Zoli

England-Czechoslovakia
1930s-1959

THE ROOM WHERE I LIE is small but has a window to what has become an intimate patch of sky. The blue of daytime seems ordinary, but on clear nights it is made obvious, as if for the first time, that the wheel of the world is not fixed: the evening star spends a tantalizing few moments hung in the frame. The shrill gabble of birds on the rooftops comes in odd rhythms and, from the street below, I can almost hear the engine of my motorbike ticking. The rattle of the road is still in my body: one final corner and the bike rolled out from underneath me. Strange to watch the sparks rising from the tarmac. I slid along, then smashed into a low stone wall. In the hospital they did not have enough bandages to make a cast-they splinted my leg and sent me home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Vienna the small wooden huts of the Russian sector were warmed by single-bar electric heaters. The guards interrogated me over cups of black tea. I was passed from hut to hut and finally put on a train. At the Czechoslovakian border, some leftover fascist guards roughed me over, rifled through my suitcase, took the bottles, and threw me into a makeshift cell. My hands were tied and they beat the bottoms of my feet with sticks rolled in newspaper. I was accused of falsifying documents, but two weeks later the door opened to Martin Stränsky who seemed, at first, just a shadow. He said my name, lifted me up, put his sleeve in a cold bucket of water, and cleaned my wounds. He was, against expectations, a small man, tough and balding.

“Did you bring the booze?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was in her early twenties, not beautiful, or not traditionally so anyway, but the sort of woman who stalled the breath. She held herself at the door nervously, as if she were a bowl of water that would not be allowed to spill. Her skin was dark and her eyes were as black as any I'd ever seen. She wore a man's dark overcoat, but beneath it a wide skirt with a tripled-over hem: it appeared she had patched two or three skirts together and rolled the hems over each other. Her hair was tied back beneath a kerchief, and two thick plaits hung down either side of her face. She wore no earrings, no bracelets, no jangling necklaces. I rose from under the covers and slipped on my wet socks.

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

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

“Comrade,” she said, nodding at me.

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

The afternoon returns to me now as a step back into what we all once believed: revolution, equality, poetry. We pulled up chairs to the table and sat for hours, the clock ticking away. Zoli kept her head slightly bent, her glass untouched in front of her. She rattled off a few verses of the older songs. The words were in Slovak, but there was a touch of wildness to them: she wasn't used to speaking them aloud, she ‘d always sung them. Her style was to quietly build layer upon layer until, by the end, the songs became sad and declamatory, tales of bitterness and treachery, the verses repeated over and over, like the falling and layering of so many leaves. When she was finished, Zoli locked her knuckles and stared straight ahead.

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

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

“Do they get out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just scribble the last verse, go on.”

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

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

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

“Well, well, well,” said Stränsky.

The horsecart went around the corner and away.

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

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

After the lecture, a young woman from the air force strode out to the planes. Stränsky nudged me: she had a stillness at her center that might have been called poise, but it wasn't, it was more like the tension that can be seen in tightrope walkers. Her blond hair was cut short, her body slim and winsome. He followed her up into the cockpit of one of the machines and they sat for a while, chatting and flirting, until she was called away. The journalists and dignitaries watched the thin sway of her as she climbed down. She reached up and helped Stränsky to the ground. “Wait,” he said. He kissed her hand and introduced me as his wayward son, but she blushed and shimmied off, with just one look over her shoulder-not at Stränsky, nor at me, but at the military jet stuck in the grass.

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

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

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

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

“Around here somewhere,” he said.

The engine of the Jawa sputtered. I hopped off. Smoke rose from some distant trees and a series of shouts rang out. We pushed the motorbike into the center of a clearing, where intricately carved caravans stood in a semicircle. Light came through the high pines, creating long shadows. Young men stood by a fire. One turned an axehead with a pair of tongs; another blew a bellows. A number of children darted towards us. They climbed on the bike and yelped when their bare feet touched the hot pipes. One jumped on my back and slapped me, then yanked my hair.

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

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

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

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

“Who's this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

“I told you, son,” said Stränsky.

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

“Her husband,” whispered Stränsky.

I sat back on the log.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don't think so.”

Stränsky unjammed the play lever on the recorder.

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

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

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

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

A crowd of Gypsies had gathered together in front of the union. There'd been a new decree that all musicians had to have licenses, but to have a license they had to be able to fill out a form, and none of the Gypsies, except Zoli, were able to write fluently. They carried violins, violas, oboes, guitars, even one giant harp. Vashengo wore a black jacket with red bicycle reflectors as cufflinks. When he moved his arms, his wrists caught the sunlight. He was trying, it seemed, with Zoli's help, to calm the crowd. A small battalion of troopers stood at the other end of the street, slapping truncheons against their thighs. Moments later a loudspeaker was passed out of the window of the union and the crowd hushed. Vashengo spoke in Romani at first-it was as if he had laid a blanket underneath the crowd. He commanded a further silence and spoke in Slovak, said it was a new time in history, that we were all coming out of a long oblivion, carrying a red flag. He would speak with the leaders of the union. Be patient, he said. There'd be licenses for all. He pointed at Zoli and said she would help them fill out the required forms. She lowered her head and the crowd cheered. The troopers down the street dropped their truncheons and the officials from the Musicians Union came out onto the steps. A small boy came pushing past me, laughing. He was wearing the yellow blinker from Stränsky's motorbike on a chain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found Stränsky swaying in the beerhalls. “Come here, young scholar,” he shouted across the tables. He sat me down and bought me a glass. I lapped it up, the high idealism of an older man. He was sure that having a Gypsy poet would be a coup for him, for Credo, and that the Gypsies, as a revolutionary class, if properly guided, could claim and use the written word. “Look,” he said, “everywhere else they're the joke of the week. Thieves. Conmen. Just imagine if we could raise them up. A literate proletariat. People reading Gypsy literature. We-you, me, her-we can make a whole new art form, get those songs written down. Imagine that, Swann. Nobody has ever done that. This girl is perfect, do you know how perfect she is?”

He leaned forward, his glass shaking.

“Everyone else has shat on them from above. Burned them out. Taunted them. Branded them. Capitalists, fascists, that old empire of yours. We ‘ve got a chance to turn it around. Take them in. We ‘11 be the first. Give them a value. We make life better, we make life fairer, it's the oldest story of all.”

“She's a singer,” I said.

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

“You're drunk,” I said.

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

“Me?”

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

I knew what he wanted from me-the prospect thrilled me and knocked the air from my lungs at the same time.

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

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

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

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

Beyond Trnava I went towards the low hills where the vineyards stepped down towards the valley. I leaned the bike into the corners, wobbled to a halt when a rifle was pointed at me. The tallest trooper smirked while the others gathered around him. I was, I told them, a translator and sociologist studying the ancient culture of the Romani people. “The what?” they asked. “The Gypsies.” They howled with laughter. A sergeant leaned forward: “There's some up there, with the monkeys in the trees.” I fumbled with the kickstand and showed him my credentials. After a while, he radioed in and came back, snapped to attention. “Comrade,” he said, “proceed.” Stränsky's name, it seemed, still held some sway. The troopers pointed me in the direction of some scrubland. I had rigged a cushion in place where the seat had been stolen: the troopers guffawed. I slowly turned, pinned them with a look, then took off, scattering dirt behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a singer she could have lived differently, with no scrubbing, no cooking, no time spent looking after the children, but she didn't isolate herself, she couldn't, she was in love with that bare life, it was what she knew, it fueled her. She washed clothes in the river, beat the rugs and carpets clean. Afterwards she put playing cards in the spoke of a bicycle wheel and rode around in the mud, calling out to the children. Each of them she named her chonorro, her little moon. “Come here, chonor-roeja,” she called. They ran behind her, blowing whistles made from the branches of ash trees. Behind the tire factory she played games with them on what they called their bouncing wall. She threw a tire over a sapling for each new child that was born, knowing that one day it would fit snug and tight.

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

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

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

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

Later I sat with Stränsky while he transcribed the tapes. “Perfect,” he said as he pulled his pencil through one of her lines. He was convinced that Zoli was creating a poetry from the roots up, but he still wanted to put manners on it. She came into the city, alone, the railway ticket moist in her fist. Ner- vously she twisted the hair that had fallen out from beneath her kerchief. Stränsky read the poem aloud to her and she went to the window, peeled back some of the black tape from the glass.

“That last part is wrong,” she said.

“The last verse?”

“Yes. The clip.”

Stränsky grinned: “The timing?”

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

I could feel my heart thumping in my cheap white shirt.

A week later she came back to say that the elders had accepted it and it could be published-they saw it as a nod of gratitude to Stränsky for what he'd done in the war, but we were convinced it went beyond that; we were building a vanguard, there'd never been a poetry like it before, we were preserving and shaping their world while the world changed around them.

“The incredible happens,” she said when Stränsky took us to a bookshop in the old town. She wandered along the rows of shelves, touching the spines of the books. “It's like not having any walls.” For a while she stood next to me, ran her fingers ab-sentmindedly along my forearm, then looked down at her hand and quickly pulled it away. She turned and walked the length of the shelves, said she could feel the words running like horses. It seemed raw and childish, until Stränsky told me she'd possibly not been in many bookshops before. She spent hours wandering around and then sat to read a copy of Mayakovsky. It hadn't even dawned on her that she could own it. I bought it for her and she touched my forearm again and then, outside, she hid the book in the pocket of her third skirt.

Stränsky looked at us hard and askance, whispered to me: “She's got a husband, son.”

We took the train out to the countryside. The other passengers watched us: me in my overalls, Zoli in the colorful dresses that she hitched sideways when she sat down. Together we read Mayakovsky, our knees not quite touching. I recognized it as a tawdry desire, but more than anything I wanted to see her hair loosened. She couldn't do it, it was the habit of a married woman to wear her head covered, though I had begun to make sketches of her in my mind, what she might look like, how that hair would fall if unfastened, how I would take the weight of it in my fingers.

At the station she ran towards Petr who sat waiting on the horsecart, his dented hat on his knee. He looked a little confused, but she whispered in his ear. He laughed, slapped the reins, and took off.

I saw myself then at a distance, as someone else, doing things that only another person would do-I waited for them to return. The Stationmaster shrugged and hid a grin. A clock-tower chimed. I remained three hours, then walked the long country roads towards the camp with my rucksack on my shoulder. At nightfall, my feet bloodied, I reached the camp. The men were by the fire, cheering. A jar of booze was shoved my way. Petr shook my hand. “You look like you've been slapped,” he said.

Zoli had made up a song about a wandering Englishman waiting for a train station whistle and, with the violin at his shoulder, Petr played alongside her while the crowd laughed.

I grinned and thought about punching Petr, pounding him into the mud.

He walked around camp, wheezing. He seemed to carry his sickness tucked under his arm, but when he sat, the sickness spread out all around him. After a while, he didn't have the strength to leave the caravan at all. Zoli would come back in darkness, after singing, and sit at his bedside, waiting for him to fall asleep, his cough to subside.

“How young are the girls when they marry in England?” she asked. She was on the steps of her caravan, absently pleating the hem of her dress.

“Eighteen, nineteen, some not until they're twenty-five.”

“Oh,” she said, “that's quite old, isn't it?”

The truth was that I didn't really know. I had for some years considered myself to be Czechoslovakian but, in retrospect, I was too English for that, too Irish to be fully English, and too Slovakian to be in any way Irish. Translation had always got in the way of definition. Listening to the radio in the coalshed in Liverpool with my father, I had dreamed myself into the landscape of his country. It was not the place I had foreseen- endless mountains, rushing rivers-but it didn't matter anymore, I'd become someone new and the thought of her held me fast. Each word she came up with sent a thrill along me-she called me Stephen rather than Stepän, she liked the strange way it brought her teeth to her lips. She would giggle sometimes at the Englishness of what I did, or said, though it didn't seem English to me at all. I bought her a fountain pen from the market in the old town, discovered books for her to read, gave her ink, which Conka used to stain their dresses. I began to learn as much Romani as I could. She touched my arm, looked my way. I knew it. We had begun to cross that hollow that had come between us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You're a naive fool. She is too.”

“It won't happen again.”

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

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

He pulled up his collar and lowered himself to his work. It was almost a relief to get out from the mill, away from Stränsky and his obsessions, to get lost underneath the streetlamps of the city. He rarely called me his son anymore, but I walked taller for those few months-my chest was drawing breath from Zoli, she was filling me out. We published her first chapbook in the autumn of ‘53, and it was embraced by all sides, the younger poets, the academics, even the bureaucrats. She wanted it threaded, not glued, for no reason I could fathom, something to do with a horse she had once known.

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

There exists somewhere, hidden away, a photograph of the three of us-Stränsky, Zoli, and me-taken in the Park Kultury beside the Danube on a gray afternoon. The water ripples gently. Zoli wears a long, flowing skirt and a frayed bolero jacket. I wear a bright white shirt and a Basque beret, tilted at an angle. Stränsky-almost fully bald by then-wears a dark blue shirt and black tie. He has a slight stomach that Zoli used to call his kettle. My foot is up on a dockside bollard. Zoli is as tall as me, while Stränsky nestles between us. My arm is firmly around his shoulder. In the background a cargo ship passes with a giant sign pasted along the hull: All Power to the Workers’ Councils!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had printed up a poster with Stränsky: it was a new take on an old slogan, and it included an approximation of Zoli's face, a drawing, not a photograph, slightly idealized, no lazy eye, just a working woman's stare and a gray tunic. Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us. She liked it when she saw it first, falling from cargo planes over the countryside, landing on the lane-ways, tumbling through farmyards, catching on branches. Her face was pasted up along all the pylons and telegraph poles of the countryside. Soon her tapes were being played on the radio and she was talked about in the corridors of power. She was a new sort of Czechoslovakian woman, taken out of the margins to illustrate our steps forward under socialism. She was telling the story unlike anyone had told it before. Zoli was invited to the Ministry of Culture, the National Theater, the Carlton, the Socialist Academy, screenings in the Stalingrad Hotel, conferences on literature where Stränsky stood up and bellowed her name into the microphone. She spoke five languages with varying degrees of fluency, and Stränsky had begun to call her a Gypsy intellectual. A shadow crossed her face, but she didn't silence him, something in her liked the novelty.

The elders had begun to notice shifts in the outside world- the licenses came more easily, the troopers didn't seek them out to demand permits, the local butchers served them with less fuss than before. The Gypsies had even been invited to create their own chapter in the Musicians Union. Vashengo hardly believed that he, of all people, could now be served in a tavern where years ago he was not even allowed in by the back entrance. Sometimes he walked into the Carlton Hotel just to hear the porters call him Comrade. He came out, slapping his cap off his knee.

One night at the dressing room in the National Theater, Zoli turned to Stränsky and said she could not read aloud, she did not have the stomach for it. Her back left a trace of moisture on the leather chair. They walked out into the wings together and looked around the curtain-the theater was packed. A glint of light from a pair of opera glasses. The dimming of the chandeliers. Stränsky leveled the crowd with one of her poems and then Zoli walked onstage beside him. The spotlight made her seem at ease. The crowd whispered amongst themselves. She put her lips against the microphone and the feedback squealed. She stepped to the side and read without benefit of the mike. When the crowd cheered, the Gypsies-who had been given two rows at the back of the theater-erupted in applause. At a reception afterwards, Zoli was given a standing ovation. I watched Vashengo at the tables, filling his pockets full of bread and cheese.

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

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

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

“Oh,” she said, “I changed my mind.”

Yet the prospect of her still kept me going. There was a chance that others would find out, that she ‘d be considered polluted, marime, damaged. Whole weeks would go by when we could not touch sleeves for fear of being seen, but there was an electricity between us. Alone at the mill we sat with our backs against the folding bed that Stränsky had set up on the second floor, by the Zyrkon cutting machines. She touched the whiteness of my chestbones. Ran her fingers in my hair. We had no clue where our bodies stopped and the consequences began. In the streets, we walked apart.

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

She was, they said, trying to live her life several feet off the ground. It was still considered beyond the realm for her to be seen carrying around books: some notions were impossible to defeat. When she was with the kumpanija she sewed pages into the lining of her coat, or deep in the pockets of her dresses. Among her favorites was an early Neruda, in Slovak, a copy of which she had bought for herself in a secondhand shop. She moved along, lovesongs at her hip, and I learned whole poems so that I could whisper them to her if we chanced on a moment alone. In her other pockets there were volumes by Krasko,

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

Winter arrived and the Gypsies did not travel. It was a time I could not, for the life of me, understand. The tape recorder froze. The reels cracked. There was ice on the microphone. My shoes filled with frost and the blood backed away from my fingers. Zoli would not spend time with me unless others were around: we could not afford to be seen too much together.

I took the train home to my flat in Bratislava, stood under the railway loudspeakers just for the sound of things. I preferred my shelf of books to the feet of Vashengo's children stuck in my ribcage, but after a couple of days the desire to see Zoli built up again and out I went, the microphone and recorder in my rucksack. She smiled and touched my hand. A child turned the corner and she sprang away. I wandered the winter camp. Rusted scrap metal. Severed cables. Bent petrol drums. Dog bones. Punctured cans. The tongues of carriages. Whole matrices of lost things. Conka had found a scarf with patterns of roses on it. She sat, all blanketed up on the steps of her caravan, face twisted by the cold. She looked thin and bitter. The men stood around as if waiting for what might fall from the teeth of horses. I wanted nothing more than to bring Zoli to the city, settle her down, have her write, make her mine, but it was impossible, she liked it there, she was used to it, along the riverbank, she saw the dark and light of the camp as the one same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

“None of your business,” I said.

He laughed his tired laugh, lifted his glass.

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

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

For Zoli's kumpanija, the changes had begun with Woo-woodzhi, a young man who had taken to nailing his own hand to a tree. He was a hard case, a schizophrenic. The families heaved with loyalty, and Woowoodzhi was among their favorites. His bandages were changed every few hours. Zoli brought him boiled sweets from the city and whispered nighttime legends in his ear. Woowoodzhi rocked back and forth at the sound of her voice. Whenever he strayed from the caravans the alarm went-saucepans were banged-and the women spread out along the forest edges to look for him. The boy would often be found, hammering the nails into his hands. He never cried out, not even when hot poultices were put to his palm.

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

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

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

“I can read.”

“Then you must do what it says.”

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

“Please leave,” said Zoli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Here and there,” she said.

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

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

“They killed him, Stephen.”

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

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

“You've seen the news?”

In her absence, Zoli had become something of a cult figure- the arrest warrant had been torn up by no less than the Minister of Culture himself. A new tomorrow was on the way, he said. Part of it would include the Roma. Zoli was the subject of a whole new series of editorials that professed she had been painting the old world so it could finally, at last, change. They saw her as heroic, the vanguard of a new wave of Romani thinkers.

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

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

She picked up a pigeon feather from the ground and let it fall from her fingers. “The troubles of primitivism}” Something in my spine went liquid. She left the mill with a bundle of papers under her arms. Down the road, she climbed onto a horse-cart which she operated on her own. She slapped the horse and it reared high for a moment, then clattered down onto the cobbles.

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

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

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

That summer, in 1957, one of the few places we saw Zoli was the house at Budermice. It was set on parkland in the shadow of the Little Carpathian hills, a country mansion maintained by the Union of Slovak Writers. A long row of chestnut trees lined the lane. The driveway curled to a grand front entrance with marble steps. Several rooms on the top floor were kept locked and most of the bedrooms were dusty. Downstairs the union had burned the old furniture-too imperial, too bourgeois-so plastic chairs had been installed, hardtop counters, towering Russian prints. Stränsky managed to get the house for the whole summer-he hated anything that smacked of cronyism, but he saw it as a time for some serious creativity. He wanted us to finish a whole book with Zoli-there'd only been a chapbook, but now a real volume, he knew, would cement her reputation: he was convinced that she had a vision that would lift the Gypsies out of their quandaries.

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

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

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

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

Zoli came and sat beside him on the marble floor. I watched from the balcony above. Stränsky was half-smiling, looking at a small cut on his hand-a tiny bit of glass was stuck in his skin. She took his wrist and pinched the glass up from the folds in his hand. She hushed him and guided his finger to his mouth. Stränsky sucked out the sliver of glass.

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

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

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

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

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

“What's that supposed to mean?”

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

“You've got a wife, Stränsky.”

“Don't be a chamber pot,” he said.

It was an old expression, odd and formal, one my father had used many years before. Stränsky caught me square and I stepped back from him. He squeezed my shoulder, just enough to show that he still had a young man's power.

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

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

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

The night rose up like something to be exhausted.

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“It's just talk, Zoli.”

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

“Stränsky?” I said.

“Stränsky has nothing to do with it.”

“Do you love him?”

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

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

We met early the next afternoon, away from Budermice, by the wheel of an old flour mill. The water had been diverted. Zoli had tripled her path to make sure she was not followed. She had in her pocket a photograph, a shot of splintered lightning, a bright blue flash across a dark landscape. She said it came from a magazine she had found, a feature on Mexico, that someday she wouldn't mind traveling there, it was a long way, but she ‘d like to go. Perhaps when things were finally good, she said, she'd take off, follow that path. She quoted a line from Neruda about falling out of a tree he had not climbed. I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen-how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He spread his arms out wide in the air.

“Alcohol as biography.”

He finished the bottle.

In the early winter of ‘58, Elena left him. His marriage had been unraveling for a while-he had started to think that he was becoming a caricature in her cartoons, a small fat man with an axe to grind. I found Stränsky in the corner of the mill, framed by windowlight. I had never seen him so silent. He had punched the wall and the bandage on his hand was already stained with ink.

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

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

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

The three of us were to meet one Thursday at the Carlton Hotel. Under the hotel awning we stood smoking cheap tobacco, waiting for Stränsky to show up. Zoli looked radiant in a bright red dress, small beads sewn into the fabric so that when she moved they caught the light, even beneath a shawl. Stränsky didn't appear. A grayness chilled the air, a sense that winter was on its way. We rounded the corner and went down by the

Danube. The ground was damp but she kicked off her shoes anyway. There was very little grace in how she did it, except that her legs were momentarily liquid as they lost the shoes. She bent down to pick them up and dangled them in her right hand.

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

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

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

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

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

When the knock came on the door early in the morning- just as dawn was breaking over Bratislava-I knew exactly who it was. Six agents turned the room inside out. They knew all the answers to their questions already. They checked my credentials and filled in an extensive dossier. They seemed upset at how housebroken my life was, how ordinary, how sanitized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 valleys, beneath the snowcapped eastern mountains, in the early mornings when small house lights still dawdled by the rivers, a smoke of mayflies drifting in the air. I opened my mouth and it filled 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, hall to hall. In the evening, we stayed in the homes ofgadze activists. Even they had become silent. I walked around with a hollow 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 all over the country, Zoli tore her face down off the walls, 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, full of plastic plants and cheap prints. The bites that woke me were from bedbugs concealed under a loose corner of wallpaper. Bells rang out in the early morning, calling 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 small 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 fill 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 allowed 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 eventually 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.

All 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 sawmill 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 allowed 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 fell 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. All 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 fall 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 allowed 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 smelled 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 guillotine 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 wall 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 all 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 brilliant, and we leaned forward onto the handlebars, until eventually, 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 all around us were pebbles and amongst the pebbles, stones, and amongst the stones, rubbish, and amongst the rubbish, small 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 will be easier for you.”

The hubs were of elm. The spokes, mostly oak. The rims were made from felloes 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 still perfect after decades. They were hauled in from riverbanks, deep forests, fields, edges of villages, long, empty tree-lined roads. Thousands of them. Sledgehammers were used to remove them. Two-man saws. Levers. Tire irons. Mallets. Pneumatic drills. Knives. Blowtorches. Even bullets when frustration set in. They were taken to the railroad yards, state factories, dump grounds, sugar mills 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. Small groups in the villages 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 rolled 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 collective 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 rolled 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 fully 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 called it the Big Halt. They were joined by other families as the roads filled. 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 alleyways, my hand trailing the lichen on the walls, 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 mill, 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 mill. She wore her overcoat and her kerchief had fallen down over her eyes. I walked up and stood in front of her a moment, lifted her chin with a forefinger. She pulled away. I could hear the noise of the mill 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 mill and strode inside. Kysely, grimy and yellow-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 wall. It bounced on the floor and slid against the hellbox. 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 falling.

“They'll 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 will 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'll blame me.”

“They can't.”

“They'll have a trial. They'll make judgment. Vashengo and the elders. The blame will come down on me. Do you understand? It'll 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 allow 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. All she had to do was wait. I stammered, came to the end of my arguments, and stood, then, rimrocked by them all.

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 fall 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 galley trays. I turned the switch. The metal began to roll. Its dark and constant rhyme. I couldn't now give it a meaning even if I wanted to, the cogs caught and the rollers spun, and I betrayed her.

Under the mackling hum, I tried to convince myself that with a book, a bound book, she might still 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 finally come together, simply, elegantly, and we would all be given a row of red medals to wear upon our chests.

It is astounding how terrifying words can be. No act is too shallow 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 rolling 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 will never really 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 well educated. He mumbled “Siberia” under his breath, said it could be seen from the tallest 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 hills of rotting corpses and they did not speak back to him.

Yet there are moments I can name and miss-I will miss the tall trees around the wagons, the way the harps sounded when the wheels moved, the soaring hawks around the lakes when her kumpanija pulled out to the road. I will miss her wandering around the machinery in the mill, touching her fingers against the smudges of ink, reciting the older songs, changing them, restoring them. I will 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 will miss the urgent swerve of her Romani, the way she said “Comrade,” how full and alive it felt, and I will miss the poems though they are stacked within me still.

To be where I am now is the whole of it. The days will not get any brighter. I do not seek to imagine what echo my words will 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 mill.