went outside, plunged his face in a stream, fed some snowmelt to Red, and we went on.

For days we traveled, first light until last. We went through a vil age where the four-faced clocktower told three different times. The shops were open and the market was bustling. When we entered the square Grandfather's shoulders went stiff.

Some Hlinkas were gathered around the church steps, laughing and smoking. They fel silent when they heard the clopping of our horse. An armored truck came from behind the clock-tower. Quiet now, said Grandfather. He whipped Red's rump and we left quickly, out past the church and into the countryside, far away.

Fascist snakes, he said.

We knocked on every door, looking for food, and late in the evening we came upon a laneway with high brambles. A stone house sat surrounded by high trees. A cat watched from a windowsil . Grandfather bartered with a peasant to repair a gable wal in exchange for some soup and a little money. The peasant said, Go ahead and fix the wal first. Grandfather said, I can't with the child so hungry, look at her, we need money for food. The peasant said, If I give you money you'l run off and gyp me. Grandfather held his tongue and said: I'l build the wal if you give the child food.

The peasant came out from the house, balancing a smal bowl of borscht for us to share. We drank from the same side of the handle-shorn cup.

The soup was measly and watery.

There are times in a fountain's life, Grandfather said, when even it must learn to swal ow piss.

We stayed that night in the weedy field behind the peasant's house. The peasant had a radio, and we heard it faintly but there were no reports on the kil ings. I leaned in close to Grandfather and asked why my family had not bolted across the ice, and he said to me that my father was strong but not strong enough to escape the fascists, and my mother was strong but with a different strength, and my brother surely attempted but was probably beaten back. He looked away then and said: The Lord or whoever have mercy on the soul of your youngest sister.

When the dark was ful y down, Grandfather pul ed hard on his tobacco and said: When ice breaks it sends out a warning, child. The Hlinkas ringed the lake with their fires and waited for the day to get warmer. We were lucky they never found us.

He ran the blade of his knife along his thumb. I asked how deep the water was and what happened when the ice got thinner, but Grandfather said no more questions, they would be mule soon, spirit, they did not want to be disturbed. Maybe they were able to swim away, I said, under the ice. He looked at me and sighed. I asked if the horses were spirit too and he said no more questions, girl, but later in the evening, when the night had fal en upon us, he lay down beside me and said that he did not want to think about what the first crack was like, nor the screaming of the horses, nor the creak of the wheels, nor the breath of the soldiers, nothing at al . He pinched my cheek and told me a story instead about nails and a forge and a sky that was pushed into place with strong hands, and he finished it off by saying that good things would be built in the long days to come.

In the morning the peasant came out of his house and said, Away with you.

Grandfather slapped Red on the rump and asked her to leave a big steaming one for the peasant outside his house, but she did not. We went on, but that became his favorite saying, and then his never-ending joke, whenever we got somewhere he did not like: Go ahead, horse, and shit.

No smal turn of my grandfather's head was lost to me. He was made up of elaborate things. He had three shirts and he did not believe a man should have more. The open col ars were folded down outside the lapels of his black jacket. His enormous mustache curled and the hairs on his chin were long. His nose was bony and it had been broken many times. He wore a Marx pin on his hat, but he always removed the hat before we got near a vil age, stuffed it in the waistband of his trousers where it made his jacket bulge. The pin would only bring trouble, he said.

He liked to smoke very thin rol ed cigarettes, he held them between the fourth and little finger of his right hand. The grapevine turned his fingers green, and the smel of the tobacco drifted back over the air.

As far as he knew, Grandfather was thirty-nine years old. My grandmother had escaped this world years before I entered it. He kept a photograph of her inside his jacket, but half of her was worn away from forever coming in and out of his pocket. They had been mother and father to many, but al except one were already buried. The last one stil alive had taken gadzi-kano ways, which meant he was dead too. Nobody said anything about him anymore, not even his name. From my earliest days Grandfather had cal ed me Zoli, a boy's name, after his first son. Sometimes, when I was cal ed Marienka, I would not even turn to answer. He said that the most important thing about names were the namers, to hel or high water with what anyone else said. We are ful of names, he said, we always wil be, that's our way.

We drove on, Grandfather and me, we left it al behind: the chocolate factory, the tire plant, the rivers and the mountains. We cal ed the mountains the Shivering Hil s, though of course they were the Carpathians. He wore shiny knee-boots with concertina creases at the ankles and the right boot was split at the back seam. I liked to lean out from the back of the caravan to watch it, it looked like it was speaking, open and closed, open and closed, though there were long stretches of road where it didn't say much at al . I was not old enough yet, daughter, to know why my family had been driven out on the ice.

The spring before, I remember waking early one morning, me, my brother, and my older sister. My mother and father were sleeping, the baby, Angela, too. I peeped into the zelfya, which was hung from the ceiling, and watched her little chest rise and fal . We tiptoed out, down the three steps. The sun had not yet ful y risen. Outside the fields shone green and white. Most of the other children were already playing outside. There were twenty of us, maybe more, making a lot of noise. Father came to the door and threw his slipper at us to make us quieten.

Shut up! he shouted.

We hushed and went towards the fields, near the factory, and crossed the low wal , made of tires. It gave a tiny bounce. My shoes were made from rubber too and they squeaked when I landed. We looked out over the field of frosty grass.

The game we played was to see who could find the longest sleeve of ice. The greenest blades were best since they stood tal and straight and did not bend over with the weight. Slowly we went through the field, over the hard muddy ridges of ground, searching. I could hear my brother shouting how he ‘d found a sleeve, possibly the biggest sleeve ever, you could fit your finger in it, maybe even your arm. We pushed and shoved and yelped and laughed and laid the ice out on our fingers to measure it before it melted.

I loved the feel of the frost and I stayed in the long grass, looking. The trick was to hold the bottom of the blade steady and then to coax the ice along—too slow and it broke, too fast and it fel . The most perfect sleeve came off almost whole and you could see down its sparkling length. I put it to my mouth and blew air through. I could feel my own breath at the other end and then the ice dissolved on my tongue.

I stayed in the field until the sun rose over the trees and the others were gone. The shadows grew long and then sprang back al of a sudden. The sun topped the highest branches and soon everything began to melt. My socks were soaked through. I ran back over the field and over the bouncing tire wal , towards the caravans, just beyond the edge of the cypress trees. The fire was already lit, and my father had his hands cupped around the first smoke of the day. Everyone else had already eaten, and they had run off towards the chocolate factory. My mother banged the last of the kasha out of the pot and said: Zoli, we thought the gadze got you and took you away, where in the world were you? My father said: Get over here, you little pup. He grabbed my ear, pul ed it hard, took a piece of bread from his pocket, and gave it to me. How was the ice? he asked.

Delicious, I said. Was it not cold? he said with a laugh, and I said, Yes, it was cold and delicious together.

My grandfather once said, Show me a child of ours who is not happy and I wil show you a gadzo dwarf.

We went down the road, Grandfather and I. My days were spent stil staring backwards, waiting for my dead family to catch up, though of course I knew then that they never would.

We ate from the forest: boiled leaves, pine cones cracked open in a fire, wild garlic grass, and whatever smal animals he ‘d caught in a trap the night before. We could not eat birds, we were not al owed, it was ancient law, but we ate rabbit and hare and hedgehog. We fil ed our canteens from the taps of houses where they welcomed us, or from the fast-running streammelt that came down from the mountains, or from wel s abandoned in the fields. Sometimes we stopped with the settled ones who lived in tin huts and underground hovels. They opened up with great friendliness, but we did not stay, we kept moving on, there was no time for that, Grandfather said we were meant for skies not ceilings.

In the evenings Grandfather sat and read—he was the only person I knew who could read or write or count. He had a precious book I did not know the name of and in truth I did not care, it sounded strange and ridiculous and ful of huge words, nothing like his stories. He said that a good book always needed a listener, and it sent me to sleep quickly—he always read from the same pages, they were heavily thumbed and they even had a tobacco burn in the bottom left corner. It was his only book and he had stitched another cover on, a brown leather one with gold lettering from a catechism to fool anyone who questioned him. I found out years later that it was Das Kapital—the notion stil makes me shiver, though in truth I'm not sure, chonor-roeja, if he ever got a lot of meaning from the pages, they confused him as much as they final y confused others.

Why didn't Mama read? I asked him once.

Because.

But why?

'Cause she didn't want to feel the weight of my hand, he said. Now run along and stop asking me stupid questions.

Later he gathered me up in his arms and I snuggled against his long hair and he said it was tradition, it had always been so, only the elders read, and that one day I would understand. Tradition meant sticking with old ways, he said, but sometimes it meant making new ways too. He sent me off to bed and tucked the blanket around me.

On our slow trip eastward, under the shadow of the mountains, he promised that if I kept quiet he would teach me to read and write, but I must keep it secret, nobody else could know, it would be better that way, it would cause a fuss among those who did not trust books.

He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his shirt where he kept his eyeglasses safe. The glasses were broken, wrapped in bits of wire and tape. The cross frame was held together with a supple twig. I laughed when he put them on.

When he began he did not start with A, B, C, but with a Z, although my other name was Marienka.

We slept under the sky, the weather was fine and the nights were ful and soft, except of course for our yearning for those we ‘d left behind. We had little left to remember them by, but there was an old song my mother had sung: Don't break bread with the baker, he has a dark oven, it opens wide, it opens wide. There were times I would sing it for Grandfather while he sat on the low steps and listened. He closed his eyes and smoked his tobacco and hummed along, and then one day he stopped me cold and asked, What did you say, Zoli? I stepped back. What did you say, child? I sang it again: Don't break bread with the Hlinka, he has a dark oven, it opens wide, it opens wide. You changed the song, he said. I stood there, trembling. Go ahead, sing it again, you'l see. I sang it over and he clapped his hands together, then rol ed the word Hlinka around in his mouth. He repeated the song and then he said: Do the same with the butcher, precious heart. So I did the same with the butcher. Don't chop meat with the Hlinka, he has a sharp knife, it slices deep, it slices deep. He said: Do the same with the farrier. Don't shoe horses with the Hlinka, he has long nails, they'll make you lame, they'll make you lame. I was too young to know what I had done, but a few years later, when we found out what the Hlinkas and Nazis had done with ovens and nails and knives, the song changed for me yet again.

In fact when I see myself now from a distance, when I look back on it al , I was just another girl in a polka-dot dress on the backroads of a country that seemed strange to me at every turn.

Once, a motorcar passed us, and a man in a rich brown overcoat wanted to take a photograph. Grandfather turned his head. This is not the circus, mister. The man held out a few hel ers. Grandfather said: I'd rather skim stones. Then the man took out a crisp note from his wal et and pul ed it tight so that it made the noise of a drumskin, and Grandfather said with a shrug: Wel , why didn't you say so? I was made to stand stil on the steps and I held the flare of my skirt. The man put his head under a black sheet. He looked like a hooded bird. A bulb flashed and I jumped. He did it six times. Grandfather said: Al right, mister, that's enough.

He was quiet when we clopped away again under the trees, but in the next vil age he bought me a peppermint stick. He slapped the whip at Red's rump and said: Don't ever give them something for nothing, Zoli, you hear me?

They documented me when we got to Poprad because al Romani children had to be examined by the age of five and I was already seven. The building was grand and white, with statues outside and a row of gray steps leading up to a huge wooden door. Inside there was a curving staircase, but we were told to go to the smal squat cabins in the back courtyard.

The clerk examined Grandfather's papers for a long time, looked him up and down, from his hair to his boots, and said: Is she yours?

My daughter's daughter, he said.

She's surprisingly tal , you know.

I heard a creak of leather and noticed Grandfather had stretched up on his toes.

She took me into an office, closed the door on my grandfather, turned my face back and forth in her fingers. Your left eye's lazy, she said. She pul ed my head down and checked in my hair for lice and then asked where the bruise came from. What bruise? I said. My hair had begun to grow and my grandfather had sewn a single coin at the fringe, where it bumped against my forehead. She pul ed back the coin, pressed her finger against my forehead. It's ridiculous to have money in your hair, she said. Why do you people insist on such things?

I watched the bob of silver at her neck. She put the cold round metal of it against my chest and listened through tubes.

She shone the flashlight into my throat, put me up against a wal , and mumbled something. She gazed at me and said I was very tal for my age. I was indeed tal , even for seven, but now I had to be five once more.

The clerk said: Five, my holy eye.

She measured my nose and the distance between my eyes, even the length of my hands and wrote it al down careful y. She took my thumb and rol ed it back and forth on a soft pad of black ink and pushed my other fingers down hard onto the page. I liked the little patterns my fingers made, like bootprints down by a river. She asked me lots of questions, where I was born, what was my real name, if I went to school, where were my parents and why weren't they with me. I told her they had fal en beneath the ice but said nothing about the Hlinka guards. She said: What about your brothers and sisters? I said, Them too. She raised her eyebrows, looked at me sternly, and then I blurted: My brother, Anton, tried to break away.

Break away where? she asked. I looked at my fingers. Break away where, young lady? From the lake by the forest. Who in the forest? she asked.

The wolves, I said. Lord above, she said. And what did these wolves look like? I didn't say another word but she said, Oh, you poor thing, and then she touched me on the side of the face with a gentle stroke of her finger.

She took me out to where my grandfather was waiting. She looked around quickly, then leaned in close and whispered something. Grandfather stepped back and swal owed hard. The clerk looked over her shoulder again.

Do you want to make a complaint? she said.

About what?

I'l make sure it gets to the right people.

I don't know what you're talking about, said Grandfather.

The little girl told me, she whispered.

Told you what?

You don't have to worry, she said.

Grandfather nicked a quick look at me, then started talking a long line of gibberish about a pack of wolves and men who were hungry and wheels that leave a mark in the forest and birds flying above the trees. It made no sense at al , not even to him.

The clerk stared at him: I'l ask one last time. Do you want to make a complaint or not?

Grandfather went off on another long kite line of gibberish.

The clerk sighed and her voice became stern and loud again. I've had enough of you people, she said. One day you want help, the next you just

spout nonsense.

She slapped her hand down on a desk bel . Another official came out from a back office. He wore black elastic bands on his sleeves. He raised his eyes to heaven when he saw us. Christ, he muttered. He shoved the papers across the wooden counter without even looking at them.

Al right, she must come in and register every three months.

What about the other children? asked Grandfather.

Al the Gypsy children have to do it.

And the other children?

Oh, them? he said. No, why?

Grandfather made a rattling sound in his throat and signed the papers with an XXX. On the way out I asked him why he didn't write using the letters he ‘d taught me, but he turned and pinned me with a look. Halfway down the steps he caught me by the ear and said: Never tel them that story, never. Do you hear me?

He almost lifted me in the air by my ear.

They'l make it twice as bad, he said. And then they'l just shove us under again. D'you understand me, child? Never.

The pain shot through me. We walked down the last of the steps. I looked at my hands. They were black with fingerprint ink. I sucked at my fingers, but he slapped my hand.

A respectful girl keeps her insides clean, he said. Don't bring that ink down into your bel y.

The wagon was listing sideways on the cobblestones. I went up and held on to Red's reins, rubbed against her, my ear hot against her pulsing neck. Grandfather climbed up and sat a long time, staring at the building. Final y he said: Come up here, precious heart. He lifted me up with one hand and sat me on the board beside him. He sat quiet a long time, then he spat sideways, put his arm around my shoulder, and said to me that one of the reasons he wrote XXX was that he would not let them make an idiot of him with their rules.

He took the reins in his hands and was about to slap them down on Red's rump, but then he looked back over his shoulder and whispered: Go ahead, horse, and shit. And as if by the very string of heaven, Red lifted her tail and left two steaming loads on the cobbles outside the grand white building, and we drove away laughing, we never laughed so hard. At the end of the road we looked back and saw a man lifting the clumps up on a shovel with a scrunched red look on his face. We laughed even harder until the building was out of sight and we went out on the country road with the trees in bloom and the midges rising and blue dragonflies on the air, the kind that leave the shine from their wings on the glass once you put them in a jar.

Grandfather put his hat back on his head and wound his curling mustache around his finger and said very loud again to the road: Go ahead, horse, and shit.

We fol owed signs—a knotted wishbone to turn left, a broken twig for a right fork in the road, a white cloth for a friendly farmhouse where we could water Red and fil our canteens.

It was late summer and the cherry trees were heavy and drooping. We crossed a lovely clean river and went deep into the forest where we were shielded from view by thick lines of yew, green oak, sycamore. Among the wiry grasses grew wild orchids and dandelions. Grandfather brought me into a clearing where fourteen caravans stood, they took my breath away, beautiful y colored and carved. Water came up from the ground around a piece of swampy grass. A tin cup was upended on a nubbed pole. A girl came towards us with a drink. It ran cool against the back of my throat. I watched as Grandfather took giant strides across the camp and put his arms around the shoulders of his very own brother who he had not seen in years. He shouted at me to hurry up and come meet my cousins, and cousins of cousins, and cousins of other cousins. Soon we were surrounded, and I was scooped up immediately into a new life which was so much like my old life.

A few of them had strayed down from Poland, carrying harps. I had never seen instruments so tal , beautiful y carved and strung with catgut. They stood twice my height. Even when I stretched on my toes I could not reach the top of the strings. They were varnished and carved with wheels and griffins and birds. The plucked sound carried through the trees. There was nothing so lovely. The women who played the harps had very long fingernails. They painted their nails every night, using whatever colors could be found, boiled up from animals and red riverstone and some from bird eggs, light blue. The colors were brushed on with tiny brooms made from weed-grass. Eliska, a Polish woman with hair black as thumbprints, owned a very fine enamel brush—she had found it at the back of a theater in Krakow, she said it belonged to a famous actress who could be heard on the radio. Who needs a radio when you have Eliska! she shouted.

She took my arm and walked me across the camp: You have the eyes of a little devil, she said.

She laughed and spun me round in the air and later told me to sit with her as she brushed the color onto her fingernails. Her words were quick and clipped. Eliska had fal en in love with a young man named Vashengo and soon she would marry. She said she would teach me an old song that I could sing at their wedding. Hers were the old laments I already knew, but then she taught me a new one. I will fill the empty cup, it is not so hollow anymore, I will fill it with wine, it will come from the palm of your hand. I learned it quickly and wandered around the camp singing it, until Vashengo said: Please shut up, you'l drive me to the nuthouse. I sang another verse and he clipped me on the ear. Eliska whispered to me that I was al right, not to worry, pay no attention to the men, they wouldn't know a good song if it kissed them on the lips. Come here, she said, and I'l braid your hair like your mother used to. How do you know how my mother braided my hair? I asked. It's a secret, she said. I began to cry, so she said: Oh your mother was famous for many things, most of al she was a great singer.

She leaned down to my ear and sang, and the songs grew and grew, and she took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead. Pity about your eye, said Eliska, otherwise you'd be as pretty as she was.

It was my talent that I could remember words and phrases, and so I was kept up late at night to listen to the songs. Sometimes they shifted and rol ed and changed. If the women were swaying with cucu, they could not remember where the song had led the night before. They said to me: Zoli, what did I sing? And I would say: They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. Or I would say: I have two husbands, one of them sober, one of them drunk, but each one Hove the same. Or I sang: I want no shadow to fall upon your shadow, your shadow is dark enough for me. They smiled when these words came out of my mouth and told me again that I had the look of my mother. At night I fel to sleep thinking of her. I pictured her in my mind, she had a row of perfect teeth except for a bottom one missing.

It is strange now to talk of such things, but these are the moments I remember, chonorroeja, this was my childhood, I try to tel it to you as I saw it then, and as I felt it then, when I was not yet shunned, when it was al stil free and open to me, and for the most part it was happy. The Great War hadn't yet begun and, although the fascists sometimes hunted us to give us another dose of their hatred—we were no more than wild animals to them—we settled as far away from them as possible, kept to our own ways, and made music where we could. That, back then, was enough.

In the new camp there was another girl the same age as me. Conka had red hair and freckles in a band across her nose. Her mother had sewn a string of pearls in her hair. Her dresses were threaded with silver, and she had the most beautiful voice of al , so she too was kept awake at night to sing. The canvas flap of the singing tent was pul ed back for us. We stood on buckets so we could be seen. Grandfather shoved his hat back on his head and lit up a smoke. Everyone gathered in a half circle around us. The women played the harps at a furious pace, once or twice they bent a fingernail backwards in the strings, but stil they kept going.

My voice was not as sweet as Conka's, but Grandfather said that it hardly mattered, the important thing was the right word, to pul it out, or squeeze it short, and then dress it up with air from my lungs. When we sang, Conka and I, he said that we were air and water in a pot and together we boiled.

In the nighttime, we tried to fal asleep by the fire, but our favorite stories kept us up late and when a story was real y good we had no legs to hold us up. Her father slapped us and told us to go to our beds, we'd waken the dead. Grandfather carried me and put me beneath the eiderdown where my mother had once stenciled a harp using thread that came from cottonwood trees.

One evening, Grandfather carried home a carpet of a man's face, and he hung it on the wal above the drawer ful of knives. It was a portrait of a man with a gray beard, a strange gaze, and a high forehead. It's Vladimir Lenin, he said. Don't tel a soul, you hear me, especial y the troopers if they come along. Later that week he bought a second carpet—this one was the Holy Virgin. He rol ed the Virgin into a tight circle with string, and positioned her above Lenin, so that if a stranger came into the caravan, he could reach up with his knife and cut the string and the Holy Virgin would come down on top of Lenin in a rush. Grandfather thought it hilarious and sometimes he cut the string just for fun, and if he was drunk he would talk to their faces and cal them the greatest of bedfel ows. If there was a rumble outside in the camp, he would quickly cut the string and shove his leather-bound book into a hidden pocket at the back of his jacket. Then he stood outside with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.

He would sooner have invited in typhus than a trooper.

If they forced a check on us they pushed their way past him without asking, stomped their boots on the floor, but they never found Lenin or the book. They tore the place up and tossed teacups to one another. From outside we could hear the smashing, but what was there to do, we just waited until they came out, down the steps, their boots shiny at the knees and scuffed at the toes.

When they were gone, we cleaned the mess, and Grandfather rol ed up the Virgin again, let Lenin look out once more.

Grandfather went to the Poprad market one day and didn't come back for four more. He had built a wal for a man who had given him a wireless radio. He carried it into the camp with great fanfare, put it down by the fire, and music jumped out. Vashengo's father came to look at it. He liked the music indeed and everyone gathered around and fiddled with the knobs. But in the morning, a group of elders came and said they didn't like the children listening to outsiders. It's only a radio, said Grandfather. Yes, they said, but the talk is immodest. Grandfather took Vashengo's father by the arm and they walked down by the river and worked out a plan: he would only listen to music and not the other shows. Grandfather took it with us to our caravan, turned it very low, and listened anyway. It's my duty to know, he said, and he ran the little yel ow dial along the glass panel, Warsaw, Kiev, Vienna, Prague, and the one he loved the most, though it didn't get any sound: Moscow.

One day I heard him slam down the wooden backing on the ground: This bloody thing needs batteries, can you imagine that?

He came back a couple of days later with a sack ful of batteries over his shoulder and his clothes covered in flecks of gray. He told us that the gadze now wanted wal s held together with cement—al his other wal s he had built with rocks and air—but if that's what he had to do for batteries, that's what he had to do.

Soon everyone grew to like the radio. Mostly we listened to music, but every now and then government voices came through. In the caravan, Grandfather tuned it in to whatever he could find, al the different languages. He spoke five—Romani, Slovak, Czech, Magyar, and a little Polish—

though Eliska said he should forget al that red gibberish, he sounded the same in every language, he should come back in the next life as a loudspeaker strung up on a lamppost. He said that loudspeakers were fascist and just you wait, you black-haired chovahanio, you witch, when the good ones, the Communists, final y get power. She shouted at him that she couldn't hear him, that she must have been asleep when he was talking.

He shouted back: What the hel did you say, woman? I thought that Eliska might lift her skirt to shame him, but she did not, she just turned away. She got a lash of his tongue, and he said something rude about her little enamel brush and where she could sweep it. Soon everyone began laughing and joking and it was forgotten.

Stil , Grandfather got in fist-thumping arguments about the book he carried. He sat with the elders around the fire and tried to talk to them of revolution, but they said that our men were not meant for such things. Petr the violinist nodded in agreement with Grandfather, and Vashengo too, but Conka's father was loud against him.

Did you ever hear such nonsense! If Marx was a worker, how come he never worked? How come he just wrote books about working? Tel me, did he just want to keep pissing on a hot stove?

Grandfather clicked his fingers, stood up, and shouted: Whoever is not with us is against us!

He and Conka's father stepped across the pots and came to blows.

In the morning, they drank their coffee and began al over again.

So you never answered my question, said Conka's father. If Marx loved the poor so much, how come he had time to write books?

Grandfather took me down to the river. He tipped his hat and brought me across a fal en log, and he held my hand as we balanced near the edge.

Listen to me, Zoli, he said. The river here, it doesn't belong to anyone, but some of them say they own it, they al say they own it, even some of us say we own it, but we don't. Look there, see the way the water is stil moving underneath? It'l keep on moving. Only inches below, girl, the owning is gone, even ours, and you have to remember that, otherwise they wil make a fool of you with their words.

The next day he led me to the schoolhouse.

I had heard about schools and did not want to go, but he pul ed me under the green overhanging roof. I tried to run away but he caught me by the elbow. Inside, the desks were arranged in neat rows. Strange pictures with lots of green and blue hung on the wal s—I did not yet know what a map

was. My grandfather talked with the teacher and told her I was six years old. The teacher arched her eyebrows and said, Are you sure? Grandfather said, Why wouldn't I be sure? The teacher's hands trembled a little. Grandfather leaned forward and stared at the teacher. The teacher went white in the face. Bring her here, sir, she said. I'l gladly look after her.

I was put in the corner with the youngest of al , dribbles from their noses, one even wore diapers. The older children giggled when I sat on the tiny seat, but I stared at them until they were quiet.

That night, when it was raining, and the sound of it was drumming off the leaves outside, there was an enormous fight in the singing tent. Stay where you are, said Eliska. But I want to sing, I said. Stay where you are, she said, if you know what's good for you. I huddled up under the eiderdown. There was screaming and shouting. Then it stopped and the music started and I could hear Conka's voice drifting out under the rain.

They broke they broke my little brown arm. She got the words wrong, muddled them up, and I wanted to run through the wet grass to tel her, but I heard some more shouting and the whip of a tree branch, so I pul ed the eiderdown over me and stayed quiet. Grandfather came in with his hat dripping wet. He didn't seem to notice a cut on his cheek, by his eye. He sat by the window and smoked some grapevine, looking out.

No matter what, he said, it's my choice.

He kissed me goodnight on the forehead and he turned on the wireless radio and it played a polka. In the morning I was caught by the oldest woman, we cal ed her Barleyknife because of the scar on her breast. She slapped me nine times. I walked over to the fence, my face stinging. She tied back her hair with a clothes peg and shouted after me: You'l learn to marry the butcher's dog, wait ‘til you see, mark my words, you'l marry the butcher's ugliest dog.

Rain dripped off the slanted school roof, down the window-pane. The teacher smel ed of lye. Her neck was goose-white and she wiped chalk from the board with her elbow. My knees kept bumping against the top of the desk. I wore a blue skirt with white polka dots and a fril ed hem.

Across the room, the older gadzo boys were able to spit silently through the gaps in the front of their teeth. Soon one side of my hair was soaking wet with spittle, but I did not turn. I think they expected me to shout, but I did not. They whispered an old rhyme at me, saying: Marienka sold a horse for a dog, she ate the dog with rotten haluski. I said nothing, just stared ahead. I hated the way that the chalk rubbed the blackboard, it squeaked and made me feel cold. They laughed at me and the way I talked, but the schoolteacher could not believe that I already knew the ABC's and, after a week or two, she gave me a book about a prince who turned into a lion.

The older children shouted at my back and threw bird eggs at me. I picked up the shel s and put them in my dress pocket. I tucked the book in the hedges near the school and covered it with leaves. When I got back to camp I held out my hand ful of birdshel . The women were delighted, even Barleyknife, she said that maybe school wasn't so bad after al , and she went off to paint her fingernails blue, though she also painted the nails on her feet—that was one difference between the Slovaks and Polish, we kept our feet unpainted and never wore rings on our toes.

One day I forgot about the rain, and the book in the hedges was ruined, al the pages were stuck together. They tore as I opened them. The schoolteacher said that I should have known better, but stil she gave me another one, wrapped this time in oilcloth.

She insisted I take a bath in her house, close to the school, every morning, though I washed in the river with Conka every day. I told her that a Gypsy girl wil bathe in running water, but not in a bath and she laughed and said: Oh, you people. She fiddled with my clothes, even gave me some she pretended were new. They were wrapped in brown paper, but I could tel they had been worn before—I saw the rol of paper and twine in the corner of her desk.

She ran her fingers hard through my hair, looking for lice, then combed paraffin through my braids and wrote a long letter to my grandfather: Sir, Marienka needs to take proper care of her hygiene. Her mathematics and wordcraft are up to standard, especially given her circumstances, but it is imperative that the highest levels of cleanliness be maintained. Please ensure that the proper steps are taken. Yours, Bronislava Podrova.

Grandfather rol ed a grapevine leaf around the note and smoked it.

She talks more shit than a factory outhouse, he said.

After that, I didn't go to school for a while. Everyone was delighted, especial y Barleyknife who made up her very own song about a black girl who goes to a green schoolhouse and then becomes white, but final y on the road home she turns black again. I thought it was a stupid song, and so did almost everyone else, but Barleyknife sang it whenever she had climbed down into the bottle.

There was stil talk of punishment for my grandfather because not only did he send me to school, but sometimes he sat in the open now, reading his book. The punishment never happened, though. Vashengo's uncle stood up for him and said it was al right for one child to go to school because then we would know what was going on, not to worry, it was time to stick together, we would use it for our benefit, one day, just wait and see.

Petr, an old man with a soft handsome face, played his violin and Grandfather stood clapping his hands in the middle of the big canvas singing tent, and it seemed like everything was going to be al right.

The teacher gave me more books. Conka loved the pictures of wild animals and we snuck off and put the jaguar, the dolphin, the tiger up in the stars beside the badger and the wagon, the hen and the wheel—I had no idea then that others had different names for the stars, the plow, the hunter, the seven sisters. There was so much I had yet to see. Bit by bit, the stars turned on their sides and fel below the line of the earth.

I began at an early age to like the feel of a pencil between my fingers. Days in the caravan, I sat in silence with Grandfather as he spread his playing cards on the table. Red limped past in the muddiness outside. One morning, Grandfather sat beside me at the diamond window and looked outside and said he thought ofthat horse as a sickness he was catching. He had ridden the animal many times, and in his voice he said that he might not be able to do so too much longer. That was the way of things, he said, it was al right, he would stil always catch the sound, al he had to do was open his ears and listen, that was enough.

Red disappeared into the trees by the water. We listened to the shake of her mane and the whinny of her throat and the dip of her flank in the water. The bushes bent and the stems snapped as she returned through the mud. We harnessed her up. I stayed in the caravan as we went down the roads. I sat with my pencil, sharpening it, and I shaped to a stil ness the sound of Red's hooves in the muck outside: dloc dloc.

Gray meadows rol ed past. Dark squares of plowed earth. Faint sounds came from the harps when we went over a bump. At night we jumped down from the carriages and swung open whatever gates we could find. Everyone gave a coin for the kerosene and Conka's uncle told great Romani tales. Often they would not stop until wel into nightfal , long ramblings about twelve-legged horses and dragons and demons and virgins and cruel aristocrats, about how the gadze blacksmiths tricked us with their molten buttons.

This I tel you, daughter: they were warm nights even when they were cold, and I recal them dearly and perhaps, in truth, they were warmer because of those that were yet to come.

We moved our kumpanija near the smal er town of Bänksa Bystrica, and we were al owed to stay in the field of a man we cal ed the Yel ow Farmer. The farmer had huge yel ow boots that went up to his waist. He stamped around in them and sometimes went fishing down by the river.

Janko was four and he was found one day on the riverbank, hiding in the boots, his little head popping out of the top rim. Nearly al of him was tucked inside, only his grin could be seen, and after that we cal ed him Boot.

They were quiet moments in the Yel ow Farmer's field, but bit by bit we began to hear that terrible things were afoot in the country. The Germans didn't take over as they had in the Czech lands, but Grandfather said it hardly mattered, the Hlinkas were just like Gestapo, except they wore different badges. The war was coming our way. New laws were brought in. We were only al owed in the cities and vil ages for two hours a day, noon until two, and sometimes not even then. After those hours, no Roma man or woman was al owed in public places. Sometimes even the purest woman was charged with spreading infections and was thrown in prison. If a man was caught on a bus or a train, he was beaten until he couldn't even crawl. If he wandered the streets, he was arrested and sent to a workcamp to chop logs. We learned the sound of military vehicles the way we'd once learned the sound of animals—jeeps, tanks, convoys of canvas-covered trucks, we could tel which was coming around the corner. And yet we stil thought ourselves to be among the lucky ones—many of our Czech brothers streamed south with terrible stories 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 mil house where they were al owed barter for batteries.

Grandfather didn't have time to build any more wal s, he said that now everything was held together by factory cement, but if he ever built another wal he would do it his own way, and hold it together with what he cal ed cunning.

At night he turned the radio to polkas again, away from news of the war. Someone cal ed Chamberlain had become a doormat, he said.

Grandfather sat on the roof of our caravan and drank until he fel asleep under the stars. I whizzed the radio 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 al 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. Al 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 fel . 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 amongst sickness 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 al . 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 smel ing 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 recal 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 any type of musical instrument, and so that would have to be the end of the harps for a while. The harps were buried in huge wooden containers that the men made out of maple trees from the Yel ow Farmer's forest. The men dug huge pits and laid the harps in the ground. We covered the ground with brambles and switched plants in the soil so that nobody could find them. Conka and I ran to the place of the burial, and she started a game where she jumped up and down on the ground and we pretended that music was coming out from the earth and that's when I put together a song in my mind, about down in the ground where the strings vibrate, I can stil to this day recal every word, the harps listening to the grass growing above them, and the grass listening back to the sounds two meters below.

We went that night from the Yel ow Farmer's place, sloshing down the bowerpaths through a mudstorm. The wheels got stuck in the puddled roads. We lifted them out and walked bowlegged for a better grip, fol owing the notched bones and bundled straw and other signs. A boy my age, Bakro, the cousin of Conka, walked alongside me. I think he already had the desire for me. He squandered his time in the mirror at the back of the caravan, fixing his black hair. A line of tanks went past and the last one stopped to search us, they didn't even clean their boots on the steps. Conka and I hid under an eiderdown, but the Hlinka who came in lifted it immediately and prodded at our dresses with his boot, then spat at us. Nothing could be worse for a Romani girl. When they left, we cal ed them pigs, lizards, snakes. They were unclean, the last of the last.

On we went, walking at the paced hol ow clop of the horse's hooves. Bakro whispered to me that he would protect me, no matter what, but my grandfather fixed an eye on us and I did not feel a sway in my bel y for Bakro the way I did for other boys.

At night, Grandfather released Red and stepped between the tongues of the carriage, hoisting it with his bare hands. He turned it slightly while I slipped smal rocks under the wheels, and in the morning we moved on again.

The radio reports came in from across what we now cal ed, once more, Slovakia—it was confusing with Bohemia and Moravia and Germany and Hungary and Poland and Russia, and so Grandfather stood up one night and said that one day it would al soon be Rromanestan or the Soviet

Russia, but someone else said that it might be America, where a very blue lady would hold a torch for us and everyone was created equal. We were moving around the country then, every week a new place, but someone, usual y Boot's father, always returned to the forest and stayed with the harps. At night he slept near them. He swore there were restless spirits who came to play.

I soon reached womanhood and had to burn the red rags. It happened in a forest of white poplars and Conka knew what was going on, she had already been through it herself. She gave me a strip of cloth to clean myself up. I was careful now where I stepped, the touch of my skirt could dirty a man. She said no matter, but be careful not to go behind the hedge with a boy, they might take advantage. Together we sewed pebbles in the hem of our dresses to weigh them down. Nine days later Grandfather said that I had to learn to cal him Stanislaus now; he did not want to be grandfather to a grown woman. I blushed and knew that soon it would be time to walk under the linden blossoms with a husband.

Stanislaus, I said, go ahead, horse, and shit.

It was the first time I had said such a word in his presence, and he squeezed my shoulder and pul ed me to his chest and laughed.

Bakro gave me a silver chain and, although I didn't wear it around my neck, I kept it in my pocket and wound it around my fingers. The next day he came along and put a gingerbread heart in my hand. I was quite sure we were to be married and I begged Stainislaus not to let it happen, but he looked away from me, said he had other things to worry about, and walked off through the mud to talk to Petr.

Grandfather pointed over at me, and Petr nodded. I put my head down, kept my paths to myself. In my mind the old songs repeated themselves, took a new direction, turned, swerved.

We went further east and, by the banks of the Hron River, on a muddy morning, Red died. She was found on the ground with a single eye open.

Grandfather lifted her with ropes and took her off to the glueyard. The blood sloshed in her as she was dragged along. I would never forget the sound. She was hoisted onto a cart. The body thumped, her eye stil open. Grandfather came back with a bottle of fine slivovitz and offered me some, but I turned away and said no. He said, These things happen, girl. No they don't, I said. He grabbed my braids and said to me: Do you hear me, girl, these things happen, you're no longer a child. He let go of me and I watched as he stamped away through the bushes.

A couple of years later, chonorroeja, when so much of my life was taking place in the city of Bratislava, and in the printing mil , using words that had come from the songs, I asked Strän-sky and the Englishman Swann not to put the few pages of my first poems together with glue, rather to stitch them with thread. I thought the glue might have come from the same yard. They didn't know what I was talking about, and, in truth I don't know why I expected them to. I could not stand the notion of the glue of Red traveling along the spine of the book, leaning down to things so foreign to her, who would want their own horse in their book, holding it together?

I was writing things down then, on any paper I could find, even the labels from bottles. I dunked them in water, dried them out, and fil ed the emptiness with ink. Old newspapers. Brown butcher sheets. I dried them out until the bloodstains were faint. It was stil a secret, my writing. I pretended to most that I could not read, but, I thought, then, surely it could do no harm? I said to myself that writing was no more nor less than song.

My pencil was busy and almost down to a nubbin.

Wash your dress in running water. Dry it on the southern side of the rock. Let them have four guesses and make them al be wrong. Take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. Cook haluski with hot sweet butter. Drink cold milk to clean your in-sides. Be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you were. Don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. Ignore curfew. Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. Dress in oiled cloth around sickness. Adore darkness. Turn sideways in the wind. The changing of stories is a cheerful affair. Give the impression of not having known. Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur.

There are things you can see and hear, nowadays, long after: the way the ditches were dug, and the way the ground trembled, and the way birds don't fly anymore over Belsen, about what happened to al our Czech brothers, our Polish sisters, our Hungarian cousins, how we in Slovakia were spared, though they beat us and tortured us and jailed us and took our music, how they forced us into workcamps, Hodonin and Lety and Petic, how they placed a hard curfew, and even that curfew had curfews upon it, how they spat at us in the streets. You can hear stories about the badges that were sewn on the sleeves, and the Z that split the length of our people's arms, the red and white armbands, and the way there were no lean dogs near the camps, the way Zyklon-B turned al the hair of the dead brown, and how the barbed wire flew little flags of skin, the slippers that were made of our hair. You can hear al this and more. What happened to the least of us, happened to us al , but little wil ever bring it back to me in quite the same way as the day when my grandfather, Stanislaus, was stopped by a tal fair-haired soldier in the little gray streets of Bratislava.

We had gone, on a coal train, al the way through Trnava, beyond the lake, to the thick air and stinking puddles of the city. Grandfather was carrying six homemade toothbrushes to sel at a house where it was reputed there were streetwalkers: it was the only way in those days to make a little money.

Thirteen years to heaven, I had grown curious about the life beyond. What a sight the city was for me—the laundered shirts on strings across the streets, the fancy paper wrappers on the ground, the tal cathedral, the bony cats staring out from windows. Grandfather said to keep close by his side—there were a lot more Germans around now the resistance was stronger, they were helping the Hlinkas with reinforcements, and it was best to keep out of their way. There were rumors of what they would do to us if we took a wrong step. Stil , I fel behind. He cal ed at me: Come on, you lanky camel, keep up. I hurried and linked my arm in his. We came to a narrow al ey in a hundred narrow al eys, up on the hil , near the castle. I stopped a moment and watched a child playing with a paper kite. Grandfather turned a corner. When I caught up, he was standing boardstiff, next to a kiosk. I said: Grandfather, what's wrong? Say nothing, he said. His eyes had grown huge and he began to tremble slightly. A German soldier was coming towards us. He had fair hair, like so many of them. We had not broken curfew and I said to Grandfather: Come on, don't worry.

The soldier's uniform was crisp and gray. He had not yet seen us, but Grandfather couldn't help staring, watching his manner—a Rom knows another anywhere.

Grandfather pul ed hard on my elbow. I turned away, but just then the young German soldier saw us and his face slid like snow from a branch. He could, I suppose, have walked away, but he hitched his rifle to his chest, cocked it back, stepped across and ignored, with no great difficulty, the pleading of my eyes. He stared at Grandfather, picked the toothbrushes out of his pocket one by one, and then replaced them just as slowly. A dog loped away to the side of us and the soldier aimed a kick at it.

And what is it you have to say? said the soldier.

What is it you want me to say?

The soldier prodded him in the chest, hard enough that Grandfather took a step backwards.

It was demanded of us that we give praise to Tiso and then, if required, to say Heil Hitler with a snap of the hand. Grandfather let the first of the salutes out easily. He had learned to say it so often that it had become as easy as a simple hel o. Good, said the soldier, and then he stood waiting.

The bobble in Grandfather's neck grew. He sucked in the skin of his cheeks, leaned towards the German soldier, and whispered in Romani: But you are one of us, you have colored your hair, that is al . The German soldier knew exactly what he was saying, but he thumped Grandfather on the cheek with the butt of his rifle. I heard the jawbone crack and Grandfather went down to the ground. He rose and shook his head and said: Bless the dear place your mother came from.

He was knocked down a second time.

On the third time, he rose again and said Heil Hitler and his boots snapped together smartly at the heels.

Do it again, said the soldier, and this time click your heels together better and while you're at it, salute.

This happened eight times. In the pocket of my grandfather's jacket, the toothbrushes were al bloody.

Final y the soldier nodded and then he said in perfect Romani: Thank yourself, Uncle, that you and your daughter are alive. Now walk on and do not look back.

Grandfather put his head on my shoulder and tried to clean the lapels of his jacket. Hold my elbow, he said, but do not look at my face.

Slowly he put one foot in front of the other on the steep, slippery stones. At the door of the streetwalkers, he leaned down and commenced to cleaning the toothbrushes in a puddle. A fly settled on the balding spot at the top of his long hair. He looked up and said an old thing, but in a new, weary way: Wel , I guess the horses didn't shit, too bad.

I got married when I was fourteen. Petr and I had a quiet linking of hands under the trees. Stanislaus had picked him out for me. I had no choice.

He was older than a rock, slow to walk, quick to sleep, but Petr was hailed as a violinist amongst our people. He was big-shouldered and stil ful -

haired. And Conka was right, he could make his violin stand up and play, it stil had rosin, we laughed at that, although I wept on the morning when the sheets were checked. The women al asked me about it, Eliska did not stop, but for a long time Petr's rough hands didn't lose their charm for me and, besides, I wanted to make my grandfather happy, that has always been our way.

I do not care for your protests, he said to me, but from here on, now that you're married, with no exception, you wil just cal me Stanislaus, do you understand?

I watched Stanislaus walk away to sit in a rough-hewn chair by the bushes. He fel asleep with a bottle of fruit wine in his jacket pocket, and, when he woke, it had spil ed across his shirt. What's my name? he said. I laughed at him. Not much of a name, he said. I unbuttoned and changed his shirt. He fel asleep again. Petr walked across and righted Stanislaus in the chair.

Further along, down among the caravans, the wedding music began. Our names were cal ed, the sound of my own so strange alongside Petr's.

The rest of the day stil shines in my mind, but in truth it is not my own marriage that I remember the most now, daughter, no, it was the wedding of my heart's friend, Conka, that was, in the end, the most splendid affair of wartime. Her young husband, Fyodor, came from a family of wealth. He seemed to smile out loud as he walked along. The marriage was announced far and wide. Curfew was defied, and our people came, some on trucks, some on foot, some on horses, already tuning their instruments, and the harps had been dug up from the ground and cleaned, tuned, rosined. He wore silver bands of coins around his waist. Most everyone had visited the tailorshop in Trnava where the young man behind the counter liked us—he took the risk and made clothes without the fancy price of other tailors who didn't want us in their shops anyway.

Stanislaus picked out a thin tie and he put the Marx pin underneath one flap so that when he danced the badge jumped around. His jacket was light blue velvet. My own skirts were tripled over, the top one made of silk—better clothing than I had worn for my own wedding just a month before.

Petr had me sit at his right-hand side al the way through Conka's ceremony, and I did not leave, except to sing songs, my favorite was the one about the drunken man who thought he had seven wives when in truth he only had one, though he cal ed her a new name each night of the week. It was a funny tune and my husband rose to his feet in pride, in his hat and waistcoat, and played alongside me. He tucked the violin against his shoulder, raised his bow with one hand, gripped the neck with the other, and a shadow of joy smoothed his brow.

We watched Conka and the sparkle of her as she stepped under the new brooms we held aloft. A few cars were lined up along the hedges, their lights shining. The white skin of the linden blossoms spun and caught and scented the ground. The moon was a half-cut apple above us, and just as white. The best animals had been slaughtered and the longest tables laid out leg to leg, fil ed with hams, beef rump, pig ears, hedgehog. Lord, it was a feast. Earthenware jars ful of plum brandy. Vodka. Wine. So many candles had been hol owed out from potatoes that there were not enough insects to gather round them. Conka and Fyodor stood opposite one another. A few smal drops of spirit were poured into their palms and they drank from each other's hands, then a kerchief was tied around their wrists. Afterwards they threw a key into the streambed and were wed. Conka unbound the kerchief and tied it in her hair. Feather blankets were laid out on the ground. We sat under the stars and we put a few coins in the bottom of a bucket so the money would get bigger under the moon. No Hlinkas came, no farmers walked up with pitchforks, it was the most peaceful night imaginable, with hardly even a raised word about dowry, mistrust, sin.

Men kept their blackened hands behind themselves so as not to dirty Conka's dress, and even Jolana's little Woowoodzhi, who was born strange, danced. It seemed to me that the night could have go on for more than the three nights it did; we were blind with happiness.

It was my first night drunk—I had not been al owed to drink at my own wedding. I whispered to my husband, Get rosin on your bow, Petr, and we went off into the night, that's exactly how it happened and, although I know that a wal to happiness is expecting too much happiness, it stil makes me smile.

While there were times that I yearned for a softer face to touch, or a neck without folds, it was never shameful to think that I slept content with my neck at the crook of Petr's arm. He lay under the covers with a string vest on. I suppose I began to think that I too had suddenly grown older beside him. Between one moment and the next, chonorroeja, I had grown a lifetime. The younger boys looked at me and made jokes that I should not buy any green bananas for Petr. They each had the eyes of Bakro, my suitor, but I did not gaze their way.

Stanislaus had settled on Petr as my husband because he knew that I would stil be al owed to guide the pencil, even when the war was over.

Few others would ever al ow their wives to put words on a page. I had gone far beyond the first dloc dloc, but I wrote in Slovak. Romani never looked right to me on paper, though it sounded beautiful in my head. I never wrote in front of Petr, nor did I read in his presence, what use would it be to bring mockery down on him? But I had fal en in with books, they were friendly to me in the quiet hours. For a long time, I remember, the only book I had was Winnetou, I, penned by a German whose name I can't recal . It was a book given to simplicities. Stil , I walked out in the forest and read it enough times to know it by heart. It was about Apaches and gunfighters, a volume for boys. Final y I was given a different volume, The Lady of Öachtice, which I loved—it was cracked and torn with so much use.

Stanislaus was given a copy of Engels by some men who worked in the salt mines. It was a dangerous thing to own and he sewed the pages inside his coat. I read the parable of the master and the servant, and while it didn't make much sense, it was the other voices, the Kranko and the Stens, that I truly liked. One day Stainslaus found a Bible printed in Slovak and said it was a handbook for revolutionaries, a notion I tested and began to like since there were ideas in there that made sense.

And yet, stil , it was real y only song that held me, our own song, which kept my feet to the ground.

New laws came upon us, even harsher than before. We were no longer al owed to travel at al . We stole back to Trnava and lay camouflaged in the forest, eight kilometers out. The chocolate factory was making armaments. The smoke drifted over us. We were joined by some of the settled Roma who left the town when their husbands were hung from the lampposts by way of reprisal: the law was ten vil agers for every one of theirs. The mayor of the city gave the fascists the cheapest lives and what was cheaper to them than their Gypsies and, of course, Jews? On one steel pole eight were hung and left for the birds. For years afterwards no man or woman would ever take that street again, it was known as the Place of the Bent Lamppost.

Conka had a bruise on her neck where Fyodor had been rough with her on the last night before he went into the hil s to join the fight. Something in her sagged. She walked around like a sheet on a string between trees. She sang: If you love me drink this dark wine.

Vashengo joined the partisans who were making noise in the hil s. Stanislaus would have gone too, but he was older and his body was giving way. Stil , he gave shelter to anyone who came in our direction: fighters from the Czech lands, refugees from the workcamps, even two priests who strayed our way. There were rumors of American fighters in the hil s. We hid the caravans, yet twice they were spotted and shot at with bul ets by passing Luftwaffe planes. We went in and fixed the shattered wood, picked the glass from broken jam jars. We carved more hovels in the mudbank, shored the roofs up with valki brick, wove reeds in the trees so the area couldn't be spotted by planes. We found frozen potatoes in the fields. Petr hol owed out the last of each potato with a spoon and fil ed it with sheep fat from a pot. He rol ed a tight strip of cloth or string, until it was thin, then stood the wick inside the sheep fat and waited for it to harden. It did not take long and soon we had candles for the inside of our shelters. If we were hungry we ate the potatoes, though they tasted of burn and tal ow. We kil ed a deer and, inside it, found a fawn.

The weather worsened. Sometimes the hovels flooded, carrying what little we had away, and then we commenced building once more. We were stuck by the riverbank, living like so many of the settled ones.

When Vashengo came back down from the hil s, we were not too surprised to hear him singing “The Internationale.” Grandfather walked with him down by the water and they returned, arms around each other's shoulders. Vashengo took off again, carrying two belts of silver to buy munitions.

The songs we sang became more and more red, and in truth who could blame us—it was what Grandfather had predicted for many years. The only thing that seemed right was change, and the only thing that would bring change was good and right and red, we had suffered so long at the foot of the fascists. We were joined then by even more settled Roma, they came and lived in the forest with us. In years gone by we had sometimes pitched battles with the settled ones. They thought that we held our noses in the air, and we thought that they drank furniture polish and were wedded to Hoffman's tincture, but now the fighting between us stopped. We were too few to be divided. We boiled snow for water, searched the forest for food. We kil ed a badger and sold the fat to a pharmacy in the vil age. We had more pride than to eat the horses, but the settled ones ate whatever they could find, and we turned our eyes and let them.

News came over the radio: the Russians were advancing, the Americans too, and the British. We would have taken any of them. I woke one morning and the last of the fascist planes had just broken the sky. We were at the riverbank, and we watched as our caravans were riddled with bul ets for the last time.

When we went in to repair the damage, we found Grandfather. He had gone in to find silence to read his book. It lay open on his chest. I lay down beside him and read the last forty pages aloud to him before I put coins on his eyes and we carried him out. Boot, who had grown tal and was back from the war, said how light my grandfather had become. I put the Marx book in my grandfather's coffin, under the blanket, along with cigarettes wrapped in grapevine, so that he could pul them out in the unknown. His boots surprised me as much as anything; he had sewn the seams back together with fishing wire. I wanted to undo them and take them, but we burned most of everything he owned to warm him for his journey. The flames shot up and the ground outside began to steam. Some burned trees stood in the grove, they looked like dark bones in the ground. Petr and I went to sleep with our feet pointed towards the embers. No singing was done for three days and lit candles were put upon the stream. Six weeks later, we knew that he was gone for good, though I stil wore the colors of mourning.

Certain things wil take the life from you.

I took a trip to the lake one day, alone, and plunged myself in. The water made my skin tight and my body became a part of the drifting. I stayed for hours, trying to go deeper, right out into the center, to see if I could touch what had fal en through. My hands reached out and the further I went, the cooler it got, and the pressure on my ears was like a voice with no sound. When I opened my eyes, they burned. The longer I stayed underwater the more I struggled, but then my lungs could take no more and I felt the speed of my own rising weight. I broke the surface. My hair was pasted down onto my shoulders and I felt my necklace drift away from me. I went underwater again, longer this time. I was quite sure that I was going to drown. They were al stil there, I felt them—my mother, my father, my brother, my sisters—but who can set a lake on fire? On the shore, I sat with my knees to my chest and two days later, when I returned to the forest, much to Petr's relief, we took care of the very last of my grandfather's possessions. Sparks rose yel ow into the air. I put my fingers to the ground and left my thumbprints there. Go ahead, horse, and shit.

That was the birth of me, it always wil be.

I am no longer afraid to tel you these things, daughter: it was how they happened.

Even as a young girl, I always wanted too much.

The war ended, I think I was almost sixteen. The Russians liberated us. They came in, loud and red. Vashengo and the partisans came down from the hil s, and flowers were thrown at their feet. Victory parades were held. The wooden shutters of shops were thrown open. We went to the city to make money playing music. We stayed in a field on the far side of the river. In the mornings we went to the railway station where Petr played his violin. Conka and I sang. Do not blame your boots for the problems of your feet. Huge crowds gathered and money was thrown into a hat. Some of the Russians even danced for us, hands clapping, legs outstretched. Late in the evening, as the money was counted, I wandered with Conka through the station. We loved the whine of the engines, the hiss of the doors, the movement, so many different voices al together. What a time it was. The streets were crammed. Bedsheets were hung from the windows, Russian sickles painted on them. Hlinka uniforms were burnt and their caps were trampled. The old guard was rounded up and hanged. This time the lampposts did not bend.

The gadze tugged our elbows and said, Come sing for us,

Gypsies, come sing. Tel us of the forest, they said. I never thought of the forest as a special place, it was just as ordinary as any other, since trees have as many reasons for stopping as people do.

Stil , we sang the old songs and the gadze threw coins at our feet, and we raised ourselves on the tide. Giant feasts were held in the courtyards of houses that had been taken back from the fascists, and the loudspeakers pumped out music. We gathered under megaphones to hear the latest news. The churches were used for food stations, and sometimes we were al owed to stand first in line, we had never seen that before, it seemed a miracle. We were given identity cards, tinned meat, white flour, jars of condensed milk. We burned our old armbands. Under the pil ars of a corner house a market was in ful swing. The soldiers cal ed us Citizens and handed us cigarette cards. Films were shown, projected on the brick wal s of the cathedral—how huge the faces looked, chonorroeja, on that wal . We had been nothing to the fascists, but now our names were raised up.

Cargo planes flew over the city, manned by the parachute regiment, dropping leaflets: The new tomorrow has arrived.

Out in the country, the leaflets caught in the trees, settled on hedges, and blew along the laneways. Some landed on the rivers and were carried downstream. I brought them to the elders and read them aloud: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us. The farmers no longer cal ed us a pestilence. They addressed us by our formal names. We listened to a radio program with Romani music: our own harps and strings. We sang new songs, Conka and I, and hundreds of people came down the roadways to listen. Photographers with movie cameras pul ed up in jeeps and motorcars. We waved the red flag, looked down the road into the future.

I had hope right up until the end. It was the old Romani habit of hoping. Perhaps I have never lost it.

Many years later, I was to walk up the granite steps and pass the fluted columns of the National Theater, in a new pair of shoes and a black lace blouse with patterned leaves, where I listened to Martin Stränsky read my own song aloud. You do not know what you are hearing when you hear something for the first time, daughter, but you listen to it as though you wil never hear it again. The theater held its breath. He had little music in him, Stränsky, for a poet, but afterwards the crowd stood and cheered, and a spotlight swung around on me. I hid from it, sucking on stray ends of my hair, until Stränsky put his fingers to my chin and tilted it upwards, the applause growing louder: poets, council members, workers, al waving program sheets in the air. The Englishman, Swann, stood in the wings of the theater, looking out at me, his green eyes, his light-colored hair.

I was taken to the inner courtyard where huge wooden tables were laid out with an assortment of wine and vodka, fruit, and bowls of cheese. A flurry of formal speeches.

Al hail to a literate proletariat!

It is our revolutionary right to reclaim the written word!

Citizens, we must listen to the deep roots of our Roma brothers!

I was guided through the crowd, so many people pushing towards me, extending their hands, and I could hear my own skirts swishing, yes, more than anything I could hear the sound of cloth against cloth as I went out into the quiet of the street, it was one of the happiest times I remember, daughter. From inside the theater I could stil hear the hum from the people, they were on our side, I hadn't heard anything quite like it before. I walked out in the cool air. A sheen of light was on the puddles, and night birds arced under the streetlamps. I stood there in the silence and it seemed to me that the spring of my life had come.

I was a poet.

I had written things down.

England-Czechoslovakia

1930s-1959

THE ROOM WHERE I LIE is smal but has a window to what has become an intimate patch of sky. The blue of daytime seems ordinary, but on clear nights it is made obvious, as if for the first time, that the wheel of the world is not fixed: the evening star spends a tantalizing few moments hung in the frame.

The shril gabble of birds on the rooftops comes in odd rhythms and, from the street below, I can almost hear the engine of my motorbike ticking.

The rattle of the road is stil in my body: one final corner and the bike rol ed out from underneath me. Strange to watch the sparks rising from the tarmac. I slid along, then smashed into a low stone wal . In the hospital they did not have enough bandages to make a cast—they splinted my leg and sent me home.

I have given up searching, but it is impossible to think that she is gone, that I wil never see her again, or catch the sound of her, the grain of her voice.

Just before the accident, near Piest any, a raw gust of February wind blew off my scarf. It snagged on a row of barbed-wire fencing by a military range, fluttering there a moment before fal ing to the ground. Zoli gave me the scarf years ago, but I could see no way of retrieving it and feared what might happen if I tried to climb the fence. The scarf blew back and forth, like most everything else, just beyond my reach.

Thirty-four years old—a shattered kneecap, a heap of overcoats, a pile of unfinished translations on the table. From the hal way comes the squeaking of floorboards and the soft slap of dominoes. I can hear the mops dipping in bleach, the keys in the door, the incantations of solitary men and women home from work. Christ, I'm no better than al those numberless mumblers of Ave Marias—how I used to hate confessionals as a child, those dark Liverpudlian priests sliding back the gril , bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been how many decades since my last confession?

My father once said that you can't gauge the contents of a man's heart by his greatest act of evil alone, but if that's true then it must also be true that you can't judge him without it: mine was committed on a freezing winter afternoon at the printing mil on Godrova Street, when I stood with Zoli Novotna and betrayed her against the hum of the machinery. Since I've done little worse, or measurably better, in the days before or since then, I'm forced to admit that my legacy to the world may very wel be this one solitary thing that's with me now almost every breathing moment.

There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tel them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shel or the shock—perhaps that's me, or perhaps I must tel it before it's forgotten or becomes, like everything else, something else.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's stil impossible to land exactly where we took off. My mother was a nurse from Ireland, my father a dockworker from Slovakia. Mam hailed from a little seaside vil age in Donegal. She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and al human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea. My father emigrated to Britain in the early years of the century when he changed his last name to Swann, but didn't alter his soul; in later years he described himself as a Communist, a pacifist, and a Catholic in no particular order.

Home from the docklands, he used to put a dark thumbprint on the bread in order that I would know where it came from.

From a young age I was hooked on the plot of my father's homeland. We sat together on crates in the coalshed searching the radio bands. In the laneway behind, my friends played footbal . My father spent hours trying to tune in to the long-wave broadcasts from Bratislava, Kosice, Prague, while the bal thumped against the wal . Only at odd moments did the weather al ow the radio a crackle from the beyond—we leaned forward and our heads touched. He wrote it down and later translated for me. At night, my prayers were in his native tongue.

When the Second World War struck, it didn't seem at al unusual that he took off to join the partisans in the Czechoslo-vakian mountains—he said he wanted to become a medic and that he'd carry stretchers, that wars were useless and God was democratic, and, with that in mind, he'd return shortly. He left me his wristwatch and a copy of Engels in the Slovak language. I found out, years later, that he had become an expert with dynamite; his specialty was blowing up bridges. The news that he had died in an ambush came in a two-line telegram. My mother wilted away. She took me on a trip back to Donegal for a week, but for whatever reason it was not the same place that she had left behind. “Nobody lives where they grew up anymore,” she said to me shortly before she died.

I was made a ward of the state and spent the last two of my school years with the Jesuits in Woolton, walking around the edges of rugby fields in a gray V-neck sweater.

What I recal of growing up: redbrick houses, rough stones from the worked-out pit, shaved shoulders of sunlight on street corners, dockside cranes, penny sweets, gul s, confessionals, brushing gray frost from the bicycle seat. It was not exactly violins I heard when I stuck my head out the train window and bid Liverpool goodbye. I'd missed the war—a measure of luck and youth and a dose of cowardice. I went south to London where I spent two years on a scholarship, studying Slovak. I ran with the Marxists and mouthed off on the soapboxes of Hyde Park, to little success. My work was published intermittently, but mostly I sat at a smal window that looked out beyond the half-open blinds at a dark wal and the faded edge of an Oval-tine advertisement.

I fel in love, briefly, with a beautiful young librarian, Cait-lin, from Cardiff. I bumped into her on a ladder, quite literal y, while she was shelving a book by Gramsci, but our politics didn't match and Caitlin sent me packing with a note that her life was too dul for revolution.

In my flat, the skyline became a shelf of books. I wrote long letters to novelists and playwrights in my old man's country, yet they seldom wrote back. I was fairly sure the letters were being censored in London, but every now and then a reply fel on the welcome mat and I brought it down to the local teashop where, amid the stains and the day-old cakes, I opened it.

The replies was always terse and clean and to the point: I burned them in the ashtray with the tip of a cigarette. But then in 1948, after a burst of ink-spattered correspondence, I was on my way to Czechoslovakia to translate for a literary journal run by the celebrated poet Martin Stränsky, who wrote to say that he could wel do with a new set of legs—would it be possible, he asked, to bring a few bottles of Scotch whisky in my bags?

In Vienna the smal wooden huts of the Russian sector were warmed by single-bar electric heaters. The guards interrogated me over cups of black tea. I was passed from hut to hut and final y put on a train. At the Czechoslovakian border, some leftover fascist guards roughed me over, rifled through my suitcase, took the bottles, and threw me into a makeshift cel . My hands were tied and they beat the bottoms of my feet with sticks

rol ed in newspaper. I was accused of falsifying documents, but two weeks later the door opened to Martin Stränsky who seemed, at first, just a shadow. He said my name, lifted me up, put his sleeve in a cold bucket of water, and cleaned my wounds. He was, against expectations, a smal man, tough and balding.

“Did you bring the booze?” he asked.

As a youngster he had been friends with my father in an il egal Socialist youth group, and now he ‘d come ful circle; he ‘d been instrumental in the Communist coup and was wel liked by those newly in power. He slapped my back, put his arm around me, and walked me beyond the tin-roofed sheds where he had already taken care of the last of my paperwork. The two guards who'd beaten me and taken the bottles were sitting handcuffed in the back of an open truck. One stared down at the truckbed but the other was moving his bloodshot eyes side to side.

“Oh, don't worry about them, Comrade,” Stränsky said. “They'l be al right.”

He kept a tight grip on my arm and helped me towards a military train. The white headlamps burned and a brand-new Czechoslovakian flag fluttered from the roof. We took our seats and I felt buoyed by the shril whistle and the blast of steam. As the train chugged off, I caught a last glimpse of the handcuffed guards. Stränsky laughed and slapped my knee.

“It's not so serious,” he said. “They'l have a day or two in lockup to recover from their hangovers, that's al .”

The train jolted forward and we passed through rows oftal forest and low cornfields towards Bratislava. Pylons. Chimneys. Red and white railway barriers.

From Hlvanä Station, we walked along the tramtracks, down the hil towards the old town. It struck me as medieval, wiry, even quaint, but revolutionary posters were pasted on the wal s and thumping music rose from loudspeakers. I stil had a slight limp from my beating, but I skipped along in the light rain, carrying, of al things, a cardboard suitcase. Stränsky chuckled when it opened up—a nightshirt fel out and a long sleeve trailed the cobblestones.

“A nightshirt?” he laughed. “Two weeks of political reeducation for you.”

He clapped his arm around me. In a vaulted beerhal , ful of drunks and hanging pottery, we clinked glasses for the Revolution and for what Stränsky cal ed, as he looked out the window towards the street, other fathers.

In the winter of 1950 I was sick for quite a while. When the day came for me to leave hospital, the doctor signed me out, undiagnosed, and told me to go home to rest.

I lived in a worker's flat in the old part of town. The communal kitchen, on the first floor, ran with mice. Laundry was strung up and down the length of the corridor—boiler suits, overcoats, shirts eaten through with acid. The staircase quite literal y swayed under my feet. When I got up to my tiny fourth-floor room, a patch of snow lay on the wooden floor. The concierge had forgotten to fix the smashed window— a week before, in a dizzy spel , I had fal en against the pane—and a cold wind blew through. I took my bedding to the only warm part of the room, where the poppet valve on the radiator hissed. In gloves and overcoat I curled up near the valve and slept. I woke coughing in the early morning. It had snowed heavily again during the night, and the floor was already covered in stray flakes. Around the radiator pipes was a patch of wet wood. The things I adored the most, my books, lay ranged on the shelves, so many different volumes that it was impossible to see the wal paper. Three translations awaited me—chapters from Theodore Dreiser, Jack Lindsay, and an article by Duncan Hal as—but the thought of delving into them fil ed me with dread.

I had bought a secondhand pair of boots, stamped by a Russian bootmaker, and, although they leaked, I liked them, they seemed to have a history. I went out into the cold streets, stepping over gutters and cobblestone, past the barracks, beyond the checkpoint.

At the mil Stränsky had set up a smal room where, in between printing jobs, he often sat and read. The room had no ceiling, and so one could look up to the high roof of the mil and watch the pigeons flap from eave to eave. I lay down on the green army bed he kept in the corner, and the noise of the machines rocked me to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept, but I woke disoriented, not even sure what day it was.

“Put your socks on for crying out loud,” said Stränsky from the doorway.

Behind him, a little confused, stood a tal young woman.

She was in her early twenties, not beautiful, or not traditional y so anyway, but the sort of woman who stal ed the breath. She held herself at the door nervously, as if she were a bowl of water that would not be al owed to spil . Her skin was dark and her eyes were as black as any I'd ever seen.

She wore a man's dark overcoat, but beneath it a wide skirt with a tripled-over hem: it appeared she had patched two or three skirts together and rol ed the hems over each other. Her hair was tied back beneath a kerchief, and two thick plaits hung down either side of her face. She wore no earrings, no bracelets, no jangling necklaces. I rose from under the covers and slipped on my wet socks.

“Forgotten your manners, young scholar?” said Stränsky as he pushed past me. “Meet Zoli Novotna.”

I extended my hand for her to shake, but she did not take it. She stepped beyond the threshold only when Stränsky beckoned, and went to the table where he had already taken a bottle from his jacket.

“Comrade,” she said, nodding at me.

Stränsky had found Zoli, by chance, outside the Musicians Union and he had been given permission, through one of the elders, to talk to her about her songs. They were a secretive bunch, the Gypsies, but Stränsky had always been able to comb people out of themselves. He spoke a little Romani, knew their customs, how and where to tread, and he was one of the few they trusted. They also owed him a couple of favors—during the national uprising, he had commanded a regiment that had a few Gypsy fighters, in the hil s, and had, by al accounts, saved some of them with the aid of a few bottles of penicil in.

The afternoon returns to me now as a step back into what we al once believed: revolution, equality, poetry. We pul ed up chairs to the table and sat for hours, the clock ticking away. Zoli kept her head slightly bent, her glass untouched in front of her. She rattled off a few verses of the older songs. The words were in Slovak, but there was a touch of wildness to them: she wasn't used to speaking them aloud, she ‘d always sung them.

Her style was to quietly build layer upon layer until, by the end, the songs became sad and declamatory, tales of bitterness and treachery, the verses repeated over and over, like the fal ing and layering of so many leaves. When she was finished, Zoli locked her knuckles and stared straight ahead.

“Good,” said Stränsky, rapping on the table.

She looked upwards as a bird feather fel from the ceiling and spun silently down to the floor, then smiled as she watched the pigeons fly around the ceiling beams; some of the birds were darkened with ink.

“Do they get out?”

“Only to shit,” said Stränsky, and she laughed, picked the feather up, and, for whatever reason, put it in the pocket of her overcoat.

I didn't know it then, but there'd only ever been a few Gypsy writers scattered across Europe and Russia before, and never any who were part of the establishment. It was an oral culture, they had no books or written-down stories to speak of, they distrusted the unchangeable word. But Zoli had grown up with a grandfather who had taught her how to read and write, an extraordinary thing among her people.

Stränsky ran a journal, Credo, in which he was always trying to push the limits: he was known for publishing daring young Socialist playwrights and obscure intel ectuals and anyone else who vaguely amplified his beliefs. I was there to translate whatever foreigners he could get his hands on: Mexican poets, Cuban Communists, pamphlets by Welsh trade unionists, anyone whom Stränsky saw as a fel ow traveler. Many of the Slo-vakian intel ectuals had already moved north to Prague, but Stränsky wanted to stay in Bratislava where, he said, the heart of the Revolution could be. He himself wrote in Slovak against the idea that a smal er language was useless. And now, with Zoli, he thought he'd come upon the perfect proletarian poet.

He clapped his hands and clicked his fingers: “That's it, that's it, that's it.” Leaning back in his chair, he twirled the tiny peninsula of hair in the center of his forehead.

Zoli improvised as she went along—he'd ask her to repeat a certain verse so he could transcribe it, and the verse would shift and change. It seemed to me that her words contained simple, old-fashioned sounds that others had forgotten or didn't know how to use anymore: trees, pooh, forest, ash, oak, fire. Stränsky's hand rested on his leg, where he held a glass of vodka. He bounced his knee up and down, so when he final y stood up and went to the window there were dark stains on his overal s. Late in the afternoon, when darkness lengthened across the floor, Stränsky extended a pencil. Zoli took it gingerly, put the end of it against her teeth, and held it there, as if it were describing her.

“Go ahead,” said Stränsky, “just write it down.”

“I don't real y create them on the page,” she said.

“Just scribble the last verse, go on.”

Stränsky tapped his knuckles on the edge of the table. Zoli turned the thread on a button. Her lip was bitten white. She lowered her gaze and began to write. Her penmanship was shabby and she had little idea about line breaks, capitalization, or even spel ing, but Stränsky took the sheet and clutched it to his chest.

“Not bad, not bad at al , I can show this to people.”

Zoli pul ed back her chair, bowed slightly to Stränsky, then turned to me and said a formal goodbye. Her kerchief had slipped back on her head and I noticed how pure the parting was in her hair, how dark the skin between two sets of darkness, how straight, how clean. She readjusted the scarf and there was a flash of white from her eyes. She stepped towards the door, and then she was gone, out into the street in the last of the light, under the trees. A few young men on a horsecart were waiting for her. She put her nose to the horse's neck and rubbed her forehead along the top of its spine.

“Wel , wel , wel ,” said Stränsky.

The horsecart went around the corner and away.

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck in my chest.

The next day Stränsky and I were invited to an air show for journalists on the outskirts of Bratislava: three brand-new Meta-Sokols, high-technology jets, were on display. Their noses were pointed westward. It was stil a no-fly zone around Bratislava, and the pilots had been forced to drive the jets into the airfield on huge trucks, which had become bogged down and had to be pul ed onto the field with ropes. Stränsky had been asked to write an article about the Slovak-born fighter pilots. He slinked around the machines with a general who lectured us earnestly about landing patterns, high-range radar, and ejector seats.

After the lecture, a young woman from the air force strode out to the planes. Stränsky nudged me: she had a stil ness at her center that might have been cal ed poise, but it wasn't, it was more like the tension that can be seen in tightrope walkers. Her blond hair was cut short, her body slim and winsome. He fol owed her up into the cockpit of one of the machines and they sat for a while, chatting and flirting, until she was cal ed away.

The journalists and dignitaries watched the thin sway of her as she climbed down. She reached up and helped Stränsky to the ground. “Wait,” he said. He kissed her hand and introduced me as his wayward son, but she blushed and shimmied off, with just one look over her shoulder—not at Stränsky, nor at me, but at the military jet stuck in the grass.

“Hey-ho, the new Soviet woman,” said Stränsky under his breath.

We walked across the airfield, through the giant muddy marks made by the trucks. At the field's edge Stränsky stopped and wiped some of the muck off his trousercuffs. He turned, rubbed one shoe against the other and said, suddenly, as if to the trampled grass: “Zoli.”

He hitched up his trousers and walked over the tire marks. “Come on,” he said.

Out past Trnava, towards the hil s, along a dirt road, through an isolated copse of trees. I clung on as Stränsky brought the motorbike to a skidding stop and pointed to a series of broken twigs arranged to mark a trail.

“Around here somewhere,” he said.

The engine of the Jawa sputtered. I hopped off. Smoke rose from some distant trees and a series of shouts rang out. We pushed the motorbike into the center of a clearing, where intricately carved caravans stood in a semicircle. Light came through the high pines, creating long shadows.

Young men stood by a fire. One turned an axehead with a pair of tongs; another blew a bel ows. A number of children darted towards us. They climbed on the bike and yelped when their bare feet touched the hot pipes. One jumped on my back and slapped me, then yanked my hair.

“Say nothing,” said Stränsky. “They're just curious.”

The crowd swel ed. The men stood in shirts and torn trousers. The women wore long-hemmed dresses and thick jewelry. Children appeared with babies clasped against their chests. Some of the babies wore red ribbons on their wrists.

“It's an adorned world,” Stränsky whispered, “but underneath it's plain enough, you'l see.”

A middle-aged man, Vashengo, with long wisps of graying hair, strode through the crowd and stood straddle-legged in front of us, hands on his hips. He and Stränsky embraced, then Vashengo turned to assess me. A long stare. An odor of wood-smoke and rank earth.

“Who's this?”

Stränsky slapped my shoulder: “He looks Slovak, sounds Slovak, but at the worst of times he's British.”

Vashengo squinted and came close, dug his fingers into my shoulder. The whites of his eyes had a smoky gray tinge.

“Old friend of mine,” said Stränsky before Vashengo parted the crowd in front of him. “He owes me a thing or two.”

At the rear of the crowd, near a series of carved wooden caravans, Zoli stood with four other women in colorful dresses. She wore an army greatcoat, river boots rol ed down on her calves, and a belt made out of wil ow bark. She held a coat- hanger skewered with a piece of potato. She glanced at us, strode towards a caravan, stepped up, closed the door behind her.

For a split second the curtain parted, then ricocheted back.

Food was prepared, a bal of meat served with haluski and flatcakes. “How's your hedgehog?” asked Stränsky. I spat it out. Vashengo stared at me. It was, it seemed, a delicacy. I picked it up from the dirt. “Delicious,” I said, and speared a mouthful. Vashengo reared back and laughed, jaunty and intimate. The men gathered and slapped my back, fil ed my glass, heaped more food on my plate. I washed the hedgehog down with a bottle of fruit wine, then tried to share the bottle with the others, but they turned away.

“Don't even ask,” said Stränsky. “They're just not going to drink from your swish.”

“Why not?”

“Learn silence, son, it'l keep you alive.”

Stränsky sat down by the fire to sing an old bal ad he'd learned in the hil s. The wind blew, stirring the ash. The Gypsy men nodded and listened seriously, then brought out their fiddles and giant harps. The night tore open. A child climbed on my shoulders and began to shine Stränsky's balding head with her bare foot. After a second bottle, it didn't seem to me that my corners were sticking out quite so much anymore—I opened the neck of my shirt and whispered to Stränsky that I'd take whatever was to come.

In the early evening, crowds of Gypsies started to arrive from the countryside. They packed into a large white tent where a row of candles lit a makeshift stage. The benches were made from fal en logs. The singers began with raucous bal ads, gamblingsongs, weddingsongs, lovesongs, eveningsongs.

When Zoli walked in, she wore a long multipatterned dress with flared sleeves. Tiny beads were sewn into the dress front, and an anthracite necklace lay at the long curve of her throat. At first she was just another one of the singers. Her body was held straight and her head almost motionless, al the movement in her shoulders, arms, hands. It wasn't until later, when the night had a coating of drunkenness and the darkness had fal en, that she began to sing on her own. No harp, no violin. Raw. Sad. An old song, long and rambling, nostalgic. The firelight flickered on her face, her eyes closed, lids blue-veined, half a smile on her lips. It was not just her voice—it was what she sang that rattled us. She had made up the song herself, a story with place names, Czech and Polish and Slovak, dates and times too. Hodonin. Lety. Brno. 1943. The Black Legion. Chimneys. The carved gateposts. The charnel houses. The bone fields.

“I told you, son,” said Stränsky.

When Zoli finished, the tent fel silent: only the sound of the breeze through the trees outside, ancient, unpackaged. She stepped across to a wreck of an old man—the sort of creature who could have lived shabby and mumbling in a shoebox room somewhere. He wore a half-shirt, the sort favored by musicians, with no cloth at the back. When he stretched his arms towards her, his naked skin showed. She kissed him gently on the head, then sat down with him while he smoked a pipe.

“Her husband,” whispered Stränsky.

I sat back on the log.

“Careful, Swann, your mouth's open again.”

Zoli leaned in to the older man. He looked as if he had been tal and broad-shouldered once and he stil annexed that space, though he was clearly sick. Later in the evening, he coaxed sounds from a fiddle that I'd never heard before—fast, wild, screeching. He was given an extended round of applause and Zoli supported his elbow, left the tent with him. She did not come back, but the night started up again, raucous and pure. My shirt was open to the bel y button. I hardly knew what to think. Someone threw a bottle of slivovitz at me—I unscrewed the lid and drank.

In the early morning, Stränsky and I stumbled towards the motorbike. The seat, the blinkers, and the handlebar grips had disappeared. Stränsky chuckled and said it was not the first time he'd had unreliable Czech machinery between his legs. We climbed on, tamped our jackets down for a seat, and made our way back towards Bratislava. We approached the city, the tal brickwork adorned with arches and lintels. Rows of pigeons dozed on high ledges. Wreathed dates commemorated memory in stone. It was an old city, somewhat Hungarian, somewhat German, but on that day it felt newly and whol y Soviet. Crews were working on the bridge and, beyond that, towers and factories were going up.

Stränsky's wife was waiting for us in the courtyard of his apartment block. He kissed her, skipped up the stairs, and immediately went inside to transcribe the tapes. He placed the recorder on the top of her latest cartoon. She took the drawing and smoothed it out.

“It's a Hungarian name,” Elena said as she listened. “Zoltan. I wonder where she got it.”

“Who knows, but it's quite a song, isn't it?”

“Maybe she got someone to write it for her.”

“I don't think so.”

Stränsky unjammed the play lever on the recorder.

“It's naive,” said Elena. “Your mother cries, your father plays the violin. But there's a quiver to it, isn't there? And, tel me this, is she beautiful?”

“She's more beautiful than she's not,” he said.

Elena cracked her husband's knuckles with a rol ed-up newspaper. She stood, her hair ful of colored pencils, and went off to bed. Stränsky winked and said he would join her shortly, but he fel asleep at the table, bent over the transcribed pages.

I found Zoli again, the fol owing week, on the steps of the Musicians Union, where she stood with her hands outstretched, fingers apart.

A crowd of Gypsies had gathered together in front of the union. There'd been a new decree that al musicians had to have licenses, but to have a license they had to be able to fil out a form, and none of the Gypsies, except Zoli, were able to write fluently. They carried violins, violas, oboes, guitars, even one giant harp. Vashengo wore a black jacket with red bicycle reflectors as cufflinks. When he moved his arms, his wrists caught the sunlight. He was trying, it seemed, with Zoli's help, to calm the crowd. A smal battalion of troopers stood at the other end of the street, slapping truncheons against their thighs. Moments later a loudspeaker was passed out of the window of the union and the crowd hushed. Vashengo spoke in Romani at first—it was as if he had laid a blanket underneath the crowd. He commanded a further silence and spoke in Slovak, said it was a new time in history, that we were al coming out of a long oblivion, carrying a red flag. He would speak with the leaders of the union. Be patient, he said.

There'd be licenses for al . He pointed at Zoli and said she would help them fil out the required forms. She lowered her head and the crowd cheered. The troopers down the street dropped their truncheons and the officials from the Musicians Union came out onto the steps. A smal boy came pushing past me, laughing. He was wearing the yel ow blinker from Stränsky's motorbike on a chain.

I tried to elbow my way towards her, but she leaned down to whisper something to her husband.

I moved away through the mil ing bodies, past the horses and carts they had lined up along the street.

I'd already memorized the tilt of her chin and the two dark moles at the base of her neck.

In the National Library, amid the dust and the shuffle, I tried to read up on whatever little literature there was. The Gypsies were, it seemed, as fractured as anyone else, their own smal Europe, but they were stil lumped together in one easy census box. Most had already settled down in shanty towns al over Slovakia. They were as apt to fight among themselves as they were to pitch battle against outsiders. Zoli and her people were the aristocracy, if such a word could be used; they stil traveled in their ornate caravans. No dancing bears, or begging, or fortune-tel ing, but they did wear gold coins in their hair and kept some of the older customs alive. Modesty laws. Whispered names. Runic signs. There were thousands of them in Slovakia. They were linked with extended groups of tinsmiths and horse-thieves, but some, like Zoli's kumpanija, moved in a group of about seventy or eighty and made a living almost entirely from music. They were written about in exotic language—no photographs, just sketches.

I shut the pages of the books, walked out into the streets, under the swaying banners and the loud grackles in the trees.

From an open window came the low moan of a saxophone. These were stil vibrant times—the streets were ful and pulsing, and nobody yet sat waiting for the knock of the secret police at the door.

I found Stränsky swaying in the beerhal s. “Come here, young scholar,” he shouted across the tables. He sat me down and bought me a glass. I lapped it up, the high idealism of an older man. He was sure that having a Gypsy poet would be a coup for him, for Credo, and that the Gypsies, as a revolutionary class, if properly guided, could claim and use the written word. “Look,” he said, “everywhere else they're the joke of the week.

Thieves. Conmen. Just imagine if we could raise them up. A literate proletariat. People reading Gypsy literature. We—you, me, her—we can make a whole new art form, get those songs written down. Imagine that, Swann. Nobody has ever done that. This girl is perfect, do you know how perfect she is?”

He leaned forward, his glass shaking.

“Everyone else has shat on them from above. Burned them out. Taunted them. Branded them. Capitalists, fascists, that old empire of yours. We

‘ve got a chance to turn it around. Take them in. We ‘11 be the first. Give them a value. We make life better, we make life fairer, it's the oldest story of al .”

“She's a singer,” I said.

“She's a poet,” he replied. “And you know why?” He raised his glass and prodded my chest. “Because she's cal ed upon to become one. She's a voice from the dust.”

“You're drunk,” I said.

He hoisted a brand-new tape recorder, a spare set of reels, eight spools of tape, and four batteries up onto the table. “I want you to record her, young scholar. Bring her to life.”

“Me?”

“No, the fucking pickled eggs there. For crying out loud, Swann, you've got a brain, don't you?”

I knew what he wanted from me—the prospect thril ed me and knocked the air from my lungs at the same time.

He spun a bit of tape out from a reel. “Just don't tel Elena that I spent our last savings on this.” He wound the spool on and pressed Record. “It's made in Bulgaria, I hope it works.”

He tested it out and his voice came back to us: It's made in Bulgaria, I hope it works.

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again. I raised my glass and signed on. I might as wel have done it in my own blood.

The equipment fitted into a smal rucksack. I strapped it on my back and rode Stränsky's Jawa out into the countryside. Under the grove of trees, I kil ed the engine and waited. The kumpanija was gone. A scorched tire in the grass. A few rags in the branches. I tried to fol ow the rutted marks and the bent grass, but it was impossible.

Beyond Trnava I went towards the low hil s where the vineyards stepped down towards the val ey. I leaned the bike into the corners, wobbled to a halt when a rifle was pointed at me. The tal est trooper smirked while the others gathered around him. I was, I told them, a translator and sociologist studying the ancient culture of the Romani people. “The what?” they asked. “The Gypsies.” They howled with laughter. A sergeant leaned forward:

“There's some up there, with the monkeys in the trees.” I fumbled with the kickstand and showed him my credentials. After a while, he radioed in and came back, snapped to attention. “Comrade,” he said, “proceed.” Stränsky's name, it seemed, stil held some sway. The troopers pointed me in the direction of some scrubland. I had rigged a cushion in place where the seat had been stolen: the troopers guffawed. I slowly turned, pinned them with a look, then took off, scattering dirt behind me.

From the hil s came a strange series of high sounds. Zoli's kumpanija carried giant harps, six, seven feet tal , and, with the bumps in the dirt roads, you could sometimes hear them moving from a distance away: they sounded as if they were mourning in advance.

When I came across her, she was draped across the green gate of a field and her arms hung down, limp. She was dressed in her army coat and was propel ing herself with one foot, slowly back and forth, in a smal arc over the mud. One braid swung in the air, the other was caught between her teeth. On the gate was an il -painted sign that warned trespassers of prosecution. As I approached, she stood up quickly from what had seemed an innocent child's pose, but then I realized that she had been reading while draped on the gate. “Oh,” she said, tucking the loose pages away.

She walked on ahead, cal ing behind her that I should catch up in an hour or two, she ‘d alert the others, they needed time to prepare. I was sure I wouldn't see her again that night, but when I came upon them they had prepared a welcoming feast. “We're ready for you,” she said. Vashengo clapped my back, sat me at the head of the table.

Zoli stood in a yel ow patterned dress with dozens of tiny mirrors glinting on the bodice. She had rouged her face with riverstone.

English, they cal ed me, as if it were the only thing I couldever be. The women giggled at my accent, winding my hair around their fingers. The children sat close to me—astoundingly close—and I thought for a moment they were rifling my pockets, but they weren't, theirs was simply a different form of space. I felt myself begin to lean towards them. Only Zoli seemed to hang back—it was only later I realized she was creating a hol ow between us to protect herself. She said to me once that I had a sudden green gaze, and I thought that it could have been taken as any number of things: curiosity, confusion, desire.

I began to visit once or twice a week. Vashengo al owed me to sleep in the back of his caravan, alongside five of his nine children. The pinch of a sheet was al I had to hold on to. The knots in the wood were like eyes in the ceiling. Al the way from Liverpool to a bed where, on my twenty-fourth birthday, I rol ed across to see five smal heads of tousled hair. I tried to take the bedding outside but in truth the darkness didn't suit me, the stars were not what I was built for, so I slept at the edge of the bed, ful y clothed. In the mornings I heated a coin with a match and put the hot disc to Vashengo's window in order to make a peephole in the frost. The children joked with me— I was wifeless, white, strange, I walked funny, smel ed bad, drove a cannibalized motorbike. The youngest ones pul ed me up by the ears, and dressed me in a waistcoat and their father's old black Homburg. I stepped out to mist shoaling over the fields. Dawn lay cold and wet on the grass. I stood, embarrassed, as the kids ran around, begging me to play wheelbarrow with them. I asked Zoli if there was anywhere else to sleep. “No,” she said, “why would there be?” She smiled and lowered her head and said that I was welcome to go to the hotel twenty kilometers away, but I was hardly going to hear any Romani songs from the chambermaids.

As a singer she could have lived differently, with no scrubbing, no cooking, no time spent looking after the children, but she didn't isolate herself, she couldn't, she was in love with that bare life, it was what she knew, it fueled her. She washed clothes in the river, beat the rugs and carpets clean.

Afterwards she put playing cards in the spoke of a bicycle wheel and rode around in the mud, cal ing out to the children. Each of them she named her chonorro, her little moon. “Come here, chonor-roeja,” she cal ed. They ran behind her, blowing whistles made from the branches of ash trees.

Behind the tire factory she played games with them on what they cal ed their bouncing wal . She threw a tire over a sapling for each new child that was born, knowing that one day it would fit snug and tight.

Zoli was already wel known amongst her people, settled and nomadic alike. She touched some old chord of tenderness in them. They would walk twenty kilometers just to hear her sing. I had no il usions that I'd ever belong, but there was the odd quiet moment when I sat with her, our backs against a wheelbase, a short span of recited song before Petr or the children interrupted us. When I cut brown bread don't look at me angrily, don't look at me angrily because I'm not going to eat it. At first she said that the writing was just a pastime—the songs were what mattered, the old bal ads that had been around for decades, and she was only shaping the music so they'd be passed along to others. She was surprised to find new words at her fingertips, and when whole new songs began to emerge, she thought they must have existed before, that they had come to her from somewhere ancient. Zoli had no inkling that anyone other than the Gypsies would want to listen to her, and the notion that her words might go out on the radio, or into a book, terrified her at first.

Before their performances, she and Conka sat on the steps of her caravan as they aligned their voices. They wanted to get within a blade of grass of each other. Conka was a ful redhead, blue-eyed, and she wore coins, glass beads, and pottery shards woven in a necklace strand. Her husband, Fyodor, stared me down. He didn't like the idea of his wife being recorded. I feigned bustle when real y al I was waiting for was Zoli's voice to pul through, with her own songs, the new ones, those she had made up herself.

One spring afternoon, near a remote forest, Zoli walked out to the edge of a lake and undertook a ceremony for her dead parents, brother, and sisters, floating candles out on the water. Three Hlinka guards had final y been charged with their murders and had received life sentences. There was no celebration among the Gypsies—they didn't seem to enjoy the revenge— but the whole kumpanija accompanied Zoli to the lakeside, and they stood back to al ow her silence while she sang an old song about wind in a chimney turning back at the last moment, never reaching down to disturb the ashes.

At the lake edge I trampled the reeds, fumbled with the batteries and clicked the lever on: she was beginning to stretch and move the language, and, like everyone else, I was chained to the sound of her voice.

Later I sat with Stränsky while he transcribed the tapes. “Perfect,” he said as he pul ed his pencil through one of her lines. He was convinced that Zoli was creating a poetry from the roots up, but he stil wanted to put manners on it. She came into the city, alone, the railway ticket moist in her fist.

Ner- vously she twisted the hair that had fal en out from beneath her kerchief. Stränsky read the poem aloud to her and she went to the window, peeled back some of the black tape from the glass.

“That last part is wrong,” she said.

“The last verse?”

“Yes. The clip.”

Stränsky grinned: “The timing?”

Three times he reshuffled it before she shrugged and said: “Perhaps.” Stränsky positioned the metal. She bit her lip, then took the printed sheet and pressed it against her chest.

I could feel my heart thumping in 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 wal s.” For a while she stood next to me, ran her fingers ab-sentmindedly along my forearm, then looked down at her hand and quickly pul ed 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 overal s, 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 fal 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 nightfal , 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 al around him. After a while, he didn't have the strength to leave the caravan at al . Zoli would come back in darkness, after singing, and sit at his bedside, waiting for him to fal 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 real y know. I had for some years considered myself to be Czechoslovakian but, in retrospect, I was too English for that, too Irish to be ful y 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 with sent a thril along me—she cal ed me Stephen rather than Stepän, she liked the strange way it brought her teeth to her lips. She would giggle sometimes at the Englishness of what I did, or said, though it didn't seem English to me at al . I bought her a fountain pen from the market in the old town, discovered books for her to read, gave her ink, which Conka used to stain their dresses. I began to learn as much Romani as I could. She touched my arm, looked my way. I knew it. We had begun to cross that hol ow that had come between us.

A light snow fel in early September, six months after Petr died. I strayed from the camp. On a sandbar in the river were the footprints of wolves.

They plaited their way towards a final twist in the riverbank and disappeared into a light forest. She was standing by the water, listening to the smal thumps of snow from the branches. I came up behind her, put my hands over her eyes. My fingers went along her neck and my thumb lay in the hol ow of her shoulder. My mouth touched briefly against her cheek. She pul ed away. I said her name. A sharp intake of breath as she took off her red kerchief. She had, in mourning, cut her hair quite close to the scalp. It was against tradition. She turned away and walked the riverbank. I fol owed, put my hands over her eyes once more. She went up on her toes in the snow, a soft crunch. I rested my chin on her shoulder, felt the press of her back against me. My hand to her waist, she breathed again, and her kerchief was wrapped around my fist. She turned, pul ed at the neckline of my shirt, moved within the shadow of my shoulder, pushed the smal cloud of her stomach against my hip and held it there. We went to the ground, but she rol ed away. She had not, she said, seen the underside of a tree since she was a child, how strange the leaves looked from underneath. We did not make love, but in the snow she said any fool could tel what had gone on, and she stamped up and down in her shoes. She left, ful of tears. The il -fitting lid of Petr's old lighter clinked, marking the rhythm of her steps. I sat for the next five hours, terrified, but she returned, tripling her route so as not to be fol owed, bright with eagerness, and I forgot as we pressed against the cold bark of a tree. I could almost hear the wolves returning. The moles on her neck, a perfect dimple on her left breast, the arch of her clavicle. I traced my finger down the path of her body, pul ed a ring off her little finger with my teeth. I had suffered so many fantasies over the previous few months, it was terrifying to think that this was a riverbank, not some dingy al ey, where I had dreamed Zoli, afraid of nostalgia, in printing rooms, corridors, against hard machinery.

Zoli believed there was a life-spring that went down to the center of the earth and that it ran both ways but mostly it rose from the wel of her childhood. It was what she talked about, in her hard country accent, her days traveling with her grandfather, the roads they had covered together, the silences. When she talked about him she took her kerchief al the way across the bridge of her nose and covered her face. She figured her skin too dark, too black, too Gypsy to be in any way beautiful, that her lazy eye somehow marked her, but it seemed to me that for those few days that the moon was rol ing along the ground. I was quite sure that eventual y we would be caught together, that people would know, that the children would see us, or Conka would find out, or Fyodor, or Vashengo, and we were alert enough to know that the snowmelt would final y flood the bend, but it didn't matter.

She heard an owl hooting one evening, and froze in terror, covered her eyes, said something about the spirit of her grandfather returning, shamed.

“We can't do this,” she said, and she stepped off, feet snapping on the cold leaves.

The train to the city was strangely old-world, brown-paneled, the wind rattling at the broken windows.

“They'l tie your bal s around your neck and knot them like a bulb of garlic,” said Stränsky.

“We haven't done anything. Besides, she wouldn't tel a soul.”

“You're a naive fool. She is too.”

“It won't happen again.”

“Don't touch her, I'm warning you. They'l pul a sheet across you. She's a Gypsy woman. She belongs to a Gypsy man.”

“And is that why we ‘re printing her poems?”

He pul ed up his col ar and lowered himself to his work. It was almost a relief to get out from the mil , away from Stränsky and his obsessions, to get lost underneath the streetlamps of the city. He rarely cal ed me his son anymore, but I walked tal er for those few months—my chest was drawing breath from Zoli, she was fil ing me out. We published her first chapbook in the autumn of ‘53, and it was embraced by al sides, the younger poets, the academics, even the bureaucrats. She wanted it threaded, not glued, for no reason I could fathom, something to do with a horse she had once known.

Smal matter, the work was now towards a longer, more lasting series of lyrics. I sat, happy, on an upturned bucket, in the street outside my flat, watching the sun rise between the old buildings.

There exists somewhere, hidden away, a photograph of the three of us—Stränsky, Zoli, and me—taken in the Park Kultury beside the Danube on a gray afternoon. The water ripples gently. Zoli wears a long, flowing skirt and a frayed bolero jacket. I wear a bright white shirt and a Basque beret, tilted at an angle. Stränsky—almost ful y bald by then—wears a dark blue shirt and black tie. He has a slight stomach that Zoli used to cal his kettle.

My foot is up on a dockside bol ard. Zoli is as tal as me, while Stränsky nestles between us. My arm is firmly around his shoulder. In the background a cargo ship passes with a giant sign pasted along the hul : All Power to the Workers’ Councils!

Even now I can step towards that photograph, walk along the edge of it, climb down into it, and recal exactly the sharp thril of being photographed with her.

“Please don't look at me,” she said at times when the spotlight caught her, but it seemed to some that Zoli had begun to develop a smal fondness for the microphone.

Once, in the vil age of Prievidza, she was taken to the Hal of Culture, which backed out onto an enormous courtyard. The yard had been ful for hours with al manner of Gypsies, waiting. The reading was given in the upstairs room where the ceiling was corniced and the rows were orderly. As the locals filed in, the Gypsies stood, bowed, and gave up their seats to the vil agers, then took a place at the back of the room. Bureaucrats sat in the front row, families of the local police took the seats behind. I couldn't quite fathom what was going on. It seemed the officials had been ordered to go along as part of the policy of embracing the Gypsies. The room fil ed and soon only a couple of Gypsy elders remained—I thought they might fight, or start an argument, but instead they wil ingly gave up their places and went out to the courtyard. “A point of pride,” said Stränsky. They were amazed that any gadzo would want to come to hear one of theirs. “At the end of the day, Swann, they're just being polite.” Something in me shifted

—it had seemed to me to be part of some elaborate ritual, and I hadn't thought of such simplicity.

Zoli begged for the reading to be switched to a bigger hal , but the organizers said it was impossible, so she bowed her head and went on. She was stil not used to reading aloud but she did so that evening; she spoke of a light rain in the onset of winter, and a set of horses tied to telegraph poles, a brand-new lyric that suddenly went off-kilter and she could not haul it back. She stammered and tried to explain it, then left abruptly, tearing off one of her new earrings as she went.

Afterwards she opened up the bottom-floor windows and passed plates of food out to those who had waited in the courtyard for her. Stränsky and I found her later, smoking a pipe in the blue shadows of the hal , one eye closed against the smoke, fingers trembling. There was talk that trouble had flared in the local bar.

“I want to go home,” she said. She put her head against the wal and I felt privy to her sadness. It was, of course, the oldest idea: home. To her it meant silence. I tried to take her arm but she turned away.

Zoli disappeared for four days then and I found out only later that she had been taken around by horsecart to al the settlements where she did not read for them but sang, which is what they wanted anyway—they wanted her voice, the secret of it, the one thing that was theirs.

I had printed up a poster with Stränsky: it was a new take on an old slogan, and it included an approximation of Zoli's face, a drawing, not a photograph, slightly idealized, no lazy eye, just a working woman's stare and a gray tunic. Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us. She liked it when she saw it first, fal ing from cargo planes over the countryside, landing on the lane-ways, tumbling through farmyards, catching on branches.

Her face was pasted up along al the pylons and telegraph poles of the countryside. Soon her tapes were being played on the radio and she was talked about in the corridors of power. She was a new sort of Czechoslovakian woman, taken out of the margins to il ustrate our steps forward under socialism. She was tel ing the story unlike anyone had told it before. Zoli was invited to the Ministry of Culture, the National Theater, the Carlton, the Socialist Academy, screenings in the Stalingrad Hotel, conferences on literature where Stränsky stood up and bel owed her name into the microphone. She spoke five languages with varying degrees of fluency, and Stränsky had begun to cal her a Gypsy intel ectual. A shadow crossed her face, but she didn't silence him, something in her liked the novelty.

The elders had begun to notice shifts in the outside world— the licenses came more easily, the troopers didn't seek them out to demand permits, the local butchers served them with less fuss than before. The Gypsies had even been invited to create their own chapter in the Musicians Union.

Vashengo hardly believed that he, of al people, could now be served in a tavern where years ago he was not even al owed in by the back entrance.

Sometimes he walked into the Carlton Hotel just to hear the porters cal him Comrade. He came out, slapping his cap off his knee.

One night at the dressing room in the National Theater, Zoli turned to Stränsky and said she could not read aloud, she did not have the stomach for it. Her back left a trace of moisture on the leather chair. They walked out into the wings together and looked around the curtain—the theater was packed. A glint of light from a pair of opera glasses. The dimming of the chandeliers. Stränsky leveled the crowd with one of her poems and then Zoli walked onstage beside him. The spotlight made her seem at ease. The crowd whispered amongst themselves. She put her lips against the microphone and the feedback squealed. She stepped to the side and read without benefit of the mike. When the crowd cheered, the Gypsies—

who had been given two rows at the back of the theater—erupted in applause. At a reception afterwards, Zoli was given a standing ovation. I watched Vashengo at the tables, fil ing his pockets ful of bread and cheese.

On nights like these, I was background music; there was no way I could get to Zoli, there was a whispering pact between us, our goodbyes were quick and fateful, yet the dul pain in my chest had disappeared by the time I woke in the morning. I had taped a photo of her in the corner of my mirror.

When we walked beneath the trees in the Square of the Slovak National Uprising, there were always one or two people who recognized her. In the literary cafes the poets turned to watch. Politicians wanted to be seen with her. We marched on May Day, our fists high in the air. We attended conferences on Socialist theater. Across the river, beyond the bridges, we watched the swinging cranes and the towerblocks rise up in the air. We found grace in the most simple of things: a street-sweeper humming Dvorak, a date carved in a wal , the split backseam of a jacket, a slogan in a newspaper. She joined the Union of Slovak Writers and shortly afterwards, in a poem published in Rude'pravo, she wrote that she had come to the beginning of the thread of her song.

I read to her from a translation of Steinbeck that I'd been working on intermittently. “I want to go to university,” she said as she tapped the spine of the book on her knee. A part of me knew it was doomed to failure. I stammered. She sat by the windowsil in silence, scraping a bit of light from the blackened glass. The next week I bartered in the university for an application form—they were hard to come by. I slipped her the application one chil y morning but heard nothing more about it, though I saw the form weeks later—it plugged a chink in the boards of her wagon where cold air was getting through.

“Oh,” she said, “I changed my mind.”

Yet the prospect of her stil kept me going. There was a chance that others would find out, that she ‘d be considered pol uted, marime, damaged.

Whole weeks would go by when we could not touch sleeves for fear of being seen, but there was an electricity between us. Alone at the mil we sat with our backs against the folding bed that Stränsky had set up on the second floor, by the Zyrkon cutting machines. She touched the whiteness of my chestbones. Ran her fingers in my hair. We had no clue where our bodies stopped and the consequences began. In the streets, we walked apart.

There were other rumblings among some of the Gypsy leaders of course—Zoli was becoming too gadzo for them, her Party card, her literary life, her trips to the cinema, the Lenin museum, the botanical gardens, the box seats she was given one night at the symphony where she took Conka, who cried.

She was, they said, trying to live her life several feet off the ground. It was stil considered beyond the realm for her to be seen carrying around books: some notions were impossible to defeat. When she was with the kumpanija she sewed pages into the lining of her coat, or deep in the pockets of her dresses. Among her favorites was an early Neruda, in Slovak, a copy of which she had bought for herself in a secondhand shop.

She moved along, lovesongs at her hip, and I learned whole poems so that I could whisper them to her if we chanced on a moment alone. In her other pockets there were volumes by Krasko,

Lorca, Whitman, Seifert, even Tatarka's new work. When she dropped her coat to the floor, in the mil , so that we could read to one another, she immediately got slimmer.

Winter arrived and the Gypsies did not travel. It was a time I could not, for the life of me, understand. The tape recorder froze. The reels cracked.

There was ice on the microphone. My shoes fil ed with frost and the blood backed away from my fingers. Zoli would not spend time with me unless others were around: we could not afford to be seen too much together.

I took the train home to my flat in Bratislava, stood under the railway loudspeakers just for the sound of things. I preferred my shelf of books to the feet of Vashengo's children stuck in my ribcage, but after a couple of days the desire to see Zoli built up again and out I went, the microphone and recorder in my rucksack. She smiled and touched my hand. A child turned the corner and she sprang away. I wandered the winter camp. Rusted scrap metal. Severed cables. Bent petrol drums. Dog bones. Punctured cans. The tongues of carriages. Whole matrices of lost things. Conka had found a scarf with patterns of roses on it. She sat, al blanketed up on the steps of her caravan, face twisted by the cold. She looked thin and bitter.

The men stood around as if waiting for what might fal from the teeth of horses. I wanted nothing more than to bring Zoli to the city, settle her down, have her write, make her mine, but it was impossible, she liked it there, she was used to it, along the riverbank, she saw the dark and light of the camp as the one same thing.

Graco, Vashengo's oldest son, pushed up against me. He was younger than me, in his late teens.

“And how's the boy, how's the boy, how is he?” At first he just threw a wild punch. Great laughter. I stepped backwards. A jab, then a hook. We were backed up against a fence. I could feel the wire strands against my legs and back. I brought my bare hands to my face. Closed my eyes. Soon I could feel my whole body being worked. I looked out from my fingers. A couple of flecks like ash floated around me. I spun out from the fence and surprised Graco with an uppercut that lifted his bare feet from the mud. The bones in my fingers crunched. A crowd gathered. Conka stood in the background, next to her husband. He raised his hand, cupped it around his mouth and yel ed. Another quick punch from Graco and my eardrums rang. A high wasting whine in my ears. I was aware of al the mil ing bodies around me. He ducked my second jab. I fel . Graco was smiling down at me, he thought it was something majestic, something intimate. He loved the idea of fighting an Englishman, it was pure hilarity to him. For al his smal size he was everywhere at once. “Get up.” A jab. A left hook. Another shout. “Get up, you shit-drink.” He tossed back his head to clear his locks from his eyes. I felt the fence against my back again and pul ed into it, held my hands over my face. Blood through my fingers. Graco seemed to have become melancholy, like he was hitting a tree. He went on punching and the roars changed, yelping noises from the kids, the adults silent and abstracted. Conka stood beside her husband, a soft grin on her face. Graco's knuckles snapped me and my head spun. A boot came in from the outer edge of the ring and caught me in the jaw. “You and al your pale pieces.” Another boot came in. A foot to my ribs. And then I realized that I was fighting for my life, scrabbling backwards in the mud, al the sounds merging, until I heard her voice going up, quiet, but nervous, and she broke the line, a few strands of dark hair between her teeth, and she shoved Graco backwards, and I had no hunger for it anymore, no desire, I stood with blood dripping from my eye and it dawned on me that Zoli, too, must have been watching al along.

She leaned in to me and put her scarf to my eye to staunch the blood and said: “They're only keeping warm, Swann, that's al .”

I suppose that in the beginning the changes seemed negligible enough—the switch in the eyes, the hunch into overcoats, the peepholes cut into doors, the darkened windows. It was a smal enough price to pay. A few isolated incidents. Raindrops, Stränsky cal ed them. You put out your hand, he said, and al of a sudden they were there, almost lovely at first. But one by one these things became a form of light rain, and then the drops began to col ide, until after a while we were silently watching them come down in sheets. There was a refusal to talk unless we were in an open area, or in a hired car, or down by the water. Black Marias began to appear more and more on the streets. Soon we heard stories of folk dancers being sent off to dig canals, professors on dairy farms, philosophers folding back the cardboard flaps of orphanage boxes, shopkeepers lying facedown in the ditches, poets working in the armament factories. Signposts were sawed down. Streets were given new names. It was raining hard and we hid from it—yet it was our own rain, of our own making, and it promised to bring on a good crop, we were sure of it, so we let it fal . Already too much had been invested in the Revolution, and we weren't prepared to give in to the despair that things would not work out. It was so much like desire.

“Are you fucking her, Swann? “ Stränsky asked one evening when the two of us sat together at the back of the Pelikan cafe. The place smel ed of old overcoats. I looked around, table to table, at the gray faces, watching us watching them. The truth—and Stränsky knew it—was that nobody was fucking her, though we al wanted to in whatever way we could.

“None of your business,” I said.

He laughed his tired laugh, lifted his glass.

I walked out and was startled to notice that we were under the gaze of a cameraman who was clicking pictures from the window of a black Tatra.

The darkness rose up like it was coming from the cobbles.

For Zoli's kumpanija, the changes had begun with Woo-woodzhi, a young man who had taken to nailing his own hand to a tree. He was a hard case, a schizophrenic. The families heaved with loyalty, and Woowoodzhi was among their favorites. His bandages were changed every few hours.

Zoli brought him boiled sweets from the city and whispered nighttime legends in his ear. Woowoodzhi rocked back and forth at the sound of her voice. Whenever he strayed from the caravans the alarm went—saucepans were banged—and the women spread out along the forest edges to look for him. The boy would often be found, hammering the nails into his hands. He never cried out, not even when hot poultices were put to his palm.

In the middle of an autumn rainstorm a tal blond nurse was driven up to the caravans at the edge of the forest. She stepped out of her car into the mud, up to her ankles. She screeched for help and so the blonde was carried, with pomp and ceremony, to one of the caravans. She was given hot tea and her shoes were cleaned. She nipped the clasp of her handbag. A badge said she was from the Ministry of Health. She unfurled a piece of paper and thrust it out. Zoli was cal ed upon to read it.

“It's a mistake,” said Zoli. “It must be.”

“It's no mistake, Citizen. Can you not read?”

“I can read.”

“Then you must do what it says.”

Zoli stood up, tore the paper into pieces, stuffed it back into the woman's palm. It was an order to bring Woowoodzhi to the local mental institution.

“Please leave,” said Zoli.

“Just give me the child and there'l be no problems.”

Zoli spat at the woman's feet. A riffle of whispers went around the caravan. The woman blanched and reached for Zoli's arm, dug her fingers in:

“The child needs proper care.”

Zoli backhanded her twice across the face. A cheer went up around the caravan.

Two hours later the troopers arrived but al the Gypsies were gone—they had disappeared without a trace.

Stränsky loved the story—the troopers arrived at the mil with an arrest warrant for Zoli and told us everything—and I had to admit it thril ed me too, but we had no idea where to find the kumpanija. We searched and found nothing, not even a rumor.

Without Zoli they were days of gnawing restlessness and gloom. Flocks of gul s argued above the Danube. I worked at the mil , attended a conference on Russian typography, then sat at home, books propped open on my chest—Mayakovsky, Dreiser, Larkin.

It was a ful two months later, on a day of slanting sunlight, that Zoli arrived back. She looked different: a moving rawness. In the mil she stood amid the noise and the high clacking of machinery, inhaled the smel of grease and ink. I hurried across to greet her, but she leaned away from me.

“Where've you been?” asked Stränsky from the staircase.

“Here and there,” she said.

He repeated it and half-laughed, went up the staircase, and left us alone together.

She drew herself up to a height. I watched as she stepped towards the hel box and searched through the old broken ingots, looked at al the backward letters, arranged them to form a song that she had composed in her mind, My grave is hiding from me, a quick and luminous poem where she said she felt locked like wood within a tree. She set the letters out on the counter and pressed her hands down on the hard metal. She said she could stil feel bits of Woowoodzhi in her cuticles: he had died, she said, from a bout of influenza, contracted on the same night that the caravans were trying to escape.

“They kil ed him, Stephen.”

“Be careful, Zoli,” I said, looking around.

“I don't know what careful means,” she said. “What does careful mean? Why should I be careful?”

“You've seen the news?”

In her absence, Zoli had become something of a cult figure— the arrest warrant had been torn up by no less than the Minister of Culture himself.

A new tomorrow was on the way, he said. Part of it would include the Roma. Zoli was the subject of a whole new series of editorials that professed she had been painting the old world so it could final y, at last, change. They saw her as heroic, the vanguard of a new wave of Romani thinkers.

One of her poems had been reprinted in a Prague-based university journal. Tapes of her singing were played again on the radio. The further away she was the bigger she had become. Now there was talk in government circles of al owing the Gypsies to halt, of settling them in government housing, giving them absolute power over their own lives. The idea of them living out in the forest had become bizarre and old-fashioned, almost bourgeois to the pure-minded. Why should they be forced to live out on the roads? The papers said they should be cut free from the troubles of primitivism. There would be no more Gypsy fires, only in the theater.

“Allow us to halt?” The chuckle caught in her throat.

She picked up a pigeon feather from the ground and let it fal from her fingers. “The troubles of primitivism}” Something in my spine went liquid.

She left the mil with a bundle of papers under her arms. Down the road, she climbed onto a horse-cart which she operated on her own. She slapped the horse and it reared high for a moment, then clattered down onto the cobbles.

I walked alone down by the Danube. A soldier with a megaphone shouted me away from the bank. In the distance, Austria. Beyond that, al the places that young men had fought for, died for, mil ions of them, fed to the soil, and beyond that, it seemed to me, France, the channel, England, and the soot of my early years. It had been nine years since I arrived in Czechoslovakia, jittery and expectant. Someone had borrowed the jaunt from my step. I could feel it in the way I walked. So much of my revolutionary promise seemed to be slipping away, my hard grip on the world, but, stil , it didn't seem possible that there would come a time when it would vanish completely.

Across the river the lights from the towers twinkled once and then went off. The streets were lifeless, cold—the only mystery was that I expected them to be otherwise.

“Don't sulk,” said Stränsky when I pushed open the door of the mil again. “She's only waking up. She's going to do something that'l stun us al , just you watch.”

That summer, in 1957, one of the few places we saw Zoli was the house at Budermice. It was set on parkland in the shadow of the Little Carpathian hil s, a country mansion maintained by the Union of Slovak Writers. A long row of chestnut trees lined the lane. The driveway curled to a grand front entrance with marble steps. Several rooms on the top floor were kept locked and most of the bedrooms were dusty. Downstairs the union had burned the old furniture—too imperial, too bourgeois—so plastic chairs had been instal ed, hardtop counters, towering Russian prints.

Stränsky managed to get the house for the whole summer—he hated anything that smacked of cronyism, but he saw it as a time for some serious creativity. He wanted us to finish a whole book with Zoli—there'd only been a chapbook, but now a real volume, he knew, would cement her reputation: he was convinced that she had a vision that would lift the Gypsies out of their quandaries.

The lawn sloped down to a stream that was conducted through a wooden pipe the size of a giant barrel. Here and there the wooden structure was pierced to irrigate the lawn. Water arced out into the grass and onto the wel -tended paths. Even on clear summer nights it sounded as if it were raining outside.

Stränsky went walking with her every day—Zoli, in her skirts and kerchief and dark blouses, he in his white col arless shirts that made him look a little quixotic. They strol ed past the fountains, looking as if they were whispering secrets to each other. She was at the height of her powers then, and they were working out patterns for her poems. Stränsky would come to me, clap his hands together and recite her lyrics. I had seldom seen a man so worked-up, burning high, wandering around the house, saying: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” A Steinway stil sat in the main dining room, one of the last of the old artifacts, though the markings had been rubbed out. Stränsky raised the lacquered lid, sat on the stool, clinked his ring finger against the ivory, and denounced the empty elegance of art without purpose. He winked and then played “The Internationale.”

One night, from the staircase, Stränsky took a flying leap at the chandelier. It fel from the ceiling with a crash and he lay there stunned.

“Adoration's more fragile than rope,” he said, looking around, as if surprised.

Zoli came and sat beside him on the marble floor. I watched from the balcony above. Stränsky was half-smiling, looking at a smal cut on his hand

—a tiny bit of glass was stuck in his skin. She took his wrist and pinched the glass up from the folds in his hand. She hushed him and guided his finger to his mouth. Stränsky sucked out the sliver of glass.

I came down the stairs, stepping loudly. She looked up and smiled: “Martin's drunk again.”

“No, I'm not,” he said, grasping her elbow. He fel again. I lifted him from the floor, told him he needed a cold bath. He put his arm around my shoulder. Halfway up the stairs I had a brief vision of dropping him, watching from a height as he tumbled down.

From below, Zoli smiled at me and then she stepped outside to where she slept. She wasn't used to sleeping in a room. She felt that it was closing in on her and so she kept her bedding in the rose garden. I woke in the morning to find her dozing happily under the noribundas. She washed in the running stream distant from the house. She couldn't fathom someone taking a bath in standing water. Stränsky took to bathing in a giant tub outside, just to mock her gently. He sat singing in the tub, soaping himself, drinking, and laughing. She dismissed him and wandered off into the woods, coming home with bunches of wild garlic, edible flowers, nuts.

“Where's she gone?” I asked him one afternoon.

“Oh, get the stick out of your arse, would you, young manr

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She's out walking. She's clearing her head, she doesn't need you and she doesn't need me.”

“You've got a wife, Stränsky.”

“Don't be a chamber pot,” he said.

It was an old expression, odd and formal, one my father had used many years before. Stränsky caught me square and I stepped back from him.

He squeezed my shoulder, just enough to show that he stil had a young man's power.

“I'm looking after her poems,” he told me. “That's al . Nothing else.”

Towards the end of summer, Zoli's kumpanija showed up. Twenty caravans camped in the field right at the back of the house. The backs of the horses were shiny with sweat. I woke up in the morning and smel ed campfire. Conka wore a fresh scar, from eyecrook to the nape of her neck, and one upper tooth was gone. She stepped down from her caravan in the shadow of her husband, Fyodor. She wore a yel ow dress patterned with feathers. Down the steps, she suddenly had a limp and I wondered who could possibly bear the courage to live that way? Her breasts sagged and her stomach pushed against the cloth dress, and for a moment she was like something I recognized from a melancholy viewing elsewhere.

Kids ran naked in the fountains. The men had already taken some of the plastic kitchen chairs and had set them up beside their caravans. Zoli was in the middle of the crowd, laughing. Stränsky too was suddenly in the thick of things. He and Vashengo drank together. Vashengo had found a case of Harvey's Bristol Cream—an extraordinary thing, how they got it I never knew, but it was contraband, and could get them arrested. They drank it down to the final drop, then started in on bottles of slivovitz.

The night rose up like something to be exhausted.

Zoli sang that week, the thorn was in her skin, and we got some of her best poems. Stränsky said he could detect a new music in her, and it gave him different beats for the poems, always listening, watching. He saw her as ful y authentic now, she had forged herself in a world that was not ours, a poet fil ed with mysterious voices that sometimes even she didn't know the meaning of. He said to me that she had an intel ect that came to her like a bird off a branch, unrecognized, the images chasing each other with speed. And he swal owed the portions of abstraction and romanticism that annoyed him with other poets, al owed her what he saw as her mistakes, tamed her line length, structured the work into verses.

Stil , in my mind, I can hang a painting of it in midair: Stränsky, after working a whole afternoon with Zoli, walking to the wagons and sitting down, playing bl'aski with tin cards, his shirt filthy, looking like one who belonged. And there I was, standing outside, waiting for her.

By the end of the week the house was ransacked. The kumpanija had taken almost every ounce of food. The broken chandelier hung in the middle of one of their caravans.

I found Zoli sitting on a chair in one of the half-empty rooms upstairs, a crumpled handkerchief in her hand. When she saw me in the doorway she rose, said it was nothing, she had only caught a cold, but as she went past me she ran her fingers along my arm.

“Vashengo says that there are more rumors,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Resettlement. They want to give us schools and houses and clinics.” She knuckled her lazy eye. “They're saying we used to be backward. Now we're new. They say it's for our own good. They cal it Law 74.”

“It's just talk, Zoli.”

“How is it that some people always know what is best for others?”

“Stränsky?” I said.

“Stränsky has nothing to do with it.”

“Do you love him?”

She stared at me, grew quiet, looked out the window to the gardens below. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

From outside came the sound of laughter that abruptly broke the silence, lingered, and died.

We met early the next afternoon, away from Budermice, by the wheel of an old flour mil . The water had been diverted. Zoli had tripled her path to make sure she was not fol owed. She had in her pocket a photograph, a shot of splintered lightning, a bright blue flash across a dark landscape.

She said it came from a magazine she had found, a feature on Mexico, that someday she wouldn't mind traveling there, it was a long way, but she

‘d like to go. Perhaps when things were final y good, she said, she'd take off, fol ow that path. She quoted a line from Neruda about fal ing out of a tree he had not climbed. I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen—how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.

“Stephen,” she said. “You'l fight with us if we have to, right?”

“Of course.”

She smiled then, and became so much like the very young Zoli I'd seen in the early years at the mil , her shoulders loosened, her face lit up, a warmth came to her. She stepped towards me, placed my hand on the curve of her hip. Her back against a tree, our feet slipping in the leaves, her hair across her face, she seemed dismantled.

There are always moments we return to. We are in them. We rest there and there is nothing else.

Later that night we made love once again in the high empty rooms of the house. A white sheet took on the print of our bodies. A bead of sweat from my forehead ran down her cheek. She left with a finger to her lips. In the morning I ached for her, I had never known that such a thing existed, a pain that tightened my chest, and yet we stil could not be seen together, we couldn't ford that gap. It felt to me as if we were fal ing from a cliff face, perfect weightlessness and then a thump.

“If they catch us,” she said, “there'l be more trouble than we can invent.”

An official from the Ministry came along later that same week, a tal gray-haired bureaucrat with an air of pencil sharpeners about him. He sat and glared at the women doing their washing in the fountains. He talked with Stränsky, voices raised. The cords in the bureaucrat's neck shone. A sleeve moved across his brow. Stränsky leaned closer, spittle flying from his mouth. The bureaucrat went inside the house and ran his fingers over the piano. Al the ivory keys were missing. He turned on his heels.

Within a few hours he was back, troopers with him. Va-shengo jabbed his pitchfork at a line of six troopers. “Put it down,” Stränsky pleaded. The troopers backed away and watched as the smal est children picked up rocks from the gardens. Stränsky came between them al , arms outstretched. The troopers left with a promise that the kumpanija would leave the next day.

The fol owing morning Zoli sat on a horsecart. I walked across the gravel. She shook her head to keep me away. Something in me burned. I would have given it al , every word, every idea, to turn around and walk with her up the stairs into that old mansion again, but she turned sideways, and someone whipped the back of the horse. Behind her, Conka smirked. Vashengo led the kumpanija away.

I found Stränsky on the steps of the big house, palms pressed tight against his temples. He seemed suddenly so very old, so ful of sorrow, you could see it in his eyes: “We're drinking off their coffin lids, Swann, you know that?”

Stränsky once wrote that only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way, becomes a verse—one's death explains oneself. Stränsky was the sort of man who was always going to do something that would take the floor from beneath his feet—he'd been disappearing for a long time, restless with the way things were evolving. Stalin's death, though he hardly celebrated him, had winded Stränsky. The Congress buoyed him up for a while, but then came the events in Hungary in ‘56, the tanks rol ing south, and a new series of trials in Czechoslovakia. In the Tatra Hotel he raked his wedding ring along a polished table, gave a long speech about living in the margins. He wrote a poem in a Prague journal saying that he was no longer interested in rubbing his lips with red crepe paper. What he meant, I suppose, was that the more people were given power, the more they learned to despise the process that had given it to them—the country had changed, turned sour, lost its edge. Our cures were so much less powerful than our wounds.

Stränsky's old political friends stopped cal ing over to his flat, and his visits to the Ministry of Culture found him patrol ing the waiting rooms. He stopped lecturing in factory auditoriums, clubs, rural houses of culture. In the mil , he drank heavily.

“I assure you,” he said, “it's the vodka that's drinking me, but I've stil two fingers left.”

He spread his arms out wide in the air.

“Alcohol as biography.”

He finished the bottle.

In the early winter of ‘58, Elena left him. His marriage had been unraveling for a while—he had started to think that he was becoming a caricature in her cartoons, a smal fat man with an axe to grind. I found Stränsky in the corner of the mil , framed by windowlight. I had never seen him so silent.

He had punched the wal and the bandage on his hand was already stained with ink.

He stubbed a cigarette out into the cloth and pointed to two men who paced the street outside.

Over the next few weeks Stränsky grew gaunt and hol ow-eyed. He wandered the mil , making paper cuts in his hand. The cuts kept him awake so he could work. Sometimes he lit a match off his fingernail and inhaled the sulphur. He wouldn't al ow anyone to see his new poems and we didn't ask—it was better not to. I avoided him. It was only a matter of time. He al owed me to drift. It was his form of generosity—he would not drag me down with him. The hours passed like hours pass, yet they seemed longer hours than ever before. I plunged myself into creating posters, working with other artists and designers. My skil was turning out a four-color poster on the Zephyr printer. I could do it alone, in a matter of hours. Stränsky would sometimes come down the stairs in the mil and walk over the freshly printed posters. Then he would return upstairs, leaving fresh ink with his footsteps.

He stil delved into Zoli's work and reworked her poems, added words and fixed rhymes, checked them with her, fired back at those who said her work was formalistic and bourgeois because of her respect for nature, that she was drawing a social advantage from pain. He thought that the purpose of her poems was not to dazzle with any astonishing thought, but to make one single moment of existence unforgettable.

The three of us were to meet one Thursday at the Carlton Hotel. Under the hotel awning we stood smoking cheap tobacco, waiting for Stränsky to show up. Zoli looked radiant in a bright red dress, smal beads sewn into the fabric so that when she moved they caught the light, even beneath a shawl. Stränsky didn't appear. A grayness chil ed the air, a sense that winter was on its way. We rounded the corner and went down by the Danube. The ground was damp but she kicked off her shoes anyway. There was very little grace in how she did it, except that her legs were momentarily liquid as they lost the shoes. She bent down to pick them up and dangled them in her right hand.

“I haven't walked barefoot in years,” she said.

A motorboat puttered up the Danube and a searchlight caught us. Within seconds she had gone up the riverside track, near where the nuclear bunkers were being built, and she was bending down to put on her shoes once more. Another searchlight caught her as she leaned. A soldier recognized her and shouted her name. The searchlight threw her distorted shadow about her and the dress sparkled. I thought then that we would never get away from the circles that held us.

She whispered to me: “We can't be seen alone, Stephen. There's too much at stake now.”

I didn't believe her. I couldn't. The prospect of having nothing stunned me. The darkness seemed miles thick.

At home I fel asleep, too tired to dream: it was not yet my thirty-third birthday.

When the knock came on the door early in the morning— just as dawn was breaking over Bratislava—I knew exactly who it was. Six agents turned the room inside out. They knew al the answers to their questions already. They checked my credentials and fil ed in an extensive dossier.

They seemed upset at how housebroken my life was, how ordinary, how sanitized.

There was no radio trial for Stränsky. He was labeled a parasite for the most recent of his poems, and his confession appeared in the newspaper. I scoured it for clues to the man I had once worshiped. I kept seeing him in a cel , hoisted aloft, hands tied behind his back, a terrible splintering sound as the arms dislocated from the shoulder sockets. Rubber truncheons. Electrified baths. In the evenings I had visions of him walking along by the prison wal s, chil ed by the utter silence of what we had become.

I was cal ed into the Ministry and given a tour of the punishment cel s. They told me to file a weekly report about what I knew: I learned a whole new vocabulary of sidestepping.

Zoli was not arrested but instead she was brought in, for what they cal ed a consultation. I waited near the headquarters. She emerged with her face a perfect mask, only two dark paral el streaks down her cheeks gave her away. She was driven away by motorcar, her dark hair against the beige leather of the seats. I watched the car go.

She fel , then, into a period of prolonged silence. I searched, but couldn't find her. There were rumors that she had burned every bit of paper around her. Some said she had gone to Presov and would not be back. Yel ow leaves floated on the Danube. I worked on her poems but, without her voice surrounding the words, they were not the same. Plans for publication of the book were shelved—we needed her to be around for it to have its ful impact. After three months, she sent one of Conka's children to my door. The child had a message but it had been relayed through three others, and she could not remember the exact details. I asked for a letter, but the child stared at me dumbly and ran her fingers through her hair. In a rough rural accent she said that Zoli needed to talk to me, and she rattled off the names of some vil ages I presumed would roughly pinpoint her.

I drove Stränsky's bike so hard that the engine began to sputter. I stopped under an arch of cypress trees. With a pair of old binoculars I watched Zoli at the back of her caravan, strumming a violin bow against a metal sheet, an old quirk of hers, making patterns on the metal with sugar, hordes of children gathered around her, and I stood there, and it felt as if I were gripping her neck in my hand, and the strut ran al along her body, with the strings going down to the curve in her bel y, and I was chest-deep in her, lost.

The rumors picked up speed. If I had ransomed everything and given it to her it would stil never have been enough. Her people were not able to stand outside the true bend of gravity. The force was always downwards, even if the inclination was to raise them up. There was no single hour when it came about, but things had begun to slip: more talk of Law 74, the End of Nomadism, the Big Halt. Some ignored it. Others embraced it, saw it as a way to fil up their pockets and cal themselves Gypsy kings, a notion that meant nothing to Zoli and her people.