Zoli

Czechoslovakia-Hungary-Austria
1959-1960

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

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

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

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

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

From the darkest corner of the hut, she hears a series of skittering noises. Across the narrow expanse a single brown rat looks at her with curiosity. Zoli hisses the rat away but it returns with a mate. It sits on its hindlegs, licking its forepaws. The second darts forward, stops, touches its long tail against the face of the first, draws a lazy circle with its body. Zoli hammers her sandal on the ground. The rats twitch, turn, return, but she slaps the shoe off the metal windowframe and the rats scamper to the dark corner. Zoli fumbles in the hut to collect leaves, sticks, and bits of crate. She builds them into a small teepee, shakes out the cap of her lighter, cups her hands around the kindling, blows it to flame. When the rats peek out again she slides lit spears of twig across the floor, one after the other, bouncing shards of light. The twig ends burn slowly, scorching the wooden boards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stops and pulls the sleep from her eye, eats the small yellow deposit from the tip of her finger.

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

At the doorway she throws the bundle in a heap to the middle of the floor. She shakes the lighter for fuel-enough for a week or two perhaps-and builds the fire using broken wine-crate. When it is lit, she drops the pinecones into the flames and waits for them to crack open. She touches her swollen jaw, quite sure the seeds will break her bad tooth and dislodge it altogether, but when she bites down into one, her front tooth quivers.

I will not lose my front teeth. Of all things, I will not lose those.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At a bend she stops to look at a lump in the roadway behind her. A thing, a person, a body, in the road. She pulls deep into the brambles. How did I step past a body in the road? How could I possibly miss it? She pushes herself further into the hedge, branches crisscrossed in front of her. How did I fail to see a dead person lying there? She waits for a sound, any sound- a vehicle, a rifle shot, a moan-but nothing comes. She hooks her fingers around the strand of bushes to look again: the body lies flat and dark and prone in the roadway.

“Idiot,” she says aloud to herself.

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

A rumble of engines as she passes the gates of a collective farm. Zoli pulls herself down into the long ditch grass. The engines grow loud until they are almost upon her, and she is surprised to see truckloads of young Czechoslovakian troopers going past, rifles held across their chests, faces darkened with shadow, cheeks hollowed as if they have been blown out with tiny explosives. Not a word from them. Staring ahead in the cold. All these young men, she thinks, hardened by long wars and short memories. The same ones who took us down the road, who sprinkled petrol on the wheels, who led the horses away to the farms, who sat outside the National Theater the night Stränsky read my poems. The same ones who saluted me at the all-weather posts as I passed in the snow. One of them once had a copy of Credo rolled up in his uniform pocket.

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

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

Pollution for Life. In the Category of Infamy. It seems possible now to Zoli that she is walking in some terrible otherness, that she is not out in these wet winter fields, cast off from everything, but instead she is standing at the point where she was, long ago, before the poems, before the printings, before Swann, before Stränsky, and for a moment she is like one who believes that to continue a good dream you must lie in the exact same place you fell asleep, so she might somehow be able to drift back into days that once had been, where there were no poems, just songs, a step back into the ordinary territory of the ago, before the gatherings and the meetings and the conferences and directives, before the flashbulbs and the microphones, the openings and ovations. To become nothing at all, she thinks, a mind capable of nothing, a body capable of nothing, an escape backwards to a time when things were half-considered, inconsequential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, Gyp.”

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

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

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

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

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

She stumbles past the young saplings, pushes the door of the hut open. On the floor lies the small round scorch mark of her fire from the night before. She nudges a piece of scorched wine-crate with the sole of her bloody sandals. From the floor a small light twinkles, a shard of mirror no bigger than her palm. Zoli wonders how she had not noticed it yesterday. She lifts the shard to her eyes and sees immediately that her jaw has swollen terribly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small acts of kindness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only gadze knock.

She backs into the corner and sits, looking at the fire-marks beneath her, spreads her dresses over to hide them. Two more series of triple knocks. A grunt and a whisper, then rifle fire, she is sure it is rifle fire until she recognizes the high bark of a dog. The door is slowly pushed open and the dog comes through, arcing its body. It snaps at the end of a rope, bares its teeth. Light spreads sideways into the hut. The farmer and a woman stand in the doorway, made into portrait by shadow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Are you going far? ”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I'm not sure, Comrade.”

“Are there many of you? ”

“Just me.

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

“It's just me, only me.”

“If you're not telling me the truth I'll tell the troopers.”

“It's the truth.”

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

The woman turns to the farmer with some silent gesture. He grins at Zoli, shuffles outside. A brief darkness until the door creaks open once more. He stands under the frame, carrying a plate covered with a towel. He grins again, leans across, exchanging the plate for the shotgun. The woman sighs, lifts the towel from the plate, and spreads the food on the floor in front of Zoli: cheese, bread, salt, and five homemade biscuits. A small dollop of yellow jam sits on the side of the plate with some butter. The woman hesitates a moment, takes a knife from her dress pocket, and lays it sideways on the edge of the plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you not hungry? ”

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

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

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

“Nor to ever return.” No.

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

“I kiss your kind hands.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoli pulls her kerchief tight across her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She moves along the rutted path, in the shadows, hidden especially from the troopers. If she dawdles they will stop her, cock their rifles, question her, the mud on her overcoat, the dark bloodstains on her ankles, and then bring her to the nearest all-weather post. Flip open the gray cover and examine the raised stamp of her Party card, the thumbprint, the details: 169.5 cm, black eyes, black hair, distinguishing feature a lazy left eye, a 2 cm scar on lower right lip, chin dimple, poet. She used to sign her name with three Xs, and the most perceptive of them used to ask her why. If she replied at all she would simply shrug her shoulders, making them more difficult, more probing, more insistent: “But how can you be a poet and sign XXX?” Often the whole transaction would have to wait for confirmation over the radio: “That's Comrade Novotna, you idiot, let her go.”

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

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

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

Past the granite steps and fluted columns of the National Theater. Raindrops fat on the pavement. She can almost hear the voice of Stränsky reading her poem aloud to the large crowd, the gray suits, the white shirtfronts, the lifted caps. All that applause. Her name was shouted out to the rafters, but it didn't seem real, it was as if it had been recorded and a button had been pressed in the watchers, and her name was part of their routine. Yet she had bowed in front of them, she had accepted the applause, she had eaten and drunk with them, shook their hands, took their astonishment, allowed it. How long, she wonders, can I remain in the city before someone spots me and tries to make a triumph of me once again? Before they line me up and snap their photographs? Before they ask for another pronouncement? Hell's fire on them, they will not hear me now, they can feed the flames with flutes, I will not bow a second time, no.

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

A voice: “Hey, you.”

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

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

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

“That's nowhere?”

“Just up the road a way.”

“Identification.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She crosses towards the sink and stacks the poems over the drainhole, rubs her thumb along the wheel of Petr's old lighter. The curl of Petr's thumb along it, broad, slow, bringing it to life. Pipesmoke curling out. Him watching Swann. The days slowly slipping away from him. The coughing. The thought that he would soon be gone, spirit. Wandering around, hiding, waiting for Swann, thinking of him, the feel of his fingers over my eyes.

The high flame singes her eyebrows and she steps back, lifts some of the pages from the sink and begins again with a smaller scatter of poems. They take easily. She uses a fork to prop up the edges of the pages, to air them underneath. She inhales the scent as the poems burn and curl. Small pieces of ash float and fall. Zoli toes them into the linoleum where they leave dark stains.

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

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

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

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

The tapes.

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

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

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

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

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

Fifteen spools.

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

There go my songs. Good riddance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things, he said, cannot wait. They have to be made. What Swann foresaw was a world raised up in an immense arc and everyone beneath it, looking up in admiration. He wanted to take hold of all that was vague and equal and give it form. He constantly rubbed his hands over his scalp so that when he was in the printing mill his hair became the color of whatever poster he was printing. In the cafe he would sit unaware of people looking at him, streaks of yellow and blue and red under his cap, his hands almost entirely black. He was afraid that he didn't sound Slovak enough, but he gave everything to it, listened to the workers, developed the same accent, strode out with them under their banners. After a while his arguments grew more defined, with stronger edges. It was like watching a piece of wood being carved right in front of her eyes, and she had liked the surprise of it. Certain men in the kumpanija could sculpt a spoon, or a bowl, or a bear at their fingertips-with Swann, he would sometimes create an idea and then hold it out as if it were something she could touch.

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

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

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

“Yes?”

“I have some things.”

“I do not trade,” says the woman.

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

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

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

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

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

“I have good horse teeth too.”

“What did you say?”

“I am here to sell my things. That is all.”

“You people will be the death of me.”

“Not before you have everything we own.”

“You've an errant mouth for a Gypsy.”

“I've nothing to lose.”

“Then leave.”

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

“I have told you already, the best.”

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

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

“Yes?”

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

“Useless,” he says.

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

“And this?”

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

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

“It isn't worth much.”

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

“These things are English.”

“I will take two hundred.”

“I cannot sell them, they are foreign.”

“Two hundred,” she says. “No less.”

The jeweler huffs: “One hundred and fifty.”

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

“It's a bad price.”

“Go elsewhere, woman.”

“There's nowhere to go.”

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

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

“Well?” he says, flourishing his handkerchief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turns the corner into Sedlärska, past a building site, and stops at a pile of red bricks on the ground. She toes one, rolls it over on its side. How many times, this same street, these same buildings, these same cracks in the footpath? She walks towards a squat building with two huge picturefront windows. No lights on, nobody around. She steps to the window and runs her fingers along the pane. The glass frame is so big that in the center it quivers and bounces. In the instant that she brings her arm forward she also withdraws, so that the brick is still in her hand when the glass spiders and shatters.

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

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

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

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

How distant now, thinks Zoli.

Cowboy films.

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

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

She recognizes the thought in an instant: it is gadzikano, vacant, pathetic. She will not allow them such simplicity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoli presses against the corner of the wall and peers into the distance. A wreckage of a dog paddles beside the hulk of an abandoned car, recently burned out, as if someone has died in it. At the far end of the camp, a child rolls a barrel hoop and beyond him a man stands by the fire. She knows Vashengo by the outline of his hat alone. Graco carries a coal-oil lamp. Milena, Jolana, Eliska, and one or two of the children are already awake. No Conka.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We'll go,” he said. “Peacefully. I told him to call the troopers off. And their dogs.”

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

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

Slow bootcrunch through the gravel. A shadow passes on the ground. She studies the passage of a swallow, dipping down from the towers. It alights on a series of poles laid out longways on the ground. One of the workers from the huts greets her in a high language: too formal, she knows. Behind her, a low grunt and a muted whistle. The cars begin to thin out and the streetcars pass. The cracked concrete gives way to muck and the towers disappear.

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

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

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

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

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

The first of them is Bora. The sound of the spit comes in advance of the moment and Zoli can feel the spray in her face. She does not wipe it away. She stands, chest rising and falling, her heart surging under her ribcage. A roar in her ears, a splintering. Never a stillness quite like this. The second child, Magda, is next, crossing with soft and measured steps. The spit is without sound or venom. It lands on the shoulder of Zoli's overcoat. A muttered curse, almost an apology. She hears the girl turn slowly away-of course, her bad foot. The last is Jores, the oldest, and he leans up close, she can feel his breath on her face, the smell of almonds. “Witch,” he says. A ratcheting sound from his chest. The spit volleys into the perfect point between her eyebrows.

Another roar from the side of the road, the arc of the voice, so familiar, calling the children together. Zoli does not move. She waits for Conka. Flickering now across her mind: a hill run, a bare body dressed, laughter beneath a blanket, all those childhood things, ice across a lake, a basket of candles. Balance, she thinks, balance. In danger of losing my footing and being carried off the edge. What edge? There is no edge.

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

Conka did not spit.

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

At least there is that.

It is almost enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Paris.”

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

The following morning she builds up Swann's boots with the socks, places dry moss at the ankle of each, starts off along the riverbank, watching for the osprey, expecting it to appear, stately, serene, to do something magnificent-to come down the river on a floe of ice, or to burst from the trees, but nothing stirs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a tiny village market she buys a slab of meat, some cheese, a loaf of bread. “Comrade,” an old fruitseller says to her, “are there many of you?” The fruitseller watches Zoli go as she cuts across a field and doubles back around to make sure she is not followed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A reply slices the crisp air. Perhaps it is the wind in the trees, or a branch falling, but then there is another sound, and a deep bronchial coughing. Zoli hurries to gather her things and bundles them in her zajda. Frosted leaves snap beneath her feet.

A voice then.

She spins.

Two men in loden jackets lumber through the trees, axes over their shoulders. They halt and one drops his axe. Together they shout as she scrambles through the snow. The whip of a twig against her face. Her foot catches on an exposed tree root. She falls, slams into a cut-off tree trunk. She rises again, but the men are upon her, above her, looking down. One is young and fresh-faced. The other wears a shabby beard and broken eyeglasses. The younger one leers. She turns in the snow and curses them but the younger one gazes down, amused. The older reaches to pick her up and she bites at his arm. He jumps back. She shouts at them in Romani and the younger says: “I told you there was someone out here. Last night. I told you. I felt it.”

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

“I bet she's the one. Look at her.”

“Pick her up.”

“Watch the evil eye.”

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

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

“Shut up.”

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

“Pick her up.”

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

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

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

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

“Don't be an idiot,” says the older.

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

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

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

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

And as if by way of proof the younger one begins to undo his belt. He pulls it through the loops and snaps it in the air. His trousers, caked in mud, fall to the ground around his ankles, but he keeps his back turned. His underclothes are a filthy gray. Zoli slips the knife further down along her wrist and closes her eyes. A deep coughing comes from across the room. She looks up to see that the man has stepped into another pair of trousers. He adjusts the belt. His eyes sharpen. He toes a small cone of wood-dust on the floor, comes across, and reaches past her for a cup on the table.

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

“What's your name?”

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

“What's your name, Gypsy?”

Let me go.

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

“Conka,” she says, immediately regretting it.

“Conka?”

“Elena. I was with my people.”

“Elena now is it?”

“When the troopers came.”

The younger one chuckles: “Is that so?”

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

She hesitates and searches their expressions-nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You're lying,” he says.

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

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

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

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

Elena.

“That's a lie.”

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Know who?”

“Don't play us for fools.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So you're a real Gypsy then?”

“You're a real woodsman?”

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

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

“Our fortune.”

“What?”

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

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

“I don't tell fortunes,” says Zoli.

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

“Shut up,” says the older.

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

“I'm telling you to shut up, Tomas.”

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

“Shut up and leave her alone.”

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

“Can you read this?” he says.

“Christ rides!” says the younger.

“Can you read it?”

“Yes.”

“For fucksake!”

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

“Yes.”

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

“And this?”

“That's the old border.”

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

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

“Give her back the knife.”

“Shit.”

“Give her the knife, Tomas.”

The younger skids the knife across the floor and sighs. Zoli picks it up, backs across the hard stone floor towards the door, pulls down the handle. Locked. A brief panic claws at her throat until the older man steps across, leans forward, turns the handle upwards, and the door swings open. A blast of cold wind.

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

“Yes.”

“Same thing, no?”

“No, I don't think so,” she says.

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

“Josef,” he says.

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

“It's a funny name.”

“Perhaps.”

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

“Maybe.”

“I ask only then-”

“Yes?”

“How have you come to this?”

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

“There are worse things,” says Zoli.

“I can't think of them, can you?”

She turns her face towards the distance.

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

“Say to him?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you will tell him his fortune.”

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

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

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

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

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

The first of the wooden watchtowers appears on stilts like a tall wooden bird. Two soldiers perch within it, scanning the horizon. Here, Hungary. There, in the distance, Austria. She creeps along, half-bent to the earth, her body porous to every noise. Before her, the haze of mist drifting off the marsh. The air is cold, but lines of sweat run along her shoulderblades. She has stripped her bundle down to the barest needs-only a wickerjar of water, some cheese, some bread, the tarp, a blanket, her warmest clothes, the stolen knife. She backs a good distance away from the watchtowers, settles in the grass far from the dirt road, feels for a dry place to lie down.

No more movement, thinks Zoli, until nightfall.

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

Afternoon birdcall wakes her. The sun has shifted southward, red at its edges. She lifts her head slightly at the sound of an engine, and sees, in the distance, a squat truck with a canvas back trundling along the forest line. The voices of young soldiers, Russians, carry through the forest. How many dead bodies lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as they made the short trip from one place to the other? The army truck passes along the edge of the trees and away, and, as if by design, two white swans break across the sky, their shapes laboring above the treetops, quartering on the wind with their necks craned, apparitions not so much of grace as difficulty, with the gunneling sound that comes from their mouths, a deathcall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deer. A whole herd of them.

Sweep left, she whispers, sweep left.

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

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

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

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

Zoli rolls her shoulders from her overcoat, and drops it on the ground. I will not fill my pockets with water, no.

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

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

The merest luck, she thinks, has preserved me.