Zoli

Czechoslovakia
1930s-1949

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascist snakes, he said.

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

The peasant came out from the house, balancing a small bowl of borscht for us to share. We drank from the same side of the handle-shorn cup. The soup was measly and watery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shut up! he shouted.

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

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

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

I stayed in the field until the sun rose over the trees and the others were gone. The shadows grew long and then sprang back all of a sudden. The sun topped the highest branches and soon everything began to melt. My socks were soaked through. I ran back over the field and over the bouncing tire wall, towards the caravans, just beyond the edge of the cypress trees. The fire was already lit, and my father had his hands cupped around the first smoke of the day. Everyone else had already eaten, and they had run off towards the chocolate factory. My mother banged the last of the kasha out of the pot and said: Zoli, we thought the gadze got you and took you away, where in the world were you? My father said: Get over here, you little pup. He grabbed my ear, pulled it hard, took a piece of bread from his pocket, and gave it to me. How was the ice? he asked. Delicious, I said. Was it not cold? he said with a laugh, and I said, Yes, it was cold and delicious together.

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

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

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

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

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

Because.

But why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My daughter's daughter, he said.

She's surprisingly tall, you know.

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

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

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

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

The clerk said: Five, my holy eye.

She measured my nose and the distance between my eyes, even the length of my hands and wrote it all down carefully. She took my thumb and rolled it back and forth on a soft pad of black ink and pushed my other fingers down hard onto the page. I liked the little patterns my fingers made, like bootprints down by a river. She asked me lots of questions, where I was born, what was my real name, if I went to school, where were my parents and why weren't they with me. I told her they had fallen beneath the ice but said nothing about the Hlinka guards. She said: What about your brothers and sisters? I said, Them too. She raised her eyebrows, looked at me sternly, and then I blurted: My brother, Anton, tried to break away. Break away where? she asked. I looked at my fingers. Break away where, young lady? From the lake by the forest. Who in the forest? she asked. The wolves, I said. Lord above, she said. And what did these wolves look like? I didn't say another word but she said, Oh, you poor thing, and then she touched me on the side of the face with a gentle stroke of her finger.

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

Do you want to make a complaint? she said.

About what?

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

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

The little girl told me, she whispered.

Told you what?

You don't have to worry, she said.

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

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

Grandfather went off on another long kite line of gibberish.

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

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

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

What about the other children? asked Grandfather.

All the Gypsy children have to do it.

And the other children?

Oh, them? he said. No, why?

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

He almost lifted me in the air by my ear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He would sooner have invited in typhus than a trooper.

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

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

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

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

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

Soon everyone grew to like the radio. Mostly we listened to music, but every now and then government voices came through. In the caravan, Grandfather tuned it in to whatever he could find, all the different languages. He spoke five-Romani, Slovak, Czech, Magyar, and a little Polish-though Eliska said he should forget all that red gibberish, he sounded the same in every language, he should come back in the next life as a loudspeaker strung up on a lamppost. He said that loudspeakers were fascist and just you wait, you black-haired chovahanio, you witch, when the good ones, the Communists, finally get power. She shouted at him that she couldn't hear him, that she must have been asleep when he was talking. He shouted back: What the hell did you say, woman? I thought that Eliska might lift her skirt to shame him, but she did not, she just turned away. She got a lash of his tongue, and he said something rude about her little enamel brush and where she could sweep it. Soon everyone began laughing and joking and it was forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grandfather took me down to the river. He tipped his hat and brought me across a fallen log, and he held my hand as we balanced near the edge. Listen to me, Zoli, he said. The river here, it doesn't belong to anyone, but some of them say they own it, they all say they own it, even some of us say we own it, but we don't. Look there, see the way the water is still moving underneath? It'll keep on moving. Only inches below, girl, the owning is gone, even ours, and you have to remember that, otherwise they will make a fool of you with their words.

The next day he led me to the schoolhouse.

I had heard about schools and did not want to go, but he pulled me under the green overhanging roof. I tried to run away but he caught me by the elbow. Inside, the desks were arranged in neat rows. Strange pictures with lots of green and blue hung on the walls-I did not yet know what a map was. My grandfather talked with the teacher and told her I was six years old. The teacher arched her eyebrows and said, Are you sure? Grandfather said, Why wouldn't I be sure? The teacher's hands trembled a little. Grandfather leaned forward and stared at the teacher. The teacher went white in the face. Bring her here, sir, she said. I'll gladly look after her.

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

That night, when it was raining, and the sound of it was drumming off the leaves outside, there was an enormous fight in the singing tent. Stay where you are, said Eliska. But I want to sing, I said. Stay where you are, she said, if you know what's good for you. I huddled up under the eiderdown. There was screaming and shouting. Then it stopped and the music started and I could hear Conka's voice drifting out under the rain. They broke they broke my little brown arm. She got the words wrong, muddled them up, and I wanted to run through the wet grass to tell her, but I heard some more shouting and the whip of a tree branch, so I pulled the eiderdown over me and stayed quiet. Grandfather came in with his hat dripping wet. He didn't seem to notice a cut on his cheek, by his eye. He sat by the window and smoked some grapevine, looking out.

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

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

Rain dripped off the slanted school roof, down the window-pane. The teacher smelled of lye. Her neck was goose-white and she wiped chalk from the board with her elbow. My knees kept bumping against the top of the desk. I wore a blue skirt with white polka dots and a frilled hem. Across the room, the older gadzo boys were able to spit silently through the gaps in the front of their teeth. Soon one side of my hair was soaking wet with spittle, but I did not turn. I think they expected me to shout, but I did not. They whispered an old rhyme at me, saying: Marienka sold a horse for a dog, she ate the dog with rotten haluski. I said nothing, just stared ahead. I hated the way that the chalk rubbed the blackboard, it squeaked and made me feel cold. They laughed at me and the way I talked, but the schoolteacher could not believe that I already knew the ABC's and, after a week or two, she gave me a book about a prince who turned into a lion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We moved our kumpanija near the smaller town of Bänksa Bystrica, and we were allowed to stay in the field of a man we called the Yellow Farmer. The farmer had huge yellow boots that went up to his waist. He stamped around in them and sometimes went fishing down by the river. Janko was four and he was found one day on the riverbank, hiding in the boots, his little head popping out of the top rim. Nearly all of him was tucked inside, only his grin could be seen, and after that we called him Boot.

They were quiet moments in the Yellow Farmer's field, but bit by bit we began to hear that terrible things were afoot in the country. The Germans didn't take over as they had in the Czech lands, but Grandfather said it hardly mattered, the Hlinkas were just like Gestapo, except they wore different badges. The war was coming our way. New laws were brought in. We were only allowed in the cities and villages for two hours a day, noon until two, and sometimes not even then. After those hours, no Roma man or woman was allowed in public places. Sometimes even the purest woman was charged with spreading infections and was thrown in prison. If a man was caught on a bus or a train, he was beaten until he couldn't even crawl. If he wandered the streets, he was arrested and sent to a workcamp to chop logs. We learned the sound of military vehicles the way we'd once learned the sound of animals-jeeps, tanks, convoys of canvas-covered trucks, we could tell which was coming around the corner. And yet we still thought ourselves to be among the lucky ones-many of our Czech brothers streamed south with terrible stories about being marched down the many-cornered road. Everyone now listened to my grandfather at the fire. He knew what was happening from his radio, and even Conka's father went with him to the millhouse where they were allowed barter for batteries.

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

At night he turned the radio to polkas again, away from news of the war. Someone called Chamberlain had become a doormat, he said. Grandfather sat on the roof of our caravan and drank until he fell asleep under the stars. I whizzed the radio away from polkas and heard a man announce in Polish about what was happening, the same thing in Slovak too. Of course there was no Romani radio, there was not even a half-hour show, and we didn't hear news of our own people.

Who needs news, Grandfather said, when it's all around us? A pig doesn't need a gold ring in its nose to know where it is sleeping, does it?

Conka's mother went to Poprad but she got lost in the back-streets near the promenade, by the fruit market. Everyone searched for her, but she was picked up by the Hlinkas. They took her to the back of a bookshop, pushed her down on a table. They laughed at her long fingernails, said they were so lovely. One said he liked her fingernails so much that he would like to bring one of them home, maybe his wife would like to see such fine artistry. They held Conka's mother down by her shoulders. All she could see was a very dark patch of ceiling above her head and then the room began to spin. One held her arm. Another held the pliers. The nails came out one by one, though they left one little finger alone-they said it was so she could please herself if she got a Gypsy itch.

They strung her nails on a little chain around her neck and sent her out of the bookshop into the street, where she fell. The troopers came out of the bookshop and brought her to hospital because, they said, she had grazed her knee. They said to the nurse: Take care of this woman's knee, it's very important that you fix her knee. On and on they went about her knee. The nurses lifted Conka's mother from the ground. Her hands were streaming blood.

They tried to heal her but she left as quick as she could. None of our people wanted to remain in a hospital amongst sickness and death, it was not a good place to be. Conka's father drove her home, and she lay crying in the back of the cart. Her hands were huge with white bandages that soon turned brown no matter how much she boiled them. She stayed in her caravan. Every day she took off the bandages and bathed her hands in water mixed with dock leaves, and then she pasted the stumps of her fingers with woodsap and chamomile. She stared at her hands as if they did not belong to her at all. Conka said it was not the pain that made her mother wail, but because she would never be able to pluck the harp again. She tried the catgut strings with the stumps of her fingers, but her hands bled once more and that was it-the owls were in the sycamores, and things would never change.

The bookshop burned down. My grandfather and Conka's father came back smelling of petrol. A feast was held. The tent rippled in the wind and my grandfather sang “The Internationale”-it was not the first time I had heard it, but now even Eliska joined in. She made a song up too: There are good rocks to throw and better roofs to burn, even Grandfather liked it, and I recall the last verse was that thorn trees would learn to grow from Hlinka hearts.

We were in the thick of things. The axles were packed with grease and we got ready to leave our Polish brothers and sisters, although Eliska was coming with us. She had married Vashengo. Before we split, we gathered in a circle at the tent, and Grandfather told us the news: there was a new law out that said we needed licenses for any type of musical instrument, and so that would have to be the end of the harps for a while. The harps were buried in huge wooden containers that the men made out of maple trees from the Yellow Farmer's forest. The men dug huge pits and laid the harps in the ground. We covered the ground with brambles and switched plants in the soil so that nobody could find them. Conka and I ran to the place of the burial, and she started a game where she jumped up and down on the ground and we pretended that music was coming out from the earth and that's when I put together a song in my mind, about down in the ground where the strings vibrate, I can still to this day recall every word, the harps listening to the grass growing above them, and the grass listening back to the sounds two meters below.

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

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

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

The radio reports came in from across what we now called, once more, Slovakia-it was confusing with Bohemia and Moravia and Germany and Hungary and Poland and Russia, and so Grandfather stood up one night and said that one day it would all soon be Rromanestan or the Soviet Russia, but someone else said that it might be America, where a very blue lady would hold a torch for us and everyone was created equal. We were moving around the country then, every week a new place, but someone, usually Boot's father, always returned to the forest and stayed with the harps. At night he slept near them. He swore there were restless spirits who came to play.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it you want me to say?

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

It was demanded of us that we give praise to Tiso and then, if required, to say Heil Hitler with a snap of the hand. Grandfather let the first of the salutes out easily. He had learned to say it so often that it had become as easy as a simple hello. Good, said the soldier, and then he stood waiting. The bobble in Grandfather's neck grew. He sucked in the skin of his cheeks, leaned towards the German soldier, and whispered in Romani: But you are one of us, you have colored your hair, that is all. The German soldier knew exactly what he was saying, but he thumped Grandfather on the cheek with the butt of his rifle. I heard the jawbone crack and Grandfather went down to the ground. He rose and shook his head and said: Bless the dear place your mother came from.

He was knocked down a second time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got married when I was fourteen. Petr and I had a quiet linking of hands under the trees. Stanislaus had picked him out for me. I had no choice. He was older than a rock, slow to walk, quick to sleep, but Petr was hailed as a violinist amongst our people. He was big-shouldered and still full-haired. And Conka was right, he could make his violin stand up and play, it still had rosin, we laughed at that, although I wept on the morning when the sheets were checked. The women all asked me about it, Eliska did not stop, but for a long time Petr's rough hands didn't lose their charm for me and, besides, I wanted to make my grandfather happy, that has always been our way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanislaus had settled on Petr as my husband because he knew that I would still be allowed to guide the pencil, even when the war was over. Few others would ever allow their wives to put words on a page. I had gone far beyond the first dloc dloc, but I wrote in Slovak. Romani never looked right to me on paper, though it sounded beautiful in my head. I never wrote in front of Petr, nor did I read in his presence, what use would it be to bring mockery down on him? But I had fallen in with books, they were friendly to me in the quiet hours. For a long time, I remember, the only book I had was Winnetou, I, penned by a German whose name I can't recall. It was a book given to simplicities. Still, I walked out in the forest and read it enough times to know it by heart. It was about Apaches and gunfighters, a volume for boys. Finally I was given a different volume, The Lady of Öachtice, which I loved-it was cracked and torn with so much use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Vashengo came back down from the hills, we were not too surprised to hear him singing “The Internationale.” Grandfather walked with him down by the water and they returned, arms around each other's shoulders. Vashengo took off again, carrying two belts of silver to buy munitions. The songs we sang became more and more red, and in truth who could blame us-it was what Grandfather had predicted for many years. The only thing that seemed right was change, and the only thing that would bring change was good and right and red, we had suffered so long at the foot of the fascists. We were joined then by even more settled Roma, they came and lived in the forest with us. In years gone by we had sometimes pitched battles with the settled ones. They thought that we held our noses in the air, and we thought that they drank furniture polish and were wedded to Hoffman's tincture, but now the fighting between us stopped. We were too few to be divided. We boiled snow for water, searched the forest for food. We killed a badger and sold the fat to a pharmacy in the village. We had more pride than to eat the horses, but the settled ones ate whatever they could find, and we turned our eyes and let them.

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

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

Certain things will take the life from you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All hail to a literate proletariat!

It is our revolutionary right to reclaim the written word!

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

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

I was a poet.

I had written things down.