Zoli

The crux of the matter was assimilation, belonging, ethnic identity. We wanted them, but they wanted us to leave them alone. And yet the only way to be left alone was to let us know what their life was, and that life was in Zoli's songs.

On the motorbike, we drove east to meet with local officials in Zilina, Poprad, Presov, Martin, Spisskä Nova Ves. In town meetings she spoke about tradition and nationhood, about the old life, against assimilation. She had written down the poems, she said, in order to sing the old life, nothing more. Her politics were those of road and grass. She leaned forward into microphones. Don't try to change us. We are complete. Citizens of our own space. The bureaucrats stared at her and nodded blankly. Simply being who she was aroused an expectation among them—they wanted her in the Gypsy jam jar. They nodded and showed us the door, assured us they were on our side, but anyone could see that they were separated from honesty by fear. Nor could we be rescued by the forces of beauty around us: we clattered down the potholed roads, through val eys, beneath the snowcapped eastern mountains, in the early mornings when smal house lights stil dawdled by the rivers, a smoke of mayflies drifting in the air. I opened my mouth and it fil ed with midges.

The journey hammered me down. A deadness in my fingers. Climbing on the bike, the day seemed to stretch out, endless. Zoli carried her clothes in a zajda blanket stretched around her back, two knots tied at her chest. She had already scarred her left leg on the heat of the exhaust pipe, but she did not stop: she applied her own poultice from dock leaves. Town to town, hal to hal . In the evening, we stayed in the homes ofgadze

activists. Even they had become silent. I walked around with a hol ow pit in my stomach. Whole marching bands of children went through the streets wearing red scarves, shouting slogans. The loudspeakers seemed to be turned up a notch. For long stretches we found in ourselves little to say. In the corridors of community offices al over the country, Zoli tore her face down off the wal s, shredded the pieces, put them in her pocket: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

We stayed one night in a monastery that had become a hotel. It was shoddy and ruined, ful of plastic plants and cheap prints. The bites that woke me were from bedbugs concealed under a loose corner of wal paper. Bel s rang out in the early morning, cal ing workers to their jobs. I rose and washed my arms and face in the handbasin in the corridor, paid the plump woman at the front desk. She sat in a bright plastic chair and regarded me, diligently bored, though she sat upright when she saw Zoli, recognizing her from the newspapers.

As we rode from the monastery, a series of thin and trembling images caught in the rain puddles: moving feet, windows, a smal slice of steel-colored sky. I had the very ordinary thought that surely there was an easier life elsewhere. Zoli and I waited for an hour to fil up the petrol tank. The motorbike was a curiosity with young children on their way to school. They were fascinated by the speedometer. Zoli lifted the children and al owed them to pretend that they were driving. They laughed and clapped as she pushed them along, school satchels slung over their shoulders, until they were shooed off by the petrol attendant.

In the evening we reached Martin, a gray little town along the Vah River. We were refused a hotel room until Zoli showed her Party card, and even then she was told that there was only one room left, though there were four single beds in it. It was on the top floor, something she always resisted unless she was sure there were no Gypsy men beneath her—every now and then she dredged up some of the ancient ways, and it was possible, in the old blood laws, to contaminate men by walking above them. She eventual y managed to get a first-floor room with the suggestion that she would throw a curse on the clerk. Alarmed, he scuttled away and came back moments later with the keys. It was a form of voodoo that she used only in the worst cases. She threw her bag on the soft mattress and we left for a meeting with the local officials—three Cultural Inspectors who had formerly been priests.

Al Zoli wanted to do was hold a hand up against the tide that she felt was washing over her, but Law 74 had become part of the vocabulary now; the idea was that the Gypsies were part of the apparatus. Zoli pleaded with them, but the officials smiled and doodled nervously at the edge of ledgers.

“Shit on you,” she said to them, and she walked out into the front courtyard, and sat with her head in her hands. “Maybe I should sing a song for them, Swann?” She spat on the ground. “Maybe I should jangle my bracelets?”

In the local market she came across a family of Roma who had been burned out of a sawmil and had nowhere to sleep. She brought them through the lobby of the hotel, eleven or twelve at least, not including children, and promised the clerk that they'd be out first thing in the morning. His jaw hung slack, but he al owed them to pass. In the room I set up a makeshift sheet around one bed so as not to be improper. I tried to leave so she and the family would have the room to themselves, but neither Zoli nor the others would have any of it. They insisted I stay in the bed. The women and children giggled as I undressed. My ankles were exposed underneath the hanging sheet—it was what they deemed immodest.

Part of the curtain fel aside and I watched as they gathered in the middle of the room and talked in a dialect I couldn't make out. It seemed they were talking of burnings.

When I woke I saw Zoli, in the predawn dark, climbing out the window. Al the others had already gone from the room. When she returned she held in her hand a wet cloth that I assumed she must have wiped in the dew. She lit a candle, placed it in an ashtray, and curved her hand around it as if to shield the light from me. She leaned forward and let her black hair fal before her. She pressed the wet cloth along the length of it a number of times. She brushed it as many more times with a wooden comb, then gathered her hair, coiled it, braided it. The ceiling skipped with shadow.

She slipped into the far bed.

When I stood up and walked over to her she did not move. She lay with her back to me, her neck bare. A draft flattened the candle flame. She al owed my arm across her waist. She said that there were many things she missed in her life, not least a sinewy voice that might come up from beneath the ice. I nudged in against her, kissed the back of her hair. It smel ed of grass.

“Marry me,” I said to her.

“What?” she said, speaking towards the window, not as a question, nor an exclamation, but something distant and unfathomable.

“You heard me.”

She turned and gazed some other place beyond me.

“Haven't we lost enough?” she said.

She turned and kissed me briefly as she lowered the guil otine for a final time, and I was grateful in a way that she had waited so long. A single phrase, and yet it hit me with the force of an axe. She had put a line down between us, one I could never again cross.

Zoli rose and gathered her possessions. When she left the room, I punched into the wal and heard a knuckle crack.

She was waiting outside. I had to drive her to another town. She smiled slightly at the sight of my fist wrapped in a towel, and for a brief moment I hated her and al the bareness she brought to her life.

“You've got to drive me through the mountains,” she pleaded. “I can't stand the idea of those tunnels.”

And yet we were in a tunnel anyway, we knew it, and maybe we had always been. We had sped into the arch of darkness, slowed down, steered a moment in the unusual cold, until it felt right, and then we'd jolted the bike forward again, pushed against the headlong wind. We had recognized a pinpoint of light, a tiny gleam that kept growing, and the longer we journeyed in the darkness the more dazzling the light had become, ever brighter, more bril iant, and we leaned forward onto the handlebars, until eventual y, like everyone, we had approached the mouth of the tunnel. Then we smashed that motorbike out into the sunshine, momentarily blinded, stunned, and we stayed so for quite a while, until our eyes adjusted and we began to blink and things came into focus and al around us were pebbles and amongst the pebbles, stones, and amongst the stones, rubbish, and amongst the rubbish, smal gray buildings, and between, and beyond, pockets of gray men and women, a wasteland of them—ourselves. Instead of letting our hearts sink, we had closed our eyes once more and we had ridden that bike into another darkness, another tunnel, thinking there would be a brighter light just a little further along, that nothing would derail us, and that belief, like most beliefs, was more precious than the truth.

What is there to say?

Stränsky's last words to the firing squad: “Come closer, it wil be easier for you.”

The hubs were of elm. The spokes, mostly oak. The rims were made from fel oes of curved ash, joined by strong pegs, bound with iron. Many were painted. Some were badly nicked and scarred. Certain ones were rigged with wire. A few were buckled with moisture. Others were stil perfect after decades. They were hauled in from riverbanks, deep forests, fields, edges of vil ages, long, empty tree-lined roads. Thousands of them. Sledgehammers were used to remove them. Two-man saws. Levers. Tire irons. Mal ets. Pneumatic dril s. Knives. Blowtorches. Even bul ets when frustration set in. They were taken to the railroad yards, state factories, dump grounds, sugar mil s and, most often, to the weedy fields at the rear of police stations where once again they were tagged and then, after meticulous documentation, they were burned. The troopers worked the bonfires in shifts. Smal groups in the vil ages gathered, bringing their chairs with them. In the freezing afternoons workers broke off early to see the stacks as they whistled and hissed in the fires. At times the air bubbles popped in rackety succession. Sparks yawed off into the air. The rubber caught and threw huge flames. The iron hoops reddened and glowed. The nails melted. When the fires waned, the crowds threw on extra paraffin.

Some cheered and drank from bottles of vodka, jars of cucu. Policemen stood and watched as the embers made silent passages into the air. Army sergeants leaned in and lit cigarettes. Teachers gathered classes around the flames. Some children wept. In the days afterwards, a slew of government officials rol ed out in jeeps and cars from Kosice, Bratislava, Brno, Trnava, Saris, Pobedim, to inspect what had happened under Law 74. It had taken just three days, an incredible success, so our newspapers and state radio told us, generous, decent, Socialist: we got rid of their wheels.

There were horses too, of course, requisitioned and sent to the col ective farms, though many were old and bony and ready for the glueyard.

Those were shot where they stood.

I walked the backstreets of Bratislava, reeling, the copy of Rude pravo rol ed up in my back pocket. I knew there was a syntax in the way I carried my body, and I was careful now not to unfold myself ful y to the troopers. I stayed at home, hung shirts across the window for curtains.

Zoli's kumpanija, which had been hiding out in the forests not far from the city, had tried to flee, but they were surrounded and brought to the city.

They cal ed it the Big Halt. They were joined by other families as the roads fil ed. Women at the front, men at the flank. Long lines of carriages and children. Dogs snapped and kept them in line. The people were herded into fields at the foot of the new towers. The troopers disappeared and the bureaucrats came, waving files. The children were deloused in the local spa, then everyone was lined up and inoculated against disease.

Speeches were given. Our brothers and sisters. The true proletariat. Historical necessity. Victory is swift. The dawn of a new era.

Flags were unfurled. Bands played trumpets as Zoli's men and women were guided towards community centers—from now on they'd live in the towerblocks. They were a triumph of what we had become. They were to be envied.

Alone in my room, I listened to the radio reports: serious and high-minded, they talked of the rescue of the Gypsies, the great step forward, how they'd never be shackled by primi-tivism again. One of Zoli's poems was read out on the midnight program. I didn't have the bravery to turn it off.

I went downstairs, snapped the front cable on the motorbike, took apart the chain and left the links in pieces on the ground. I wandered the al eyways, my hand trailing the lichen on the wal s, paced underneath the marble arch carved with Soviet stars. Blue posters were pasted on street corners, long columns of names of those who had committed crimes against the popular democratic order. I looked down at the dismal sweep of the Danube. Citizens moved along the waterfront without motive, without volition. It was like watching a silent movie—they spoke but remained silent.

In the mil , the new boss, Kysely, was a vicious little corner-shop of a man. He waited for me with a clipboard.

I ventured down past Galandrova Street, wearing a black-belted shirt and a pin from the Union of Slovak Writers, and there she was, huddled in the shadows of the mil . She wore her overcoat and her kerchief had fal en down over her eyes. I walked up and stood in front of her a moment, lifted her chin with a forefinger. She pul ed away. I could hear the noise of the mil behind us, its mechanical hum.

“Where've you been, Stephen?”

“The motorbike.”

“What about it?”

“It's broken down.”

She took one step back, then reached forward and ripped the pin out of my shirt.

“I tried to get out there to help you,” I said. “I was stopped, Zoli. They turned me back. I tried to find you.”

She pushed open the door of the mil and strode inside. Kysely, grimy and yel ow-faced, was wearing one of Stränsky's shirts. He stared across the machines at her. “Identification?” he said. She ignored him, stamped across the floor, and went to the filing racks. The original poster plate was there, cased in steel. She took it and threw it against the wal . It bounced on the floor and slid against the hel box. She picked it up and began to hammer the image of her face against the ground.

Kysely began to laugh.

Zoli looked up at him and spat at his feet. He gave me a smile that froze me to the ground. I took him aside and pleaded: “Let me handle this.” He shrugged, said there would be repercussions, and went upstairs, past Stränsky's colored footprints. Zoli was standing in the middle of the floor, chest rising and fal ing.

“They'l keep us there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The towers,” she said.

“It's temporary. It's to control—”

“To control what, Stephen?”

“It's just temporary.”

“They played one of your recordings on the radio,” she said. “My people heard it.”

“Yes.”

“They heard there wil be a book.”

“Yes.”

“And do you know what they thought? ”

I felt something sharp move under my heart. I had heard about the Gypsy trials, the punishments that could be handed down. The law was binding.

Anyone banished was banished forever.

“If you print this book they'l blame me.”

“They can't.”

“They'l have a trial. They'l make judgment. Vashengo and the elders. The blame wil come down on me. Do you understand? It'l come down on me. Maybe it should.”

She crossed the floor towards me, her knuckle to her chin. There were only two floorboards between us. She was pale, almost see-through.

“Don't print the books.”

“They're already printed, Zoli.”

“Then burn them. Please.”

“I can't do it.”

“Who is it up to, if it isn't up to you?”

The sharpness of her voice slid right through my skin. I stood, trembling. I tried rattling off excuses: the book could not be shelved, the Union of Slovak Writers wouldn't al ow it. Kysely and I were under strict instructions. The government would arrest us, there were darker things afoot. They needed the poems to continue resettlement. Zoli was their poster girl. She was their justification. They needed her. Nothing else could be done.

They would soon change their minds. Al she had to do was wait. I stammered, came to the end of my arguments, and stood, then, rimrocked by them al .

Zoli looked momentarily like a window-stunned bird. Her eyes flicked the length of my body. She tugged at the looping drape of skirt at her feet and toed her sandals in the ground, then she slapped me once, and turned on her heels. When she opened the front door, a cage of light moved across the floor. It sprang away as her footsteps sounded outside. She left without a word. She was absolutely real to me then, no longer the Gypsy poet, the ideal Citizen, the new Soviet woman, something exotic to fal in love with.

I understood what Stränsky had understood too late—we had interrupted her solitude in order to compensate for our own.

That afternoon I stood by the new Romayon printing machine. Her poems had been set, but they had not yet been printed. I ran my fingers over the metal ingots. I placed the gal ey trays. I turned the switch. The metal began to rol . Its dark and constant rhyme. I couldn't now give it a meaning even if I wanted to, the cogs caught and the rol ers spun, and I betrayed her.

Under the mackling hum, I tried to convince myself that with a book, a bound book, she might stil be able to rescue her people—they would not blame her, or banish her, she'd become their conscience and the rest of us would listen and understand, we'd study her poems in school, she'd travel the country, her words would bring her people back onto the road, the ones in the settlements would walk up through their towns without being spat on, and she would return that dignity, it would final y come together, simply, elegantly, and we would al be given a row of red medals to wear upon our chests.

It is astounding how terrifying words can be. No act is too shal ow so long as we give it a decent name.

I worked on in a sweat and a fury. A memory gaffed me. I saw those young guards who had beaten the bottoms of my feet when I first crossed the border. They sat on the back of the flatbed trucks, waiting. I felt myself back on the train with Stränsky, about to move, and then I heard two clear pistol shots ring out in the air.

By early morning the first of the poems was rol ing off the press. I looked up at the light in Kysely's office. He was peeking through the blinds. He nodded, raised his hand, smiled.

I climbed the stairs towards the cutting machines, the weight of her work in my hands.

The heart's old furniture, watch it burn. I lie here now and my leg has healed enough to know that it wil never real y heal. Just a few days ago, after she was banished by her own people, I went searching for her. I met some farmers in a field near Trnava. They said they had seen her, and that she was walking east. There was no reason to believe them—they were working fields that were no longer their own, and they were nervous at the sight of me. The youngest had the clipped speech of one wel educated. He mumbled “Siberia” under his breath, said it could be seen from the tal est tree around, I should climb up and take a look. He struck a shovel into the ground and threw a clod back over his shoulder.

As I drove away I thought that I would, without hesitation, do that work now: go into a field not my own and strike down deep into it.

I only wish I could astonish with some last-page grace. But what should I do? Stay here and read aloud my ration book? Sit down and write a revolutionary opera?

I asked Stränsky once if there would be music in the dark times, and he said, yes, there had always been music in the dark times, because that's what they mostly are, dark times. He had seen the hil s of rotting corpses and they did not speak back to him.

Yet there are moments I can name and miss—I wil miss the tal trees around the wagons, the way the harps sounded when the wheels moved, the soaring hawks around the lakes when her kumpanija pul ed out to the road. I wil miss her wandering around the machinery in the mil , touching her fingers against the smudges of ink, reciting the older songs, changing them, restoring them. I wil miss the way she pinched her dress with her fingers whenever she passed a man she did not know, the slight skip in her younger step, the quiver of the two moles at the base of her neck when she sang. And I wil miss the urgent swerve of her Romani, the way she said “Comrade,” how ful and alive it felt, and I wil miss the poems though they are stacked within me stil .

To be where I am now is the whole of it. The days wil not get any brighter. I do not seek to imagine what echo my words wil find. Kysely knocked on my door yesterday when I didn't appear for work five days in a row. He gave a thin little smile as he looked me up and down and said: “Tough shit, son, you have a job to do.”

And so I am off, now, on my crutches, towards the mil .

Czechoslovakia—Hungary—Austria

1959-1960

FOR A LONG TIME NOW the road has been deserted. Vineyards and endless rows of pines. She steps along the grass verge between the mudtracks, her sandals sodden, her feet raw. At a slight bend she is surprised by a low stone wal and, through a stand of young saplings, a smal wooden hut. No horse. No car tracks. No roof smoke. She walks beyond the trees to the edge of the hut, forces the door, peers inside. Dead winter grass lies in the cracks of the planks. Pieces of winecrate, empty buckets, shriveled leaves. The door hangs off its wooden hinges, but the roof is strong and arched, and might keep the worst of the weather out.

Zoli pauses at the threshold a moment, framed between light and shadow.

A cracked sink stands in the corner, a trickle from its tap. When she opens the spigot, the pipes rattle and groan. She holds her hand under the drip for it to pool and fil , then drinks from her palm, so thirsty that she can feel the water fal ing through her body.

She bends to remove her sandals. The layers of flesh tear and flap. The skin smarts most at the edges where the dead meets the living. She swings one foot up into the sink but, in the solitary drip, can only massage the dirt deeper into her wounds. Zoli pushes the bunched skin back into place, crosses the floor, leans against the wal , lays her head on the floor, cold against the side where her jaw aches.

She sleeps erratical y, woken at times by the heavy rain and the wind outside, making the trees swing and rear and canter. The noise on the roof sounds to her like a drum she was once given as a child—it is as if she has stepped inside the hol ow-ness of it.

From the darkest corner of the hut, she hears a series of skittering noises. Across the narrow expanse a single brown rat looks at her with curiosity. Zoli hisses the rat away but it returns with a mate. It sits on its hindlegs, licking its forepaws. The second darts forward, stops, touches its long tail against the face of the first, draws a lazy circle with its body. Zoli hammers her sandal on the ground. The rats twitch, turn, return, but she slaps the shoe off the metal windowframe and the rats scamper to the dark corner. Zoli fumbles in the hut to col ect leaves, sticks, and bits of crate.

She builds them into a smal teepee, shakes out the cap of her lighter, cups her hands around the kindling, blows it to flame. When the rats peek out again she slides lit spears of twig across the floor, one after the other, bouncing shards of light. The twig ends burn slowly, scorching the wooden boards.

She waits, head slumped against the wal —how strange this desire to stay alive, she thinks, how easy, with no integrity nor purity, simply a function of habit.

In the morning she wakes panicked. The rats are nowhere to be seen, though fresh pel ets lie in patterns beyond her feet.

A gray reef of light climbs up and around the window. From the top of the pane to the bottom, she watches a raindrop slide. An acute wave of nausea hits her. She presses her thumb against her lower jaw. Her mouth feels riven, her jaw huge. The pain shoots along her jaw, to her neck, her shoulderblades, her arms, her fingers. She reaches for the tooth with the tip of her tongue, rocks it back and forth, waiting for the roots to snap. The tooth shifts in her gum, but does not lift. She heaves again, dryly, nothing in her stomach anymore. I have been many days on the road, she thinks, and have not eaten a single thing.

At the judgment, three nights before, the congress said that she was weak, that she did not have the strength of body or mind, and they sentenced her to Pol ution for Life in the Category of Infamy for the Betrayal of Romani Affairs to the Outsiders.

She wonders now if she has discovered what it means to be blind: she can see nothing before her that she wishes to enjoy, and little behind that she cares to remember.

It happened so quickly and she accepted it without question. She was ushered into the center of the tent and made to stand. They checked for metal in her hair that might absorb the ruling. The elder krisnitoria sat in a half-ring on crates and chairs. Five coal-oil lamps were placed in a semicircle around them. They stood and invoked the ancestral dead, the lamplight flickering on their faces as each spoke in turn, an even pitch of accusation. The crossing and uncrossing of feet. The blue curl of tobacco smoke.

Vashengo stood and asked if she understood the charges. She had betrayed her people, he said, she had told of their affairs, brought unrest down upon them. He spat on the ground. He looked like a man in a state of gentle decay, water left stagnant in a pail. Zoli pinched the front of her dress, felt the weight of pebbles sewn in her hem. She talked of settlement and change and the complicated sorrow of the old days, of which she had often sung, of the hewers of tin and the drawers of water, of stencils of smoke and fire that tightened the skin, of patterns and snapped twigs, of the sound of wood against the land, of roads and signs, of nights on the hil s, making from broken things what was newly required, how the gadze used words, delegations, institutions, rules, of how she had misunderstood them, how they had hastened the dark, of brotherhood, decency, towerblocks, wandering, of how these things would be felt amongst the souls of the departed, of wisdom, whispered names, things not to be repeated, of her grandfather, how he was waiting, watching, silent, gone, of what he had believed and what that belief had become, of water turning backwards, banks of clay, snowfal , sharp stones, of how they could stil only cal her black even after she had been soaked in whiteness.

It was the longest speech she had ever made in her life.

A riffle of whispers went around the tent. As they conferred, Vashengo lit a cigarette with brown hands and studied the lit end deeply. Another cough and a silence. He was the one designated to speak. He stil wore his cufflinks coined from red bicycle reflectors. He lit a match off his fingernail so that it looked as if fire was springing from his hand. He sat, tunneling mud from his boot with a stick, gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and blew, wiped his hand on his trousers which were lined, on the seam, with oval silver studs. He stood up, neck cords tight, walked towards her. The sound of his voice was redundant, for she knew the punishment already. Vashengo slapped her face with the back of his hand. Something gentle lay in his slap, but one of the rings on his fingers caught her jawbone. She turned her face in the direction of the blow, kept her head to her shoulder.

Nobody would ever eat with her now. Nobody would walk with her. If she touched any Romani thing it would be destroyed, no matter what value: horse, table, dish. When she died, nobody would bury her. She would not have a funeral. She could not come back, even as a spirit. She could not haunt them. They would not talk of her, they could not even mention her: she had betrayed the life and she was beyond dead, not Gypsy, not gadzi, nothing at al .

Zoli was told to close her eyes as Vashengo ushered her out of the camp. Her late grandfather's breathing came in behind her: in it, the sounds of years. The other elders did not touch her, but instead they guided her with the sound of their boots. Al the children had been taken inside. She glanced at Conka's caravan, the chopped wheels making it list sideways. A corner of the curtain trembled and a half-shadow shot back. If I could take al my foolishness and put it in your hands, piramnijo, you would be bowed over for the rest of your life. None of the other women were looking out: they had been told not to, otherwise they too would feel the hand.

It was close to morning and a thin line of cloud had appeared on the eastern rim of the sky. In the distance stood a few warehouses, more stray towers, and an emptiness of hil s, stretching beyond. No place seemed more or less sheltered than any other. It was then that she had begun to walk.

In the morning she stands, gripping the doorframe, staring out at the puddled vineyard, the terraced slopes, and the mist of middle-distance where a sheet of gray hangs across the low Carpathian hil s. She has, she thinks, become unused to such a clean silence: only the wind and the rain and her own breathing.

For an hour she waits for the rain to slacken, but it doesn't, so she hikes her belongings, pul s her scarf over her head, and walks out into the downpour.

She stops and pul s the sleep from her eye, eats the smal yel ow deposit from the tip of her finger.

Close to the road, she clambers over a stone stile towards the pine forest. Raindrops bel down from the branches and fal to the forest floor. She bends to fil her skirt pockets with brittle needles, pinecones, dry twigs, and carries them al , bundled in her zajda, back towards the hut.

At the doorway she throws the bundle in a heap to the middle of the floor. She shakes the lighter for fuel—enough for a week or two perhaps—

and builds the fire using broken wine-crate. When it is lit, she drops the pinecones into the flames and waits for them to crack open. She touches her swol en jaw, quite sure the seeds wil break her bad tooth and dislodge it altogether, but when she bites down into one, her front tooth quivers.

I wil not lose my front teeth. Of al things, I wil not lose those.

She hunkers down, eating. What might it be like to stay like this forever, she wonders, moving back and forth between forest and hut, over the empty field, through the colorless rain, eating pine seeds, watching the flame crackle? To lie on the floor and slip down into the boards, to wake again in silence, saying nothing, recal ing nothing, with not a soul in sight, to have her name pass silently into the wal s of the hut?

Zoli feels her stomach churn. She gathers the folds in her dress, shoves open the door and hurries to the stone wal . She pul s down her undergarments, the cold grass brushing against her skin. She steadies herself against the wal , one arm draped around the rock. Her stomach gives. The stench of her insides. She turns her head to her shoulder, away from the filth.

A huge brown dog stands lantern-eyed at the far end of the wal . The dog raises its head and howls, the rheumy folds of skin above its eyes shaking.

Zoli hikes her dresses, slips on the top stone of the wal . The stone scrapes the length of her knee. Her feet slosh in the muck. By the time she reaches the road the dog is already nosing in her filth and raw seeds.

She pul s her overcoat tight around her and hurries down the road, sandals slapping, away from the hut. She crosses another stone wal and sits with her back against it, chest heaving. Smal swal ows scissor soundlessly through the trees. No signs of houses or horsecarts. She rests awhile and recleans herself with wet grass, wipes her hands clean, swings her legs over the wal .

A larger road, this, blacktopped, long, straight.

The rain stops and she walks the shining tarmacadam in a spel of lavish winter sunlight. Her sandals squelch and rub her torn feet. I am, she thinks, a twenty-nine-year-old woman walking like one already grown old. She touches her chest with the fingers of her right hand and stretches her spine long. Her coat feels wet and heavy and an idea comes, almost comforting in its simplicity—I should just drape it over my arm. Lightheaded, she negotiates the middle of the road. Al about her are long rows of vines, sheds from the col ectives, and, in the distance, the mountains standing simple against the sky.

At a bend she stops to look at a lump in the roadway behind her. A thing, a person, a body, in the road. She pul s deep into the brambles. How did I step past a body in the road? How could I possibly miss it? She pushes herself further into the hedge, branches crisscrossed in front of her.

How did I fail to see a dead person lying there? She waits for a sound, any sound— a vehicle, a rifle shot, a moan—but nothing comes. She hooks her fingers around the strand of bushes to look again: the body lies flat and dark and prone in the roadway.

“Idiot,” she says aloud to herself.

Zoli climbs from the bushes and wearily trudges back to pick up the dropped coat. It lies on the roadway in a sprawl, one arm outstretched as if pointing in another direction.

A rumble of engines as she passes the gates of a col ective farm. Zoli pul s herself down into the long ditch grass. The engines grow loud until they are almost upon her, and she is surprised to see truckloads of young Czechoslovakian troopers going past, rifles held across their chests, faces darkened with shadow, cheeks hol owed as if they have been blown out with tiny explosives. Not a word from them. Staring ahead in the cold.

Al these young men, she thinks, hardened by long wars and short memories. The same ones who took us down the road, who sprinkled petrol on the wheels, who led the horses away to the farms, who sat outside the National Theater the night Stränsky read my poems. The same ones who saluted me at the al -weather posts as I passed in the snow. One of them once had a copy of Credo rol ed up in his uniform pocket.

She shivers as the squadron sprays by, leaving tire tracks on the wet of the road.

A sudden sound startles her: like gunfire at first but she turns to see geese rising up by the hundreds from the fields, cutting a dark vee against the sky.

Pol ution for Life. In the Category of Infamy. It seems possible now to Zoli that she is walking in some terrible otherness, that she is not out in these wet winter fields, cast off from everything, but instead she is standing at the point where she was, long ago, before the poems, before the printings, before Swann, before Stränsky, and for a moment she is like one who believes that to continue a good dream you must lie in the exact same place you fel asleep, so she might somehow be able to drift back into days that once had been, where there were no poems, just songs, a step back into the ordinary territory of the ago, before the gatherings and the meetings and the conferences and directives, before the flashbulbs

and the microphones, the openings and ovations. To become nothing at al , she thinks, a mind capable of nothing, a body capable of nothing, an escape backwards to a time when things were half-considered, inconsequential.

She had only meant for it to be good, for it to pierce the difference between stars and ceilings, but it did not, and now the words were shaped, carved, placed—they had become fact.

I have sold my voice, she thinks, to the arguments of power.

Caution, No Entry. She pul s aside one of the boards and peers inside. A tiny concrete shrine, only big enough to kneel in. Al of the religious paraphernalia has been removed and the stone arch of the altar careful y dril ed out. She searches for a candlestub left by some Citizen. A couple of gray feathers lie amid the dirt piles, and a spider toils in the upper rafters, moving towards a smal sliver of leaf at the edge of the web.

The bracket pops in the top of the wooden boards as she squeezes her way inside.

She sits awhile in the driest corner. A holy cross is scratched in the front wal of the shrine, and she puts her finger to her lip, touches the cross, then places her head on her bundled zajda and dozes in the safety of the shrine. How many travelers have passed over this cold floor? How many incantations? How many people beseeching God to make two plus two not equal four?

She is woken later, startled by the sound of an airplane. Outside, the brightness stings her eyes. A line of jet-smoke in the sky.

By early afternoon beads of sweat shine on her forehead and a dizziness propels her. I must find a stream to plunge my head into, some moving water to take this fever away. But she can find no sound of running streams along the road, only bird-song and wind among the trees. She reaches a smal tarmac road where a pile of chainsawed trees lie stacked like corpses. She turns as a large truck approaches, muck spraying up from the wheels. The horn blares long and loud. She stands, unmoving, as the truck bears down. The hum of the tires. The gril almost upon her, silver and slatted, light and dark. The horn blasts yet again. She closes her eyes and the wind sucks her close. Spray from the wheel splatters her face, and the driver screams out the window as the truck passes no more than a half meter from where she stands. She watches it go. The truck grows smal er against the road, a last light twinkling from its roof as it rounds a corner.

It would, she thinks, have been just as easy to have stepped out in front of it.

She returns the way she came and sits under a giant sycamore, pul s a fistful of yel owed grass from the ground and puts it in her mouth against her aching tooth. She removes her over- coat and ties the arms together around her waist. It was Swann who gave her the coat a year ago. He had returned from Brno with a whole cardboard box of them balanced precariously on his motorbike. He had bought them for the kumpanija and had even found smal sizes for the children. He could not understand her when she said no, that she did not want them, that she'd just as soon walk around with a yel ow armband, or a truncheon stuck in her back. Swann sat in the wooden chair by his window, perplexed: “But it's not charity, Zoli, it's just a few coats, that's al .” He remained silent then, tapping the glass pane, his light hair framing his face. She crossed the room and said: “I'l take one each for Conka's children.” He brightened and sifted through the pile to find the right sizes. “One for you too,” he said, and put it around her, and as he touched her shoulders, he said that he had found a consignment of red shirts also. What strange laughter had come to her then, the idea of the whole kumpanija wandering down the road in the exact same cheap red shirts.

Yet what was once funny turned out to be inevitable; what was once strange was, now, final y, true.

Zoli feels as if she is carrying the sandy-haired Englishman on her back. Impossible to shuck him. She wonders how long she might walk before the weight of him drags her down, again, to the ground. He told her once that she looked like a Russian poet he had seen in photographs: the dark eyes, high forehead, her hair swept back, her tal body, her complicated stare. He brought her to the National Library and showed her the poet, Akhmatova, though she could see no resemblance. She had always thought herself dark, simple, black, yet in the photos the Russian woman looked white, heavy-eyed, and beautiful. Swann read to her a line about standing as witness to the common lot. He had asked her if she would marry him and she was stunned by the simplicity of his plea. She had loved him then, but he did not know the extent of the impossible. In the printing mil , at the end, he was not able to hold her gaze. He had not printed the poems yet, but she knew he would. What else had she expected? Where happiness was not a possibility, the il usion of it was always more important. Wasn't it Swann who told her once about a bird, a glukhar, that went deaf with its own mating cal s? Both of us with that inextinguishable need to make noise, she thinks. If only I could have known. If only I could have seen.

Zoli wonders now if Swann is searching for her now. If he is, she thinks, he wil not find me. He wil seek and seek. He wil wander the ends of the earth and return with nothing, not even a name.

Zoli clambers over a gate, down a hil , through a muddy field, where some irrigation pipes are laid out on the ground. She tries to figure a way to make it across the field: a maze of tubes and muck with a barbed-wire fence at the far end. The vast concrete sleeves have sunk a little in the mud, and the only way to cross is to walk along the top of the pipes, arms held wide for balance. She slips, her leg in the mud up to her ankle. She lifts it out noisily, cleans her sandal on the rough edge of the pipe, kneels down into the opening and looks into the hol-lowness of it, imagines her breath traveling al the way around the field, circling and returning, added to by the grasses and the muck.

“Hey, Gyp.”

A muffled shout. She is sure it must be distant, but it comes again. She turns, startled. Behind a hedge on the hil , four children sit crouched and staring. Three retreat immediately, turning their backs to flee, but the oldest remains steady, facing her. “Hey, Gyp,” he says again. Brownish hair and a broad band of freckles across his nose. Mudmarks across the front of his trousers. A stare in his eyes so much like Conka's youngest. He is wearing a jacket so big that he could fit two more boys inside.

The other children top the hil and cal back to him. He lets out a long arc of spit which lands a meter in front of her, then turns and gal ops up the slope.

They wil bring back the adults, thinks Zoli. Cite me for trespassing. Bring a sergeant to arrest me. Fingerprint me. Find out who I am. Take me back to the city. Place me in front of my people again, shame me, humiliate me. Banish me once more.

She scrambles across the pipes and up the hil , each step a half-step backwards into the last.

A wooden stake scrapes her ankle and she stops in midfur-row, looks up, catches sight of a wooden roof. So here I am. I have walked al day and have come ful circle, and am back in the vineyard once again. I could just as easily be anywhere else. I have spent another day walking, and what else is there to do? Nothing else. If there has been a pencil beneath me it would have made great, useless circles.

She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the smal round scorch mark of her fire from the night

before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a smal light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swol en terribly.

The whole of her right cheek is puffy, her neck bloated, her right eye almost shut. I must deal with the tooth now. Be done with it. Pul it out.

In a corner she finds a single boot, the lace stil intact. It is against al custom to touch the boot, another smal betrayal, unclean, taboo, but she yanks at the lace until it pul s through, scattering smal flakes of dried mud. She rubs the lace in her fingers to warm it, holds it beneath the dripping pipe to moisten the fabric. She makes a loop in the string, reaches into her mouth, hooks the tooth and draws in a sharp breath, yanks hard upwards, tries not to dry-heave. She feels the roots being dragged up from the bottom of her jawbone. Eyes ful of tears. Blood fal ing now from her mouth to her chin. She wipes it away, head to her shoulder, closes her eyes, hauls again. Darkness.

The tooth rises and tears and for a moment she sees little Woowoodzhi, feverish against a tree, a nail perfectly inserted between his handbones, and he is gone, then back again, feverish once more, and she tugs harder, his smal face dissolving.

A sound rips through her jawbone like the tearing of paper, and the tooth lifts.

In the morning she feels for the gap with the edge of her tongue. The wound is large and she wonders if she should try to sear it shut, sterilize it with her lighter. She rises to rinse her mouth out in the trickle from the tap. She lifts the tooth from the sink, dark and rotten at its base, the roots clotted and fibrous.

On the wal above the sink, there is a perfect trapeze of light from the rising sun. She watches it crawl, like something breathing, until another long shadow passes within the box of light, and Zoli drops the tooth with a clank.

A farmer stands in the field outside, the rheumy-eyed dog at his heels. A face like a Hlinka guard: thick eyebrows and smal eyes and a neck with skinfolds. A long burlap sack lies at his feet; a shotgun clasped alongside his leg. He taps the gun against his high rubber boots, then hitches it to his waist and steps forward, moves out of the range of the window.

Zoli hears the clicking of dog nails, the turn of a boot at the entrance. She waits for him to come in, push the door open, put the shotgun to her neck and take her while the dog watches. The same dog, she thinks, that nosed in my own filth. She slides to the floor, brings her knees to her chest, tries to hold her breath. No movement, no sound, and she goes to the doorway. Her fingers reach around the frame and she pushes it gently, waits for the click of the gun or the thud of his fist in her face. The door swings open further and she peers around the frame.

Smal acts of kindness.

Outside, the farmer has left two bread rol s and a tin cup, half-fil ed with black tea. So what if others have drunk from it? I wil drink it anyway. She picks it up and sips, and for a split second she wonders if it has, perhaps, been poisoned.

She drinks the rest quickly, tucks the tin cup into the pocket of her skirt, touches the bread against her lips and inhales its freshness.

From the window, the farmer and dog are nowhere to be seen. Zoli rips a chunk of the bread and puts it in her mouth, then tongues it into her gum to soak up the last of the blood. At the window, only the same emptiness of trees and vineyard. She wipes a coatsleeve across her brow. Her forehead is dry and un-fevered now, and in the shard of mirror her face has already begun to lose its swel ing. Did I walk al day yesterday or did I just dream it? She digs deep in the fabric of her pocket, finds a pine nut and rol s it in her palm. In what sort of chance universe have I been brought back to a place where there is a waterpipe and a loaf of bread? In what curious conjunction of fever and road have I been al owed such generosity?

She eats half the farmer's bread and places the remainder in her zajda. Then, with a start, she remembers the rats: they wil nibble right through the cloth to get at the least crumb. Zoli shunts upwards with one foot on the windowframe and places the remaining bread on a crossbeam. She pushes it further along the beam with a twig. No good, she thinks, the rats wil fol ow from beam to beam, she has seen their like before. She goes up on her toes and knocks the bread down from the beam. With her headscarf, Zoli loops what is left of the loaf, then reaches up to tie the strange-looking bundle from an iron nail in the ceiling beam.

For a long time she wil recal herself by this: the loaf of bread, the ancient scarf, the spin of both in the air.

Years ago Conka got hold of a radio, one that used a wind-up handle. It worked for no more than thirty seconds at a time and then the signal faded, but in the middle of a wet afternoon, when the kumpanija was traveling near Jarmociek, a recording came over the radio, a broadcast from Prague. The horses were hauled short near a smal stream and were taken to be watered. Everyone sat listening to the radio, silent while Conka's husband wound the handle and Zoli's voice came through.

Later, while the horses were shaking out their manes, the youngest, Bora, climbed up on Zoli's lap and asked how was it possible for her to be in both places, inside the radio and on the road, at the exact same time. She had laughed then, they al laughed, and Conka pushed her fingers through Bora's hair. But something lay behind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other.

She wakes to the smal est one turning, face twitching. The other fol ows, fluent, waterlike. Nose to the floor, it whips across the boards to join its mate, both grown bold. Zoli backs into the corner and throws twigs across the floor, then builds three smal makeshift fires in a ring around her, flings lit pine needles towards the rathole.

She wonders what it might look like from the outside: the little wooden shed half-aglow in the darkness, tiny spears of light rol ing across the floor.

The morning rises along the windowledge. A long barrier of cloud is sliced by the movement of a tree branch in the wind. She looks down the length of her body. Her skirts are torn and there are smal lumps of dried dirt at her knees. Her feet, stil blood-raw and filthy. She stands, lifts her skirts. It is not right, she thinks, immodest, but it does not matter, I am not what I used to be. She rips a strip of white cloth from the underdress and folds it over, places it snugly at the back of her shoe. She tests it out, stepping lightly across the floor. Marime, unclean, but it works wel and her feet feel cushioned. She leans over again and slowly lifts her dress once more, then hears, from outside, a rapping. The knock on the door is gentle yet it takes her breath away.

Only gadze knock.

She backs into the corner and sits, looking at the fire-marks beneath her, spreads her dresses over to hide them. Two more series of triple knocks. A grunt and a whisper, then rifle fire, she is sure it is rifle fire until she recognizes the high bark of a dog. The door is slowly pushed open

and the dog comes through, arcing its body. It snaps at the end of a rope, bares its teeth. Light spreads sideways into the hut. The farmer and a woman stand in the doorway, made into portrait by shadow.

The woman holds the shotgun and the farmer hovers behind her. Zoli wonders how they have made their silent approach, then notices that the dog has been muzzled: the contraption is hanging down in the farmer's hand.

The woman stands gray-haired, sturdy, much older than the farmer. She wears a housedress many sizes too smal . Her breasts swing low to her bel y. She shouts at the dog to quieten. The dog whimpers and the hair roaches momentarily along its back. The woman looks around, finger stil on the trigger of the gun. She glances at the burnt twig-ends and the smal teepee of ashes, the one empty sandal in the middle of the floor.

Spreading back the loop of Zoli's skirts with her foot, she bends down and examines her face.

The long hairs on the woman's chin, the flare-out of her nose, the tiny twitch of her mouth, the smokeblue of her neck, the very green of her eyes, narrow, like the wick-slot of a lamp.

She tilts the gun, lifts Zoli's chin. “We have laws here,” she says. “We have curfew.” The barrel touches, cold, against Zoli's throat.

“Are you going far? Hey. Gypsy woman. I am talking to you. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going far? ”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I'm not sure, Comrade.”

“Are there many of you? ”

“Just me.

“The first snow in a blizzard comes from nowhere,” says the woman.

“It's just me, only me.”

“If you're not tel ing me the truth I'l tel the troopers.”

“It's the truth.”

“I can swal ow hot rocks easier than I can the word of a Gypsy.”

The woman turns to the farmer with some silent gesture. He grins at Zoli, shuffles outside. A brief darkness until the door creaks open once more.

He stands under the frame, carrying a plate covered with a towel. He grins again, leans across, exchanging the plate for the shotgun. The woman sighs, lifts the towel from the plate, and spreads the food on the floor in front of Zoli: cheese, bread, salt, and five homemade biscuits. A smal dol op of yel ow jam sits on the side of the plate with some butter. The woman hesitates a moment, takes a knife from her dress pocket, and lays it sideways on the edge of the plate.

“You can't stay here,” she says, flattening out the edges of the tea towel with a picture of a cathedral on it. “Do you hear me? You cannot stay.”

The farmer lumbers outside once more and comes back carrying a wicker-bound wine jug. He sets the jug on the floor, stamps his boot, and yanks the dog by the rope-leash.

“It's just a little something,” says the woman. “Go ahead, eat. Drink. The milk is fresh.”

The farmer crosses the floor and reaches up for the lace and bread hanging from the ceiling, then looks across into the sink where Zoli's tooth sits in the metal drainhole.

“My son doesn't speak,” says the old woman. “He's mute. Do you understand?”

The farmer stares at Zoli, the grin splayed from ear to ear.

“He came home yesterday waving his arms. I didn't believe him, trying to tel me there's a woman out walking in the rain. But he was up early this morning, cooking. Supposed to be hunting goose but he's cooking breakfast instead. Burned the first four batches. Jesus of sweet heaven. He's never once cooked before, never in his life, not even for his mother. Cooking for a Gypsy. I slapped him. Look at the size of him. I slapped him. But there's one good thing I like about your people. You steal a chicken, you steal a chicken. The others, they come in, they steal al your chickens and don't even cal it stealing. I am sure you know what I mean. I'm too old for double-talk. I suppose they'l put me in the cold ground for it. You go ahead and eat now. There are no five-year plans on that bread.”

Zoli pul s the plate towards her. The edge of the tea towel rumples.

“Are you not hungry? ”

The woman rises from the floor and takes her son's elbow: “Let the woman eat in holy peace. Look at her. She wants to eat in peace.”

“I bow deeply before you, Comrade,” says Zoli.

The woman blanches: “I don't expect you to be here when we return.” No.

“Nor to ever return.” No.

“I wish you a good journey. You can take the knife, the jug. The towel if you like it.”

“I kiss your kind hands.”

“I would not have used them,” says the woman.

She guides her son towards the door of the hut and the dog fol ows, head bent low. They leave the door swinging open and the farmer turns slowly to look behind, his sloping walk, the tap of the gun against his leg. What curious destiny has brought him along the road, thinks Zoli, not once, but twice in his tal and lumbering silence?

They make their way towards the line of the trees and a gap in the stone wal , the farmer stil looking fondly over his shoulder.

He grins and extends his hand: in his palm rol s the white and dark of Zoli's gone tooth.

Zoli watches as mother and son become pale shapes against the land. She reaches out for one of the biscuits. It stil holds, at its center, a touch of warmth. She smears the jam with her finger. The milk runs cold against the back of her throat. The butter she eats on its own, in one go. She wraps the shard of mirror in her pocket, careful y swaddling the tip so it wil not pierce her, slides the knife into her rope belt, twisting it so that it hangs like a gewgaw. She folds the towel with its cathedral piercing a false blue sky. The plate she wil leave behind.

She turns to take a look at the smal hut—the laceless boot, the bent grass between floorboards, the scorch marks—and she touches her left breast. For the first time since judgment, Zoli feels a pulse of strength: she wil return now to the city and leave nothing behind, not even a trace.

As she moves out, across the stone wal , onto the tarmac, she has the sudden feeling that if a truck screams down the roadway now she wil undoubtedly be able to stand out of its way.

ZOLI SHAMBLES DOWN the footpath, in the shadows of the pines, under their tal, lamenting sway. She moves against the current of the river until she reaches the Red Army Bridge, wind-bitten and vapory in the morning. Behind her, chains of smoke rise from the outlying factories and, further stil , the curve of distant hil s against the sky. The Danube shines, skeins of oil floating on the surface. A wheat barge, toiling upstream, lets out a high whistle.

Across the river sits the old town of Bratislava: the castle on the hil , the chimneys, the cathedral.

Zoli hobbles out from under the steel girdings, over weeds sprouting from cinder and muck, up the grassy embankment. At the top of the bank, the wind blows cold and fast. Early traffic thrums past and the bridge shakes. Two men labor with a broken-down car, one at the rear, the other at the driver's window, guiding the steering wheel.

Zoli pul s her kerchief tight across her face.

On the far side of the bridge she cleans her hands in a smal puddle and dries them on a lamppost poster, a Russian circus announcement, red and yel ow with curled Cyril ic. Two trapeze artists swing at the top of the poster, blond women stretching out towards one another in the air. Rain has bubbled underneath and swol en their bodies. At the bottom of the poster, a ringmaster, a hoop on fire, and a dancing bear. How I used to love them, those dancing bears in their roped circles, heavy- pawed and majestic, brought from far away. They came lurching through Trnava square, red-hatted and shit-smeared, into the shadows cast down from churches. The music was wound by the carnival man on the painted box, and the tambourine was struck and we shouted for our favorite songs: / have two wives, one of them sober, one of them drunk, both of them I love the same. Old men stood away from streetcorners, shopkeepers closed their doors, and women stood up from pail and rag. Al around the square was the hum and bustle of merchants, with the local crier, the policemen, the schoolchildren.

Zoli edges her finger along the paper to where it bunches at her fingertips.

She turns from the lamppost, crosses the road onto a smal pebbled footpath. A squeal of brakes as a car swerves towards the footpath. She turns quickly. A shower of mud. The car horn beeps as one of the men from the bridge leans out and leers at her.

“Shit on you,” she says quietly when they are far enough away. She wipes the muck from her cheek.

At the underpass, swarms of men and women from the early shifts walk towards work, their shoes slapping against the pavement. Most of them wear identical blue hats of the armament factory, and, as they descend, they merge into the same stream of color.

Across the square, past the bare winter trees, she passes the Carlton Hotel, where men in the dark overcoats of the security police trundle back and forth. She shudders at the thought of stepping inside: the silver door handles, the huge paintings, the gilded frames, the beveled mirrors, the curving staircase. How foreign it is now, the columns, the pil ars, the plastic plants in the windows. There used to be applause when I entered the front rooms. They would hold their cigarettes to their mouths and squint. The soft-faced women would nod and whisper. Always the feeling that they were looking right through me, past me, anxious to be with anybody but themselves. The way they smoked, as if it would never belong to them. How loud it was when stepping from the carpet to the tiled floor. Something gal oping under my ribs. Looking for Swann, his familiar face. He used to arrive hours beforehand just so I'd not feel nervous, waiting there with his hat tapping against his thigh, a copy of Rudepravo rol ed up in his pocket.

A low swing of sadness in her bel y, Zoli crosses away from the hotel and up the hil , into the short and vaulted al eyways of the old city. A banner is strung between lampposts: Citizens, We Must Conserve Bread. It flaps and twists in the breeze, and, as she gets nearer, one end of the banner snaps, curtsies a moment, fal s to the ground, and sags in the cobblestone puddles. She steps over the slogan, walks on, hand trailing the lichen on the wal s.

Quieter here, darker: the light gone out of things.

She moves along the rutted path, in the shadows, hidden especial y from the troopers. If she dawdles they wil stop her, cock their rifles, question her, the mud on her overcoat, the dark bloodstains on her ankles, and then bring her to the nearest al -weather post. Flip open the gray cover and examine the raised stamp of her Party card, the thumbprint, the details: 169.5 cm, black eyes, black hair, distinguishing feature a lazy left eye, a 2

cm scar on lower right lip, chin dimple, poet. She used to sign her name with three Xs, and the most perceptive of them used to ask her why. If she replied at al she would simply shrug her shoulders, making them more difficult, more probing, more insistent: “But how can you be a poet and sign XXX?” Often the whole transaction would have to wait for confirmation over the radio: “That's Comrade Novotna, you idiot, let her go.”

Past the flaking wal of an old city monastery, sandals slapping against the cobblestones. The monastery has long been gutted. What remnants of incense, stained glass, wax candles? What smal ruby flames stil burn behind pier glass? She looks up to see a number of narrow window slots in the upper reaches of the building, near the timbered roof. Birds fly in the windows, wings held together, and flare out again seconds later into the sky.

In the drizzle, she notices a group of young boys standing in her path. Their ease, their nonchalance. At the end of the line, one boy toes at the carcass of a dead pigeon. The boy is white-skinned. Red-shirted. Hair shorn close. He flicks the pigeon with his boot and it sails a moment in the air, thuds on the cobbles with a spray of tiny feathers. Zoli pul s together the folds in her dress and steps over it. Heart quick and thumping. She hears a whistle behind her, and then the sound of footsteps.

Even when the bird hits her in the back of the head she does not turn.

Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. Al that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, al owed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again?

Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hel 's fire on them, they wil not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I wil not bow a second time, no.

She rounds the corner of the theater, beyond the ironwork fence, past the dead winter gardens. In the tenements, gnarled women stare out from behind high windows, their bodies lost to brickwork. At a roadblock she stops cold: four troopers stand scanning the street, bil yclubs banging into their hands. Traffic passes by in a muted rumble. Some pedestrians are waved through, raw-looking girls in headscarves and soiled white uniforms. Zoli bends to adjust her sandals, accustomed now to the mess of her feet. She waits until the troopers put their hands up in front of a dark automobile and lean in either window, bil y-clubs prodding. Breathe softly. Easy. No sudden movement. Beyond the roadblock she goes, careful not to glance at them.

A voice: “Hey, you.”

A young soldier taps the butt of his rifle on the cobbles, his voice ful of snarl: “Where to, Auntie?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Just past the market a little way, Comrade.”

“That's nowhere?”

“Just up the road a way.”

“Identification.”

She unties the knots, hikes the zajda from her back and deliberately sifts through the bundle. “Shit,” he says, holding his nose. The toe of his boot stamps down hard on the cloth. “Go on, woman, out of here.”

The tin cup punches at her spine when she lifts the bundle. Shit on you too, she thinks. Who are you to say I'm filthy? Who are you to ask where I am going? She turns the corner and spits into the gutter. Paris, you idiot, I am going to Paris. Do you hear me? Paris. She has no idea why the city comes to mind, but she strikes her fist against the left side of her chest. Paris. That's where I'm going. Paris.

At the top of the road she slows again, a stitch in her ribcage. A line of forgotten laundry is strung from one side of Galandrova to the other, the wet shirts moving in the wind as if waiting for men to inhabit them. Under the trees, beyond the warehouses, past the printing mil , she goes, staying close to the shadows. She can already smel the ink and hear the sound of the rol ers—the fumes make her head reel momentarily.

Swann wil be in there now, she thinks, printing government posters behind the blacked-out windows, his fingers stained, his shirt askew, the machines churning around him. We Salute Our Persecuted American Negro Brothers. Solidarity with Egypt. Ciechoslovakians for African Unity.

We Must Struggle, Comrades, Against Ignorance and Illiteracy.

And the one with her face, changed slightly, no lazy eye: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us.

At the top of the stairs she grips the rail, pauses, walks briskly down the communal corridor. Cambering floorboards. Broken plaster. A faint smel of mold and dust. She walks high- toed, shushing her squelching sandals, turns the door handle, and backs careful y away as it swings on its creaking hinges.

It is a room tuned to Swann—the dark linoleum curling where it meets the wal , a half-empty pewter jug of old cucu on the bedside table, the windowframe rattling in the weather, Marx and Engels each in many different languages. Gramsci, Radek, Vygotsky. Some volumes with their spines taken off, others re-stitched. On a single wal hook hangs a ratty shirt, faded and anonymous. On the floor, orange peels curled and ambered with age. Three fire irons, but no fireplace. The huge pile of overcoats from Brno in the corner. Swann has set up a simple chair for looking out the smal window onto the street, four stories below.

From the room above, transistor music filters down, muffled and worn, shot through with the hammering of steampipes.

She flips through the books open on the table—Dreiser, Steinbeck, Lindsay—and rifles through their Slovak equivalents, handwriting spidery and blotchy with ink. She pushes the books off the table in one quick sweep. They land cantered on the floor. Beneath the desk lie four containers from the printing mil . She yanks them out and turns them upside down. Pages and pages of Swann's work. Dozens of issues of Credo. A few obscure journals from Prague. Some letters. A book about Jack London. A col ection of Mayakovsky's poetry. How many times have I heard that name, late at night when the two of them worked in the printing mil , the metal letters scattered al around them? Their laughter as they quoted the poems back and forth. The hol ow of desire in my stomach, and another hol ow, there, shame. I liked to watch him then, enjoyed it, it seemed so easy. The way he carried his body, the slope of his shoulders, the crackle of his voice. The lines going between him and Stränsky, chains, and, later stil , the same with my songs, speaking them to one another, quoting them back and forth, taking them, bending them, praising them, making them theirs.

She rips another container out from under the table where it clangs against the leg. A sudden pop of glass. Zoli wheels around but the window is intact and there is nobody at the door, no sound along the corridor. Losing my mind. Imagining things. She turns again and feels a coldness run along her fingers. She looks down, perplexed. Her nails and fingers are stretched out, blue, and for a moment she looks at her hand as if it can't possibly be hers. She rights the fal en inkwel and picks up the pieces of glass scattered near the radiator. The dark liquid gul ies in the gap between the floorboards and the hissing pipe.

Zoli wipes her hand on the floorboard and the wood streaks with ink. Her thumbprints on the cardboard, the table, the books themselves. She empties the third and fourth containers into the middle of the floor. Yet more journals and translations, nothing else. She looks up at the sad petals of green wal paper hanging just below the ceiling. A great pain in her eyebal s, like the pressure of swimming in deep water. Easing herself up from the floor, she catches her finger on a stray piece of inkwel glass. She sucks the splinter out, the ink heavy at the end of her tongue. Stränsky, she remembers. Budermice. A cold thread pul s the length of her spine.

She kicks over the table and then she spots, against the wal , a black cardboard trunk with metal latches. Inside, the poems are neatly stacked on top of each other, tied with thick elastic bands, in phonetic Romani and Slovak both. The newer poems are crisp and straight-edged but the older ones have yel owed over the years. So be it. Soon they wil be dust.

She hunkers over the suitcase. Al the dates, towns, fields, and settlements where they were recorded have been careful y labeled. By what is broken, what is snapped, I create what is required. When the axe comes to the forest the handle doesn't say I am home. The road is long with sorrow, everywhere twice as wide. They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. They are, she realizes, the first

thing she has read since the judgment.

She crosses towards the sink and stacks the poems over the drainhole, rubs her thumb along the wheel of Petr's old lighter. The curl of Petr's thumb along it, broad, slow, bringing it to life. Pipesmoke curling out. Him watching Swann. The days slowly slipping away from him. The coughing.

The thought that he would soon be gone, spirit. Wandering around, hiding, waiting for Swann, thinking of him, the feel of his fingers over my eyes.

The high flame singes her eyebrows and she steps back, lifts some of the pages from the sink and begins again with a smal er scatter of poems.

They take easily. She uses a fork to prop up the edges of the pages, to air them underneath. She inhales the scent as the poems burn and curl.

Smal pieces of ash float and fal . Zoli toes them into the linoleum where they leave dark stains.

Outside, the city goes about in the cold—tramsound, bus screech, the rain slicing steadily on the windowpane. She looks down onto the al eyway below. A sudden strange thril runs the length of her body. Al the meetings, al the speeches, al the factory visits, the trains, the labor parades, the celebrations, they are gone now, al gone—and only this is mine, this alone, this burning. She turns back into the room and the smoke fil s her nostrils, fragrant, taut, sweet. She lifts more poems out of the suitcase and burns them in ever larger groups, flames surviving on flames, yel ow to red to blue.

My tooth, she thinks, with half a smile, the way the mute farmer carried my tooth away in the palm of his hand.

Zoli puts the lighter back in her dress pocket: the heat of it traveling through to her skin. She brushes back strands of hair from beneath her kerchief and touches something smal behind her ear. A white pigeon feather. She plucks it out and lets it fal to the floor. The early afternoon seems now so far away. When the pigeon hit the back of her head she had wondered for an instant if it had recognized flight, even in death: and then she had judged the thought worthless, vain.

She closes her eyes and exhales long and hard, turns towards the door. “Shit,” she says.

The tapes.

She returns and scours the room. Two umbrel as, three cigarette lighters, a snuffbox, a bottle with a ship inside it, a smal square of linen decorated with flowers, a series of Soviet pins, a dozen leather bookmarks, a samovar, an English kettle. How can one man have so many useless things? She finds the tapes in a cardboard box underneath his bed—they too are meticulously dated and stamped.

The first spool fal s from her fingers, unravels across the floor, long and shiny, catching light in places, as if her voice is going into the corners.

Swann was always so careful to hold the microphone close to her lips when they were out on the road. It had bothered her—not his closeness, she had liked that, it had livened things in her, sent a shiver through her—no, what truly bothered her was the idea that her songs were being taken and put back together again by a machine. When he had played the recording to her it did not sound a bit like her, as if some other Zoli had climbed inside. It captured other sounds too, the tapping of a stick on the ground, the high strike of a match, the creak of a doorframe: it seemed almost ghostly to her; things that she had never noticed in real time had suddenly acquired a weight. She had written one night, by the light of the candle, that smal rivers carted up drops as they were never seen before—it was one of her worst poems, even Swann had found it tame, he suggested that it bordered on the bourgeois.

To hel with him, she thinks, to hel , with his hands held in the air, his apology, his sharp face when I slapped him, as if he should have been surprised, his stuttering when we stood in the mil and said he had done al he could do, to hel and high rivers with him.

The tape spins out and she slices it with a kitchen knife, doubling the tape over and cutting it with one quick motion, like gutting a smal animal.

Fifteen spools.

Outside, the sky grows steadily darker, winter lying down upon it. Zoli takes the last spool to the window and watches the tape unfurl from her fingers, to the ground, spinning and twisting in the wind and rain. A tail of it catches on the upcurrent and floats on the air.

There go my songs. Good riddance.

She flings the last spool and the disc sails across the courtyard, smacking into the building opposite. From the street below comes a shout and then the delighted shriek of a child. Zoli leans out the window to see a young girl pul ing the tape behind her.

Just then, footsteps along the corridor. A tapping on the floor—a truncheon perhaps, or a cane. She looks around, spots the pile of overcoats, steps across the buckled floorboards, and covers herself. How ridiculous. Absurd. I should stand up and walk out, past him, without a word, without recognition. Fuck you, Swann. I wil strol down the stairs and disappear in front of your eyes. Look backwards and curse you. She shifts under the weight of the coats, but then there is the sudden thought of Swann not long ago, out on the road, when they found a children's piano, fixed the pedals with bands of steel, replaced the keys with maple wood. They hung it from the ceiling of her wagon with a giant hook, and Swann had walked behind while the piano played the road, every bump and curve, the microphone held out in front of him.

A turn of the door handle. Shoe studs on the nailheads, the hissing of the radiator valve, the strange clop of his feet. A cane, she thinks. He must be walking on a cane.

A smal broken sound comes from his throat as he rummages through the room. A wooden lid is lifted and banged down hard again. Cupboard doors open and close. The mattress flops sadly to the floor. Swann says something in English, a hard guttural noise. She is gripped with a nausea, her fingers clenched, neck rigid. She recal s the feel of his hand against her hip, her back against the bark, the way he rol ed her hair around his forefinger, the hard taste of him at the neck, the sweat, the ink. He closes the door with a firm snap.

At the window, she catches sight of Swann rounding the streetcorner, his sandy-haired form disappearing, one of his crutches thrown aside. A long string of tape catches his ankle as he goes, dragging it through the rain.

They were my poems. They belonged to me. They were never yours.

She turns, finds a photo of herself in the corner of his shaving mirror. She tears it into pieces. On the bed she notices an open rosewood box with a silver clasp. Around it, scattered documents, and a bal ed-up handkerchief. Zoli waits a moment, leans down, and lifts the wooden lid, finds a panel kiltered sideways: a false bottom. Underneath that, a gold watch.

Things, he said, cannot wait. They have to be made. What Swann foresaw was a world raised up in an immense arc and everyone beneath it, looking up in admiration. He wanted to take hold of al that was vague and equal and give it form. He constantly rubbed his hands over his scalp so that when he was in the printing mil his hair became the color of whatever poster he was printing. In the cafe he would sit unaware of people looking at him, streaks of yel ow and blue and red under his cap, his hands almost entirely black. He was afraid that he didn't sound Slovak enough, but he

gave everything to it, listened to the workers, developed the same accent, strode out with them under their banners. After a while his arguments grew more defined, with stronger edges. It was like watching a piece of wood being carved right in front of her eyes, and she had liked the surprise of it. Certain men in the kumpanija could sculpt a spoon, or a bowl, or a bear at their fingertips—with Swann, he would sometimes create an idea and then hold it out as if it were something she could touch.

He suggested once that she always carry a book around to defeat their notion of her. Even if she did not read it, the others would see it. That was enough, he said. Just let them see you. Astound them by writing it al down.

As if books could stop the massacres. As if they could be somehow more than harps or violins.

From the arch of the doorway hangs a red velvet rope-pul , the tasseled end cold to the touch. A woman in an embroidered dress answers, her feet in slippers, hair in a blue string net. She leans out the door, looks down the length of the al eyway, and in one quick movement pul s Zoli inside.

“Yes?”

“I have some things.”

“I do not trade,” says the woman.

A single shaft of light shines through the dark of the smal house, onto a cupboard lined with large china plates.

“My grandfather was here many times,” says Zoli. “Stanislaus. You knew him by that name.”

“I've no idea who you're talking about.”

“It was a different place then, but you knew him by that name.”

The woman takes Zoli by the shoulders, turns her around, stares down at her feet.

“I have good horse teeth too.”

“What did you say?”

“I am here to sel my things. That is al .”

“You people wil be the death of me.”

“Not before you have everything we own.”

“You've an errant mouth for a Gypsy.”

“I've nothing to lose.”

“Then leave.”

Zoli measures her steps back to the doorway. The rattle of the doorknob. Silence from the street outside. The woman's voice behind her, once, twice, higher now but stil measured: “And if I was interested what might you have?”

“I have told you already, the best.”

“I've heard that so often even my ears tire me.”

Zoli snaps the door shut and opens the giant bundle made of Swann's bedsheets. The woman feigns nonchalance, blows air from her cheeks. “I see,” she says. She shakes the keys and leads Zoli through a series of dark-paneled rooms to a rear parlor where a bearded man sits on a high stool with what looks like a smal jar dangling at his neck. In front of him sits a solitary game of tarock. He adjusts his stomach in his waistcoat. With an exaggerated sweep, he takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose, then tucks the cloth back in his pocket. She watches with a shiver of disgust.

“Yes?”

Zoli places Swann's wireless radio on the nicked wooden counter. The jeweler lowers his head, pushes the buttons, fingers the dial.

“Useless,” he says.

He examines the underside of a picture frame, purses his lower lip: “You're wasting my time.”

“And this?”

She lays Swann's gold watch upon the counter, stretching out either end of the strap.

The jeweler takes the monocle from around his neck and examines the watch, looking up twice at Zoli. On the table lies a switchblade knife with a black onyx handle. He flips open the back clasp of the watch and looks at the inner workings, a smal universe of dials and cogs. He clips it back, laces his fingers, stretches his hands wide on the table. They are, she notices, ancient and liver-spotted.

“It isn't worth much.”

“I'm not one who bargains,” says Zoli.

“These things are English.”

“I wil take two hundred.”

“I cannot sel them, they are foreign.”

“Two hundred,” she says. “No less.”

The jeweler huffs: “One hundred and fifty.”

He unlocks his desk drawer, takes a long leather pouch, and slowly counts the bil s out, making a show of sliding the beads across a wooden abacus. He counts another ten and says with a grin: “You look as if you need it.”

“It's a bad price.”

“Go elsewhere, woman.”

“There's nowhere to go.”

“Wel then, it's a good price, isn't it?”

He pushes the bil s across the table, puts the wal et back in the drawer, turns the key once more, and, with a chuckle, reaches across for a ledger and makes an entry. He stands, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Wel ?” he says, flourishing his handkerchief.

Zoli is already halfway down the street when the jeweler comes out of his house at a fat man's trot. She can hear the flap of his shoes on the wet pavement and the high pitch of his shouts.

She darts towards the busy thoroughfare where the market is winding down. Blue tarps are being folded away and the legs of tables col apsed. A few lean fish rest in beds of salted ice. A half dozen potatoes sit cupped on a weighing machine. Swerving between the tables, Zoli crosses the marketplace, veers down an al eyway, doubles back, sidesteps another two stal s, ducks in behind a large yel ow container.

From across the marketplace come the jeweler's shouts. In the shadows, amid an acrid scent of rubbish, Zoli squats down, breathing hard. She lifts her head for an instant, peeps over the metal lip. At one of the stal s the potato-sel er, heavy and white-aproned, gestures to keep low.

I used to wear gold coins in my hair, she thinks. We were faithful to that, we stole nothing.

The jeweler's last defeated roar drifts across to her, but she remains out of sight until she is sure he is long gone. She stands, taps her overcoat where she can feel the handle of her brand-new onyx-handled knife.

She flicks open the blade and tests it on the thread of her overcoat: it is sharp, honed to a point.

When you fal , thinks Zoli, you never fal halfway.

The rain hammers, pours, soaks: in the fluted gutters it sluices along, carrying smal rafts of rubbish down the streets. By the river, the sparse jewelry of the bridge lights. Beyond that, the silhouette of the giant towers where the kumpanija has been resettled. The electricity is out in the towers again. Zoli wonders if she might be able to catch that moment when the electricity comes on, lighting up al eight buildings at once, their only moment of beauty. It was Stränsky who had told her, years ago, that only poetry was capable of capturing the true horrors of human consciousness, but she had doubted that idea immediately, thinking that poems came on and off again only like tower lights, no more and no less.

The towers appear smal and fragile now: almost as if she might lift up parts and replace them at wil .

At the foot of the bridge she stamps about in her wet clothes. Underneath her skirts she wears a pair of Swann's old trousers. His boots have been stuffed with socks to make them comfortable. In the bundle on her back, the rest of his possessions. From somewhere in the night comes the sound of a motorbike, sputtering into the distance. Figures emerge from the night fog along the river—any one of them might be Swann. How is it that he hurt his leg? Did he fal , was he beaten, was he thrown down a flight of stairs? Those days by the river. His fingers along her shoulder, his chin at her neck, his head within the shadow of hers. Watching the patterns the wolf feet made on the bank.

She shivers, curses, moves along the river's edge. The bundle on her back, soaked through with damp now, grows heavier with every step.

She turns the corner into Sedlärska, past a building site, and stops at a pile of red bricks on the ground. She toes one, rol s it over on its side.

How many times, this same street, these same buildings, these same cracks in the footpath? She walks towards a squat building with two huge picturefront windows. No lights on, nobody around. She steps to the window and runs her fingers along the pane. The glass frame is so big that in the center it quivers and bounces. In the instant that she brings her arm forward she also withdraws, so that the brick is stil in her hand when the glass spiders and shatters.

The last chime of the last shard fal s away and silence closes around her.

Two young workers appear on the other side of the street, looking across, staring. She wonders how it is that they have seen it: a woman in a huge overcoat and headscarf and a man's black boots, in the darkness walking away from the shattered window of the Union of Slovak Writers, but what matter now? They can take me, they can do what they want—when hel freezes over I wil not skate towards them.

Under the awning of the riverside cinema she stops to rest. There is a poster with a blond woman and a green-coated man behind a glass pane: The Best Will Happen Tomorrow. Zoli catches her reflection in the glass and marks, careful y and coldly in one glance, her hair askew under her scarf, her cheek muck-splattered, her eyes blackened with lack of sleep, the laddered boneshapes of her cheeks. She looks down on Swann's boots, their ridiculous brown weight, their long laces, their shiny eyes, stuffed with socks to make them comfortable.

It had always been, when Swann was around, the time of evening that promised most brightness. Into the dark lobby. Up the stairs. Past the waterstains on the wal s. The air hard with cigarette smoke. Swann would flick a lighter for them to find their way. Through the swinging door. A few heads turned. Swann liked to think that they were already stepping into saloon territory. They stood for the national anthem, then sat against the hard-backed seats and waited for their eyes to adjust. After a few moments the first ripples began, tiny craters of whiteness, dark hairlines, bright splotches, and then an eruption of color. She could sense him relaxing, waiting for the images to flare into life: the snakefence, the basin of water with soap, the deer wading through high drifts, the hand around a whisky glass. What amazed him most was that al the films were shot in Czechoslovakia. Afterwards, when they were walking through the streets, she would push her way through the imaginary doors in the Trigger-Happy Saloon and talk of the empty buffalo fields and the temperance girls and Winnetou, I—she was sure that Swann was watching her more than he had watched the screen, his mouth ajar, stunned, leaning close to her.

How distant now, thinks Zoli.

Cowboy films.

The sky lightens over the city as she makes her way across the tramtracks, down towards the river in the early morning. A rusty fishing boat sloughs through the wide channel, pul ing behind it a trail of smoke. She climbs the long ramp to the bridge, her back bent beneath the bundle. Zoli totals up what she has to her name: one hundred and sixty krowns, an onyx-handled knife, one bedsheet, two blankets, an overcoat, boots, a pair of Swann's trousers, three shirts, a hairbrush, a pair of thick gloves, a tin cup, and a tea towel.

Someone has inserted a bouquet of flowers into the ironwork curls of the bridge. Zoli leans against the drooping stems and looks down into the water. The wind fans across the surface, ricocheting off the far bank. I should throw something in the water, climb the railing, and leap right here. Tie a kerchief around my chin. Spread my arms out. Say nothing. Tumble. Hit the surface with my skirt above my head. Disappear into the depths.

Send up a flume of spray.

She recognizes the thought in an instant: it is gadzikano, vacant, pathetic. She wil not al ow them such simplicity.

How stupid I was. I went to their table and kissed it in thanks. They promised to leave us alone, but they did not. How strange it was to be so liked amongst those she could never quite comprehend: the parties, the chalets, the hotel gatherings, the way they rol ed her out at the conventions. Their vodka, their caviar, their sweet haluski. They packaged me up and made an eloquent ribbon of me and then they al owed me the short walk up the hangman's ramp. The noose, the trapdoor, the lever.

Lightheaded, Zoli pauses on the bridge and looks down at the river, and in the vertigo of shadow there is the sudden realization that she has not burned her poems at al ; there are hundreds of them stil out there, in printed copies, in the mil , in the union houses, even in the bookshops along Zelenä. Al she has done is burn the originals and given strength to the others.

Zoli crosses to the end of the bridge at a slow walk and stands at the junction on the far side. West, the towers. South, the road away. She pul s her arms close in against her stomach, cradles her elbows in the palms of her hands, hikes her belongings on her back, and shuffles down past the line of red dump-sters, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence. Tractors move in the early morning. Cement tankers. Men alongside the sheet-metal huts, their slick yel ow jackets bright against the morning gray. One bends over a pot, stirring coffee. She moves beyond him, unnoticed. Most of the towers are inhabited now but there are three blocks stil under construction. The grand experiment. They wanted the best for the Gypsies, they said— as if they could be a single throbbing organism, forty thousand people lumped into one. Running water, electric switches, heating.

You hurry on the light, she thinks, it just hastens the darkness.

Zoli ducks through another hole in the barbed wire and stops at a long wal , a distance from the caravans. Hundreds of wagons are strewn around, stil clumped together by kumpa-nija. At least they did not burn the carriages, she thinks, only the wheels.

She leans forward, the imprint of the pebbles against her hands.

In the barren squares of grass, a few of the wagons are already ringed with campfires. Pins of firelight wheel the air. One or two dim figures move in and out of the shadows. So, some have abandoned the towers already, taken the floorboards out, come down to the ground, burnt what should have been beneath their feet. A smal triumph. Further along the wal , someone has put up a lean-to against the concrete blocks. Old roofing tin, wooden boards from the apartment floors, and an orange highway sign. She squints to read it. Slow: Construction in Progress. Over the boards hang quilts and army blankets. A miscel any of junk along the wal . A woman kneels to the dirt floor and cleans it with a cloth. Around her a few children stil sleep, dark shapeless mounds, beneath their quilted blankets. Inside, an oil lamp sits on a packing crate and a long table has been created from three boards, the light from the lamp dul ed by ash. This, then, is how they wil live now: soot on the glass flute.

Zoli presses against the corner of the wal and peers into the distance. A wreckage of a dog paddles beside the hulk of an abandoned car, recently burned out, as if someone has died in it. At the far end of the camp, a child rol s a barrel hoop and beyond him a man stands by the fire.

She knows Vashengo by the outline of his hat alone. Graco carries a coal-oil lamp. Milena, Jolana, Eliska, and one or two of the children are already awake. No Conka.

She pushes her palms deeper into the pebbled wal , favoring one leg so her hip tilts out. She longs to tilt the other forward and stride into the camp, but she is as separate from them now as she can ever be. She watches the nickering campfires, the cigarettes traveling at mouth level, a rimless wheel of red light moving. I would, she thinks, set fire to al my words just to travel that air once more.

Some children break the line beyond the campfires towards the wal . From where do they come? How far down the road were they driven? Zoli steps back and turns her face into the col ar of Swann's overcoat. In what words wil the children speak of me now that I have vanished?

High above the towers a yel ow crane swings through the air. It stops for a moment, lets a bundle dangle and swerve in the middle of the air. It settles, then starts to swing once more. Zoli pul s at her zajda, brings it tight around her, and ducks back out through the fence.

It feels to her, as she walks, that she has just pul ed her entire body over a region of barbed wire.

Hiding was part of an old language but they had not hidden wel . Not this time. It had snowed and the fields lay touched with a phosphorous glow.

They had been picked out easily, bright colors against the snow. The troopers arrived on motorbikes and in vans. They trudged across the fields, unscrol ed a copy of the new law, then stood back, curious, when Vashengo said they did not want to go. The troopers had thought it was an easy sel . Your own apartment. Heating. Running water. Al the magical cures. They spat on the ground and then grunted into radios: “They're refusing to come.” A short time later a senior officer drew up in a large black sedan. He cal ed Vashengo over and then asked for Zoli. She touched a pair of shoehorns above the caravan door and went out across the fields. Dogs were barking in the police vans. She sat in the car, warm air blowing into the backseats. “We're not going,” she said. The officer's cheeks flushed. “I'm under orders,” he said. “There's nothing I can do, there'l be bloodshed.” The word had flashed a Spanish poem across her mind.

“You of al people,” said the officer to Zoli, “you must know, these are the best fiats in the whole of the country. Don't let there be a fight.”

She sat silent, the word stil tril ed through her. How strange it was to touch against the comfortable leather seats and hear the word, away from poems, away from pages. Bloodshed.

“You can travel with us,” said the officer. He turned to Vashengo, who was holding his hands in front of the dashboard vents. “You too,” he said.

“You can sit with us, it's warm in here, Comrade.”

Zoli muttered a curse in Romani, slammed the door, and walked away. The officer rol ed down his window to watch her go. From a distance away she could feel his astonishment.

Outside, in the fields, the children were at play. Sleeves of ice cold against their tongues. Vashengo came and stood behind her.

“We'l go,” he said. “Peaceful y. I told him to cal the troopers off. And their dogs.”

Something in Zoli had stal ed. It was as if she had already vanished. She knew what would happen. Vashengo whistled. Eliska came out onto the steps of her caravan. She passed the word around. The children cheered—they did not know, they thought it an adventure.

Flurries of snow whirled down in the white silence. Zoli walked towards her caravan and waited.

Slow bootcrunch through the gravel. A shadow passes on the ground. She studies the passage of a swal ow, dipping down from the towers. It alights on a series of poles laid out longways on the ground. One of the workers from the huts greets her in a high language: too formal, she knows.

Behind her, a low grunt and a muted whistle. The cars begin to thin out and the streetcars pass. The cracked concrete gives way to muck and the towers disappear.

Out and away, the country begins to rol lighter and uninhabited, and in the early afternoon she stops in the shade of an old tin shelter.

She is startled to see a group of four coming down the far side of the road. A smal shapeless mass at first, but then as they get closer the group clarifies—three children and a woman, carrying buckets and a few smal bundles, out looking for whatever food they can find. Zoli recognizes them by their walk. The children run around the woman like smal dark magnets. Two dip down into a ditch, emerge again. A shout of some sort. The figures loom like something through poor glass. The distant cal of geese above them.

One of the children darts across the road to a line of wil ows and then al three youngsters are hauled in close to Conka's dress.

A panicky claw at Zoli's throat. She grows faintly aware of a sharp odor from her body. She blinks hard. The odor worse now, her bowels loose.

Conka and her family narrow the distance. The red hair, her white skin, the row of freckles across the eyes, the scars on her nose.

The first of them is Bora. The sound of the spit comes in advance of the moment and Zoli can feel the spray in her face. She does not wipe it away. She stands, chest rising and fal ing, her heart surging under her ribcage. A roar in her ears, a splintering. Never a stil ness quite like this. The second child, Magda, is next, crossing with soft and measured steps. The spit is without sound or venom. It lands on the shoulder of Zoli's overcoat.

A muttered curse, almost an apology. She hears the girl turn slowly away—of course, her bad foot. The last is Jores, the oldest, and he leans up close, she can feel his breath on her face, the smel of almonds. “Witch,” he says. A ratcheting sound from his chest. The spit vol eys into the perfect point between her eyebrows.

Another roar from the side of the road, the arc of the voice, so familiar, cal ing the children together. Zoli does not move. She waits for Conka.

Flickering now across her mind: a hil run, a bare body dressed, laughter beneath a blanket, al those childhood things, ice across a lake, a basket of candles. Balance, she thinks, balance. In danger of losing my footing and being carried off the edge. What edge? There is no edge.

When Zoli opens her eyes the road is misted and shimmering, but there is no laughter, no shouting, no lapping echo from behind. She feels the phlegm trail along her neck. She wipes it away and bends down to the grass, passes her wet fingers along the blades. The smel of the children on her fingers.

Conka did not spit.

She did not cross the road and she did not curse me.

At least there is that.

It is almost enough.

A little further on, at the side of the road, Zoli stops short and leans down to touch a tin can—grain and old berries, a single piece of meat beside it, unspoiled. Fingers to her mouth, she inhales the smel of the younger children. I wil not cry. Only once since judgment have I cried. I wil not again.

Zoli bends down at the side of the road to lift the tin can and, beneath that, finds a hacked-off coin from Conka's hair.

THE DAYS PASS in a furious blank. The sky is wintry and fast. Soft flurries of snow break and melt across her face. She descends a steep bank towards a stream, the sun glancing off the thin ice. Whole patterns of crystals encase the river-grass. She steps to the water, sleeves her hand in her boot, and cracks the surface. She pokes around with a stick to clear the shards, touches the freezing water with her fingers.

With a deep breath she plunges her face into the water—so cold it stuns the bones in her cheeks.

Gingerly she takes off her socks. The blisters have hardened and none of the cuts have gone septic, but the makeshift bandages have become part of her skin. Zoli inches her feet into the burning cold of the water and tries to peel away the last of the bandages. Skin comes with them. Later, over a smal fire, she warms her toes, pushes the flaps of torn skin against the raw flesh, attends to her wounds.

Smal birds come to feed in the cold of the open riverbank: she watches which trees they fly to, what last foliage, what winter berries, then sets out to col ect whatever food she can find. She discovers, in the mud, a dead sparrow. It is against al custom to eat wild birds but what is custom now but an old and flightless thing? She spears the bird with a sharpened twig and roasts it in a low flame, turning it over and over, knowing at first bite that it wil not be good for her, al rot and age and use- lessness. Stil , in the urgency of hunger, she rips at it with her teeth and runs her tongue along where the heart once beat.

The tiny yel ow beak of the bird sits in the palm of her hand and she tilts it over and drops it into the flames.

She squats over the fire, thankful for her lighter. I must, she thinks, be careful in the use of it. Soon there wil be no more fuel. Smal fires are unseen. Smal fires can be perched above and drawn upwards into the body. Smal fires ignore curfew.

She feels her stomach churn, and, in the late hours, she lies tossing, turning, under Swann's blanket.

She rises dizzy, the sun a bright disc in the trees. A tal os-prey surveys her from a pine tree, his neck curved long and nonchalant, only his eyebal s moving. The branch looks built to him, a perfect blue and gray melding. The osprey turns as if bored, swings its long head to the side, pecks at its feathers, then takes off lazily into the forest.

Moments later it is on the bank, a fish in its beak. Zoli inches silently towards the fire, patiently picks up half a log, flings it. It misses the osprey but the log skitters and bursts into bright embers across the ice. The bird turns to look at her, drops the fish, then lifts its wings and bursts out over the reeds. She hobbles over to retrieve the fish; it is no bigger than the length of her hand.

“You could at least have found me a bigger one,” she says aloud.

The sound of her own voice surprises her, the clarity of it, crisp in the air. She looks quickly about her as if someone might be listening.

“You,” she says, looking around once more. “A big fish would have been more generous. You hear me?”

She chatters to herself as she builds up her fire. She eats the white flesh, licks the bones clean, then plunges her feet in the river once more. One more day and they wil be ready. I can walk and keep walking: long roads, fence lines, pylons. Nothing wil catch me, not even the sound of my own voice.

It had seemed so strange a few days ago, near the roadblock, when Paris leaped into her mind for no reason at al , but now it comes back and she tries the weight of the word upon her tongue.

“Paris.”

She stretches it out, a wide elegant avenue of sound.

The fol owing morning she builds up Swann's boots with the socks, places dry moss at the ankle of each, starts off along the riverbank, watching

for the osprey, expecting it to appear, stately, serene, to do something magnificent—to come down the river on a floe of ice, or to burst from the trees, but nothing stirs.

She finds a length of oak branch with a knobbed end and picks it up, tests it against the ground as a cane. It bends under her tal weight and she shakes the stick in the air.

“Thank you,” she says to the nothingness, then strikes out against the road with her new cane, clouds of white breath leaving her for the morning air.

Paris. An absurdity. How many borders is that? How many watchtowers? How many troopers lined along the barbed wire? How many roadblocks? She tries the word again, and it seems that it arrives in everything around her as the days go by, a Paris in the tree branch, a Paris in the mud of a roadside ditch, a Paris in a sidelong dog that retreats at a half-trot, a Paris in the red of a col ective tractor driven distantly across a field. She clings to its ridiculousness, its simple repetition. She likes the heft of it on her lips and finds that, as she goes along, it is a sound that helps her think of nothing at al , rhythmical y bumping against the air, carrying her forward, a sort of contraband, a repetition so formless, so impossible, so bizarre that it matches her footsteps and Zoli learns exactly when the first of the word wil hit with her heel against the ground, and the last of the word wil hit with her toe, so that she is going, in perfect conjunction, sound and step, onwards.

At the stil ness of a crossroads, she makes out the dot of a vehicle coming towards her, a motorbike, a flash of smal metal, and she takes cover with her back against the damp of a roadside ditch.

The motorbike bounces past with a tinny roar. It is Swann, she can tel by the lean of him, his crutches strapped to the back of the bike. She rises and watches him labor up the bumpy road, through smal countries of light and shadow, swerving once to avoid a rabbit. The animal bounds into a field, its ears held high as if amused by the encounter.

“You wil not find me,” she says to his disappearing form. She strikes the cane down hard on the road as the engine sound stutters into the distance. It seems to her, in the silence, that if it weren't for Swann she could almost sleep while walking.

In a tiny vil age market she buys a slab of meat, some cheese, a loaf of bread. “Comrade,” an old fruitsel er says to her, “are there many of you?”

The fruitsel er watches Zoli go as she cuts across a field and doubles back around to make sure she is not fol owed.

Later in the evening, not far from the vil age, she happens upon a burned-out camp, not in runic signs but a terrified clamber.

She stops short. So this, then, is why they asked. The marks are stil everywhere—in the returning grass, the ruts, the peg-holes, the mounds of earth where they hastily covered their fires. Around the camp, there is a zigzag of tires and, against the trees, a single burned-out carriage, its wheels missing. The hub of one wheel has been shoved into the earth while the rest— spokes and rim—have burned into the ground. An iron wheel-hoop, fused shapeless. Bits of melted canvas frozen against the burnt wooden boards. The tongue of the carriage pierces the muddy ground, as if it just bowed down and accepted defeat. Zoli touches the wood. One of the timbers fal s with a faint snap. The dark carcass of a radio sits in a corner of the carriage. She can tel by other marks in the ground that the men had tried to carry the carriage to the forest without benefit of horses but gave up after only a few paces. No sign of bones or weapons.

Zoli tears off the burnt canvas, cuts around it with her knife. Nothing else to salvage. She touches her left breast, bows her head, moves away. Al that we wanted, she thinks. Al that we ended up with.

A short distance from the camp she hooks the canvas among the branches and settles down for the evening. By dark she is sure she hears something pacing in a half-circle around her camp. A wolf or a deer or an elk. Not a man. Men do not circle in that way. She sits upright and stirs the loose embers of the fire, throws on more leaves. The flames jump in the pitch-dark. She rips a piece of cloth from the sleeve of one of Swann's shirts and sets it aflame, circles her camp with the rag burning.

She remains awake until morning, knees drawn to her chest, then dozes until a patch of wet shocks her cheekbones. Giant flakes of snow gently fal ing. It is as if the weather, too, wants to make a fool of her.

The snowfal makes the tree branches darkly flamboyant, pencil lines in a pale drawing. Crows gather on the branches and flap off black into the sky. She can see, in the nearby trees, an eyebrow of white on the burnt-out carriage.

“Blessings,” she says aloud, for no reason she can fathom.

A reply slices the crisp air. Perhaps it is the wind in the trees, or a branch fal ing, but then there is another sound, and a deep bronchial coughing.

Zoli hurries to gather her things and bundles them in her zajda. Frosted leaves snap beneath her feet.

A voice then.

She spins.

Two men in loden jackets lumber through the trees, axes over their shoulders. They halt and one drops his axe. Together they shout as she scrambles through the snow. The whip of a twig against her face. Her foot catches on an exposed tree root. She fal s, slams into a cut-off tree trunk.

She rises again, but the men are upon her, above her, looking down. One is young and fresh-faced. The other wears a shabby beard and broken eyeglasses. The younger one leers. She turns in the snow and curses them but the younger one gazes down, amused. The older reaches to pick her up and she bites at his arm. He jumps back. She shouts at them in Romani and the younger says: “I told you there was someone out here. Last night. I told you. I felt it.”

Zoli scoots backwards in the snow, wraps her hand around a length of stick, but the younger one knocks it out with a swift kick.

“I bet she's the one. Look at her.”

“Pick her up.”

“Watch the evil eye.”

“Oh, shit on your evil eye. Just pick her up.”

“I bet she's the one. Look at her coat.”

“Shut up.”

“She was going to hit us with that stick.”

“Pick her up.”

They lean down together and grab under each shoulder. Zoli jams her feet hard down in the snow and leans backwards, but the men have a hold and she feels useless between them. They bring her a good distance through the woods to a clearing where two donkeys pace patiently around the front of a wooden shack.

So that was last night's noise, thinks Zoli: only donkeys.

A wafer of snow slides from the roof and plops onto the ground below. Skinned logs stand in stacked piles around the shack. A piece of cutting machinery lies against the wal . Nearby, a trundlecart. The snow is footprinted and packed: more than just two men here, she thinks.

She spits on the ground and the younger one says: “She's trying to put a curse on us.”

“Don't be an idiot,” says the older.

Inside, the men knock snow off their boots and lead her to a chair. The air is heavy with sweat and old tobacco. Eight wooden bunks are screwed to the wal and an unlit lamp hangs from a chandelier of antler horns in the center of the room. The floor is made of flat riverrock. A workcamp of sorts, she thinks. Or il egal hunting. She watches as the younger one latches the door shut, kicks the bottom in place.

She reaches inside her pocket, opens the blade of the onyx-handled knife and slides it along her coatsleeve, the tip of the blade against her forefinger.

The older man turns away and bends down to the stove door. He opens it and pokes with a stick. The fire rises orange in the joints of the stove and a hot ember lands on his boot. He knocks it off, takes a saucepan, begins stirring food with the same stick. A hind leg of lamb hangs like a jacket above the stove. He shaves off a sliver with a blade and it drops directly into the pot.

“There's nothing good that wil come to you out here,” says the man.

And as if by way of proof the younger one begins to undo his belt. He pul s it through the loops and snaps it in the air. His trousers, caked in mud, fal to the ground around his ankles, but he keeps his back turned. His underclothes are a filthy gray. Zoli slips the knife further down along her wrist and closes her eyes. A deep coughing comes from across the room. She looks up to see that the man has stepped into another pair of trousers.

He adjusts the belt. His eyes sharpen. He toes a smal cone of wood-dust on the floor, comes across, and reaches past her for a cup on the table.

With two fingers on his cup he raises it to drink. There is, she knows, nothing in the cup.

“What's your name?”

She slides the chair backwards but he pushes her once more into the table. A smel of resin to him.

“What's your name, Gypsy?”

Let me go.

The younger one slams the empty cup down and leans across her, his breath smel ing, strangely, of fresh woodmint. So he knows the woods, she thinks, he wil not be easily fooled. She nudges the knifeblade back into her coatsleeve where it feels cool against the soft of her wrist.

“Conka,” she says, immediately regretting it.

“Conka?”

“Elena. I was with my people.”

“Elena now is it?”

“When the troopers came.”

The younger one chuckles: “Is that so?”

“The families were taken away. The last of us were driven to the city under the new laws. We were pushed along by dogs. My husband was forced to carry a large wooden box with lacquer patterns and al our belongings inside.”

She hesitates and searches their expressions—nothing.

“A huge lacquer box,” she says. “He dropped it on the road. The rain was beating down like a drunk. Everyone was slipping in the mud. The dogs, they had such sharp teeth, you should have seen them. They ripped us. They took a chunk from my mother's leg. The troopers hit us with their sticks. I stil have the marks. They let the leashes loose. My children got bitten. Eight children, I once had eleven. Al our belongings were in that box.

Al my jewelry, papers, everything, inside that box. Wrapped in old twine.”

She pauses again—only a slight twitch at the side of the younger's face.

“I've come now from the city. To get the box. Eight children. Three died. One stepped on an electric cable by the cypress lake. When the thaw came they were digging by mistake with metal shovels. Once there were eleven.”

“A whole team?” says the younger with a grin.

She turns away and stares at the older man who smooths out the hairs of his eyebrow with his knuckle.

“We have a roof now,” says Zoli. “Electric lights that come on al the time, water that runs. The new directives have been good to us. Good times are coming. The leaders have been good to us. Al I want is to find the box, that's al . Have you seen my things? ”

The older pushes himself wearily from the stove and sits down, carrying with him a bowl of kasha with smal pieces of lamb scattered in it.

“You're lying,” he says.

“A blue lacquer box with silver clasps,” she says.

“For a Gypsy you don't even lie very wel .”

Light crawls up and around the window—no curtains, she notices, no woman's hand in the cabin. She al ows the tip of her knife to press deeper into her cupped finger.

“What's your name?” says the younger again.

Elena.

“That's a lie.”

The older man leans in, serious and gray-eyed. “There was a man out in these parts riding a two-stroke Jawa. An Englishman. He was looking for you, says you've gone missing. Says he's been searching al over. We saw him by the forest road. He wants to take you to a hospital. He looked like he should've been in the hospital himself, driving around with a broken leg. Hadn't shaved in a while. Said your name is Zoli.”

He slides the bowl of kasha across the table, but she does not touch it.

“I real y need to find the box. It has so many precious things inside.”

“He said you were tal , with a lazy eye. He told us you'd be wearing a dark overcoat. That you might have a gold watch. Rol up your sleeve.”

“What?”

“Rol up your fucking sleeve,” says the younger.

He steps across and hikes her coat, wrist to elbow. The knife fal s with a clatter to the floor. He stamps on it, picks it up, tests the blade with his thumb, then turns to the older. “I told you. Last night. I fucking told you.”

The older leans in further to Zoli: “Do you know him?”

“Know who?”

“Don't play us for fools.”

“I know nothing about a watch,” says Zoli.

“He said it was his father's. A precious timepiece.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“He asked for petrol for his motorbike. He didn't seem much of a threat. He spoke a funny Slovak. He tried to tel me he grew up here, but I know better. Is it true, then, what he says? How did you get a man's name?”

Zoli watches as the younger one cuts the hairs on his arm with the knife, whistling at the sharpness of the blade. The older takes off his cap, something soft and compassionate in the lift. His graying hair, a little damp, lies pressed against his scalp. When he leans forward she notices a smal scapular swinging at his neck.

“It was given to me by my grandfather,” she says final y. “It was the name of his own father.”

“So you're a real Gypsy then?”

“You're a real woodsman?”

The older laughs and drums his fingers on the table: “What do I say? We're paid by the cubic meter.”

So, she thinks, a workcamp for prisoners. They remain out here, al summer and winter. Minimum security. Morning until night, sorting wood, gauging it, chopping it, weighing. She watches as the younger rises and goes to the door where he takes an oilskin cloth out of the hanging pair of trousers. He unties a string from the cloth and produces a set of playing cards, slides them across the table to Zoli.

“Our fortune.”

“What?”

“Don't be a God-fearing idiot,” says the older, slapping the cards off the table.

The younger one retrieves them from the floor. “Come on, tel us our fortune,” he says again.

“I don't tel fortunes,” says Zoli.

“It gets lonely out here,” says the younger. “Al I want is my fortune told.”

“Shut up,” says the older.

“I'm just tel ing her it gets lonely. Doesn't it? It gets real lonely.”

“I'm tel ing you to shut up, Tomas.”

“She's worth money. You heard him. He said he'd pay us money. And you said—”

“Shut up and leave her alone.”

Zoli watches as the older goes to a smal bookshelf where he takes down a leather volume. He returns to the table and folds back the cover.

“Can you read this?” he says.

“Christ rides!” says the younger.

“Can you read it?”

“Yes.”

“For fucksake!”

“Here's where you are now. Right here. It's an old map, so it looks like it's Hungary but it's not. This is where Hungary is, along here. The other way, over here, is Austria. They'l shoot you before they lay eyes on you. Thousands of soldiers. Do you understand? Thousands.”

“Yes.”

“The best way to make it through is this lake. It is only one meter deep, even in the middle. That's where the border is, in the middle. They don't patrol it with boats. And you won't drown. They may shoot you but you won't drown.”

“And this?”

“That's the old border.”

He closes the book and leans in close to Zoli. The younger looks back and forth, as if a language lies between them that he wil never understand.

“Ah, fuck,” he says. “She's worth money. You heard what he said. A reward.”

“Give her back the knife.”

“Shit.”

“Give her the knife, Tomas.”

The younger skids the knife across the floor and sighs. Zoli picks it up, backs across the hard stone floor towards the door, pul s down the handle.

Locked. A brief panic claws at her throat until the older man steps across, leans forward, turns the handle upwards, and the door swings open. A

blast of cold wind.

“One thing,” he says. “Are you real y a poet?” I sang. A smgerr

“Yes.”

“Same thing, no?”

“No, I don't think so,” she says.

Al three step out into the stinging light of the morning. The oldest extends his hand.

“Josef,” he says.

“Marienka Bora Novotna.” She pauses a moment: “Zoli.”

“It's a funny name.”

“Perhaps.”

“May I ask one thing? I was wondering. I think I've seen your photograph once. In the newspaper.”

“Maybe.”

“I ask only then—”

“Yes?”

“How have you come to this?”

He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is cal ed upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he wil ask it again, later, when he feels the hard rol of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?

“There are worse things,” says Zoli.

“I can't think of them, can you?”

She turns her face towards the distance.

“Hey,” says the younger, “what are we going to say to the Englishman if he comes back?”

“Say to him?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you wil tel him his fortune.”

At the top of a hil she looks north and south—Bratislava and its towers long gone now, not even a hint of them on the skyline. She is pleased by the silence as it reverberates from horizon to horizon. There are days when she walks great distances and the only sound she discerns is the swish of her own clothing.

At a lonely farmhouse she crouches behind a barn, listening. She crosses to the huts and undoes the string that holds the hasp. A few scrawny hens eye her from behind the wooden slats. When she reaches in, one erupts from the box with a long squawk and flies past her. Il egal, of course, to own chickens— they must belong to a family nearby. She reaches in a second time, keeping the gap in the door tight. In the uproar the others take to the air and she lunges and grabs one by the wing. She holds it in the wel of her skirt, and breaks the neck with a simple twist, fol ows with a second. From the nesting boxes she fil s her pockets with eggs and wraps them in the cathedral tea towel.

She unwinds a long piece of thread from her coat, ties it around the neck of the animals, and places them together at her belt, where they bounce against her thigh as she walks, as if stil alive and protesting.

Hunger has made me original, she thinks: the chicken-stealing Gypsy.

Three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that she has already crossed the border into Hungary. She had expected a concertina of barbed wire to mark it, or a high concrete watchtower, but maybe it was just a hedge or a furrowed field or the little vil age where they spoke both languages. Perhaps it was when she crossed the shal ow streambed in the forest, snow fal ing and trees darkly waving. It startles her, the ease with which she has crossed from one place into another, the landscape whol y alien and yet so much the same. The other border, East and West, she knows, wil begin in a matter of days and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

The first of the wooden watchtowers appears on stilts like a tal wooden bird. Two soldiers perch within it, scanning the horizon. Here, Hungary.

There, in the distance, Austria. She creeps along, half-bent to the earth, her body porous to every noise. Before her, the haze of mist drifting off the marsh. The air is cold, but lines of sweat run along her shoulderblades. She has stripped her bundle down to the barest needs—only a wickerjar of water, some cheese, some bread, the tarp, a blanket, her warmest clothes, the stolen knife. She backs a good distance away from the watchtowers, settles in the grass far from the dirt road, feels for a dry place to lie down.

No more movement, thinks Zoli, until nightfal .

She tracks the sun awhile across the sky, through the woven shapes of the branches above, until the last of the mist has burned off. How strange to try to sleep in such light, but it is important to rest, and to keep warm—there can be no fire.

Afternoon birdcal wakes her. The sun has shifted southward, red at its edges. She lifts her head slightly at the sound of an engine, and sees, in the distance, a squat truck with a canvas back trundling along the forest line. The voices of young soldiers, Russians, carry through the forest. How many dead bodies lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as they made the short trip from one place to the other?

The army truck passes along the edge of the trees and away, and, as if by design, two white swans break across the sky, their shapes laboring above the treetops, quartering on the wind with their necks craned, apparitions not so much of grace as difficulty, with the gunneling sound that comes from their mouths, a deathcal .

Other people, she knows, have had reasons to cross—for land, or nation, or desire, but she has no reason, she is empty, clean, raw. Once, as a child, traveling with her grandfather, she had seen a hunger artist in a vil age west of the mountains. He had set himself up in a cage and made a spectacle of his starvation. She watched him as his ribs grew clearer, stronger, almost musical. He lasted forty-four days and he looked so much like an old man when they took him from the cage that she was surprised to see him given, at last, a plate of crumbs and a drink of milk. This is how I am, she thinks: I have made a spectacle of myself, and now I am taking their crumbs. It is stil possible to turn around—there is nothing to prove.

And yet I have come this far, there is no more reason to return than there is to advance.

Zoli shifts slightly on the blanket. I should sleep, build up my strength, pul myself together, free my mind, become clear.

By early evening it seems to her that the darkness has begun to lift itself out of the earth, overtaking the grays and yel ows of the marsh floor. It rises to the top of the trees and shoulders against the last patches of light. She considers a moment that it is, in fact, more beautiful than she has ever created in words, that the darkness actual y restores the light. The trees more dark than the dark itself.

She bundles her belongings tight and rises up from between the logs. This is it. Take it now. Go. She taps her left breast, begins moving, hunched, careful y, deliberately. Windnoise in the grass. A shape in the distance catches her eye, another watch-tower, this one camouflaged with leaves and bushes and almost immediately she hears some dogs in the anonymous distance. She strains to hear what direction they are heading but it is hard to tel with the wind.

A high chorus, getting closer. Trained bloodhounds maybe. The sound of men's voices, joining the clamor. At a distant watchtower, two soldiers jump from the last rungs of the ladder to the ground, their rifles pointed at the sky, moving out at a trot. So this is it. I should just stand and raise my arms and have them cal the dogs off. Why gibber? Why beg? And yet there is something about their excitement, a tension to their voices, that makes her wonder. She crouches down into the grass. The headlights of a truck on the far road light up the marshland. A second truck, a third. The dogs only a short distance away now. The lights paint the grass silver, spectral.

It is then she sees a brown flash along the road. Ten or twelve of them. Antlered, majestic. Dogs snapping behind them. A shout of grim confidence from a soldier and then a yelp of joy.

Deer. A whole herd of them.

Sweep left, she whispers, sweep left.

She hears the soldiers whooping under the clamor of the dogs. Her fate, she realizes, is within the swing of a deer foot. Swing away from me, away.

The herd passes through the forest line behind her. Over her shoulder the soldiers fol ow, shouting.

She races forward and through a low ditch. Water sprays upwards and she skews a moment on the slick mud before gaining her footing once more. Beyond the ditch, a line of trees. A light sweeps the landscape. She ducks into the shelter of a single cypress tree, slides down behind it, pauses for a breath and looks about in terror before lurching onwards. Her wet shoes make sucking sounds against the earth. She punches her way through a brake of long grass. The thorns of a bush rip her hands. She hears another dog's barking and then a high yelp. Have they finished their chase? Cornered their animal?

Her breath wheens fast and uneven. Her lungs, scalded. I must get now to the lake. A quarter kilometer perhaps. To the water edge.

Zoli rol s her shoulders from her overcoat, and drops it on the ground. I wil not fil my pockets with water, no.

Four searchlights tilt and sweep across her. She drops to the soft earth, face in the dirt. The lights stencil the marshland. In the distance the hounds are being held back from the deer and the laughing voices of the soldiers carry through the night. The deer with its bel y split open, surely, the guts steaming on the ground.

Zoli ventures forward again, the bracing cold pul ing at her skin, her heart, her lungs tight.

The merest luck, she thinks, has preserved me.

Slovakia

2003

THE BOTTLES WERE EMPTY, the ashtrays ful. They had cheerfuly slapped his back, sung for him, even fed him the last of their haluski. They had gazed at pictures of his child and posed for their own, by the fire, standing tal and fixed. They had laughed at the sound of their own voices on the tape recorder. He even played it for them in slow mode. They had accepted al his money, except for fifty krowns in a hidden pocket. They'd played him like a harp, he thought, but he was not fazed; he even felt for a while that he had a bit of the Gypsy in himself, that he'd been inducted into their ways, a character in one of their elaborate anecdotes. They led him this way and that about Zoli, and the more krown notes he laid on the table, the more their stories loosened— she was born right here, lam her cousin, she wasn't a singer, she was seen last month in Presov, her caravan was sold to a museum in Brno, she played the guitar, she taught in university, she was killed in the war by the Hlinkas—and he felt like a man who'd been expertly and lengthily duped.

He promised Boshor that he'd come back when he discovered anything more about her, maybe the next week, or the one after, but he knew he'd never return. The young girl, Andela, picked up the china cups from the table and smiled at him as she backed away—she wore his wristwatch high on her arm. He had even, towards the end, watched the cigarette foil being used to languidly clean a gap in Boshor's teeth.

He tapped his pockets. Everything was intact. Car keys, tape recorder, wal et. Boshor shook his hand and grasped his arm in affection, pul ed him close. They almost touched cheeks.

Outside, the shadows lay gray on the settlement. The kids cheered when he pushed open the shack door. Robo was sitting on a cinder block, carving a piece of wood out of which had come the figure of a woman. The whittled chips lay in white patterns at his feet. Robo skimmed off the last bark edge and handed him the statue, leaned in and said: “Don't forget, mister, fifty krowns.” He smiled and put the statue in his pocket: “Just get me to the car.” The other kids pul ed at his jacket sleeve. He leaned down and mussed their hair. He felt happily torn by the desolation; he'd survived it, he was safe, secure, out in one piece. The bands of sweat at his waist and armpits had dried. He had even begun to fret that his car was pointed in the wrong direction, that he would have to reverse it al the way up the dirt road, or execute a three-point turn with al these little kids around.

“This way,” said Robo, “fol ow me.”

He moved through the muck and made signposts in his mind to come back to later, random thoughts, notes to scribble down in a journal: The children's clothes are strangely clean. No running water, no taps, no pylons. Electricity is pirated. A girl with eight piercings in her ears. Two huge rubber rings used as jewelry. Not many young men in their twenties or thirties—possibly in prison. Man in bright pink jacket. Chess pieces strung as a windchime. Old woman using broken television as a seat. Immaculate white cloths flapping on the washing line.

He was passing by the last of the shanties when Robo let go of his arm and moved back into the shadows. He felt immediately that he had been dropped.

A bare-chested man. Smal . Barefoot. A bottle scar on one cheek, almost a perfect circle. A tattooed teardrop on the other, beneath his eye. He held the engine of a motor scooter in one hand and his chest was slathered in fingerlines of grease. The journalist turned quickly to look for escape, but the tattooed man took his elbow and pul ed him towards a shack. “Come here, come here.” A curious high tinge to the voice. The tattooed man deepened the grip around the journalist's forearm, and then, as if from nowhere, a young woman in a yel ow dress appeared at his other elbow. She bowed, a smal wren of a thing, her hands folded as if in prayer.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I have to go.”

He tried backing discreetly away, but the tattooed man was gentle, insistent. The ragged edge of a sackcloth doorway was drawn back. He bumped up against a rough wooden pole. The shack seemed to shake.

“Come on, Uncle, sit down.”

Shapes grew out of the darkness. Three children sat on the bed as if placed there for show.

“I real y must go,” he said.

“You've nothing to worry about, Unc, I just want to show you something.”

The children made room on the pine-pole bed. It was strung with rope. On one end lay a folded white eiderdown and a cushion for a pil ow. When he sat, the ropes sagged and the poles shifted. The tattooed man's hand lay heavy on his shoulder. The journalist looked around. No windows. No carpet.

No wal hangings. Only a row of empty shelves on the far wal .

He turned away and there, swinging from the ceiling, hung a huge zelfya scarf, a hand peeping out of it.

“Food,” said the tattooed man. “We need food for the baby.”

The tattooed man ran a finger along the lip of a little Russian-made fridge, and then swept a lighter around the emptiness. He said something in Romani to the woman. She squeezed up onto the bed. Her smile was wide, though two of her lower teeth were missing. She edged closer, ran her hand along the buttons at the front of her dress, put an arm around the journalist's shoulder. He pul ed back and smiled again, thinly, nervously.

A rat tiptoed across the zinc roof.

The woman opened her top button and then, with a sudden flick of her fingers, reached inside her dress. “Food,” she said. He turned away but she squeezed his shoulder and when he turned back he saw that she had her breast out in her hand, the whole of it, milky at the nipple and striated with sores. Oh, Jesus, he thought, she's turning tricks on me. Right in front of her children. Jesus. Her breast, she's giving me her breast. She held it between her middle fingers and began to keen, incanting something in a low, desperate voice. She squeezed the nipple again. He stood up and his knees gave way. A hand pushed his chest. He thumped back onto the bed. Her breast was stil out and she was pointing to the sores.

The tattooed man reached up to the hanging bundle and raised his voice: “We need food for the baby, the baby is so hungry.” And then, out of the bundle came a tiny bag of bones, wrapped in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

The child was placed in the journalist's arms. My own baby would cry, he thought. She is so light, so very light. No more than a loaf of bread. A packet of flour.

“She's beautiful,” he said, and he went to put the baby in the woman's lap, but she folded herself against it, curled up tight, put her chin to her chestbone. She moaned, closed the button of her dress, hugged herself, and her moans rose higher.

A fly settled on the child's top lip.

The journalist took one hand from the baby and patted his pockets. “I've nothing with me,” he said. “If I had anything I'd give it to you, I swear, I wish I had, I'l come back tomorrow, I'l bring food, I promise, I wil .”

He swished the fly away from the baby's mouth and watched as the tattooed man slapped his fist into his palm, and he knew for certain now that they were prison tattoos, and he knew what the teardrop meant, and al seemed suddenly cold. A bal of emptiness swel ed in his stomach, and he stuttered: “I'm a friend of Boshor's, you know.”

The tattooed man smiled sharply, then stood up in the center of the hard-packed floor. He reached for the baby, took it in his arms, kissed it on the forehead—a slow, careful kiss—and then dropped it in the zelfya. He stretched his arms wide and said, as if there were coins in his voice:

“There's a cash machine up by the supermarket, friend.”

The hanging bundle swayed in the air, back and forth, a slowing timepiece. The tattooed man pul ed the journalist up from the bed, put his arm around his shoulder, held him close. It was as if they'd competed in some vast athletic competition together, wrapped themselves in the flag, the anthem was ringing out, and thousands were cheering al around them.

“Come on, friend, fol ow me.”

The sackcloth was pul ed back from the doorway and the hard light stung the journalist's eyes. He looked back at the woman, passively smoothing the eiderdown. A platoon of flies was now buzzing around the baby. The sackcloth curtsied across the open frame.

In the raw camp air, the tattooed man laughed. Robo appeared from the corner and began walking at the head of their shadows. “Don't forget, mister,” Robo whispered. Everything seemed tightened down. A pressure on his ribcage. A pulse at his temple. The tattooed man stayed close by his shoulder, careful to bring him across the bridge, al exaggerated safety.

“Don't put your foot here, friend, that's a bad one.”

For a moment he thought he stil had the child in his hands, he tried to cradle it, but his foot caught on a swinging plank, and the tattooed man grabbed him by the lapel, hauled him back, and touched the soft swel of his waist: “You're safe with me, friend.”

He cast his eyes up towards the distant vil age: a church-tower peeping up above the trees and the clock ringing for a quarter to five in the afternoon.

They walked towards the car, the kids swarming around them. Robo shuffled behind. It was silent, their pact. He ferreted in a hidden pocket for the money and backhanded it to Robo, fifty krowns. Robo yelped and broke away through the crowd and disappeared into the trees. The tattooed man stopped to watch Robo go.

“Robo,” he said, closing his eyes as if weighing something extraordinarily heavy on his lashes.

The journalist fumbled in his pocket for his keys. The man stood behind his shoulder, breathing against his neck. The doors unlocked with a click and then the tattooed man vaulted across the front hood, landed in the passenger seat with a soft plink as his skin hit the plastic.

“Nice car, friend,” said the tattooed man as he clapped his hands together.

“It's a rental,” said the journalist, and he was amazed as he drove away, reversing through the crowd of kids, that the tattooed man leaned his head on his shoulder, like some lover.

At the bend in the road, near the fridge, he turned the car around, beeped, waved out the window to the children. His stomach heaved. He shoved the car into gear. The kids waved as the car wheels caught, cheered as mud flew in the air. The hedges shot by. They passed the women stil washing sheets in the river. The tattooed man popped out the ashtray and began picking through the smoked butts.

“I won't gyp you,” he said as he smoothed out the crushed end of a cigarette, and the journalist felt as if he had been chest-kicked by the word, as if it meant nothing at al , like fly or shit or sunrise.

The road widened and curled up the hil . The tires gripped hard on the tarmac. His knuckles turned white on the wheel. He had no idea what he could do to get rid of the tattooed man, but then—in sight of the town—it struck him. That's it, he thought. It was simple, honest, elegant. He would go to the supermarket and buy baby formula, yes, baby formula, and milk, and cereal, and tiny jars of food, and some clean bottles, some ointment, some rubber nipples, a box of diapers, a tub of baby-wipes, even a dol if they had one, yes, a dol , that would be good, that would be right. Maybe he would throw in a few extra krowns. He would emerge from the supermarket laden down and at ease.

He leaned back and steered the wheel with one hand, but when he rounded the corner towards a low row of shops, the tattooed man turned to him as if he had divined his intention and said: “Y'know, they don't al ow any of us into the market, friend.” His skin plinked away from the plastic of the seat. “We are forbidden, there's none of us al owed.”

The wheel bumped against the curb.

The tattooed man was out of the car before it had even stopped. He vaulted the hood again and opened the door before the key was out of the ignition. “Cash machine,” he said, pointing. “Over there.”

The journalist cast about for a policeman, or a bank official, anyone. A few teenagers sat brooding on a low brick wal . Under their swinging legs, the faded graffiti read: “Gyps go home.” The tattooed man tightened his grip and they crossed to the machine.

“Stand back,” the journalist said, and was surprised to see the man shuffle backwards.

Some of the teenagers laughed and one wolf-whistled.

“Stand back or there's no money. Do you hear me?”

The teenagers laughed again.

He shielded the numbers from view as he punched them into the keyboard. The high beeps of the machine sounded out. Behind him the tattooed man was moving foot to foot, biting his lip. The cogs rattled and the levers whirled. Two hundred knowns came out in twenty-krown notes. He ripped them from the rol ers, turned, walked four steps, and thrust the money into the tattooed man's hand.

“The baby is so hungry.”

“No,” he said, “there'sno more.”

He was seven steps from the machine when he heard the receipt cough out from the wal . He froze, then turned and jogged back to get it, crumpled it in his fist.

“Five hundred please, five hundred, she's so hungry.”

The journalist patted his wal et again to make sure nothing had been lifted.

“Please, Uncle, please.”

He pul ed the handle of the car door, his hands slippery with sweat. The keys shook as he shoved them into the ignition. The engine caught. He locked al four locks simultaneously.

The tattooed man pressed his face up against the window. His mouth was moist and red.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, his breath fogging the glass.

The car lurched forward and a wave of cool air enveloped him. “Fuck,” the journalist said. He swung out onto the road. “Fuck.” The light was fading. In the rearview mirror he saw the tattooed man striding off in the direction of the supermarket, swaggering as the electronic doors opened.

The man entered the market with a smal skip of his feet and his head disappeared amongst the shoppers.

The car clipped the curb and the moist face print dissolved from the window.

As he drove along the winding road towards the highway, looking back down on the settlement, the journalist felt what he thought was a sadness, or an ache, or a desire, and these thoughts heartened him, warmed him with their misery, and he pretended that a part of himself wanted to slide down the bank, wade through the filthy river, give them al that he owned, and walk home, penniless, decent, healed, return their ancient dignity by leaving, by the riverbank, his own.

He drove on, then reversed once more, got out, and stood on the hil overlooking the settlement. The satel ite dishes looked like so many white mushrooms: he used to go wandering in Spissy Podhraide for those.

The last of the light winked on the metal roofs. Some children rol ed a bicycle wheel through the mud, stepping in and out of their own lengthenings, shadows of shadows.

He narrated a brief line into his tape recorder and played it back to himself: it was empty and stupid and he erased it.

A brief spit of low cloud went across the sun. He lifted his col ar against the breeze and he looked down again, towards the camp. The man with the tattoos was returning across the bridge. He was carrying a flimsy plastic bag, bel -shaped, heavy, and he was looking down into it. He swayed across the rickety planks, one leg slower than the other, concentrating hard, mouth to the bag, breathing in and out, in and out, breathing. In the other hand he held a half-gal on can by a thin wire handle.

The tattooed man tottered a moment on the bridge and then he was gone, into the warren of shacks, out of sight.

The breeze blew cold across the hil side. “Paint thinner,” said the journalist to himself and then he repeated the line into his tape recorder.

He stepped towards his car, slid into the seat, threw the recorder down beside him. With an empty inner thud, he realized that he didn't know the tattooed man's name, that he'd never asked for it, had not been given it, did not require it, the transaction had been nameless, the man, the woman, the children, the baby. He rubbed his hands on the steering wheel and looked down at the recorder. It lay, running, the tiny spools turning in the silence.

“No name,” he said, and he clicked the tape recorder off, stamped the clutch, and shoved the gearstick hard into first.

He turned on his headlights in the dusk, and drove away from the settlement, insects smashing against the windscreen.

Compeggio, Northern Italy

2001

IT STRUCK ME EARLY THIS MORNING, while lighting the first of the kerosene lamps, how strange it is to be so much at peace and yet stil nothing certain.

The lamplight fil ed the room. I opened up the rol top drawer of the old desk, shook the fountain pen awake. The ink splotched the paper. I went to the window and looked out. Enrico used to tel me that it takes a great deal of strength to get the snow out of the mind—not so much the path out from the mil down to the road, or the blanket the length of the val ey, or the mounds backed up against the road, or the whiteness of the vil age, or the patches of sheer ice high in the Dolomites—it is the snow in the mind that takes the most getting used to. I failed to put any words on paper, so I pul ed on a pair of his old shoes and walked down into the vil age. There was nothing about, not a footprint except his own—which were my own—

and I sat on the steps of the old pastry shop and wondered about what you asked, about how a road could ever have brought me to such a place.

Before the vil age began to stir, I walked back up the winding road to the mil house, in the stil -dark. I put wood on the stove and turned on the other two kerosene lamps. The room was warm and amber. Al I could hear was your father's voice in everything, even his shoes had left a wet mark on the floor.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do. Seventy-three winters have passed now across my brow. I have often settled by your bed and whispered to you of distant days, have told you of the young girl staring backwards, of your great-grandfather, and what happened to us in the Shivering Hil s, of how we crossed and recrossed our land, of how I sang and what happened to me and those songs. I could never have known what would become of the pencil in my fingers. For a good while, in that previous life, I was celebrated. They seemed like the best of years, but they did not last—maybe they were not meant to—and then came the time when I was banished. In my new life, I could not bear the thought of my old poems. Even a flash of them across my mind brought a coldness to my spine. I had already made a little grave for them, the day of my judgment back in Bratislava, when I walked out from beneath the towerblocks and away. I promised myself that I would never write again, nor would I try to remember the old poems. There were times, of course, when their rhythm flitted across my mind, but for the most part I closed them off, pushed them away, left them behind. If they returned to me at al , they returned as song.

In al those years I never dared put a pen to paper, and yet I must admit that once or twice, after I met your father, I found myself stirred. I sat waiting for him to come across the mountain, or to walk up the mil road, or to appear at the window, and I thought that perhaps, in the silence, I should crack open the cap on the fountain pen, remove a page from his blank journal, and put down my simple thoughts. Yet it scared me. It reminded me of too much and I could not do it. It seems strange now after al these years, and to you, chonorroeja, it might seem ridiculous, but I feared that if I tried to give written meaning to my life that I would once again lose what I had gained. There were these mountains, these silences, your father and you—these were not things I was wil ing to part with. Your father bought me books but he never asked me to write. The only person he told about my poems was Paoli, and he said that Paoli would not have known a poem unless you had him drink it. Both are gone now, Paoli and your dear father, and you are elsewhere, far away, and I have grown old and stooped and even happily gray, but in the face of your questions it strikes me now that I have no reason to fight it anymore, so I sit down at this rough-hewn table and attempt once again to put pen to paper.

Forty-two years!

When a bird breaks the line of the window it surprises me almost as much as a word.

I am sorry now that I burned your father's belongings, and I know I should have kept them for you, but in grief we do such foolish things. He told me once that he wanted his body brought to the summit where he could look down on both countries, Italy, Austria, so he could contemplate the memory of a life spent dragging cigarettes, tractor parts, coffee, medicines, from one side to the other. He said he was content for his body to be left up there for the hawks and the eagles and whatever else wandered his way—he almost relished the idea of becoming part of the buzzards, he cal ed them the most Tyrolean of birds. In the end I could not do that, dearest heart, the thought of leaving him there was far too much, so I took al of his possessions, except one pair of shoes made from his old suitcase, and burned them not far from the mil house. I lay down in the place of the burning, an old form of mourning. What I loved most of al were the shirts he wore, most especial y the woolen ones, do you recal them? They were patched and repatched and patched again. He had learned, when he first moved to the mountains, to darn the elbows with needles, using single strands of birch twigs sharpened to a point. He joked that he was glad that I was going to burn his shirts, but it would not take long. I came back days afterwards and searched in the scorched earth for the buttons and the metal beltloop from his jacket, but the fire had burned everything down.

There is an old Romani song that says we share little pieces of our hearts with people and the further we go along, the less we have for ourselves until there is not enough left to go around and that's cal ed traveling, and it's also cal ed death, and since it happens to us al there's nothing more ordinary than that.

In Bratislava I burned my poems. I walked down the swaying staircase into the bright light of day carrying another man's possessions—his boots, his shirts, his radio, his watch. I could see nothing for my future. I was twenty-nine years old. I was cast off. So much of my life had been taken from me and yet I did not want to die.

I went out to the towerblocks for one last look. Eight shadows fel from the eight blocks, thick and dark across the ground where the children played. The caravans tilted sideways where the wheels had been ripped off. I turned away and began my terrible walk, al the way south through the smal vil ages of Slovakia. They were the worst days of al , and often in the mornings, when I woke up in the forests, I was surprised—not so much at the notion that I had slept, but that I was alive at al .

I struck out west and crossed the border into Hungary where the only relief that came to me was the idea that I would not, now, be fol owed by Swann. He could not cross the border. That part of my life was behind me and I moved on to forget it. Snow came, thick in the wind. I bundled into my blankets. Vil agers stared at me as I passed. I am sure I looked wretched, al skin and bone and rags. Some were kind and brought me bread, others asked where the caravans were. I selected a point in the snow's distance—a tree, a cliff, a pylon—and walked towards it. At a deserted farm, I fil ed my pockets with bonemeal from a feeding trough and later boiled it and ate it without thinking. The paste clove to the top of my mouth. I was eating the food of animals. I slept one night in a large cave, the roof tonsil ed, the folds in the stone like curtains. Soldiers had carved words in

the rock, names and dates, and I wondered how could wars extend so far? In the corner I found an old tin of meat, cracked it open with a rock, ate with my fingers. The truth is that I no longer, then, considered myself a Romani woman at al . They cal ed me Gypsy, yet I was not even that. Nor did I think of myself as one who had read books or sung stories or written poems—if anything I thought of myself as only a primitive.

For days I kept myself low to the ground, then I waded into the lake which is, I suppose—if there is to be a beginning—the place where my life in the West began.

Even at this very moment I can feel the cold wal of water as it rose against my chest. Al night long I waded through the lake so freezing cold that my feet burned. There were no rocks on the bottom of the lake and it was hard to walk, but I kept my arms high, and for once I was glad of my height. Some water plant wrapped itself around my ankle and I tried to shake it off, but lost my balance. Soon I was dripping wet from head to toe. I did not expect the rol s of barbed wire the Austrians had put down, so when I got nearer the edge of the lake I had to step over. At first I thought I was just bumping against another lake plant, but then I felt my skin ripping. My legs were sliced and bloody and yet I thought then that I was not made up of flesh or muscle or bone, I was made up of strength and it would take me onto land. I had been walking since early nightfal and al was silent. The only light was the sweep of searchlights along the frontier.

I was sure that, when dawn broke, the Russian soldiers would find me an easy shot against the light.

Stupidly, I had brought with me only bread and it had gone sodden in my pockets and drifted out into the lake. A few damp crusts were al that remained. What foolish things cross our minds at these times, daughter, the worst of times, and I thought that I would keep on going for just a glass of milk, and the prospect of this kept me wading, perhaps it was because when I was young, and traveling with the kumpanija, we were told that milk would keep our insides clean. I stumbled on, my mind unsteady. The shore seemed to retreat and for a while I thought maybe I was walking in one place, as in some awful dream, with the sandy underbottom accepting my steps one after the other, but I final y managed to wrap a blanket around my hands and pushed on. I got over the last of the underwater wires and col apsed on the ground. The searchlights swept along the shore in cones and the trees were ghost-shaped.

I stooped low and went to a marsh hole not far from the lake, lay back against the wet of the soil, and looked down upon the rips of flesh from the barbed wire. I searched my pockets for the last of the soggy crumbs and ate, trying to savor them in my mouth. The light crept up. In front of me was more marshland and surely more wooden towers with soldiers. I would do what I had done on the other side of the border—wait for the hour just before darkness, then stumble through until I found a friendly person or a farmhouse.

I was told as a girl that death always came with the hoot of an owl. I have never clung to old superstition, chonorroeja, my own grandfather dissuaded me of such things on the road to Presov, but I think what kept me alive that dark morning, strange as it might seem, was that I did hear an owl as he hooted long and hard, and it shocked me awake because I wanted to see in what sort of body death would arrive. It seemed to greet me with birdsong and insect noise. Something burst out of the nearby grass and I looked up to see a pheasant a little way up in the air, taunting me.

How delicious it would be to catch her in my bare hands, wring her neck, and eat her without even use of a fire. I searched in the earth for anything at al to eat, even an earthworm, the most unclean of things, but there was nothing, and I sat, my body chattering in the cold. I had sewn Petr's lighter into my dress pocket. I tore it out and tried to flick it alight to warm my hands. No flame.

I woke under glaring light. A shadow fel across me and a white face looked down. I stil to this day do not know how they found me, though I was told that I was discovered half-dead in the marsh and indeed they treated me like one dead at first.

The nurse shone a flashlight in my eyes, took hold of my jaw and said in German: Keep stil . She pushed my head back onto the pil ow and whirled away saying: She bit me, the little savage. I did indeed and did it wel , and I would do it again, daughter, if I had to. I was sure straight away that they would arrest me, beat me, send me back to Czechoslovakia. Three nurses gathered, I could smel their sharp perfume. One grabbed hold of my cheeks, the other used a brown stick to hold down my tongue, and the third shone the flashlight into the back of my throat. The fat one wrote on a chart. The tal est took a little jar of something from her pocket and they passed it around one to the other, inhaling the fumes. It has always fascinated me that the gadze cannot smel themselves, I find it strange that they do not know how unusual their soaps and foods and bad odor, but some people only have an eye for others and never themselves. They held the jar to their noses and coughed and said how much I stank. The nurses made a telephone cal and asked for some assistance, then said: We're taking her down to the showers.

Believe you me, that is when hel 's fury was let loose—al I had heard for a decade was talk of poverty, strikes, and persecution, of the ordinary people in the West beaten down, of how we were hounded, of how little had changed since the days of the fascists, of how the streets were strung with reams of barbed wire, and in my delirium it was possible to believe that in the West they had begun their showers again. Who would deny that if it happened once it would not happen again? There is nothing so terrible that they wil not try to repeat it. I shouted in Romani that they would not take me to their showers, no! I would not let them take me! I pul ed back the sheets and ripped the drip out of my arm. They whistled for the guard but I was already out of the bed. A siren went off. The tal white-haired nurse tried to stand in front of me, but I shoved her backwards, stumbled to the door, pushed it open, I do not know where the strength came from.

Three men in uniform appeared at the far end of the corridor. One banged his bil yclub on the wal . I backed into a room. Light came through one smal window. Outside, through the haze of glass, was a patch of green. I squeezed out and landed in the grass. A number of tents stood squat on the ground. Beyond them, a few wooden buildings where smoke rose from the tin-pot chimneys. I heard someone shouting in Hungarian and another language I didn't recognize. I ran down the dirt road, past the tents, towards the gate, but the men in uniform were standing there wearing white armbands. They put up their rifles and said, with half a smile: Halt. A single red-white-red wooden barrier lay across the road. I could see long flat plains and in the distance huge mountains, with clouds halfway up them, capped with snow against the blue sky—so this, then, was Austria and the West, what a strange way to see it, through an open gate, with nurses shuffling in the dust behind me, and a rifle pointed at me.

Along came a tal gray-haired woman with four soldiers trailing behind her. She had the air of a bureaucrat but she stood in front of me and said: This is a D.P. camp, don't worry.

Her voice was calm. We're here to help you, she said. She took another step forward.

Displaced persons, she said.

When I tried to break the line of soldiers, one of them caught me in the shoulder with the end of his rifle. The woman knocked his gun aside and said: Leave her alone, you brute. She bent down to me and began whispering that I would be al right, not to fret, she was a doctor, she would take care of me. Yet I did not trust her—who would? I pushed away from her, began to walk towards the red and white gate, my head held tal , my body straight.

Okay, said the woman, put her in cuffs.

They brought me to a gray building where the nurses undressed me. A few soldiers stood outside the shower room and although most of them looked away, one or two came to the smal window and looked inside. I sat on a hardbacked chair under the stream of water, while the nurses rubbed me fiercely with hard soap and brushes on long broom handles.

I tried to hide my nakedness. On and on they went about how I wore no breast support, about how I smel ed, and that there was no smel on earth like a Gypsy, but stil I said nothing. Near the end of the shower one of the soldiers put his pink tongue against the glass and licked it. I curled into myself and closed my eyes. They threw me a towel, then led me to another hospital room where they razored my hair. When I looked down on the floor there were some white larvae moving through the clumps. I had no feeling. It was my hair, but so what? It hardly mattered, it was just another ornament. Since a young age I had cut it off many times, always against custom. They sprayed me with a white powder that made my eyes itch. I did not al ow them to know I could speak a little German, but I understood their words and believe me they were not talking of me as a flower that had sprung from the earth.

I had escaped an old life and was caught in a new one, but I could have no sympathy for myself, it was of my own making.

I was brought back to the ward. The doctor put her stethoscope to my chest. She said I was being held for my own safety, she would look after me, I was protected under international treaties, there was no cause for concern. She had the confident voice of one who did not believe a single word she was saying.

Her name was Doctor Marcus, from Canada, and she spoke German like she had just shoved a fistful of stones into her mouth. She said she would give me medical quarantine for a month or two, but after that I would have to apply for refugee status and then I would be al owed the status of the other displaced people. On her desk Doctor Marcus had some of my possessions: my Party card, my knife, some paper krowns wrinkled from the lakewater, and the coin Conka had given me, stil wrapped in strands of her fine red hair. I reached out to get my possessions but she dropped them in a large paper envelope and said that they would be returned when I began to comply. She spun the coin in her fingers, dropped it in the envelope, and closed the clasp. A hair had fal en onto the desk.

Are you wil ing to talk to me? the doctor asked.

I pretended again that I was mute. Doctor Marcus spoke into an intercom system, instructed them to bring in the translator, an enormous heap of a woman who asked me question after question, in Czech and Slovak both, who I was, how I got a Party card, what had happened to me, how did I cross the border, did I know anyone in Austria and, of course their favorite question, was I real y a Gypsy? I looked like one, they said, I dressed in colorful rags like one, but I did not seem like one. I sat stil with my hands in my lap. The translator told me to nod yes or no to her questions. Are you Czech? Are you Slo-vakian? Are you Gypsy? Why have you come in from Hungary? This coin is an unusual coin, isn't it? Is this your identity card?

Are you a Communist? I sat stil . The best way around her was silence. When they were finished, the translator threw her hands up in the air but Doctor Marcus leaned forward and said: I know you understand us, we only want to help you, why don't you let us?

I lifted the single strand of Conka's hair from the desk and they took me off to quarantine.

So much time was spent in the white rooms of the hospital that I began to think back on al that had happened. My voice is strong now when I recal this, but back then I was a weak and terrified thing, and I stopped in every corner I could find, real or not. I did not want the roads of my childhood to return, I attempted to put them out of my mind, but the more I did so the more they appeared.

We used to make potato candles, Conka and I, we hol owed them out and lit the thin wal s of potato with light, and in winter Conka loved to skate with the lit candles in her hands, tree to tree, they kept her hands warm. She had a pair of skates her father had made from old boots and knifeblades. Sometimes the lights went out when she turned on the skates, or skidded and fel , or sometimes the ice sprayed up and put out the wick-flame. Above us the stars swung. These and other things returned to me while I lay in the Austrian bed—I sometimes felt as if I were stil out on the ice. I heard cracking and saw hands reaching up for me. I could hear boots in the forest and there stood Swann and there stood Vashengo and there stood Strän-sky, rifling through a sheaf of papers and, behind them again, a row of bureaucrats and nurses and officers and guards. I turned and thrashed about in the bed, but the pictures returned harder, faster, with the insistence of things impossible to shake.

Doctor Marcus arrived at the end of my bed every noon, her stethoscope twinkling in the light, a row of pens in her pocket, one with a Canadian flag, and although she looked not a bit like

Swann, I could not help thinking that she was like a sister to him, with her light hair, hazel eyes, her oval face.

You don't have to suffer, she said. There's no point. Why don't you tel me your situation and then I can help?

It was like an old song, a children's rhyme, I had heard it so often, it was as if she had taken the words of a bureaucrat and put them in a child's mouth.

I know you can talk, she said. The nurses heard you. On the first day, you were screaming in a language they didn't recognize, surely it was Gypsy, am I right, was it Gypsy?

I turned away.

Some people think you're Polish, she said.

Then she leaned in even closer.

But I think you're from outer space.

That almost made me smile, yet when Doctor Marcus left I stared at the ceiling, and the more I stared, the more it pressed down on me.

They did not know my name let alone my anguish.

Later in the day Doctor Marcus came back and shone her flashlight into my eyes and wrote something on her chart. Pil s were given to me with water, white tablets with orange writing. I had the strange thought that I was swal owing words and Swann's face kept coming to my mind. I had lost a tooth in my journey and the orange pil s fitted perfectly in the gap. I spat them out when the nurses left, dropped them down a hole in the top of the metal bedstead.

I don't think that even now I can find the proper words to describe the feeling of having left my life behind. I was suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch. Every time I turned in the bed I would see an old road, the lane at the back of the chocolate factory, or the road to the schoolhouse near Presov, or the high path to the forest above the vineyards; smal flashes that burst out green and yel ow into my mind. I turned to the other side of the bed and more flashes came. I was at a strange bridge. I did not know how wide it was. I tried crossing it. I stood in the dark waving at what

was, a second ago, the bright sky. Leather straps were buckled down across my chest. They put a piece of rubber between my teeth. The child I was came back to me, hovered above me, her lazy eye looking down. After a while I recognized that the child was Conka too, but her hair was hacked off. She sat watching things retreating into the distance. Strange noises came, nothing like melody. A line of trees went out of sight. A tent napped in the wind. The nurses hovered over me and a needle went into my arm. I turned away and tried to rattle the orange pil s from the bottom of the bedstead. I would have taken them al in one go. They were terrible days, they could not have been worse.

The doctor final y said she would not give me any more pil s or injections. She barked at the nurse to put her arm under mine and al owed me to walk through the ward. I stood and swayed. Walking helped cure some things and for the next few weeks they fed me wel and al my lacerations healed, my hair began to grow back, and my feet were careful y tended to. They replaced the bandages three times a day, using a soft creamy medicine that smel ed of mint. They al owed me to mark my sheets—I did not want to share my bedclothes even if they were to be washed, I made it clear by holding on to them and wrapping them around my wrist.

Doctor Marcus said let her keep them, they're only sheets, it's a smal price, she wil open up soon.

But I said to myself that I would not open up, I would make a little place for myself in my mind, I would close its door, settle behind it, and I would not step across to open it again, ever. I walked around and around, like a clockhand. After a while my feet began to recover and my legs felt strong.

Doctor Marcus came in and said: Oh, what rosy cheeks we have today. I thought that I should give her one of Stränsky's old lectures on Marxism and the historical dialectic, and then she wouldn't think me such a broken paltry thing wandering around her hospital floor, but in truth I never real y thought about the days with Stränsky or Swann—no, it was more my childhood that kept coming back to me, the touch of Grandfather's shirt, nine drops of water in the ashes, looking from the back of the wagon while the caravan bounced, and I think now that these thoughts were there to protect me and to make sure that I kept myself intact, although at the time they almost drove me to an edge I did not recognize.

You can die of madness, daughter, but you can also die of silence.

There is a quiver in my fingers and the hairs on my arms stil rise when I put voice to these things. I dress in the dark these days, remove the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp, take the lid off the firebox, crumple the paper, drop it in, strike a match, wait for the flame to catch, then bring the same match to the stove. I have been spared another night to come into this day. Soon I hear the ticking of the metal and the char-sound of wood, and it becomes light enough to see and the room comes alive.

I had, today, a strange thought as I walked down al the way to the vil age. It was just past noon and the light seemed to sus- pend the street, ful of years somehow. I walked along the road, towards Paoli's old shop. I kept my eyes down on the pavement and watched the feet of people as they went past. The bel clanged when I went in—it is stil one of the few shops where the old ways have held. Paoli's son Domenico was behind the counter, lighting candles to put on a table.

It was then that it flashed in front of my eyes, a simple thought and yet I stil cannot shake it. For a brief second, I saw Conka. She wore a scarf and her hair was bundled beneath. She stood near the bottom of the towerblock where I had left her long ago, in Czechoslovakia. Her children were grown and gone. She wore a dark dress and her hands were shoved deep in her pockets. She walked towards the towerblocks, but the lift was broken, so she began to climb the stairs. At first I thought that she was looking for firewood, that she was going to rip up the floorboards from the flats, carry the wood down and burn it so she could cook a meal for her family. But al the doors to the flats were locked. She climbed higher, going from floor to floor. It grew dark. She got to the top of the towerblock, reached into her pocket, and took out a potato candle. From the other pocket she took out a match. She fumbled awhile to light it, but final y the wick took. It sat there, flickering on the top wal of the flats. She watched it a long time and then she reached forward and pushed it off the edge and down it went, through the air, aflame.

Why I thought this I stil do not know. Domenico took my arm and told me to sit down on the corner stool in the shop, my hands were trembling so.

His brother, Luca, the smal est of them, carried my groceries home, relit the kerosene lamp for me. He asked me if I would be al right and I said yes, I would. He asked for you and I told him you were in Paris, that you send letters, you live in an apartment, that your work is good and healthy and keeps your mind sharp.

Paris, he said.

I am quite sure his eyes sparkled—you are not forgotten, chonorroeja.

He bid me goodbye and he spotted the pages on the table, but I am sure he thought nothing of them. I could hear him whistling as he went down the hil .

After a few days in quarantine I could stand it no longer and I cal ed on Doctor Marcus and said to her in German, Am I a prisoner? She stared at me as if I had just somersaulted twice through the air. She said, Of course not, no. I told her that I was ready to go. She said it was not that simple and why hadn't I talked earlier, it would have been much easier. Why do you say that I am not a prisoner? I asked again. There are certain rules we must adhere to for the good of everybody, she said. Is this not the free West? Pardon me? she said. Is this not the democratic West? What an interesting thing to say, she said. Tel me why I am being held prisoner. There are no prisoners here, she replied.

I told her that I wanted to be released immediately, that it was my right, and she sprang back indignantly that she would do her very best, and she could promise me that at the very least I would be al owed out of the hospital if I helped them with information. Be thankful, she said, for what you have.

They always ask you to be thankful, chonorroeja, after they have locked you up. Perhaps they also ask you to kiss them when they throw away the key.

My name is Marienka, I told her.

The chair scraped as she pul ed it up closer.

Marienka, she said, that's a beautiful name.

Is it? I asked.

She blushed.

Doctor Marcus took down my strange story on her white notepad. My German was not good enough, nor did I want to speak in Slovak, so I spoke to her in Magyar. The translator was a pious young man from Budapest who wore a giant crucifix at his neck. I did not cal myself Zoli for fear of two things, their laughter at my name and the chance that the word would take wing and they might find out exactly who I was.

The story was simple. I had been born in the Hungarian lands. I was abandoned by my husband and I wanted to join my children who were living in France. They had left in ‘56, but I could not go since I was arrested and beaten. I got out of jail and went back to my settlement which was near the border. My people had never cared about borders. Once it had been one giant country and we stil treated it that way. The Party card was something I had found on the ground near a dump by the border. I saw Doctor Marcus pale with doubt, so I circled back and told her that I'd inserted a picture of myself into the card and that one of my family was an accomplished forger. Doctor Marcus shrugged. She said: Al right, go on, go on.

For a little gaiety, I said I'd taken a bus from the city of Györ but the bus broke down and I bartered for a bicycle. It was my first time riding such a machine. I wobbled down the road and farmers laughed at me. I slept in abandoned farmhouses, ate nettle soup, and made a borscht from sour cherries. I threw away the bicycle when I got a flat tire. Doctor Marcus began smiling then, and as the story went on she became triumphant and scribbled everything down as fast as she could. I began to like this person I was creating, and so I said that I had stolen a second bicycle, except this one had a giant basket on the front and, of course, I had borrowed some chickens, tied them down in the basket, feathers flying, and had lived on them until I made my break for freedom.

You can make them swal ow any lie with enough sugar and tears. They wil lick the tears and sugar and make of them a paste cal ed sympathy.

Try it, chonorroeja, and you might feel yourself dissolve.

I cannot explain why so many of them have hated us so much over so many years, and even if I could, it would make it too easy for them. They cut our tongues and make us speechless and then they try to get an answer from us. They do not wish to think for themselves and they dislike those who do. They are comfortable only with the whip above their heads, yet so many of us have spent our lives armed with little more dangerous than song. I am fil ed with the memory of those who have lived and died. We have our own fools and evils, chonorroeja, but we are pul ed together by the hatred of those who surround us. Show me a single patch of land we did not leave, or would not leave, a single place we have not turned from. And while I have cursed so many of my own, our sleight of hand, our twin tongues, my own vain stupidities, even the worst of us has never been amongst the worst of them. They make enemies of us so that they do not have to look at themselves. They take freedom from one and give it to another. They turn justice into revenge and stil cal it by its old name. They expect us to see the future or at least to rob its pockets. They shave our heads and say: You are thieves, you are liars, you are filthy, why can't you just be like us?

This is the truth of how I felt then, daughter, and so I said to myself that I would be like them only for as long as it took to get out of the camp and move on elsewhere.

I was transferred from the hospital into the camp, given blue status, on a day of sunlight. Doctor Marcus reeled off a long list of rules. I would be permitted to go to the nearby town two days a week, but I would not be al owed to beg or tel fortunes or any of the other things they expected us to do, they were against local rules. I could leave at eight in the morning and had to be home by curfew. They would give me a ration book and I could deposit it in the camp bank. No drinking alcohol, she said, or relations with men, and beyond the camp wal s I was not al owed to fraternize with the guards.

Before I left the hospital the nurses pretended they'd found another louse in my hair just so they could shave it off. They pul ed the razor hard across my scalp.

My other clothes had been burned, but what could I do, mourn for them?

I was taken to the storeroom. I found a long scarf to put over my scalp and I was given new sandals to parade around in, brown with a shiny brass buckle. I chose some Portuguese dresses in splendid yel ows and reds, but when I put them on I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked so much like my old self that I turned around and chose a long gray dress donated by the people of the United States. I was given my useless money and Party card and even my onyx-handled knife. I burned the card right away. I opened the envelope to see Conka's coin sitting there. I kissed it and thanked my dear lost friend for not spitting at me, and yet for giving her children the dignity to do so.

Doctor Marcus escorted me to a special room at the far end of the wooden barracks. Only the very youngest children were about and they trailed behind me, laughing, pul ing at my sleeve. Some of them were kicking a bal made from a pig's bladder and their high voices split the air. The women looked out from the kitchens. Most were Hungarians. I felt a tenderness for them since I knew they had been here since they walked across the border in ‘56, four years before. Someone had written on the wal in Magyar: We have left behind the raincoats, pray for us.

When we turned the final corner towards the last barracks, near the wire fence, I stopped cold. A woman, dark, long-skirted, sat on the steps nursing a young baby. She put her hand to her mouth in surprise, handed her baby to another child, and came to touch my head.

Lamb of heaven, she said, they shaved off al your hair.

I cannot tel you, chonorroeja, how low my heart dropped at the sight of this woman, and I knew almost immediately that I would have to escape, not only because I was pol uted, but because eventual y they would know, they would feel it from me, I tel you the bare truth, a Rom always knows, and I would bring the shame to them too. She took my hand in hers and gave me a slab of bread. I cannot do this, I thought, I am a traitor. And yet what was I betraying? What was left of my old self to betray? How distant I felt from the Zoli who had spent many hours in the rooms of Budermice, and the ringing phones of the writers’ union, and the pulsing machines of Stränsky's printing mil , and the shining chandeliers of the Carlton Hotel, and al the other places I met Doom and put on her shining jewelry.

Now here was bread being put in my hands by a dark sister, jabbering in our sweet and ancient tongue.

Her name was Mozol. She grabbed my elbow and pul ed me inside the dark barracks—her blankets, several bundles, a series of mats unrol ed on the floor—and pointed at a fat man sleeping under a hat, on a tattered couch. That's my husband, Panch, she said, he's lazier than a bad sin. He snores even when he walks, I tel you. Come, come, I wil show you around. We are rich with room. None of the gadze want to be with us, so we have the whole barracks to ourselves, can you imagine?

She touched my cheek then spun me around and dizzied me with her voice: Lord above, I kiss your tired eyes.

With Mozol al I had to do was nod and listen. She put one and two words together, and soon they made ten thousand. Her endless jabberjaw fil ed my ears, but it felt as if a salve had been put at the raw points of my mind. She showed me around the barracks, led me through the camp towards the shop where I could use the ration slips. On and on Mozol talked, I am not sure she ever paused for breath. Her husband couldn't get a word in either. He cal ed her his little nightingale, but even then she would drown out his voice with her babble. Mozol had seven children and was working on her eighth, and if there was nobody around to talk to she would have talked to her own bel y.

Al hardships, chonorroeja, have a streak of laughter in them.

Those few days are welded into me now and I cannot speak of them quietly. I took on a life I did not know. I was no longer a poet nor a singer, or one who read books, not even one who traveled. I woke in the same place each day. I put a saucepan of coffee on. I aired the mattress, beat it with

my bare hands. I ate with Mozol's family around their three-legged pot. I was privy to their yarns and confidences. I had never had such a life before.

I swapped out my clothes for a few of the Portuguese dresses once again. I caught sight of myself, colorful, in the windows of the offices. My hair grew, and I sewed the coin in the strands. My old language bore me to the window.

You may ask why I did not leave, move out from the camp under cover of darkness, and keep moving, why I brought the secret shame to Mozol's family, why I never told them who I was and what had happened to me. The fence surrounding the barracks was so low that a child could have climbed it, but we were scared of what lay outside. The awfulness of the camp was less than the fear of what lay beyond. And I wil also tel you this: there was a terrible plague of insects one day a few weeks after I left the camp hospital, grubby little things with smal yel ow wings. I got up early one morning and found a good many of these insects clinging to the wal . They had lost their way, and had clung there until dead, held fast by their tiny claws, stiffened into their last moment. I went to wipe the dead ones away, but as soon as I did one of them, just one, came out of its stiffened pose, and I bore it on a cloth to the open window with the one bit of life stil left in it.

And so, for a while, I al owed myself to live under the awning of my own people once again. An invisible hand had reached in and turned my heart a smal notch backwards.

In the camp I had taken one great big year of breath and held on to it. I did not attempt to escape.

Mozol and I began to col ect flowers, which we sold in the marketplace near to Domplatz. At home in the barracks we buried our money in the corner behind the stove. Mozol had spent twelve years in the camps, her children had been born there, and she dreamed of nothing more than leaving, but she needed a country to take her in, and who would sponsor the Gypsies when they thought of us as something less than human? But one morning she came running up to me and thrust a paper into my hand, a Canadian insignia stamped on it. Doctor Marcus had told her what was in the letter. I opened the envelope, took a glance, and then announced myself happy indeed. Mozol gazed at me. How did you know what the letter said? she asked. My spirits dropped. How did you know what the letter said, my heart's friend? I looked to the ground. I almost told her that I had read it, daughter, that I could indeed read and write, that al along I had brought the shame to her, but I caught myself. I walked across the high wire then, saying I was able to feel what was in the letter, it tril ed through my toes, it was intuition. She looked at me doubtful y but I spun her around in the dust and she began to laugh. She was on her way to Toronto, but within a few days another note came to say that she and Panch would have to pay for a portion of their own passage. The nurse who read the letter aloud had a shine in her eyes when she read it. The fare was enormous, it would have bought them a patch of land. Mozol could not understand. Surely I can go by train, she said. To Canada? said the nurse and she laughed.

Mozol lay in her wickerbound bed crying. Bit by bit she began to descend, if you can imagine, into silence. She said that Jesus had wept for everyone, but the gadze had put a roof in the sky and yel ed down destruction so his tears could not refresh us. I have never real y believed in God or a heaven or any of that loud ranting, but I believed in it for her, it is what she wanted. She ran rosary beads through her fingers and I cal ed back our old prayer: Bless these bits, these bridles, these reins, keep these wheels firm to your solid ground.

Later that week we were sitting on the steps of the barracks. An ant crossed in front of me, carrying another ant bent double. I pressed my hand to the cool earth. The ant stopped at my hand and looked for a way around but then climbed my fingers and took the body of the dead one across. I leaned down and blew it gently off my finger.

We fal out of rhythm with our earliest ways. There were so many times when I had forgotten my old life, I even forgot I was pol uted, or maybe I had just put a rag on the blade, and in some ways I had begun to think of myself as Mozol's sister. The decision had no fear. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why. I knew the town wel . I did not like what I was about to do, daughter, but I had forced myself not to think about it. I cut the nerve that twitched in me and went to the dump at the edge of town. Some piles of rubbish were smoking from early fires.

Ash and dust wheeled in the air. I rescued the door of a thrown-away cupboard, yel ow with flaking paint. I tore it from its hinges and gauged its weight. I carved a set of maple leaves and a griffin on either side of the door—ridiculous, of course, but I did not care.

I fashioned two grand rubber earrings from parts of a discarded carburetor.

In the early dawn, I found a Spanish scarf in the col ection of camp clothing. I tied it around my head, went out the gate, and wandered along the streambank at the rear of the camp. I picked pebbles from the water, the smoother and more polished the better. The pebbles clacked in my pocket as I made my way into the center of the town, carrying al my materials. Gusts of wind encouraged me along. I passed through a cobbled square.

How strange the light was, it fil ed everything up, yet nothing seemed to cast a shadow. I kept expecting to have trouble, but found none. A woman on her own did not present too much of a threat. I wandered until I settled on a narrow al eyway just off the long Odenburger, not far from the railway station. I was struck by the stil ness of the al ey, though many were passing on foot. I found two broken concrete blocks in an unpainted doorway, set the door on top, put a blanket underneath, and sat down with my head bowed. I said to myself over and over that I was a traitor to everything, even myself.