Zoli

Nothing happened. A smel of cabbage wafted out from a nearby restaurant. I could hear the buzz around me, the restaurant workers gathering at the door to watch, to smoke, to point. Austrian women in long brown coats passed with their heads cocked indifferently, but I could sense an excitement they did not want to betray. I listened to the sound of their shoes as they turned, nearly always six paces beyond. Just a moment's hesitation, and then they moved on. I had settled on silence as a form of communication, as good as any. A young man hunkered down on the ground in front of me and held out his palm. I placed the stones in his hand and asked him to rol them across the table. I told him to be calm, that he had nothing to be afraid of. Take my hand, I said, but do not look into my eyes. His own hands were smooth and unlined, his arms were thin and his shoulders narrow. His face, though, was generous, and on his wide nose were the red marks of one who usual y wears eyeglasses, so I said to him that I had a strong feeling that he had left something behind, perhaps it had something to do with distance. He shook his head, no. Wel , then, I said, maybe it has something to do with sight. His mouth twitched. Yes, he stut- tered, and he took the glasses from his pocket, put them on. I had a hold on him already. It was nothing more or less mysterious than that. I touched the scattered stones one by one and in-canted some gibberish above them.

I thought of myself then in a poor reflection of what I used to be and yet it did not disturb me. I felt at ease with the sham, and I began by asking: The heart or wealth?

The question meant nothing, yet seemed to have the right weight.

The heart, the boy replied immediately. I made the sign of the cross on his palm. He rol ed the stones a second time. He had been through dark times, I said. Yes. He was searching now for a different place. Yes. Some of it, I said, involved flight or movement. His eyes lit up and he leaned in closer. A city or town, I said, not far away. Yes, yes, Graz, he replied. There had been dark things in Graz, I said, and he had held on to the hand of

someone. Yes, he declared, and his eyes grew big. He said that he had a friend named Tomas who had died after the war, he had stepped on a tram line and his foot had been caught and he was kil ed, the tram bearing down on him, unstoppable. I closed my eyes, then asked him to rol the stones across the board again. There was awful sorrow at the death of Tomas, I said, and here I furrowed my brow. It was something to do with trains. Yes, yes, he told me, it was a tram! Tomas was suffering, I said, from something during the war, some awful moment, it had something to do with his uniform. Yes, you're right, the boy whispered, he had wanted to desert. He wanted to leave the army, I repeated, and he was afraid of what would happen, the disgrace. Yes, said the boy, his Uncle Felix. I stared into his eyes and told him that there were other secrets too, and here I deepened my brow. I touched the boy's cold hands and said, after a long silence, the name uncle Felix. But how do you know, said the boy, how on earth do you know that name?

I wanted to say that some things are more important than the truth, but I did not.

From this distance of four decades it may seem that I was not scared, but I can tel you now that my blood was coursing triple time, for I kept expecting troopers to round the corner, or some dead family spirit to lean in from a doorway to see what had happened to me, how I had betrayed al that I had ever known. I had no name for what I had become, it did not exist in either pain or pleasure.

Stil , the less I talked, the more the boy talked, and he was not even aware of what he was tel ing me. They never remember what they have said, chonorroeja, instead they wait for the wisdom which you have borrowed. He gave me his answers and I repeated them back and made them mine, he had no idea of my trickery. I could have dressed the dead in bearskins and taught them how to dance and stil he would have believed that they were there to console him. His voice became low and even. I said to him that he should carry bread in his pocket as protection against bad luck and that in the spirit world everything was fine for his good friend Tomas. I talked of goodness and purpose and vision. Keep things close to your heart, I said, and they wil be a power. The boy stood, reached deep in his pocket and took out a whole handful of coins, which he laid on the wooden board.

You cannot understand what this means to me, he said.

I pocketed the coins and hurried back to the dump. I found an old chair and set it up in the al eyway and by noontime I had four customers, each of whom paid successively more, relegated as they were to their own peculiar dooms.

There are times I must admit that I had a little giggle at the foot of their foolishness. Once a trooper came by, slapping his truncheon at his thigh.

For al his snarl he could have been a Hlinka, but I rol ed the riverstones for him and fil ed him with fol y about his good life, and he promised that he would leave me alone as long as I did not make too much of a fuss. I told him he should wear socks of a different color for good luck and the next day he walked past me, flicked a quick look at me, raised his trouser legs, one after the other, brown and blue, and marched on.

A number of weeks went by and I lost myself in the tel ing. Word of my talents spread. Many young men in particular came to visit me. I could see that something inside them had gone soft and loose and hopeless, but when they talked about it they briefly forgot it. I fil ed them with promises of cures and good days to come. I made a cross of wax mixed with charcoal and wrapped it in hair. I sewed two yel ow buttons together and tied them on a stick. These I cal ed my little corpses and I set them up around me; such ridiculous charms only gave weight to my words. They paid me good money for such foolishness and I sat watching the shadows reach out for other shadows as the idiots rol ed a few riverstones across a cupboard table. I had no mercy for them, it was not my pocket they were reaching into.

Mozol almost cried her eyes out onto her breast when I gave her al the money.

In the height of autumn, 1961, Mozol left on a canvas-covered truck. Her few possessions were stacked high in the air and her children stil higher upon them. Her husband was spread out over them to keep them from fal ing, but was already sleeping. She smiled, clasped my hands, and looked me in the eye. For many years I would remember that look, how close I came to tel ing her the truth. I stopped her several times as she gathered her possessions together and said: Mozol, I must tel you something. But she said, I am too busy, tel me later. I am quite sure she knew, she kissed my forehead when she left, then put my hand against her heart.

There is no single goodbye for us, chonorroeja. Ach Dev-lesa. Dza Devlesa. One is staying. One is leaving. Stay with God, go with God.

I saw the white mountains and how they lay against the sky, and I am not ashamed to tel you that the sight was terrifying.

You'l be next Marienka, said Doctor Marcus. She walked back towards her clinic with her hands tight behind her back.

How lost I felt then, daughter, how very alone.

Only people with desires can be fooled, and I had none. My friend was gone. The next morning I put on the same clothes that I had worn for months, took my makeshift table, and prepared to go into town. But then I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and let me tel it to you straight, daughter, I knew that in my shame I had lost every shred of dignity that I had ever worked to own. I do not seek to make a complicated dance of it, I had done these things for a purpose, but now the purpose had disappeared. I looked at myself and saw nothing that shored me up on the left shoulder and little to shore me up on the right. The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be.

Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, had become it.

I went down past the cathedral to Franz-Liszt Street. No sound came from the high shuttered windows. I set my things around me. The people gathered and I gave them al bad omens that they accepted and wore like masks. The next day, I walked beyond the red-white-red barrier like there was nothing unusual at al , but instead of going down by the dump road I went towards the mountains.

Last night I woke thinking Enrico was here. I rose and flamed the lamp but found only these pages. Out the window, I could see way down into the val ey. What is it about the cold that sharpens the edges of everything? Enrico used to say that the emptiest days are the loveliest.

Do you, daughter, recal the sight of your father coming home after a foray across the rocky part of the northern mountain when he had cut himself from a fal off a smal cliff? He was carrying animal medicines then—steroids, hormones, injections to sel on the other side. He had packed them solid into a giant rucksack, had even fil ed his pockets and socks, and then he trudged off to Maria Luggua. A blizzard blew up, a curtain of snow opening and closing around him. He was edging his way around the point in the mountain where not even the goats ventured. He stepped off into nothing but air, and his fal was broken only by an outcrop of rock. He landed in a drift and he looked down to see that his leg had been ripped open.

He contemplated the animal injections but didn't know which might help him with the pain. He had to dig himself out with a smal folding shovel strapped to the side of his rucksack. The blood fil ed UDhis snowboot. He could onlv recognize where he was by the feel of the trees—the further down he went on the slope the less gnarled the bark became. When he reached home, he dropped the rucksack, and simply said: Put the kettle on, Zoli, I'm freezing.

He pul ed off the snowboot, put it by the stove and said it had been a very bad evening for a walk. He had been gone three whole days.

I can see him now, his thin nose, his wide mouth, the lines grooved deep in his face, his eyes half-closed against the glare of the snow.

When the new trade laws came in, there was no longer any need for medicines or cigarettes or coffee or seeds to be brought across the mountain, and he had always refused to bring dynamite for the Tyroleans who were blowing up pylons and causing havoc. He stopped his trade, just as suddenly as he had started, and he seldom walked the mountain anymore, except on festive days, and he made his living instead at the mil house, and when the mil house went the way of everything else, he bought it, moved with us in here, kept the wheel running, and did whatever handyman jobs he could find around the val ey. Two or three times a day he stood in the doorway, looking out over the weather above the mountain.

He could have walked out blindfolded and stil found his way there.

I have loved your father, pure and simple; his and yours are the only lives I have never betrayed.

The first truck to ever give me a lift belonged to a fruit farmer. He wore a black suit. His cheeks were red and newly shaven, his eyes bloodshot.

He knew that I was running from something, but at first he did not say a word. I sat tight in the seat as the gears clanked and the engine rumbled into life. The farmer asked where I was going and when I didn't answer he shrugged and said he was on his way to the market a few towns down the road and I was welcome to join him so long as I did not make a fuss. I feigned being mute once again and the farmer sighed deeply as if it were the oldest trick, which it was, and one that has always failed me, as much as looking over my shoulder.

Scared of something? he asked.

The hedges shot by, trees and windmil s, and I realized just how strange it had been to have walked so far, things being so much different at speed. I stil did not recal how I had walked in the haze after the judgment. I kept that part of my mind blank, I could not face it, how I had crossed the border first from Slovakia and then from Hungary, and then to Austria. Nor did I think of where I was going. Paris seemed as good, or as ridiculous, a place as any.

After a while it began to rain. The windscreen wipers were broken but the farmer had made a rope that he could pul from inside the truck. He showed me how to do it with exaggerated movements and it made me happy, this smal task. I tugged the rope from one side of the dashboard to the other. The fruit farmer complimented me, but I noticed that he had opened his window and was smoking furiously. So he thinks I smel , I thought.

I wanted to laugh. I rol ed down my window and felt the cold wind blowing. We went west in open country under the shadow of the mountains. The road was long and straight and the trees snapped to attention. The mountains lay white and enormous in the distance. It was curious to me that the closer we came to them the further away they seemed to drift. The farmer drove with one hand on the steering wheel and looked across at me every now and then.

You know those Russians put another satel ite up in the air? he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about, nor for what reason he said it.

You can see them at night like smal stars moving, he said.

I made a complicated series of hand gestures and finished by scrunching my fingers down into the palm of my hand, like grinding a tooth that might once have laid there, long ago. The fruit farmer shook his head and sighed. He steered with his knee and lit yet another cigarette. Two streams of pale blue smoke came from his nostrils and then he leaned across and passed the cigarette to me. I shook my head, no, but another voice said take it, Zoli, for crying out loud take it. He shrugged and held the cigarette near the window, and I watched as it reddened and burned down. Sparks flew from his fingers. The smel of tobacco made my head spin. That was one of my first lessons about the West—they do not ask twice. You should always say yes. Say yes before they even suggest that you might say no, say yes even before they ask you to say yes.

The road sped beneath us. For the first time I began to think I was truly in a different country. I turned to look at a family col ecting blackberries at the side of the road until they became smal dots in the distance. Tal silos gave way to church steeples and, near the outskirts of a large town, the farmer pul ed into the roadside verge. Right, here we are, he said. He climbed out, lifted a tarp and handed me some apples. I've always had a passion for the traveling life, he said. I nodded. Just steer clear of the Kieberer, he said, and you'l be al right.

For whatever reason I forgot my mute ways and asked: What's a Kieberer?

He did not blink an eye and said: The gendarmes.

Oh, thank you, I said.

He laughed long and hard and then said: I thought as much.

I felt my body tighten and I yanked the door handle, but he threw his head back and laughed again.

He drove the truck alongside me as I tried to walk away along the verge of the road. Traffic was zooming past and blaring their horns. To one side was a grazing field, the other a stoneworks. When I quickened my pace the fruit farmer quickened too. He was rol ing tobacco with two hands and steering the truck with his knees, but then he brought the truck to a halt, sealed the paper with his tongue, leaned out the window and gave me two hand-rol ed cigarettes. I took them straightaway.

I'm fond of escape stories, he said.

He clanged through the gears and drove off in a cloud. I stood watching and thought: Wel , here I am in Austria, with two hand-rol ed cigarettes and a man waving me goodbye from a battered fruit truck, if ever I had four guesses of where I would be after so many years, al of them would be wrong.

That night I found some lovely gardens, dense and private, to sleep in. A hard breeze was approaching, announced in advance by the clapping of house shutters. Rain came and I huddled against a wal . I woke to find that I had spent the night beneath a monument to war. Stanislaus used to say that wars were fought especial y for the carvers of stone, and I thought about the truth of that, when in every smal vil age of Europe you can see Christ or Soldier hammered out in stone. But who, on a battlefield, chonorroeja, wants a monument? Who, in the middle of his fighting, thinks he wil one day be in the hands of a mason?

I cursed my old poems and went down to the town square— I did not even know what town I was in—and told a series of fortunes for a paltry sum that brought me enough for a train ticket. A shiny train stood on the tracks. Questions rattled in my mind. Where could I go? How could I break a border without a passport? What place might accept me? I tried pushing these thoughts aside. I would buy a ticket west, that was al . I was halfway through the queue at the ticket window when two gendarmes appeared. One lifted my chin with the cold end of his truncheon. He turned and whispered to his col eague. I had a fair idea that they would make their own statue of me, so when the gendarme looked over again, this Gypsy woman was gone once more, on foot.

You do not cross the mountains in Austria, you fol ow the val eys and the rivers. It is like you are held in the clasp of a breast, not always a kind breast, but one that wil guide you along anyway.

My river was the Mürz, clear and leaping. I walked for many days, hugging the bank. On the floodplain there were a few smal huts where I could lie down and sleep for a few hours, sometimes on swales of straw. I watched the circles of a hawk swooping down for food in the tilted grass. I made a canopy above my head with sticks and an old cloth bag to keep out rain and sunshine. When I was forced to move from the riverbank and fol ow the direct line of the road, there were always a few kind drivers who brought me a distance down the val ey. I knew that I was going west by the fal and rise of the sun. Flocks of wild geese flew overhead, and I saw myself as one who lagged behind their formations. In places the road became wide and ambitious with more lanes than I had ever seen before, although, where possible, I stil kept to the smal back-ways or the riverbank. Voices rang out from steepled churches. Laughter and good smel s spil ed from restaurants. In the smal er vil ages, some of the Austrians taunted me—Gyp, thief, Black Pharaoh—though just as many raised their hats in greeting, or sent their children after me with cheese, bread, cake. A boy put me on a scooter and promised to take me around a railway tunnel but he did not, he simply rode his scooter up and down in front of his friends who jeered and taunted. I pretended to put a spel on him and he stopped—they are so fearful, sometimes, of their own invented fears.

Once I passed a burning house in the night with the family outside. I returned and gave to them what little food I had, some bread, some strips of chicken meat. They did not throw the food to the ground as I expected, they just huddled down, prayed, and thanked me, and it struck me then that the world is as varied in goodness as it is in evil.

I had acquired the confidence of a blind woman—I could have stepped down the road with my eyes ful y closed. I was fol owing the grass along the busy way to Kapfenberg, Brück, Leoben, when the mountains began to rise, higher even than the biggest of the Shivering Hil s. I paused at the path heading south, and the other heading north, and took, like many times before, the wrong one. I walked north along a different river, the mountains crowding in closer, the trees on the cliff faces above me, steep rocks held back by giant nets. The traffic whizzed past and it was then that I saw signs for a tunnel, a red sign with a white border. Nothing petrified me more—even when I was a child I refused to go into such darkness. I looped backwards and tried to find a smal er road, but there was no way around. In a roadside petrol station I made inquiries of an old man who said that there were roads that would lead me over the mountains, but I would surely perish. The safest way to get through the tunnel was with the Lastwagenfahrer, the truck drivers.

They lined up behind the petrol station and talked across from truck to truck in languages as coarse as they were varied. I was not sure if they would look kindly on a Romani woman traveling alone, but the truth is that I was so deeply scared of the tunnels I would have done anything to avoid walking through them. For two days I turned and returned to that station before I bought myself, to my shame, a bottle to put me under a spel . The bottle was labeled with green vines and tasted of cough mixture, but it gave me courage to walk in amongst the drivers time after time. I climbed into the trucks, brought my knees to my chest, stared straight ahead. There were many tunnels, of course. Often they were only just being built and we would sit for hours, but the drivers, up until the last, were good to the core. They gave me cigarettes and sometimes the last of their food. They showed me pictures of their children and one al owed me to take the smal statue he cherished of Saint Jude. Later I sold it, to my shame, for food.

At the end of each tunnel I got out of the truck to clear my head and bid goodbye to the men who often told me that I could go further with them if I wanted. But my spirit had been put in my feet, chonorroeja, and I felt safe there, and wanted to walk again, and I thought, Am I cursed to this?

I kept my head down and for the most part I stil stayed in the val eys and slept in the abandoned sheds down on the val ey floor. At times I balanced on narrow tree trunks laid across streams so I could find shelter in a light forest. When I approached the tunnels I bought myself a bottle and went then to wherever the trucks might stop.

It seemed to me that there were two different worlds, that of trees and that of engines: one seemed clear, the other dark.

Sometimes when I got to a vil age there would be a few of our own people on the outskirts. For my own safety—I did not want to talk to my own for fear of pol uting them—I could easily shoo the children off with curses. I remember, though, a settlement on the edge of a smal town in the plains beneath the central Alps. A few young boys could be seen through the low trees. I did not want to be seen by any adults, but a woman came over from a wel carrying water and she greeted me first in German and then Romani. Her dialect was hard to fathom, but in her delight she dropped the bucket and blessed me three times and then took me to their camp. I could not get away, she had such a grip on my arm. The children danced around me, tugging at my clothes. I became so caught up with them that I sprinkled a metal sheet with a pile of sand and used a saw to show them how the sand jumped. They giggled and rol ed about in joy. The women cooked me potato pancakes and fil ed my cup with fruit juice, I tel you the truth, there was never such generosity.

Five girls were brought out to dance. They wore identical green dresses with corded sashes of white tied around the waist. Listening to the music, I was happy, but imagine my raw fear, daughter, when they announced that there were three of our own from near Trnava who had been staying with them for some years now. They would be back in the evening from their work in an automobile factory. I tried to break away but could not, the force of their friendliness was too strong. They even gave me some old clothes and washed my own for me. I feared for the evening and, sure enough, when the men came along, the first word that came out of their dark mouths was Zoli.

Nobody had cal ed me this name in such a long time that it had the strength of a slingshot.

And yet they did not cower or retreat, nor spit or curse me. Instead they raised my name to the air. They were of settled folk from out near the chocolate factory, but they had left shortly after the war. They had seen me singing a few times but did not know of my time as a poet. It was soon clear to me that they knew nothing of what had happened in the judgment, nor even what occurred in the last few years to our people, the resettlement, the laws, the burnings. They had been turned back at the border several times now, these men. They stil knew routes across the Danube, they would get back eventual y to Slovakia they said, there was no other place they wanted to be. One always loves what is left behind—

and I feared I would break their hearts if I were to tel them the truth about what had been done to our people, although I knew that sooner or later in the evening the questions would come to me, deep hard questions that I would be cal ed on to answer.

The mind can do anything it wants. Al along I had blocked out song, it was a denial that came from deep inside. The choice to forget is a way of surviving. Yet at that moment I knew that, to survive, I had to sing once again. The people crowded around me, a lantern was turned on, bottles were passed. I knew I would never sing one of the songs I had written down—that was the pact I had made with myself—but I could sing the old songs, the ones I had known as a child. I took a deep breath. The first notes were awful. The people cowered. Then I relaxed and I felt the music move through me. 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. The old horse is standing

though he is not sleeping, he always has a watching eye, a watching eye, a watching eye. If you have the money you can think what you like. I do not suppose that you wil doubt it when I say that there were tears in the eyes of the people that evening and they hugged me to their hearts like I was their very own sister. I thought, I am pol uting them and they do not know, I am bringing shame down upon them and they have no idea.

It brought a sharp knife to my heart and yet what was I to do? How many smal betrayals would there be for me? It is rules not mirrors that steal away our souls.

They danced that night, the firelight catching the red thread in their black dresses. In the morning, when I stole away, I al owed myself to sing a few of the songs as I went. They surprised me with their beauty and carried me along. Once or twice I would hear some of my own songs in my head, those I had written down, but I forced them out, I did not want them.

The road hooked west. A family stopped for me and the man jerked his thumb and told me to get into the back with his children. The children unrol ed the window and I felt the warm wind blowing on my face. There were nose prints of a dog on the rear window, but no animal. I did not ask, though I could see tearmarks on the faces of the children, and I had an idea that they had lost their pet. Red, I thought. To gladden them I began to hum the tune of the old horse song. The man turned in his seat and gave a smal smile, though the mother kept looking straight ahead. I sat back and hummed some more and he said he liked the humming and I surprised myself with song. My voice tipped out into the wind and back over the hundreds of roads I had already traveled.

When the man dropped me off outside a cafe the children cried, and the mother gave me money. The father pinched his hat by the crown, tipped it to me and said that he always had a warm heart for the outdoor life. In the tanned leather of his face, he smiled.

You sing wel , he said to me.

I had not heard these last words in such a long time and I mouthed them in the distance as I left the town for the hinterland. Later I sat, lit myself a fire, and watched the riverspiders on the water. They moved quickly across the surface, uncanny, ancient, leaving no circles nor ripples, as if they were part of the water itself.

It was many days later, and some towns further on, that I met my final truck driver.

He pul ed the truck over to the side of the road, near a laneway, where some boys were playing, and said that a little kiss would not go astray. I said to him that I would tel him his fortune, but he said to me that he knew it already, it was plain to see, it was there in front of his eyes, it involved a little kiss. His face was greasy and shining with sweat. When my hand hit the doorhandle he grabbed the other and he said yet again that a little thanks was needed. I yanked the handle but he clamped hard on my neck and pushed me down, his thumbs deep in the hol ow of my throat. I prayed for al my strength and hauled back my fist and blackeyed him, but he just laughed. Then he gritted his teeth and hit my forehead with his.

Things went black. I saw myself then as Conka's mother, her fingernails as they were pli-ered out. He ripped al the buttons off what I wore and his hands went to my second dress and he tore that open too. It is no long story, what I tel . I watched his hands. He went soft-faced and gentle for a moment, and said: Come on, woman, one little kiss. I knew then, as he was stroking my shoulder and the side of my face, that what I had stolen was what would save me.

The blade went into his eye socket with an ease not far from butter.

I was out of the truck, hauling al that I had, and he was stumbling around, shouting the whore took my eye out, she took my fucking eye out. Indeed the knife was in his hand and his eye was a bloody mess. Some boys gathered around him and began to shout and then they pointed at me excitedly. I ran down the narrow laneway, looking for a turn. I passed a wooden shed and pul ed back one of the rotting boards, crept through. Fresh shards of wood fel to the ground where I pul ed the plank back and I knew I had left a marker for them to fol ow, but I had no time. Loud footfal s in the al eyway. Inside the shed were piles of broken slates, some farm machinery, and a blue automobile. I tested the door handles but they were locked tight. I hunkered down at the back of the car and pul ed the silver latch. The trunk flew up. I flung my bundle of possessions inside, then looked about in terror and climbed in. I held the lid of the boot so it would not close. From the shed came the ripping of a plank. The boys shouted and banged around. I heard them tug the handles and I was quite sure I was finished.

When I think of it now it was such bare stupidity, but when they left the shed—one shouting that he had seen me running across the fields—I lay back and cried, chonorroeja. Would things always be like this? I pul ed the lid of the boot down but lay part of my blanket over the latch so it wouldn't shut me in. I curled up against the dark.

In the morning, I woke as the boot-lid bounced up and down.

My ordeal with the onyx knife did not land me in prison, as you might expect. The man who found me in his car wore a smart col ar and tiepin. He stared in at me, then slammed the lid of the boot down. As we drove, I could hear him muttering amid the rattle of what must have been rosary beads. I was sure he would lead me to the courthouse, or to the officials, or to yet another camp, but when the boot was opened up, an hour or more later, a young man in a black suit and white col ar looked down on me. I blinked against the light, clutched at my torn clothes.

Al yours, said the man with the tiepin.

I was terrified, but the young priest guided me along the pebbled path towards a house. I had heard much about priests, and knew how easily they turn into bureaucrats, but something about Father Renk stopped me from running. He sat me down at a smal table in the kitchen of his house.

He was a young man, with a little badger streak of gray at the temples. He ‘d known many Gypsies in his life, he said, some good, some bad, he did not make judgments, but how in the world did I end up in the back of a motorcar? I began to invent a story but he said, sharp and sudden: The truth, woman. I told him the story, and he said that indeed the police probably were searching for me, but not to worry, I had been driven a good distance away. He had dealt with displaced persons before, in the nearby Peggetz camp.

There's a bed if you want it, he said. He showed me the stairs to a smal room at the top of the house where I would be al owed to sleep. In return I was asked to clean the floors of the church, to keep the sacristy in order, and to attend his services—simple daily tasks that were more difficult for me than they should have been. In the end I stayed for three months and I stil recal those days, how unusual they were, ful of cloths and dishes and furniture polish. For al my worldliness, the simple mechanics of a vacuum cleaner stumped me and I had never before used bleach. I made holes in the young priest's shirts. I left an iron sitting on a tea towel and burned the ironing board, but Father Renk found it al amusing. He sat in the kitchen and watched me and chuckled and once even took the vacuum himself, singing as he guided it down the hal way. There were long cold mornings spent listening to his homilies about peace—he stood at his altar and said to his parishioners that we must live together in fel owship, one and al , that it was a simple thing to do, black, white, Austrian, Italian, Gypsy, it did not matter. How little he knows, I thought, but I did not say a word, I went about my cleaning duties and kept my head low.

One night he saw me, not kneeling, but sitting at the altar. He sat across from me in the front pew and asked what it was I was searching for. To go across the mountain, I replied. He said it was a good proposition but only God knew where it would take me to. I replied that God and I were hardly friends, though the Devil seemed to like me sometimes, a notion which made him turn to the window and smile.

Over the next few days Father Renk made several phone cal s, until one morning he said to me: Pack up, Marienka, come on. Pack what? I said.

He grinned and put money in the palm of my hand, then drove me south through beautiful countryside, past vil ages where people waved at the priest's car. On the underside of a bridge was a sign: One Tyrol. Up we drove, through bends that seemed never to end, hairpins and switchbacks, so that it felt like I might turn around and meet myself. With every meter there was something new to take my breath away—the mountains sheer and gray, a flock of sheep taking the whole mountain road with ease, the sudden shadow of a buzzard darkening the roadside grass.

We stopped in the little vil age of Maria Luggua where Father Renk walked the twelve stations of the cross, blessed me for my journey, and then left me in a vil age cafe with a man who hardly looked at me from over the rim of his cup.

Across the mountain? he said in German, though I could tel straightaway it was not his language.

I nodded.

There are two things in this part of the world, he said. God and money. You are lucky that you found the first.

He had never taken a person across before and he did not cherish the idea, and would only do so if I could carry a sack on my back. I knew nothing about smuggling, or contraband, or taxes, but I said I could carry my weight and more in order to get to Paris. He chuckled at me and said, Paris? Of course, I said. Paris? he said again. He could not stop himself from laughing and I thought him a detestable thing in his leather waistcoat, with his stringy hair and his lined face. It's the wrong way, he said, unless you want to climb the mountains for another year or two. He drew a map for me on the back of his hand where he showed me Paris and then he showed me Italy and then he showed me Rome. I am not a fool, I said to him. He drank his smal dark coffee and said, I'm not either. He stamped his cigarette out on the floor, rose, and didn't look back.

Down the street, he final y turned and pointed at me and told me that my luck only ran as far as my friendship with the priest.

Over the other side of the mountain and that's al . Do you understand me? he said.

Three sackloads of syringes were what he carried the night he brought me across the border. He did not, in the end, al ow me to carry anything.

We silently set out along the val ey floor, the moonlight blue on the riverstones. We waded through a high meadow where the grass reached above my waist. He had instructed me that there were two types of troopers on either side of the border, and they were strung along the hil s at various intervals. The Italians, he said, hated him most of al . You know you could be arrested? he said. I replied that it was hardly a new prospect for me, I knew the difference between a door and a key. We stopped at the edge of a forest. You're ful of pepper, aren't you? he said. He shook his head and sighed, then looped a string around my waist which he tied to his own belt. He said he was sorry to have to treat me like a donkey but in the darkness I could get lost. The string was only long enough to stretch out and touch his shoulder. He was surprised that I kept pace with him and only once or twice did the string tighten around my waist. Halfway up he turned and raised his eyebrows and smiled at me.

His shirtfront pulsed, but I thought little of him yet, chonor-roeja, there was no skip yet in my heart for him.

The moon disappeared, the darkness was ful , and there seemed more star than sky. We stayed away from any of the paths or dirt roads that ran up the mountainside, and instead we kept to the trees, feeling the hard pul of our legs against the steep ground. He grew at ease with the silence between us and only once on the ascent did he turn quickly at a noise. He put his hand on my head and forced me to hunker low. Far off, in the trees, two flashlights shone beams at a steep ledge, the lights sweeping the rock. It struck me that we might have to climb, but we turned sideways, and went quietly through the forest, and away. The climb grew ever upwards until the trees stopped. A long run of rocky scree loomed in front of us.

Be careful with the rocks, he said, they're slippy. We went onwards, cresting the mountain, but, just over the top, he turned and said that the tough part was stil ahead of us, the carabinieri had a grudge against him, and they would like nothing more than his capture.

For the descent he untied the string and shifted the weight of the contraband on his back. The water grew louder the further down we went, fol owing the course of large gray boulders. Rain began to fal and I slipped in the mud. He lifted me. He said he knew that sooner or later my balance would become undone, but I had no idea what he meant.

Are you not scared of troopers? he asked.

I built the sentence slowly in my mind to lay the ful impact of it on him, as it was something Stanislaus had been fond of saying a long time ago, and I wanted to leave one good thing with this strange man, Enrico, and so I said in German: I would happily lick a cat's arse, my heart's friend, if it got the taste of troopers out of my mouth.

He reared back and laughed.

I stayed that night in the hut he had built. He had made latches on the door from the remnants of tires and the planks were stained with black tar.

The windows were smal . Only one piece of furniture looked out of place—a rol top desk crammed with papers, some of them watermarked. He gave me blankets and a carafe of cold mountain water, stacked a few provisions on the table, and said I was welcome to al of it, smoked meat, dried vegetables, matches, condensed milk, even a lantern. He left the hut, stil in the darkness, to complete whatever business he had in the vil age of Sappada and the door clicked behind him.

I had crossed yet another border and was now in Italy.

The sight of the bed fil ed me with happiness and I fel crosswise on it from one corner to the other. Outside, the river babbled in its fastness. I quickly fel asleep. I knew he had come back in, for I saw the mark of wet bootprints upon the floor. It must have been hours later, for the light was intense and yel ow, when I heard the rattle of his breath in a nearby chair. He mumbled some words in Italian to what he thought was my sleeping form and then he left again, shutting the door gently behind him.

Al of this is to tel you, chonorroeja, that the idea of going any further no longer pulsed in me. There is an old Romani saying that the river is not where it starts or ends, but it seemed that I had certainly come to the crest of something, I had thrown away the idea of Paris, and the shape of my walking had changed. I replaced the blankets, packed the food he had left me, kissed the table in thanks, then walked out of the hut. I fol owed a val ey road for five ful days. I could not help but bring my mind around to Enrico, how he had not questioned me about anything at al and yet it had not seemed a lack of curiosity or a dislike. The further I got from him, the more he came back to me. He once said to me, in later years, so much later, that the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.

On a rainy day in the mountains, I heard the sound of rol ing tires. He pul ed up behind me in a ruined jeep, cal ed to me, and said perhaps I was a

little tired, and I said, yes, and he told me that I was welcome to get into the jeep for shelter. I said it hardly looked like shelter since there was no roof. He shrugged and said: You can always pretend. I looked out over the mountains, then walked across, got in the seat beside him. Dry, isn't it?

he said. We turned around in the road, with the rain lashing us sideways. I huddled down against the blowing heater. The road opened up before us and I suppose this is where my traveling story ends.

We went to Paoli's cafe where Paoli looked across the counter, shook his head, grinned, and told us to sit.

I asked Enrico why he had not asked me anything about being a Gypsy and he asked me why I had never asked him anything about not being one.

It was perhaps the most beautiful answer I have ever heard in my life.

We knew each other slowly, in terror and excitement, drew apart, stepped backwards. Sometimes I caught sight of him in the dim lamplight and he seemed closer to the shadows than he was to me. We clasped in an awkward embrace and sat for a long time without moving, but the distance grew shorter, unfolded, and the desire never wore itself out. It seemed to me that the world had tried me and final y showed me joy. For a long time we found in ourselves little to say and we learned to be together without speaking. The moment we lived in was enough. During the night he slept with my hair across him and

I watched his ribcage move up and down. The mornings came and he stepped to the stove, brought it to life. There was a spot of soot where he had touched my cheek. At night I told him of Petr, of my days with Swann and Stränsky, of what had happened between us—he simply sat and listened until a sharp line of windowlight opened the morning.

When he left, sometimes for days on end, I would wait up without ever sleeping. I was not sheltered from despair, and there were times I wondered how in the world I could survive in such a place, days I was sure I would just walk off into the hil s, disappear, keep moving, to no particular place, or purpose, but then he came back and the light opened up again, and it seemed to me that happiness had returned, unasked. It was hard to remember what waiting had once meant.

There were al those years I had spent in the caravan— strange, when I looked out, not to see any horses.

Enrico was not an easy nor a simple man. He did not like where he had come from and he hid it for a long time. It had never struck me that wealth could fester, but Enrico fought his. I final y learned that his was a family of famous judges and lawyers, of wealth and renown, even sympathy. He tried to leave it behind, the fine houses of Verona, the open spaces and courtyards, the white statues in the garden, but I suppose when you leave something behind it wil always fol ow you. What Enrico belonged to was nothing more or less than the mountains. He had already gone, at a young age, through a series of jobs in hotels, chairlifts, restaurants, but he real y only wanted to be alone in the peaks, and so he had found a hut on his country's side of the border, sheltered by a hil and trees kept smal by winter. He built the hut using money from odd jobs. He had few visitors and was known by some as Die Welsche, the stranger, though in truth he himself said that he was just a citizen of elsewhere.

Enrico knew he would stay in the mountains the day he gave his leather suitcase to the local cobbler and asked him to make a pair of shoes from them.

He lived beyond the reach of most people and grew to enjoy what Paoli cal ed his fine idleness. He was liked, your father— he brought his medicines across the mountain, kept himself quiet, and had no time for the bombers who wanted to level the telegraph poles in the name of Tyrol.

He stayed away from his family, sought nothing from them, and went hungry when it was time to go hungry. He did not use this as a badge of sacrifice, he was no saint, far from it. He said years later how stupid it had been to deny their existence, and yet it was my own difficulties that eventual y forced him back to his family.

I had been in his hut for just three months when the cara-binieri came up the road. Fresh uniforms, white belts, epaulets. It was like watching the approach of sadness. Don't say a word, Enrico whispered. They marched in, put me in handcuffs, stood me at the door, and then gave your father a good beating in front of my eyes. Afterwards he took the first train he could back to Verona, in his old clothes and white bandages, and, though he never told me what he gave in return—it was the first time ever he had asked a favor of his father—he returned with a document that released me from the clutches of the cara-binieri. Within a few days a car arrived with a court officer and handed me a blue passport, said it was compliments of the Italian government. He left without another word. I asked Enrico what it had taken for this, but he shrugged, said it was nothing, that what was an ordeal for me was an easy task for him. Yet even then I knew that it had taken some of the life from him— the carabinieri had never before known where, nor which family, he came from. It also pierced some of the Tyroleans who doubted him now, but Enrico said it was not his choice to care, I had the passport and that was enough—a man would always be traitor to one thing if he truly believed in another.

He laced his boots and continued his work, smuggling goods across the mountains. He knew that if ever they found him he would spend his time in jail—he would not ask for a second favor. It eventual y happened one spring and he was away for a three-month stretch. I thought my heart would scale the wal s of the hut, chonorroeja. I lay awake listening to you climb in my body.

And so it happened.

One afternoon, Enrico lifted a fine suit from a wooden chest, blue with very thin pinstripes. He held it up to the light and said: I hate this thing. He rol ed it in a bal and wrapped it in brown paper. We're going to Verona, he said. He had bought me a fine dress though it was two sizes too short and it showed my new size. It is hard to forget the oldest of customs, blood laws, territory, silence, but he would take no part in them. He put his hand to my stomach and grinned like a fool. We were driven to Bolzano by Paoli who whistled al the way. On the train Enrico ran his hands together nervously, and then al of a sudden tried to explain his family, their history, but I hushed him. Right there in the carriage he dressed in the suit, the dark tan of his neck sharp against the pale white of his body. We sat, the countryside clicking by. Once or twice he stood and laughed out loud: Here I am! he said. Here I am, going home!

A few hours later we were walking down a wide laneway together. The house in Verona put me in mind of Budermice, the light so clean it felt like it had been wrung through water.

It was the occasion of Enrico's brother's wedding and so his family was there, some outside on the lawn, others drinking on the veranda, the women arguing in preparation for supper. His father grinned and smashed a glass when we appeared. His brothers cheered. His mother, your grandmother, was a refined woman—but not so refined, chonorroeja, that she couldn't eventual y tel me so. I held my dark head high and took it in my stride, I was not going to hide in the corners.

A feast was spread out on giant silver plates, glasses of the best wine, trays of the freshest olives, the finest meat, the most colorful and exotic of fruits. I thought to myself this was just a flicker and I was going to enjoy it, who knows how long it might last. Enrico stayed close to my shoulder. He

said, Here's Zoli. Nothing more. I was glad—with him, my name was enough. More wine flowed. An opera singer stood up for an aria. We applauded and Enrico's father winked across the tables at me. He took my hand afterwards and walked me through the grounds and said that he would never know his son properly, but he had also never known him to put on such a suit, he was glad for it, something in him had shifted. You're a good influence, he said with a grin. Enrico's mother glared at us from across the lawn. I dared to smile at her and she turned away. Enrico and I were given rooms at opposite ends of the house, but he entered through my doorway late that night, drunk and singing, and fel asleep at the end of the bedspread. He woke in the morning with his tongue dry and his head thumping, and said we would be greeted at death together so why should we wait—it was his way of saying he wanted to marry.

On the train journey back, we stepped across a line while the train was stil moving and he clasped me to him, that was al the formality he wanted.

It is only a few years ago now, 1991, I think—the label of years seem so little to me now—that the Wal fel , though perhaps it has never been a wal so much as an idea grown away from its own simplicity.

We walked down from the mil house to Paoli's shop, Enrico and I, and we watched the television pictures from Berlin— how strange to think of those young men using hammers to break apart the bricks at the exact same time as Paoli cursed his little coffee machine that never worked. The scenes from Berlin seemed to me so much the work of my grandfather and his strong hatred of cement. Paoli kept the coffee shop open late that night, and your father walked me home with his arm across my shoulder.

Wil you ever go back? he asked.

Of course my answer was just another disguise for yes. There were many nights when I had dreamed myself into the wide open spaces of my old life and the people who were now just shadows. Each year he would ask me again and so, four years later, your father borrowed just enough money for the trip from his brother in Verona. You wil recal the time—you stayed with Paoli's family while we took the train al the way from Bolzano. We went clear across two countries and stopped in Vienna, your mother grown old in her headscarf, your father in his threadbare suit. The streets were so clean that they surprised me with the occasional piece of litter, a cigarette butt, a bottle cap. We bought our tickets for Bratislava but stayed one night in what was once a fine hotel on a street near the railway station, Kolschitzkygasse, where the streetlamps seemed to curtsy. There was a mirror on the dressing room table over which I draped the bedcover in order not to look at our reflections. We lay completely stil . Your father had bought me an array of colored beads, which I intertwined around my waist for a belt, it was the closest I wore to the clothes of my old life. I cinched down on the beads and could hear the glass chipping as I tightened. The hotel was two lifetimes old. The dim hum of elevator cables sounded and the front desk bel clanged. There was cornicework high in the corners. Molding a handspan beneath the waterstains. I made pictures from the col ision of stains and created my old self there. I stil was not sure if I could ever make the journey back to the place I had been a child.

Enrico did not say a word when I stepped down off the train the fol owing day and shook my head, saying: Sorry.

He turned his hat inside out and punched a smal dent in it, and I knew ful wel that he was thinking of the money he had borrowed. We walked through the city of Vienna like two old piano notes floating, and later that evening took a bus out to the countryside for an hour or more, to Braunsberg. We walked up the hil overlooking the Danube and in the distance I could see the towers of Bratislava standing gray against the skyline. It looked like a thing made of child's building blocks, my old country. The river curled away from it. The wind blew strong. Enrico squeezed my hand and did not ask me what I was thinking of, but I turned away, I did not know an answer. It seemed to me that our lives, though mostly gone and getting smal er, were stil large with doubt. The distant towers went in and out of cloud shadow. I held Enrico's arm and leaned against his shoulder. He spoke my name and that was al .

I could not go back there, not then, I could not make myself cross that river, it was too difficult for me, and he walked me back down the steep hil with his arm around me, and I thought us both a part of the silence.

The next morning we stood in the train station. I was tempted to make the journey as I watched the letters clacking on the signboards, but instead we took the train in the direction of what I could, I suppose, now cal home. Your father laid his head against my shoulder and slept, he sounded for al the world like an old horse wheezing. Later he found me a berth on the train and put me to sleep and he climbed up beside me. That whole journey back to Italy, I wondered what I had missed, or what, perhaps, it was better to have missed. I feared my old country would be the same, and yet I also feared it would be terribly changed. How can I explain that there are times we hold on, even to the terrors? But if I speak the truth, it would have been the lake that I would have visited, along the road to Presov, the dark groves where we played the harps, and the smal laneway where we danced at Conka's wedding—those days shone in my head like a bright coin.

There are times I stil miss the crowded days and being old does not shelter me from sadness. Once I was guilty of thinking that only good things could happen; then I was guilty of thinking they would never happen again. Now I wait and make no judgment. You ask what it is that I love? I love the recol ection of Paoli each time I hear the shop bel sound. I love the dark coffee brewed up by Paoli's daughter, Renata, who sits at the counter in her dangling earrings and painted fingernails. I love the accordionist, Franz, in the cafe corner shielding his bad teeth with his hand. I love the men who argue about the value of things they don't real y like. The children who stil put playing cards in the spokes of their wheels. The whistle of skis.

The tourists who climb out of their cars and hold a hand to their eyes and then climb back in again, blind. The blue wool mittens of the children. Their laughter as they run down the street. I love that in the orchards the fruit trees grow out of mud. I love the strol through woods in autumn. The deer walking up the narrow switchbacks, the lowering of their heads to drink, the black center of their very eyes. I love the wind when it blows down from the peaks. The young men in open ragged shirts down by the petrol station. The fires that burn in homemade stoves. The brass catches worn on the doorway. The old church where roofbeams lie noiselessly in rubble, and even the new church, though not its mechanical bel . I love the rol top desk where the papers have not changed. I love to recal when you were one year old and you took your first steps and you fel on your bottom and cried, surprised at the hardness of the wood floor. The first stomp of your tomboy foot. The day you came in with the firewood and stood in the doorway, almost tal er than I, and you said that you would be leaving soon, and I asked where and you replied to me: Exactly. I love the dawn of al these questions, they come around again and again and again. I love the winters that have crossed me and even the angry weather that has passed over us al , and our times of silence on those days when Enrico was not home, when I was left to wait for the click of the latch and he came in, shaking snow or rain or pol en off his boots.

It is good, daughter, to be prepared for surprise. This is a place where a slant snowfal can arrive at any time—even in summer I have seen flakes fal , fol owed by gales of light and dark. It is strange to think how far my life has come, having discovered enough beauty that it stil astounds me.

Enrico once told me of a time when he was just a boy, no more than five years old, the sort who was told to wear navy-blue calzoncini and long white kneesocks. He ran around the courtyard of his Verona home, its beautiful garden with large ferns and white brick and fountains and giant pots of towering plants that his mother's gardener tended to. In the far corner of the garden there stood a large brass statue of three chimpanzees: one with its hands over its eyes, one with its hands over its ears, one with its hands over its mouth. Beneath them was a smal wel of a pond where water gurgled in and out. Enrico used to sit there and pass his days.

I sometimes stil see myself as a child and how much I was loved and how much I loved in return and in my childish heart I was sure it would never end, but I did not know what to do with such love and I relinquished it. I put my hand over my mouth, my ears, my eyes, but I have come around again, and I stil cal myself black even though I have rol ed around in flour. I have always been with my people even though they have not been with me.

He never much asked me about my past, your father, so I told him wil ingly, I always thought that he, and you, were the only ones to whom I could trust these words of mine, the dark ink of what they have said.

SINCE BY THE BONES THEY BROKE WE CAN TELL NEW WEATHER: WHAT WE SAW UNDER THE HLINKAS IN THE YEARS ‘42 AND

‘43

What sharp stones lifted our wheels,

What high skies came to rest on the ground.

On a golden morning the river turned

And two uniforms appeared at our backs.

We asked by what roads we could escape—

They showed us the narrowest one.

Don't go looking for bread, dark father,

You won't find bread under breadcrumbs.

The spring died at the furthest corner

And our song went into the mountains

Where it sounded along the ridges

Then put on a twice-removed hat.

We called this song the quiet

But it came answering back.

Some days we went looking for the sky

But, Lord, it was a long walk upwards.

Land of black forests we grew from you.

We found the sun in your branches,

Warm shelter in your roots,

A shirt, a hat, a belt in all your moss.

Now it is raining and raining so hard,

Who can make our black ground dry?

The hour of our wandering has been

And passed and been and passed again.

They drove our wagons onto the ice

And ringed the white lake with fires,

So when the cold began to crack

The cheers went up from the Hlinkas.

We forced our best horses forward

But they skidded, bloody, to the shore.

My land, we are your children,

Shore up the ice, make it freeze!

The women came to their windows

To see what was up the road ahead.

They threw out the fire's ashes

So that some might rise in the wind.

The darkest birds of winter

Told others not to follow behind.

The snow fell large and white

And buried our wheels center deep.

How soft the road underfoot,

The branches gray and bare.

Light through light in the treetops

Warned other light not to return.

We had been everything to the forest

Except enemy and danger.

How many times the trees bowed

In our long and dark marching.

They loaded the railway trains

Until the springs went flat.

We heard the moaning of Gypsy children

Too hungry to sleep or dream.

Even those who stayed alive

Found a grave in each survival.

In all the white fields and forests

Old sorrows called out to the new.

At the gate two wooden poles,

Out of which nothing could be carved,

Not a spoon, a moon, nor a Gypsy sky,

Not a swift or an owl or another flight.

We went through them single file,

Our faces turned to the sky.

Who could tell the time from the stars

If the roof was an inch from their eyes?

A child's black fingers descended upon a moth

That descended upon a candleflame.

The winter was closing in

Cold and fast and blue.

We dreamed of a better place

Just above the roof of the pines.

Yet some small splinter of shade

Was nothing but another shadow.

We carried the streams of streams through seasons.

What sorrow and terrible wailing were heard

In all your lonely downcast corners,

Auschwitz, Majdanek, Thieresenstadt, Lod(.

Who gave them such places, O Lord,

Right on the edge of black forests?

We were taken in through their gates,

They let us up through their chimneys.

Gentle mother, make no friend

With the snake that even the snakes hate.

You ask why this song doesn't speak

To you of dreams and of opened gates?

Come and see the fallen wheels

On the ground and deep in the darkest mud.

Look at our fallen homes

And all the Jews and Gypsies broken!

But don't leave behind the dead, broken!

With whom we shared our hunger.

Don't let the snakes go free

Of what they wanted us to be.

Icicles eaten from the wire in winter

Will not freeze our tongues with weight.

We are watching still, brother,

The bend in the distant corner.

The bell that has been pealing

Is not the bell you heard before.

We will tear it to the ground

And use the old forged brass.

It will take us back around

The long five-cornered road.

I speak from the mossy earth to you—

Sound out your mouth ‘s violin!

The song of the wandering is in all the trees

And is heard in the last stars of daybreak.

It ripples in the bend of the river

Turning backwards towards us again.

Soon you shall see nothing in the chimney

Except silence and dim twilight.

The sky is red and the morning is too—

All is red on the horizon, Comrade!

Old Romani mother, don't hide your earrings,

Your coins, your sons, your dreams,

Not even inside your golden teeth,

And tell this to hell's dark brother:

When he goes collecting

He won't take any more of us along.

Who has said that your voice will be strange

To those who have risen from you?

Sun and moon and torn starlight,

Wagon and chicken and badger and knife,

All the sorrows have been heard

By those who suffered alongside us.

You who were sad at evening

Will be happy now at dawn.

Since by the bones they broke

We can tell new weather.

When we die and turn to rain

We shall stay nearby a little while

Before we go on falling.

We shall stay in the shade of the mossy oak

Where we have walked

And cried and walked and wandered.

Zoli Novotna

BRATISLAVA, SEPTEMBER I 9 5 7

Paris

2003

SHE DESCENDS THE TRAIN in the amber light of afternoon, shading her eyes with her hands. Her daughter steps from the shadows, looking tal, short-haired, lean. They kiss four times and Francesca says: “You look beautiful, Mamma.” She dips to the ground to pick up the smal bag at Zoli's feet. “This is al you brought?” They link arms and walk out under the wide ceiling of Gare de Lyon, past a newspaper stal , through a throng of girls, out into the sunlight. At the corner they hear the shril beeping of a car horn. Across the road, a young man in an open leather jacket clambers from a car. His hair is cut close, his shirt ambitiously undone. He rushes across to Zoli and his stubble bristles against her cheek when he greets her.

“Henri,” he says, and she rests for a second against a lamppost, winded, the name so close to that of her husband.

Francesca half-skips around the front of the car and helps Zoli into the front seat. “Does he speak Italian?” Zoli whispers, and before her daughter can respond, Henri has launched into a speech about what a pleasure it is to meet her, how young she looks, how marvelous it feels to have two such beautiful women in his car, two, imagine, two!

“He speaks Italian,” says Zoli with a soft chuckle, and she closes the car door.

Francesca laughs and hops in the backseat, leans forward with her arms around the headrest to massage the back of Zoli's neck. She has not, she thinks, been so careful y touched in a long time.

The car jolts forward and merges into traffic, swerves around a pothole. Zoli puts her hands against the dashboard to brace herself. The streets begin to branch and widen and clear. Out the window she watches the quick blip of traffic lights and the flash of bil boards. I have arrived in Paris so many times, she thinks, and none of them ever like this. They speed through the yel ow of a traffic light and down a long avenue shaded by half-grown trees. “We'l show you around later, Mamma,” says Francesca, “but let's go home first. We've a nice lunch ready, wait until you see how many cheeses!” It is a thing her daughter seems to have invented for her, that she is a lover of cheese, and she wants to say, That's your father, not me.

Zoli puts her hand on Henri's forearm, asks him if he likes cheese, and he finds it funny, for whatever reason, she is not entirely sure, and he slaps the steering wheel as he turns a sharp corner.

They slow down, past kiosks and storefronts strange with foreign script. A number of Arab women in dark headscarves emerge from a shop, only their eyes apparent. Further up the street, a black man wheels a trol ey of jackets across the road. Zoli turns to watch. “So many people,” she says.

“I never expected it to be like this.” Her daughter unbuckles her backseat seat belt so she can whisper: “I'm so glad you're here, Mamma, I can hardly believe it.”

Henri taps the brakes and the car jolts. “Put your belt on, Francesca,” he says. A silence descends until Zoli hears the soft fal of her daughter's body against the rear seat and a long exaggerated sigh.

“Sorry, Franca,” he says, “but I'm the one driving here.”

How odd it is to hear the nickname of her daughter from this young man. How extraordinary, in fact, to be here at al , in this smal car, in these thrumming streets, on a sunny Thursday afternoon when back in the val ey they wil be cutting grass on the lower slopes.

They negotiate a few more winding side streets and pul in next to the curb under a row of low trees by a pale stone building studded with blocks of ancient red marble. They climb out of the car and walk through the front courtyard. Henri puts his shoulder to the giant ironwork door. It creaks and swings, revealing a black and white tiled floor. They walk towards an old elevator, but Zoli veers off to the stairs, explaining that tunnels and elevators are not for her, that they make her claustrophobic. Henri takes her elbow and guides her towards the elevator's intricate gril work. “The stairs are so steep,” he says. Zoli reaches back for her daughter's hand. She is afraid now that she wil dislike Henri, that he is one of those who is almost too happy, the sort who forces his opinions of happiness on others. A sharp look appears on his face, and he goes ahead, alone, in the elevator.

Mother and daughter stand wordless in front of each other. Francesca drops the bag on the first stair and takes Zoli's face in her hands, leans over and kisses her eyelids.

“I can't believe it,” says Francesca.

“You'l be glad to get rid of me in a day or two.”

“Want to bet?”

They laugh and climb the stairs, stopping on each landing for Zoli to get her breath back. She has the clammy thought that they wil have arranged their home for her, that they wil have laid out a bed and perhaps a night lamp and they wil have cleaned and ordered things out of their usual places, perhaps even put up photographs for the occasion.

On the fourth floor, Francesca hurries ahead, opens the door, throws her keys onto a low glass table.

“Come in, Mamma, come in!”

Zoli pauses a moment on the threshold, then slips off her shoes, steps in. She is pleasantly surprised by the apartment, its high wal s, the cornices, the crevices, the oak floorboards, the woodcut prints along the hal way. The living room is bright and open with high windows and a piece of artwork she immediately recognizes as Romani, vibrant clashing colors, odd shapes, a settlement of sorts. A photo of Enrico sits on an old wooden shelf made from a slice of railway sleeper. A dozen other photos accompany it. Zoli runs her fingers along the hard tar on the shelf, then turns and examines the rest of the room.

In the center of a glass coffee table sits the leaflet for the conference, in French, odd words shoved together. The leaflet is slick and professional and not at al what she expected. She should, she knows, pay attention to it, comment on it, compliment it, but Zoli wants nothing more than to ambush it with silence.

A row of books sit under the table and she lifts one, photographs of India, and deftly lays the leaflet underneath, its edge sticking out so it doesn't look hidden. Her daughter stands over her with a glass of water, and tenses slightly at the sight of the covered leaflet.

“You must be tired, Mamma?”

Zoli shakes her head, no, the day seems bright and open. She runs her fingers along Francesca's blouse: “Where's that cheese you promised me?”

They pass the lunch in idle chatter, the train trip, the weather, the new layout of Paoli's shop, and as the afternoon lengthens, a heaviness bears down. Her daughter brings her to the bed- room, where the sheets on the double bed have been freshly changed, and a nightgown has been laid out with a shop tag stil on it. Francesca snips the tag from the back of a nightdress and whispers that her boyfriend wil be staying elsewhere for a few days, and that she wil sleep on the couch, no protests al owed. She folds back the covers and fluffs the pil ow and guides her mother to the bed.

Zoli feels briefly like a pebble that, having lain around for quite a while, is quickly tossed from hand to hand.

“Have a good nap, Mamma. And I'm not going to say anything about bedbugs.”

“I wouldn't even feel them.”

She wakes to darkness, disoriented a moment. A harsh whispering issues from the kitchen, the voices low and urgent. She lies and listens, hoping they wil quieten, but Henri curses, and then she hears the slamming of a door, the slide of grooves in a kitchen cupboard, a rattling of cups.

Zoli looks around the room, surrounded by the possessions of others, cosmetics on the table, photographs in frames, a row of men's shirts in the cupboard. In her mind she goes through the three rooms of her own mil house, how the four doors creak, how the curtains jangle on the rings, how the stove leaks a little light, how the lantern nickers. Curious to have taken a train here and arrived so quickly, somewhere so unfamiliar, as if the journey has failed her by such ease. She lies back down on the bed. A surprising stil ness to the room—no sounds of traffic, or children playing outside, or neighbors with their radios.

“You're awake?” says Francesca. She has put on some light makeup and she looks exquisite as she steps graceful y across the room. “Are you ready for dinner, Mamma? We ‘ve booked a little restaurant.”

“Oh,” says Zoli.

“Henri's gone to get the car. Do you like him, Mamma?”

Zoli wonders a moment what there might be to like, so quickly, so abruptly, but she says: “Yes, I like him very much.”

“I'm glad,” says Francesca with a chuckle. “I've been with worse, I suppose.”

They embrace again. Zoli swings her legs off the side of the bed, narrows her mind, forces it upon her arms and legs, stands. The nightdress comes up over her head. It takes an effort not to sway. Francesca turns her back and flicks on a smal lamp on the nightstand as Zoli puts on her dress. Foolish not to have brought more clothes, but she wanted to impress that it would only be for a few days, no more, that she would not be part of the conference, that she would just sit and watch and listen, if even that.

Her daughter hitches the dress at the shoulders.

“Are you al right, Mamma?”

“I wouldn't know I had it if it didn't hurt,” says Zoli, and a smile loosens over her face.

At the door there is a series of three gold locks she had not noticed earlier. Three. And one hanging chain. It strikes Zoli that she has never lived in a place with locks on the door.

“We should take the elevator.”

“No, chonorroeja, we'l walk down.”

Outside, in the darkness, the engine of the car purrs. Henri waves them over with the sort of grin that already seems to throw out opinions and confidences. She wil try hard to like him, she tel s herself. He has, in any case, a fine name—so much like Enrico, though the sound is not as round or as ful —and he is handsome in a measured way. She slides into the front seat and pats his arm.

“Onwards,” Henri says abruptly, and they drive off through a light rain.

By the time they reach the center of Paris, the rain has let up and the streets shine wet and black under lamplight. Elegant statues and houses, each angle planned, each tree thought out. Boats along the Seine dimple the water. Zoli opens the window to hear the rushing of the water, but receives only traffic.

At the restaurant there are engraved mirrors behind the bar. Wood and heavy glass. Waiters in long white aprons. She is given a menu and it strikes her with a start, how absurd, a menu in French, but her daughter says: “I'l help you, Mamma.” So many things to choose from, and nothing amongst them simple. She sits in a mild haze, listening to her daughter and Henri talk about their jobs, social work with immigrants, of how there is always a heartbreaking story, how it is hard to believe, in a civilized society, that these things stil go on, day after day.

Zoli finds herself drifting, watching the movement of the waiters in the background, their intricate steps. She circles her fork around the edges of her wineglass, but snaps herself back when Francesca touches her hand: “Did you hear me, Mamma?”

It is, she knows, a story about an Algerian man and a hospital and flowers by someone's bed, but she can't quite locate the center of the story, and has to catch up. She surmises that the man sends the flowers to himself, and it seems to her not so much a sadness as a triumph, sending flowers to his own bedside, but she doesn't say so, she is caught up in the caughtness of her daughter who has a tear at the edge of her eye, which she brushes away.

A waiter arrives bearing three large plates. The dinner unfolds and Henri seems to sweep in behind Francesca, as if he has started driving the table, taken the front seat, lowered the pedal. He rattles on, in a high voice, about the plight of the Islamic women and how nobody takes them seriously at al , how their lives are denned by the narrowness that others bring to it, how they have been poisoned by stereotype, that it's time for people to open up and listen. He is, thinks Zoli, the sort of man who knows in advance al that, for him, is worth knowing.

Dessert arrives and the taste of coffee fil s her with sadness.

She wakes in the backseat of the car, startled a moment as Henri points out the Arc de Triomphe. “Yes, yes,” she says, “it's beautiful,” though the car is sandwiched in traffic and she can hardly see it at al . They swing past a tower and then zoom along the quays. Henri clicks on the radio and begins to hum. Soon they merge onto a highway and it seems like only moments later when Zoli is being brought up in the elevator. She panics briefly and reaches for the buttons but her daughter catches her arm and strokes her hand. “It's al right, Mamma, we'l be there in a flash.” A strange word, it seems, and the light actual y flashes across her mind as if invited. She feels her daughter support her indoors. Zoli flops to the bed with a little laugh: “I think I drank too much wine.”

In the morning she rises early and kneels down by the couch and combs her sleeping daughter's hair, the same way she used to comb it when Francesca was a child. Francesca stirs, smiles. Zoli kisses her cheek, rises, and searches in the kitchen for breakfast items, finds a card on the fridge with a magnet attached. She runs the magnet over her own hair and suddenly Francesca is there behind her with a phone to her ear: “What are you doing, Mamma?”

“Oh, nothing, Franca,” she says, and it's a name so close to Conka that it stil manages, at times, to hol ow out Zoli's chest.

“What's the magnet for?”

“Oh, I don't know,” says Zoli. “No reason real y.”

Her daughter begins chatting rapid-fire into the phone. There is, it seems, a seating issue at the conference and some rooms have been overbooked. Francesca clicks down the phone and sighs. In the kitchen she opens a can of coffee beans, grinds them, fil s a contraption with water.

So much white machinery, thinks Zoli. She can feel a slight tension between her and her daughter, this is not what she wants, she wil not embrace it, conference or not, and she asks Francesca how she slept and she says, “Oh fine,” and then Zoli asks her in Romani. It is the first time they have used the language, it seems to stun the air between them, and Francesca leans forward and says: “Mamma, I real y wish that you would speak for us, I real y wish you would.”

“What is there for me to speak of?”

“You could read a poem. Times have changed.”

“Not for me, chonorroeja.”

“It would be good for so many people.”

“They said that fifty years ago.”

“Sometimes it takes fifty years. There's going to be people from al over Europe, even some Americans.”

“And what do I care for Americans? ”

“I'm just saying it's the biggest conference in years.”

“This thing makes good coffee?”

“Please, Mamma.”

“I cannot do it, my heart's love.”

“We've put so much money in. It's huge, people from al over the world, it's a mosaic. They're al coming.”

“In the end, it won't matter.”

“Oh, you don't believe that,” says her daughter. “You've never believed that, come on, Mamma!”

“Have you told anyone about the poems?”

No.

“Promise? ”

Mamma, I promise. Please.”

I can t do it, says Zoh. I m sorry. I just can t.

She places her hands on the table, emphatical y, as if the argument itself has been tamped beneath her fingers, and they sit in silence at a smal round kitchen table with a rough-hewn surface. She can tel her daughter has paid a lot of money for the table, beautiful y crafted, yet factory-made al the same. Perhaps it is a fashion. Things come around again and again. A memory nicks her. Enrico used to spread his hands out on the kitchen table and playful y stab a knife between his fingers, over and over, until the wood at the head of the table was coarse and pitted.

“You know, Franca, this coffee is awful, your father would rol over.”

They look at each other then, mother and daughter, and together they smile broadly at the thought of this man now slid briefly between their ribcages.

“You know that no matter what, I am stil pol uted.”

“But you said it yourself, Mamma, that's al gone, it's over.”

“That's gone, yes, those times, but I'm stil of those times.”

“I love you dearly, Mamma, but you're exasperating.” Francesca says it with a smile, but Zoli turns away, looks towards the kitchen window. No more than a meter away is the brickwork of a neighboring building.

“Come on,” says Zoli, “let's go for a little strol . I'd like to see those ladies I saw yesterday, near that market, maybe we'l buy some headscarves.”

“Headscarves?”

“And then you can show me where you work.”

“Mamma.”

“That's what I'd like, chonorroeja, I'd like a little strol . I need to walk.”

By the time they reach the front courtyard of the apartment, Zoli is already wheezing. A few grackles fly out from the trees and make a fuss above them as they walk along the cracked pavement, her daughter busy with a mobile phone. There is talk, Zoli knows, of the cancel ations and registrations and mealtimes and a dozen other things more important than the last. It strikes Zoli that she has never once in her life had a telephone and she is startled when Francesca snaps hers shut and then open again, holds it out in front of them, clicks a button and shows her the photograph.

“Older than a rock,” Zoli says.

“Prettier though.”

“This young man of yours …”

“Henri.”

“Should I get the linden blossoms ready?”

“ Course not, Mamma! It gets so tiring sometimes. They just want you to be their Gypsy girl. They think during breakfast that you wil somehow, I don't know …”

“Clack your fingers?”

“I've gone through so many of them, maybe I should get an accountant.”

They sit in the sunshine awhile, happy, silent, then walk back arm-in-arm to Francesca's car, a beetle-shaped thing, bright purple. Zoli slides in the front seat, surprised, but gladdened, by the disorder. There are cups on the floor, papers, clothing, and an ashtray brimming with cigarette ends.

It thril s her, the complicated promise of a life so different. On the floor, at Zoli's feet, she sees one of the colored fliers for the conference. She studies it as the car lurches forward, trying hard to figure out the wording. Final y her daughter says, as she shifts the gearstick: “From Wheel to Parliament: Romani Memory and Imagination.”

“A mouthful,” says Zoli.

“A good mouthful, though, wouldn't you say?”

“Yes, a good one. I like it.”

And she does like it, she thinks, it has force and power, decency, respect, al the things she has ever wanted for her daughter. The wheel on the front of the flier has been distorted so that a Romani flag, a photograph of an empty parliament, and a young girl dancing appear through it. The edge of the flier is blurred, distorted, and the colors are lively. She bends down, picks it up, knows her daughter feels heartened. She flips it open and sees a series of names, times, rooms, a schedule for dinners and receptions. She wil not, she thinks, go to any of these.

In the flier there are photographs of speakers, one a Czech woman with high cheekbones and dark eyes. The thought of it gaffs Zoli a moment—

a Czech professor, a Rom—but she does not let on, she closes the flier, clenches at a bump in the road, and says: “I can't wait.”

“If you speak I could arrange something, on gala night, maybe, or the last night.”

“I'm not made for galas, Franca.”

“One time you were.”

“I was once, yes, one time.”

The car winds out to the suburbs of Paris and in the distance she can see a number of smal towers. She recal s the time she stood on the hil with Enrico, overlooking the landscape of

Bratislava. She feels, tenderly, the touch of him, inhales his smel , and sees—she does not know why—the ends of his trousers napping in the wind.

“This is where you work?”

“We've a clinic out here.”

“These people are poor,” says Zoli.

“We're building a center. We've got five lawyers. There's an immigration hotline. We get a lot of Muslims. North Africans. Arabs too.”

“Our own?”

“I have a project going in the schools in Saint Denis, one in Montreuil as wel . An art thing for Romani girls. You'l see some of the paintings later, I'l show you.”

They park the car in the shadows of the towers. Two young boys rol a car tire along a pavement. The ancient games don't change, thinks Zoli. A number of men stand brooding against the gray metal of a shuttered shop, brightened with graffiti. A cat stands high-shouldered and alert in the shop doorway. An older boy hunches down into his jacket, aims a kick at the cat, lifts it a couple of feet in the air, but it lands nimbly and screeches off. The boy raises the flap of his jacket and then his head disappears into the cloth.

“Glue,” says Francesca.

“What?”

“He's sniffing glue.”

Zoli watches the young man, breathing at the bag, like the pulse of a strange gray heart.

A thought comes back to her: Paris and its wide elegant avenue of sound.

They link arms and Francesca says something about the unemployment rate, but Zoli doesn't quite hear, watches instead a few shadows appear and disappear on the high balconies of the flats. She smoothes down the front of her dress as they walk across a stretch of scorched grass towards the door of a low office building propped on cinder blocks. The door is locked with a metal bar. Francesca flips out a key and fumbles at the lock, opens it, and the door swings open when the metal bar is pressed. Inside there is a row of smal cubicles with a number of people working in them, mostly young women. They raise their heads and smile. Her daughter cal s for a security guard at the far side of the cabin to go and lock the outside door.

“But how do we get out?” asks Zoli.

“There's another door. He guards that one, and we lock the front one.”

“Oh.”

She hears the clicking of computer keyboards die down and sees a number of people rising from their desks, their heads popping above the low corkwood wal s.

“Hi, everyone!” shouts her daughter. “This is my mother, Zoli!”

And before she can even take a breath there are a half dozen people around her. She wonders what she should do, if she should hold her dress and bow, or whether she might have to kiss them in the French way, but they extend their hands to shake hers and it seems that they are saying how nice it is to final y meet her, finally like a very smal blade between her shoulders, she intuits it from the Italian, and she hardly knows in what language to speak back. They crowd her and she feels her heart going way too fast. She looks around for her daughter, but can't find her, in the faces, how many faces, Lord how many faces, and the word eiderdown slides across her mind, she does not know why, she feels her knees buckle, she is on a road, she is around a corner, but she catches herself, shakes her head, returns, and suddenly her daughter is there, holding her aloft, saying: “Mamma, let's get you some water, you're pale.”

She is brought across to a brown swivel chair. She leans back in it: “I'm al right, it's just been a long journey.”

And then she wonders, as she takes the glass of water, in which language she has said this, and what, if anything, it has meant.

“This is my cubicle,” says Francesca.

Zoli looks up to see photographs of herself and Enrico, standing in the val ey on a summer afternoon. She reaches out to touch his face, dark with sun. There is also one of Francesca as a child of eight, a kerchief on her hair, standing outside the mil house, the turn of the wheel slightly blurred.

Did we real y live this way? she wonders. She wants to ask the question aloud, but nothing comes, and then she snaps herself back, pinches her wrist, and remarks how nice the office is, though clearly it is a temporary structure, cramped, leaky, tight.

“What were you saying about eiderdowns, Mamma?” I m not sure.

“You're pale,” Francesca says again.

“It's just a little hot in here.”

Her daughter clicks on a smal white fan and directs it at Zoli's face.

“I have always had some paleness,” says Zoli, and she means it as a joke, but it's not a joke, nobody gets it, not even her own daughter. She reaches forward and turns the fan off, and can feel Francesca's warm breath on her cheeks, can hear her saying: “Mamma, maybe I should take you home.”

“No, no, I'm fine.”

“I'l just make some phone cal s.”

“You go ahead, chonorroeja.”

“You don't mind? It's just a few cal s, that's al . A couple of other things and then I'm al yours.”

“Headscarves,” says Zoli for no reason that she can recognize or discern.

When they emerge through the back door, there is a group of young boys swinging along, carrying a giant radio on their shoulders. They wear basebal caps turned backwards and wide baggy trousers with brightly colored shoes. The beat of the song, loud and jarring, is not entirely foreign and Zoli thinks that she has heard it somewhere before, but perhaps al songs come around to the same song, and she wishes for a moment that she could walk with the boys, over the hil of rubbish to the cluttered construction site, just to figure out where exactly she has heard it before.

“Drive me around, Franca,” she says.

“But you're tired.”

“Please, I want to drive around.”

“You're the boss,” says her daughter, and it's meant as something sweet, Zoli knows, though it comes out barbed and strange-sounding. They round the back of the makeshift cabin and her daughter stops short. “Oh, shit,” she says as she leans over the hood of the car, pul s back the windscreen wipers. “They took the rubber,” she says. “They use them for catapults. That's the fourth time this year. Shit!”

A pebble lands at the back of the car and rol s on the tar.

“Get in, Mamma.”

“Why?”

“Get in! Please.”

Zoli settles in the front seat. Her daughter leans against the car, her breasts against the window, and Zoli can hear her talking urgently into the phone. Within moments the security guard is out, his radio crackling. Francesca points at a number of children scampering away in different directions. The security guard bends down to Zoli's window: “I'm very sorry, Madame,” he says in a broad African accent, then walks wearily towards the construction site.

“Can you believe that?” says Francesca. “I'm going to get you out of here.”

“I want to see it.”

“What is there to see, Mamma? It's not exactly the val ey. Sometimes the gendarmes won't even come in here. There's a few vigilante groups now, they keep it quieter. Mamma, don't you think—I shouldn't have brought you out here, I'm sorry.”

“And where are ours? ”

“Ours?” Yes, ours.

“Block eight. There's a few out near the highway too. They've built little shelters for themselves. They come and go.”

“Block eight, then.”

“It's not a good idea, Mamma.” Please.

Francesca shifts the car into gear and drives past the shuttered shops, pul s up at a series of yel ow bol ards. She points across a gray courtyard at the buildings, six stories high, where laundry is strung from balconies and shattered windows are patched with thick gray tape.

Zoli watches a tiny girl running through the courtyard, carrying a folded red paper flower stuck on the end of a coat-hanger. The girl picks her way across the gloom, past the hulk of a burned-out van, and begins to climb a set of black railings. She twirls the coathanger above her head. The folded flower takes off and she jumps and catches it in midnight.

“How many live here, Franca?”

“A couple of hundred.”

The figure of an enormous woman looms out onto a balcony. She leans over the railing—the fat of her arms wobbling—and screams at the little girl. The child darts into the shadow of the stairwel , pauses, flicks her wrist, and the paper flower takes off again in the air, and then she is swal owed by darkness. Zoli feels as if she has seen her before, in some other place, some other time, that if she spends long enough she wil recognize her.

The girl appears on the top balcony, where she skips along and is suddenly dragged into the doorway.

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“It's okay, love.”

“We try to help as much as possible.”

“Go ahead, horse, and shit,” says Zoli, and the engine catches and the car pul s away.

By the motorway Zoli catches sight of the camp, strung out along a half-finished piece of road. The doors of the caravans are open and four burnt-out vans stand nearby, their front bonnets open. Three barechested men are bent over one engine. A teenage boy drags a stick in the dirt; behind him, a wake of pale ash. Some older men sit on chairs, like stone figures quarried. One of them dabs at his mouth with a flap end of shirt. Smoke rises from sundry fires. An array of shoes are strung on a telephone wire. Tires lie strewn around an upended wheelbarrow.

They pass in a raw, cold silence.

Zoli stares out at the blur of the cars, barriers, low bushes, the quick whip of white lines on the road.

“Who are al these people tonight?”

“Mamma?”

“At the conference, who are they?”

“Academics,” says Francesca. “Social scientists. There are Romani writers now, Mamma. Some poets. One is coming al the way from Croatia.

There are some bril iant people about these days, Mamma. The Croatian's a poet. There's a man from the University of—”

“That's nice.”

“Mamma, are you okay?”

“Did you see that wheelbarrow?”

“Mamma?”

“Someone should turn it the right way up.”

“We'l be home soon, don't worry.”

In the apartment she fal s asleep quickly, hugging the pil ow to her chest. She wakes in the afternoon, the room silent. In the adjacent bathroom she drinks deep from the cold-water tap. She dresses and lies on the bed with her hands on her stomach. She could stay like this, she thinks, for quite a while, though she would need a view, maybe a chair, or some sunlight.

In the early afternoon Henri comes breezing through the door. He stops at the sight of her, as if he ‘d forgotten she ‘d be there. He is dressed in crisp white trousers and a light blue shirt. He clamps a phone to his ear, smiles broadly, blows her an air-kiss. Zoli has no idea what to do with the gesture. She nods back at him. This is his room, she thinks, these are his shirts, his cupboard, his photo frames, one of which she herself inhabits.

In the bathroom, she sprinkles some water on her face and readies herself for the living room. She is glad to hear the sound of Francesca's voice, from the kitchen, talking about some catering accident. Henri, it seems, is on the lookout for a band of musicians, drunk somewhere and due to play at tonight's opening tonight.

“Scottish,” he shouts into the phone, “they're Scottish, not Irish!”

Across the room Francesca winks at her, circling her hand in the air as if to hurry her phone cal along. In the background the television is on, mute. Zoli sits at the coffee table and flips open the photographs of India. The dead along the Ganges. A crowd in front of a temple. She turns a page as Henri begins clicking his fingers frantical y, first at Francesca, then at Zoli. “My God, my God, oh, my God!” he says as he slams the phone down and turns the volume of the television up high. On the screen he appears tight and nervous. The camera sweeps away from him to a group of young girls in traditional costume, dancing. The screen flashes with the title of the conference, then back to the dancing girls once more.

Francesca sits on the couch beside Zoli and when the report is finished she takes her mother's hand and squeezes it.

“Wel , did I foul it up?” says Henri, combing back his hair with his fingers.

“You were perfect,” says Francesca, “but you might have been better if you'd taken off that straitjacket.”

“Hmmr?”

“Just joking.”

Mother and daughter lean into each other, hands clasped. Light slides through the curtains and seems to spread itself out at their feet.

“Wel , you might have just loosened it a little,” Francesca says, and then she lays her head on Zoli's shoulder and both of them laugh together as one.

“Wel , I think I did just fine.”

He turns on his heels, stomps back to the kitchen.

The two women sit, foreheads touching. It seems to Zoli the perfect moment, unbidden, unforced. She would like to freeze it al here, rise up, leave her daughter on the couch, in the warmth of laughter, walk through the apartment, pick up her shoes at the door, strol down the stairs, through the quiet streets, and leave al of Paris frozen in this one moment of strange beauty, floating through the city on the only moving thing in the world, the train, heading towards home.

Zoli showers by sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it. The water mists her hair. She hears stirrings in the bedroom, the fast shuffle of feet, the quick closing snap of the door. Henri's voice is harried, looking for his cufflinks. She can hear Francesca insisting that he hurry up and leave. There is silence from Francesca and then a long sigh.

Zoli closes her eyes and al ows the water to fal along her body.

The front door closes with more than its usual noise and then she hears a gentle knocking on the bathroom door.

“Coast is clear, Mamma.”

They dress together in the bedroom. Zoli keeps her back turned though she catches a glimpse of her daughter in the corner of the mirrored armoire, the skin taut at her waist, the brown length of her leg. Francesca wiggles into a blue dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes.

Zoli leans against the armoire, closes her eyes to the reflection: “Maybe I should skip it, chonorroeja, I'm a little tired.”

“You can't skip it, Mamma, it's the opening night.”

“I feel a bit dizzy.”

“It's nothing to worry about, I promise.”

“I could just stay here. I'l watch for Henri on the TV.”

“And die of boredom? Come on, Mamma!”

Her daughter fumbles in a drawer, then stands behind Zoli and drapes a long necklace over her throat. “It's an old Persian piece,” she says, “I found it in the market in Saint Ouen. It wasn't expensive. I want you to have it.”

Francesca's hand touches, soft, against the pulse of her throat.

“Thank you,” says Zoli.

On the drive over—through a maze of highways and overpasses—Francesca drums on the wheel, saying how it was nearly impossible to find a hotel for the conference. “We had to drop the word Romani and change it to European, just so they'd let us in.” She laughs and wipes a smudge from the windscreen with the end of her shawl. “European memory and imagination! Imagine! And then we had to put the word back in, of course, for the flier, so the hotel tried to pul out. We can't have Gypsies, they said. We had to threaten a lawsuit and then the prices rose, we almost had to cancel. Can you believe that?”

The car loops in front of the hotel, palm-fronted, glassy, glossed over with a high cheapness.

“And they wanted to know if there'd be any horsecarts!” She unbuckles her seat belt before the car stops, laughs hard, and hits the steering wheel and, mistakenly, the horn, so that the car seems to arrive angrily at the curb. She flips open the seat belt across her body: “Academics on Appaloosas! I mean, what century are we living in? ”

Zoli hears birdsong and it takes a moment for her to realize that it is being piped through loudspeakers. So much the world changes, so much it stays the same. She passes through the revolving doorway, treading slowly so that for a moment the electronic door almost hits the back of her ankle. She inches forward and the door goes with her and she feels as if she is moving through a mil wheel.

“I hate those doors,” says Francesca as she guides Zoli along the corridor, past a series of smal signs, to where a giant version of the flier sits outside a large brown-paneled conference room.

Zoli recognizes some faces from Francesca's workplace, their wide-open smiles, and indeed a few of her own—a Rom always knows—she can tel in the swirl of faces, the eyes, the quick glances, the happy grasp of shoulders. My language, she thinks. She can hear it in snatches, like a bird in a room, one corner to the other. It feels as if air has entered her legs. She sways. A glass of water is thrust in her hand.

Zoli sips the water and feels a flush of emptiness. Why the fuss? Why the worry? Why not be back in the val ey, watching the sun sink beneath the windowframe?

Across the hal way she sees Henri pumping hands with a tal man in a banded white hat.

“That's the poet,” whispers Francesca. “And across there, that's one of our big donors, I'l introduce you later. And that girl's from Paris-Match, a reporter, isn't she gorgeous?”

Al the faces seem to blur into one. Zoli wishes for anger but can't dredge it up. She wants to reach out and grasp whatever she can find, a fencepost, a rosebush, a rough wooden railing, her daughter's arm, anything.

“Mamma?”

“Yes, yes, I'm fine.”

A bel rings and Francesca guides her along the corridor into the bal room where circular tables have been arranged with shining cutlery and folded napkins.

Laughter sounds through the hal , but a gradual silence descends at the sound of knives tinkling against glass. A speaker stands up at a podium, a tal Swedish man, and his speech is translated into French. Zoli is lost, but happily so, though every now and then her daughter leans across and whispers the context of the speech in her ear—a sharp sense of our own experience, memory as a funnel, understanding Romani silence, no access to public grievance, the lack of preservation, the implicit memory at the heart of al things. They seem like such large words for smal times, and Zoli al ows them to wash over her as applause ripples through the room.

She watches her daughter walk onstage, swishing up in her beautiful blue dress, to give a brief welcoming speech in Romani and French both, and to outline the three days of conference, the Holocaust, the Devouring, Lexical Impoverishment, Cultural Values in Scottish Bal adry, Police Perception of Belgian Roma, Economic Stratification, and, at the core, Issues of Romani Memory. How proud she is, she says, to see so many scholars, and so much interest at last: “We wil not be made to stay at the margins any longer!” A great cheer goes up from the tables, and there is talk then of names and sponsors and donors and although Zoli has begged her not to mention her name she does so anyway, and it feels as if the room has hushed and the air has been sucked out to fil the space. There is a brief round of applause, brief, thank God, and no spotlight. Henri grabs her hand and squeezes it, and real y al she wants now is to be back in the apartment, lying on the bed with her hands folded across her stomach, but it means so much to Francesca, al of this, she must remain, stand side by side with her daughter, and what does it matter anyway? It is such a smal thing to give. She feels a smal shame at the wal s of her heart. I should stand and applaud her. I should sing out her name. Al I have been is smal against this. Petty, foolish, selfish. Zoli hikes the hem of her dress and stands, applauds as her daughter comes down the steps on her high heels, a beaming smile, a triumph.

They nestle in to one another. This is what I have, thinks Zoli. This is my flesh and blood.

Onstage the Scottish musicians begin to break the skin of the evening and the music fil s the room—mandolin, guitar, fiddle. Laughter sounds out al around and movement blurs the hal . Waiters. Hotel staff. Tal men with leather patches on their sleeves.

Zoli leans back in her chair, touches her throat, and is surprised by the feel of the new necklace against her skin. She barely remembers putting it on. How long, she wonders, since she wore something like this? She closes her eyes to Enrico. He strides up the hil side, towards the mil . His coat is thrown off his shoulders before he even enters. He kicks the mud off his boots and closes the door.

Go, violin, she thinks, go.

The pulse of the music rises. Under the table, she releases one foot from its shoe. The air feels cool against her toes. She lifts off the second shoe and stretches backwards and feels a light tapping at her shoulder. A voice from behind. Her name. She turns in the chair and fumbles to get the shoes back on her feet. Her name again. She stands. He, the visitor, is fleshy, wiry-haired, mid-forties or so—something about him open and ful , a wide smile on his face. He stretches out his hand, plump and soft.

“David Smolenak,” he says. “From Presov.”

The air around her suddenly compresses.

“I do have the right person, don't I? Zoli Novotna?”

She stares at the row of pens in his waistcoat pocket.

“Are you Zoli Novotna?”

It is the first time she has heard Slovak spoken in many years. It sounds so acutely foreign now, out of place, dredged up. She has, she thinks, been transported elsewhere, her body playing games, her mind tripping her up.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Did I get the wrong person?”

She scans the room and sees the rows of faces at table after table, animated with music. She stammers, shakes her head, then nods, yes and no.

“You had a book? In the ‘50s?”

“I'm here with my daughter,” she says, as if that might account for her whole life.

“It's a pleasure,” he says.

She wonders what pleasure it could possibly be, and feels a flush of heat at her core.

“Presov?” she says, as she catches the edge of the table.

“Would you have a minute, maybe?” he asks. “I'd love to talk to you. I read your book. I found a copy in a secondhand store in Bratislava. It's amazing. I've been to the settlements, Hermanovce, places like that. They're quite a sight.”

“Yes,” she says.

He bal s up his fist, coughs into it, and says: “You're hard to keep track of.”

“Me?”

“I ran into you first when I was reading some articles about other writers, Tatarka, Bondy, Stränsky, you know.”

“Yes, yes,” she says, and it feels to her as if al of the windows have been closed al at once.

“I didn't know you were going to be here,” he says, almost stuttering. “I assumed …” He laughs the sort of laugh designed to fil spaces. “If it wasn't for Stepän, I wouldn't have known anything.”

He lights a cigarette and moves his hand in a coil of blue smoke. Zoli watches the smooth trajectory of the cigarette to his lips, and the movement of his hands in the air, the quick fingers. It is as if the words come out in odd streaks from his mouth—talk of Slovakia, the plight of the Roma, what it means now to European integration, and suddenly he is in Bratislava, he is talking of a towerblock cal ed the Pentagon, graffiti in the stairwel s, dealers in the dark shadows—what sort of dealers? she wonders—and something about an exhibition, about Stränsky's poems being resurrected, a strange word, she thinks, Stränsky would not like it, no, the very thought of him bil owing through the gardens at Budermice, resurrected.

The journalist touches her elbow and she wants to say, No, please leave me alone, leave me be, I am in a garden, I am walking, I am not where you think I am, I am gone, but he is off again on a tangent about a poem, one of her old songs, something about the trunk of a linden tree. He was searching out Stränsky, he says, and discovered Credo, and then a chapbook, they were odd, these poems, rare, beautiful, in a dusty back issue, and when he went searching for the book he was told it could be bought in the secondhand shops, there was a smal cult around it, that she is seen as a voice, a new voice from old times, and he has been looking, searching, digging, and then he says the name again, Stepan, how he helped out when he final y got in touch with him. He crushes the cigarette into a saucer on the table. The smoke rises and she watches it curl. Stepan, the journalist says yet again, and then he mentions something about a photograph taken at the piano of the Carlton Hotel, the clarity of it, the beauty, and she wants more than anything just to lean over and to pour water on the smoldering cigarette, to extinguish it, but the more she watches it the more the smoke rises in stutters.

“Swann?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Stephen Swann?”

“Yes, of course,” he says.

Zoli drags the chair across the carpet, lowers herself into it. She reaches for a glass of water, puts it to her lips. She does not know whose it was, yet she turns it a half-circle and takes a sip. Taboo to drink from someone else's glass, but the water feels immediately cool at the back of her throat.

On the far side of the room a pale face comes forward into the light.

“In the reception,” the journalist says, or seems to say, but his voice feels blown sideways, past her, beyond. It is as if there is a rush of air at her ears, the words make no sense, they are just bits and pieces. The journalist leans forward, earnest and podgy-eyed, his breath stale with cigarette smoke: “I met him today.”

He goes to his knees in front of her, arm on her chair, and she can feel the weight of his other hand on her wrist.

“Ms. Novotna?” he says.

She rises to her feet and there across the room, standing like a silent sadness sunk down, is Stephen Swann, staring back at her.

Zoli thinks a moment that she must be wrong, that her mind has slipped an instant, that she has found his face in someone else, that the mention of his name has brought his face to another, that the dizziness has misled her, that time has just shifted and fractured and landed in shards. The man—is it Swann?— looks directly across at her, one hand down by his side, a wooden cane in the other. He is dressed in a fine gray suit. His hair, or what remains of it, is gray. A shiny bald pate in the middle. Heavy lids frame his eyes. His face is thin, his brow furrowed. He does not move.

Zoli looks about her for some escape. Her breath sounds to her like someone drowning. She casts about for her daughter again, grasps the back of the empty chair. Go away, she thinks. Please go away. Disappear. The music from the stage is loud, powerful, and the extended pul of a bow across a violin makes her shiver.

“If you'l excuse me,” she says to the journalist.

“I was just wondering if we could have a word—" I must go.

“Later perhaps?”

“Yes, yes, later.”

The man across the room—it is Swann, she is sure of it— has begun to move in her direction, stiff and lopsided on the cane. His body moves in the folds of the suit, which creases and uncreases, like some strange gray animal.

“Al of us, we'l get together,” says the journalist.

“Of course, yes.”

“We'l meet here?”

She stands suddenly and faces the journalist, stares into the round outline of his face, and says sharply: “You must excuse me, please.”

From the corner of her eye she watches Swann, his neck a sack of sag, vanishing into the folds of the jacket. She thinks for a moment of curtains disintegrating on a rail. “Don't come here,” she whispers. She pushes the high back of a chair out of her way. Three tables away. “No.” She grabs the cloth of her dress and bundles it in her fingers. “Disappear,” she says quietly. “Leave.” Two tables, and then he is standing in front of her and he says his name, quietly, softly, “Stepän,” as if he is final y and entirely Slovak, as if he always has been, but then he corrects himself, maybe remembering something so old it has been carved from a tomb: “Stephen.”

“I know who you are,” she says.

“Zoli, can we sit?”

She wants, in that instant, nothing more than a wicker chair faced to the sunset in the val ey and to grow old and dead, that's what she wants, she would like to be in the val ey on that brown wicker chair, yes, dying in the shadow of Enrico.

“No,” she says.

Swann tries what surely wants to be a smile, but is not. “I can't tel you how… I am… I…,” he says, as if he is trying to recal a Slovak word he might never have known. “So happy.” His words make a hol ow imitation of his face. He takes a pen from his pocket and stares at it, nervously inverting it, his pale hands twitching. “I thought something had happened to you, I thought maybe you were, I thought maybe, al these years … it's so good to see your face, Zoli, so very good. May I sit, please, may we sit? How did you—” No.

“I want to say something. Please.”

“I know what you want to say.”

“I have something I've wanted to say for years. I thought you were—”

“I know what you thought.”

He clears his throat as if to speak again, some knowledge, some good word, but it does not come, it seems caught in his throat, and he cannot disguise his shaking. He lowers his head and his eyes accumulate shadow.

She steps sideways and she does not know why or from where, but in her hand she has picked up a smal metal spoon. She thinks of placing it back on the nearby table but she doesn't, she pockets it, and she is sure then the waiters are watching, or the journalist, or the security guards, and they have seen her, she has stolen a spoon, that they wil come across, accuse her, they wil grab her forearm, say, Excuse me, come with us, show us the spoon, thief, liar, Gypsy. She can hear the thump of Swann's cane behind her. In front of her, a thick crowd—the young Croatian poet surrounded by women, the workers from her daughter's office. Swann shuffles behind her. The sound of his cane.

She would like the people to part like water but she cannot get through, she must tap them on the shoulders. They turn and smile and their voices sound to Zoli as if they're speaking from inside a tree. She slides past, her nerve ends stripped clean.

At the far side of the room, Francesca watches, a smal frown on her face, confused, but Zoli shakes her head, gives a wave, as if she is al right, not to worry, chonorroeja, I'l be okay. She pushes the last chair aside. Out the door, into the corridor, fast now, around the corner.

He's gone bald, she thinks. Old and bald and wearing a suit a size too big. Liver spots on his hands. White knuckles. A silver-tipped cane.

She hurries towards the entrance, through reception, out the revolving door, where the concierge skips towards her. “Taxi, please,” she says in Slovak first, then Italian, and she feels as if she wants to tear at her tongue, remove al these languages. The concierge smiles and raises his hand, his glove so very white against the red of his uniform.

Zoli is halfway in the taxi and halfway out when she realizes she doesn't have any money, and she thinks how absurd, climbing into this car, in a land she doesn't know, going towards a room she doesn't know, with no coins to take her there. “Wait, please,” she says to the driver.

In the hotel glass, the reflection startles her, her gray hair, the bright dress, the shrunken bend of her back. To have come al this way and see herself like this. She pushes back through the revolving doors. Far down the corridor she sees Swann— he looks as if he has spent his life turning in every wrong direction he can find, and, for a moment, she sees him as that man on the motorbike, with a rabbit hopping in front of him, swerving to avoid it, his crutches strapped on the back, light and dark moving over the fields.

She hurries down the corridor, ducking through the kitchen to the amazement of a young man chopping carrots into tiny slivers. Someone shouts at her. Her hip glances off the edge of a metal table. She fol ows a young waitress carrying a large silver tray out of the kitchen, into the hal again where she stops a moment, breathes deeply, looks for Francesca in al the faces, their confusion, their joy, their music.

“Mamma?”

Zoli shuffles across and takes her daughter's elbow. “I need some money. Some French money.”

“Of course, Mamma. Why?”

“I need to get a taxi. I need to go home. Your home. Hurry.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, precious heart.”

“Who was that man you were talking to?”

“That was Swann,” she says. She is surprised at herself. She wanted to say: Nobody. To shake her head and shrug. To cast it off, pretend indifference. To stand there, a picture of ordinary strength. But she doesn't, and instead she says it again: “That was Stephen Swann. He has some journalist with him.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I just need some money for a taxi.”

“What did you say to him?”

“What did I say? I don't know what I said, Franca. I need to go.”

“What's he doing here?”

“I don't know. Do you know?”

“Why would I know, Mamma?”

“Tel me.”

“No,” says her daughter. “I didn't know.”

“Just give me the money, please. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I beg of your sweet eyes, Franca.”

She sees a light sweeping over the val ey, a bird through treetops, a road rising white in front of her eyes, then she feels herself sway. Francesca takes her elbow and places the other hand tight around her mother's waist. The rush of hotel wal paper. The quick glint of light on glass. Fingerprints at the low corners of the windowpanes. Swann is leaning against the wal , framed by two cheap prints, his chest heaving. The journalist stands beside him, head bent, scribbling in his spiral notebook. Swann looks up as they pass. He raises his hand again.

“Don't turn,” says Zoli. “Please don't turn.”

They move towards the revolving door and the sound of taped birdsong. Francesca presses money into her hand.

“I swear, Mamma, I had no idea. I swear on my life.”

“Just take me out to the taxi.”

“I'l go with you.”

“No. I want to sit alone.”

She catches a brief waft of her daughter's perfume as she slides into the backseat. “Keys!” shouts Francesca, and Zoli rol s down the window, takes the key ring in her palm.

She can see Francesca mouthing something as the taxi pul s away—I love you, Mamma—and in the rear of the reception area, shuffling, trying to get through the crowd, is Swann, rail-thin, quivering. He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

Zoli sits back against the warm plastic of the seat and looks out to the alarming beauty of the sky as the taxi swings away from the hotel.

She takes the elevator without a second thought, places her head against the cool of the wooden panel, and recal s the noise of his cane, the shine of light on his forehead, the contours of his brow.

For a long time she forgets to push the button.

The chains clank and she rises. The elevator opens on another floor. A young woman and a dog step in to take her place. She walks the final flight of stairs. Turns the key in the door. Negotiates the long corridor in the dim light. She drops her dress to the floor and the metal spoon tumbles out of her pocket. Her underclothes fal behind her. She stands naked in front of the long mirror and gazes at her body—a paltry thing, brown and puckered. She reaches up and unloosens her hair, lets it fal . Al the ancient codes violated. She walks into the living room and picks up the photograph of Enrico from the shelf near the window, takes it from the frame, returns to bed, lifts the covers, curls up under the sheets with the photo just beneath her left breast.

She wishes for a moment that she had waited to hear the things that Swann might have had to say, but what would he say, what could he say, what would ever make sense? Zoli closes her eyes, grateful to the dark. Patterns passing, crystal patterns, snow now, gently settling. There are no days more ful than those we go back to.

She wakes to the sound of people coming into the apartment. The clicking of bottles and a hol ow boom of an instrument in a case being banged against a wal . She sits up and feels the photo pasted against her breast.

“Mamma.”

She is startled to see Francesca at the end of the bed, curled up, knees to her chest. The room seems familiar now, almost breathing.

“You'l take the life from me, precious heart.”

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“How long have you been there?”

“A little while. You were sleeping so wel .”

“Who's there? Who's that? Outside?”

“I don't know, that asshole is bringing people here.”

“Who?” says Zoli.

“Henri.”

“I mean who's with him?”

“Oh, I don't know, just a group of drunks. The bars are closed. I'm sorry. I'l kick them out.”

“No, leave them be,” says Zoli. She pul s back the sheet and shifts sideways on the bed, puts her feet to the floor. “Can you give me my nightdress?”

She stands with her back to her daughter and pul s the dress over her head, rough against her skin.

“You were sleeping with Daddy?”

“Yes, how sil y is that?”

“Just sil y enough.”

A series of shushes come from the living room, then one clink of a bottle cap fal ing to the floor, rol ing across the hardwood, and a series of stifled laughs.

“Mamma, are you okay? Can I get you something? Hot milk or something?”

“Did you talk to him? Swann?”

“Yes.”

“And he said he was sorry, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say what he was sorry for?”

“For everything, Mamma.”

“He's always been an idiot,” says Zoli.

The low sound of a mandolin niters through the apartment and then a harsh piece of laughter, fol owed by the faint pluck of a guitar.

“Come here beside me.”

Her daughter swings longways across the bed, spreads herself out, takes a piece of Zoli's hair and puts it in her mouth. In so many ways, her father's child. They lie side by side in the intimate dark.

“I'm sorry, Mamma.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“I had no idea.”

“What else did he say?”

“He lives in Manchester now. He got out in ‘68, the whole Prague thing. He says he thought you were dead. There were bodies found along the border. He was sure that something bad had happened to you. Or that you were living in a hut somewhere in Slovakia. He says he looked for you.

Searched al over.”

“What's he doing here?”

“He said he likes to fol ow things. To keep in touch. That it was a hobby. He stil uses the word Gypsy. Goes to a lot of conferences and things.

The festival down there in Santa Maria. Al over the place. He says he owns a wine shop.”

“A wine shop?”

“In Manchester.”

“Nobody lives where they grew up anymore.”

“What's that?”

“Just something he said to me once.”

“He said he was heartbroken, Mamma. That's what he said. That he's been heartbroken ever since.”

“He lives alone?”

“I don't know.”

“Swann,” Zoli says with a slow, sad laugh. “Swann. A capitalist.”

She tries to imagine him there, amid a row of wooden racks, learning to count prices, the bel on the doorframe tinkling. He stands and greets the customer with a smal bow of the head. Later, stooped, he shuffles to the corner shop to buy his half-liter of milk and a smal loaf of bread, then goes home to a smal house in a row of smal houses. He sits in a soft yel ow chair and looks towards the window, waiting for the light to disappear so he can have his evening meal, wander off to bed, read the books that wil make up his mind for him.

“He wants to see you again, Mamma. He said that his ideas were borrowed, but your poems weren't.”

“More of his horseshit.”

“He says he has some of Stränsky's poems too.”

“Did he say anything about Conka?”

“He fel out of touch with everyone. They were made to stay in the towers, that's al he knows.”

Francesca's body stretches away from her as if, in their huddling, they might be able to extend each other.

“And the other man, the journalist?”

“He'd like to talk. That's what he said. He found an old book of yours, and went searching. He was just curious at first, enjoyed the poems, he said. He'd like to talk to you. Tomor-row.

“You can talk to him for me, Franca. Tel him something.”

“Tel him what?”

“Tel him I've gone somewhere.”

“You're going home, aren't you?”

“Of course I am.”

“What wil I tel him?”

“Tel him that nothing is ever arrived at.”

“What?”

“Tel him that nothing is ever ful y understood, that's what I'd like to say.”

A peace descends between them now, a quietness that travels across the sheets. Her daughter hikes herself onto an elbow, a little hil of shadow where her hip juts out.

“You know what he wanted to know? Swann. At the end?”

“Tel me,” says Zoli.

“He was a bit embarrassed. He kept looking at the floor. He said he just wanted to know one thing.”

“Yes…?”

“Wel , he wanted to know what had happened to his father's watch.”

“That was his question?”

“Yes.”

Zoli watches as a smal bar of light moves along the wal and down. Someone passes in the corridor outside and a series of shushes sound from the living room. She closes her eyes and is carried away on the notion of Swann resting on one smal fixed point of an ancient clockhand, as if it al might come around again, as if it al could be repeated and cured. A single gold watch. She wonders if she should feel pity, or anger, or even amusement, but instead she locates the pulse of an odd tenderness for Swann, not for how he was, or what he has become, but for al he has lost, the flamboyance of what he had once so dearly believed in, how absolute it was, how fixed. What must it have been like for him, to break the border one final time and to move back to England? What must it have been like for him to return empty, to be back with less than he had ever imagined leaving with? Swann, she thinks, did not learn for himself how to be lost. He did not know the meaning of what it was to turn and change. She wishes now that she had kissed him, that she had taken his slack face in her hands, touched her lips against the pale forehead to release him, to let him walk away.

Zoli lays her head against her daughter's breastbone and feels the breath trembling through Francesca's body.

“You know what I want to do?” Zoli says. “I'm going to see him tomorrow. Then I'd like to get on a train and go back to the val ey. I would very much like to wake up quietly in the dark. That's what I'd like.”

“You're going to tel Swann where you're living?”

“Of course not. I couldn't bear the thought of him coming there.”

And then Zoli knows for sure what she wil do: she wil take a taxi to the train station, stop off first at the hotel, move under the birdsong, cal Swann's room, stand in the reception, wait, watch him shamble across towards her, hold his face in her hands for a moment, and kiss him, yes, on the forehead, kiss him. She wil al ow him his sorrow and then she wil leave, take the train, alone, home to the val ey.

“I'm happy there,” says Zoli.

A note jumps out from deep in the apartment, a hard discordant thing moving through the air, surrounded a second later by a new one, as if testing the old one, until they start to col ide, rising and fal ing, taking air from each other.

“Idiot,” says Francesca. “I'l tel him to shut up.” Her body pul s taut, but Zoli taps her hand. “Wait a moment,” she says. The music rises and draws itself out, quicker, more turbulent.

“Get dressed,” says Zoli.

“Mamma?”

“Let's get dressed.”

Laughter bursts out with the music now and the smel of smoke filters along the corridor. The women step away from the bed. Their clothes lie scattered in the darkness. They fumble a moment: a nightgown, a blue dress, a high-heeled shoe. Francesca's arm gets caught in her sleeve, and Zoli helps it along. She strokes the side of her daughter's face. They stand together at the bedroom door.

“But you're in your nightdress,” says Francesca.

“I don t care.”

They cross the wooden floors of the corridor and a sharp silence fil s the room when mother and daughter appear. Henri stands, wide-eyed, with a thin joint at his mouth. “Oh,” he says, swaying on his feet. Scattered around the room are the Scottish musicians. One of them, tal and handsome and curly-haired, stands and bows deeply. He stubs out his joint in a flowerpot. Francesca giggles and looks across at her mother. How glorious, thinks Zoli, how joyful, that it is al , stil , even on this night, so unfinished.

Zoli nods to them and simply says: “Smoke away.”

The musician looks around, a little startled, fishes his joint from the pot. He straightens it, lights up, and laughs.

“What happened to the music?” says Zoli.

She used to play the sugar upon the metal, she recal s, in those old days when she gathered children at the back of her wagon—she would place a sheet of siding on a wooden saw-horse, sprinkle the sugar on the sheet, sometimes salt, or, if nothing else, seeds. She teased the violin bow along the very edge of the plate until the metal began to hum. The sugar jumped and swerved and found its own vibrating patterns: standing waves, circular clumps, solitary grains, like smal white acrobats. Afterwards the children clamored to lick the sheet clean. She had loved those maps, their random patterns, their odd music, the way the children clapped the sugar into place. She had never thought of them as anything new or unusual, although she heard that others cal ed them chladnis, sound charts—the sugar settling at the points where there was least sound—and she thought, even then, that she could have looked at the metal sheet and found a whole history of her people painted there.

“Go on,” she says. “Play.”

The curly-haired one strikes a note on the mandolin, a bad note, too high, though he rinses it out with the next, and the guitarist joins in, slowly at first, and a wave moves across the gathering, like wind over grass, and the room feels as if it is opening, one window, then another, then the wal s themselves. The tal musician strikes a high chord and nods at Zoli—she smiles, lifts her head, and begins.

She begins.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/AUTHOR'S NOTE

WE GET OUR VOICES from the voices of others. I am enormously indebted to a number of people who have helped me research, refine, and radically change the structure of this novel over the past four years. I can claim no familial link with the Romani culture—it is, I suppose, the novelist's privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread. I have scavenged from all over and am indebted to so many sources that it would be impossible to list them all. Our stories are created from a multiplicity of witness.

The following artists and writers have inspired me—Ilona Lackovä in A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia (University of Hertfordshire Press); Milena Hiibschman-novä; Bronislawa Wajs (Papusza) and Jerzy Ficowksi. I have found enormous help in the work of Ian Hancock from the Center of Romani Archives at the University of Texas. The Romani language and orthography are only now in the process of being standardized. As Hancock has written, the word “Gypsy” is intently disliked by some Roma and tolerated by others. The persistence of the use of “Gypsy” lies in the fact that there is no single Romani equivalent universally agreed upon. Time and scholarship is changing this. I have used certain spellings and constructions determined by geography, history, and political affiliations that were current at the time when the novel takes place, sometimes purposely confused. The choices and mistakes are purely mine.

The story of Zoli was suggested to me after reading the extraordinary study Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca. Zoli is loosely inspired by the life of Papusza, the Polish poet who lived from 1910 to 1987. Zoli's poem in this novel is original, though it takes some of its form from the poetry of Papusza and others. Despite published reports to the contrary (including some statements attributed to characters in this novel), there have been many Roma poets in Europe down through the years—their work has been careful and loving, even if consistently ignored.

I would like to give very special thanks to Laco Oravec and Martin Fotta and everyone else at the Milan Simecka Foundation in Bratislava who, over the course of two months, helped me negotiate the contemporary Romani experience. The novel would have been impossible without their help. I can think of no better guides, nor no better hosts than the people of the settlements that I visited in eastern and western Slovakia. The following know their own role; I only wish I could give them deeper thanks: Richard Jurst, Robert Renk, Valerie Besl, Michal Hvorecky, Jana Belisova, Anna Jurovä, Daniela Hivesovä-Silanovä, Zuzanna Boselovä, Mark Slouka, Zdenek Slouka, Thomas Ueberhoff, Dirk Van Gunsteren, Thomas Böhm, Manfred Heid, Tom Kraushaar, Francoise Triffaux, Brigitte Semler, Martin Koffler, Barbara Stelzl-Marx, and the various people of the Roma camps and housing estates that I visited.

In New York I want to give sincere thanks to Lorcan Otway for all his advice and scholarship. Thanks to Hunter College and the Hertog fellowship program. A deep bow to Emily Stone, my research assistant. Gratitude also to Roz Bernstein, Frank McCourt, Terry Cooper, Gerard Donovan, Chris Barrett Kelly, Tom Kelly, Jeff Talarigo, Jim Harrison, Aleksandar Hemon (for the music!), Bill Cobert, and all at the American Irish Historical Society. The book is dedicated to all at the New York Public Library, including the scholars at the Cullman Center, but a specific thanks goes to Marzena Ermler and Woj-ciech Siemaszkiewicz, and of course to Jean Strouse, Pamela Leo, Adriana Nova, and Amy Aazarito.

Amongst the many, many authors whose writings I have found very helpful are Will Guy, Eva Davidovä, Emilia Horväthovä, Michael Stewart, Alaina Lemon, David Crowe, Donald Kenrick, Tera Fabianovä, Cecilia Woloch, Jan Yoors, Margriet de Moor, Louise Doughty, Vaclav Havel, and Walter Starkie, to name but a few.

Last, but never least, my thanks to Allison Hawke, Daniel Menaker, Kirsty Dunseath, and Sarah Chalfant.

A Conversation with Golum McCann and Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt: I was saddled with the quintessential miserable Irish childhood. You enjoyed the opposite, didn't you? What sort of life does a writer need these days in order to carve out a career in novels?

Colum McCann: That's where I envy you, Frank! You had something to write about from the beginning! I had to carve stories out of nothing! Seriously, though, you're right. There's advantages and disadvantages to both. I grew up in a safe, suburban Dublin household. My father didn't drink. My mother stayed at home. I remember when I came home from school at lunchtime, she would be waiting for me. She used to cut the crusts off my lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a tiny gesture, but representative. I was blessed in so many ways. They looked after us well. We ate together at the family table. We went for walks on Sunday afternoons. And we were surrounded by books. When I think about it, there were thousand of stories in our house. Of course it wasn't all simple and hunky-dory. It never can be. But it was close and it will always be home.

It's interesting to contemplate the notion that writers are not necessarily born, but that they make themselves—from the stuff of desire, of community, of the need to listen. There's never just one way to tell a story. That would be acutely boring. But for me I have no desire to write about my upbringing. Two hundred blank pages. What is it they say? Happiness writes white.

FM: You make these wild imaginative leaps. For This Side of Brightness it was a homeless man living in the subway tunnels. For Dancer it was a gay, Muslim-born ballet icon. Anyone can tell from a quick glance that you're not homeless and, let's face it, neither of us really look like dancers, so where do these stories come from?

CM: My stories come from images and then I end up building worlds around them. The story of Rudolph Nureyev stemmed from a story I heard that took place in the flats of Ballymun, where a young boy caught a glimpse of Nureyev on his family's first television, out on the balcony of a high-rise project. He was holding the TV, and I was awestruck by the notion that a seven-year-old Dublin boy was carrying the world's greatest dancer in his arms. I wanted to explore the idea that we all have stories, that stories are the ultimate human democracy. It doesn't matter how white you are, how poor you are, how straight you are, how far-flung you are, we all have stories and the deep need to tell them. That's the door Fve been knocking on for quite a while now. That's my current obsession—the thought that stories are the only true human currency.

FM: Zoli is in some ways your most “foreign” character, a woman, a poet, a Rom, an exile, an Eastern European. How did you discover and maintain her voice?

CM: Zoli broke my heart a number of times. It certainly was the biggest leap I had ever made. But I'm interested in compassion and clarity and making new worlds available. Or at least, making old worlds visible—I mean visible in literary terms. To do that I had to try to be honest to her voice. There were occasions when I would have to sit for a long time—weeks on end—waiting for her voice to come. She was elusive. Strangely enough, though, now that I've finished the book I can call back her voice in an instant. I can close my eyes and she's right there. Many people have written to me to say that they can still hear her echo in their heads.

FM: Growing up around Limerick, we always had our tinkers, our travelers, our Gypsies. I know they're ethnically different to the Roma, but they seem to share some similarities.

CM: Yes, we had our travelers in Dublin too. They always seemed to embrace mystery. And we had so many cliches in place. You know, when we were growing up, my mother used to say to us: “You be good now or the Gypsies'll come take you away.” Years later I was in a settlement in Slovakia where I heard a mother berating her son. I turned to my translator and asked what was going on. He said: “Oh, she's giving her son a hard time. She's telling him that if he doesn't behave the White Man will come take him away.”

I thought I had suddenly come some full strange and lovely circle. We doubt one another. We distrust. We have the same stories.

The travelers are Ireland's oldest minority group. There's been a long history of anti-traveler prejudice. There's about 30,000 travelers in Ireland. Around the world there are something like twelve million Roma. But the hatred is often the same. And the tarring brush paints both groups as secretive, immoral, dishonest, filthy, uncouth, nomadic, predatory—the list is endless. You repeat something long enough, it becomes the truth. Let me tell you this: In all my time with the Roma I was never hassled, never robbed, never pushed away. I suppose in the end I was the one who was robbing from them. I went there with all the prejudices intact and came away a changed person. That's what I want the book to do too. It's a lofty aim, but why not aim high, since most of our flights of desire fall short, anyway? I believe in the social novel. People ask me why I didn't write about the travelers. I don't know. It wasn't the right time for me. It wasn't the story I wanted to tell. I had found this Polish poet, Papusza, and she took my breath away.

It was her story that Zoli was modelled on. It probably would have been easier to tell the story of the travelers. At least I would have had some geography in place. As it was, I had a mad time just researching this book. I started from point blank nothing. And I had to build from there.

FM: Zoli is a survivor. And she survives primarily on her wits, but in the end she survives and endures by her use of language, her songs, her poetry. Is there a message behind this?

CM: As much as there's a message behind anything, I suppose. Language is at the fulcrum of all that we do. Language and memory. Nobody knows that better than you. That was at the heart of Angela's Ashes.

FM: Some of what amazes me is that there is still very little literature available about the Roma, but there are anywhere from ten to twelve million Gypsies living in the world. Why are there not more stories told?

CM: There's a kaleidoscope of reasons I suppose. Firstly they have traditionally been an oral culture. Very little was written from within—until recent years, that is. Until Romani scholars began to say that one of the ways of combating cliche is not by silence, but by speech. And then there's the ability, or inability, of the non-Roma to listen. We need to learn how to listen to the stories that are there, and to have a deep-rooted empathy within us. We need to destroy our own stereotypes and build from the ground up. Because we have so many stereotypes. And they can commit murder, these stereotypes. They can fly fascist flags, they can spit, they can sterilize, they can kill.

And I come back again, as I often do, to John Berger's line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one.” Stories must be told from all angles. Those who try to own them are those who abuse power. Do I believe that literature has power? Certainly. I have to believe that. And every writer who has ever lived under a tyrannical government knows that a lot better than I do.

FM: Ireland is in the midst of a huge economic boom. Some of that means that the Roma are coming in from Bosnia, from Romania, from Slovakia, along with thousands of other immigrants. Ireland is in the midst of a cultural boom, or bust, depending whom you talk to. You started writing about other cultures at a young age. Do you think you were, in a way, writing the history of your country in advance?

CM: Well, I don't know. I do think writers anticipate things, though they're not necessarily conscious of it. Fiction suggests trends and then has to come around, afterwards, and re-interpret them.

I will tell you this, though. I remember writing a story called “Fishing the Sloe-Black River.” It was a magic realist story about emigration, women fishing for their sons. I thought at the time that it was cutting edge. And I never thought it would be anything but that. However here I am, almost twenty years later, and that story strikes me as decidedly quaint now. It seems so old-fashioned. It's strange. Life is gloriously unfinished. We never know what it's going to deal us.

FM: Great steps have been made in Ireland in recent years. Why not write about those? Why bother with what you call the “small, dark anonymous corners”?

CM: Because I suppose every story is a story about Ireland. To expand the consciousness of what it means to come from that little, dark, shadowed country and then to realise that it's not dark and shadowed at all. As Whitman says, every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.

FM: You, Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibin, Roddy Doyle, and Joseph O'Connor have all wandered from Ireland for subject matter. Is modern Ireland becoming too rich for your taste?

CM: Well, it's become too expensive, that's for sure! I can't recognize it when I go home. I think the new emigration (as a problem) is the problem of return. It's not so hard to leave anymore. It's hard to go back. Brodsky talks about the notion of not being able to go back to the country that doesn't exist anymore.

Also, I think we ‘re at a time when a lot of us are looking out. We will have to look quickly inward again and write the Irish novel from within. But there's nothing wrong with being outside for a while. It gives us perspective. I think we're getting ready to jump back in, feet-first. I know I want to. I want to go in and take it all on. Just when everyone starts thinking that I'm not an Irish novelist at all, I want to go back and find the voice of my land. Because that is where my voice came from. And I have a deep love and appreciation, and maybe a healthy dose of skepticism, of and for Ireland.

FM: And the next project is … ?

CM: That said, it's a New York novel that has 9-11 implications, though it's set in 1974. And it's about joy and technology and faith and all those crazy things. After that, the Irish book.

Jesus, that's looking into the future, isn't it?

For further information, readers can go to colummccann.com

Questions for Discussion

1. Many Romani scholars have argued that the portrayal of Gypsy communities in the mainstream media is partly responsible for ongoing negative stereotypes. McCann opens the novel from the point-of-view of a journalist who seems to be sympathetic toward Zoli, but as the novel progresses the journalist's attitude seems to be benign but superficial. What does the journalist represent?

2. What do we, as readers, learn on a deeper, more substantial level about the life of the Roma from Zoli's story?

3. Zoli's story—even when raw and terribly sad—is told in smooth, bold, simple strokes, almost as if she is whispering in our ears. The Roma are known for having a predominantly oral culture. How much do you think that Zoli (and, by extension, the author) value the art of intimate storytelling?

4. Zoli is asked by a little girl how she can be both “on” the radio and on the road at the same time. “But something lay behind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other” (p. 151). How can old traditions survive in the modern world?

5. In the 1940s and ‘50s, Zoli becomes a poster girl for socialism. But then the socialists try to put her and her whole culture in the “Gypsy jam jar” (p. 119). As a result, her own people blame her for what happens. Soon, she is betrayed on all sides. Is Zoli a prophet of sorts? Are prophets inevitably doomed to banishment?

6. Stephen Swann falls in love with Zoli. At times he believes that the love is fully requited, but is he just deluding himself? Is he a reliable narrator?

7. “We had interrupted her solitude in order to compensate for our own,” says Swann (p. 128). Why does Swann feel so lonely and outcast before Zoli's banishment? Is he a forerunner of a certain type of international wanderer? Is he at heart, ironically, what some people might have called a “gypsy”?

8. Is Zoli a poet or a singer? Or are they the same thing?

9. When McCann first embarked on this novel he says he knew “little or nothing” about the Romani culture. What was your own experience of the Gypsy way of life? Has it changed now after reading the novel?

10. Not the least of McCann's achievements is the realism of the voices of his characters. How does he achieve the verisimilitude?

11. “One always loves what is left behind,” says Zoli (p. 258). Is our view of Romani life solely based on some sentimental folk memory of something that does not exist anymore?

Will

ignorance prevent the embrace of true cultural diversity? Or will memory and/or poetry carry it through?

12. This epic story encompasses the twentieth century's battles with fascism and communism and idealism. Yet it comes back to the fundamental search for home. How much do the politics of our times define where our true homes are?

13. The epigraph quotes Tahar Djaout: “If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die.” How much faith or strength do you think Zoli would put in these words?

14. Zoli says “I still call myself black even though I have rolled around in flour” (p. 277). What do you understand her to mean by this?

15. Zoli triumphs in Paris. It is a small, personal triumph, a journey toward joy. Will that joy extend itself through the rest of her days? Do you think her poetry will now be rescued and sung by others? What happens to Zoli after the final page?

Suggested Further Reading

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

What Is the What, by Dave Eggers

The People's Act of Love by James Meek

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey

by Isabel Fonseca

COLUM MCCANN is the author of five other works of fiction, including This Side of Brightness and Dancer, both of which were international bestsellers. He was featured as the

“Next Great Novelist” in Esquire magazine's “America's Best and Brightest” (2003). He is the winner of the inaugural Ireland Fund of Monaco's Literary Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Pushcart Prize, and he was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame for Irish Literature. McCann's books have been published in twenty-six languages. His short film Everything in This Country Must, directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. He lives in New York City with his wife and children.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.

Copyright © 2006 by Colum McCann

Reading group guide copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

RANDOM HOUSE READER'S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

McCann, Colum.

Zoli: a novel / Colum McCann.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49372-9

1. Irish Travellers (Nomadicpeople)— Fiction.

2. Womenpoets, Irish— Fiction. 3. Journalists— Fiction. I. Title

PR6063.C33SZ42 2007

813 ‘.S4— dc22 2006042922

www.randomhousereadersdrcle.com

v3.0

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books By This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1 - Slovakia

Chapter 2 - Czechoslovakia

Chapter 3 - England-Czechoslovakia

Chapter 4 - Czechoslovakia—Hungary—Austria

Chapter 5 - Slovakia

Chapter 6 - Compeggio, Northern Italy

Chapter 7 - Paris

Acknowledgments/Author's Note

Questions for Discussion

Suggested Further Reading

About The Author

Copyright